“Oh, yeah, definitely.” Missy flipped the menu over. “Right there. They come with French fries.”
More French fries? I smiled.
* * *
I’d never tasted meat before, and I really liked it. There was something amazingly decadent about the food, with all its brash flavors. Everything seemed more intense than the food we had at home. It was all sweeter and saltier. It tasted so good, but there was way too much of it. I could barely eat half of the burger and half of the French fries before I was stuffed.
I sat back in the booth, my hand on my stomach, feeling more sated than I ever thought I had in my entire life.
Jesse was still eating. Of course, I’d already had dinner tonight, and he hadn’t had anything, so I guessed it made sense that he was hungrier than I was.
He set down his burger and wiped his mouth with one of the paper napkins. “This is amazing.”
“I know.” I grinned. We hadn’t been talking much, not since the food came. We’d both been completely mesmerized by eating it. I groaned. “But we’re probably going to go to Hell now.”
He shook his head. “Nah. Lots of guys do stuff like this when they come to Lebenet. The Albertson brothers go to McDonald’s every single time. They said the first time they ate there, they were both afraid that God was going to strike them dead or something. But so far, they’re all right.”
“Really?” The Albertson family had always struck me as godly and pure. I couldn’t believe it. Was everyone in the community really a secret hypocrite?
He munched on a fry. “I think it’s pretty normal for the younger generation to rebel a little bit. I never have, because it’s not worth it to disgrace my family. My father’s still trying to get another wife, and if anyone found out I wasn’t walking the straight and narrow, it would make him look bad.”
Guilt surged through me again. “Oh, I’m sorry that I brought us here, then.”
“You and your apologizing.” He laughed. “Seriously, it’s okay. I wanted to come here. I wanted to spend time with you.”
I blushed. “You did?”
He nodded. But then he seemed to get a little bit shy, and so he took another bite of his burger, and looked down at it while he chewed.
I looked down at my plate. It had been so good, and I wanted more of it, but I was so, so full. I picked the bun off the top of the burger and slid the meat patty onto the plate. Using my knife and fork, I cut off a piece and popped it into my mouth. I closed my eyes as the flavors burst on my tongue. That was amazing.
“Listen, it’s not all about my dad, anyway,” said Jesse. “The truth is that it’s less fun to be rebellious all by yourself. I’m the oldest boy in my family, so I’m always here on my own. Maybe I’ve just been waiting for someone else to misbehave with.”
I understood that. “Well, I’m glad it was me.” I was having the most fun that I thought I’d ever had in my entire life. And even if it was a sin, at that moment, I didn’t really care.
“Me too.”
We grinned at each other across the table.
“So,” he said. “What brought all this on? What made good little Abby London decide to be wicked today?”
I shrugged, feeling self-conscious. “I don’t know. I came to Lebenet with Thomas because he said it might be my last chance before the elders married me off. And then when I saw you, I just thought…” I toyed with the straw in my Coke. “Sometimes, when I see you, I feel like…”
He leaned forward. “What?”
I hesitated, unsure how to put it. “Well, it’s wrong, whatever it is.”
“How do you know that?” he said.
“You know how. Us being here together alone goes against everything we believe.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean what we feel is wrong, because whatever it is that you’re talking about, I’m pretty sure I feel it to.”
I met his gaze. His eyes were startlingly blue, and I was struck by the familiar urge to touch him. I wanted to put my fingers on his chin, to touch the fine hairs of his beard. I swallowed.
“You know,” he said, “there are people who go to the elders and tell them that they feel that God is leading them to be married. Calvin and Eliza Davis, for example. The two of them were sneaking around and taking walks together for months before it happened.”
Had he just said that he wanted to marry me? I kind of thought he had. I felt weak and breathless. I took a drink of Coke to try to steady myself. “I guess that’s true. Do you really think that what we’re feeling could be from God, not from the devil?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
I wanted to bask in that moment, in the possibility that what he was saying was true. But I couldn’t do it for too long, because another thought crept in. A more likely thought. “I don’t know. They always say that the way of sin feels good, and that the way of God is hard and painful, full of sacrifice.”
“But it doesn’t have to be, does it?”
“Marilyn Jones and Anthony Kelby were sneaking out together too,” I said. But when the elders found out, they didn’t let the two of them get married. Instead, they cast Anthony out of the community and forced Marilyn to marry someone else, someone older. She was now Ezra Allen’s third wife, already pregnant with her first child.
Jesse sighed. “I know.” He shook his head. “My father’s right. They do have us by the balls.”
I wrinkled up my nose.
“Sorry,” he said.
Then I laughed. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
He crammed the rest of his burger into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “Now that I’ve tasted that, I don’t know if I can handle living the rest of my life never eating it.”
I widened my eyes. “But it’s wrong.”
“Maybe.” He took a drink of his Coke. “If you could do anything you wanted, Abby, even if it was sinful, what would you do?”
