Mom had swept in a moment later, shooing tonight’s bed companion and bundling me in her arms, carrying me off to my own bed and whispering how much she loved me.
That was the thing about Mom; I never knew which her to expect.
At St. Michael’s, the schedule remained unchanged.
My heart swelled now with the comfort of it.
This church had brought me peace in so many moments of chaos.
I’d begun to wonder if that’s where I’d gone wrong when I graduated high school. I was so hell-bent on escaping Mom’s house that I’d run full tilt in the other direction, forgetting everything about my history and embracing the future with total abandon.
But that night… That night had snuck up and bit me in the ass.
I smashed my lips together until the soft flesh ached, pressing the stacks of photos to my chest before spinning and leaving the holy comfort of the church.
Crisp winter wind bit at my cheeks as I walked as quickly as possible down the icy sidewalk to the tiny two-bedroom cottage next to the church.
I was so grateful for Bastien’s kindness, putting me up here and giving me a job I genuinely enjoyed.
But deep down, I resented it too.
I resented relying on anyone or thing, and escaping to the cottage at St. Michael’s didn’t exactly feel like a healthy boundary between and Bastien and me.
My cold fingertips fumbled with the key in the lock, eyes turning back down the way I’d come, a slash of deep crimson against the snow-white landscape catching my eye.
The cardinal stepping down the steps of the church, Bastien’s palm hovering behind the old man, gentle grin gracing his calm face.
My heart slammed against the cage of my chest, hummingbird wings thrumming between my thighs at merely the thought of his hands on my skin.
The cardinal paused outside of an idling black Suburban, the smell of its exhaust carrying all the way down the block to land in my nostrils. Bastien looked up then, eyes catching mine and lingering.
His lips slid into a sinful grin, giving me one salacious wink before I ducked my head and crashed through the old cottage door. I slammed it shut behind me, hinges protesting as an inferno of pent-up emotion blazed through my insides.
What the fuck was I thinking?
EIGHT
Tressa
“I thought I was the fuckup here. Finding you drunk in a bathtub is forcing me to reevaluate my decision-making.” Lucy’s cheery voice split my eardrums before she burst through the bathroom door, empty wine bottle in hand and frown on her face.
My eyes stung angrily. From the lavender-scented soap, I told myself.
“S-sorry. I shall replace all of it.” I tipped the last skims of wine past my lips and set the long-stemmed glass on the edge of the tub.
“Let me get that for ya.” Lucy snatched the glass before my elbow made contact with the delicate, church-provided stemware.
What would Father Bastien think if he could see me now, drunk and floating in a tub of bubbles, trying to scrub the memory of his fingertips against my skin from my mind?
“Mmm…” A loopy smile curved my cheeks as I sank a little deeper into the hot suds.
“Mmm…what?”
Crap.
Lucy was still hovering over my shoulder, waiting with that expectant look on her face.
“The water feels nice.”
Her eyes narrowed, running up and down my tired body before hovering at my lips. “I bet the water feels nice, but I’ve got a feeling the good Father feels nicer.”
“Lucy!” I squealed, sloshing a wave of soap over the porcelain.
“Relax, I don’t care what you and Father get up to behind closed doors.”
“No, Lucy, I swear nothing has happened.”
She raised an eyebrow and plopped down on the edge of the tub. “Well, then call me disappointed. Those long, lingering gazes are the stuff of romance novels.”
My mouth popped open before I thought better and shut it again.
“The thing is…” She paused, eyes averting. “I see that it’s hard for the two of you to…be discreet. The chemistry is written all over both of your faces. As soon as one of you enters a room with the other one, it’s…well…suffocating.”
“Really?” I asked just above a whisper.
The wine and humid air suddenly had my head swimming with the dizzy memory of us.
Everything we’d done.
Who’d seen what.
“I trust you when you say you haven’t done anything.” She grinned wickedly. “Mostly because I trust his piety over your good sense.”
