T,
How was your weekend? Did your family end up going down to Salt Lake?
This weekend at the Brother house was insane. It seemed like our doorbell was constantly ringing. We had a few Primary activities at church on Saturday. Lizzy and I were helping run it, and trying to get twenty six-year-olds into a single-file line is like trying to work with feral cats. Plus, I think Sister Cooper gave them candy when she finished her activity with them before ours, so they were wild.
I got home late on Saturday and went up to my room and thought about you for about two hours before I could fall asleep. Well, I thought about you, and prayed, and then thought about you some more. Both activities make me feel amazing—the more I pray, the more confident I am that what we’re doing together is right—but then I’m also lonely. I wish we could be together at the end of days like this, talking about it in the same space rather than through these letters. But we have this, at least.
And we have Thursday. Is it crazy I’m so excited? You might have to control me. All I want to do is kiss, and kiss, and kiss you.
When are you going to let me read the new book? You’re good, Tanner. I’m dying to see what you’re writing now.
I’m heading off to campus and will be in class for the Seminar today to give this to you. When you finish reading it, just know that I was thinking about kissing you while I was writing this sentence (and all the ones that came before it, probably).
Yours,
S
I read it about seventeen times before tucking it into the deepest pocket in my backpack, where I will hold it until I get home and can put it in a shoe box on the top shelf of my closet. (Now that I think about it, if I die today, a shoebox on the top shelf of my closet is where my parents will probably look first for clues about what happened to me; I should find a better hiding place.)
I let these meandering thoughts distract me from the uneasiness I feel regarding Sebastian’s curiosity about my book.
Don’t get me wrong: I actually love what I have so far. But I have to face reality: At this point, I’m not going to have a book I can turn in. So far, that truth has been this repellent magnet, and my thoughts bound freely away from it. I’ve told myself again and again that I can demonstrate that I did it, give Fujita some sample pages before Sebastian appears in the narrative—under the request of confidentiality—and ask him to grade me on what he sees. Fujita is a pretty laid-back guy; I think he’d actually do this for me. Or, I can admit to Sebastian that this book is still about us and have him press to grade some of the projects, mine included, under the guise of taking some of the work off Fujita’s hands.
But what if Fujita doesn’t go for it? What if he won’t give me a passing grade based on the first twenty pages or so? I’ve been writing in a fever. Since I crap-edited the first four chapters for Sebastian, I haven’t changed any details, not even our names. In the present version, it’s all there in stark black-and-white for the world to see, and I don’t want to change it. The Seminar. Bishop Brother. Our hikes on Y Mountain. My parents, my sister, our friends. I know Sebastian needs me to, but I don’t want to hide.
• • •
He’s waiting for me at the trailhead at three on Thursday. We have only a few more hours of daylight, but I’m hoping we can stay out later tonight, stretch this into the darkness. I know he doesn’t have any classes until after lunch tomorrow, and I’m happy functioning on little sleep.
“Hey.” He shakes his head, flipping his hair out of his eyes. My skin hums. I want to press him up against a tree and feel his hair slip through my fingers.
“Hey.”
God, we are idiots, grinning like we just won a gold medal the size of Idaho. His eyes are impish, and I love this side of him. I wonder who else sees it. I want to think what I see right here in his eyes is his one, pure truth.
“You brought water?” he asks.
I turn halfway to show him my CamelBak. “The big one.”
“Good. We’re going up today. You ready?”
“I’ll follow you anywhere.”
With an enormous grin, he turns, charging up the path and into the thick, rain-damp brush. I follow close behind. The wind picks up as we climb, and we don’t bother with small talk. It reminds me of going to a seafood buffet with Dad when he took me to a conference in New Orleans. Dad got this intensely focused look on his face. Don’t eat the filler, he said, meaning breadsticks, tiny sandwiches, even the beautiful, tiny-but-flavorless cakes. Dad made a beeline for the crab legs, crawdads, and seared tuna.
Breathless small talk right now would be breadsticks. I want to feel Sebastian’s body right up against mine the next time he says anything.
Most people hiking Y Mountain stop at the enormous painted Y, but after we arrive there a half hour into our hike, we continue, leaving the town sprawling below us. We head where the trail narrows and continues south, then turns east into Slide Canyon. Everything is more rugged here, and we watch our step more carefully to avoid stinging nettle and scratchy brush. Finally, we reach the area of the mountain where there is pine tree cover. We need it less for shade—it’s getting colder, in the high twenties now, but we’re bundled in jackets—and more for privacy.
Sebastian slows and then sits under a thatch of trees overlooking Cascade Mountain and Shingle Mill Peak. I collapse beside him; we’ve been hiking for well over an hour. Any question I had about whether we’d be here together at night has been put to rest. This is farther than we’ve hiked together on a weekend, let alone a weekday, and it will take us at least another hour to get home. The sun hangs low in the horizon, turning the sky a heavy, seductive blue.
His hand slides into mine, and he leans backward, pressing our joined fists to his chest. Even through his puffy jacket I can feel his body heat. “Holy . . . that was a hike.”
