The ABO Serum

The Spiral Dance

While the pastor prayed for a miracle, Lance quickly accepted the inevitable. He bought a larger house with bedrooms for each of the boys and moved all their things over, including the pastor's personal belongings. He argued that the boys would feel insecure if it didn't look like they would all eventually be living together.

He packed Stephanie's things away in the basement. He'd wanted to burn them, but his mother cautioned him that the boys might one day want to go through them to try to understand and reconnect with their limited memories of the woman who gave birth to them.

Jonathan was alarmed when one of the church ladies (on one of their periodic visits to comfort and support their pastor) asked him why he moved out of the parsonage. He couldn't admit Lance moved him without his knowledge, so he acknowledged the painful truth he'd been avoiding instead. "I don't know when I'll get out of quarantine and be able to serve the church again. You shouldn't have to wait for me. If the parsonage is available, you can invite a new pastor. It's up to the board whether you make that a temporary or permanent hire, but I'm not living there, and a family friend is taking care of the boys elsewhere. It's only stuff that was in the way. The church needs that space to accommodate my replacement."

In truth, Jonathan could come out of quarantine immediately, if he acknowledged and accepted his reciprocal mate. But if he did that, could he still be a pastor? Would his congregation accept him? His denomination had clearly opposed ordaining gay or trans pastors, but he was already ordained, and his body changed through no fault of his own. Except, if he traced the threads back far enough, he wasn't without fault. He was continuing to pay the price for his sin of succumbing to the hot cheerleader's deception in high school.

He knew she'd belonged to Lance throughout most of high school. And why not. Everybody admired Lance. They partied at his house and curried his favor. Except Jonathan. His parents didn't allow him to go to parties like that and he didn't really want to. Alcohol was gross and made people do self-destructive things. But even he admired the charismatic son of the Rosenfeld's. Though the boy probably wouldn't remember his name back then.

He'd been so surprised when Stephanie suddenly started coming to their church youth group. She said she had ignored her parent's faith until some things happened and she realized she needed something more to believe in. That summer after graduation, she'd gone to the regional church youth camp with him, and by the end of what was always an emotionally vulnerable and intimate week, she'd caught him in her web.

His parents were more disappointed than angry. His dad took him aside and asked him what he really wanted to do for his future now. His first choice of Bible College had already accepted him. He could still go. But if he didn't think it was really his calling, if he was doing it to please them, then he shouldn't. If he was going to continue to have problems saying no to seduction, then he really shouldn't.

Jonathan couldn't imagine having interest in any other woman with Stephanie by his side. And the responsibility of a child was like an added lock holding their relationship together. He'd learned his lesson and he wasn't worried about future temptation. Most of all, being a pastor was his calling. He'd always known this. He wanted to love and help people through the most difficult times of their lives. He wanted to rejoice with those who rejoiced and mourn with those who mourned, and spread the gospel of peace and love. He'd thought of that summer as setting him on a courageous and meaningful course for the rest of his life.

Yet here he was, nine summers later, calling Lance to bring him his blanket and pillow. Not his blanket and pillow, but Lance's blanket and pillow for an exchange, so they could avert the inevitable mutual physical decline caused by denying themselves mutual comfort for just a little longer. Stephanie was gone, who knew where, from his life, and from his heart. A tsunami of alpha pheromones flushed her out of that tender organ in an instant.

The relief he felt when Lance arrived was extreme. He brought the boys and the daddy hugs helped, too. They were excited to tell him about their new rooms. Lance hired an interior decorator, and their bedrooms were Pinterest worthy.

Daddy's bedroom was really cool, too. It had its own bathroom! but he had to share with Mr. Lance. They each got their own bedrooms. And daddy had an office next to Mr. Lance's downstairs. And their house had a LIBRARY! Full of grown-up books! But Mr. Lance said they would fill one section with kid's books and Grandma Katie helped them put the books they already had there, and then took them downtown for lunch at Bill's Burgers and bought them each a new book after!!!

"Will you read them to me later over the phone?" Jonathan asked the boys.

"Yes daddy," Josiah promised. "When will you come home?" he asked. The question was always on his mind. He'd only recently stopped asking where mommy was. All the grown-ups made weird faces when he asked that. But daddy was only here so he would come home eventually, right?

"Soon," Jonathan promised his son, and knew it was true. He couldn't hold out much longer. This was the third time he'd called to trade bedding, and his first heat was due soon. "How did you manage to get the house and move everything so fast?" He asked Lance.

Lance shrugged, "money and connections, of course." He smiled. "I didn't have to sell the old one in order to buy the new one so that saves time. I think I'm going to keep it as a rental."

"That's...nice?" It must be, to be financially comfortable. Not something a pastor's family ever experienced. But he supposed he would now. He would never be able to leave Lance, and Lance showed every intention of taking responsibility for him. The kind of relationship security he'd mistakenly thought he had before he now had in abundance, but with a man he barely knew and had every reason to distrust.

A man, first of all, who had once shared his sexual interest in the same woman. He wondered if Lance saw him as a female equivalent. The way he texted him good mornings and sleep tights and pictures of anything beautiful he saw throughout his day felt a lot like a boyfriend doting on his girlfriend. Jonathan had treated his wife this way. Very often they were pictures of his beautiful boys who had taken to their new guardian and grandparents like ducks to water. A single mom would swoon.

The way Jonathan kept having wet dreams focused on taking the handsome doting attorney into his body and making him cum repeatedly...he questioned his sanity. The fact of wet dreams he understood. The lab personnel warned him this transition would be like a secondary puberty. The content of those dreams is what disturbed him. Was he thinking of himself as the same as a woman now? He spent time talking to God about it and then he would have a thought come to him like, why do I think of myself becoming like a woman as a step down? Am I really this sexist? Was that kind of quiet interruption to his self-piteous thinking the voice of God answering him?

His first heat proved to him that he couldn't do this anymore. He couldn't stay away from his mate, and he didn't want to stay away from his family. His body burned and he thought perhaps this was what hell was like, since its most basic description was eternal separation from God and a fire that never consumed you. Would the sinner long for a God they'd once denied even more than he longed for the bastard who'd cheated with his wife?

In between the fiery insanity, in moments of rest that felt sacred by contrast, Jonathan felt God draw him to Hosea. Was there something he wanted to say to his people, to the world, through Jonathan that he must have this experience to understand? Was he having a prophetic experience? He couldn't say for sure, but when his heat was over, he called Lance to bring him home.