Chapter 1

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The ant has six legs. It’s an insect after all, and all insects have six legs, and I know this from some remedial science class from youth. I still count them as it moves, to make sure. It carries its head at an upward angle, with purpose, perhaps smelling the air. Can ants smell? I assume this one can. Something is leading it, anyway—some invisible thread of purpose, drawing it ever closer to the plate on the picnic table where the un-eaten half of my sushi roll waits. As its antennae prod the side of the porcelain, an instinct comes over me to reach down and swipe it away, but I stop. I reconsider. It climbs up, smaller than a grain of rice, and tastes.

“Blake may never be attracted to you. That’s what you’re signing up for.”

I look at Zeke. He’s leaning forward in his folding chair, over remnants of his dinner, also left untouched. But his wife sits calmly, legs crossed, in her own oversized piece of porch furniture with her sushi perched atop a pregnant belly. She is eating. She is due any moment.

The porch light hangs behind Zeke and a shadow obscures his features, but I know he’s doing that which I’m too afraid to do: looking at my fiancé.

“I know.” The reply is soft, defensive.

Her voice breaks my resolve. At last, I look at Leah. Wrinkles etch lines at the edges of her eyes; three on either side. Pain. Defiance. Hope, or the phantom of it. I’m helpless before them.

Zeke turns to me.

“You may never be attracted to Leah. That’s what you’re signing up for.”

I’m still watching her, hoping that maybe she’ll turn her head to look. I know she can feel me looking, and I know somehow that this is why she doesn’t turn. She holds her face before the light, and the light reflects off her cheeks in a way that betrays past tears intermingled with makeup. It’s this detail that transports me to La Carniceria, where we’d sat in similar fashion two nights ago, with tequila on our lips. The manager of the hip butcher shop in Germantown had seated us at his best patio four-top, doting on us with drink samples and catering menus. He thinks he needs to win us over, but we’ve already decided we’ll be booking the rehearsal dinner here. We’d first talked about getting married here, at a table near the bar. That conversation had meant a great deal to us. To her.

I turn back to Zeke.

“I know.”

Our friend and pastor nods, offering an encouraging smile. I envy his utter lack of fear, his fierce optimism. I see it in his smile, and I hear it when he says the word may, into which he channels his particular brand of divine prophetic confidence, as if the invisible God were breathing the future into his ear and he, like Jesus, were choosing which fragments to divulge. I’m not sure if he means to, but his statement conjures to mind something else he said to me weeks prior during our premarital counseling: “You may find that you come to be attracted to Leah in time, after practicing loving her. Where your feet go, your heart may follow.” 

Silence soaks the clammy June air. I tear at the corner of my fingernail until a piece comes loose and I’m able to rip it away. Jess, Zeke’s wife, makes a labor of shifting positions, alerting the rest of us that she’s about to speak. I see only now that a bead of sweat inches down her temple. She is perfectly at ease to let it run its course, to sit with the discomfort.

“I think it should also be said”—she pauses, looking at Leah and me as if she can see something important that neither of us can—“if this isn’t right . . . if there’s even the smallest feeling in your heart that makes you think this wedding shouldn’t happen, we can call it off. There doesn’t have to be a reason. We don’t have to do this right now.”

I am captivated. It’s as if an invisible string ties my chest to her words, pulling me, pleading with me: See? Speak!

But I am also confused. The prophet Jeremiah, using every pastor I’d ever known as his mouthpiece, forbids me from listening to my heart in such a fashion. His instruction is a cornerstone of my faith, and it must be for someone like me—someone whose every affection developed in such a way as to displease the Almighty God. 

I watch the way Zeke’s lips purse. I know what he wishes to say, even though he’s chosen not to say it at this moment, and so I give my heart its reply: I can’t trust you.

Instead, Zeke says: “I need an agreement from both of you: are you committed to following through with this?”

Finally, Leah and I look at each other. She offers the same half-smile she offered me while rising from our table at La Carniceria two nights ago. We both look at Zeke, and agree.

The owner returns with the spicy margarita—Leah’s favorite. She asks him if we could get them in pitchers for the party, and he makes some reply in the affirmative. I’m watching a bird near the edge of our table, hopping around in search of crumbs, having returned after Leah tried to shoo it away minutes before (she hates birds). Upon the edge of the steel table in front of me, I notice the jagged remnant of a tortilla chip, forgotten amid the flurry of appetizer samplings. Discreetly, I brush it off onto the ground. The bird pounces.

“Blake!”

I look up. Both Leah and the owner are staring. He inspects me with unveiled curiosity, arcing eyebrows shaped and groomed too perfectly. I’ve seen him at the downtown YMCA with his partner before, and I wonder, as I do with any gay man I meet, whether or not he can tell.

