Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Harrison
I had stood at the door for a full thirty seconds before I knocked, and in that time I prayed—actually prayed, head bowed in a beige hallway like a man at an altar rail—that no one would answer. That the number had died in the dead app.
If that happened, I could turn around and ride the elevator back down to my suite. Return to my mother and the locked, lightless room of my life, and call this what I always called it afterward: a fever that passed.
Then the door opened, and the prayer died in my throat, because God, apparently, has a sense of humor after all.
He was the face. The one real face in that whole grid of cowards, mine included.
And in person it was worse because the photograph hadn't caught the way he held himself, loose and unafraid, or the dark-blond hair pushed back damp from his face, or the eyes that took me in once, head to shoe, and didn't flinch from a single inch of what they found.
I was used to being looked at. But I was not used to being seen, and this man saw me, and I felt it land somewhere under the sternum where the hollow feeling lived.
Neither of us spoke. Names were the one currency neither of us could spend.
I stepped over the threshold and he stepped back to let me in.
The door swung shut behind me with a soft pneumatic sigh, sealing us in.
I thought, helplessly, of the ancient inner sanctums of myth, those forbidden chambers hidden deep within tombs or temples.
The kind of sacred, perilous ground you were permitted to stand upon only once, and only if you were willing to offer up your life as the price of admission.
He reached up, took my face in both hands, and kissed me, and the temple came crashing down.
My entire body trembled as his soft lips pressed against mine, and I grabbed his upper arms to keep from falling to my knees.
The man’s scent, the feel of his stubble against the skin around my mouth provoked a groan of pleasure I didn’t recognize, because it had been so long since I’d made it.
I had not been touched by another man in eleven months.
I’d counted. That was the obscene private arithmetic of my life—the careful spacing of sins, a back-room encounter in a town too small to have a name I'd remember. Months of fasting, of cold control, of standing under the stage lights telling my congregants to master the very hunger that was eating me alive from the inside out. Eleven months since I’d allowed myself this sin.
And now his mouth was on mine, unhurried, certain, and I made a sound against his lips that I would have been ashamed of anywhere else on earth, and here it felt like the first true word I'd said in a year.
He walked me backward toward the bed without breaking the kiss, his hands already working my tie loose, and I let him.
That was the thing no one would ever believe about Pastor Harrison Cole: that the only peace I’d ever known came from being the one who yielded.
From laying the whole crushing architecture of myself down at another man's feet and being, for a few fleeting moments, nobody's pillar.
Nobody's pulpit. Just a body, and a need, and a pair of hands that didn't know my name and didn't give a damn.
He got the jacket off my shoulders, my shirt open, and his palms spread flat over my bare chest. Then his thumb found the little gold cross and went still.
“There it is,” he murmured, the first words either of us had risked, and there was no mockery in it, only a kind of wonder. He looked up at me through his lashes. “You wore it for me.”
I wore it always. I couldn't tell him that I had worn it through every sin of my adult life, that the cross had lain against my skin in every dark room I'd ever knelt in, that I had never once been able to take it off because taking it off would have meant admitting that the two halves of me could be separated—the holy and the filthy, the shepherd and the man who hungered for the sinful embrace of another man.
“Leave it on,” my voice cracked.
A smile slowly spread across his cheeks and he sank to his knees.
I want to be honest about what it was, because I’ve spent my whole life being dishonest about everything that mattered. A man should tell the truth somewhere, even if only in the darkness of his own soul.
This was worship.
Not a metaphor for it. The thing itself.
When this stranger opened my belt, freed my cock and took me into the wet heat of his mouth, I understood for the first time every word I’d ever preached about ecstasy and surrender.
How the soul came undone before the divine—understood that the church had handed me all the language for this and then forbade me the only altar where it was true.
I sank my fingers into a stranger's hair in a beige hotel room twelve floors above a strange midwestern town, and I felt the veil rip from top to bottom.
