Chapter 7 #2
I compromised myself a thousand times, told myself that it was completely platonic even on my end, that all I wanted was to be his best friend like a chocolate cake with a cherry on top and for him to say it back—just say it, Callum—I could cry how much I wanted to hear those words, which had to be some bizarre emotional fetish left over from not growing up with a brother or an absent father or too much American TV.
I wanted my subjugation rewarded and named.
But the one thing I swore to myself was that I would never say it first, Callum would have to.
Down on one knee. We were so close. We knew each other’s birthdays.
We knew our star signs and checked in on them often.
Now I found myself lying under those same stars with Simon in my arms—this new friend, this boyfriend? this lover?—and I had to tell myself to let it go. Relax. But our hungry physicality for each other had dug up my same old fears, those
unsayable words, and I felt the need to pull back. I needed to slow down. One night, we lay out in the field of our smallholding
and watched the stars at night and I remained deliberately passive. I collected kisses like clues. I didn’t dip into easy
ecstasies. I didn’t even bother trying to say something impressive about astronauts or the moon landing or satellites and
simply relished the fact that nothing was more thrilling than having Simon’s head against mine, his voice in my ear, as he
pointed out constellations. I clung to the edge of every word—those affirmatives, those directions—in awe of how a man could
be so confident and exactly who he was.
He laughed.
“What?” I said.
Simon said nothing, only smiled. His eyes were cheery shadows in the moonglow. I asked again and kissed him like the peck
of a bird digging for more.
“I was just thinking,” he said, “about how I wished we had figured all of this out sooner. And I was about to ask you: If you could go back in time and change anything so we could have come together quicker, would you? But then I remembered you actually have traveled back in time. It’s silly.”
I smiled. “I’ve thought the same thing—about how long it took.”
“I wish I had said something. I wish I had done something sooner.”
“You could have busted me out of that cell quicker.” I laughed, and Simon tried, but there was a falter at the corner of his
mouth. There was still guilt there.
“I was so scared,” he said. “I waited too long.”
“No, how could you have known?” I said. I kissed his forehead and looked up at the forest of stars above us, more stars visible
than I had ever imagined possible. Night was practically a purple daylight. And there was a silence that suggested every human
on the planet was looking up in similar wonderment, all of us so few in number compared to what would someday be billions.
“I don’t think I’d be able to go back in time and make this any more perfect than it’s already been. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“Even to avoid all that pain you went through?” Simon asked. “If you had to do it all over again, you wouldn’t change a thing?”
I thought for a moment in silence. I had a vision of a thousand copies of myself, all the branches my life could have taken, looping through time.
A thousand Georges beat to a pulp, brought to the brink.
It had been unlike anything I had ever experienced.
I sighed, searching for words. But before I could give an answer—some paradoxical mishmash about how if I had wanted to go back and fix something, I would have already known about it, by meeting myself already doing it, so there wouldn’t be a need, which all suggested that the initial instigation came from something external, beyond our control, like all this was meant to happen, both the good and the bad—Simon nestled his head closer and whispered into my ear, all too shockingly soon, “I
love you.”
I did not mishear it. As much as my stomach dropped with unprepared shock, thrilling rush shot through me up and down and
the temptation to overindulge was right there. Simon’s eyes were too open, large, and blue, asking for nothing, just pouring
pure giving, and I said, “I love you too,” more as a reaction, like an umbrella for what was pouring out of him. Here was
the affirmation I wanted—but I didn’t know what I love you meant, at least not here, not in this context.
“I’ve devoted my life to you,” Simon continued, and all I could do was look at him. He said this like he expected to hear
nothing in return. Maybe he sensed my shock because he took my head in his hands and cradled it to his chest. Each pectoral
was perfectly formed and taut, skin smooth beneath his loose shirt, smelling of charcoal and wet stone.
“What does that mean, exactly?” I asked, as abstractly as possible.
“It means exactly that. I love you, and I’ve sworn my life. I would lay down my life for yours. I would have done so even
before all this.” He ran his hand across my back.
“Although this is a nice development.” He kissed the top of my head.
I looked up at him. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to ask, so I kissed him first. His tongue enveloped mine.
I smiled and so did he. No need to pull back and take this slow, George.
I sat up and tried to remember what I wanted to say.
