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Spring 2021
It had been a false spring: the cruel kind unique to the Midwest. After the unnervingly early warmth and melt, the weather was lurching back to normal, with a blizzard forecast for overnight. Every shoot of green that had sprung up from the earth was now in danger of freezing to death.
The house was quiet, bathed in a gray and cloudy light. He retrieved his coffee from the kitchen. He’d lost track of whether this was his fifth or sixth cup of the day.
His phone started buzzing. He felt guilty ignoring it, but there were only so many Times notifications about the Ginsberg and Breyer replacements that he could stomach. But it kept buzzing, and he realized, belatedly, that someone was calling him.
When he saw the name on the screen, he froze. He pushed the phone away, up against the backsplash, as if it was burning.
Then at the very last minute he seized and answered it.
“Chasten,” he said. His heart was so far up his throat it was threatening to choke him.
“Peter,” he said.
And there was silence.
“How are - ”
Chasten interrupted. “Good, good. Tired.”
“Me, too.”
“They always tell you how exhausting the first month is, but boy. I didn’t know the meaning of the word.”
Oh . “So it’s even worse than campaigning, huh?” he said. This was his subconscious’s attempt at a joke, and he regretted it immediately.
“I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but yeah. Much harder.” An artfully timed pause. “I’m just lucky to have Paul.”
Of course he was. “Isn’t Paul gone a lot?” Pete asked. “I seem to remember doing a lot of travel back in the day.”
“Well,” Chasten said, the thermostat of his tone sliding down a degree. “He’s discovered that if you stick with them, McKinsey actually pays pretty well. We’re not wanting for anything.”
Pete started furiously stirring his coffee. “Glad to hear it.”
“And I hope you’re doing well?”
His fingers tightened around the phone. “Why are you calling?”
“I was being polite.”
“Sorry,” he said. He was not sorry.
A distrustful silence.
“Look,” Chasten said, and he sighed. “I can already tell I’m going to regret this, but… Paul and I are having John baptized at Easter Vigil. Honestly, we could care less about it, but it’s for Paul’s family; they’re Episcopalian. The priest or whatever you call him wanted us each to choose a godparent, preferably one who attends church regularly. He took us on a bit of a guilt trip about it. I thought of you. Are you still observant? After...everything?”
Pete stopped stirring. The coffee swirled around the motionless spoon. “More so since Mom died,” he finally said. Piety was more appealing when you were the only one left. It had taken him longer than it should have to realize that his newfound obsession with the church was completely selfish. All he wanted was a guarantee that, if he never found another Chasten, the head of the congregation would feel an obligation to check in on him as he grew old and even more unsteady than he already was.
“Well,” Chasten said. “I talked to Paul. And the job’s yours, if you want it.”
“I - ” Pete turned around and leaned against the counter. He looked down at the floor. “Did the rector specify to you exactly what he expects my responsibilities to entail?” He hated that his words sounded like second-rate Austen dialogue.
“I don’t know,” Chasten said, maddeningly incurious. “Raise the child in Christ, whatever that means. I don’t really care. We just need someone to stand there and sign the certificate.”
“A baptism is a serious commitment.”
“It’s an excuse to get my family together.”
“It’s one of the sacraments.”
“Well, we all know how seriously you take the sacraments.”
Pete took a breath. “You’re the cruelest man I’ve ever met.”
“Funny, you said the opposite on election night in 2015.”
Of course he'd bring that night up. He shook his head in grudging admiration. “You are a goddamned master,” he said. “You know I’ll never get over you, not really. You know I have a pathological sense of duty. You just want to remind me of what I fucked up. You just want to manipulate me even further into submission. I see exactly what you’re doing. I’d be an idiot to say yes.”
“So you’ll be there.”
Before the Vigil began, the four of them drifted through the opulent, lily-scented St. James Cathedral in Chicago. It felt even more foreign than the one in South Bend had become.
Pete avoided looking at Paul. Pete was irritated by his dark hair, his height, and his easy, extroverted rapport with his ex-husband. And he knew it shouldn’t, but the fact that Paul was wearing a white dress shirt and tie, with no jacket, grated on him to no end. Chasten had dressed him that way deliberately, he was sure of it.
Pete avoided looking at John, who, for all his infancy, looked unnervingly familiar. He’d never inquired as to the details of the surrogacy. At least one of those details was now clear; this boy was Chasten’s, without a doubt. How could his existence be so easy? How many times had they sat at the dining room table in South Bend, poring over calculators and brochures and bank statements so intensely that their foreheads nearly touched, trying and failing to will this child into existence? And yet - here he was, with no help from him.
