A Little Bit Engaged

by Teresa Hill

  “I don’t think I’m being careful. I think I’m being a coward.”

  If she’d been anyone else, he would have reached over and squeezed her hand or patted her shoulder to try to comfort her because she looked so troubled. But Ben wasn’t touching her.

  “You think I’m awful, don’t you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You say that, but you sound like you think I’m awful. You’re looking at me like you think I’m awful. Do you know Joe?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a good man. A very good man.”

  But that didn’t make him right for her.

  He groaned. Ben, gag yourself now. Right now.

  If he had a needle and thread, he’d have sewn his mouth shut and known he deserved the pain it caused him.

  “Now you look angry,” she said.

  “At myself. Not you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m wishing you weren’t engaged,” he admitted. “Which means I have no right giving you advice about this, and I have to shut up. Now.”

  She looked puzzled. “You mean…you want to…you and me?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh.” Her mouth fell open and her eyes got big and round. Soft color filled her cheeks, and he started laughing, couldn’t help it.

  Either he was a terrible flirt or she was completely oblivious to him as a man, because it was obvious it hadn’t even occurred to her that he might be interested in her. He either really liked her for that or felt sorry for himself for being invisible to her.

  “I’m really not very good at this sort of thing,” she said. “You know, the man-woman thing.”

  “Me, neither.” Ben laughed some more. “Obviously.”

  “No. It’s not you. It’s me. If there was a textbook or a class in college or a test, I could have aced it. But there aren’t any of those things when it comes to relationships. I mean, there are tons of books but they all say different things. Have you ever tried to make sense of all the different things written about relationships?”

  “No.”

  “It’s awful. Give me numbers. I can add them up. They always come up to the same thing. I love that about numbers. Ask me something about love, and I’m just baffled. You can’t quantify it in any way. There’s no definitive test for it. There’s no checklist. It has an infinite number of variables. You can’t even define the term. It means so many different things to people.”

  “It is annoying in those ways,” he agreed.

  She groaned aloud. “What am I going to do?”

  “You’ll figure it out,” he said.

  She stared at him and frowned. “You’re a really nice man.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “No, it’s not. It’s just…I don’t know what to do.”

  “And you’re the only one who can decide.”

  She looked hopeless then, like she might cry sometime soon.

  He stiffened his spine, tried to strengthen his resolve. He had to get away from her. Nothing else would save him.

  “Okay. I’ll stop talking now and go sit on the other side of the room, in case I’m tempted to do more harm than I’ve already done. It was nice to meet you, Kate. You’ll do the right thing, whatever it is.”

  “I’m not so sure of that.” She looked as if she might cry at any minute. “I’m not very sure of anything right now.”

  Oh, great. Make her cry. Way to go, Ben.

  “Kate, sorry to have kept you waiting,” Charlotte Sims said, saving him from whatever he might have said by choosing that moment to walk into the reception area and place herself directly in front of him and Kate.

  Kate looked panicked and guilty. Very guilty.

  Ben finally noticed that her friend, Melanie, was staring at them both with rapt attention.

  Charlotte looked puzzled. “Something wrong?”

  “No,” Ben said. “Not at all.”

  Things were right. Very right. She had saved him from saying something he would definitely regret and stepping across a line he had no right to cross.

  “And it seems I’ve double booked myself. Again,” Charlotte said, still studying all three people in the reception area to see what she’d missed.

  “No problem,” Ben said. “Kate can go first.”

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “Positive,” he said, thinking, Please, just go.

  “We won’t be long,” Charlotte assured him.

  Kate stood up and followed the woman, turning briefly to shoot a puzzled look at Ben that he couldn’t begin to decipher.

  Was she mad at him?

  He was mad at himself.

  And too curious for his own good.

  “Well,” Melanie said. “That was interesting. How do you two know each other?”

  “We don’t,” Ben insisted. “We just met at the front door to your office five minutes ago.”

  “Oh.” She sounded terribly disappointed.

  He wondered if he could ask her not to say anything about this to anyone, particularly Kate’s kind-of-fiancé, but that would probably make them look even more guilty. He wondered if Melanie liked to gossip and how well she knew Joe, whom Kate might or might not love. He’d feel really guilty if the talk he and Kate had had caused any trouble between her and her fiancé.

  Ben, you should have slept in today, maybe not gotten out of bed at all. But Mrs. Ryan would have been horrified, and someone had to do the morning prayer service. Staying in bed really wasn’t an option.

  Keeping his mouth shut with Kate and staying out of her relationship with Joe…now, that was an option. He clamped his mouth shut, glanced at Melanie, only to find her grinning at him and staring right back.

  “So,” Melanie said. “Want to know about Kate and Joe?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  He bit his tongue and sat there, stone-faced. Now, she had him lying. Him…a minister.

  But, if he’d told the truth, Melanie would have told him all about Kate and Joe, and it was definitely none of his business.

  No way to win this one, Ben.

  Melanie laughed at him and told him anyway. “They’ve been together forever. Five years now, I think.”