I scoffed, hands splashing in the sudsy bubbles and soaking the leg of her denim jeans.
“Don’t pretend.” She splashed me back. “Just be careful, huh?”
I swallowed the boulder in my throat, nodding as stubborn tears pricked my eyelids.
“I hate this.”
Lucy’s frown softened, her fingers caressing the rim of my empty wineglass. “I know you’re older than me, but just trust me when I say sometimes you have to do what’s best for yourself. Sometimes it’s best to find a way out of love.”
Fall out of love with Bastien?
Was I even in love?
I didn’t think it was something I’d ever experienced, but I was finally almost pretty sure I would recognize it if it showed up one day.
Hopefully with flowers and a diamond ring.
But in a holy cassock?
Definitely not.
Father Bastien and I were soul mates, there was no doubt about it, but Lucy and I were too. I’d run into a lot of amazing and generous souls in my life, people I just seemed to have instant chemistry with, but a one-way ticket on the love train that did not make.
“I wouldn’t say that I really love anyone.”
Lucy tried to hide the look of doubt on her face by flicking her hair and standing up from the tub. “Whatever, Tressa Torrado.”
She blew me a kiss over her shoulder and then breezed down the hallway and into the small kitchen, bathroom door left hanging wide open.
“Suddenly I feel so sober,” I grouched, standing from the tub and tucking a towel around my body. “And I was gonna make homemade pizza for us tonight.”
“For you, you mean.” Lucy was already pulling salad ingredients out of the refrigerator.
“No,” I husked, that entire bottle of wine suddenly bubbling up in my brain. I hunched onto the barstool, both elbows on the counter.
“You’re dripping on the floor, ya know.” She didn’t even bother to look. “It’s been two days since the cardinal visited. Why are you still hiding out here?”
I huffed, hardly able to catch a thought in my head. “M’not hiding.”
“Bastien asked about you today.”
“He did?” I jumped from the stool, edging around the corner to get closer to Lucy.
Her eyes cut to me, taking in my chilly, soaked form. “I told him you haven’t been feeling well.”
“Oh.”
“And he was worried.”
“Oh?” I perked up again.
“He asked if he could bring you soup.”
A smile crept over my lips at his attentiveness to my imagined sickness. “He’s so sweet.”
“Guess if you’re into that.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I told him it wasn’t a good idea. I figured you didn’t want him to see you like this anyway.”
“Oh,” I breathed, suddenly aware of my shivering form.
“But he really looked concerned, T.”
I bit down on my lip, eyes hanging heavy on hers.
“I was going to lie, wasn’t even going to say a thing,” she said quickly. “But then I came home and found you like that.” Her eyes swept up and down me. “Geez, you’d think you were the one jilted by her baby daddy.”
I slumped down into the chair, processing her words through the wine fog. “Wait.” My head pounded, awareness chugging just out of reach. “Baby daddy?”
Her grin sof
tened, and she stepped closer, sliding a little white stick out of her pocket and across the counter to me.
“Pregnant.” She shrugged, eyes watery with emotion.
“Oh my God.” I leaped from the stool, throwing my arms around Lucy’s small form. “I’m so happy for you.”
“Really?” She sobbed against my shoulder. “I didn’t know what to think. I mean, I had a feeling, but I didn’t have the money to buy the pregnancy test until today, so I just found out.”
“Lucy…” Tears sprang to my eyes. “Gosh, I would have given you the money for the test. Oh my God, a baby!”
Lucy pulled away, hands cupping the imagined swell of her abdomen. “I know I shouldn’t be happy. I know bringing a baby into my situation, well, it’s not really ideal. But, Tressa—” her eyes locked with mine, dark irises swimming with real tears “—I’m so happy.”
We both burst into smiles, tears sliding down our cheeks as we hugged again. “You should be happy. You made a life.”
Silence slipped between us, the last unspoken question hanging in the air.
