Her clarification makes my stomach plummet to my gut: “The activities coordinator.” She pauses, adding meaningfully, “She organizes the singles ward.”
“Oh. Not yet.”
“So,” she says, smiling warmly, “make sure you do, okay? I’ve told her you’ll be calling. I just think it’s time.”
It’s time? What does that mean? Does it bother his parents that he’s nineteen and doesn’t have a girlfriend? I thought he wasn’t supposed to be in a relationship when he left on his mission.
Do they suspect he’s gay?
He starts to speak, but she gently cuts in, answering some of my questions. “I’m not saying you should grow attached to anyone. I just want you to know some . . . people . . .”—Ugh, she means girls—“so that when you come home—”
“Okay, Mom,” Sebastian says quietly, blinking to me and away again. He smiles at her to remove the insult of his interruption.
She seems satisfied with this answer and moves on. “Have we received your promotional schedule from your publicist?”
Sebastian winces, shaking his head. “Not yet.”
His mom’s smile droops, and a furrow takes up residence on her brow. “I’m worried we won’t have time to coordinate everything,” she says. “We still need to do your paperwork and coordinate with the MTC. If you leave in June, you’ll be cutting it close. We don’t know where you’ll be going, so we assume you need three months at the center before you leave.”
In any other house, this detailed planning would have me making a crack about spies and Agent Q and pens that turn into machetes. Not here.
But then something clicks. My brain suddenly feels like Mom’s old Buick. She would always push the accelerator before the motor turned over, and the engine would flood, needing a few extra seconds to clear. It takes me the same amount of time to realize Sebastian and his mom are talking about this summer.
As in, when he’ll leave Provo for two years.
The MTC is the Missionary Training Center. He’s leaving in four months.
Four months used to feel like an eternity.
“I’ll ask her,” Sebastian says. “I’m sorry. When I last checked in, they told me they would be getting me an itinerary with my tour stops as soon as it was done.”
“We have so much to do before you go,” she says.
“I know, Mom. I’ll follow up.”
With a little kiss to the top of his head, she leaves, and the room seems to be swallowed by tense silence.
“Sorry about that,” he says, and I’m expecting his face to be tight, but when I look at him, he’s smiling broadly. The awkward conversation between us is gone. The awkward conversation with his mom, too. “So much to coordinate. I need to get her this stuff soon.”
“Yeah.” I pinch my lower lip, trying to figure out how to ask what I want to ask, but the move distracts him, and his smile slips as he watches me touch my mouth.
I don’t know what it is about that tiny break, but—much like his reaction when he admitted coming to see me that day with the boat—it says so much.
It says so much because the smile seemed real until he looked at my mouth, and then it just totally shattered.
The room is full of unspoken sentiments. They hang over our heads like rain clouds. “Where are you going?” I ask.
He looks back up at my eyes, and the smile is nowhere to be seen now. “Oh. After my book tour? I’m going on my mission.”
“Right, right.” My heart is a hundred marbles rolling on the floor. I don’t know why I needed him to say it out loud. “And you’re not sure where you’ll be assigned?”
“I’ll find out in July, I think. As you heard, we still need to send in my papers, but I can’t do that until the book comes out.”
Missions, from the outside, are hard to understand. Young men—and women sometimes, but not as often—leave their homes for two years to be sent to a location anywhere in the world. Their job? Make new Mormons. And not the sexy way, at least not yet. Missionaries make new Mormons the baptizing way.
We’ve all seen them, walking or riding bikes in their clean trousers and pressed, short-sleeved white shirts. They come to our doors with bright smiles, tidy hair, and glossy black name tags and ask whether we’d like to hear more about Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
Most of us turn them away with a smile and a “No, thank you.”
But my mother never says no. No matter how she feels about the church—and trust me, she doesn’t let them talk about the Book of Mormon to her—they’re far from home, she said back when we lived in Palo Alto. And it’s true; many of them are, and they’re on their feet all day, pounding pavement. If we invited them in, they’d be as gracious and lovely as you can imagine. They’d take lemonade and a snack, and their gratitude would be effusive.
Missionaries are some of the kindest people you will ever meet. But they will want you to read their book, and they will want you to see the truth the way their church sees it.
While they’re gone, they aren’t allowed to watch television, or listen to the radio, or read anything beyond a few church-sanctioned texts. They’re there to dive deeper into their faith than they ever have, to be alone and become men, to help grow the church and spread the Gospel. And they aren’t allowed to leave a girlfriend behind. Of course they aren’t allowed to engage in any sexual behavior—certainly not with members of the same sex. They want to save you, because they think you need saving.
Sebastian wants to be one of them.
I can’t get the thought out of my head, and we’re sitting here in his house, surrounded by the truth of it—of course he wants to be one of them. He is one of them. The fact that he so easily saw himself in my book, that he knows I have feelings for him, doesn’t change that one single bit.
I don’t even care about the farce of my novel anymore; I’d let him see the original version, the version where I clearly can’t stop thinking about him, if he would promise me to stay.
He wants to go on a mission? He wants to leave here and commit two of his best, hottest, wildest, most adventurous years to the church? He wants to give his life to this—really give his life?
