Priest

by Sierra Simone

  Something shifted for me that day, something that I realized had been shifting for a while. It was like the feeling I’d had as a child, when I’d taken off my roller skates after a few hours of skating and my feet would feel abnormally light and floaty. Or maybe like the feeling when I camped with my dad and Ryan, and we finally got to dump our gear on the ground after several hours of hiking, and I felt so light I could swear I was hovering a few inches above the ground.

  I didn’t have a name for it, but it was lightness and lifting, and it had something to do with Lizzy. Something to do with sharing her death and its aftermath with Poppy, something with Poppy’s whispered words, is Lizzy the reason you’re afraid to let go with me?

  I realized now, as I cradled Lizzy’s rosary in my palm, that Lizzy was the reason for a lot of things. She was the reason for everything. Her death was a weight I carried with me always, a wrong I had to avenge. But what if I could change that? What if I could trade vengeance for love? That was what Christians were called to do, after all, choose love above all else.

  Love. The word was a bomb. An unexploded bomb living inside my chest.

  That night, I texted Poppy. Are you awake?

  A beat. Yes.

  My response was immediate. Can I come over? I have a gift for you.

  Well, I was going to say no, but now that I know there’s a present…come on over ;)

  I made my careful, quiet way across the park, wearing a dark t-shirt and jeans. It was late and the park was in a natural dell, sheltered from view, but I still felt nervous as I strode in quick steps down the path, cutting through the weed-choked grass to get to Poppy’s gate. I let myself in, wincing at every creak of the rusted latch, and then walked up to her door, rapping once with my knuckle on the glass.

  She opened the door and her face lit up with the most beautiful fucking smile I’d ever seen.

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re here. Like a real person.”

  “Did you doubt that I was real before?”

  She shook her head, standing aside so I could walk in and then closing the door after me. “I’ve never dated someone whom I couldn’t actually date. I had half-convinced myself that you only existed inside the church walls.”

  “Dating?” My voice came out too eager, too excited. I cleared my throat. “I mean, we’re dating?”

  “I don’t know what you call it when you fuck someone’s ass raw, Father Bell, but that’s what I call it.”

  A sudden fear dropped into my stomach, and I stepped towards her, grabbing her hand and pulling her into me, so I could look down into her eyes. “Are you sore?” I asked, worried.

  She beamed up at me. “Only in the best ways.” She raised up to kiss my jaw and then moved into the kitchen. “Would you like a drink? Let me guess…a cosmo? No—a pomegranate martini.”

  “Ha. Whiskey—Irish or Scotch, I don’t care. But neat.”

  She gestured toward the living room and I went, taking the opportunity to look around her house as I did. It was still mostly boxes and paint cans, and despite the attractive furniture and tasteful pictures and paintings resting against the wall, it was fairly plain that Poppy didn’t find much interest in the domestic arts.

  Stacks of books rested against the wall, waiting for a permanent home, and I ran my fingers down the ridged towers of their spines, both openly pleased and secretly jealous of how well-read this woman was. There were the usual suspects, of course—Austen and Bronte and Wharton—but names I would not have expected along with them—Joseph Campbell and David Hume and Michel Foucault. I was flipping through Thus Spoke Zarathustra (an old nemesis from both my mDiv and my history classes) when Poppy drifted over with our drinks.

  Our fingers grazed against each other when I took my tumbler of Macallan, and then I set it down and set Poppy’s drink down, because I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to slide my hands up that slender neck and cup her face as I explored her mouth, and I wanted to walk her back to the couch so I could lay her down and slowly peel every layer of clothing off her body.

  But I had come here to do something, not to fuck her (well, not only to fuck her) so I contented myself with a kiss and then pulled back to get my drink again. She looked a little dazed from the kiss, a dreamy sort of smile hanging around her lips as she took a sip from her martini glass, and then she declared that she was going to get something for us to snack on.

  I continued my slow perusal of her living room, feeling relaxed and peaceful. I’m doing the right thing. This could be a new beginning for us, for me. Something official to mark our relationship—that’s how rituals worked, right? Something tangible to signal the intangible. A gift to show Poppy what she meant to me—what us meant to me—to show her the strange but also divine transformation happening in my life because of her.

  The house was small, but it had been recently renovated, with sleek wooden floors and the original large fireplace and large, clean lines of trim. She had a wide wooden desk by a window, the only symbol of any true intent of unpacking and staying, with an iMac and a printer and a scanner, neat stacks of folders and a small wooden box filled with expensive looking pens.

  Next to the desk, in an open cardboard box, were her framed degrees, neglected and buried amongst other castoff office items—half-used pads of Post-Its and open boxes of envelopes.

  Dartmouth — Bachelor of Economics, summa cum laude.

  Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth — Master of Business Administration, summa cum laude.

  And then one I didn’t expect, University of Kansas — Bachelor of Fine Arts, Dance. This one was dated from this past spring.

  I held it up as Poppy returned with a cutting board loaded with cheese and sliced pears. “You got another degree?”

