Page 45 of Slay the Gay Away, Daddy

Miles blinks at me. At first, I think he’s going to turn my offer down. Instead, with a quivering lip, he asks, “Can I tell you something?”

“You can tell me anything.”

“It’s something I’ve never told anyone. Not even Mal.” He’s breathing a little faster now, and when his hands start shaking, I wrap an arm around his shoulder.

“You’re okay. Whatever it is, you’re okay. I’m here.”

He places his hand over my heart like he needs to hold onto it to get through whatever this is. “My dad, he . . . he made me do something I didn’t want to do.” He quickly sucks his bottom lipbetween his teeth, and the look he’s shooting me is horrifying. It’s like years and years of anguish, pouring out like a bursting dam. “Before I married Mal, he paid a woman from church to turn me straight. He paid her to sleep with me. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want her hands all over, touching and grabbing like she owned me. I begged her to stop. I begged and begged, but she just kept going, telling me it was God’s plan. That she was doing His work.”

“Oh, Miles,” I whisper.

“She raped me.” Once the words are out, he opens his eyes, and dabs at his cheeks again. “I’ve never said that word out loud.” He turns to me, and there’s so much hurt and ache all over his face. Decades of anguish slathered across it like makeup. “I felt so dirty. When I told Dad I was struggling, he just told me to man up. He kept saying over and over it was God’s will.” He sighs, and it’s such a devastating sound. I’m realizing I don’t know everything about my Miles. I thought I did. I thought my constant snooping and the late nights we spent together cuddled in bed gave me an inside look at a version of Miles no one else has had the chance to see. But there’s so much more beneath the surface. Life experiences he’s never shared with anyone, and I want him to share them with me. The good and bad. “We didn’t talk a whole lot after that. I started sneaking my mother’s pills to numb the pain. I just couldn’t make it stop. The memories. Her hands. Dare, they were everywhere.”

“Baby,” I soothe. “I’m sorry.”

He gives me an appreciative smile even though I haven’t done anything other than apologize. “I got really messed up on her pills and confronted Dad once. I asked him why it was okay for me to have premarital sex with a woman, but if I so much as looked at another guy, my soul would be damned to Hell. He didn’t have an answer for that.”

“Zealots never do. They cherry-pick sins and put them in their own little top-ten lists, arranging them however they see fit. Never mind the fact that no sin is greater than the next. We’ve got a lot of obese congregants who are quick to run their mouths about abortion or gay rights, but you don’t see any of them calling out gluttons. Brother Bishop cheated on his wife last year. I didn’t hear anyone tell him he was going to Hell.” I lean closer, my eyes locked on his. “Your father was a bastard, Miles. I’m so sorry you had to go through that. You deserved to have someone in your corner.”

“I did,” he says, the slightest hint of a smile touching his lips. “I had you.” He tilts even closer, and our lips touch. There’s an unspoken rush of emotion consuming us both, and the longer the kiss goes on, the bigger those feelings feel. He whimpers into my mouth, just the smallest admission of vulnerability, but I latch onto it, deepening the kiss, because I know it’s what he needs. Miles is the strongest man I’ve ever known, but even the strongest steel can be melted down into something else. That’s what they tried to do to him. To turn him into this cookie-cutter evangelist with his lovely wife and a not-so happy life.

“What happened after?” I ask, breaking the kiss. “After you asked why one sin was worse than the other?”

He sniffles. “He didn’t have an answer, and it made him angry. He socked me in the jaw and told me to take my queer ass upstairs. We never talked about it after that. It feels like I can’t breathe sometimes. I thought it would hurt less one day, but sometimes it’s like I’m right back on that bed begging God to make it stop.”

“Do you want me to have her killed?” The question isn’t a joke, because this isn’t a joking matter. Someone touched Miles. They touched him, and he said no. They kept going when he begged them to stop. “I swear to God, I’ll do it myself. Just say the word.”

His arms tighten around me. “She’s already dead. Cancer.”

I dig my nails into his back. “I hope it fucking hurt.”

He nods. “I had to see her at every church function. Five nights a week, she was there, smiling at me like she’d just rescued me from Hell herself. I didn’t want to see that smile. I didn’t want to see her, Dare, but I didn’t have a choice.”

“Wait. Was I here when this happened? Was I already going to church?”

“Yeah.” He stares down at his hand, not elaborating. I try to jog a memory I’m not sure exists. If I was here, I would have known something, wouldn’t I? We were inseparable. And if Miles was raped, he wouldn’t walk around with his usual happy-go-lucky smile he usually plastered on his face. The same one he tends to hide behind now.

“Wait. Was it the summer you got really depressed because they rejected your application for cabin leader at church camp?”

“Yeah. I didn’t get rejected. I didn’t even apply. I just made it up so you wouldn’t think anything was off. I didn’t want you to know about it.” His voice cracks. “I was so ashamed. But you were there, though. You were always there to make me smile. I swear, it’s like the second we met, you latched yourself onto my hip. You got me through it. You’re the reason I hung on when I wanted to . . .” He pulls away and looks out the window. “You’re the reason I’m still here. The only reason. I loved you before, but that love is different now. It’s changed.” He sighs. “Or maybe I’ve changed.”

I don’t know how to respond. How could anyone ever respond to an admission like that? I saved him. Our friendship kept him going. I kept him going. So, when the words refuse to come, I do the only thing I can. I touch the side of his face and guide him back to me, giving him another kiss.

As our lips brush against each other, there’s a knock on the window, and when I break the kiss and look to my right, one ofthe men from the bar is knocking on the window. It’s the more reserved of the pair. Gray, he called himself.

Miles takes a deep breath, then rolls down the window from the panel on his door. “Gray, was it?” he calls out.

“That’s me.”

“Where’s your husband?” I ask, because sassy though he may have been, he was kind of great.

Gray darts his eyes toward a white pickup truck. His husband, Kent, has the tailgate down, and is lying in the truck bed, his legs dangling over the side, staring up at the stars. “He had a little too much to drink tonight.” The way Gray smiles at him makes my heart feel warm and fuzzy. There’s so much devotion in his eyes. Endless appreciation, like he believes the stars Kent is staring at are all shining just for him. Hell, maybe they are. “We were childhood best friends. We grew up in church together.” His smile widens as he studies him. “I told him I loved him, and I lost him an hour later. He lost everything, and I lost twenty years of my life because I was too scared to run away with him.”

“And then he came back?” Miles asks.

“And then he came back,” Gray agrees. “And I thank God for it every day. I see you. Even before they showed that video, I saw you, because Iwasyou once. I tried to hide my sparkle and shine from the world for twenty years. I made myself smaller so I wouldn’t be seen. Spent years denying myself, telling me I needed to stay the course. To walk the straight and narrow. All the while knowing, the only thing about you that changed was my tolerance for heartache. It’s a deep ache, isn’t it, Pastor?” There’s no anger in his tone. No judgment. Just sympathy. Miles stares at Gray like he’s dazed. “It gets away from you, the lie. You cling to it for so long, you almost start to believe it yourself. Then something—sometimes someone—comes from out of nowhere and shoves the truth back in your face.”

Miles looks at me, his jaw shaking as he nods. “Yeah.”

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