  Which could mean anything. That they were perfectly suited for each other or that they’d simply let things run on, with no inclination to take that final step, because they simply had no desire to actually be married.

  “Supposed to get married this summer, but Kate’s mom’s cancer came back in the middle of planning the wedding, and then she died this spring, and… Well, I’m not sure what’s going on now.”

  “Melanie—”

  “But Joe really is a great guy.”

  So he’d heard.

  “Still, you’d think if they were going to get married, they’d have done it by now,” Melanie proclaimed.

  Please, please, please, please, please, Ben begged silently. Get me out of this. I’ll be good. I promise.

  He closed his eyes, closed his ears as best he could, refusing to listen anymore. Melanie got a phone call, thank God, and then another one. She hadn’t said one more word about Kate and Joe.

  Charlotte Sims’s office door opened, finally, and she and Kate came out. Ben stood up, thinking he would slide on into Charlotte’s office and not have to say anything but a polite goodbye to Kate, and he’d have escaped relatively unscathed.

  But then Melanie, who’d been on the phone again, put it down and said, “Hey, wait a minute. There’s a really annoyed older woman on the phone who’s lost a priest named Ben Taylor.” She glared at him, looking at him like he was a snake. “Are you a priest?”

  Kate’s head whirled around, and she stood there, openmouthed, waiting for him to answer. Charlotte Sims was staring, too.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  Melanie held out the phone. “Pastor? If this is you, it’s your secretary. She’s saying something about you slipping past her and going AWOL.” Then sh
e said into the phone, “He’s not dangerous is he?”

  Ben groaned and took the phone, hoping Mrs. Ryan had the courtesy to say that no, he was not dangerous and that no one called the police. Obviously, he’d been right to worry this morning about being arrested and defrocked.

  Kate was certainly looking at him as if he was a criminal.

  Which was probably the punishment he deserved for flirting with her—had he really been flirting?—without his collar on and without saying he was a minister.

  He held the receiver to the side of his face and said, “Mrs. Ryan, you found me.”

  Chapter Three

  Kate was surprised her lower jaw hadn’t hit the floor. Her mouth had already been hanging open ridiculously at the idea that she might have been both flirting with and getting advice from a priest! And to have him confirm it like that—

  She made a tiny sound of outrage, one he clearly heard, because he turned toward her, and for just a moment their eyes met, hers blazing, his contrite, and then he went back to his conversation.

  That rat, she thought, because that was much, much easier than examining the guilt she felt, both for talking with a complete stranger about her feelings for Joe, when she hadn’t found the courage to talk to Joe himself, and for kind of flirting with the priest.

  Was it really flirting?

  Honestly, she’d never been that good at either recognizing it or doing it, preferring a much more direct approach. So maybe that wasn’t what they’d done. True, she had thought he was cute for a moment but, really, that was it. She’d spent maybe ten minutes with the man, in a public waiting room and on a public street. They’d done nothing but talk. So she really hadn’t done anything horrible.

  Except flirt with a priest, while she was engaged to someone else!

  Kate groaned again.

  Ben Taylor handed the phone back to Melanie and then turned to Charlotte and said, “I’m afraid I have to go. Can I call and reschedule?”

  “Of course,” Charlotte said.

  And with that, he was gone.

  The minute the door closed, Kate, Melanie and Charlotte all started talking at once. Charlotte’s low, insistent voice cut through the other two, as she said, “What’s going on?”

  “He’s a priest?” Kate asked.

  “He must be. That woman kept telling me there had to be a man in a clerical collar in our offices, and I said there wasn’t. Finally she said Ben Taylor, and I just about choked.”

  “Wait,” Charlotte said again. “What’s wrong?”

  “He was trying to pick Kate up, right here in our reception area,” Melanie said.

  “Surely not,” Charlotte said.

  “He was. Tell her,” Melanie said.

  “I don’t know what he was doing, but… He seemed so nice.”

  “But he’s a priest. What’s this world coming to, if you can’t trust a priest?” Melanie said.

  “He was trying to pick you up?” Charlotte asked. “Right here?”

  “I think so,” Kate said.

  “He definitely was,” Melanie announced.

  She should know. She was much more of a flirt than Kate had ever been. Distressed and feeling even more guilty, she turned to Charlotte and said, “How do you know him?”

  “I don’t, really, but I’ll find out all there is to know about him,” Charlotte promised. “Don’t worry.”

  But Kate did worry.

  He’d thrown her completely off balance.

  She prided herself on being a good judge of character, and she’d liked him right from the start. He had kind eyes with little crinkles in the corners and more at the corners of his mouth, which made her think he must smile a lot and generally be a pretty happy guy. He seemed a little too easygoing for her, but then most people were a lot more easygoing than Kate was. She didn’t understand it, but she knew it wasn’t always a bad thing.

  He had a nice voice, strong and smooth and easy to listen to, and he was a very good listener. So few men were. So she’d talked, and he’d listened, and she’d told him everything she didn’t want to even acknowledge about her and Joe, things she been avoiding for months.