I ran my finger over the lip of the table. “I don’t know.” I had ideas, of course, but I didn’t feel comfortable sharing them.
“You know what I sometimes wonder?” he said. “I wonder if they don’t have a better idea out here in the world.”
“They don’t,” I said, shocked.
“Well, they don’t force people to marry people they don’t like,” he said.
“But they all get divorced,” I said. No one in the community ever got divorced. Marriage was forever, no matter what.
“Maybe you should be allowed to get divorced,” he said. “Sometimes the way my father treats my mothers is pretty horrible. You know, I would never do that. Maybe if you got to pick who you wanted, it wouldn’t be so bad. Or if you got to change your mind, and decide that you didn’t like that person anymore.”
“But it’s not about what you want,” I said. “It’s about what God wants.”
“Exactly,” he said. “So, if I could do anything I wanted, even if it was sinful, that’s what I’d do. I’d live my life the way I wanted to, not the way God wanted me to do it. Maybe I’d only have one wife. Maybe I’d only have two kids. Maybe I wouldn’t even work on a farm.” He raised his chin as if daring me to disapprove.
I knew what he was saying was very wrong. But I didn’t want to say that out loud. Instead, I felt swept away by this dream world in which we were allowed to follow our own desires. I took a deep breath. “You know what I’d do?”
“What?” he said.
“I’d play my guitar and sing. You can do that out here in the world, you know. There are people, and that’s their job. They play music for people, and those people watch them and clap for them, and they travel all over.” This idea had always appealed to me. I loved to play music, and I wished that I never had to stop. “That’s what I’d do. Maybe I wouldn’t even get married. Maybe I wouldn’t have any children at all.”
I waited for him to tell me that was a horrible idea, but he didn’t.
He just gazed at me. “Would you let me come along?”
“
Definitely,” I whispered.
* * *
Jesse
I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t. Even though we’d been breaking rules left and right, doing so many sinful things, I kept my hands to myself. I didn’t want to scare her.
But it was all I could think about, the whole time that we sat together in that restaurant. She was sitting across from me, and she was so pretty, it made me crazy. She’d worn her hair down, instead of back in a braid, and I loved the way that it cascaded over her shoulders, the way it framed her face.
She blushed a lot, and I thought she was even prettier when she blushed. Something about the color it brought to her cheeks drew me to her. I kept thinking about the way our hands had brushed when I took that key from her. I kept noticing any inch of her skin that was bare. Her wrists. Her neck. Her ear lobes. I wanted to touch her in all of those places.
I’d never felt something quite so intense. After we ate the worldly food, it was almost worse, as if some fierce energy was surging through me, waking me up inside. I wanted to touch her. I felt like I was meant to touch her. Like it was the most important thing on earth.
But I didn’t.
It was already bad enough being so close to her, doing all these forbidden things with her, sharing our forbidden dreams. Touching her might have taken it just a level too far.
But I really wanted to, especially after we left the restaurant and went walking around the parking lot. We made a grand plan of what we’d do if we were living for ourselves, not God. She and I would travel the world, and she’d write songs on her guitar, and I would learn to play them and back her up. I was okay at guitar. It was practically a prerequisite for men in the community to learn to play, since the father of a family often led his whole brood in family sing-a-longs. It was less common for women to learn to play, but it wasn’t unheard of. And Abby was very good. She had an angelic voice. Whenever I heard her sing, I felt as if it cut through right to my insides.
As we walked she tossed her hair back, her eyes glinting with mischief. “We won’t get married at all, but we’ll stay in the same hotel rooms, and we’ll be amazingly wicked.”
And when she said that… I really wanted to touch her then. I wanted to reach out and grab her hand, to intertwine our fingers and link us. Because I knew there was something there between us. I felt it, and I knew it meant something.
What exactly it meant, I couldn’t say. In our community, love was something that we grew into. We were taught that God would speak to the elders and tell them who we were meant to spend our lives with. For men, that didn’t mean only one woman. Supposedly, with every wife that we were given, we became more Christlike, learning to expand our love, in the way that Christ loves the church. But when I was walking through that parking lot with Abby, that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I didn’t want to have to try to love her equally along with someone else, because in that moment, it seemed like it would diminish her. I tried to picture her sitting at a table like the one in my home while I presided over it the way that my father did, her silent and subjugated, just one of the women I was supposed to love in the way that God loved everybody.
I didn’t know if I wanted to be like God. I didn’t think I wanted to figure out how to divide my affections. I just wanted her. I wanted our crazy dream, traveling through the world and living in hotels and breaking all the rules.
Still, I didn’t touch her.
We walked and we talked until cars began to disappear from the parking lots of the surrounding restaurants. I told her things that I’d never told anyone else.
“I don’t respect my father,” I said, staring out into the distance. “I know he’s supposed to be my spiritual head and that he’s supposed to be the model of Christ for me, but… More than anything else, I guess, I just want to be free of responsibilities and be on my own.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “To only answer to myself sounds… amazing.”
