Abel pushes his chair back. Ten seconds click by on the wall clock.
“Holy cow,” he says.
I can’t talk.
“I don’t even remember saying that Hell Bells line,” Abel says. “Did you know your sister had a blog?”
I shake my head.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Click the link.”
“Are you sure?”
My hands make a whatever gesture.
He hesitates, but he clicks the screencap link. This page pops up with a blog entry titled “Okay, so my little bro FINALLY came out…” I peek at it through my fingers. It’s Natalie, no question. Her username is Vashta and she makes halfhearted stabs at concealing identities—”B” for me, “Father X” for Father Mike—but the story’s all there. How my mom let the leftover meatloaf sit on the counter and spoil that night. How my dad kept saying but how can you be sure, as if it was a diagnosis that needed a second opinion. How I sat on Nat’s bed and cried about the sermon Father Mike had given two weeks earlier, the one where he held up a picture of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and gently explained the “true definition of family.” Poor little nerdling, Nat wrote. I nagged him into this coming-out drama and maybe he wasn’t ready. He was a Father X fanboy as a kid and now he’s so terrified of his real self I just want to smack him. I think it’s his destiny to be fucked up his whole entire life unless he gets serious help.
I go lie down on the couch. I think of Sim on the Henchmen’s operating table, his chest pried open and his cold organs clicking and whirring out of sync. Abel takes another minute with Nat’s blog entry, and then he comes over and kneels down beside me.
He’s quiet for a minute. Then he reaches out and pats my hand.
I don’t know what about that sets me off. It’s kind of a neutral gesture, something Sim would do, and maybe that’s part of it. Or maybe it’s just that it’s so unlike Abel, or maybe my nerves are rubbed raw right now and any little touch would have done this, make my sore eyes fill up and spill over.
“It’s okay.” He squeezes my hand. “Seriously.”
I drape my arm over my eyes.
And I tell him everything.
I tell him about Father Mike. I tell him about Put on the Brakes!, my three awkward months trying to date Bec, my parents and the sad looks they shoot me when they think I won’t notice. I even tell him about the Ryan Dervitz kiss and the Dairy Queen freakout. When I lift my arm off my eyes I see him watching me like I’m some TV show about one-legged orphans with Olympic dreams, and it kind of makes me want to smack him but it feels so good to tell him that I keep going and going until the cut on his lip opens up again, and I remember what happened outside.
He grabs three tissues from the box on the desk. One for his lip, two for me.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“Just forget it.”
“What I said—”
“Forget it, Brandon. All that shit in your head—”
“I’m used to it.”
“And I’m such an idiot, I kept shoving boys at you.”
“Only two.”
He glances over his shoulder, as if someone’s watching at the window.
“So…” He lowers his voice to a stage whisper. “Do they really tell you all that?”
“All what?”
“Like, you have a ‘special calling’ to be celibate?”
“Pretty much.”
“’Cause if you believe that you should totally talk to my dad’s friend Mitch, he’s this Unitarian minister or whatever and he’s on his third husband so maybe he can help you—”
“I don’t believe it. Not anymore.” I sigh and stick my hands in my hair. There’s no way I can explain this logically. “It’s just hard to turn it off.”
“Why?”
I pick at the hem of my shorts. “There’s still this little part of you that’s like ‘what if they’re right?’ What if there is a hell and you’re like gambling with eternity just because you want a boyfriend, so you get terrified and think it’s not worth it, I’ll suck it up and be alone forever, but then on the other hand what if it turns out there is no God or he’s up there shaking his head because people keep twisting the Bible around, and you wasted your life being alone and miserable for nothing, and then—” I’m babbling like a freak. “Stuff like that. You know.”
Abel lifts the tissue off his lip and runs his thumb over the splotch of blood. “That Father Mike guy never…like, tried anything with you, did he?”
“No! No. Never. He just has really specific ideas about God.”
“You believe in God?”
“I’m…confused.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“I left my church.”
“So? You can believe in God without church. I do.”
I blink at him. I would not be more surprised if David Darras pulled up in a white limo with two dozen blue roses and begged me to elope with him. I’ve consistently shut up about religion around Abel; he talks so much crap about it I just assumed he was like Bec. “You do?”
“I believe in something, yeah. I just think the world’s too complicated and amazing not to.” He’s folding the tissue into a lopsided rose. “I mean, I don’t believe in a big bearded badass on a cloud throne, but I can buy a loving creative higher power that wants everyone to be happy. Something that roots for us. Like, the anti-Xaarg.”
I shake my head. “I have no idea how to think that way.”
“Why not?” He lobs the tissue rose at me. “I mean, if no one knows for sure what God’s like, then why don’t you just believe the people who think he’s all rainbows and sunshine and loves you no matter what?”
“Because it’s too easy.”
His eyebrows steeple.
“Suffering’s supposed to be valuable.” Abel opens his mouth but I cut him off. “I’m just saying. That’s what they teach you. They tell you when you suffer you share in the passion of Jesus and so God doesn’t save us from suffering because…” I glance up at him and let out a long sigh. “Forget it.”
Abel leans forward, elbows on knees. Probably trying to gauge the depth of my mental disturbance, so he’ll know how far to sit from me.
“I totally want to hug you,” he says.
“You do?”
“We wouldn’t piss off Worst-Case-Scenario-Angry-God if we hugged, right?”
“Nope.” I gulp. “Probably—”
His arms are around me before I can finish. He still smells like popcorn and cotton candy and he feels so warm it’s like diving under an electric blanket after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I try to melt into the hug, the way Cadmus and Sim are always melting into hugs in Cadsim fics, but my nose is running and leaving horrifying wet spots on his army-green t-shirt and I’m positive I smell like sweat—not the clean I’ve-been-working-out kind but the toxic nervous kind I specialize in. It figures. My first lingering hug from a cute guy, and I’m too screwed up to enjoy it.
“God…” I murmur.
“I know. I’m a great hugger.”
I pull back, hold him by the shoulders. “Abel.”
“Brandon.”
I take a deep breath. “I am so fucking ready to be normal.”
“Fun normal or boring normal?”
“Fun normal.”
“Congratulations. How can I help?”
I just look at him. My lips vibrate from spitting out the f-word. He freezes in the Empathy Position, head cocked and one hand resting on my knee, like an action figure of a perfect boyfriend. I know exactly what I want. To be able to hug him over and over again, to sling my arm around his waist in public, to feel his warm reassuring hand around mine on a regular basis, without any real sex stuff ever getting in the way. I know that’s about as realistic as Cadsim fic.