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“Not bad for a dress rehearsal!” the director had said. “Take fifteen minutes and I’ll give you my notes.” But Judas had an awful feeling she might already have spent more than fifteen minutes here in this room with no clock, surrounded by hymnals and heavy fabrics and the dust-grimed glitter of gold embroidery. She wasn’t even sure how she’d gotten in here. She had a memory of squeezing through a tunnel of stacked wooden furniture, feeling so, so grateful that they were doing this production in a church whose ancient nooks and passageways offered so many hiding places.
Though she’d stopped running, Judas’ heart was still pounding and cold sweat was pooling at the small of her back and beneath the hair of her scalp. She held her hand away from her body without looking at it, because it was covered with blood and there was nothing here to wipe it on except the strange rich fabrics and her own jeans and black leather jacket (“Very original,” Simon Zealotes had said with a snort when the production manager gave them their costumes). Her body was the only living thing in this dim cavern until she heard Jesus say, “Judas? Are you in here?”
That must be where the door was, off to Judas’ right. She didn’t turn around. There was a stained glass window in this room, and the street lamp shining through its tinted panes would give enough light for her to see the thing she’d managed to avoid seeing since twenty minutes ago when she’d looked out through the wings, waiting for the cue for “Superstar” and seen Jesus being dragged on her belly over the rough plywood stage; the thing she’d kept herself from looking at even during the curtain call, when she grasped blindly at the hand beside her and felt the viscous liquid ooze over her wrist and smear palm to palm.
“Judas, are you okay?” Jesus said, her warm contralto sharpening, and she was trying to plunge forward except she got tangled up in some piece of furniture Judas thought might be a prie-dieu. She kept talking as she worked to extricate her legs, “You were amazing out there, everyone is saying so,” while Judas couldn’t move or breathe until she realized that Jesus was reaching for her and yanked her soiled hand away.
Mistake. Because in moving to keep Jesus from taking her hand, she accidentally looked at her, and now she couldn’t look away.
The stupidest thing was that until that very last song, everything really had been okay. Judas had fallen to her knees on the boards and sang “Damned for All Time” with everything in her, and if there was a part of her that knew it wasn’t just about the play, that there was a price to this raw honesty that she’d be paying later, even that knowledge could barely stir a ripple of unease before she pictured Jesus’s smile and the next words poured out in an arcing wave. I don’t know how to love her. I don’t know why she moves me...
She finished and ran, wracked by guilt and grief, into the wings to be surrounded instantly by the fluorescent lights of the church basement and chattering chorus members snacking on pretzels and carrot sticks. She felt hollow. She felt incapable of standing still. She noticed her own strange mental state and even worried that it might make her miss her cue; but not even with the smallest corner of her mind did she listen to the whip crack in the church above their heads, hear Pilate shouting “Fourteen... Fifteen... Sixteen...” and attach this sound to any awful significance.
She hadn’t been picturing what she would see when she went back upstairs for her cue, what she could see now in the dim light beneath shelves of hymnals: the angry welts oozing through Jesus’s shredded white tank-top, the trickles descending from her hairline to mat her eyebrows.
Eyebrows that were furrowed with worry as Jesus looked at Judas staring back at her and clutching a bloody hand against her breasts.
Judas didn’t know what Jesus was seeing. She’d evidently followed Judas in here expecting to discover some kind of delayed-acting stage-fright meltdown, and Judas almost hoped that she would keep assuming that was what was going on. But Jesus had always seen too much. Ever since four months ago when Judas had sat down in the school gymnasium after singing her first audition, and the girl beside her leaned close and said, “What role are you hoping for?”
“I don’t know, maybe a Soul Sister?” Judas said, because she knew she didn’t have the warm sexiness of a Mary Magdalene. Her face was too long and her jaw looked funny. She thought of the performance she’d just given and said, “Maybe Pilate’s Wife?”
And this girl with the big round cheeks said, scandalized, “Pilate’s Wife doesn’t sing. You have to be Judas.” As if it didn’t matter that Judas was a man’s role. As if that was the kind of thing that someone could think of, and then say out loud.
Judas had never felt more seen than she had at that instant in those clear brown eyes.
But though Judas was sure that her secret terror must be written all over her, Jesus’s first words weren’t to ask why, if she so clearly had a problem with blood, she had signed up for musical with a two-minute whipping scene. Instead she reached out again and took Judas’s wrist very firmly in her hand. More blood transferred between them. Jesus reached for one of the fabrics piled around them, said, “Oh, those are altar linens,” and didn’t touch them. She seemed uncertain what to do next, but then she looked back at Judas’s chalky face and her eyes grew determined. She lifted the hand to her mouth. Judas closed her eyes before she felt the heat of contact scald her palm.
Jesus didn’t exactly lick her. She scraped her teeth over the base of Judas’ thumb, worked her way upward, poking her tongue into the delicate webbing between each finger, and then down again toward Judas’s wrist. She pulled her head back a fraction so that her lips were brushing against the skin as she spoke. “Judas. Look.”
Judas’s eyes opened without any sensation of will and she saw Jesus watching her from across her forearm, saw her own skin marked only by Jesus’s red fingerprints and the shine of saliva. Judas could have pushed the other girl away—she had, in a sense, spent the past three months rehearsing the exact sequence of words and gestures that would push her away—but Jesus smiled encouragingly and raised her own blood-streaked hand toward Judas’s lips, and instead Judas found herself tipping forward, queasy and exhilarated, and tasting—
“Chocolate,” she mumbled in surprise.
“You didn’t know?” Jesus said. “I came downstairs at intermission and Susan was mixing it up in the church kitchen. It has corn syrup in it to make it viscous. Cocoa to make it opaque. A bit of red food colouring. She paints the welts on me with a brush while you’re singing with Caiaphas.”
