Work Text:
When stars are in the quiet skies,
Then most I pine for thee;
Bend on me then thy tender eyes,
As stars look on the sea!
(from "When Stars Are in the Quiet Skies", Edward Bulwer-Lytton)
---
Four drinks in at Elder Schrader’s twentieth birthday party, Connor had decided that he liked alcohol.
He had had it before, of course. He had never been a perfect Mormon, unlike some fellow Elders he could name. (Well, one fellow Elder.) He had sneaked a glass of wine at his cousin Lisa’s civil wedding; she had left the church to marry an atheist, and the McKinleys had been aghast—family politics meant that they couldn’t refuse to go to her wedding, but when Mom had talked to the bride and groom she had complimented his “lovely bow tie, goodness me, how unusual,” and smiled and otherwise almost ignored him, which was such a typical Mom thing to do that Connor had honestly just drunk the wine to spite his parents even though they hadn’t even seen him do it. He had also choked down most of three cheap beers at his high school prom’s after-party. They had tasted bitter and gross. He’d mostly wanted to get drunk enough that he could make himself at least kiss his date, Beth. (He had, in fact, kissed her, and then jerked away mumbling something about his curfew. It was all very awkward, and they broke up the next week.) But he’d never drunk frequently, and he’d never drunk much.
The Arnold-ist branch of Latter Day Saints, unlike any of the actually legitimate branches, had no issue with alcohol or many of the other sins Connor had spent his twenty years avoiding. “Uhhhh,” Arnold had said, in his usual somewhat rambling style. “I think it’s fine if you want to drink or whatever, or wear different clothes, or have coffee, or even, y’know, have sex and stuff.” He had paused, looking awkward. “If there’s someone who wants to have sex with you. Don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you, ‘cause Heavenly Father doesn’t like it, and he’ll… send… Gandalf to, uh, to smite you. But if you both want to, then yeah, go for it. And it’s totally fine if they’re a guy and you’re a guy, or if you’re both girls, because Jesus is love and love is awesome. Even though I think doing gay things is actually illegal in Uganda? But it’s okay with me and it’s okay with Jesus.” Thus saith the prophet.
So the mission hut had pooled their resources and gone into the closest actual town, two hours’ bus ride away from Kitguli, to buy a few cheap bottles of whatever they could find to go with the admittedly pathetic plans for the first birthday celebration since Price and Cunningham had arrived and managed to tear their way of life completely down and rebuild it sideways. The initial plans had included nothing more celebratory than potatoes instead of maize porridge with their dinner, but it turned out that Kevin Price had Ideas about birthdays. Because of course he did, Connor thought. Typical Kevin Price. And of course—of course—he could bake.
It had been watching Kevin singing Disney tunes to himself and baking a cake from banana and maize flour, three shirt buttons undone, a smear of baking powder on that perfect collarbone, impeccable hair mussed, that had sent Connor’s infuriating but easily ignorable crush on the other missionary from a gentle simmer to a full boil. “Darn it,” he’d muttered to himself, and Kevin Price had, thankfully, entirely misunderstood.
“I know you must be tired of posho,” he’d said apologetically, “but this is something totally different, I promise! It’s still made from maize, but it’s a cake, a real cake; it’s called chigumu. I think it’s actually a Malawi recipe. Afiya from the bakery told me how it’s made.”
“Oh, cool,” Connor had said, affecting indifference. “Will there be frosting?”
“Will there be frosting?” Kevin had acted offended, before grinning. “It’s not a birthday cake without frosting, Elder McKinley. Even if this frosting is going to be mostly banana.” Which it had been, and it had been a surprisingly good cake, and oh, this was so bad.
