“All of that is coming,” he says harshly. “All of that and more. I won’t be anything but a vessel for this hatred and reaction. Reactivity,” he corrects. “This is all a battle in a culture war, that’s all we are, Rayne. Now we’re the faces of this…war. And I can’t do my job.” He throws his hands up. “They probably don’t even want me to keep trying.”
“I feel sure they do.”
“Yes, and you know so much about the church, Vance. Is Evermore your area of expertise?”
“Fuck, dude. No, it’s not. I was just—”
“Trying to be supportive. I know. Everyone says they want to be supportive but at the end of the day, the only person standing up there is me, looking like an idiot and crying. Getting spit on. Like the only person in the freak show, but I’m not the only one, because you’re in it too! I dragged you in with me, and for some reason—” His voice breaks, and he covers his eyes as he turns his body slightly away. “Nobody minds messing with you, Rayne.” His voice sounds broken as he says, “Because you’re too nice.”
He lifts his head then, eyes flashing. “You leave yourself open to all this…shit, and people come at you. And they come at the baby. Why are we adopting a baby? That’s just another symptom of the problem, people leaving babies for me. This is going to be a zoo, Vance, and we’ll never have the kind of peace I wanted for us. I was a fool to think that it would ever work—”
“If you don’t want to do it, we can leave.”
“Oh, can we?” He steps closer to me, looking mad enough to breathe fire. “Maybe you can leave and you can ship your statutes anywhere, but I can’t even be a pastor anymore because the world’s not right for…anything good.”
He shakes his head, clenching his jaw. His eyes won’t touch mine as he blinks out vacantly at the wall. “This whole world, the church, is never going to be accepting. They’ve got years and years, decades, of history on their side, telling them I’m just a liar, leading them to hell. Even the nicer ones are thinking how we show our love to each other is weird and unnatural and gross. This place doesn’t want us. It doesn’t want me.”
His face is so bleak. I have never seen him like this before.
“Sky, let’s go home. Just for a little while—”
He laughs and shakes his head, and he steps toward the office door. “I’m not going home. I don’t know where that is.” His voice breaks on the words. I see him from the side, the way he squeezes his eyes shut and gives a shake of his head. And then he moves so fast. He’s out of his office in an instant. When I dash behind him, he jogs through the empty room where his staff members work.
“Luke!”
“STOP,” he says, and it’s so hard—his voice is such a punch—that I do. I stop by a desk and stand there panting because my chest hurts. My head is spinning before I realize…inhaler!
It’s there in my pocket. I fill my lungs with the stuff. It makes my heart pound like it always does.
I sit down in a chair and put my arms up on the table. Rest my face there, hidden. The room is dark and quiet. Someone comes through, but I realize when I lift my head that I’m behind a coat rack. No one even sees me.
“Where is Luke?” a man’s quiet voice says.
“I’m…not sure.” That’s Pearl. I lift my head, and I’m about to tell her. But she doesn’t look my way.
When they leave the room, I stand up and walk back into Sky’s office. I sit in his chair for a few minutes, and then I try him on the phone.
No answer.
There’s a text from our next-door-ish neighbor, Arrow—well, the college-aged child of our neighbors—who’s watching the baby in the nursery.
‘We’re all good. One dirty diaper & she’s had three bottles!’
‘That’s good,’ I text. ‘I’ll update on our ETA soon.’
‘Is Luke okay? Did that guy spit on him??’
That one…I can’t answer. I call Sky again, feeling hopeful that he’ll answer me this time, but it goes straight to voicemail. The old fuck-you button.
Perfect.
I leave his office and start down the staff stairs, where I’m met by Frank, who is waiting at the bottom like some kind of nanny for me.
“How’s it going?” I ask, making my best effort to be polite to the guy.
“Going just fine. How are you?” he asks, so loud it echoes in the stairwell.
“I’m all right.” He steps awkwardly out of the way as I exit the stairwell. I hold a hand up in that basic bitch wave Luke does sometimes. “Have a nice night, Frank.”