The guitars make a loud sound and the lights go down. Griffin walks up to the mic and begins to sing a gorgeous song about the rain that everybody loves, even Leslie, but I can hardly hear any of it; the only music I can hear is the music that Jack’s making. He thuds and throbs, makes a series of wonderful clattering crashes from his little leather stool behind the drum kit. I can feel the joy pouring out of him and onto me. He closes his eyes and concentrates, letting his arms travel all over. I close my eyes too and take it in. I know as I listen to him and sway along that we’ll be together.
After the set is over, I find him standing alone by the bar, staring into the foamy bottom of a pint glass. His mahogany eyes are sunk deep into his skull. He is skinnier than I remember him; there’s a heaviness all around him that I hadn’t noticed before. He doesn’t look like he wants to talk to anyone and my heart is so sure that I don’t mind waiting another month or twelve for him to be ready. I go to leave, but as I push through the crowd his eyes find me again and a glimmer of him returns. I walk straight into his chest and I think he knows that we’ll be together too.
We go to an after-party together where we talk about the holidays, my mom’s dressing, and his mom’s pie. He laughs and it is the best music either of us hears the whole night: whatever was broken in him suddenly isn’t anymore. His uncooperative, horsetail-thick hair falls into his eyes and he holds my hand. When everybody leaves at 3 a.m., we go to a Waffle House, where we first sit in the parking lot and listen to a Dido record he thinks is romantic. I make him try my smothered hash browns, which he says look like cat barf, and he feeds me a bite of pancake. The sun begins to come up and we both nearly miss our flights home to see our families. When he comes back from his trip, he becomes the first boyfriend I, at twenty-three years old, have ever had.
We fall in love like a pair of diving seabirds, nose-down, at top speed, totally fearless, and we parade our newfound love around town with kisses on the street and double dates. I watch him play drums from the side of the stage and I’m so proud to be with him I could bust open. I love him the way I like to be loved; I delight in him. Jack has never been delighted in this way by a girl he likes and he thinks it’s the best feeling in the world. I go to Houston to meet his parents and he meets mine. Then they meet each other and we start to dive harder and faster. The heaviness he had that night at the club still comes back to him some days, but I never let him sit in it alone. We binge-watch 24 and sleep late and order cheese sticks from Domino’s while Kiefer Sutherland walks slowly around corners with his gun pointed. I don’t know why Jack gets sad, but I like that I make him feel better. I’m special and needed, I belong.
We’ve been dating four months when he tells me that the thing that makes him sad is depression. We’re at my apartment and the weather is bad; the sky is brown and the Channel Five news team tells us to get in our safe spot. I’m already in mine. My cheek is at its home on Jack’s shoulder and he starts in when the weather girl is done showing off the splotchy radar shape. He tells me he doesn’t really know why it happens, that maybe it’s trying to make everybody happy, or being a talented musician in a town of tens of thousands of talented musicians. Maybe it’s having an unspeakably successful father, or having ADHD. It could just be the weather. Thunder crunches right after he says this and we both giggle. He waits for me to react, to ask worried questions or ask to see the medicine he takes, but I don’t. He could have the bubonic plague and I’d still love him till the day I died.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You’re not alone. You don’t ever have to be.”
I don’t know why I say it, but it seems to be exactly what he needs to hear. His cheek finds its way onto my shoulder now, and I comb through his hair with my fingers, rubbing little circles on his temples. The storm stops, the sun begins to peek at us through the green-studded branches of the trees outside the window, and we become something more than just kids kissing on the sidewalk. We dive even faster, even deeper, into loving each other.
Love feels nothing like they told me it would. It’s nothing like the calm, comfortable kiss my daddy puts on my mom’s forehead; it’s nothing like the humble, kind, patient union they talked about in RUF. Love is rocket fuel and I can never get enough of it. I’ve only ever kissed a few boys before Jack, but everything is different with him. I want him. I can hardly keep my clothes on when he parks his clunky tan Expedition by the curb, and though we’re both saving ourselves until marriage, we do everything, see everything, and touch everything until we have traveled every inch inside the boundaries the church set for us. We roll around for hours under my big white duvet, lanky bodies knotted together, hot, heavy animal breathing making the sheets wet. I feel so much happiness and so much shame as I watch him sleeping naked beside me and I wonder if there are other church leaders splayed out in their underwear promising God they won’t let their boyfriends go down on them next time. At least not for as long. I’m supposed to be good, it’s my job to be good, but I can’t stay good anymore.
It starts out like it normally does. We’re up late in Jack’s barren room, almost as naked as the walls are. I kiss him and he presses himself into me. I take his face in both hands and kiss him again. He unsnaps my bra and his hands move over me. I put my hands on him. Our bodies start to make the motions without us asking them to, and I tell him to keep going. He pulls my panties off and we get lost. We know nothing about sex. Nobody told us about our bodies, how powerful they are, that they can demand things. All they told us in school and church was not to listen to them if they spoke. He puts himself in me for just a second but we stop ourselves, panting, zapped into submission like a pair of bad suburban dogs caught in the invisible fence. The guilt is a shock wave. I run to the bathroom and bleed onto toilet paper; I’m not a virgin. Jack’s face is white when I climb back into the bed. I pull my underwear up to my belly button and start to cry. I return to twelve, hiding in the bathroom at the slumber party with covered ears, waiting until the other girls stopped talking about what it would feel like to be touched.
“Tell me everything is going to be okay,” I sniff at him.
He kisses the top of my head and his mouth quivers. “Everything is going to be okay. I love you. I love you so much.”
He says it because he does love me, but also because of what we’ve done and who we are and where we come from. We know the rules: the person you have sex with is the person whom you marry; the person you say “I love you” to is the person whom you marry. So we both silently agree that’s what we should do.
“I love you too,” I whisper.
We kiss and feel forgiven. Over the next few weeks, shame chases desire in a giant circle.
* * *
We get engaged quickly and none of it, really, is a surprise. I go on a mission trip to Mexico that I almost miss because I’m sick from taking a Plan B. We had been fooling around and even though he finished into a throw pillow, I was worried I might get pregnant. When I get back to Nashville, sunburnt and still nauseous, Jack claims to be stuck working in the studio, so he sends his grinning, winking roommate to pick me up. He drops me off by the curb and honks the horn three very precise times as I lug my suitcase to the front door. When I climb up the stairs to our apartment, there is a note outside: