Adam Venus
So clearly I didn’t get that job. But the next day something bizarre and hilarious happens – we stay in a church. Daybreak Baptist in South Carolina is a massive complex with a dormitory alongside the hangar-sized main sanctuary meant for traveling clergy and such, and after I’m checked in I text Fabian not to raise any eyebrows when he follows me in. My room is small but clean, and there’s a bathroom with a large shower, perfect size for hooking up – not that I would ever do that with him tonight. Not here. That would be too much, even for me…
“Get dressed,” he says when I finish my interview.
“What?”
“I want to take you somewhere. To make up for my…indecision lately. And my little performance yesterday. It’s not your fault that you’re in this situation, and I shouldn’t have blamed you like that.”
“Aw. Okay? Where are we going? Dinner?”
His posture relaxes, and he smiles. “Yeah, I’ve been looking around online for a few days, and…yeah. Get dressed.”
Within half an hour I’m in the car beside him. He makes me promise not to pay attention, so I busy myself with my phone until we eventually hit downtown Charleston. Then we pull up and park near a church that says 5CHURCH CHARLESTON in big fancy letters. As he takes off his seatbelt, I turn to him.
“Fab? Another church? Really?”
“Shh. Just come. Wait.”
And indeed, I was wrong. Apparently 5Church is a fancy restaurant inside an old chapel, and a giant chapel at that. We enter in what used to be the main lobby, then a server leads us into the huge vaulted interior. On the left side is a gigantic bar, probably two stories tall, and on the far side are beautiful stained-glass windows. She sits us at the end, where the altar probably used to be. It feels oddly appropriate, and oddly kinky, too. I like Fabian on his own terms – who wouldn’t? – but obviously the taboo of this whole thing just adds to the intoxicating mix around him. It’s like being told I can eat whatever in the refrigerator I want, except this one thing in the corner. Clearly I’m going to reach for the forbidden fruit when nobody is looking. And man, is Fabian forbidden…
“Isn’t it cool?” he asks soon, eyes brighter than the stained glass. “I found it online and just had to bring you here.”
“It’s…cooler than cool. Like you.”
“I like you so much,” he smiles out of nowhere. “I like every moment around you. All of it.”
I just smile, my insides warming magically. “You know how I feel. I can’t believe any of this happened.”
“Neither can I. it wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did.”
“I like you so much it scares me sometimes, makes me spin inside my own skull.”
“Same,” I say, drowning in him.
“Same? That’s all you got?”
“That’s all I feel like I need to say. Sometimes it feels like my thoughts aren’t only mine, they’re yours, and we share them. Everything that was supposed to be different is the same now.”
“And that’s why I brought you here,” he says soon, looking around. “A rehabilitated church. Remade. Things can change, you know. Just because God’s presence was here once, doesn’t mean it left. It can be anywhere. Regardless of…certain factors.”
I gasp a little. He’s right. The wooden beams holding up the ceiling are no less stately, the windows are no less beautiful, now that it is not a church anymore. The grace remained.
“You’re also teaching me so much,” he says. “I will admit that I was a little…haughty about the religion thing before.”
“Really?” I ask sarcastically. He raises a hand.
“Hey – let me finish. My problem was that I always viewed God as…hmmm, like a pacifier. You stick a pacifier in the mouth of a baby to pacify it, to make it stop wanting something else, to shut it up. That’s what I viewed religion as. Instead of dealing with their lives and confronting the big scary questions, I thought people sat back and threw it all up to God. They didn’t have to worry about anything if they just displaced all their mental responsibilities to the sky, and I thought that was a little…spineless. But with you…I see it, I feel it. You believe these things so strongly… the way you pray every night and morning, the way you talk about the Bible. It’s so real with you. You walk the walk, and it’s so inspiring. You make me think that maybe something bigger really is out there. Some kind of plan. Some system of order.”
“I used to think so, too,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Past tense. It’s getting hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“You opened my eyes, too. Maybe I was doing some of what you’re saying. Maybe I felt some things I didn’t know how to process, and stuck that pacifier in my mouth.”
“When you really wanted something else…”
“Shut up,” I smile. “But really – there are things I can’t deny anymore. The Bible says that what I feel with you is wrong, plain and simple. How am I going to reconcile that? I can’t anymore.”
