“Whatever you have to,” Smokey said, and Kicks gave a short grunt of acknowledgment. “Just get him here safe, and we’ll figure out how to deal with this Hydra shit when you get back.”
Kicks hung up, shoving his phone into his pocket before revving his bike and rolling it toward the edge of his driveway. His home was his sanctuary—out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by trees that muffled the sounds from the road. It was the place where the voices didn’t always follow him, where his nightmares stopped nipping at his heels.
Kicks wasn’t afraid to die, but he was afraid to give in to the madness he sometimes felt clawing at his edges. Stronger men had been taken down by a lot less, and he knew that there were days he was hanging on by the skin of his teeth.
It was really only a matter of time before he cracked—before his threadbare hold broke, and he descended into the darkness. But he wasn’t giving up.
At least, not yet.
2
“Yes,” Jude breathed out, his face tilting toward the early morning stream of sunlight filtering through his bedroom window.
Pleasure rippled up his spine in the rhythm of his cock pushing between slick thighs. He was a fastidious person, so he’d never loved this sort of frotting, but there was always something so shamelessly erotic about losing himself to the pleasures of the flesh with total strangers.
The moment felt stolen, mostly because this wasn’t something Jude often did. His hook-ups were always gone by morning if he could help it, and when they weren’t, he usually ushered them out the door with a stale muffin and skillful avoidance of making promises that he would call. Because he wouldn’t.
He never called.
Of course, he always set that as an expectation when he brought them home—but there were days he wondered if it wasn’t his greatest sin. Not the sex, not pleasure, because he could never really buy into the idea that sex could ever really be shameful between two consenting adults. And only a few of his colleagues over the years had ever come at him about homosexuality, to which he offered a rather graphic anatomy lesson involving prostate stimulation that usually killed the conversation before it could really get started.
But no, his sin, he supposed, was his inability to offer more than his body—more than moments of his time. And it wasn’t about them—the people he brought home. Too often, he’d met people of all genders who were beautiful and kind and so deserving. And too often he felt on the cusp of being able to fall in love.
The problem was, he wasn’t deserving.
He’d long-since moved past his fear that he was responsible for his brother’s accident. He didn’t think HaShem would reward the prayer of a fourteen-year-old twin who begged him to change their bodies so people would allow them individuality by punishing the other sibling with life-long pain. He understood their God was often cruel—that his lessons cut to the quick, that their history made no promises of peace or kindness without working for it.
But Eliah had done nothing to deserve what happened to him.
And Jude was not worthy of having a cruel wish granted for the sake of his own vanity.
Yet, Jude still couldn’t forgive himself. And he didn’t trust himself not to indulge in that vanity he still felt simmering under his skin. The ego he carefully stroked in small, subtle ways by sculpting his body and allowing people to fuck him simply because they liked the way he looked.
Most people’s assessment of him was accurate. He did not ‘seem’ like a rabbi. In fact, if he’d gone back in time to tell his sixteen-year-old self that this was his path in life, he would have laughed. Or, more likely, he would have punched himself in the face. Because back then—to the angry, lost teen, it would have sounded like the worst sort of joke.
But like most of his peers who had been in rabbinical school with him, Jude chose that path because he wanted answers to unanswerable questions. But unlike most of his peers, his questions were about his brother.
Why had God chosen Eliah to suffer? Why had God made Jude such an angry person? Why, when Eliah forgave him, could he not forgive himself?
He spent most of his formative years scouring the Tanakh and the Talmud, and haunting the doorway of his rabbi’s office trying to find some reason why HaShem set in motion all the events that burrowed under Jude’s skin, not giving him a moment of peace. And eventually, his rabbi took him by the shoulders and told him that he was the only one who would be able to answer his own questions. He just had to learn to listen for the answer—in the still quiet just after his prayers.
He supposed it was a bit ironic that his desperation for answers led to the real divide between him and Eliah. His brother had always been so steadfast in his belief—or lack thereof. Eliah’s dedication and commitment to the knowledge he acquired brought him a peace that Jude had never been able to find, even decades later.
So maybe it did make him a terrible rabbi. And maybe the fact that he still only heard silence after his prayers was why he kept at it. Every person who left his office—who left shabbat services with a smile on their face and some semblance of calm—should have proven to him that he was good at this. That he was a good spiritual leader. That he knew what he was talking about.
And yet, every Sunday sunrise, when all was said and done, he stared up at the ceiling as he lay on his bed and felt inferior.
And small.
And wrong.
He wished more than anything it was a crisis of faith—but it wasn’t. No matter how often he was met with silence, he felt a connection to HaShem. He could stop mid-run on the beach and watch the sun cresting over the horizon and feel close to that great unknowable being responsible for sparking the life of humanity.
But the trouble was, he would never be a particularly good man. And he would never be satisfied.
He’d confessed that once to a couple of colleagues during a conference some years back when he first moved to the States. One of them, Abraham Levi, who was so old it looked like a stiff breeze could knock him into his grave, just smiled at Jude’s rambling.
“A man who has lost the ability to question himself and his own morality is the only true evil left in the world,” he said after the table went silent. His rheumy eyes met Jude’s without wavering. “The only person I ever want to give me advice is someone who continues to actively seek the same for themselves.”
At the time, Jude thought that was a load of bollocks—considering what he knew about himself. He supposed there was wisdom in those words, but he wasn’t brave enough to admit to Abraham that he was likely not worthy to be sitting at the table with him.
And of course, he didn’t think he was evil. The evils being perpetuated across modern society were often by people who excused their actions with their own unshakable interpretations of what was morally good and bad. People who would allow no introspection, who bought into their own hype.
But now, years later, in the moment he tipped his head forward and bit the top of the man’s shoulder as he shot his come, he wondered if he didn’t actually fit into that second category. What good was being introspective, after all, if you never used what you learned to better yourself?
“Fuck.” The ragged, hoarse voice of the man whose name Jude was struggling to remember, cut through Jude’s thoughts and brought him back to the present.