32. Jaxson
32
Jaxson
I don’t know if it’s a hunch or me for once indulging in my curiosity and need to have satisfactory answers to everything. Regardless, I can’t let go of Lauressa’s hate for her brother. Since she more or less has accepted that she just hates him, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it, I’m going to have to do a little digging into her brother. Much deeper than the surface level digging I did when I was first making my web for Lauressa.
I enlist Abner to gather any information about David as it relates to Lauressa without giving him any context to who either of them are, and then don’t think too much about it. There’s not much that could possibly be found that would overly help or hinder me from my goals. Lauressa has already been conditioned. I’ve made a case for our future together. She knows it’s inevitable, and I’ve already demonstrated that I don’t mind forcing her no matter how much she fights me. She just has to accept it. Not only accept it, but embrace it.
The only thing stopping her from fully embracing it is her attachment to her old life. She’s never going to be able to fully embrace our future if she won’t let go of her past .
I could force her to let it go. Get her fired from her job. Make One Humanity disassociate themselves with her. Reveal her identity as the online Dr. Cult persona so her family and Loving Eden completely disavow her. But those things are always better done without force. Forcing myself into her life and onto her body is one thing. Taking her from her life is another. She needs to do that all on her own. She needs to want to throw her entire life away and realize that I’m the only one she can turn to. That I’m her only savior, just like I’ve positioned myself to be.
For now, where we are is acceptable.
She’s unblocked my number, but I still don’t call her or text her nor does she. Instead, she just shows up at my home to play with Nala after work. To my surprise, she hasn’t tried to take her back, either because she knows I’ll just come steal her again or she’s using Nala as an excuse to see me. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter since when Lauressa does show up, she drags me down to the in-home theater that came with the house to watch movies.
“Gotta get you caught up on pop culture, so you can understand the references instead of looking at me blankly. The fact that you have no idea what a fu-freaking flux capacitor is should be a crime,” she mutters as she proceeds to drown her popcorn, made in a popcorn machine I had installed for her, in butter with the butter machine I also had installed.
I don’t comment on the way she self-censored her vulgar language. She’d probably just curse a full sentence to spite me.
We follow the pattern for the next few weeks leading up to Christmas. She comes by randomly in the evening during the week, plays with Nala, then drags me down to watch movies with her and her cat. Then one day, I get a call from her.
“Lauressa,” I answer, like I was expecting her call.
“What are you doing for Christmas?” she asks without preamble.
“The same thing I do all the time. Nothing.”
“The Sovereignty doesn’t celebrate Christmas? I thought you all said Jesus was the first Oracle or some crap like that.”
“Yes. But the Sovereignty doesn’t think his birthday was in December.”
“Oh. You’re one of those groups who like to spoil everyone’s fun and remind people that it’s actually the god Nimrod’s birthday, and he slept with his mother and all that,” Lauressa says.
I chuckle. When Lauressa finally joins me in the Sovereignty, learning the lore and the way it does things isn’t going to be a learning curve for her since she’s already dedicated so much of her free time to studying cults and religion.
“I thought you would be one of those people too, seeing as you hate all things religion and think it should be eradicated,” I tease.
“One, I’m far from one of those people. I celebrate Christmas. I like Christmas.”
The state of her apartment says otherwise. She doesn’t even have a Christmas tree. But since she lives alone and has no children, I gather she doesn’t see the point.
“Two,” she continues, “I hate cults and high demand religions. I certainly don’t think religion should be eradicated. Just the general idea that there is one absolute way to do spirituality and there’s one big guy in the sky who controls all and restarts the world every time people don’t live the way he says to. Which people in power then use to subjugate and control others,” she explains blandly like she’s explained this a thousand times and is bored of it. “I would have thought you figured that out already considering you’ve been trying to convert me to the Sovereignty all this time.”
I did figure it out. It’s just entertaining to rile Lauressa up. So I reply, “That’s an interesting take.”
“It’s not a take. You start talking about eradicating religions and this bad thing called genocide and slavery tend to happen,” Lauressa explains. “But you just want to get me riled up about something, and that’s not why I’m calling you.”
“I’m all ears,” I state, hoping that Lauressa hasn’t learned me enough to know that I’m burning with curiosity.
“Loving Eden does this big thing every year on Christmas Eve where they congregate and party until midnight and well after to celebrate the birth of the Messiah.”