  She actually blushed, busying herself with setting the tray down on the coffee table. “I had a lot of free time when I moved here, and once I started making so much money at the club, I thought I’d put it to good use. This time, my parents weren’t around to tell me not to get a dance degree, so I just went for it. I managed to squeeze it into three years instead of four.”

  I came toward her. “Will you dance for me sometime?”

  “I could do it now,” she said, pressing her hand against my sternum and pushing me down onto the sofa. She climbed over me, straddling me, and my cock immediately leapt with interest. But her thigh pressed against my slacks pocket and I remembered why I was there in the first place.

  I trapped her with one arm around her waist, forcing her to hold still while I dug the small tissue-paper-wrapped packet out of my pocket.

  She tilted her head as I handed it to her. “Is this my present?” she asked, looking delighted.

  “It’s…” I didn’t know how to explain what it was. “It’s not new,” I finished lamely.

  She unwrapped it, staring at the pile of jade beads nestled in the tissue paper. She pulled the rosary out slowly, the silver cross spinning in the low light. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  “Everyone should have a nice rosary. At least, that’s what my grandmother always said.” I slid my hands to rest on the outside of Poppy’s thighs, mostly so I could look somewhere other than the rosary. “That one was Lizzy’s.”

  I felt her body tense in my lap.

  “Tyler,” she said carefully. “I can’t take this.”

  She tried to hand it back to me, but I caught her hand with my own, curling her fingers around it.

  “After Lizzy died, no one wanted anything of hers that reminded them of what she had gone through at church. Her bible and holy cards and saint’s candles—my dad threw them all away.” I flinched, remembering his white-hot rage when he’d found out that I’d dug her rosary out of the trash. “But I wanted something of hers. I wanted to keep all the parts of her alive in my memory.”

  “Don’t you still?”

  “Of course, but after we talked the other night…I realized that I also need to let parts of her go too. And when I think about her—well, I know she would have lov
ed you.” I met her eyes. “She would have loved you like I do.”

  Poppy’s lips parted, her eyes wide and hopeful and scared, but before she could respond to what I said, I took her fingers in mine and said, “Let me teach you how to use this.”

  Yes, I was a coward. I was afraid of her not telling me that she loved me, and I was afraid of her telling me that she did love me. I was afraid of the palpable tie between us, afraid of the ribbon that laced through my ribs and around my heart that was also laced and tied around hers.

  Her eyes never left mine as I moved her hand from her forehead to her heart and then to each shoulder. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” I said for her. And then I put her fingers on the crucifix. “Now we pray the Apostle’s Creed…”

  We prayed the entire thing together with her on my lap, her echoing faintly after me, our fingers moving together through the beads, and it was somewhere near the last decade that I became aware of how hard I was, of how her nipples showed through her soft flowing tank top. Aware of those big hazel eyes and that long wavy hair and the watchful intelligence that peered through each and every expression of hers.

  This is love, I thought dizzily, wondrously. This is what laying down a cross feels like. This is what taking up a new life feels like…it feels like Poppy Danforth. And as I intoned the final words of the rosary, I almost forgot whom I was praying to.

  Hail holy queen…our sweetness and our hope.

  Later that night, when I was moving over her and into her, those words tumbled around in my mind, words that were so indelibly Poppy, so indelibly attached to the brightness of her mind and the paradise of her body.

  Holy. Queen. Sweetness.

  Hope.

  “Jordan.”

  The priest kneeling in front of me didn’t stop praying or even turn to face me. Instead, he kept murmuring to himself in the same measured voice with the same measured pace, and I knew Jordan well enough to know that this was a polite way of telling me to fuck off until he was done.

  I sat in the pew behind him.

  Jordan was the only priest I personally knew who still prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, a practice that was so monastic as to be almost obsolete, which was probably part of the reason it appealed to him. Like me, he loved old things, but his fascination went beyond mere books and the occasional spiritual encounter. He lived like a medieval monk, a life almost completely and totally devoted to prayer and ritual. It was this mystical, unearthly nature that had brought so many young people into his parish; over the past three years, it had been his presence that had revitalized this old, inner city church that had been so close to closing when he’d taken it over into something thriving and alive.

  Jordan finished his prayers and made the sign of the cross, standing with a purposeful slowness to face me.

  “Father Bell,” he said formally.

  I refrained from rolling my eyes. He’d always been like this—aloof and intense. Even the one time he’d accidentally drank too much at the seminary barbecue and I’d had to babysit him as he puked all night. But what appeared to be haughtiness or coldness was actually just a symptom of his vibrant inner life, the constant atmosphere of holiness and inspiration that he lived in, an atmosphere so palpable to him that he didn’t understand why other people didn’t sense it as he did.

  “Father Brady,” I said.

  “I imagine you are here for a confession?”

  “Yes.” I stood and he looked me up and down. There was a long pause, a long moment where his face went from confused to sad to unreadable.

  “Not today,” he finally said and then turned and started walking toward his office.

  I was confused. “Not today? Like no confession today? Are you busy or something?”

  “No, I’m not busy,” he said, still walking away.

  My brows knit together. Was denying someone confession even legal according to ecclesiastical law? Pretty sure it wasn’t.

