The Book of David (19 page)

“Oh, c'mon. Who else was gonna give me flowers and not leave a note? Then Amy asked who gave them to me, and Erin almost had an aneurism across the table tonight.”

“I just . . .” I was blushing, and I didn't know what to say. Did he think they were lame? That it was too girly or something? I thought about standing up to my dad. Talking to Jon was way easier. I just had to find my voice. “I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you.”

Jon didn't say another word. He unbuckled his seat belt, opened his door, and grabbed the roll bar, swinging all six feet, three inches of himself over the side of the Jeep and into the backseat. I looked back, and he patted the seat next to him.

“C'mere.”

I followed.

We kissed for a long time. Jon pulled me down on top of him, and we were pressed tightly against each other, the force of our legs and arms pulling tighter, our hips grinding into each other, until I couldn't tell where he stopped and I started. We got lost in each other.

It's funny, I don't remember getting lost when I was making
out with Monica. I was always wondering if I was doing it right, or thinking about how wet my face was getting, or worried about squishing her if I rolled over the wrong way.

I don't think about any of that when I'm making out with Jon. I don't think about anything. It's all I can do to remember to keep breathing, and sometimes I forget to do even that. Every once in a while one of us would pull back, sort of gasping for breath. One time when this happened, Jon pushed me back, and we both sat up. I hopped up and sat on the back of the backseat, pulling off my shirt. It was sweaty, and I was having a hard time catching my breath.

Jon kneeled on the seat in front of me and wrapped both arms around my waist. He laid his head against my chest, and I pulled him close, running my fingers through his wavy hair.

“I can hear your heartbeat,” he whispered. “It's like a bass drum.”

I bent down and pulled his face to mine. I kissed him gently on the forehead. He smiled and started undoing my belt, slowly pulling open the buttons on my jeans one at a time.

“Monica was wrong.”

“About what?” I whispered. I was shaking all over as Jon slid my jeans down.

“I got the nicest flowers in the whole cast. Tulips are my favorite.”

“Oh yeah?” I could barely speak. I kept my eyes glued to Jon's as he ran his hand down the front of my underwear.

“You know what's better than roses on your piano?” he whispered.

“What?” I choked.

He smirked as he pulled down my boxers. “Two lips on your organ.”

I started to laugh, but Jon turned my laughter into a gasp. I saw stars. I'm not sure if they were actual stars, or just ones in my head, because my body felt so amazing. I'm not sure what I saw or exactly how Jon did what he did. I just know that he was really good at it. There were definitely no mishaps that involved teeth, and by the time he dropped me off here a few minutes ago, neither one of us had blue balls.

Pastor Colbert's sermon today is called “God Hates Sin.”

He's talking about how much God loves sinners but hates the sins they do. I feel like he's talking directly to me, like somehow he saw me and Jon last night. It's weird. I've never really thought about God having a problem with me—or anything that I do, really. I've always been way more afraid of people. Maybe it's because God is this sort of abstract concept—this big presence up in the sky someplace who
supposedly sees and hears everything, but what does he actually do about it?

What Brent said to Tyler last night about rethinking who God was happy with—that sorta stuck in my head. How do we really know who God is “happy” with? Pastor Colbert seems to be the one who is most upset to me. He's all red in the face again. He just spouted out this long list of the people who make God mad: atheists, people who have abortions or vote for abortion or support abortion, homosexuals. . . . The list went on from there, but that's when I stopped listening.

I keep replaying what happened last night in Jon's Jeep, and I know I'm on Pastor Colbert's list now. I'm one of the people who makes God mad. It makes me feel terrible about liking Jon so much. How can it make God mad that we're into each other? How is what we're doing hurting anybody else? Or God, for that matter?

If it makes God so freaking mad, why does it feel so good?

We all drove to church together this morning, and on the way home in the car, Tracy asked Mom about Monica's uncle and whether or not he was one of the people God was angry about. I almost opened the door of the car and threw myself into the road. I did not want to be there for this conversation.