“It’s up to you,” he shrugs. “It’s only up to you.”
“Ugh…”
He sits back and flashes a weird smile. “On that note, I also brought you here,” he says, setting down his napkin, “because I want to ask you something. Will you be my boyfriend, Adam?”
I frown a little, taken aback. “Boyfriend?”
His face falls.
“Oh no, I didn’t mean anything bad, that just seems so…”
“So what?”
“So…weird, and old-fashioned. So…not really ‘us,’ you know?”
“I feel like it’s us,” he says. “I want to be your boyfriend. I want you to be mine, nobody else’s, just mine. If you didn’t learn that the other night with that lady…”
“Now that is old-fashioned,” I laugh. “Are there shackles I need to slip on?”
“Take this seriously, for once in your life,” he sighs, and I lean forward.
“I do take you seriously, Fabian Judas. Serious as death. Obviously I wouldn’t be here with you if I didn’t. I just thought we were beyond boyfriends. But yes, fine, in a heartbeat I would be your boyfriend. Cheers.”
We clink the glasses of white wine the server just brought, and I laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“It’s just – now I really am gay,” I laugh, pointing at the wine, and my tight pants he’d picked out for me. “Not to trade in stereotypes, but come on…”
“No,” he says soon, “I just think you’re getting closer to the person you really are. The person underneath what you showed to the world.”
“I wonder why it took you to show me I was hiding?” I ask, and he shakes his head.
“No. It just took me to show you that you’d already started letting down the mask. You were unhappy with your situation, or else you never would’ve come to that bar with me. I was just a little jump-start, that’s all. The progress should all be attributed to you.”
I look away. “Which is exactly right. Now I’m a mess. I don’t know where my life is doing. And I’m so scared you’ll wake up one day and not want me anymore.”
“I think you’re scared of the opposite,” he says, and I tilt my head as he continues. “I think you’re afraid this thing is forever. And you don’t know what to do with forever. You’re only used to right now.”
I just let my shoulders fall. “I don’t even know what I want or don’t want anymore. I’m nowhere.”
“No. You’re here. With me. And you need to stop running.” He meets me dead in the eye. “Adam. I would give anything…I would do anything in the world to make you look in the mirror and accept what you see. And feel. Fully, without reservations.”
“Don’t make it sound so bad. I’m so much closer than I ever was. I didn’t even know I hated myself before. You brought it all out. Now I just want to get to the finish line. I want to wake up in the morning and be fully, totally okay with what I feel. And I don’t know if that will ever happen if I’m…living the life I live right now.”
He stares at me.
“Fabian, seriously. I’ve built my whole life around this. What will I do? And you…you’re a janitor. No offense, I’m just stating a fact. You’re a janitor, and my undergrad degree is in theology. Consider I walk away. What would we do? There is no money anywhere.”
“We do whatever we want,” he smiles. “And you’re terrified of that.”
“Maybe I am. But one of us has to have some sense.”
“Sense? You push my love away like it’s a stick of dynamite.”
“Do I really do that?” I ask, dismayed.
“Sometimes, yes. I have to protect myself at some point, you know. I’m falling in love with someone who is…who is in this situation. You look at me and think of sin, you associate me with the worst things in the world. I can’t deal with that sometimes. You walk away and it’ll fucking destroy me. I can’t do that to myself again, not with my past.”
Tears seeping out of my eyes, I take in all his otherworldly beauty. “Fabian. You’re wrong. I look at you and think of clouds and dreams and things I’ve never even been able to imagine before because they made me too happy. Let me figure this out. I’m trying every day, and I want you to go there with me. I want to make it with you. Hell, Fabian, I want to get old with you.”
He smiles, bit his eyes are dark. I know exactly what this date was – a last-minute push. He’s getting impatient. “Well hurry up and get there, because I won’t be waiting here forever. I’d almost rather walk away now than have to start liking you even more and look back on even more memories with you. And-”
But before he can finish, the server arrives, and cuts off the conversation for good. An alarm starts blaring, and the employees in the back start getting a little frantic and maybe annoyed.
