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