Page 27 of Original Sins
She opened it, and Alec was standing on the other side with his fist raised, an inch from knocking.
They froze, the two of them, face to face—the woman who had built the cage and the man who'd shown me the door out of it—and I watched my mother's eyes do the cold arithmetic.She took in the lanyard, and arrived instantly at the answer.
This was the man with the camera.This was the crack in the wall.
Mother simply looked at him—one slow, surgical pass, head to foot and back—and when she spoke her voice was pleasant, almost warm, which was how I knew it would be the cruelest thing she could find.
“So you're the one.”She tilted her head.“How proud you must be.You'll have your little story, I'm sure, and your moment, and in a year he'll be a stranger you used to know and you'll still be exactly what you are right now—a nobody who got close to something that mattered, once.”A small, gracious smile.“Enjoy him while he's grateful.Gratitude is the shortest-lived thing there is.”
And she stepped past him—a deliberate clip of her shoulder into his, never once looking back.
Alec came into the room rubbing his shoulder, watching her go.“That,” he said, “is the scariest woman I have ever met.”
And then he looked at me, and we just stood there for a long moment.
I crossed the room, took him in my arms before either of us could say another clever thing, and I held on.“I'm sorry,” I said into his hair.“For her.For all of it.For what I said to you last night.I was trying to be noble and it was just one more kind of lying, one more cage with the door painted to look like a way out.I'm sorry.”
“Harrison—”
“Let me,” I said, and I kissed him.
It was nothing like the others.Not the fever of the first night, not the fury of the second.This was slow and certain and unhurried, a kiss with no clock on it and no door about to open.A kiss between two men who were not hiding from anyone anymore—and somewhere in the middle of it the thing I'd been holding at bay since the stage finally broke loose, and the tears came.I trembled against him, shaking like a man set down after carrying something heavy for an impossibly long time.
Alec held me through it.He was good at that, I'd learned.He just held on and let me shake.
When I could speak, I pulled back enough to see his face.“I keep waiting for it,” I said.
“For what?”
“The lightning.The judgment.I stood up in front of ten thousand people and I told the truth.Then I burned down everything I was ever told God wanted me to be, and I keep waiting for the sky to open and strike me down for it.”I laughed, wet and a little wild.“And it hasn't.The sky's just— the sky.I don't know what I believe anymore, Alec.About any of it.I spent my whole life so certain, and now I'm standing in the ashes of it.The strangest part—the part I can't explain—is that I'm not afraid.For the first time in my life I don't have the answer and I'm not afraid of not having it.”I pressed my forehead to his.“I'm free.I'm actually free.And I have you to thank for it.”
“No.”He cupped my face, and his thumbs moved over my cheekbones, wiping away my tears.“You did that.All of it, up on that stage, that was you.I didn't say a word.I just—stood there and cried like an idiot and forgot I was holding a camera.”He shook his head, smiling, his own eyes shining.“I've waited my whole career for a shot like the one you just handed me, and I let it go by.Couldn't lift the thing.”
“I've waited my whole life,” I said, “to feel something.To feel—human.Like a person and not a performance.I didn't think it was in me.I'd been told my whole life it wasn't, that what was in me instead was sin, and I believed them.And then you opened a hotel room door and looked at me like I was real.”
He kissed me again, quick, like he couldn't help it.
“So what happens now,” he murmured.
I pulled back, and I looked at this man—this furious, honest, armored, soft-hearted man—and I felt the last piece of the puzzle click into place, the thing I'd been moving toward since the stage without knowing the words for it.
“You're a journalist,” I said.
“Last I checked.Barely.”
“The best one I've ever met.The only honest one.”I took his hands.“I just told thousands of people half a truth.I told them what I am.I didn't tell them how I got here, or what it costs, or what's underneath the whole rotten machine I helped build.The money, my mother, Kimberly, all of it.The real story.The one that could actually do some good, that could reach some terrified kid in some megachurch pew who thinks he's the only one and that God hates him for it.”My heart was pounding, but not with fear.With something else entirely.“So I'm asking you.Not as the man who's in love with you.As the subject to the reporter.”
“You’re in love…” Alec’s eyes widened.
I laid my index finger on his lips and took a deep breath.
“Will you tell the world my story?”
Epilogue
Alec- Six Months Later
The studio was smaller than it looked on YouTube—two armchairs, a velvet loveseat, a coffee table crowded with mismatched mugs and a neon sign on the wall behind us that buzzed, in hot-pink cursive, BLESS YOUR HEART.The podcast was called Sinners & Saints, it had four million downloads a month, and it was hosted by two women from Tulsa who had taken one look at the wreckage of American piety and decided to laugh at it professionally.