“Kitchen fire,” our server explains breathlessly. “It’s tiny, but the fire department says we have to evacuate and shut down, anyway. The owners really won’t be happy about losing a night of revenue because Frankie started a little grease fire on his break…anyway, I’m so sorry, please follow us out.”
I groan and prepare to leave, annoyed that something so small has ruined our big night.
“Jesus. Do you know what this means?” Fabian asks, smiling, as the smell of greasy smoke hits my nose.
“What?”
“I walked into a church, and the thing literally burst into flames. Guess I really am the devil, aren’t I?”
“Yes. But my devil, and that makes all the difference.”
I head into the room in the church a little before him, and as soon as he crosses into the doorway he reaches back and does the strangest thing: rubs his finger from my clavicle, up my neck, to my ear. I just stare at him, but my moan reveals everything I didn’t say. He grabs me by the shoulders, literally slams me against the door, and kisses me.
Wait – let me say that again. He really kisses me. And it feels like everything in me is sliding into an endless sea of utopia. Dreams were made of whatever Fabian Blanco was created from. Whatever dreams are, Fabian is the same. My dream guy…
I roll my tongue around in his mouth, his crisp clean warm wonderful mouth. He’s a star and I’ve been searching through space for him all my life.
“So say I wanted to know about getting it,” I whisper, emboldened by the wine. “What does it feel like?”
“Sex? Hmmm. It’s one of those things that changes your life. It’s just…a bliss that doesn’t end.”
“Show me, then. Take me there.”
We undress and just tangle up in the bed together. Tangled is a good word for this, actually – my limbs are tangled in his, my dreams are tangled in his scent and his memory and his magic, my conscience is tangled up in all the ramifications of what my obsession with him means. Forever – we were always taught, above all, to cast aside earthly pleasures in pursuit of an eternal stay in heaven by His side. But I’ve found the Him whose side I would happy to stay next to, and it has nothing to do with golden gates.
All at once I realize I want to do it: I want to have sex with the man who is becoming my boyfriend. Even in a church. So I disappear into the bathroom for a second and take stock my of situation. I think of the insanely winding road that led to this moment; the litany of rules I’ve broken and swept aside along the way. I am a new man, bound by new rules. Or no rules at all, really.
Thou shall not covet? I covet every inch of Fabian’s body, all the time. Thou shall not lie? Every day I told myself I was “straight,” and that I didn’t want him, was dead wrong. At least I didn’t covet any of my neighbor’s wives. Just, occasionally, their husbands…
I know the biggest “sin” in my mind, homosexuality, isn’t addressed in the main commandments. But that doesn’t mean the subject didn’t hijack my life. As an evangelical, my life revolved around one goal: living a life true to the Lord so I could one day get into heaven. But the second my eyes got stuck in Fabian’s, all that imploded. Two new facts now rule my world now: that homosexuality is a mortal sin, and two, that I am falling for Fabian. If I am a sinner, he is my prayer – and this reality is challenging everything I have ever believed in my life. And I kind of love it.
“Okay, God,” I pray aloud, staring at my own reflection. “Game over. Time to get this out of the way. I know what the Bible says. I know all that. But it says a lot of stuff, and things are starting to not add up anymore. I just need to feel Your presence. If this is wrong, if you want to stop me, tell me now. Show me. Make me feel it. I want to feel it. Because I will listen. You made me like this, you made me love Fabian, and I don’t see why you would’ve created me just to hate myself.”
I wait. No response.
“But…on the other hand, if you are okay with it, let me feel that, too. If you want me to sleep with Fab, let me know, because I’d be happy to do that. I can’t imagine you’d make me love someone this much and then doom me to hell for it. So…make me feel something. I’m waiting. I’ve been waiting. Please?”
I stare at myself. I still don’t feel a thing in the world. Actually, all I feel is the electric light of Fabian’s love, just as I have felt for weeks now. Every hour in my car, every morning waking into his light in a hotel room – I’ve felt it every moment. And as it says in the Bible itself, love is never wrong.
And I think, in lieu of any other official response from God in the form of a burning bush or a booming voice, I’ll just trust in the Bible.
And so, with a new lightness in my bones and a new song in my soul, I turn for the bedroom to have sex with my boyfriend.