  “Hey, wait up,” I said.

  He didn’t. He didn’t even turn around to acknowledge that I had said something or that I was jogging after him.

  We went into the small hallway lined with doors, and it was as I was following him into his office that I realized this was more than his usual reserved attitude. Father Jordan Brady was upset.

  He definitely hadn’t been upset when I’d arrived.

  “Dude,” I said, closing his office door behind me. “What the hell?”

  He sat down behind his desk, the early afternoon light painting his blond hair gold. Jordan was a good-looking guy, with the kind of hair and healthy complexion that you usually only saw in Calvin Klein ads. He was fit too—we’d bonded in the first semester of our divinity program after we kept running into each other at the local gym. We’d ended up sharing an apartment for the next two years, and I was pretty sure I was the closest thing this guy had to a friend.

  Which was why I refused to be blown off.

  He kept his eyes down as he powered on his laptop. “Come back later, Father Bell. Not today.”

  “Canon law says you have to hear my confession.”

  “Canon law isn’t everything.”

  That surprised me. Jordan was not a rule-breaker. Jordan was like two steps away from being the creepy assassin in The Da Vinci Code.

  I sat in a chair across his desk and folded my arms. “I’m not leaving until you divulge why exactly you won’t hear my confession.”

  “I don’t mind if you stay,” he said calmly.

  “Jordan.”

  He pressed his lips together, as if debating with himself, and then he finally looked up, brown eyes concerned and penetrating.

  “What’s her name, Tyler?”

  Fear and adrenaline spiked through me. Had someone seen us? Had someone figured out what was going on and told Jordan?

  “Jordan, I—”

  “Don’t bother lying about it,” he said, and he didn’t say it with disgust, but rather with an intensity that unsettled me, put me more on edge than his anger ever could.

  “Are you going to let me confess?” I demanded.

  “No.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “Because,” Jordan said deliberately, bracing his elbows on his desk and leaning forward, “you aren’t ready to stop. You’re not ready to give her up, and until you are, there’s no point in me absolving you.”

  I sank back in my chair. He was right. I wasn’t ready to give Poppy up. I didn’t want to stop. Why was I here, then? Did I think that Jordan was going to say some special prayer over me that would solve all my problems? Did I think going through the motions would change what was in my heart?

  “How did you know?” I asked, looking down at my legs and hoping to God it wasn’t because someone had seen Poppy and me together.

  “God told me. When you walked in.” Jordan said it simply, the same way someone might share where they bought their clothes. “Just as He is telling me now that you are not at the end of this. You aren’t ready to confess yet.”

  “God told you,” I repeated.

  “Yes,” he said with a nod.

  It sounded insane. But I believed him. If Jordan told me he knew exactly how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, I’d believe him. He was that kind of man—one foot in our world, one foot in the next—and I’d experienced enough with him over our years of friendship that I knew he really was able to see and feel things that others couldn’t.

  It had been a lot less frustrating when I hadn’t been one of the others in question.

  “You’ve broken your vows,” he said now, softly.

  “Did God tell you that too?” I asked, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

  “No. But I can see it in you. You carry equal burdens of guilt and joy.”

  Yep, that about summed it up.

  I buried my face in my hands, not overcome with emotion, but suddenly overwhelmed by it all, embarrassed by my weakness in front of a man who would never cave to an
y temptation.

  “Do you hate me?” I mumbled into my hands.

  “You know I don’t. You know God doesn’t either. And you know I won’t tell the bishop.”

  “You won’t?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what God wants right now.”

  I raised my head, still overwhelmed. “So what do I do?”

  Jordan looked at me with something like pity.

  “You come back when you’re ready to confess,” he said. “And until then, you be exceedingly careful.”

  Careful.

  Exceedingly careful.

  I thought about those words as I visited Mom and Dad, as I rinsed the dinner dishes in their sink, as I drove home in the dark. As I snuck across the park so I could fuck Poppy again.

  Nothing about me was careful right now.

  Careful.

  A week later, I stared up at Poppy’s ceiling. She was pressed against me, her head nestled on my arm, her breathing slow and even. I had lain awake watching her after we’d made love, watching the soft lines of her face relax from ecstasy into peace, feeling nothing but mindless contentment. But now that she’d been asleep for several hours, the contentment had ebbed into an anxious doubt.

  The last several days had been like something out of a dream or a fairy tale, where my days were chased by the structured benevolence that was my life as a priest, and where my nights were filled with gasps and sighs and skin sliding over skin.

  At night, we could pretend. We could drink and watch Netflix, we could fuck and shower together afterwards (and then fuck again.) We could drowse next to each other and fall softly into sleep. We could pretend we were just like any couple a few weeks into their relationship, that there wasn’t anything keeping us from talking about normal couple things, like meeting each other’s parents or where we would spend Thanksgiving.

  But we were acutely and painfully aware of our own acting, of our own pretense. We were faking it because facing the truth was so much worse, the truth that this paradise would end one way or another.

  What if it didn’t have to end? What if I called the bishop tomorrow and told him I wanted to quit? That I wanted to be defrocked and made into a normal man again?