“Any other cocktails we need to have?” he says.

Leah turns her attention back to the menu. “Um . . .”

“I think just the margarita will work,” I say in a tone that I hope will bring to mind again the reality of my family doesn’t have much money to spend on this event.

“Maybe just something so we have options?” Leah suggests. “We can work out the cost later.”

I shrug. “Uh . . . maybe something bourbon?”

Once the owner leaves us, we draw long breaths of the approaching dusk. I wrap my arms around myself and search for the bird. It’s moved on somewhere, perhaps to another table, or perhaps to a perch high above where it waits for us to depart.

“Are you cold?” Leah asks, chuckling.

“Always.” I get it from my mom.

“What are you thinking about?”

I pause. The silence that lingers after this question contains volumes. It is familiar to us. I use it to ask her to get ready, and she uses it to get ready. That way, when the words come out, they resonate on a frequency we both feel. We’re good at this. Communication is essential for our survival.

“Remember how I wanted to talk about Love, Simon?” We had watched the movie together several nights before, reclining on her couch with plates of Italian food.

The slightest change comes over her face, but I catch it, and I know what it means: she suspected this was the conversation we were about to have. She’s not intimidated by it—she never is, which I cherish her for—but she seems tired in a way I haven’t seen before.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “We never really processed that.”

“That line the mom said to Simon . . . something about how if he were her client, he wouldn’t be so repressed.”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“It made me wonder how you talk to your gay clients. Like, do you give them advice? I know you affirm them. I know we’re different theologically. But I just wonder, does that create any . . . like . . . cognitive dissonance? You know, being affirming in your work but also being in this relationship?”

Leah opens her mouth to speak, and then closes it, and then frowns. Her shoulders cave in a little. I think she feels cornered.

“I’m not sure what you’re asking. We’ve talked about my gay clients before. I don’t know how this ties in with the movie.”

“So if I were your client, would you respond to me differently? Than how you do with me being your fiancee? Like, would you advise this relationship? As a therapist?”

“I mean . . .” Leah’s voice cracks, so she clears her throat. “Our beliefs are different, yeah, but I can still hold space for that. For you to believe what you believe.”

I nod. The silence returns, and the meaning of this one isn’t familiar to us. Her eyes search mine, and then our surroundings, afraid. I know only a few things right now: despite how often we talk about my sexuality, this particular conversation and this particular question have shaken her, and suddenly I forget about how deeply it had shaken me upon my first encounter with it. I wish I had never thought it, never asked it. Her bottom lip is trembling but she staves off the tears for now.

“I don’t know if I want to hear the answer to this question,” she says. “I’m afraid to ask.”

My heart races.

“Are you attracted . . . to me?”

I squeeze my arms tighter. I curse my existence. If I could change everything for her, I would. If I could rewrite the genetic code at the smallest molecules of my being, I would throw my current self away for her. Anything than to have to answer this question again.

“Leah, we’ve . . . talked about this before. It hasn’t changed.” I’m stuttering. I don’t know how not to. “I’m attracted to men. So no.”

She nods. The tears are coming, and I watch as she tries to fight them off, and fails, and is overtaken. From the corner of my eye, I see the owner approaching. When he sees what is happening, he veers off course, pretending to have other matters. He knows, I think. There’s no way he doesn’t know.

Leah is shaking her head, as if in anger, as if in disbelief. I feel guilty, ashamed, confused.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Was that new information?”

She dabs her eyes and clears her throat. “It’s not new information, no. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”

There’s accusation in her eyes, but behind that, a deep pool of pain. 

Sometimes I struggle thinking that maybe I’ll be the key to unlock his sexuality.

She had said this in premarital counseling, and in her eyes now, I can see the realization that she knows she’s failing to achieve this goal, despite both of our desires otherwise. I know that somehow, I’m not doing enough—not praying enough, not living well enough, not getting enough counsel from my pastors, and I recommit myself to her cause. 

All tears will turn to beauty one day, I know. I reach deep down for words of reassurance, but I find none this time. Still, I believe that by following the will of the divine, a narrative more beautiful than any I might imagine will get written to the rhythm of my heartbeat and hers, and God’s smile will never leave us, no matter how many terrifying questions we think of without knowing the answers.

We finish our meal as the birds chirp. We pay the bill, and I tell the owner with a reassuring smile that we’ll reach out about the details to formalize our event plans. Leah drapes her purse over her shoulder as she rises.

“I think we should get together with Zeke and Jess again. Just to talk.”

I nod. “Sounds good.”