JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 15

15. THE HAND AND THE HEART

Adam's body was about to relax because of the welcome intervention of the fire in the words of the disturbing speech. His mouth was opening to jeer at the stake, but then came the unexpected pressure on his hand from the Beloved's hand, and this held him back.

The Beloved's hand was sharing the experience of its owner, and it was not comfortable. The pain of the flames flowed through her and into him via her hand.

Adam saw a bubbling in the Transgressor's body, and then blood blubbered out of the fiend's mouth, out of his eyes, turning his eye sockets into pools of blood.

A sigh of satisfaction swept over the crowd, but the hand on Adam's hand stopped him from feeling this communal satisfaction. The hand clutched him out of the safety of numbers, the safety he always lived in. The hand brought him back to the danger of being himself.

It gripped the dissatisfaction in him, which he now realized, with a flash of pain, was the reason he was always on Dating Sites, always looking for women, always trying to find something in their company that he had not found in himself. Sex without soul, as he sometimes admitted to himself. The loss of the love of his life had filled him with a tight anger and a rigid passion for revenge. Human emotion -- the everyday exchange of feelings that smoothed the way of all psyches -- lay buried in a frozen lake of hate. He hunted women to test his numbness, and to keep it numb and frozen. He numbed himself afresh from body to body, glorying in the long winter, even though he had a yearning for warmth, which only manifested itself as a slight, irritating dissatisfaction. Now the hand connected him to his dissatisfaction, and made it bigger, bigger than all the women he slept with, as big as the event that was happening now. The hand resisted what was happening; the hand protested.

He wanted to pull his hand from the hand, run away from its grip, flee the female Beloved, vanish into the satisfaction of the crowd, but he did not. The hand held him fast, and he let it.