“I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I couldn’t leave my brothers and sisters and my mothers alone with my father.”
She gave me a wistful look. “But you still want to, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“I feel like that too.” She took a deep breath. “Whenever I’m at the worship meetings, playing guitar with the worship team, sometimes I wish that I could be the worship leader. I know that it’s wrong, because I’m a woman, and women aren’t supposed to lead anything.”
I hung my head. “But you still want it.”
She nodded. “Sometimes I feel like everything’s like that. Everything that I want is wrong, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like you. This. Us talking. It’s great.”
She gave me a small smile. “Yeah it is.”
“But we shouldn’t be doing it. I know that, and I just… I don’t care.”
“You don’t?”
I shook my head. “Not at all.” I really wanted to touch her then. I almost reached out for her hand.
But then she stopped walking and wrapped her arms around herself. “Sometimes I wonder why God made me a woman.”
I scuffed the toe of my shoe against the pavement. “Does it make me a jerk if I say I’m glad he did?”
She looked back at me, and she was smiling, and she was almost… radiant. “You know what? Being with you is maybe the only time I’m happy I’m a girl.”
“Why?” I didn’t think I understood.
“Because I like that you like me, I guess.”
“No, I got that. I just mean, what’s so bad about being a girl?”
Her shoulders slumped. “God doesn’t like girls.”
“What do you mean? Sure, he does.”
“No, he made us to be secondary and subservient. We don’t matter. One man gets more than one wife, but a woman can’t do the same thing.”
I thought about Abby being with another man besides me, and I didn’t like the thought of it at all. “Would you want that?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe.”
I drew back.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You can’t tell me that you aren’t excited at the idea of having more than one wife.”
“Actually…” I shoved my hands in my pockets.
“You’re not? I don’t believe you.”
“It’s only… maybe it’s kind of weird?” I wasn’t sure why I’d framed it as a question, but I looked up at her, feeling like I needed assurance.
She only raised her eyebrows.
“Because it’s all this pressure.” I looked back down again. “I’m supposed to turn into this spiritual head and love everyone the way Christ loves everyone, and I don’t even think I can do that, and I… maybe I don’t even want Christ to be part of it. Thinking about God and thinking about girls at the same time makes me feel weird.”
She laughed. “I don’t think you’re supposed to think about girls at all.”
I snorted. “Right, like that’s going to happen.”
“You think about girls a lot?”
“I think about you.”
She met my gaze, and we did one of those things that we’d been doing a lot, where we stopped everything and stared at each other for a while. I liked it. It made me feel close to her. But it was also frustrating, because every time we did it, it made the urge to touch her that much stronger.
“Me, huh?” she breathed.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “A lot.”
“I think about you too.”
The air around us was charged full of potential. The streetlights shone down on us, and they lit up her hair, giving her a halo. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I’m going to touch her, I decided. I’m going to reach out, and I’m going to touch her hair. And if it means I’m going to Hell, I don’t care, because I can’t stand here, staring at her, and not touch her.
And then she looked away. “We shouldn’t,” she told the ground.
I balled my hands up in fists t
o keep them from reaching for her.
She started to walk away, turning her back to me.
I went after her. “Wait, I thought that’s what we were doing. Things we shouldn’t do.”
She looked over her shoulder. “But it’s going to make it harder. We’ll both go home tomorrow, and everything will be the same, and it won’t matter what we said tonight.”
“It won’t be the same.” I fell into step beside her. “This changes everything.”
“No, it doesn’t.” She glanced at me. “We’ll go home, and we’ll do what we’re told. And we’ll accept whatever they tell us. Because that’s the right thing to do. We have doubts, Jesse, but that’s all. It’s because we’re weak, and we’re being tested. We have to bury our doubts in the deepest ocean and move forward and do what God asks of us.”
After everything we’d said, it was strange to hear the community’s words coming out of her mouth.
She walked faster.
And I could have reached out and touched her then. I could have stopped her.
But I didn’t. Because she was right. We had doubts, and we were sinning. And it was wrong. The reason that it felt so good was that bad things always felt good.
The truth was that Abigail London was being used by the devil to try to make me stumble. I was a man, and it was my job to be an example. I was supposed to learn to lead women, to keep them from sinning. That was what spiritual heads did. Just because my father wasn’t particularly good at it didn’t mean that it wasn’t the way things worked.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She paused. She was a few feet ahead of me. She turned her head to look at me. “We should stay away from each other.”
“Yes,” I said. “We should.”
She turned away, and then she took off sprinting across the parking lot towards her family’s RV.
I watched her go, my stomach in knots.
When I crawled beneath the blankets in my truck that night, I should have prayed and begged God to take this temptation from me, so that I could grow into a righteous man worthy of his glory.
But I didn’t. This was a night of sin, after all, and after all the wrong things I’d done, I didn’t figure one more would hurt things too much.
Out of Heaven's Grasp Page 3