Connor had spent almost four months sharing a tiny house with first seven, then nine other young men, and in the first two months, turning off any gay thoughts had been easier than it had ever been. Elder Neeley had really nice blue eyes, but he also loved and missed television and would wax lyrical for hours about Big Bang Theory or Scrubs or NCIS, whether you asked him about it or not. Elder Zelder had great arm muscles from playing basketball in high school, but he also took his shoes off randomly and would just leave them lying wherever. Elder Michaels had cute blonde hair, but whenever he had a shower, he left puddles on the floor and didn’t mop them up. Elder Davis did amazing pencil drawings, but every single time he was on the roster to cook dinner, it was an inedible mess and the kitchen was left a disaster. Elder Schrader loved music and had a beautiful singing voice, but he always forgot to clean out the sink when he shaved. Elder Pop-Tarts was, well, Elder Pop-Tarts, and adorable, and Connor loved being friends with him, but he would bounce from topic to topic until anyone talking to him was exhausted from trying to keep up. Elder Church was one of Connor’s best friends too, and he had a gorgeous smile, but he snored and snuffled and sleep-talked every single night. There were still hell dreams every night, but they were boring ones, routine ones. Even Satan seemed a little done with the standard torturing about the gay thoughts and had moved on to talking about what a failure he was as a missionary with zero baptisms, and the dancing sexy-guy demons in tight outfits were obviously just doing it out of habit. Then Price and Cunningham had arrived, and Connor knew he was in trouble.
Elder Cunningham—Prophet Arnold—strangely intuitive, weirdly insightful, oddly innocent Arnold—was in no way Connor’s type, and that was fine by him. Elder Price, on the other hand—egotistical, longing for validation and praise, and so very handsome—well, Connor felt like he’d been delivered a neatly wrapped Temptation to Sinful Thoughts, shake well, contents may have settled in transit.
Kevin Price, it turned out, was not the perfect Mormon missionary that Connor had been promised would turn District Nine around, but that hardly even mattered now. And he sure wasn’t flawless—but he sang Disney songs unapologetically and baked surprisingly good cakes and flinched from unexpected touches and had the most beautiful brown eyes, and ugh, Connor thought, this wasn’t fair, he hadn’t asked for this, and he might not be turning off his gay feelings anymore but he didn’t exactly want them, and darn it, he was going to drink whatever the heck they’d found in town and maybe it would make him feel better about things.
One bottle labelled ‘waragi’ tasted to Connor mostly like burning, but whatever alcohol Davis had managed to scrounge up at the market tasted kind of the way vanilla smelled, and made Connor feel both comfortable and comforted, like he was drinking a cookie. Whatever it was, four glasses in two hours was enough to get him somewhere past tipsy and well on the road to drunk. Connor didn’t think he was anywhere near smashed—and he knew he had enough experience lying to himself to know when he was telling the truth—but he was feeling warm and a little dizzy and fuzzy around the edges. It felt like he might be blurring into whatever was around him, but in a good way. What was floor, and what was wall, and what was air, and what was Connor? What parts of him, were him? Was this how a snake felt when it shed its skin?
He was lying on the scuffed linoleum floor so he could look out of the window and up at the stars. It had seemed an excellent idea in his tipsy philosophical haze, and he was still pretty sure it was a good idea even though people had tripped over him three times. The hut was dark. It was the rainy season, and the electricity was still out from the last storm, so the common room was lit by candles alone, and he had a good view of about thirty stars in what might have been a constellation he didn’t know. They were so bright here.
He could hear Elders Schrader and Zelder on the large green sofa, chuckling over some joke of Elder Michaels’, and Elders Davis and Neeley, on dishwashing duty, singing along less-than-tunefully to the EFY album Steady and Sure on the ancient battery-powered CD player and, from the noise, breaking at least one of their already limited stash of plates. Elder Church was on the smaller sofa, talking low and soft to Elder Pop-Tarts. If Connor had turned to look, he knew he would have seen the two of them, heads bent close together, in intent conversation. The bottle beside them was some fruity soda made in Uganda and bought with the other beverages, in respect of Church’s decision not to drink alcohol, and Pop-Tart avoiding it in solidarity. He could even hear Cunningham’s characteristic giggle, echoing from down the hallway, and a softer answering giggle he didn’t recognise. That made eight other Elders. Where was the last?
