Choices(Waiting for Forever BK 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

tried searching his face for answers. I had no other choice but to talk about how I felt about him, and I didn’t know where the conversation might lead. For the first time since I’d known him, a whole different set of possibilities opened for us. The conversation was going to be harder because I didn’t know how to frame the question I wanted to ask him. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear his answer. I wasn’t a very religious person, and the Schreibers weren’t church people. I didn’t have the frame of reference I needed to interpret the sermon. Mrs. Mayfield thought everyone should go every Sunday, and by dragging me along when I stayed over, she felt like she was helping to save my soul. Jamie, however, had been attending his entire life. Pastor Moore had even baptized him in that church. Surely, Jamie was more of an expert on religion and God than I was.
    “Do you think he’s right?” I asked Jamie in almost a whisper, averting my gaze to focus on a knot in the old floorboard, suddenly unable to look him in the eye. “Are we…. Is it… is it wrong, the way I feel about you?”
    He rose up on his knees, crawled over, and turned to sit next to me against the rough wall; he tossed a broken action figure out of his way before leaning back against the wall. We were side by side, his arm brushing mine casually, my breath catching in my throat at the light contact. I leaned toward him, resting my head on his shoulder. It was strange that the gesture felt so natural to me. Just an hour before, the thought of showing this kind of affection for him had terrified me. As it was, my heart rate sped because again, he was so close.
    “I don’t know, Brian,” he whispered again, so softly into my hair that it seemed that he was almost afraid to say it out loud. His breath caused an eruption of goose bumps on my cold, damp skin. “I can’t believe that how I feel about you is wrong. Just being with you like this, knowing that I’m not alone, it’s the happiest I’ve been in a long time. I don’t know how that can be wrong. But the Bible references that the preacher used seemed pretty clear. My question is, if God hates gay people and God made us, why would He make people He hated? I thought God was supposed to love everybody? Is this a test? Why me? Why you?” I sat there, contemplating his questions. My own questions were exactly the same. I wondered if maybe other boys had those same difficulties.
    Then the feeling that had been churning inside me for weeks, the one that had intensified to a fever pitch in the last week, came screaming to the surface.
    “I’m scared, Jamie,” I admitted quietly, finally voicing my fear for the first time. Turning his head slightly, he kissed my hair. He was only a few months older than me; he’d already turned seventeen while I was still sixteen. But in that moment, he made me feel safe. He made me feel like the rest of it, the preacher, the hatred, even the word “gay”—none of it mattered. Feeling safe wasn’t something I was used to, so I held on to that feeling for as long as I could.
    “Me too,” he whispered back after a moment, wrapping his hand around mine, squeezing it tightly where it lay on my thigh. It was meant to be comforting, but that one gesture, so intimate, made our situation that much more real to me. For some reason, a kiss was one thing, but holding my hand, like we were a couple, was too much for me. No matter how much I wanted him, wanted to be comforted by him, I had never entertained the possibility that it could ever really happen. My attraction for him had just been a sick, dark fantasy I had been trying to push out of my head for a long time. Suddenly, it had all become real.
    We were going to go to hell and would be exiled by God if our relationship progressed any further. I couldn’t let that happen—not to him. Jamie was a good and loving person. If anyone deserved to go to heaven when they died, it was him. Suddenly,