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They were sitting on the floor, leaning against his bed, when Dorian kissed him. It was a sweet kiss, closed-mouthed, like Dorian didn’t want to push too far. It was sweet, and lovely, and perfect. And it was wrong. It didn’t feel wrong, but Cullen believed it was wrong.
Dorian said, “I don’t want to just be friends anymore.”
What did it say about him that he’d rehearsed a response in case something like this ever happened? But what came out first wasn’t planned. “I want this too.” He got back on script. “But I can’t. It’s against God’s plan for sex, and I can’t compromise my faith like that.”
There was a moment of heavy silence. Dorian's expression flickered through a spectrum of shock, resignation, and disappointment, and finally landed on pain, brow drawing low and tight over stormy eyes.
Dorian broke the silence. “I’m a walking sin to you,” he said.
“That’s not what I said,” Cullen pleaded, his voice sounding pitiful to his own ears.
“It’s what you meant. I can’t stay here.” Dorian stood and started stuffing his things in his suitcase.
“Dorian -” he began.
“Shut. Up.”
Dorian zipped his suitcase with such force Cullen was surprised it didn’t break. He felt horribly helpless as Dorian took the few short steps to Cullen’s bedroom door.
Then Dorian turned to him. “That’s why you were so keen on taking me to your Bible studies, isn’t it? It wasn’t about spending time together, or sharing something that’s important to you, it was about fixing me. Christian boy thinks gay boy can be fixed by meeting Jesus, news at 11. How long has our friendship been just a project to you? I am not your project, and I don’t want to be fixed.”
Cullen was too stunned to answer, and he missed his chance, because Dorian turned and stormed out. He’d never treated Dorian as a project, had he? Never told him, never so much as implied, that he was in any way less because of his orientation? And yet he felt convicted, like he sometimes felt at church when the pastor gave a sermon that spoke to his sins.
He heard Dorian’s car start up outside and wondered where he was going to go at 11:30 on a December night, when he’d barely had enough money for gas to get home from Madison. Leliana’s. If he had any sense, he’d go to Leliana’s house.
But Dorian wasn’t in a mood where sense was guaranteed to assert itself.
Cullen called Leliana.
“Cullen?” Leliana’s voice was groggy as she answered.
“I’m sorry to wake you up. I… Dorian and I had… sort of a fight? And he walked out. I’m hoping he’s going to your place.”
“You and Dorian had a fight?”
“Yes.”
“Are you both okay?”
“It didn’t come to blows, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s good I guess. How bad was it?”
“Look, I don’t know yet. Bad enough that he walked out. I’m not even sure if he remembered to get his toothbrush from the bathroom before he left. Just, if he goes to your place, would you text me and let me know he’s with you?”
“Of course. Cullen, are you okay?”
“I think I might have fucked everything up.”
“What happened?”
“He kissed me.”
“Ohhh,” said Leliana, like she wasn’t even all that surprised.
“I rejected him.”
“You do like him, don’t you?”
“I - ah - he’s - maybe.”
Leliana sighed. “So why did you reject him?”
“Because I - it’s -. You know where I come down on the morality of… Lel, I thought I was doing the right thing, but I feel so guilty now.”
“Guilty because you hurt your friend?”
“Yes, and because of what he said after, that I’ve been trying to fix him,” Cullen admitted. Admitting things was sometimes easier with Leliana than with anyone else. They’d stayed after Bible study so many times in high school, talking about their faith, and some of those conversations had been intensely personal. He could go to Leliana with this.
“I just heard a car door shut. That’s probably Dorian. I will talk guilt and theology with you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah, just… Just take care of him for me.” Cullen’s voice broke.
“I will. You take care of yourself tonight, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”
By the time Leliana hung up, tears were streaming down Cullen’s face. He shut his bedroom door and toppled face-first onto his bed, choking back a sob. He wept until he was too exhausted to feel the guilt that had overwhelmed him, and then he slipped into a fitful sleep, lights still on.
At some point, someone - his mom probably - turned off the light and pulled the quilt over him. He woke just enough to notice it happening and drifted off again.
Toward morning, Cullen finally slept soundly enough to dream. At first, he dreamt of Josie, his high school girlfriend, and the dream was all brown skin and dark hair and soft kisses. He was shirtless, and her hands were on his chest, drifting slowly downward. He closed his eyes into a kiss, felt hands unbuttoning his jeans, unzipping, fingers teasing through his boxers… and then he felt the tickle of a mustache against his upper lip. He opened his eyes, and of course it was Dorian, and a part of him that was closest to his waking self wanted to pull away, to do what was right.
