Page 38 of Gay for Pray
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 thesame.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jude
I KNEW IT WAS coming, but that doesn’t make it suck less when Theo pronounces me a dirty secret he’ll do his best to forget.
Rejection isn’t enough to stop me eyeing him up at every opportunity. My body and heart are out of alignment on this one, and it’s only a matter of time before my body decides my heart can take another hit if it means getting my mouth on Theo. I’m only hurting myself more in the long run, but that’s yet to stop my bad decisions.
I’m a complete idiot, but when that blond jerk opens his mouth and sings, I sneak a glance at him from my place on the other side of the choir arrangement. Even with the whole choir singing together, I hear nothing but him, that low, strong bass that holds the whole arrangement together and thrums through my chest.
Mr. Jones takes us through the song, dragging out the last note before letting us drop into silence. For a moment, quiet fills the practice room, the very same practice room where I hooked up with Theo for the first time. The memory fills me with things my heart cringes away from, but it’s rapidly losing the battle for control. Even when he rejected me, Theo dropped a crumb suggesting we could keep this going as long as it was a secret, and that’s a crumb I’m stupid enough to scoop up.
“You’re sounding great, everyone,” Mr. Jones says. “This song will be part of the concert, so make sure you’ve got it down. Thisis a rare opportunity to allow the outside community join us for Mass, so treat it like a special occasion. Invite any friends and family who’d like to come worship with us.”
Even if Mom wanted to worship, she couldn’t take the time off work or afford the expense of traveling here from our home in Utah. It’s the same reason I don’t go home during breaks. It’s simply too expensive for us.
The same won’t be true for Theo, which is the whole reason he’s running from me. We’ve barely gotten started, and already the world’s expectations are ripping him away from me. Then again, he must have known before he ever kissed me that he couldn’t be gay. He’s trying to become a priest, and even deacons who have families don’t havethosekinds of families. This was doomed from the start, but I thought I might get a little more time to enjoy him before it imploded.
The risk isn’t only to his career. Even as an undergrad, my mere presence could smudge him. I’m out, very obviously out. I don’t try to hide it. I don’t act differently for the sake of other people. If his parents saw us exchange so much as a handshake, the gay would be too potent for them to ignore.
“We have a few more practices between now and the concert,” Mr. Jones says. “It’s imperative that you attend every one of those practices, or let me know if you can’t so I can keep you updated on any changes to the arrangement.”
His eyes sweep over the choir as he issues this pronouncement, and I swear they linger a little longer on me and Nick and Theo. We’re the only truants here, though thankfully no one has put it together that we were all absent for basically the same reason that fateful Sunday.
That look probably rattles Theo, judging by how jumpy he was when we met up on Tuesday to talk about our philosophy project. I could stick my fingers in that wound and try to hurt him the way he’s hurting me, but instead I all but throw myselfout of that practice room when Mr. Jones dismisses us. Theo doesn’t want to interact in public, and while I don’t owe him any kindness, I don’t have to be a complete jerk either. He’s dealing with complications I can’t possibly understand, even if I think he’s being an ass about managing them.