“But how does that work?” I asked. “What does that look like out here?” I gestured wildly around the field, at the whole strange
reality around me. “Like, are we a couple? I remember you told the vicar back in Scarborough we were lovers, but is that what
this is? We’re in love and we’ll just live here together? Forever? And that’s OK?” I didn’t know how to avoid sounding rude
and completely too modern. Abstract feelings didn’t compute in this world. Everything was about satisfying immediate ends:
survival, food, shelter, and now there was sex and not just sex but real feelings—amorphous, shape-shifting love. He’d said
he’d devoted himself to me.
“Are there even gay people? Is that a thing?” I asked.
“Of course it’s a thing.”
“You’re gay.” (I said this in as specific a way as I knew how, using all the vocabulary that existed here.)
“Yes,” said Simon. “Very clearly, I am.”
“You’re a man who has sex with another man and falls in love and lives with him as a couple.”
“As a companionship,” he clarified.
“As a union,” I clarified.
“As a union.”
“As a marriage?”
He demurred. “Well, not as a marriage because one of us would have to be a woman for that, but theoretically—”
“There, see! That’s what I mean.” I tapped on his chest. “Where I come from two men can get married.”
“What for?”
I balked. “Well, I—don’t know actually. Because they love each other.”
“Plenty of people get married without loving each other. And plenty of people love each other without getting married.”
“I know but I’m just saying there’s a difference. Between us. And this.” I pressed against him, ran my hands over him. “We
each have this idea about the two of us and I worry it’s two different ways of thinking—thinking in opposite directions or
something—and I guess I only say that because it scares me. Because . . .” I let my voice trail off. I toyed with letting
my mind dive fully into this feeling—devotion, melding, giving myself fully into someone else, into the love—but pulled back
like a face from cold water. I thought of Callum lying there, feet propped up on my desk, nudging me. I thought of him at
the pub, holding court among a hundred devotees just like me, a hundred thousand texts on his phone from a hundred thousand
Georges. I rolled off of Simon and stretched. Midnight gnats flew up from the grass. Sleeping sheep nearby swatted their ears
reflexively. I helped Simon up and we went sleepily back to the house, where we readied for bed in the dark, not wanting to
waste a candle, undressing nude and blue. We kissed, felt, squeezed. I sighed. I looked at the ceiling above us, the bars
of shaved timber. “Like, isn’t sodomy a thing? A sin?” I asked.
Simon laughed. “Of course it’s a sin!” he said and pulled me into bed with him.
We wrestled each other and he playfully slapped and shook my backside.
“It’s a really nice sin. So nice even straight people do it sometimes.
” He nibbled on my cheek and after more laughter, some flexing and strain, added, “But so is envy, so is laziness, so is dishonesty. So is not showing love to someone as much as you know you could.” He traced a finger around my lips.
I stared into his eyes. “The fact that you even say that means you’re coming at this from a completely different place, so
how do I know that any of this—”
He shushed me with his lips, kissing me deep and slow as if to slur. He kept his forehead against mine, curls sliding. His
eyes were closed and he said, “Just listen.”
I watched him and listened. I waited.
He said nothing for the longest time, then repeated himself. “Really listen.”
I listened.
Outside our stony hut, an antler rubbed against a tree, a fox coughed, and in the thick, voluminous gulf of the sky, stars
vibrated, the moon hummed. Before Simon had a chance to say what he wanted to say—that the world out there and the placement
of ourselves within it, whether together as a union or apart, was all that mattered, and that if sodomy was a sin then it
was a sin like all the others in the sense that sin was a sign of caution, a warning that served as a guardrail between our
world and whatever greater thing lay beyond it, both in unknowable great joy and unattainable great peril, and the timeless,
crushing responsibility of devotional love—but before he had a chance, he had fallen blessedly to sleep.
His body sunk against mine like a smoldering hearth, logs shifting, embers sizzling. My craven lust for the boy eased into
loving splendor and I tried to fall asleep in that contentedness, ignoring the ruckus of second-guessing, the visage of Callum,
the longing for signs—the hoot of an owl, the bleat of a goat.
By the time the sun rose, I had reasoned with myself enough to accept that this was pure living, purer than anything I could have imagined in my previous life, and I had to just live, for the first time in my life.
I kissed Simon’s arms and pulled them tighter around me, moved my lower half closer against his, felt the warming, hardening response, and together we greeted the morning, just as there came a loud and forceful knocking at the door.