No one had ever kissed me like that.Not in thirty-five years.
And the seawall, which had held against the flood and the fevers and the breaking, did not hold against that.Against tenderness it simply gave way, and I felt my eyes sting hot in the dark and was grateful he couldn't see the tears sliding down my cheeks.
Maybe, I thought, and the thought was so forbidden it frightened me worse than anything we'd done.Maybe I could let myself feel something.Just for a little while.Only for tonight, in this dark room where no one knows my name and the rules can't reach me—maybe I could let the door stay open for a little while longer.A single, fleeting, unrepeatable taste of the one thing I’d never once let myself desire.
Freedom.
I kissed him back, letting the tears flow, and for the length of that kiss I wasn’t Pastor Cole, or my mother's son, and I was not lying to everyone I knew.
* * *
We lay like that a long while, and I waited for the shame to arrive the way it always did.It didn't come.What came instead was his voice, low in the dark, pitched soft so as not to break whatever it was we were lying inside of.
“Can I tell you something stupid?”he murmured.
“That depends entirely on how stupid.”
He huffed a small laugh, and I felt it more than heard it, a warmth against my shoulder.“We're never going to know each other's names.Right?That's the whole arrangement.Two gray squares in the dark.”
“Um, I guess.That's the arrangement.”Even saying it cost me something I hadn't expected it to.
“So here's the stupid part.”He shifted, and I felt him turn toward me on the pillow.“That means I could tell you anything.Anything true.The realest, ugliest, most honest thing in me—and tomorrow you'll be a stranger, and it would be like I'd never said it at all.I could finally tell the truth to somebody, because you're the one person on earth who can't use it against me.”
I lay very still.He had no idea—none—how close that came to my own truth.“All right,” I said, and my voice was not quite steady.“Then tell me something true about yourself.”
A long pause ensued, and I wondered if he’d chickened out.Finally, he took in a deep breath and began to speak.
"Somebody tried to love me once," he breathed."Really tried.And the whole time, I was just—waiting.For the catch.For the day he'd figure out I was a bad investment and leave.So I kept one foot out the door for both of us.I made sure he could feel it, too."Another deep breath."And when he finally left, you know what I felt?Relief.Because being right hurt less than being left."
He was quiet a moment.
"I've told myself ever since that wanting somebody is the stupidest thing a person can do.It’s the easiest way to get destroyed there is.And I've built a whole—an entire life out of not needing anyone, and I wear it like it's a fucking virtue."His voice dropped, almost too low to catch."And then you opened that door tonight, and I've spent the last few hours terrified, because I don't want you to leave.Jesus, I don't even know your name."
It landed in the dark between us and sat there, and I understood that he’d handed me something real, and that the only decent thing—the only honest thing—was to hand him something back.
“My turn,” I said, and I told him a true thing about myself.
“I'm fake, like, the fakest man you’ll ever meet.It’s a version of me that stands at the front of a room and every person in that room would tell you they know exactly who I am.But not one of them has ever met the true me.Not a single one.I've been performing this character for so long I've forgotten where he stops and I start.”My throat closed.“You're the first person in longer than I can say who's touched the actual me.Whoever that is.”
In the dark, his hand found mine.
He didn't make anything of it.Didn't squeeze, didn't lace our fingers like a vow.He just slid his palm over the back of my hand where it lay between us and let it rest there.And I—who had been preached at, prayed over, photographed, fundraised upon, and managed by my own mother for thirty-five years—could not remember the last time anyone had simply held my hand in the dark for no reason at all except that I was there and they wanted to.
I had to look at the ceiling and breathe.
“You should know,” I said, when I could, “I don't do this part.”
“What part?”
“This.After.”I made myself say it.“I leave.Always.The second it's over I'm dressed and gone before the other man's caught his breath.I don't—” the word came out cracked, “—I don't get to stay.”
I felt him take that in.And then, instead of arguing, instead of wheedling, he did the only thing that could possibly have undone a man like me: he made it easy.
“Then don't stay,” he said gently.“Just—don't go yet.There's a difference.You don't have to decide to stay the night.You just have to not get up in the next minute.And then not the minute after that.”He turned, and drew my arm over him, and settled his back against my chest as though it were the most natural arrangement in the world, fitting himself into me.“See?Nobody stayed.We just didn't leave.”
God forgive me, I didn't leave.
I wrapped myself around this stranger in the dark and held on, and the rightness of it was so total, so foreign, that for a moment, I genuinely did not know what to do with my own body.I’d held people before—congregants weeping at the altar, my mother gripping my arm for the cameras—but I had never been the one allowed to simply close his arms around a warm and willing thing and hold on.