“I’m sure they don’t refer to it as a party.”
Lauressa snickers. “They don’t. But it’s the closest thing Loving Eden will ever get to one. They deck the entire church and all the extra land behind it in these Christmas lights and serve food. Sing. Carol. A lot of actual fun shit. People from all around the state come. It’s actually really nice. Anyway, Shelly, my coworker, is going. And my parents have been wracking my nerve about it. I figured if I’m going to go and be around a bunch of people I haven’t seen in ten years and can’t stand, might as well have you there too. At least when you get on my nerve, it’s entertaining.”
“Are you asking me on a date, Snow White?” I tease .
As I watch her while she sits in her living room through my camera monitors, I see her scowl as she says, “Show up if you want. Or don’t. Just thought it would go a long way to socializing you as a cult baby.”
She hangs up after that, and then I witness her grab a pillow to try to suffocate herself.
I shake my head at her antics.
Looks like I know what I’m doing for Christmas. Not only is it proving that Lauressa’s not too far from completely embracing us, but also, it’s the perfect opportunity for something I’ve had in mind since she told me why she left Loving Eden behind.
An overly cheerful young man greets me at the front steps of Loving Eden. He hands me an event program before letting me into the church. I take it as though I haven’t already memorized the schedule and am ushered through the long hall that’s decked in bright lights, reefs, pines, and ribbons. Then I exit out the wide, arched back entrance double doors and into the back lot where the main part of tonight’s festival is taking place.
Lauressa was right. Loving Eden can call it whatever they want, but this is a party.
I walk through the crowd, passing booths of food, drinks, and activities in search of Lauressa. Like a homing beacon, I find her trying mixed drinks with Shelly. Non-alcoholic, I assume. Because while I’ll drink alcohol if Lauressa hands me an alcoholic drink, Shelly is not so indifferent to Sovereignty doctrine whether people are around to watch and report her or not.
Lauressa suddenly stiffens and then turns to meet my gaze as soon as I’m within a few yards of her, like a plant sensing the sun and naturally turning to face it.
“You showed up,” she says, clearly feigning that she didn’t care one way or another.
“You asked me to come.”
“I said you may as well be here,” she shoots back. She turns to Shelly and says, “Shelly, Jaxson. Jaxson, Shelly.”
“Nice to meet you,” Shelly says, perfectly feigning the bland and obligatory way people meet each other.
I nod in acknowledgement without returning the greeting.
“Where’s J?” Lauressa asks.
“He wasn’t feeling well.”
“Oh. It is getting to that time of year,” Shelly says. “Is it the flu?”
“If there’s a flu name Darryl Wright, that’s exactly what it is,” I respond.
Shelly frowns in confusion, but Lauressa instantly knows. J didn’t want to come because he didn’t want to run into his father who, according to J, comes to this event every year.
“Well, I hope he feels better,” Lauressa says and then puts a drink in my hand. “Shelly and I have been going around trying all the drinks and food. She says this tastes citrusy, like pineapple. But I think she’s wrong, and it’s kiwi. What do you think?”
I glance warily at the drink, and Lauressa makes the wrong assumption as she rolls her eyes .
“Don’t worry. This whole event is a sober safe zone. Even if it wasn’t, Shelly is sober too. So it’s fine,” Lauressa says.
I take a sip of the drink and answer, “Kiwi.”
Shelly laughs and says, “Of course, you would take her side.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, pretending I don’t know exactly what Shelly is talking about. But as far as Lauressa is concerned, we don’t know each other.
“I may be a sheltered religious girl,” Shelly begins, “but I know eye intimacy when I see it. Is this the man you’ve been telling me about?”
In the Sovereignty, Shelly would never be so forward about this while said man was around because of the rules of decorum. But she knows as well as I there’s no one here to tell.
“You’ve been telling her about me?” I ask Lauressa, a smirk on my lips.
“Hard not to when she’s been disappearing every day after work to go see you,” Shelly says.
“It’s not every day. Just… a couple of times a week,” Lauressa denies.
“If it’s often enough to notice a pattern in a month, it’s every day, “ Shelly insists. Then she says, “I’m going to see if the next batch of eggnog is ready.”
“Shelly, you don’t have to make yourself scarce on account of this asshole,” Lauressa says.