Pete avoided Chasten entirely.
Instead, he struck up a conversation with an usher, asking questions about the building’s history and its architecture. The cathedral was a few blocks from McKinsey headquarters, and he’d occasionally stopped by back in the day, so he already knew the answers to his own questions. But he was desperate to be saved from small talk.
The usher was delighted at his interest. “The building sustained quite a bit of damage in the Chicago Fire,” she said. “But the bell tower survived. When we rebuilt, we re-used the sooty stones.”
“He might be interested in the Lincoln story," Chasten said, out of nowhere. “Peter used to be in politics.”
This introduction was the excuse the usher needed to acknowledge what she knew. “I thought your face looked familiar,” she said blandly, smilingly. Detached. Pete couldn’t tell what she thought of him or his failure, and the not knowing was devastating. “Well,” she said. “Abraham Lincoln worshiped here shortly after being elected President in 1860. We’re very proud of that connection.”
As soon as it was over, he wiped the memory of the baptism away. He shook the hand of Paul. He shook the hand of Chasten. (He was disoriented to discover that Chasten’s hand no longer felt familiar to him.) He may have shaken the tiny hand of John. He didn’t recall. He realized that the fact he didn’t remember portended an impending disaster that might well sweep him away in the wind.
After the Vigil ended, worshipers lingered in the narthex, laughing, so he found a seat in a pew near the altar to wait for them all to leave. The grand space was still dimly lit, smelling of flowers and hundreds of tiny candle flames. He clasped his hands and bowed his head. It was a time-honored trick employed by church-going introverts everywhere: performative prayer until everyone else had left, a ritual that ultimately allowed a person to slip away in silence and solitude.
At first he only pretended to pray. But then he saw the Book of Common Prayer in the pew back in front of him. He pulled it out and, as he always did nowadays, turned to the marriage liturgy.
Make their life together a sign of Christ's love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.
Then, as he always did nowadays, he turned forward through the thin crinkling pages to the liturgy for the burial of the dead.
For none of us has life in himself,
and none becomes his own master when he dies.
For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord,
and if we die, we die in the Lord.
So, then, whether we live or die,
we are the Lord's possession.
He reread the line.
So, then, whether we live or die,
we are the Lord's possession.
He reread the line.
So, then, whether we live or die,
we are the Lord's possession.
He reread the line.
So, then, whether we live or die…
The pew behind him creaked.
...we are the Lord's possession.
Entwined in the scent of Easter flame drifted a familiar cologne reserved for special occasions. For weddings. For funerals. For baptisms.
For election nights.
He stopped reading but his eyes kept moving and he still held the book in his hand. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t see a shadow. He only felt a warmth. The church pew creaked again. He couldn’t tell if the warm breath beside his ear was real or hallucinated.
His pulse began to trip over itself.
Suddenly, above his collar and tie, a thumbnail. It traced below his chin, from jawline to jawline, as if the nail was slitting his throat, but gently. And just like that, everything within him collapsed. His head lost balance and fell backward, and the now-unfamiliar fingers, prepared for his sudden weakness, caught the back of his skull before he cracked it open on the pew back.
He felt a cheek lean against his.
“Well, well, well,” came the whisper. “I just had to check.”
He breathed. “Check what.”
“If you’d found anyone to touch you this past year.”
That cologne.
“One tiny - ” His voice was tender. Terrifying. “...little…” He repeated the gesture across the neck, this time with soft side of his fingers, experimentally. “...swipe. And look at you. You’re buckling. You’re starved.”
Pete looked straight ahead at the arching ceiling far above. By accident he dropped the prayer book.
“Have you been playing the chaste martyr? Again? Or…” The voice leaned in further, so the pressure of a nose was up against the delicate curve of his ear. “Did you try to find someone and fail?”
Before Chasten, he’d navigated the world relying on logic, rationality, and calm, but each of those virtues were now shutting down one by one, like instruments at a failing nuclear reactor. “I tried,” he finally said, and it was true.
“Poor thing,” Chasten said. A satisfied smile was audible in the words. The fingers carefully pushed his skull back upright, pulling some clipped-short hairs in the process and triggering a kind of electrical storm down his shoulders. Then the fingers left his hair to caress both sides of his face, his cheekbones, in perfect symmetry. “So I’m still the only person who knows what you like?”
