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Our knees brushed in the tiny space.
His knuckles were white in his lap, hands clasped in strain, eyes lowered, and just as beautiful as he’d been on the pulpit.
“Do you sin?” I asked, knowing better even as the words spilled from my lips.
“I’m a man. Men are fallible.”
“That’s not an answer,” I pressed.
“Yes. To say otherwise would propagate falsehood.” Still he wouldn’t look at me.
I inched to the edge of my seat, knees pressing. “Did they teach you that at seminary?”
“What?” he asked, finally lifting his blues to meet mine.
Tragedy. Hope. Sincerity.Every word he’d spoken had been the truth. He couldn’t lie to me, not after the way he’d bared himself to me. Anthony’s eyes were windows to his soul. The same way they’d been as a teenager.
“To speak in religious riddles?” My fingers crept to the edge of my knees, brushing over his.
His eyes closed at the touch. “Seminary changes our minds and the way we experience words.”
“Your experience with words?” I asked, not sure what he meant, or if this was another riddle.
“God created the world with words. They have meaning and power, more than most of us imagine. We create our reality with words.” He held my gaze, and I realized this was a mistake.
How could I look him in the eyes and not want what we had been back? After twenty years apart, my mouth still hungered for him, and my skin ached for his touch for every depraved thing he’d write into my skin.
“How does that change the way you speak? You are more careful about your words now? To what fucking end?”
The curse didn’t so much as bring a flinch from him. He couldn’t erase all of what we were. “I weigh the words I put out into the universe because I know they write my reality, and what I’m inviting into my life.” All so matter of factly, but Anthony had always been more practical than I’d been.
I felt deeply, made decisions on those feelings. He’d never let himself decide anything based on a temporary emotion. He thought long and hard before coming to a decision. So the evolution of that bleeding into even his spoken words made sense to his character. We’d both become calculating, but in opposite ways.
“And what are you inviting into your life,” I asked, not sure he’d tell me.
He mulled the question over before he answered. “I ask for God to give me what I can handle and entrust me with what He deems necessary as his servant—His vessel.”
“What does seeing me invite into your life?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer or the final dismissal. A door closed, one that kept me from madness far more than I’d ever admit. Like I could seek salvation at his hands, and that gave me enough hope to go on. “Do you wish He wouldn’t have led me back to you?”
“I would never turn away a man seeking redemption.” His words wavered like he was holding back. “I trust in Our Savior. He’s brought me this far.”
“So you have no feelings about it?”
“I have feelings, I’m not void of emotion.”His eyes pressed closed and I hoped his struggle was as great as mine, as evil as it was to wish it upon him.
“What feelings?”
“Longing.”
“And?” I pressed, not sure what I hoped to receive from this exchange.
“Pain.”
“I cause you pain?” I asked.
“You cause me to miss what never could have been. Your face reopens old wounds.”
“I’m sorry if my coming here hurts.” I made to get up—to escape. The last thing I wanted to do was bring him my pain, or the pain from our past, if he’d moved beyond it. I didn’t want to share my misery. “It was wrong to come here.”
