71. Dex

Max's refusal to acknowledge how far I've come today stings, and quite honestly I resent it. God, I wish I had a fraction of his self-assurance.

‘I took a big step today,' I argue. ‘It might not seem like that to you, but for someone who's only just allowed himself to admit his queerness, let alone act on it, it's a big deal.'

‘I'd argue you did that backwards,' he says with a little smirk. ‘You acted on it before you admitted it, even to yourself.'

‘Touché,'I mumble, because he's not wrong there.

‘Look.' He strokes the back of my neck. ‘I know you took a big step, and if you want me to say I'm proud of you, then I will. But I hope you did it for yourself. You should be proud of yourself. The point I'm trying to make, perhaps not as elegantly as I intended, is that I'm curious what you really thought could go wrong in there today with Thum.

‘Worst case, he's a homophobe and you felt judged by him on a personal level. It's not a nice feeling, I know. But if you'd felt in the slightest bit shunned, I would have made you march straight into HR and tell them as well as Compliance. There's no way we'd let him get away with discriminating against an employee who's as senior and as high profile as you without it being escalated. Right? But it sounds like, in this case, he's given you his blessing?'

‘Yeah,' I admit, deflating. There's nothing worse than patting yourself on the back, only to be told you didn't actually do anything impressive. ‘He was lovely. I definitely took him by surprise, but once he'd recovered, he was super sweet and very supportive.' I give Max a wry smile, remembering how complimentary Thum was of him. ‘I suspect he thought I'd done quite well for myself.'

‘As you have,' he quips, and then pauses, his thumb stroking the skin of my neck. ‘Can I tell you what I think is going on here?'

I roll my eyes, because of course Max has a view on what's going on.

‘Of course,' I say, trying not to sound as churlish as I feel, though I'd gladly kick him in his self-satisfied shin right now, such are my levels of churlishness.

If he registers my eye-roll, he doesn't mention it. ‘I think,' he says as though he's choosing his words carefully, ‘that all the adults you were exposed to during your formative years crafted a very specific message, and that message is that you ought to behave and feel and love a certain way, and to err from that path would be sinful and unnatural and degenerate. Am I right?'

I nod, and he drops his forehead to mine. I yield to my supposedly sinful and unnatural and degenerate instincts and close my arms around his body, though if something that feels this beautiful is wrong, then I must have no moral compass whatsoever. I splay my palm over the small of his back, noting that his shirt sticks faintly to his skin, such is the humidity level in the air.

‘Okay,' he whispers. His voice has lost its harsh edge; now it's tender and softly cajoling. ‘And I think, thanks to a variety of circumstances and learnt behaviours that could probably buy your therapist a new yacht, you decided to conform to those totally fucking wacko moral codes. Very possibly, you didn't know not conforming was even an option.'

My eyes prick, not just at the gentleness, the kindness, in his tone but at the jolt of recognition. His theory reminds me of a conversation I had over FaceTime with my sister, shortly after our dad blew up at her and she had to have it out with him. I distinctly remember her words. No one ever told me I was allowed to reject it all.

So much doctrine.

So much dogma.

So many rules; so many lines of catechism and lists of sins, venial to mortal, catalogued so neatly for impressionable Catholic children with their relevant punishments indexed equally tightly. And right at the top of that list of mortal sins, up there with killing, were the depravities that caused a vengeful God to rain sulphur and hellfire down on the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I've often wondered if the endless detail, the complex hierarchies of sin and the terrible, bloody Biblical examples, and the culture of fear and blame, and us-and-them mentality it all engendered, are a way for the Church to so overwhelm us with small print that it's easier to adopt a policy of blanket adherence.

Let's just stick to the contract,ordinary sinners like Belle and I say. Let's just do what they say. Nobody wants God's lawyers shaking paperwork at us at the gates of Heaven because we arbitrarily disregarded some clauses.

His lips are roaming over my face now, brushing along my jaw, trailing up my cheek, kissing the hollow of my temple, as if they've never kissed anything more precious than the skin of this exhausted, confused sinner who didn't get the fucking memo that nothing in the entire contract was legally binding in the first place.

That he could have just torn it up.

‘The world is still a shitty place for people like us,' he whispers in my ear. ‘It's still tough. Still dangerous—and far more so for people who don't look like you and me. Outside of places like Alchemy, even I still make judgement calls every day on what to disclose. What to hold safe. But it's getting less shitty, especially in parts of the world like this.

‘And it makes me really fucking sad that you feel you can't walk into the office of a guy like Thum, as a member of his most valued senior management team, and maybe not expect, but at the very least not hope for, basic human decency in response to your disclosure.' He wraps his other arm around me tightly.

Just when I think he's finished, he adds: ‘But I have a feeling that wasn't your greatest fear. I suspect you genuinely thought it was. But your greatest fear was having to speak those words out loud to someone in a professional setting. Having to tell someone you respect that you're in a queer relationship. Having to officially declare yourself as something—someone—that you've always been told is shameful, and unnatural, and unwholesome. The kind of person who probably seemed very much on the borderline of what you've been taught polite, civilised society is, hmm?

‘I don't think it was about Thum, really. I think it was about finally having to give yourself permission to be that person and own it, because not only has no one ever given you permission before, but they've never done you the courtesy of telling you you didn't need theirs in the first place.

‘So I won't say well done today, but I will say this. You can do whatever the fuck you want. You're a grown fucking man, and you have the right to march into anyone's office and tell them who you really are. Just promise me you won't ever, ever ask their permission.'

It's only after he's finished speaking, when my words fail me and I turn to find his mouth instead, to tell him with my lips and tongue how very wise, how disturbingly right, he is, that I hear the rain pelting down on the terrace outside, Heaven's downpour just as impassioned and aggrieved as my lover's unorthodox pep talk was.