Saving Julian by Mason Stokes

Author:Mason Stokes [Stokes, Mason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LGBT Fiction
Publisher: Pride Publishing
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

#xa0;

Back at the apartment that night, I saw Julian for the first time in days. Our schedules never brought us together. I left for self-loathing camp before he woke up and he was never home when I returned. I was in bed long before he came home, after whatever clients had claimed his time, if not his attention. But that night he didn’t go out. He sat down with me at the kitchen table while I was eating a bowl of ramen noodles.

“How’s the dissertation going?” he asked. “Have you figured out the dick thing?”

“If I had to make a list of all the things I haven’t figured out,” I said, “the dick thing would be right at the top. I still have many questions about the dick thing.”

He was wearing a T-shirt in a shade of blue that lit up his eyes even more than usual, but this drew attention to the bags under them as well as a certain slackness in his face. I’d seen him tired and rumpled before. Normally it made him hotter, but not now. Now he just looked sort of faded. And, I’ll confess, it was a relief.

“And you?” I asked. “How’s tricks?”

“The same,” he said. “I mean, these guys recognize me now, like I’m some kinda celebrity. But everything else is the same. The same guys. The same bullshit. Oh, but this is crazy, you’ll like this. Monday night, I had a guy with three nipples, then Tuesday night I had a guy with only one. What are the odds? That two nipple freaks would balance themselves out like that? It just goes to show you.”

I couldn’t imagine what it would go to show you, and I wasn’t really up for finding out. The day’s events had thrown me and I couldn’t stop thinking about Neil. I wondered what he was doing, what he was thinking, whether he was okay.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.

“Okay.”

“Do you really believe the stuff that Drucker says? I mean, the stuff about what makes people gay? The father who never loved us, blah blah blah.”

For a second, he looked like he didn’t want to talk about it, that he didn’t want to open that whole thing up again. But then he said, “I don’t know. Some of it makes sense. I mean, do you believe the gay brain stuff? Doesn’t that seem too easy? Maybe there’s something genetic going on, but that can’t be the whole story, right? When Paul talked about the stuff we’re missing, well, I recognized some of that stuff. And when he held me, that felt like something that I’d never had before. Something I wanted.”

“But does that mean you buy the rest of it?” I asked. “The religious stuff? That homosexuality is a sin? That Jesus wants us to change?”

“I’m not religious,” he said. “I don’t believe in God. But I believe in sin. I think sin is real. I can feel it inside me.”

I couldn’t figure out how you could have sin without the angry god, Heaven and Hell, and a tablet full of rules.

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