He tried very hard not to cry at night, but when he did, Brother Luke would come sit with him and rub his back and comfort him. “How many more until we can get the cabin?” he asked, but Luke just shook his head, sadly. “I won’t know for a while,” he said. “But you’re doing such a good job, Jude. You’re so good at it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” But he knew there was something shameful about it. No one had ever told him there was, but he knew anyway. He knew what he was doing was wrong.
And then, after a few months—and many motels; they moved every ten days or so, all around east Texas, and with every move, Luke took him to the forest, which really was beautiful, and to the clearing where they’d have their cabin—things changed again. He was lying in his bed one night (a night during a week in which there had been no clients. “A little vacation,” Luke had said, smiling. “Everyone needs a break, especially someone who works as hard as you do”) when Luke asked, “Jude, do you love me?”
He hesitated. Four months ago, he would’ve said yes immediately, proudly and unthinkingly. But now—did he love Brother Luke? He often wondered about this. He wanted to. The brother had never hurt him, or hit him, or said anything mean to him. He took care of him. He was always waiting just behind the wall to make sure nothing bad happened to him. The week before, a client had tried to make him do something Brother Luke said he never had to do if he didn’t want to, and he had been struggling and trying to cry out, but there had been a pillow over his face and he knew his noises were muffled. He was frantic, almost sobbing, when suddenly the pillow had been lifted from his face, and the man’s weight from his body, and Brother Luke was telling the man to get out of the room, in a tone he had never before heard from the brother but which had frightened and impressed him.
And yet something else told him that he shouldn’t love Brother Luke, that the brother had done something to him that was wrong. But he hadn’t. He had volunteered for this, after all; it was for the cabin in the woods, where he would have his own sleeping loft, that he was doing this. And so he told the brother he did.
He was momentarily happy when he saw the smile on the brother’s face, as if he had presented him with the cabin itself. “Oh, Jude,” he said, “that is the greatest gift I could ever get. Do you know how much I love you? I love you more than I love my own self. I think of you like my own son,” and he had smiled back, then, because sometimes, he had privately thought of Luke as his father, and he as Luke’s son. “Your dad said you’re nine, but you look older,” one of the clients had said to him, suspiciously, before they had begun, and he had answered what Luke had told him to say—“I’m tall for my age”—both pleased and oddly not-pleased that the client had thought Luke was his father.
Then Brother Luke had explained to him that when two people loved each other as much as they did, that they slept in the same bed, and were naked with each other. He hadn’t known what to say to this, but before he could think of what it might be, Brother Luke was moving into bed with him and taking off his clothes and then kissing him. He had never kissed before—Brother Luke didn’t let the clients do it with him—and he didn’t like it, didn’t like the wetness and the force of it. “Relax,” the brother told him. “Just relax, Jude,” and he tried to as much as he could.
The first time the brother had sex with him, he told him it would be different than with the clients. “Because we’re in love,” he’d said, and he had believed him, and when it had felt the same after all—as painful, as difficult, as uncomfortable, as shameful—he assumed he was doing something wrong, especially because the brother was so happy afterward. “Wasn’t that nice?” the brother asked him, “didn’t it feel different?,” and he had agreed, too embarrassed to admit that it had been no different at all, that it had been just as awful as it had been with the client the day before.
Brother Luke usually didn’t have sex with him if he’d seen clients earlier in the evening, but they always slept in the same bed, and they always kissed. Now one bed was used for the clients, and the other was theirs. He grew to hate the taste of Luke’s mouth, its old-coffee tang, his tongue something slippery and skinned trying to burrow inside of him. Late at night, as the brother lay next to him asleep, pressing him against the wall with his weight, he would sometimes cry, silently, praying to be taken away, anywhere, anywhere else. He no longer thought of the cabin: he now dreamed of the monastery, and thought of how stupid he’d been to leave. It had been better there after all. When they were out in the mornings and would pass people, Brother Luke would tell him to lower his eyes, because his eyes were distinctive and if the brothers were looking for them, they would give them away. But sometimes he wanted to raise his eyes, as if they could by their very color and shape telegraph a message across miles and states to the brothers: Here I am. Help me. Please take me back. Nothing was his any longer: not his eyes, not his mouth, not even his name, which Brother Luke only called him in private. Around everyone else, he was Joey. “And this is Joey,” Brother Luke would say, and he would rise from the bed and wait, his head bent, as the client inspected him.
He cherished his lessons, because they were the one time Brother Luke didn’t touch him, and in those hours, the brother was who he remembered, the person he had trusted and followed. But then the lessons would end for the day, and every evening would conclude the same as the evening before.