  “I have to go,” Kate said, knowing if she stayed she’d really face an inquisition from Melanie and maybe from Charlotte, too.

  “We’ll be in touch about your first meeting with your little sister,” Charlotte said.

  She mumbled a thanks, picked up the satchel that doubled as both a purse and a briefcase, and fled.

  It was a quick four blocks from Charlotte’s office to Kate’s own. She breezed in, asking her assistant Gretchen to try to get Joe on the line before she changed her mind. Ben Taylor might be a jerk, but he’d shamed her into taking action. Kate sat behind the closed door of her office with her palms sweating, trying to figure out what to say. All too soon, Ginny buzzed her and said Joe was on line two.

  Kate picked it up and said, “Hi.”

  “Kate. Hi. Are you okay? You sound funny.”

  “I’m… I don’t know what I am, Joe. You and I need to talk.”

  “Okay. Talk.”

  “Not now. Not like this. Where are you?” She thought he was still out of town, but couldn’t say for sure. What did that say about their relationship?

  “St. Louis,” he said. “I was hoping to be home today, but it’s not looking like I will. I’ll have to see how things go, and then see what the airlines can do for me.”

  “Okay. Call me when you get in?”

  “Sure. Kate? Did something happen?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “You sound like something happened,” he insisted.

  And he sounded like he’d been expecting something to happen. What was that about?

  “I just need to ask you some things,” she said. “About us.”

  “Oh.”

  Oh? He said it as if it had a dozen different meanings, each fraught with possibilities.

  What was going on? She’d been leading a perfectly sane life this morning. She had a business she ran well, a family she loved, a mother she was still mourning, true, but all in all, a good, sane, predictable life.

  Was this punishment for showing up at Big Brothers/Big Sisters under the guise of doing something nice for someone, when all she’d really wanted was to get in good with Charlotte Sims’s husband?

  She did feel guilty about that part.

  But good work was good work, right? Were her motives really that important, when in the end she’d be doing a good thing? At least, she’d intended to do a good thing. She certainly hadn’t gone there to flirt with a priest and question everything there was to her five-year relationship with Joe, who really was a very, very nice man. A sane man. A responsible one. A careful one. A smart one. A kind one. Everything she thought she’d ever wanted in a man.

  “Katie, you’re scaring me,” Joe said.

  “Sorry. I’m really sorry. I just… I have to go. Call me when you get into town, okay?”

  Joe promised that he would.

  Kate hung up the phone and wished with every fiber of her being that her mother was alive and well and that she could run to her and spill out all her problems to her.

  She missed her so much. It had been horrible, watching her waste away like that. Kate had always thought she was so strong, that she could handle anything, but losing her mother had left her feeling as lost as a little six-year-old, like the little girl she’d helped to the car earlier.

  She didn’t know what was right or wrong anymore. She couldn’t be certain about anything, even marrying Joe.

  Tell me what to do, Mom. Couldn’t you just tell me what to do?

  Two hours later Ben was back, seated in front of Charlotte Sims, feeling like a naughty kid who’d been summoned to the principal’s office.

  “I am not a Catholic priest,” he said. “I’m a minister at Grace Cathedral on Elm Street. Ministers in our church get married. No one cares. In fact, people think it makes us better at our jobs to have spouses and children, to better unders
tand the kinds of emotions and challenges that come with marriage and parenthood.”

  “All right,” Charlotte said. “So you were trying to pick up an engaged woman in my waiting room because…?”

  “I didn’t pick her up. I had a conversation with her. I thought she was attractive, and I thought just maybe I might leave with her phone number, that I might ask her to dinner or something. But that’s it. And I didn’t do any of those things because I found out she’s engaged.”

  Maybe, he added. Was it maybe? Or was it really and truly engaged? He still wanted to know. No way he was asking Charlotte Sims about that. She’d probably slap his face, and rightly so.

  “Melanie said you were flirting with Kate, and Melanie should know. She’s one of the biggest flirts in the entire state.”

  “Well, then…I guess I was flirting. Guilty. Shoot me, please. Put me out of my misery.”

  “I can’t. You owe me a favor.”

  Ben clamped his mouth shut, thinking he hadn’t said a single, right thing all day.

  “If,” Charlotte added, “I decide I want you to have anything to do with my organization.”

  “I am not a bad guy!” He nearly exploded with it. “I just…I’m having a bad day, okay? I thought she was pretty. She was nice to that little girl, Allie, and I don’t think I’ve spent a moment on anything that might be considered a personal life since I came here seven months ago. Obviously, I’m lousy at it. I am still single at thirty-two. I don’t think I’ve had a serious relationship in the three years I was in divinity school or the two since I was ordained. Maybe I should have been a Catholic priest and given up on women all together!”

  Charlotte stared at him. Slowly, he came to realize that the ends of her mouth were twitching, were fighting it seemed to curve upward into a smile.

  “You think this is funny?”

  She nodded, covering her mouth with her hand, giggles spilling out of her until her eyes filled with tears and she needed a hankie to wipe them away. Her shoulders shook. She was trying mightily and failing to keep from grinning.