He’d never admitted this tragedy to himself, let alone admitted it aloud. “Yes,” he said, yes, and he sank into the slowly circling fingers. He wished he was capable of melting down himself. He was about to cry.
“That gives me a certain amount of…” Chasten paused for the right word, even though it was clear he already had the word in mind. “...leverage, doesn’t it?”
Imperceptibly the hands began moving down to his collar. A fidgety pressure pressed against the knot in his tie.
He felt a slow realization about where this was going, and the only emotion stronger than his panic was the horror that he wasn’t strong enough to stop it.
“Not in a church,” he whispered.
Again, he felt the smile of Chasten’s lip below his ear. “You forget that churches don’t mean a goddamn thing to me. I can do anything I want here. It’s you who can’t.”
“I - ” but he couldn’t remember what he was about to say.
“If you want me to stop… You have to be the one to tell me to.” A kiss on his temple, on the corner of his mouth. “Do you have the self-control to resist? Even after we married, you were always so…” He gently turned Pete’s head so he could kiss him properly. Pete didn’t fight back. “...proud…” A sotto voce murmur into his lips, so quiet neither of them could really hear the words. “...of your self control.”
This is why you should never become another man’s possession, his old self chided him, like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, but his shame failed to give him strength.
He reached his hands up to help undo the tie. Their twenty fingers, miraculously still able to work in tandem when it mattered, made short work of it, and his throat’s sudden freedom made him take a gulp of breath.
“I would have thought you’d hire someone,” Chasten whispered. “There are people, you know. Who you can pay.”
He recoiled without thinking. “I would never.”
Chasten stopped, genuinely surprised, then he laughed a little, and Pete felt the quiet rumble resonate through both of them. “You still think - ?” Chasten resumed his work again, this time somehow expertly undoing dress shirt buttons from behind. He shook his head. “Oh, Peter. The oppo research days are over. You can make mistakes now. There’s no coming back.”
Pete realized, with despair, that this was true.
“Take off your jacket. I’ve taken off mine.” Hands pulled at fabric on his shoulders; Pete was too weak to resist, and he helped to tug the weight down and off his arms.
“What are we doing?” Pete somehow found the courage to ask between the kisses. “Where’s Paul? Fuck, where’s the baby?” A panicked thought. “Do you care?”
Chasten threw a leg over the pew back and slipped over and sat down so they were finally side-by-side. It was the first time they’d really, truly looked at each other that night, and Pete thought he was going to vomit up the sheer crazed hopelessness of his desire. “I told him to take John back,” Chasten said. He had stepped on the splayed-open prayer book, its spine cracked now. “I said I needed to pray. I said I knew you’d give me a ride home. I thought you'd want to see it.”
Jesus Christ. “Always fucking manipulating every - ” Pete said, before lips started smoothing themselves against his collarbone, and he stopped talking. As long as the soft pressure lasted, he could give in to the delusion that he was still loved.
“Don’t blame me,” Chasten said into his skin. “You’ve loved every single minute. I will say, there’s still no one better to play this game with. Paul and I always say exactly what we mean to each other. There’s never any ulterior agenda. But what’s the fun in that?”
Pete felt as if he was losing balance. Distrustful, but sensing no other choice, he wrapped his arms around Chasten’s neck for support. “What happened to us?” he whispered. His ex’s hair was a fragrant halo of golden brown. “What did I do wrong?”
“You fell from grace,” Chasten said.
Pete considered that. “We fell from grace,” he offered.
“You fell. But I was pulled.”
Despair darkened his very bones. Every endearment his hazy brain could think of - darling, my dear, even the all-purpose, all-consuming love - felt entirely inadequate. He took Chasten’s face in his shaking hands to express this, the inexpressible, and he failed.
“Are you craving absolution?” Chasten whispered.
“God, yes.”
“Well.” Chasten inclined his head to the left. “If you’re hungry… There’s a table up there.”
Horror at the idea, and horror at the sweaty attraction of the idea, made his stomach feel like it was dropping into his hips. “You would never,” he breathed. He still hadn’t let Chasten’s face go.
“Is there really a difference between kissing me on the pew and fucking me at the altar?”
“I - ” and he couldn’t finish, because, when it was phrased like that, he didn’t know. It was always like that, though, wasn’t it? Chasten knew so much more than he did. He always had.
Chasten smiled at him, almost sympathetically, as if he could read his mind. He probably could. He started running his fingertips up and down the back of Pete’s hands, the motion impossibly gentle. “Do you ever wonder how Paul fucks me?” he whispered.
Never. “All the time,” Pete breathed.