“I didn’t know,” Judas said stupidly. She felt a little as if she’d been whacked over the head, the quiet of this space ringing in her ears. Jesus kept smiling at her, and when Judas still didn’t do anything she closed her own eyes and leaned forward in invitation
Oh, Judas thought with sudden clarity, thinking of the last song she sang before her death. Does she love me too? Does she care for me? The terrified sob that rose into her throat each time she sang those words, the rasping ache of it, was precisely because the answer was yes. And if that was so, then it was also true that this, whatever it was that was happening between them, could exist: something huge, terrifying, possible.
Judas began at the top of the forehead where the taste of fake chocolate blood mixed with salt-sweat and a slight, bitter oiliness. Her fingers burrowing through the hair over Jesus’s temples, she moved down, sucking lightly when her tongue met the rough ridge of an eyebrow, feeling the flutter of an eye moving under the lid, the spray of wrinkles at the corner that meant Jesus was smiling. Their noses bumped abruptly as Jesus tilted her head up, and for a moment Judas’s only thought was to wonder how they’d gotten chocolate on Jesus’s lips before her brain caught up with what they were doing.
That was a kiss, she thought dizzily. Until that moment she hadn’t been a hundred percent sure this was a kissing situation.
Now Judas did wish they had a better light than the orange street-lamp through stained glass; but when they drew their faces apart it was still bright enough to see was they’d done, the change Judas had worked just with her mouth. The last traces from the crown of thorns, the signs of pain and degradation that had triggered her unreasoning panic, had been wiped away, and there was only a girl with a few smears of chocolate on her face, grinning a little too broadly as if she couldn’t repress her happiness.
“Turn around,” Judas said, and then replayed that in her head and added quickly, “Sorry. You don’t have to.”
Jesus smirked. She bent her elbows to rest on top of the prie-dieu, then looked back over her shoulder and sang, “Why don’t you go do it?”
Judas nearly choked on laughter but managed to warble back, “You want me to do it.” It seemed as if even that song, the screaming match from the middle of the Last Supper, full of hurt and betrayal, was being transformed now into something warm and sexy that they could hold between them.
“Hurry, you foo—mmm.” Jesus’s words ended on a sigh as Judas put her hands on the skin above her jeans. She hooked her thumbs under the ragged hem of Jesus’s white tank-top—up close you could see how the rents and tatters had been cut by scissors—and pushed it upward, smearing Susan’s artistic welts into one long crimson smudge. All of them had been sweating onstage, and there was a line of dampness down the hollow of Jesus spine that felt cool against Judas’s cheek. She hadn’t realized when she was licking Jesus’s face that part of the taste had been the powdery foundation Susan applied to keep their skin from becoming shiny in the stage lights. All Judas could taste as she laid long, wet stripes over the planes of Jesus’s shoulder-blades was the clean taste of her skin, and that was more than enough to make up for no longer being able to feel the fascinating mobility of Jesus’s face.
Besides, Jesus had started to make sounds, soft grunts or an intake of breath as Judas worked her tongue under the band of her bra. Jesus noticed what she was doing and gasped, “Oh, shut up.”
Judas replied with something smug and inarticulate against the long muscle of her lower back, and Jesus squirmed and pushed around until they were facing each other again.
“My turn,” she started to say, pushing the jacket away from Judas’s bare shoulders, one hand wrapping around to pull them together, though not for a kiss... Then Jesus stopped with her nose about two inches from the top of Judas’s breasts and said, “Do you have glitter on your chest?”
“It was for the Superstar number,” Judas said, feeling desperate. Her pelvis and Jesus’s were flush against each other, so she could feel her whole body shaking as Jesus started to laugh. Another second of that and Judas would fly into a million pieces, and the only thing she could think of was to pin Jesus down, use her weight to make her be still.
The prie-dieu they had been leaning against broke.
At least, that was what Judas assumed had happened. There was a loud crack, and then Jesus, who actually possessed strength and grace from dancing in musicals like Chicago and Rent, said “Whoops!” and wrapping Judas close she slid both of them onto the floor with a not too painful thump. She was kissing Judas again almost immediately, saying brokenly, “Don’t worry—liturgical furniture—it’s all crap, I was an altar server, I know,” in between the hard, lingering press of her mouth. Judas could feel her knees squeezing the outside of her thighs, and behind her eyelids she saw starbursts brighter than the stage-lights.
It took another few minutes for the dusty wooden floor to start feeling uncomfortable again.
“Are you all right?” Jesus said at last, shifting her head back to lie on Judas’s bicep. From her tone Judas knew that she was asking, not about what that they’d done together in this dusty little room, but about that discussion they’d still managed not to have: what it was that had made Judas run here like a wounded animal thirty seconds after curtain call. Judas knew there had to be questions—Why blood? Why that reaction? Did something happen to make you that way? Is there something wrong with your brain?—because they were the same questions that yammered at her from her own mind. But Jesus only waited quietly. At last she seemed to hear an answer in the rhythm of Judas’s breathing, because she said, “We missed notes, you know.”
Judas had the strange sensation of her head wanting to jerk up in alarm, but not so much as twitching. The “Shit” that came out of her mouth sounded more slurred than remorseful. “Sorry,” she tried. That was almost intelligible.
“Eh. You were phenomenal tonight. If there’s any little thing he wants fixed he can tell you on Thursday before the show.
“Opening night,” Judas said. She felt Jesus go still and careful beside her, but she didn’t have any particular fears about this, or nothing that could find any room beside this calm wonder.
Opening night. A new thing unfolding.