A shadow fell next to him. Even without turning his head from the window, Connor could tell it was Elder Price. Perfect freaking Kevin Price. Of course it was. Who else would it be? Connor wasn’t exactly annoyed, but he had been enjoying watching the stars and thinking vaguely philosophical thoughts, and Kevin was, at the best of times, way too distracting.
“Sit down if you like,” Connor offered, still not turning his head. “Where’s your mission companion? Aren’t you still superglued to him?”
Kevin shook his head, still standing, beer in hand. “Nabulungi’s here. I guess Jake invited her and some of the other village girls. They just got here.”
Jake? Who the heck was Jake? It took Connor a moment to remember that Elder Schrader had asked them to call him by his first name, now Arnoldism didn’t require them to be called Elder. Most of the others had followed suit. Elder Thomas was still Pop-Tarts though, rather than Chris, and Davis was still Davis. He had confessed to Connor that his given name was actually David, which seemed like a bad joke.
Connor found that his brain had wandered majorly off-topic in a scarce second, and forced his mind back with some irritation. “So Arnold is…?”
“In our bedroom with his girlfriend-slash-worshipper, yeah. I’m too scared to go in and get a new shirt.” He gestured to the largish stain near the hem from when Arnold had fallen over Connor and spilled his drink, and grinned self-deprecatingly.
Self-deprecating was a slightly odd look on Kevin Price. His eyes were dark in the candlelight, and his brown hair glowed gold. Connor had to try very hard not to notice that when Kevin had tugged at his shirt, there had been a glimpse of delightfully toned abdomen and the edge of what were definitely not Temple garments.
(Connor wasn’t wearing Temple garments anymore either, admittedly. Boxers had been a freaking revelation, given that daytime temperatures in Kitguli reached into the eighties year-round. But Kevin Freaking Price wearing what looked, from a short glance, like bright red briefs. Well. Uh. Yep. That was a thing.)
Connor tore his mind away from the question of what Kevin Price was wearing under those decidedly non-regulation shorts. He had far too good a view up Kevin’s shirt from where he was lying on the floor, and given he was lying on his back he would really prefer not having that view right at that moment. “Oh my gosh,” he said, almost in a whine, “sit down, Elder Price. You’re too tall. I seriously don’t understand how tall you are. I’ve seen your medical file and you’re literally, like, one inch taller than me, so I don’t understand why you look so tall. And don’t tell me posture, I have perfect posture.”
Kevin seemed to more or less ignore this rant, which Connor admitted was all the response it probably deserved. He didn’t sit down either, but he did lean against the wall and sip his beer. It was some brand brewed only in Uganda, but Connor assumed it tasted just as awful as beer back home. “How much of that vanilla stuff,” said Kevin, “have you had?”
“Liiike. Four glasses?” Connor hazarded.
“You should go easy on that, it’s super strong.”
Connor rolled his eyes. “I know for a fact that that’s your fifth glass of beer, you’ve got no room to talk. Anyway, unlike some here, I already know my tolerance; I’ve had alcohol before, you know. We’re not all Super-Mormon Wonder Boy.”
Hurt flashed briefly across Kevin’s face before being replaced by amused embarrassment, and he sighed. “I probably deserved that.”
Connor shrugged, neither apologising for his words nor defending them, before he was distracted by, over the gentle chatter of the others, a sound that he could only compare to an angry squid being pulled out of a wet drainpipe. “Uh, so, you said some of the other village girls came with Nabulungi?” He turned his head to the side to see Schrader—no, Jake—on the sagging green sofa, enthusiastically, uneducatedly and messily making out with Mirembe, the teacher’s younger sister. Zelder and Michaels were avoiding looking at them and talking determinedly to three young women Connor was fairly sure were called Masiko, Nasiche and Dembe. “Oh-em-gosh. Did you know about this?”
