you and the bodyguard isn’t you. You’re simply confused. We brought you here so you could take some time to study and pray about what God’s plan is for your life.”
Deep breath in, out slowly. “Mother. Do you think Roman is the first man I’ve been involved with? This isn’t new, and it isn’t about him at all.”
“Well, sure it is,” she said with a sniff. I could tell by her tone that she wasn’t going to hear anything I had to say, so I didn’t bother to respond.
“Son, I don’t know or honestly care when this started. What I care about is your eternal soul. You know what the bible says about homosexuality.”
“I do, I’ve studied it extensively actually, and aside from some places in the old testament, you know the same parts where it mentions people eating their own children, it doesn’t say anything at all. Or didn’t until the nineteen-hundreds, anyway. And to be honest, that’s even arguable since most scholars agree the word used referred to pedophilia and not relationships between grown men. I can lay it all out for you if you want me to. You know, you paid good money for that bible education, and I sure didn’t want to put it to waste.”
“Okay,” the Reverend said, putting up his hands. “We aren’t here to debate biblical translations and meanings. We are here to talk about you, Malcolm, and how we can help you with this problem.”
“And what if I don’t think there’s a problem?”
“But you do, you know you do, down deep in your spirit. You just need to take some time and focus on what the holy spirit is saying to you. We may not choose our temptations, Malcolm, but we can choose how to respond to them. Unwanted homosexuality is something many of us have struggled with, and it isn’t something we can manage on our own. But you don’t have to. Once you have had time here to decide what you want to do, I’m happy to work with you one on one. There have been scientific studies done that show that therapy is very effective. You don’t have to live like this.”
“First of all, my homosexuality isn’t unwanted. And second, I don’t want anything to do with your type of therapy, thank you very much.”
“I know what you think about Transformational Ministries, but you’re wrong. We do not practice conversion therapy. We believe in transformation, not conversion. We help bridge the gap between the Christian faith and the sexually broken. We believe that through God’s love, you can be healed.”
“Healed? So I have some kind of disease, then?”
“No,” he said with a soft full-of-shit smile. “Not a disease. It’s the current culture, it has led you down the wrong path, made you believe that what you’re feeling is normal, but it isn’t. Through training, you can learn to redirect your sinful thoughts, so they aren’t a problem for you anymore.”
I chose to ignore that statement because I wasn’t the one in this room who had a problem. Instead, I turned to my mother. “Where is Becca anyway? When you staged your little intervention here, did you forget to invite her?”
“Rebecca is at home. This whole mess has been very upsetting to her.”
Chapter 30
Roman
We hadn’t been able to reach Rebecca, but my guess was her mother had her phone since it looked like she was the one who sent the text. Fredrick sent a message to Gerald to see if he could get any info from him. All he got was that he was with Senator and Mrs. Coben and that they would be back later that day. Which meant I knew where I needed to be. I wasn’t waiting on them to bring Trey back to me.
I was relieved it was his mother and not the stalker, but that didn’t mean I was okay with the situation. She lied to him to get him alone with her, even going so far as to say Fredrick would be there, which meant there was some reason she didn’t want me there, and that didn’t sit well with me at all.
“Okay, I’m going to go over to the Cobens’ and see what I can find out. I’ll wait for them there. Can you stay here until Ash gets home from work in case they bring him back here?”
“If you have a computer I can use to do some research on, I’d be happy to. I know a lot about the Cobens, so