Page 94 of Malachi
“You have to know I do,” he answered, his voice thick with emotion. Fuck it, I decided to throw caution to the wind.
“I have feelings for you, Malachi.” There it was. The truth. My truth.
“You do?” he asked in surprise. I had no idea why that would be a surprise to him. It had to be obvious.
“You know I do.” I rolled my eyes at him.
“What kind of feelings?” I honestly had expected him to drop it, to change the subject to something a little less serious, a little less real.
“What do you mean, what kind of feelings?” I scoffed. “You know what feelings, Malachi. Don’t play dumb.”
“I don’t think anyone has ever accused me of being dumb,” he chuckled, but the way he looked at me, with such raw vulnerability, stopped any other words from forming.
“How did you get here? To this place where you hated Zion so much?” I asked, in an attempt to change the subject.
“You know how,” he scoffed, brushing my question off with a shrug.
“I don’t mean all of that, Malachi. There’s something else. Don’t lie to me. I can tell,” I pushed.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he fought. I could see the moment where his walls started to go back up.
“No, please. Don’t close off to me now. Not after all of this,” I pleaded with him. With a heavy sigh, he sat down on one of the chairs in the room. His arms rested against his thighs, his head hung down, not looking at me.
“It happened years ago, long before the plan Levi created, honestly. Levi was the oldest, so he was always the one they focused on,” he explained. I hung on every word, ready for this rare glimpse into the heart of Malachi Temple.
“I idolized him, you know?” he said quietly.
“Who? Levi?”
“No,” he scoffed with a humorless chuckle. “Not Levi. The Reverend.”
“What?” I whispered under my breath. I was shocked.
“Yeah, I know. Crazy to look back and admit it, but that’s the truth. I wanted to be just like him. Everyone was pushing for Levi to follow in my father’s footsteps. He was the eldest, and so well spoken. He was basically a shoe-in to become a Reverend himself one day. At least, that’s the way it was in our home. Levi, the perfect son.”
“But there I was, hanging on the Reverend’s every word. You couldn’t find a more devout man than myself. Even with all the abuse from my father, I could only see the Reverend’s plan and the life I wanted for myself. I wanted to become Reverend of my own church, settle down with a sweet, godly wife, and have a house full of children.”
“You wanted children?” That surprised me. It wasn’t something we had ever discussed.
“That’s the part you fixated on?” he laughed. I simply shrugged. “Yes, that’s the life I wanted.”
“So what happened? What changed your mind?” I asked curiously.
“It wasn’t one singular thing, not really. But essentially, I got up the nerve to push past my father’s desires for our futures and sit down with the Reverend myself. So I set up a meeting. To my knowledge, Father was completely in the dark about it. What a fool I was,” he explained.
“You’re not a fool, Malachi,” I argued gently.
“Yes, I was. A goddamn fool out of his mind with thoughts of a future that would never be. I sat down in that meeting with the Reverend, ready to tell him of my plans and to be given all the praise in the world for it,” he continued on.
“Something tells me that’s not what happened,” I muttered quietly.
“Right you are. That’s not what happened at all,” he scoffed derisively.
“So what happened?”
“I told him of my plans. Instead of the praise I was expecting, I got an earful.” His face contorted in a grimace. This was not an easy story for him to tell, and part of me wanted to stop him from telling it, from having to rekindle the pain he had gone through emotionally.
“He wasn’t supportive?” I asked, surprised.