He scratched his head, somehow managing not to muss his perfectly-gelled, slightly-too-long hair. “I had no idea Jake had a girlfriend. Why would I? I’ve been here literally two months and my mission companion somehow started a new religion in the first week. I haven’t really been paying attention to the love lives of my fellow missionaries.”
Well, that was certainly the Kevin Price that Connor knew and—well, knew, anyway. Self-centred as a game of swingball and, what was more, he knew he was self-centred. Connor might have admired such self-awareness if it hadn’t been unbelievably annoying. Price had been getting better since he had somehow co-founded Arnoldism, but he fell back into old patterns a lot. A lot.
“Man, I thought he had a crush on Afiya,” mused Connor, shifting his gaze away. “Dang it, I owe Pop-Tarts. I’ll beg my family to send me, like, ten boxes of them in their next care package. S’mores flavour, cherry, brown sugar cinnamon, the lot.”
“Okay, number one, you were betting on your friends’ romantic lives?” said Kevin dryly, still looming from somewhere far above. “I thought I was an asshole. And number two, holy shit, your parents are still talking to you?”
“They’re not happy,” said Connor, carefully. “But I’m their baby, y’know? Youngest of six. They’ll come around.”
Not happy had been a major understatement. Connor was pretty sure he wouldn’t be getting any care packages from Mom and Dad any time soon, but he thought—or at least hoped—that his parents wouldn’t be angry about their son’s near-excommunication forever. But that first week, after his parents had told him in no uncertain terms in their own letter to come home right now or stick out the next twenty months as a proper missionary, but otherwise not to come home at all, Connor’s oldest sister Eileen had written to him via express airmail. I bet you’re feeling pretty crummy right now, baby bro, but I really admire your courage. Not everyone is brave enough to take on the Church. I wish I could do it myself sometimes. It will be OK. Love you. The letter ended with a cartoon of a smiling rabbit holding flowers, with a voice-bubble saying “Some-BUNNY cares about you!” because Eileen was that kind of person. Eileen would still send him letters and care packages, and Kayleigh listened to Eileen, and Bridget always followed whatever Kay did. Even if his parents didn’t, his big sisters still had his back.
His brothers probably didn’t. Connor didn’t want to think about that.
Kevin was talking again. Connor was happy to be distracted from considering his family, so he closed his eyes and listened. “Seriously though, you and Pop-Tarts placed bets on who Jake had a crush on? Anyone else I should know about? Is Davis secretly screwing Gotswana?”
“It wasn’t really a bet,” protested Connor weakly, eyes still closed. “More of, like, an I-think. Uh. Definite no to Gotswana. Davis has a girlfriend back home. Jemma, I think he said, or Jemima—something like that. High school sweethearts, y’know; they’ve been together, like, four years. He told his folks that he could only write to them once a month so he could write to her three times a month, not that we can get letters out more than once a month half the time anyway. Michaels—Owen, I mean—doesn’t have a girlfriend, but I think he likes one of his sister’s friends, Hannah; he talks about her all the time. Zelder—Andrew—I’m pretty sure he has a couple of nice, Mormon-y ex-girlfriends, but he’s single right now. No idea about Neeley, the guy’s pretty quiet about that stuff even if he never shuts up about anything else. Pop-Tarts is single, no exes either that I know about. James—Elder Church—well, he’s single, but I sure don’t think he’s interested in anyone from the village. Sorry.” He had seen Church and Pop-Tarts watching each other that past month, sometimes wistfully, sometimes avariciously. He was a little envious, but mostly just glad that it might be simpler for them than it had been for him.
Kevin blinked, the candlelight catching in his dark eyelashes before shimmering in the dark, limpid pool of his brown eyes. “Holy shit, Elder McKinley, how do you know all that?”