But his dreaming self kissed back, moaned in response to Dorian’s touch, pulled at Dorian’s clothing. The dream jumped a little in time and place, and they were in bed, Dorian naked beneath him, gray eyes cloudy with lust. His long, glossy hair had fallen messily across the pillow, and his lips were dark and parted, and Cullen kissed him.
And then he woke up to the weight of someone sitting on his bed, and for a moment he hoped it was Dorian, that he’d have a second chance at that kiss. But there was no way Dorian was back already; he knew it took a while for Dorian to come down from being as angry as he’d been last night. He opened his eyes, and it was his mom there sitting on the bed, affection and worry in her face. He was grateful he was lying on his stomach, hiding the lingering arousal of his dream.
“Good morning,” Mom said.
“Morning,” he mumbled without moving.
“When did Dorian leave?”
“Around midnight.”
“Would you mind telling me what happened?” Cullen had heard words like those when he was in trouble, but he could hear the concern in his mom’s voice and knew she was just worried about Dorian.
“We had an argument.” He could hear the misery in his own voice. He sounded pathetic.
“An argument so bad he left in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He really didn’t, especially not with the dream so fresh in his mind, tangling up his thoughts and feelings.
“Do you know where he went?”
“Leliana’s.”
“So he’s safe and I don’t need to go looking in snow banks for him?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. You coming down to breakfast?”
“No. I need some time.”
“Alright,” Mom said, rubbing his back for a moment. Then he felt her weight lift from the bed and heard her footsteps marking her progress out of his room and down the hall.
After some time, Cullen got up, showered, and got himself a couple protein bars from the kitchen. Rosalie was still in the kitchen, but she didn’t say anything to him. Rosie was usually pretty good about reading his moods, and he was probably giving off “Don’t talk to me vibes” loud enough to scare anyone away.
He shut himself away in his room, sat on the floor, and made quick work of the protein bars.
His mind wandered and his hands twitched. Didn’t he have a stress ball in here somewhere? He rummaged carelessly through desk drawers ‘til he found it, an old orange stress ball that still had some decent bounce. He settled back on the floor and set to bouncing the ball of the wall, listening to it thud against the wall and then slap into his palm. It made a soothing backdrop to his racing mind.
Last night's conversation kept running through his mind like a football replay he was analyzing for weaknesses. Except in this case, he wasn’t sure he'd have the opportunity to try again and do better.
His mind drifted from the argument to the kiss that had started it. He remembered the firm press of Dorian's mouth, the tickle of the silly mustache he'd started wearing last year, the moment afterwards when Dorian had looked at him with what might have been love and was certainly affection and longing.
He wanted more of that, more than that. He wanted to feel Dorian's lips open under his own, to hold Dorian's face in his hands, perhaps to press a string of kisses along his jaw, to slide hands up his shirt - he stopped himself there. What was he thinking? They were friends. They had always been best friends, and that was enough. Wasn’t it?
Leliana called him a little after 10. It took him two rings to register that there was a sound that required his attention.
“Hey, Lel.”
“How are you doing?”
“Not great. How’s Dorian?”
“What am I, chopped liver?”
“You’re not the one who…” Cullen had no idea how he meant to finish that sentence.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t make light. And since you asked, Dorian’s still pretty upset. He hasn't told me what you said to each other.”
Cullen recounted the previous night's conversation nearly verbatim, and Leliana just listened until he was done.
“I see,” was all Leliana said at first.
“Did I really treat Dorian like a project?” Cullen blurted.
“Did you want to change him or did you want to help him?”
Cullen paused for a long moment. “Is it any better if I wanted God to change him?”
“Not really, no.”
“But isn’t that what we’re supposed to want as Christians? For God to work in the lives of people we care about?”
“It becomes a problem when you start telling God what to change about people. Especially when it’s something that’s part of their identity. Has it occured to you that maybe God designed Dorian to be gay?”
“Why would God make some people gay when He has condemned homosexuality?” Cullen was thinking of his own attraction to men. He refused to put a label on it, to make it his identity, but he’d known for a long time that he was attracted to both men and women. How could that attraction be God-given if God condemned it in Scripture?
“You realize I took an entire class on that question last semester? We could be here a while.”
“They teach classes on this?”
“It was an elective for my Religious Studies program. They don’t teach it very often, but I signed up for it as soon as I heard it was being offered. I had come to peace with my sexuality, but if you’d asked me to explain it a year ago, I couldn’t have put any of it in words,” Leliana said. Cullen remembered a conversation they’d had in high school, Leliana explaining that she was bi, that she believed there was nothing wrong with being bi and Christian. But she really hadn’t been able to explain much more then.