I stay seated, leaning back on my other hand to balance and stare out at the canyon. The mountains are dramatically green with patches of white snow. Their sharp peaks and smooth rock faces are dotted with trees. It’s so unlike the valley below us, where everything seems to be dotted with TGIFridays and convenience stores.
“Tann?”
I turn, looking down at him. The temptation to crawl over him and kiss him for hours is nearly impossible to resist, but there’s also something pretty great about being able to just sit here and hold hands
with
my
boyfriend.
“Yeah?”
He brings my hand to his mouth, kissing my knuckles. “Can I read it?”
It came at me so fast. I was expecting it, but still. “Eventually. I’m just . . . It’s not done.”
He pushes to sit. “I get that. You just started it, right?”
The lie is starting to turn me black inside.
“Actually,” I say, “I’m having a hard time beginning. I want to write something new. I do. But every time I sit down at my laptop, I write about . . . us.”
“I get that, too.” He goes quiet for a few breaths. “I meant what I said. What I read was really good.”
“Thanks.”
“So, if you want, I could work on editing it? Making it less recognizable?”
I’m sure he’d do an amazing job, but he’s busy enough as it is. “I don’t want you to worry about it.”
He hesitates, and then squeezes my hand. “It’s hard not to, though. You can’t turn that book in to Fujita. But if you don’t turn in something, you’ll fail.”
“I know.” Guilt flashes cold across my skin. I’m not sure what would be worse: asking for his help here, or trying to start all over.
“I like thinking about us, too,” he tells me. “I think I would like editing it.”
“I mean, I could send you what I have in chunks to work on, but I don’t want to send it to your BYU e-mail.”
I can tell that a separate e-mail address had never occurred to him. “Oh, right.”
“You can make a new Gmail account, and I can send it there.”
&
nbsp; He’s already nodding, and it accelerates as the implication of this seems to hit him more fully. I know exactly what he’s thinking: We could write e-mails to each other all the time.
He’s so adorable, I hate to burst his bubble.
“Just be careful what you do at home,” I tell him. “My mom created the Parentelligentsia software. I know better than most how easily they could track every move you make.”
“I don’t think my mom and dad are that tech savvy,” he says, laughing, “but point taken.”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is,” I say, half proud, half deeply apologetic to those in my generation who’ve been hosed by my mother’s first invention. “It’s how my parents found out about me . . . and my interest in guys. They installed the software in our cloud and could see everything I’d searched, even if I cleared my history.”
His face goes ashen.
“They came to talk to me about it, and that’s when I admitted I’d kissed a boy the summer before.”
We’ve alluded to this but never spoken about it freely.
Sebastian shifts, facing me. “What’d they say?”
“Mom wasn’t surprised.” I pick up a rock, tossing it over the edge of the cliff. “It was harder for Dad, but he wanted it to be easy. He deals with his feelings on his own time, I think. The first conversation, he asked me if I thought it was a phase, and I said maybe.” I shrug. “I mean, I honestly didn’t know. It’s not like I’d been through this before. I just knew that I felt the same when I looked at pictures of naked guys as I did when I looked at pictures of naked girls.”
Sebastian flushes bright red. I don’t actually think I’ve seen his face this heated before. Has he never looked at naked pictures? Have I embarrassed him? Amazing.
His words come out a little garbled: “Have you had sex?”
“I’ve been with a few girls,” I admit. “Only kissed guys.”
He nods, as if this makes sense.
“When did you know?” I ask.
His brow furrows. “Know what? About you being bi?”
“No.” I laugh, but bite it back because I don’t want it to come off as mocking. “I mean, that you’re gay.”
The confusion on his face deepens. “I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“Not . . . that.”
Something seems to catch in the spinning wheel of my pulse, and it trips. For a breath, my chest hurts. “You’re not gay?”
“I mean,” he says, flustered, trying again, “I’m attracted to guys, and I’m with you right now, but I’m not gay. That’s a different choice, and I’m not choosing that path.”
I don’t even know what to say. The sensation inside me feels like sinking.
I let go of his hand.
“Like, you’re not gay, you’re not straight, you’re . . . you,” he says, leaning forward to catch my eyes. “I’m not gay, I’m not straight, I’m me.”
I want him so much it’s nearly painful. So when he kisses me, I try to make the feel of him sucking my bottom lip block out anything else. I want his kiss to be the clarification, the reassurance that a label doesn’t matter—this is what matters.
But it doesn’t. The entire time we kiss, and later—when we stand and hike back down—I still have that sensation that I’m sinking. He wants to read my book, the book about falling in love with him. But how can I send my heart to him when he’s just said, in no uncertain terms, that he doesn’t speak its language?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Late Saturday afternoon, Autumn jogs after me, down my driveway. Finally we are free of my house, and she lets loose her barrage of questions.
“Were you talking to him when I got here?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re telling me he doesn’t like you? Tanner, I see how he looks at you.”
I unlock the car, opening the driver’s side door. I’m 100 percent not in the mood for this. Even after talking to him this morning, Sebastian’s words from Thursday still bounce around my head.
Not . . . that.
I’m not gay.
“You don’t see how he looks at you?”
“Auddy.” It’s not a denial; it’s not a confirmation. It’ll have to work for now.