“I listen,” says Connor a little more sharply than he intended. “I was District Leader, remember? It was kind of my job to know everything there was to know about my missionaries, and I was gosh-darn good at it.” Connor was definitely too sober for whatever the h-e-double-hockey-sticks this conversation was turning out to be. He sat up briefly, downed half of his cup of vanilla-flavoured booze, and lay back down a little too fast. It was the oddest sensation, like he could feel the world spinning on its axis underneath him.
Kevin’s mouth twisted to the side, like he wanted to say something but wasn’t sure. Uncertainty was a good look on him, Connor thought. The dimple in his right cheek emerged briefly, and with the downward curve of his eyebrows it made him look more approachable, less Super-Mormon, the not-so-perfect-after-all missionary. He sighed. “For what it’s worth, and I guess it’s not much, I am sorry I fucked everything up for you. I’m to blame for at least, like, fifteen percent of that weird-ass bastard version of a Hill Cumorah Pageant. Even if it was freaking hilarious.”
“Uh, which fifteen percent?”
Kevin peered through his eyelashes sheepishly. “…The be-fruitful-and-multiply bit at the end.”
“Oh dear sweet God,” said Connor.
“Yeah.” A pause. “Jesus says: fuck, fuck, Mormons?”
Connor snorted. He didn’t even mean to. It sure hadn’t been funny nine weeks earlier, when he was staring at a dozen African men and women dancing and singing and inadvertently tearing Connor’s life into tatters. It hadn’t been funny when he had been slapped in the face by the realisation that Arnold Cunningham may have been a lot of things, but he was not a good LDS missionary. It hadn’t been funny at all.
He started giggling. “Do you remember… the mission president’s face? When all the men came out with their, you know,” he gestured vaguely towards his crotch area, “that?”
“He looked,” said Kevin, “like he’d lost his dog and dropped his ice-cream cone and been told Santa Claus wasn’t real, all in the last five minutes.” He was giggling too, the glass of beer in his hand shaking dangerously.
“If you’re telling me Santa Claus isn’t real…” Connor said warningly. As warningly as he could get given he was lying on a hard floor in rural Uganda, nearly five drinks deep and feeling like his bones were more liquid than they ought to be. He was fairly sure his hip joints were holding on by sheer stubbornness at this point. “You know I actually went to the Hill Cumorah Pageant once? I was, gosh, eight or nine maybe.”
“What was it like?” Kevin asked, finally sitting down. His hips were in line with Connor’s head. “I’ve never been. Went on vacation to Florida when I was a kid, but otherwise I’ve barely been out of Utah.”
“It made me want,” said Connor slowly, “to dance. I don’t even remember much of it, just the costumes and the light and the sounds and the music. I just know I whined, like, non-stop to Mom until she gave up and put me in dance classes.” He could remember jigging in his seat to the sound of the Tab Choir over the speakers, until his brother Ryan had punched him in the arm and hissed, “Stop freaking wiggling, asshole, some of us are trying to watch.”
“You dance?” Kevin had an odd tone to his voice, more wistful than curious.
“Yeah. Only stopped when I started training for my mission. Eight years of tap dance and ballet classes, five of modern dance. I was pretty good too. I wasn’t Baryshnikov or anything, but I was okay.”
“Wait, Barry who?”
“Mikhail Baryshnikov? One of the greatest male ballet dancers of all time?”
“Yeah, I don’t really…” Kevin shrugged and stopped. “Sorry. I don’t know anything about dancing. I don’t think I even danced at my prom.”
“Ah yes, prom,” said Connor, drawing the word out. “Prom totally sucked. Even though I can dance, prom sucked.”
“Why? I mean, I know why it sucked for me,” said Kevin. “I brought my cousin Annie instead of a real date. I didn’t want—I mean, I thought it would be better if I didn’t let myself be tempted. The law of chastity, you know?”