He took his time, exactly as he'd promised through the app. The man worshipped me the way I had only ever dreamt of, and I had to brace one hand against the wall and bite down on the sounds trying to climb out of me, because the walls were thin and I felt my mother’s presence nearby.
She was probably sleeping the sleep of the medicated righteous, and even now—even with his tongue swirling around my cock, and heaven coming apart behind my eyes—some watchman in my head stood guard at the door of my own ruin.
“Stop hiding,” he said, pulling off me just long enough to say it, his hand still moving slow and merciless. “There's nobody here but us. Let me hear your pleasure.”
And God help me, I did. I let the sound out.
I let it all out, the held breath of eleven months, of a decade, of a whole life lived behind glass, and he made a low pleased noise against me like a man receiving an offering, and I thought, blasphemous and certain and unrepentant: this is what they meant.
All of them, every psalmist, every saint who ever wrote of being pierced and consumed and made nothing in the presence of glory.
They meant this. They simply hadn't had the courage to say so.
He brought me to the edge with that clever, merciless mouth, and when I couldn’t bear another second of being undone by him I rose, grabbed his shoulders, and bent him over the foot of that anonymous bed with a hand pressed flat between his shoulder blades.
I felt him go down willingly, and something in my chest that had been kneeling my whole life finally, for once, stood up.
This was the other half of it. The half I never let myself name.
Because I’d spent thirty-five years on my knees—to my mother, to the board, to the three thousand faces of my congregation, to the God I preached about and could not please—and the only place in all creation where I was permitted to be myself was here, in the dark, with a man whose name I would never know bending willingly beneath my hands.
I pressed into him slowly, and he opened around me with a low, torn sound that caught in his throat.
Heat swallowed the head of my cock, then more, then the rest, tight and slick and unyielding until he relaxed and I sank the rest of the way inside of him.
My hands tightened on his hips, fingers digging into the muscle on either side of his spine.
The cross around my neck swung forward and grazed his back, cold metal against hot skin.
“That’s it,” I growled against the nape of his neck. “Let me have all of you.”
He pushed back into me, his spine arching, and the noise he made wasn’t intelligible.
My hips drew back and drove forward again, harder this time, and the wet sound of it filled the room.
I watched my cock disappear into him, watched the way his body took it, the way the muscle fluttered and clenched around every thrust. The chain of the cross dragged across his skin with every movement.
I folded over him, chest to his back, one hand braced beside his and the other still gripping his hip hard enough to leave marks.
My mouth was against his shoulder blade.
I could taste his salty sweat. Every time I drove in, the breath punched out of him, short and desperate, and he kept pushing back to meet me like he needed it deeper.
The bed creaked under us, and the headboard knocked the wall in a steady, obscene rhythm.
When I came, it ripped through me violently.
“Oh God, Jesus!”
I buried myself to the hilt, grinding in as deep as I could get, and the sound that left me wasn’t a word.
It tore out of my chest raw and helpless while I pulsed inside him, pulse after pulse, my forehead pressed between his shoulder blades and my fingers locked tight around his hips.
He came with me, gasping, his body clamping down around my cock in tight, rhythmic pulls that dragged it out longer.
For a few seconds there was nothing but the sound of both of us breathing and the wet slide of my cock as it slipped out of him.
Afterward we lay in the wreckage of the bedding, not touching, both of us breathing like men who'd run a never ending race. The room was dark. Outside the window the prairie night was enormous and black, and the only light was the red eye of a smoke detector.
And I did what I always did, afterward. I reached for the rule.
I cannot feel anything.
That was the rule, the one that had kept me alive.
My body could have its fever, once or twice a year, in the dark, with strangers—my body was an animal, and even animals must occasionally be fed—but my heart stayed locked.
My heart was not permitted at the table.
I took the fleeting thing, the encounter, the hour of mercy, and then I got dressed, got out, and I let the door shut behind me.
I would not, could not look back, and above all, I felt nothing.
It was a good rule. It had never once failed me.
But it was failing me now.