Dad was driving and said, “Hell yes, he is.”

Mom put her hand on Dad's arm and said, “Boyd, honey. Please.” She twisted around in the front seat to face Tracy. “Sweetheart, God is only upset about the actual sin. He's not upset that people feel that way.”

“Oh, c'mon,” Dad said. “What red-blooded American running back just ‘feels that way'? He chose to be that way. Nothing else to it.”

I actually got dizzy when he said this. Did I
choose
to feel this way about Jon? I mean, my dick still works when I'm with Monica, but it sure doesn't make me see stars. Why do things seem so much more exciting when I'm with Jon?

“Boyd, stop it.” Mom's tone shut Dad up in a hurry. “Tracy, honey, being tempted with homosexual feelings for another person is just like being tempted to steal or lie or cheat or gossip. It's not actually a sin unless you act on it.”

“But I saw this TV show where they said it wasn't a choice.” Tracy was frowning, staring out the window—really giving this some thought.

“Probably because homos wrote that show,” Dad said. “That's what they want you to think.”

Mom sighed. “Tracy, the Bible says that it's wrong.”

“Does it?” she asked. “I mean, I was reading this thing online that showed the place in the Old Testament where
it said that it was an abomination or whatever, but then they showed this list of the other things God says are an abomination and we do lots of those all the time. I mean, you're not supposed to touch the skin of a dead pig either, but we all feel fine about football.”

I laughed really loudly when she said this. My little sis can be a total pain in the ass sometimes, but she's really smart. Mom shot me a look from the front seat.

“Tracy, God tells us to hate the things that he hates. End of story.”

Dad pulled into the driveway, and I was out of the car almost before it stopped moving, running into the house—like I could outrun what Mom had just said.
God tells us to hate the things that he hates.

So my mom will
hate
me if she finds out I'm a homo?

I was just looking up those sites Tracy was on, and it seems like there's just as many people in the world who believe the opposite of Mom and Dad. Why couldn't I have been born to some of
those
people? I feel so pissed off that I will never be able to tell my parents the truth about who I am. They think I make God angry. I hate that they think this. I hate them for thinking it. Why would you decide to worship an angry God anyway?

Suddenly I've got tears streaming down my face while I write.
What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I so upset? I hate myself for feeling this way—for feeling any of this.

That's the saddest part of all, I guess. If being gay is a problem,
I'm
the problem.

I know I haven't written in over a month. Well, I have written, but just not in this journal. I realized after the whole incident-in-the-back-of-the-Jeep-with-Jon entry that I had to stop carrying this thing around with me in my backpack like an idiot. All it would take is one wrong move, and what's in this notebook could end up all over the Internet.

I was just reading over my last entry, and after that day in church, I almost burned this journal. I took it outside with me that afternoon and tossed it on the charcoal grill out behind the garage, but something wouldn't let me throw the match. There's too much of me in these pages. Too much I want to remember. So I took the journal back upstairs and buried it in between my mattress and box spring—far enough into the middle of the bed that Mom won't find it when she's changing my sheets.

Then I started writing in a new notebook for English class the next morning. That one doesn't have any of the gay stuff in it. I try not to even talk about Jon in it. It's totally lame, too. I feel like I'm writing fiction about somebody else's life. It's full of
dates with Monica and making out with her and how hot it is. It has tons of stuff about Tyler: his progress with his knee, how he's getting off his crutches soon, how he's excited about getting back in shape. I can tell he's pissed about the season we're having without him. We're still undefeated, and next week we start the playoffs.

I've been writing in that notebook about all the college football stuff. The week after I committed at USC, ESPN actually showed up at our game and shot some footage. They did interviews with me, and I've been on a bunch of sports talk shows on TV and the radio.