“Oh, I know,” said Connor. He very much knew. “My girlfriend back then, Beth Thompson, she was pretty keen on breaking that rule after prom. I, well, I wasn’t so keen. On that.”
Kevin’s eyes bugged out of his head. Connor slid down slightly so he could see the expression better, tilting his head back. “You’re not—I mean, you—a girlfriend? But I thought—?”
“Yeah,” said Connor, eyebrow raised. “Not even my first girlfriend, thanks. Sally-Anne Green from tap class in eighth grade, Luisa Santiago from math class in freshman year, Mara O’Loughlin from modern dance in sophomore, then Beth. Beth was in Spanish with me.”
His eyes were still big. “But I thought you were gay?”
“Oh yeah. Very.” Connor’s voice was rather dry, verging on bitter. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t have girlfriends. Apparently girls want a guy who can dance with them and likes helping with math homework and doesn’t want to push them into doing, y’know, things, almost as much as they want the handsome dude with muscles. Besides, by eighth grade, I was a year into conversion therapy and almost convinced I was straight.”
Kevin’s face crumpled. “That’s shitty. Was it as bad as people say?”
“Nah. Mine wasn’t too bad, as they go.” Connor swallowed the rest of his drink. “It’s not like they beat me up or anything, or electric shocks, or whatever. Just a smiley guy in a suit trying to hypnotise me into liking girls, and when that didn’t work, telling me I should just ignore any gay thoughts. Turn it off, right?” The weird thing was that it barely even hurt anymore. It was like a wound, long since scarred over, only twinging when he poked at it. He was afraid of what might still be underneath.
There had been a dog next door, Roxie, when Connor was a teenager. She had been a stupid fluffy thing, more hair than brain, but still sweet. One day she started limping a little. Within the week, her leg was shaved and bandaged almost from paw to hip. Roxie had chased a ball through a tangle of brambles, Connor’s neighbour had told him, and the tip of a thorn had embedded itself in her leg, grinding its way up through her flesh and leaving a ferocious infection in its wake. The entry site had healed over by the time she went to the vet. No blood; barely even a scab. Just a limp. The vet, Connor’s neighbour had said, had had to reopen the healing skin and follow the gouge upward, cleaning as she went, until she found the tiny barb that had torn its way. Surgery—stitches—antibiotics—and Roxie was well again and barking at passing butterflies. But it took time and pain, and the reopening of a wound that seemed to have healed.
Connor thought about that too much.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” said Kevin, swallowing his beer like it had no taste. “Even if your conversion therapy wasn’t as bad as it could have been, you still shouldn’t have had to do it. I’m not—I never—” He paused for too long. “I think Arnold’s right. The rule of chastity is one rule I’ve never broken, but even before… everything happened, I kind of thought it was stupid to expect people to just, not do it. Sex, I mean. And they say it’s technically alright if you’re gay, but you can’t get married so you can’t have sex, and that’s fucked up, right? It’s fucked up. Fuck them.”
“That was vehement.” Connor’s eyes were closed again. He was floating in black space. He could feel the floor beneath his back and the weight of the air on his chest, soft as a cloud. “Don’t you ever get tired of swearing?”
“Never.” Kevin shrugged, staring into his glass. “I spent nineteen years trying to be perfect. Now I’m not. Might as well break some of the other rules, too. And you never swear, even now. I’m making up for both of us.” He stretched a long leg out, flexed his foot up and down. “Can I tell you something?”
“I might only be District Leader on the paperwork now,” said Connor, “but you can still talk to me if you need to.” He felt too warm and cosy to put his Good Listener face on. Sitting face to face, plenty of eye contact, occasional gentle touches on the forearm to emphasise a point. He knew the drill. He just didn’t feel like it. He stayed horizontal, but fixed his eyes on Kevin’s face.
“I’ve never broken the law of chastity. Not even once.”
“You did already say that, like, half a minute ago.”