“I didn’t choose to be bi,” Leliana continued. “I believe God made me that way, just as he made Dorian gay and Cassandra straight.”
“You’re still not explaining why.”
“Because it is part of the Image of Divine Love,” Leliana said.
“Now you’ve lost me.”
“Let’s begin by saying that humans were created in God’s image.”
“Okay, yes.” Cullen wasn’t sure where she was going with this or why she was starting with something so basic it was practically obvious.
“‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them,’” Leliana quoted. Cullen recognized it as part of the creation story in Genesis. Leliana continued, “So God not only created the original one human being in his own Image, he created all human beings, in all their variety, in his Image. It’s explicit in the text that both male and female are aspects of the Divine Image, but we can extend that meaning to understand that all the many kinds of diversity among human beings reflect different aspects of the Divine Image.”
“I… okay… that actually makes sense. But before you didn’t say the divine image, you said the image of divine love,” Cullen said.
“I believe that the Image of God is the Image of Divine Love, that the most important aspect of God that humans reflect is his Love. Love in all its forms is God’s greatest gift to us.”
“‘Love in all its forms,’” Cullen repeated, mulling it over. He was starting to see where Leliana was going with this, and he surprised himself by not feeling entirely defensive against the idea.
“God gives us many kinds of love. Parent/child love. Sibling love. Friend love. Romantic love. They are all reflections of God’s love. And within those different kinds of love, there are infinite varieties that all reflect God’s love in their own unique ways. My mother’s love for me is different from your mother’s love for you, and neither is better or worse than the other, even if my mother didn’t give birth to me. They are both motherly love, and each uniquely reflects the Image of Divine Love.”
“And you’re about to tell me that all romantic love is romantic love, and every relationship of romantic love reflects God’s love in its own way.”
“Even if some romantic love relationships are between a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. I believe this is why God made some people gay or bisexual. It takes all the kinds of human love together to reflect Divine Love in all its variety and vastness.”
“I - I want to agree with you,” Cullen said, “But there are other verses that condemn homosexuality outright.”
“I can count them on one hand, and most of them are addressing temple prostitution. We talked about them a lot in class. I have some links and resources I can send you,” Leliana offered.
“Okay.”
There was a long moment of silence - too long for a phone conversation really - while Cullen realized that a part of him desperately wanted to be proven wrong about this, desperately wanted to see things Leliana’s way.
“I’m gonna need some time to process this,” he said finally.
“That’s okay,” Leliana said. “I’m here if you ever want to talk about it more.”
“I… I need to just think and pray about it for a while.”
“Yes. And I should get back to Dorian.”
“Would you tell him I’m sorry? He’s not gonna answer if I call him to say it. He might not even read a text from me right now.” Dorian didn’t get angry often, but Cullen had seen it enough times to know that it took awhile for him to be receptive to apologies.
“Yes, I’ll tell him.”
“Thanks. For everything.”
“Anything for my best friends,” Leliana said.
“Are we still on for New Years?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll see you then.”
“See you then. Bye, Cullen.”
“Bye.”
Cullen hung up but otherwise didn’t move, slipping into meditation and prayer. It was starting to come together. His receptiveness toward Leliana’s arguments, the way they sounded like gospel. The spiritual conviction he’d felt at Dorian’s accusations, which felt like discovering a truth, so much more profound than the old shame he felt at his desire for Dorian, which was really the same shame he held for anything sexual.
Still, he’d been taught for so long that homosexuality was sin that a part of him didn’t want to budge. He couldn’t shake the shame. He read every resource Leliana sent him, prayed for hours and hours. Weeks passed while he worked in the wood shop and had so much time to just think. He had changed his mind, and yet the shame badgered his heart.
And then Leliana sent him a book, a cheap little paperback copy of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Leliana’s note was brief: “Reading this for class. You need it.” The poem confounded him at first. It was glorified nonsense. Fascinating, but nonsense.
And then bits started to run through his mind like song lyrics. “He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.” And, “Shame is Pride’s cloak.” And, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
He couldn’t have said how it happened, but his shame slowly faded away after that. It welled up now and again, and then he’d remember: Shame is Pride’s cloak. And he’d let it go, and it would indeed go.
He called Dorian every month or two, but Dorian never picked up. And then one day, two years or more from their kiss, their falling out, Cullen called Dorian and got an automated message: “This number has been disconnected. Good-bye.”