I stare at my hands and wonder what the hell I’m actually doing here. Glitter-heart Paige has nothing on me. I am the King of Naive.
“Tanner.”
I look up at him. He’s staring at me, and it’s clear he’s said my name more than once.
“What?”
He tries to smile. He’s nervous. “You got quiet.”
Quite frankly, I have nothing to lose. “I guess I’m still stuck on the part where you’re going on a mission for two years. Like, it just hit me now that’s what you’re doing.”
I don’t even have to break it down further for him. He totally gets it. He gets the subtext, the I’m not Mormon; you are. The How long can we really be friends? The I don’t just want to be your friend anyway. I see it in his eyes.
And instead of brushing it aside or changing the subject or suggesting I learn the art of prayer, he stands up, tugging down the hem of his shirt when it rides up on the side. “Come on. Let’s go for a hike. This is a lot to digest, for both of us.”
• • •
There are a million trails headed up the hill, and when it’s nice out, you’ll usually pass someone on each one of them, but Utah weather is unpredictable, and our warm front is long gone; no one is hiking.
We have the outdoors to ourselves, and we trudge up the sludgy hillside until the houses in the valley are just tiny specs and we’re both out of breath. Only when we stop do I realize how hard we’ve both been pressing up the trail, exorcising some demons.
Maybe the same one.
My heart is pounding. We are clearly headed somewhere to capital-T Talk—otherwise why not just put away the schoolwork and turn on the Xbox?—and the possibilities of where this could go make me feel a little insane.
It’s going nowhere, Tanner. Nowhere.
Sebastian sits down on a boulder, b
ending to rest his arms on his thighs and catch his breath.
I watch the rise and fall of his back through his jacket, the solid muscle there—but also the straight posture, the unique poise of him—and absolutely defile him in my head. My hands all over him, his hands all over me.
I want him.
With a small growl, I look away and into the distance at the BYU Y monument embedded in the distance, and it’s honestly the last thing I want to see. It’s made of concrete, and in my mind is a total eyesore, but it’s revered in town and on the BYU campus.
“You don’t like the Y?”
I look over at him. “It’s fine.”
He laughs—at my tone, I think. “There’s an LDS story that the Native Americans who lived here many years ago told the church settlers that angels had told them whoever moved here would be blessed and prosperous.”
“Interesting that the Native Americans don’t live here anymore because of those settlers.”
He leans forward, catching my eye. “You seem really upset.”
“I am upset.”
“About my mission?”
“I’m certainly not this upset about the Y.”
He falters, brows flickering down. “I mean, didn’t you know that’s what most of us will do?”
“Yeah, but I guess I thought . . .”
I look up at the sky and cough out a laugh. I’m such a moron.
Was there a time I could have stopped this train of feelings from barreling into my bloodstream?
“Tanner, I’ll only be gone two years.”
My laugh is so dry it’s dusty. “ ‘Only.’ ” I shake my head, blinking down to the ground at my feet. “Well, in that case, I’m totally not upset anymore.”
We fall into silence, and it’s like a block of ice has been dropped between us. I am an enormous jerk. I’m being such a baby right now; I’m making this endlessly awkward.
“Can you at least call me when you’re gone?” I ask. I don’t care anymore how crazy I must sound.
Sebastian shakes his head.
“E-mail, or . . . text?”
“I can e-mail family,” he clarifies. “I can go on Facebook but . . . only for church-related stuff.”
I feel when he turns to look at me, and the wind whips across my face so hard it hurts, but it also feels like the sky trying to slap some sense into me.
Wake up, Tanner. Wake the hell up.
“Tanner, I don’t . . .” He rubs a hand on his face, shaking his head.
When he doesn’t finish the thought, I press. “You don’t what?”
“I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”
He’s fully staring at me, brows pulled down low. But it isn’t confusion there; at least I don’t think it is. I mean, I know he knows. Does he just want me to say it? Does he want me to say it so he can explain gently why us being together is impossible? Or does he want me to admit how I feel so he can . . . ?
I don’t actually care why. The words are this heavy boulder in my thoughts, in every waking thought, and if I don’t just let it roll straight out of me, it’s going to crash around and break everything delicate inside.
“I like you,” I say.
But when I look over, I see that these words aren’t enough; they don’t clear away the expression on his face. “And I know your church doesn’t allow that kind of feeling.”
He waits, so still, like he’s holding his breath.
“It doesn’t allow for guys to have feelings like this . . . for other guys.”
He breathes out a barely audible “No.”
“But I’m not LDS,” I say, hardly any louder than him now. “In my family, it isn’t a bad thing. And I don’t know what to do about how I feel or how to stop feeling this way about you.”
I was right. This doesn’t surprise him at all. His face clears, but only long enough to cloud in a new way. Every feature grows tight. I wonder if maybe he wishes that I hadn’t said anything at all, or that I’d just pretended that he was my new favorite dudebro and I would miss platonic hanging out and fumbling through this stupid book project with him for the next two years.
“I . . . ,” he starts, and then exhales in a controlled stream, like each molecule of air is coming out single file.
