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I stepped closer to the table. “Okay,” I said. “Final step. Everyone writes one sentence about responsibility.”

My hand brushed Alvin’s when I passed him a stack of notecards, and the contact was electric in the worst way. My body remembered the kiss even when my mind tried to insist it didn’t.

Alvin met my gaze. “Dee,” he said quietly. “You’re doing the hyper-masculine thing again.”

I felt my jaw clench. “That’s not your business.”

“It is if it’s the only way you know how to survive,” Alvin said. “And it’s sad, you know.”

I recoiled at the word. Sad. Because it felt like the first honest description anyone had ever given me of my own behavior.

Alvin shook his head and spread the notecards out again with theatrical neatness, as though he was proving he could control the room too.

The kids returned to their papers, but the tension didn’t fade. It only changed shape. Now, instead of fear, there was something else in the air: Possibility. And anger. And the sharp, religious kind of pressure that made everyone feel as if they were standing on the edge of judgment.

I stared at my group’s papers and forced myself not to look at Alvin again. When I finally did, when I caught him watching me over the table, I realized the truth I’d been trying not to face since he walked in. Alvin wasn’t just here to supervise. He was here to test me. To tempt me.

And if I couldn’t survive that… If I couldn’t survive the temptation, then all the effort I put in over the years would turn into something more dangerous than fear. It would turn into proof that I never really believed I deserved love without conditions attached to it.

The camp bell rang outside, signaling the next activity. I took a breath and smiled. It was forced. Like my time here. And the story on the table—Adam and Eve, choices and consequence, temptation in the worst way—suddenly didn’t feel like a lesson about religion. It felt like that mirror Alvin had mentioned.

CHAPTER 11

The lake looked different at night. Less like the place where I’d committed several petty crimes against Darius’s wardrobe a week ago and more like something holy.

Which was irritating. I didn’t particularly want holy tonight. I wanted dramatic.

I wanted fog crawling over the water, a thunderstorm in the distance, maybe a crow staring at me as if it knew all my sins and had organized them alphabetically. Instead, Camp Dix gave me fucking crickets, an annoying bullfrog, and moonlight.

Lame.

I sat at the end of the dock with my bare feet hanging over the edge, watching the black water ripple beneath me, drowning the Eve cutout I snatched from the rec room.

I should’ve been sleeping. Hell, everyone else was definitely sleeping at this hour. Even Dee was snuggled up in the bottom bunk, snoring away when I left.

Technically, I was responsible for a fuck-ton of cabins full of teenagers. But… Darius was also responsible for them. And seeing as he’d appointed himself Captain Make-Good-Choices after approximately a week and a half of behaving like a feral asshole, I figured he could handle it.

Besides, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, this place kept rearranging itself into memories I couldn’t handle.

Me, at eight, scared as fuck to come to this dump and yet not being able to believe my eyes when the bed-headed boy who let me escape inside his window was somehow sitting in the icebreaker smiling back at me.

Me, at ten, knowing that I ran this camp and my best fucking friend was waiting where he always was, so that we could wreak pure havoc together.

Me, at fifteen, wading in the lake, laughing at the man I realized I truly loved with all my heart.

Me, on fucking Sundays, sitting right here with scraped knees and a Bible verse written on my wrist because Daddy thought scripture could protect me from temptation or he’d try yet again to beat the gay out of me. Maybe one day, he’d succeed.

What fucking good was being gay when you’d only loved one boy your whole damn life and that boy…

Would never love you back.

Funny thing about temptation, Daddy. Sometimes it looked less like the devil and more like your best friend smiling at you from across a campfire, while your daydreams were bending him over the crooked rock and fucking his ass so hard the stars in your head blended with the ones above you.

I dragged my heel through the water, trying to wash myself of the naughty thoughts that had no base in reality.

Coming out hadn’t happened the way people thought it did. There hadn’t been some big announcement. No rainbow flag unfurling behind me and slapping my ass as confetti exited my rear hole. There was no dramatic speech. No moment where I stood on the kitchen table and declared: Father, I regret to inform you that your only son enjoys dick.

Although, in hindsight, that would’ve saved everybody a lot of time.