“Is he the father, the guy you were talking to on the steps that night?”
Lucy nodded, swiping at her eyes before turning back to the salad on the counter and tearing apart lettuce with new determination. “Yes.”
I didn’t say anything else, knowing it wasn’t my place to probe any further.
“Lucy, I—”
Three loud booms rattled the door frame.
Lucy slipped across the kitchen, opening the front door before her eyes widened and she looked to me and then away. “I’m… I think I left my phone in the day care room. It’ll probably take me a while to find it, so just…take your time. Talking. Or whatever.”
Confusion still slowed my brain before Lucy was gone and a tall, dark figure was walking across the room, his aim, me.
“Tressa.” His tone was a command.
“What?”
Father Bastien’s eyes narrowed on my bottom lip, then slipped down my throat, before hovering at my chest.
I shivered, suddenly aware that I was still in a towel, still dripping all over the floor, hair wet and makeup free and so, so enamored of everything about the man standing across from me.
I was under his spell, and I resented him for it.
“Perhaps you’d like to change into something more…?” He arched an eyebrow.
“I wouldn’t. Can I help you?” I crossed my arms, defiant.
“You left your jacket the other night. I just thought I’d return it,” he answered, passing me my winter coat robotically.
“Oh.”
His eyes darted across the room, taking in the small space and the few items I’d added it to make it more a home. “Looks cute. Everything.”
“Thanks,” I whispered, suddenly feeling so short of brave and every part the tortured thirteen-year-old girl.
Bastien’s eyes swung back around to mine, a new defiance simmering in his cocoa irises. “I wouldn’t have come, but I thought…” He paused, thrusting a hand through the dark waves of his hair. “I thought maybe something was wrong, or I’d done something…”
I stood, the conflicted look on his face causing my heart to open up a little further to him. My hands stretched to his forearms, eyes pleading for him to understand that this wasn’t personal. “When I saw the cardinal, I just froze. Every fear flooded my veins. I know we haven’t done anything, but…”
“I wouldn’t say anything.” Bastien’s rogue eyes cut to mine, grin deepening on one side and getting as close to a cocky grin as I’d ever seen on him.
“Well, not really.”
“Really?” His eyes twinkled with satisfied amusement. “I would definitely call it something.”
I shook my head.
“Isn’t that why you’ve been avoiding me? Because of that night we did nothing in the pew at the foot of my confessional?” He lunged, a beast freed of its tether. “This is my confession.” His lips grazed my cheek. “It felt like the very opposite of nothing to me.”
His words acted like a sword, severing my vocal cords and causing waves of arousal and anger to converge. “Bastien…” My gaze lingered on the thick, roped veins lining his forearms, black cotton rolled to the elbows.
And that virgin-white collar at his throat.
My thoughts about Father Bastien were anything but virginal.
Memories of writhing on that damn pew still haunted me, forced my hands beneath my underwear to relieve the ache born of him.
“Don’t look at me like that.” His voice, lowered at least an octave, slammed straight into my stomach.
My palms prickled, heart throbbing, nipples pebbling to raw peaks. “Like what?”
“Like you’ve got a secret,” he murmured, lips dancing closer to the curve of my neck. “A secret you’re begging me to take from you.”
And then my chest cracked wide open and I fell.
I fell so hard and so fast for Father Bastien that I didn’t have time to catch myself.
The damage done before I’d even hit the floor at his feet.
“That visit from the cardinal… How do you know he wasn’t called? That we weren’t reported by someone?”
Bastien didn’t miss a beat.
I felt the smile of his lips against my neck, tremors of promise spiraling slowly out of my system like a spider web.
My attachment to him tenuous.
My heart caged by silk threads.
“Sweet, sweet Tressa.” The pad of his thumb slid down the hollow of my throat and ghosted the top edge of the towel tucked into my damp cleavage. “The cardinal made a routine visit. My reaction to you, though, it’s anything but routine. And hearing you dismissing it as nothing isn’t something I was prepared to confront tonight.”