She climbs in after me, clicking her seat belt in, and then turns to face me. “Who is your best friend?”
I know the right answer to this one: “You. Autumn Summer Green.” I turn the ignition, and laugh despite my dark mood. “Still the best bad name ever.”
Auddy ignores this. “And who do you trust more than anyone in the world?”
“My dad.”
“After him.” She holds up her hand. “And after your mom, grandmother, family, blah, blah.”
“I don’t trust Hailey as far as I could throw her.” Turning, I look over my shoulder to back out of the driveway. Dad won’t let me rely solely on the backup camera in the sensible Camry I drive.
Autumn slaps the dashboard. “I’m making a point! Stop thwarting me.”
“You are my best friend.” I turn the steering wheel and set out of our neighborhood. “I trust you the most.”
“So why do I feel you aren’t telling me something important?”
A dog with a bone, this one. My heart is a hammer again, tap-tap-tapping against my sternum.
I was on the phone with Sebastian when Auddy got to my house. We were talking about his afternoon away at a church youth activity.
We were not talking about how un-gay he is.
We were also not talking about my book.
“You’re with him all the time,” she needles.
“Okay, first of all, we’re honestly working on my book,” I say, and a metaphorical knife pokes my conscience in reprimand. “You chose to work with Clive—which is fine—but now I’m paired with Sebastian. We hang out. Second, I don’t know if he’s gay, or what”—and that’s certainly not even a lie—“but third, his sexuality isn’t our business.”
The only reason it’s mine is because . . .
Only now does it register that giving this relationship oxygen outside our Sebastian + Tanner bubble would be amazing. Even the idea of talking to someone other than Mom and Dad about this makes me feel like I can take a full breath for the first time in weeks. I want more than anything to talk with someone else—Auddy, especially—about what happened on Thursday.
“If he is gay,” she says, chewing a nail, “I hope his family isn’t too terrible about it. It makes me sort of sad.” She holds up her hand. “I know you aren’t gay, but shouldn’t the bishop’s son be allowed to like dudes if he wants to?”
This conversation makes me feel mildly queasy. Why haven’t I come out to Auddy yet? Yes, Mom’s panic before we moved was mildly traumatizing to me, and Auddy’s friendship is my bedrock. I guess I’ve never wanted to risk it. But still. Autumn Summer Green is the least closed-minded person I’ve ever known, isn’t she?
“Someone needs to have a revelation,” I say, glancing at her. “Call the prophet; let him know it’s time to accept the queer folk into his heart.”
“It’s gonna happen,” she says. “Someone is going to have a revelation. Soon.”
Revelations are a big part of the LDS faith. It’s a pretty progressive idea: The world is changing, and the church needs God to help guide it through these times. After all, they are the Latter-day Saints. They believe anyone can have a revelation—that is, a communication directly from God—as long as they’re seeking it with the intention of doing something good. But only the current living prophet—the church president—can have revelations that make their way into church doctrine. He (always a he) works with two counselors and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (also men) “under the inspiration of God”—to determine what the church’s position is on any given matter and whether rules get changed.
For example, the hot button: Polygamy was okay back in the day. Autumn’s mom once explained it to me that, at the time of early LDS settlements, there were many women and few men to pro
tect them. By taking on multiple wives, men could better provide for the women in the community. But in my own digging, I read how the US government didn’t love this aspect of the church and wouldn’t grant Utah state rights. In 1890, Church President Wilford Woodruff declared that plural marriage was no longer acceptable to God—apparently, he’d had a revelation about it.
Conveniently, it was what the US government needed to hear; Utah became a state.
The idea of a revelation about wholly accepting openly LGBTQ members in the church is pretty much the single golden thread I hang on to for hope whenever I let myself think past today or tomorrow with Sebastian. Brigham Young himself said, in essence, he hopes that people in the church don’t just take what the leaders say as God’s truth; he wants them to pray and find that truth within themselves, too.
No doubt Daddy Young wasn’t talking about homosexuality, but there are those of us who live in the modern world, who are not LDS, and who sincerely hope that a revelation about homosexuality not being sin is just a matter of time.
And yet even with the legalization of same-sex marriage, it still hasn’t happened. Autumn taps her fingers on her thighs in time with the music. I hadn’t been listening to what’s been playing, but now it’s a song I love. It has this slow, building beat, and the singer’s voice is throaty, scratchy. The lyrics seem innocent at first, but it’s clear it’s about sex, just like nearly every song on the radio.
It makes me think about sex, and what that would be like with Sebastian. How it happens. How we’d . . . be. It’s this vast unknown, both thrilling and terrifying.
“Did you talk to Sasha?” Autumn asks me out of the blue.
“About what?”
She stares at me. “About prom.”
“Seriously, Auddy. Why are you so hung up on this?”
“Because you said you were going to ask her.”
“But why do you care?”
“I want you to go to your senior prom.” She smiles winningly at me. “And, I don’t want to go alone with Eric.”
This sets off an alarm bell in my brain. “Wait, why?”
“I just want to take things slow with him. I like him, but . . .” She looks out the passenger window, deflating when she sees that we’ve arrived at the lake.