Confession

It was Lan Xichen’s day to hear confessions.

There had been no penitents all the morning. Why should there have been, on a fine summer day like this one? Even city sinners should be free to enjoy sunshine and warmth. The central park had to be bursting with people and their paraphernalia right about now. Young families with their dogs and picnic baskets; young sunbathers, proud of their beach-ready bodies, lying on blankets with books that were but props.

That was a dangerous line of thought. He suppressed it.

Bless me, Father, he prayed, on the wrong side of the confessional. For I have sinned.

There was a rustle. There was someone now on the other side of the screen.

The first confessor of the day. They spoke the holy words.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been—well, sixteen years, I’ve never done this—since my last confession.”

Lan Xichen’s heart thudded in his chest.

It was him.

The boy who had been driving him mad.

What was he playing at?

Lan Xichen knew what the boy was playing at. He simply hadn’t expected him to bring the game, the chase, here. Into the house of God.

He had met him—his doom—his damnation—at the municipal boys’ school, where the bishop had made it a mission to install Church presence and instill Church values after school hours. He’d assigned Lan Xichen. “You’re young,” he’d said. “It shouldn’t be hard for you to connect with the students.”

It hadn’t been hard. They liked him well enough.

But with one of them, who liked him more than the rest—more than he should—he’d connected far too well.

“I’ve been having dreams,” the boy in the booth said now. “Carnal dreams. I dream that a man who wants me has his way with me. And I let him. And I love it. I love everything he does to me.”

It was a mockery of a holy rite. Lan Xichen had to shut it down.

He wavered, vertiginous, between what was right and what was inevitable.

What had to be would be.

“How do you know this man wants you?” he heard himself ask, and heard his own voice dark and rough.

Jiang Cheng, he thought. You’re the doom I choose.

“I know it,” Jiang Cheng said, “by the way he looks at me. Like I’m holy and unholy. Like I’m his sin and his salvation. I know it hurts him to want me—but I can ease his hurt—if he would let me—because I want him too. In my dreams, he does what he won’t do but aches to do in life. When I go to him in my dreams, instead of pushing me away he draws me close. When I lift my lips to him to be kissed, he devours me like a lover. He loves me like I’m all he needs in all the world—in heaven—and in hell. He’d go to hell to have me, I know he would, but that he thinks he would be sending me to my damnation too. But if that’s the price I’ll pay it. I’ll damn us both to hell, because in bed, on earth, we’ll make the heaven we both deserve.”

“Will we?” Lan Xichen relinquished the fiction. “Jiang Cheng: do you understand the sheer extent of what you’re asking of me?”

“It’s only what you want to give me,” the boy replied. “That’s all I’m asking of you: only what you want to give me: only all you have to give.”

“It’s more than you know,” Lan Xichen said, “what I have and want to give you.”

Jiang Cheng laughed, lightly.

“Mmm,” he said. “Tell me. Right here, right now. In this confessional, in this house of God. Is it big? What you have and want to give me?”

Lan Xichen could waste time being scandalized, or he could play this game the boy seemed to think he’d already won.

“Yes,” he said, calling up the boy’s image, so exquisite yet so carnal, as well as his own dreams. “It’s big. You think you’ve dreamt the length of me. I assure you you’ve fallen short. Have you dreamt it in your mouth? In my dreams, you can’t breathe around it. You cry to feel the stretch. You choke on it, but you want more.”

“Yes,” the boy breathed. “And you have no mercy.”

“I won’t relent. You can’t take it all.”

“You’re impatient,” Jiang Cheng said. “You pull it out, you rub the tip against my lips. I love it, the velvet of it and the steel. I lave it with my tongue.”

“It’s good, your tongue. It’s clever. It feels sublime.”

“It’s hard, your cock. It’s so hard. Do you want to come? You can. You can come all over my face.”

“No,” Lan Xichen said. “Not yet. Do you imagine that I’m so quick to be done with you? There’s even more I want to do to you than paint your exquisite face with my come.”

“I know there is. I know you do. You want to fuck me. You want to stuff me full of the length of you, longer and bigger—so you say—than I’ve ever taken in my dreams. You want me spread and screaming for you. You want—”

“I want,” Lan Xichen said, “to fuck you till you don’t care what it is I want. Till all you can think about is what you want. And I’ll withhold it. I’ll make you hoarse with begging for it—begging for me—”

“Lan Xichen,” Jiang Cheng said. “I’m begging you. I’m begging you right now: take off that collar. Come with me.”

He paused.

“Come live with me,” he said, “and be my love.”

Lan Xichen, breathless with interrupted desire, had to laugh.

“The passionate shepherd to his love,” he said. “Here I am, trying to play your game, and you switch it up on me. Quoting the one line of English poetry I taught you, amid all the verses of Scripture.”

“Leave off your shepherding,” Jiang Cheng said. “Leave off your preaching. You want me more than you want your flock. You love me more than you love God.”

“I never believed in God so much,” Lan Xichen said, “as when I first laid eyes on you.”

“God loves you.” Jiang Cheng’s voice was tender. He sounded older than his years. “He gave you me.”

What a thing to say.

What a thing to be true.

“Take his gift,” Jiang Cheng said. “Take me.”

Our Father in Heaven, Lan Xichen thought. Let me go.

He didn’t wait for an answer.

He took off his collar.

He set it on the seat.

He flung wide the curtain.

He would take his gift.

He would take Jiang Cheng out into the summer sunshine, white and wide and wild.

He would take him to bed.

Jiang Cheng met him halfway, before the pews, smiling.

The few churchgoers amid them started and stared.

Lan Xichen ignored them.

“I think I won this game,” Jiang Cheng said.

“I think we both won,” Lan Xichen said.

And took the boy into his arms, at last, for the first time.