“Well,” Chasten whispered. He spoke in the soft, reassuring tone of someone about to tell a bedtime story. “We go on date nights. They’re wonderful. They’re private. We see the best shows and we sit in the best seats and we eat at the most expensive restaurants, and nobody ever bothers us. I never need to put on an act. There are no cameras. No flashes. So in gratitude, while we wait for the food, if we’re sitting next to each other, I’ll just rest my hand...on the inside of his thigh. Like this.” Pete saw the hand coming down to his lap, and he prepared himself, but he still jerked involuntarily when he felt the pressure. Chasten smiled. “I forget how easy you are. I won’t do it to you - that would be cruel - but with Paul, I’ll move my thumb from side-to-side, just barely. Very innocent. Very modest. Under the tablecloth. Only he and I know it’s happening. I’ll time everything just so. Remember my timing? By the time we get home, he’ll be so wild that he’ll shove me against the bedroom wall. Sometimes he can’t even wait to climb the stairs. Such a nice change of pace from someone whose signature move was telling me to close my eyes and then kissing the lids.”
Something inside of him curled up like a caterpillar that had been poked by a stick. “But I wrote you poetry. I wrote you love letters. I - ” I was going to bring you to the White House.
“Words don’t get anybody off but you, Peter. Especially not empty ones.” His face burned. “But I’ll give you this: it certainly gave the impression that you cared.”
“Of course I cared,” he said. To his shock, his voice was close to a hiss. The motionless warmth on the inside of his leg was driving him mad.
“Did you? Then why could you never show it? Sometimes I wonder that, when I’m lying next to Paul. When I’m sweaty and exhausted and freshly fucked. Because finally I know what it is to be truly loved. Nights with you were like trying to cook a cold neurotic fish. I tried and I tried and I tried - I tried everything - but nothing ever touched you deep enough to - ”
“Oh, fuck you,” Pete said, and before he knew what he was doing, he had wrested Chasten’s arms together and pulled him up from the pew and out into the aisle. They each struggled for control, pushing one, then the other up the three shallow steps and back, back, back through the holiest space, until Pete shoved Chasten’s spine against the altar.
Chasten had stolen his one-sided smart-alec smile. “Well," he said, slightly out of breath. "This was more than I expected from Saint Peter.”
“Shut the fuck up and lie down.”
“You think this is going to be so easy, don’t you? But absolution is never easy. You know that.”
Pete held back his own hand to keep from striking him.
Chasten continued, dropping hints, telling a story, speaking in metaphor. “So you have my body. What else do you need to remember me by?”
“The wine,” Pete said.
“So get the chalice.”
The word sounded strange coming from quietly irreligious Chasten. But with a dubious glance, Pete obeyed and took the cup from among the sacred objects. He looked inside. There was a ring of a red wine stain in the silver bottom. “It’s empty,” he said.
“Yes. But we have the wine.” Chasten reached out and slowly slipped a hand into Pete’s pocket. Pete shivered. Chasten withdrew his multipurpose knife - the one he’d used in Afghanistan - and held it out for him on outstretched fingers. Pete noticed, with alarm, that those fingers were trembling, just a little.
“What - ?” he asked. It was all he could say.
Chasten smiled, strangely half derisive, strangely half brave. “Oh, don’t pretend you’ve forgotten. We’ve done this so many times before.”
“How did you know I brought my knife?” He tried to remember getting dressed that morning. He couldn’t remember slipping it into his pocket.
“Because you always bring your knife. Especially when you don’t remember it.” Chasten nodded at him, biting his lip. “So take it.” He was encouraging. “That’s right.”
Pete took it and stood there, at a loss.
“Can you help me undo the cuff?” Chasten whispered, extending his wrist.
Chasten never undressed in such a measured way. The idea was so strange, and it made him seem alien. Nevertheless, Pete obeyed again, holding the knife in one hand and unbuttoning the button with the other. Once he’d finished, he just held Chasten’s hand in his. It was warm, and he could see the tiny dot of a pulse beating just below the surface of the skin.
“Please,” Chasten said after a while. “Just do it.”
“Do what?”
“The longer you draw it out, the more it hurts.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh,” Chasten said, a desperately sad smile on his face. “You understand. You just don’t want to.”
At that, Pete felt as if he was suddenly being seared. He nearly dropped the knife. Surely he wasn’t... He searched Chasten’s face for permission. He could tell by his luminous eyes that permission had already been granted. The permission had been granted since the very first moment they’d met. He took a deep breath.
“I…” he said. “Can I kiss...?”
“Always,” Chasten said, and Pete slowly turned the hand in apology, and with gratitude lightly kissed the soft skin stretched over the wrist bone, the lengths of tendon, the bumps of the knuckles. Chasten murmured something Pete couldn’t understand. In the end, Chasten was the one who, just barely, pressed to turn his palm up again. Pete pressed back, panic rising, but Chasten pushed through the resistance.
He was shaking. He apologized. “I’m sorry; I…” and he couldn’t say anything more.
With his other hand, and with deep affection, Chasten tucked a stray hair back behind his ear. “It’s just me,” he whispered, patting his cheek. “Don’t you remember?”
“That’s why…” He couldn’t talk.
“Cut,” Chasten said patiently, soothingly, “and let it drain.”
“How much?”
“The usual amount.”
Pete felt a sudden weakness that there was a “usual amount.” But he’d been given all his instructions, and he realized, with horror, that he was starting to remember what to do. There were no more excuses left. He regarded the dull blade with nausea. He should have sharpened it. He would have, if he’d known. Chasten looked at him. He closed his eyes, tight, then opened them again. With a quick terrified jab he pushed the knife into the vein until liquid red began seeping out.
At first he wondered if he’d gone deep enough, because Chasten didn't react at all, but then he remembered, with a great rush of guilty admiration, that Chasten was a natural actor. He was still and quiet like a statue, and this encouraged Pete: maybe being cut hurt others less than he guessed it would hurt himself. But when the blade moved just slightly, as he moved to set the chalice beneath the wrist, feeling for all the world like a mad medieval alchemist, there came a delayed wince, and a sharp intake of breath.
“I’m trying, love,” Pete whispered. “Just hold still. It’ll be over soon.”
Chasten was starting to cry. “You said you loved me.”
Pete was starting to panic. He was getting shakier, and he knew that every tremble was being felt in the wound. If he could just be still and steady... “I do love you,” he whispered. “I’ve always loved you. I'll love you always. I promise.”
He leaned over, assessing the cut, trying to judge how much had accumulated in the chalice. But Chasten was beginning to go pale, his hand cold.
“Is this enough for both of us?” Pete asked, a little desperately. “How much do we need for this? To be forgiven?”
There was a cloudy pause. It was taking Chasten a long time to speak. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “Get every drop. Don’t spill.”
“I won’t. I’d never.” He knew, deep down, that he hadn’t gotten enough blood out to save both of them - maybe not even one of them - but he felt a sudden blind terror. He was about to choke. With a quick motion he took the blade off the vein and silently, carefully pressed it against the lip of the chalice, scraping the excess off one side, then the other. “You’re doing beautifully,” he whispered.
“I can’t describe...how much this hurts,” Chasten said. "How much it's always hurt." His breath was growing shallower. Pete tucked the knife back into his pocket and held the still-dripping wrist over the chalice. Then, a tone unlike his own, sounding like a half-hallucination: “You’re a goddamn ghoul, Peter.”
There was no denying it. Pete searched desperately for some way to make him comfortable. Finally, seeing no other alternative, he sat down on the altar himself. Always minding the wound, and being careful not to waste a single pinprick of blood, he let Chasten lean against his chest, then gratefully crumple onto his lap. He ran his spare hand through Chasten’s hair. They stayed there, quiet, for a long while.
“Can you kiss me?” Chasten finally asked, half-asleep, still bleeding.
Pete nodded, and Chasten must have felt the motion even though his eyes were closed. He pulled his scarlet wrist away and slowly ran it up Pete’s side until he could grab hold of his shoulder, and the shiver that followed the sleepy caress made Pete forgive the streak of a stain. He leaned over to kiss his husband’s forehead, his cheek, his lips.
Quietly he began to recite an Anglican confession that he remembered from his time in England. "We watch at a distance," he whispered, brushing his hand over his husband's forehead, "and are slow to follow Christ in the way of the cross. Lord, have mercy. We warm our hands by the fire, and are afraid to be counted among his disciples. Christ, have mercy. We run away, and fail to share the pain of Christ’s suffering. Lord, have mercy." He took a deep shuddering breath. "Lord, have mercy."
And he kissed him again.
He was reaching out to push the chalice to the side, away from their kiss and their limbs and to safety, when in his peripheral vision he saw a column of a man in robes: the bishop, cold and frozen and holding a candle snuffer.
With a startle of shock and shame, Pete’s hand knocked over the chalice. It fell to the floor and broke.