Jon has been giving me a hard time about all the publicity, mainly because he knows how much it bugs Tyler that it's happening. He has gradually won Tyler over because Tyler loves it when Jon calls me a “media darling” and tells me I need to borrow some of Monica's mascara the next time I go on camera.

Of course, I just smile when Tyler laughs like a hyena at Jon's jokes, because I know that Jon is purposefully bagging on me to throw Tyler off our scent. Jon and I have found an easy rhythm. We see each other mainly after our big group dates with Amy and Monica and Tyler and Erin. We'll all go hang out after the game on Friday nights, or go play mini golf, or to a movie or something on Saturday nights. Then, usually on Saturdays, Erin will take Tyler home because he's still in a brace that doesn't
allow him to drive. Once they're gone, we'll make out with Monica and Amy for a little while and then drop them off, and then I have Jon all to myself for a little while before I go home.

Yeah, so I'm not writing about that in the other journal. At all. That's why I had to pull this one out again. Jon and I just got back from the big hunting trip. I got off a few shots, but neither one of them were clean. Dad and Randall mainly drank the whole time. They'd have had a lot more luck if they hadn't been so freaking drunk and loud the whole time, but I didn't mind. It was lucky as hell that they were loud on several occasions because otherwise Jon and I wouldn't have heard them. Randall almost caught me with my pants around my ankles in the middle of the forest yesterday evening while Jon was getting . . . well . . . “adventurous,” as he likes to call it. I've never pulled up my pants so fast in my life. We laughed our asses off about it in the tent that night, but I was also scared shitless. If Randall had seen us messing around while he was holding a gun, I'm not sure both of us would still be alive.

Ironically, Jon, the only one who doesn't hunt with a gun, wound up being the star of the show. Right before we left to come home this morning, he took his bow up into the stand one more time and bagged a freaking buck. Dad and Randall were both fit to be tied. They couldn't believe it and kept talking about how Jon was a “regular Robin Hood.”

The buck is hanging up in the garage right now. Dad's
draining it tonight, and then he's gonna skin it and clean it tomorrow night. Mom is less than thrilled about the deer carcass hanging in the garage and all the bloody clothes she's washing right now, but she's pleased about the prospect of venison stew at Thanksgiving. She made Jon and me strip down to our boxers in the mudroom and give her our clothes so she could put them directly into the wash. Then she shooed us upstairs to hit the showers.

I had to run because being that close to Jon in his underwear always makes me noticeably excited, and that's a conversation I'm not ready to have with anybody yet—much less my mother. In fact, I don't intend to talk to her about that ever. I'm just going to get to California. That's pretty much as far as the plan goes right now.

But that's enough.

I'll figure out the rest when I get there.

I'm getting ready to crawl into bed, and I keep feeling like I forgot something. It hit me just a second ago that for the last two nights I got to sleep next to Jon all night. The first night when we got into the tent, we just lay awake and talked for a long time, quietly so that my dad and Randall couldn't hear us in their tents. I think we were both too scared to actually make out that first night—afraid maybe my dad would hear us—but that's the fun part of hanging out with Jon. I have such a good time just talking to him that we don't have to be constantly
making out. It's like I have this awesome, sexy buddy who I never get tired of talking to.

After a while I started getting really sleepy and told Jon I was tired. He sat up and kissed me good night. Then scooted his sleeping bag over so that I could feel him behind me. He put his arm around me and pulled me close to him, and within a few minutes, I could tell he was asleep. It felt so good just to lie there next to him like that.

I wish I could do that every night.

After classes today, Tyler walked with me to the locker room before he left for physical therapy. We passed Amy and Monica, who were selling tickets to homecoming next weekend. He reminded me that we have to get our tuxes.

“Wanna go with me and Jon tomorrow?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “Why does that kid have to come with us everywhere now?”

I got totally irritated. “He's my friend.”

“Yeah, got it, man.”

“What has he ever done to you, Tyler?” I tried to keep my voice calm, but I could tell I sounded annoyed.