“Hang out with your man friend. I didn’t come here to hang out with you anyway,” Shelly says.
“Harsh. ”
“You know what I mean,” she says before walking off, allowing me to have Lauressa all to myself.
I grab Lauressa’s hand and pull her toward me.
“Not here, Jaxson,” she says, trying to resist futilely.
Once she’s safely secured in my side, I say, “Ashamed of me, Lauressa.”
“Yes. Yes I am,” she snaps. “The last thing I need is anyone seeing us together.”
“So I’m your shameful little secret,” I tease. “I’m comfortable with that for now.”
Lauressa rolls her eyes and says, “You’re super late. I almost didn’t think you were coming.”
“I came for the part I was most looking forward to and that happened to be toward the end of the evening.”
Lauressa plucks the schedule from my hand and says, “You were most looking forward to…” She glances at the time on her phone and then at the schedule. “Listening to the Christmas Carol Choir Countdown to midnight?”
“Yes. But I don’t plan on going to it.”
“Then why…”
“You’ll see,” I say. “We still have an hour before then. Show me where you grew up, Lauressa.”
“If that’s the case, there’s nothing to see out here. Everywhere of note happened on the inside.”
“Then take me on a tour of that.”
“They don’t just let guests wander around the church. ”
“But technically you’re not a guest. Don’t tell me, if you really wanted to, you couldn’t just walk in there and go where you wanted with daddy and big brother on the Deacon Board?” I ask.
Lauressa hesitates before saying, “We’ll see how far I can go before someone stops us.”
She leads me back into the church building, passing by the sanctuary.
“Seen one, you’ve seen them all,” she says in explanation. “Besides. I was never in there.”
“Where were you then?”
“Doing anything other than sitting down listening to those awful sermons. Helping in the kitchen. The finance ministry. The hospitality ministry. The information and technology ministry. Anything so I didn’t have to sit still for two hours. But I don’t know if I can get us to any of those places. They’re all behind locked rooms.”
“I’m sure the locks aren’t so complicated that we can’t break in.”
“Maybe. But also…” Lauressa reaches into her pocket and pulls out her keyring. “I still have all my old keys.”
“You have the keys to the church?” I ask.
“Not just the church. To all the rooms.”
“All of them?” I ask. Because even with my status in the Sovereignty, I don’t have a key to all the rooms in the Chicago Altar.
“I was competent and knew how to get stuff done. Dependable. Trustworthy. So over time I just… collected them. It’s been ten years though. They should have changed all the locks by now,” she says.
“Won’t hurt to check. ”
Lauressa bites her lip before grabbing my hand and leading me to a set of stairs. Once we’re on the next floor, she leads me down a hall and then takes a right turn.
“Back that way is the school and a recreation room where we used to have family nights and shit where we didn’t want to be outside,” she says as she leads us to a set of locked glass doors. She selects a key on her keyring, sticks it into the lock, and twists.
The lock opens.
“Oh my God! They haven’t changed the fucking locks in ten years!” she exclaims as she ushers me in and then locks the door behind us.
Out of curiosity, she tries her keys on all the rooms she used to have access to, and to our surprise, she can get into every one. As she opens the doors and looks around, she gives a little anecdote about something that happened in the rooms.
She practiced singing for a youth choir competition. She got into a fight with another girl her age during a meeting with the Deacon of Youth for calling a girl who was shunned for getting pregnant a whore. She organized one of her first community outreach events at fourteen for disadvantaged youths and argued against making attendance to a Sunday sermon mandatory for assistance with the Deacon of Outreach. After the event was over, she called him an asshole and was kicked off the ministry.
She also used to help the young children having trouble with math by allowing them to help count the monies taken up during the collections. She sabotaged the Deacon of Information and Technology when she found out he was abusing his daughter and no one was doing anything about it until he was asked to step down from his position for incompetence.
All the while Lauressa recounts her childhood to me with a fond smile. If I didn’t understand that it was possible to experience pleasure with pain, that often times, the bad is accompanied with the good, I’d say she wanted to go back to those times.
“So what you’re telling me is that you were always a rebellious little troublemaker?” I ask.
“That’s an understatement,” she says with a laugh. “I was always talking back. I was always saying something made no sense or was hypocritical and using the doctrine they force fed me since birth to do it. Needless to say, they hated it. It’s really a wonder I didn’t get dragged to that damn chapel to confess my sins way before I finally left. Others certainly got up there for less.”