“I mean never. I’ve never kissed anybody. I haven’t even—you know—with myself. Impure thoughts or whatever. I don’t even think I’ve ever even had a crush. How the hell do you know if you have a crush on someone?” His voice was getting more frantic, and Connor, despite not wanting to do the listening routine, patted Kevin’s knee gently. Kevin flinched slightly. Connor had forgotten that Kevin didn’t like being touched.
“Sorry. Look, you just know, alright? Like, you want to be around them all the time, and you want them to like you and be impressed by you, and also you want to kiss them or, well, yeah. That’s what a crush is usually like, I think.”
Kevin was silent for a moment. “Maybe once, then.” He swallowed, and Connor watched his Adam’s apple jump silently. “It sounds really narcissistic—”
“You? Narcissistic?” Connor couldn’t help interrupting. “Say it isn’t so.”
“Shut up. I just thought it was, I don’t know, some kind of gift from Heavenly Father that I found the rule of chastity so easy to stick to. You’re not really meant to think about girls before your mission, so I just didn’t. I never even thought—” He coloured, visible even in the dim and flickering light. “I never thought that I might not be one hundred percent straight.”
“Are you saying you think you’re gay?” Connor could feel his own cheeks heating up at the idea of Perfect Kevin Price thinking about doing gay things.
“I’m saying I don’t know! I never had to think about it, so I just didn’t!” Kevin’s cheeks were still flushed, and the candlelight gilded the irritatingly perfect line of his cheek. He really was obnoxiously attractive. “I didn’t think about guys that way either! I mean—I don’t think I did—not back then, anyway.”
Connor ignored the implication that there had been those sorts of thoughts more recently. “Maybe I’m not really the one to talk to about this. I knew I was gay when I was eleven, I just pretended to myself that I wasn’t. But, like… what are your thoughts on boobs?”
Kevin looked somewhat nonplussed. “I’ve never thought that much about them. They exist, I guess? I probably drank milk from my mom’s when I was a baby? Ew.”
“Ew,” echoed Connor. “I guess you could just be a really late bloomer. Or you could be gay, or just, I don’t know, not interested in doing it. Some people are like that, right?”
“I feel like… I’m not not interested in sex,” said Kevin, as if he was thinking aloud. “Maybe it just needs to be with the right person. I don’t know. Please tell me I’m normal?”
“You are definitely not normal, Elder Price,” said Connor firmly. “But I don’t think anybody here is. Your best friend started a new religion, for goodness’ sake.”
“That,” said Kevin, “is very true.” He finished the last of his beer. “Please don’t call me Elder Price? I’m not him anymore, not really. Please just call me Kevin. And I can call you your name. Uh… what is it?”
“I already know what you’re going to say when I tell you,” Connor warned.
“You don’t. What is it?”
“Connor.”
“It suits you.” Connor spoke this in unison with Kevin, who raised his eyebrows. “Okay, I guess you did know what I was going to say.”
“Literally everyone says it. I’m ginger, covered in freckles, and my last name is McKinley. My parents might as well have dressed me in a ‘Kiss Me I’m Irish’ t-shirt when I was born. Instead, they called me Connor. And all of my siblings have the same problem too!” He raised his finger in the air to punctuate his point. “Sean, Eileen, Kayleigh, Ryan, Bridget, then me. If my parents had had a seventh kid, they would’ve been Patrick or Fiona. At least only me and Kay have red hair.”
“I like your hair.” Kevin might have blushed again, but the nearest candle was guttering and it was impossible to tell. Connor felt his cheeks warm. Thank Heavenly Father and Jesus, both of whom he was still fairly sure he believed in, that the room was dark and his face in shadow. “It’s got different colours in it,” added Kevin, “have you ever realised? You moved your part once, and suddenly it looked three shades darker.”
“That’ll be from the sun. Like all the freckles. Sun makes hair go lighter.” Connor stretched, still lying flat on his back, narrowly avoiding knocking over his empty glass. He couldn’t help but notice Kevin’s eyes drifted briefly towards the patch of pale skin revealed when his shirt shifted upwards. “You’ve got freckles too, now.”