“Tonight,” I uttered, “or ever?”
Both of Bastien’s hands circled my neck, fingertips settling at my nape before his mouth touched the hollow of my throat.
His lips curved into a deft smile before he pressed a thumb where his lips had been.
“Touché, my sweet dove.”
His gaze hung heavy, fists working back and forth at his waist as he backed out of the kitchen, stepping toward the door and away from me.
Away from me.
How had I lived without him in the air the last two days?
Would it be wrong if I chased him back to the rectory?
Back to his bed?
To uproot his life?
To ruin everything good he’d worked to create?
I swallowed back a wave of tears before breaking Bastien’s gaze and turning, heading back along the hallway I’d come down dripping wet not thirty minutes before, tipsy and bitter.
I paused at the frame of my bedroom door when I heard the soft snick of the front door closing, his footsteps down the porch and out of my life.
At least for tonight.
At least for now.
At least if I knew what was good for me.
Not that that’d ever stopped me before.
NINE
Tressa
“Today’s liturgy comes to us from St. Thalassios the Libyan. Inveterate wickedness requires long practice of the virtues, for an ingrained habit is not easily uprooted. It’s important for us to remember that virtue is nothing without the trial of temptation, for there is no conflict without an enemy, no victory without strife.
“Many of you know I was raised in a Jesuit school, and the Jesuits have a certain way of talking of physical acts of love. They believe pleasures of the flesh reveal loneliness in the soul. I think that’s applicable in our modern world of handheld gratification. How do we choose to spend our time? Where do we choose to put our value? For if we do not choose it, it will choose us. Succumbing to desire in various forms is the dark night of the soul crying out for help. For love. For togetherness and connection with the Holy Father.” A long, slow sigh escaped his lips, shoulders rounded forward as he avoided the eyes of his parishioners.
I sat e
namored as his voice thickened and he continued. “St. Francis of Assisi said ‘We should all realize that no matter where or how a man dies, if he is in the state of mortal sin and does not repent, when he could have done so and did not, the Devil tears his soul from his body with such anguish and distress that only a person who has experienced it can appreciate it.’”
My heart skidded to a halt, breaking with the realization that Bastien held himself to the fire. He wasn’t blaming me for tempting him—not at all. He was cutting himself for being tempted. My thoughts, along with my face, fell, Lucy’s hand patting my knee for a moment, just enough of an emotional outreach that tears welled in my eyes.
What had Bastien been through in his early years to have such a sense of…self-loathing? I tuned out the remainder of Mass, going through the motions as we sang the final hymn, then filed one by one down the steps of the church.
Except, I went out the back door while all eyes were turned elsewhere. Lucy probably hadn’t even noticed I’d disappeared behind her until it was too late and she was shaking hands with Father Bastien.
My first instinct was to track down Bastien and tell him he was out of his mind delivering that particular liturgy during this time, but then I thought it wasn’t my business. None of it was.
We were nothing, after all.
Despite what Bastien might think, we hadn’t gone further and never would.
All of this dancing around each other was only serving to drive me mad.
And I had so many more things I could be doing.
Like organizing some winter community events.
Or taking a few classes.
Maybe getting on with my life.
I bundled the chunky scarf around my neck a little snugger, staggering headfirst into the biting winter wind, when two heavy hands clamped around my elbows, sliding me along the side of the church, back to brick, lips hovering just out of reach of mine.
“You have to stop doing this in public,” I begged.
“But this is acceptable in private?” His hand slipped down my sleeve, twining our fingers and ushering me back into the side door of the church. He pulled me behind him, the broad shoulders enveloping me in his shadow until we stopped in the darkest corner of the sanctuary. Behind the pulpit where he’d just been speaking, a hand-wrought cross enveloped in fresh evergreens shielded us out of view from any other vantage point.
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