“You don’t have to say anything,” I tell him. My heart is racing. It’s a fist punching, and punching, and punching me from the inside. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “I only wanted to explain why I was upset. And,” I add, wanting the ground to open up and swallow me, “also why my book is basically about how it feels to fall for you.”
I watch his throat as he swallows thickly. “I think I knew.”
“I think you knew too.”
His breath is coming out so hard and fast. His cheeks are pink. “Have you always . . . liked guys?”
“I’ve always liked whoever,” I tell him. “I really am bi. It’s about the person, not the parts, I guess.”
Sebastian nods, and then he doesn’t stop. He just nods, and nods, and nods as he stares at his hands between his knees.
“Why wouldn’t you just be with a girl, then?” he asks quietly. “If you were attracted to them? Wouldn’t it be so much easier?”
“That’s not something you get to choose.”
This is so much worse than I ever would have guessed. This is even harder than telling my dad. I mean, when I came out to him, I could tell he was worried about how the world might treat me and what kinds of obstacles I would meet that he would be unable to help me navigate. But I saw that reaction masked beneath the firmest discipline. He wants me to be accepted and does everything he can to hide his fears from me.
But here . . . I was so wrong about this. I shouldn’t have said anything to Sebastian. How can we even be friends after today? I have the melodramatic thought that this is what it’s like to have a heart broken. There’s no shattering; there’s just this slow, painful fissure that forms straight down the middle.
“I think . . . I’ve always liked guys,” he whispers.
My eyes fly to his face.
His lower lids are heavy with tears. “I mean, I know I have.”
Oh my God.
“I’m not even attracted to girls. I envy you that. I keep praying I will be at some point.” He puffs out a breath. “I’ve never said that out loud.” When he blinks, the tears slide down his cheeks. Sebastian tilts his face up, looking at the clouds and letting out a sad laugh. “I can’t tell if this feels good or terrible.”
My thoughts are a cyclone; my blood is a river overrun. I scramble to think of the best thing to say, what I would want someone to say to me right now. The problem is, him admitting this to me is huge. It’s not the same as anything I’ve ever faced, even with my family.
I go with my first instinct, the thing my dad said to me: “I can’t tell you how good it feels that you trust me.”
“Yeah.” He looks over to me, eyes wet. “But I’ve never . . .” He shakes his head. “I mean, I’ve . . . wanted to, but never . . .”
“You’ve never been with a guy?”
He shakes his head again, quickly. “No. Nothing.”
“I’ve kissed guys, but honestly . . . I’ve never felt like . . . this.”
He lets this sink in for a beat. “I tried to change. And”—he squints—“to not even let myself imagine how it would feel . . . being with . . .”
This is like a punch to my solar plexus.
“But then I met you,” he says.
His meaning hits me even harder.
I’ve been pulled out of my own body, and it’s like watching this from across the trail. We’re sitting on a rock, side by side, arms touching, and I know this moment will be seared into my history forever.
“The first time I saw you,” I start, and he’s already nodding, like he knows exactly what I’m going to say.
“Yeah.”
My chest squeezes. “I never felt that way before.”
“Me either.”
I turn to him, and it happe
ns so fast. One second he’s staring at my face and the next second his mouth is on mine, warm and smooth and it feels so good. Oh my God. I make some guttural sound I can’t control. He makes it back, and the growl turns into a laugh because he pulls away with the biggest smile the sky has ever seen, and then he’s coming in to kiss me more and deeper, his hands on my neck.
His mouth opens, and I feel the tentative sweep of his tongue.
Light bursts behind my closed eyes, so intensely I nearly hear the popping sound. It’s my brain melting, or my world ending, or maybe we’ve just been hit by a meteor and this is the rapture and I’m given one last perfect moment before I’m sent to purgatory and he’s sent somewhere much, much better.
It isn’t his first kiss—I know that—but it’s his first real one.
CHAPTER NINE
On the walk back down the mountain, I don’t even know what to do with my hands, let alone the gnarled tangle of my emotions. What just happened back there is tattooed onto every synapse I have; I’m sure I’ll remember the sensation of every touch, even four decades from now.
Mom always tells me to take an accounting of my feelings. So, other than dizzy with lust, I’m feeling
Nervous.
Hesitant.
Desperate for that to happen again, and soon.
But the more queasy emotions are paled by the elation.
I
Kissed
Sebastian.
I felt his mouth on mine, and his tongue, and his laugh reverberating in the space between us. We kissed over and over. All kinds of kisses too. Fast and messy, and the slower deep ones that make me think of sex and long afternoons safely hidden in someone’s bedroom. He bit my lip, and I did it back, and then he let loose a sound that I’ll hear echoing around the frenzy of my thoughts for the rest of the weekend. It felt . . . so fucking right. Like, whatever I did before, with someone else, wasn’t really kissing. Maybe it sounds dumb, but it was like every cell in my body was engaged. It makes everything else I’ve ever done feel sort of whitewashed and hard to remember. We kissed until the chill started crawling beneath our clothes.
Actually, now that I think about it, we kissed until Sebastian pulled away when my hand was flirting with the hem of his shirt.
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