Page 20 of Gay for Pray (Arport Sacred Sacrament University #1)

Chapter Twenty

Theodore

I SPEND THE REST of the weekend studying.

It goes a lot slower than usual with my mind constantly drifting back to Jude and everything we did.

No matter how hard I try to focus on essays and reading assignments, eventually my thoughts wander to his hands on my body, to touching him in return, to the taste lingering in my mouth.

It leaves me tossing and turning every night.

I arrive to class exhausted and haggard on Monday, despite only staying out late on Friday.

My body heats the second I spot Jude in the back of the room, but I try to ignore him and get to my own seat.

I know it’s messed up, but what do I do with all of this?

Part of me wants more of him so badly I could scream, so badly I can’t think or sleep or eat, but another part of me remembers that my path is taking me to the seminary, and I’ve already accumulated sins I can’t wash off.

By the end of Monday’s philosophy class, I’ve taken so few notes and spent so much time agonizing over my choices that I don’t even know what Professor Demsky lectured us on.

I book it out of there, hurrying back to my room before Jude has time to catch up to me.

I know I’m being a complete jerk by ignoring him like this, but it’s the only way to keep the war going on in my head from annihilating me.

It feels so good to be with him. It feels so natural and right.

I initiated a lot of this, following the urging of something inside me that I couldn’t deny.

But my brain knows it’s wrong. If someone ever found out, it could derail my entire life plan.

Would they even let me into seminary school with something like this hanging over me?

As much as this feels good and fun right now, Jude isn’t my future; the priesthood is.

I’ve yet to find a way to reconcile that with the desire that takes over every time I’m near him.

I spend another whole day agonizing, and wake up on Tuesday even more tired and no more sure of what I should do. There has to be an answer, but I can’t find a path that doesn’t either hurt Jude or destroy everything I’ve worked for my entire life.

I’m sitting on a bench in a secluded part of campus staring at nothing and letting my thoughts churn when my phone rings. My heart drops when I check the screen.

“Hey, Dad,” I answer.

“Theodore, good to hear from you.”

I cringe at the implication behind the seemingly friendly greeting, the implication that I should have been calling and checking in at least once a week. I kind of lost track of that when this whole identity crisis landed in my lap.

“How has school been going?” my mother chimes in.

They must be on speakerphone, so I pick my words carefully in case they’re at church.

“Fine,” I say.

“Keeping up with everything?” Dad says.

“Yes, I’m doing fine.”

“Just fine?”

I hold back a sigh. “I won’t know until midterms, Dad. We haven’t had that many assignments yet.”

“Well, you should have some idea of how well you’re doing even without a grade. You know yourself, Theodore.”

By which he means, I know what he expects of me. He isn’t wrong, either. The weight of those expectations are the reason I’m usually two weeks ahead in all my classes.

“Did you call to ask about my grades?” I say.

My mother clicks her tongue, so I must not mask my irritation as well as I hope to.

“We’re your parents, Theodore,” Dad says. “We care about your future.”

There’s that word again: Future. It looms over my life like a rabid animal looming over its prey.

Right now, I’m the prey. Every second, it chases me, hounding me for answers I can’t provide.

I haven’t had an answer for this my entire life.

I thought perhaps I’d suppressed it well enough to get to the finish line, but now it’s bursting out of me in ways I can’t control.

I’m starting to wonder why I ever tried.

Maybe this moment wouldn’t be so hard if I’d given in to these feelings sooner.

I shake my head, tuning back in to find my father lecturing me about grades. If only my grades were my biggest concern. If only I was tossing and turning all night because I might get a B+ instead of an A- in my philosophy class.

I don’t respond to the lecture, letting the silence stretch out awkwardly.

“Anyway,” my mother says, the first person to break, “Theodore, we are so excited to hear about the choir concert.”

I go cold. I didn’t think I could possibly yearn for my father’s lecture, but suddenly I want nothing more than to talk about my potential academic failures.

My parents came to the concert last year.

It fell somewhere around midterms and offered friends and family their first opportunity to come to campus.

It’ll be the same this year, judging by what Mr. Jones has said during practice, but I’ve been so distracted with my other problems that I completely overlooked the complication barreling toward me.

Now, it smacks me in the face with the force of a freight train.

“We’re so excited to come up for it,” Mom says.

“It should be an interesting experience,” Dad says.

“Yeah, um, I’m excited for it.”

I’m afraid I can’t keep the trepidation out of my voice, but how could I?

This won’t just be an encounter with my parents.