Kevin Price was definitely blushing now. “Only a couple. Not like you.”
“Not like me,” agreed Connor easily. Everything was warm and cosy and the hard floor was weirdly comfortable. He could feel his head spinning gently, and Jake and Mirembe had finally stopped making squid noises in the background, and Davis and Neeley were still playing their CD in the kitchen but weren’t breaking plates anymore. Arnold giggled again, somewhere far in the distance. Connor smiled to himself, not even intentionally. “They’re still cute. Your freckles. Just so you know.”
“I—thanks. Thank you.” Kevin set his beer glass down, emptied. He lay down then, sliding until he was nearly in line with Connor, not quite parallel. Their shoulders bumped once, then separated, held apart by mere millimetres of air. Connor imagined molecules again, shifting in and out of liminal space. Connor—shirt—space—shirt—Kevin. Where did Kevin stop and Connor begin? Were there solid lines between them, or were the borders muddled?
“Arnold’s birthday is next, right?” Connor had been reminded by Arnold’s giggle. “May eighteenth. We should do something special for him. He’s our prophet, right?”
“I think,” said Kevin slowly, “that Arnold’s got everything he wants already. But maybe we can get a TV and some movies and have a movie night. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Anyway, how did you know when his birthday was?”
“District Leader, medical files, remember?” He raised an eyebrow before he realised Kevin couldn’t see it. “Yours is July ninth, you sweet summer child.”
“When’s yours?”
“December twenty-third. Mom says I was the best Christmas present she’d ever gotten.” Well. Said. Connor suspected that he’d been moved down the list of Christmas gifts, even if only temporarily, to somewhere below socks.
“Man, I just missed it, then. Sorry, Connor.”
“There’s always this year, right?”
“Yeah. We’ll have to do something special for you, too—District Leader and everything.”
“Former District Leader. We’re all equal now. Equals in an Arnoldist democracy. Though I don’t think Arnold really knows how a democracy works.”
“Yeah, I think you’re probably right about that.” Kevin stretched and sighed. His shoulder brushed up against Connor’s again, and didn’t shift away this time. “Hey, so, you mentioned ‘Kiss Me I’m Irish’ t-shirts before. Any particular reason?”
“It is,” said Connor, “a St. Patrick’s Day thing to wear a t-shirt that says that if you are even a little bit Irish, and thankfully my parents have never actually made me wear one, even if they were really weirdly into giving us all Irish names—I guess it’s because celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is too, I dunno, Catholic-y for them. I mean, Dad’s family is Irish and I think the ones who came here first were probably Catholic, but we’re talking, like, six generations in America. It’s not like the McKinley family got off the boat last year with potatoes and leprechauns going fiddle-dee-dee.”
Kevin snorted a little at that. It wasn’t a proper laugh, but Connor would take it. “St. Patrick’s Day, that’s sometime this month, right?”
“Yeah,” said Connor, “tomorrow actually. March seventeenth.”
“Huh.” Kevin was silent for a long moment and then slowly, deliberately, interlaced his pinky finger with Connor’s. Skin on skin on skin, and the lines that had been so sharp had blurred, had faded. Connor imagined that he could feel Kevin’s heartbeat through the curve of their fingers. He imagined that he could feel every whorl of Kevin’s fingerprint, branded into his skin.
The candle on the table next to them finally flickered out and died. Their corner of the room was only dim shadows now, but the window shone with starlight.
“Look up, Kevin,” whispered Connor. “Out the window. Just look at that.”
It should have been black dark outside, but the sky was spangled with silver glitter.
“It’s beautiful,” whispered Kevin. “It’s so beautiful here.”
He flexed his little finger in Connor’s, just slightly. It was completely insufficient and it was way too much and it was just enough.
And oh, Heavenly Father, there were so many stars.