“How did you avoid it for so long?”
“My dad was the Vice Bishop, and other than not knowing how to keep my mouth shut, I followed all the other rules and was so much more enthusiastically involved compared to my other peers so I got away with it,” she explains as she locks the doors behind us as we leave.
“Until you did something they couldn’t overlook.”
“Yeah,” she sighs. “Until then.” Then, “Thanks. For making me do that. It was cathartic. Closure I didn’t know I needed after all this time.”
“If you thought that was cathartic, wait until you see what I have in store while everyone else is enjoying the birthday concert for Jesus,” I say. I glance at the time, “Come on. ”
As we make our way back downstairs, people are starting to flow into the sanctuary for the concert. I grab Lauressa’s hand and tug on it to take her in the direction I want to go.
“Res!” a voice says, causing Lauressa to resist my guidance and turn around.
I take an educated guess that it’s her mother.
While Lauressa definitely looks like the female version of her father in the way her face is shaped, she still looks the spitting image of her mother, just a much younger version. Even with the woman’s hair streaked with grays, it’s clear where Lauressa got her jet black hair from. Where she got her red colored lips. Where she got the cool undertones of her skin.
“There you are, honey. I haven’t seen you all night. I was coming to ask if you wanted to sit with your father, brother, and I with the rest of the Deacon Board and their immediate families,” the woman says.
“We’re going to sit with some friends up in the balcony,” Lauressa says. “You know I like to be able to make quick and discreet getaways.”
Her mother looks at me when Lauressa says “some friends,” but otherwise doesn’t comment.
“Well, in case I don’t see you afterward.”
Her mother hugs her. “I’m glad you came tonight.”
Once her mother lets go, she disappears into the sanctuary.
“What was that?” I ask as I lead her away from the sanctuary .
Lauressa shrugs. “My mother doesn’t want to know about any of the men I date unless I think we’re going to end up getting married. So she didn’t ask.”
“We are getting married one day,” I remind.
Lauressa scoffs. “Says you.”
Now isn’t the time to argue with her about that. So I don’t. Instead, I take her to the chapel.
“Jaxson,” she asks when she realizes where I’m leading her to. “Why are we going this way?”
“Trust me, Snow White.”
“Considering everything you’ve put me through, I don’t know about that.”
“Good thing I’m not giving you much of a choice,” I say.
When we get to the chapel, no one is there, just like I planned for it to be. Everyone has been ushered to the main event of the evening, counting down to midnight for Christmas to celebrate their savior. A statue of whom is at the front of the chapel attached to a table that has a locked offering box on it. A statute of him nailed to the cross, almost naked, with a crown of thorns. A symbol of humility. A symbol of sacrifice. That if the man who was to save all humanity, the literal son of God, could subject himself to such a humiliation for humanity’s salvation, then surely insignificant mortals could sacrifice a little money, a little time, their “sinful” inclinations and desires for the sake of their own salvation.
I’ve always seen it different. That his persecution was a warning from a mad tyrant to get in line. That if he would allow his own son to be humiliated, that his own perfect son couldn’t escape persecution and judgment, what chance did any insignificant mortal stand if they decided to step out of line. There’s a reason this faith has been co-opted by dictators and tyrants over the millennia. There’s a reason this man and his story has inspired religions, cults, and movements all around the world. Including the Sovereignty.
I lead Lauressa to the front of the chapel, right under the altar.
“Is this it?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
She knows what I’m asking, but asks anyway, “Is this what?”
“Is this where they made you stand before the baptized members of Loving Eden, so you could confess your sin?”
She could lie. But again, I already know the answer.
“Yes,” she admits.
“Good.”
I grab her head and crush my lips against hers.
She resists, trying to push me away with her hands on my chest, but my hands tangled in her hair prevent her from going anywhere. Already, my cock is hard. Even if I hadn’t planned to do this tonight, I know I wouldn’t have had the self-control but to let it happen anyway. I’ve made myself wait too long.
Finally, I pull away, but I don’t let Lauressa go, forcing her to stay where she’s at.
She heaves in greedy breaths through her swollen red lips before managing to ask, “What are you doing?”
“We’re going to make an offering together.”