It won’t just be a concert and a chance for them to lecture me.

Jude is in the choir as well. They’ll see him.

They’ll see us . What if having sex has done something that makes it obvious even outside his bedroom that he means something different to me than he used to?

I don’t know how these things work, but I’ve seen people in classes and around campus who were obviously together even though they didn’t announce their relationship.

Their body language spoke to an intimacy they couldn’t hide.

With how bad I’m doing controlling my urges, what if I can’t hide how I’m feeling even in public? What if my parents see it on me the second they see me and Jude standing together in that choir?

They would never approve. All the justifications that I’ve used with myself would fall absolutely flat with them.

They wouldn’t care that it feels good, that it feels natural, that I’m starting to wonder if the kind, loving God I know in my heart could make me this way only to tell me it’s evil.

None of that would matter if my parents caught a whiff of this at the concert.

My only choice is to put some distance between me and Jude ahead of the performance. If I can get some space, maybe it will clear my head. Maybe I’ll act more normal around him. Maybe I can treat him like a stranger and my parents will never know.

And as for Jude?

I squash the guilt already boiling inside me as I head to the library for our scheduled meeting about our philosophy project.

There’s only a couple hours of space between this study session and my phone call with my parents, and my guts are a tangled mess as I open the door to the study room we booked.

Jude looks up from his laptop, his smile dazzling. It’s like not a second has passed since I was naked in his bed, touching him until I managed to memorize his skin. It sends my heart fluttering, which only serves to stir the nausea clenching my guts.

I’m going to hurt him, but if I don’t, things might turn out even worse.

This is for the best, I tell myself, as I sit across from him instead of next to him like I usually would.

I can’t look up at him as I retrieve my textbooks and laptop and search for the document where we’ve been doing a lot of our project planning.

“So,” I say before he can speak, “um, why don’t we start with a general update on what we each got done in the past week?”

“Okay…” he says slowly.

His skepticism is not unwarranted. I know what he’s been up to.

Of course I do. We were together all night on Friday, and at some point in the night our conversation wandered to school work and how the project was going.

By asking him now, I’m washing that night away, pretending it never happened, and Jude knows it as well as I do.

“Well,” Jude says, “I have to admit I didn’t get much done over the weekend. I had a pretty exciting Friday and was wiped out from it on Saturday and Sunday.”

My face heats. I can feel his suggestive smirk, even though I dare not look up and confirm its presence on his soft, plush lips.

Jude lets the buzzing quiet fill the study room. It presses down on my shoulders until I’m hunching at my computer, staring blankly at the document before me even though it hasn’t changed in a week.

“Theo, are you okay?” Jude says.

His soft voice implies a level of privacy and intimacy I’d rather shrink away from.

He called me “Theo,” a nickname no one has ever used for me.

It’s always been the full “Theodore,” even the few times I had friends who might have shortened it.

I should correct him, but I don’t, and that’s exactly the problem.

If my parents ever heard a guy like him call me something so familiar, it would ignite all their worst suspicions.

Jude ups the ante, reaching across the table to take my hand. I jerk out of his grasp on instinct, despite the guilt that stabs through my chest.

I look up at him. I can at least give him that much.

He wears an expression I’ve never seen on him: Fear.

Even when I was out of my head at that party, he was calm and cool and light-hearted about it.

That’s part of what I suspect got me through that.

He never flinched, never seemed overwhelmed or out of his element.

Now, he does. His eyebrows curl, eyes dancing with questions I don’t have good answers for.

“We need to focus on our project,” I say.

“We can hold hands and focus on our project, Theo.”

I shake my head. “We can’t. Not in a place like this. Anyone could walk by.”

Those words crush him, and my heart along with him. The pain that streaks through his face would bring me to my knees if I weren’t already sitting.

“I have to be careful,” I say, trying to explain. “The concert is coming up and my parents will be here and… It doesn’t mean we can’t… I just have to be careful.”

“You can’t risk your parents suspecting anything, is that it?”

I nod miserably, though I doubt I need to.

I brace for accusations, for anger, for all the things I deserve, but Jude sits there quietly. He leans back, and it’s a nominal amount of extra space between us, but it says everything.

“I get it,” he says quietly. “Don’t worry about it.”

On the surface, we reach an agreement. On the surface, we understand that we’re coming from different worlds with different restrictions, and there’s no hard feelings.

Underneath, I’m a pot boiling over with suppressed emotion, and while Jude probably hides it better, I’m guessing he feels the same.