Page 4 of West Bound
“Mentions of their punishment too. At least Abbess Frances prefers tours of kitchen duty rather than outright torture,” Aria admits.
We fall into silence for a moment as a bird lands and steals one of the strawberries Tamara dropped on the pathway between the berries and the basil. I imagine a million downtrodden feet have passed through this walled garden. Some seeing it as a bastion of safety, others as a cage meant to clip their wings. They’d be deprived of the ones that let them soar too high and replaced with the weight of chastity and temperance.
“So what did you confess to?” Aria glances up at me again before she returns to picking the stems off the leaves.
“That’s between me and Father Levi.” In more ways than one. I start to blush again, less prominently than when I discovered he was my confessor, but enough that my friends would know it was something shocking.
“Something bad then,” Tamara observes as she looks over me like she might find the answer written somewhere.
“Something I’d prefer Father Mark had heard rather than him.” I run my lower lip between my teeth. I have no idea how I’ll face him again, and given the amount of time he spends in the archives, there will be no avoiding him for more than a few hours.
“Something salacious then?” Aria’s eyes brighten with the possibility.
I press my lips together, and she lets out a low breath.
“Not about him?” she presses, her eyes lighting with amusement.
“It was a dream,” I answer defensively.
“You confessed to a dream?” Tamara looks at me like I’m strange.
“It was a dream I liked.” I’m not about to repeat my confession in the broad light of day. It's bad enough that heknows. I feel dirty. Like I've sinned all over again by telling him. The long lectures from the abbess were getting to me.
But I needed to get it off my chest and somehow be absolved for thinking of a priest that way. Thinking of another man, one who doesn't have those kinds of vows and responsibilities attached, is bad enough, considering my own circumstances. But the two of us? Together? It’s an impossibility. Sacrilegious, if I'm being honest with myself. I can only imagine how his opinion of me has altered. The new friend I've been making is now likely lost to awkward avoidance. Or at least I could hope. I’m not sure which I’d hate more, him dodging into a row of the archives to avoid seeing me, or him smiling knowingly when my cheeks heat under his gaze the next time he asks for my help. Either way, I’m in for torture.
“Ah, I see.” Aria tries not to grin, but her eyes betray her all the same.
She struggles with the rules as much as any of us. I’m half certain she’s broken them with visitors. Somewhere, a man is sharing a pint with a friend, bragging about how he’s so good in bed he managed to bag a nun.
“He’s a priest. I’m sure he’s heard worse.” Tamara, ever the pragmatist, offers up a distraction.
“He’s a man. I’m sure he’sdoneworse,” Aria adds, reveling in her own assessment.
I could see her point. Father Levi is too handsome and clever not to have had a youth that was filled with at least some measure of iniquity, or at least the temptation. Another flash of his wicked smile outside the confessional returns.
I try for a moment to imagine him as a naive young virgin and draw a blank. In my mind, Father Levi definitely had a past, even if he doesn’t have a present, and for that, at least, he can’t completely judge me. He knows what it’s like to be human. Atthe end of the day, whatever orders we take, whatever vows we swear to uphold, we’re human underneath it all.
“Aria,” Tamara hisses, using only her name as a reprimand, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“You know it’s true. All priests probably get it out of their systems before they join the seminary.” Aria shakes her head.
“Father Mark did say he had a girlfriend before,” Tamara admits.
“That’s a hard one to imagine.” I think of the graying old man who’s always discussing the principles of the gospels and reciting the beatitudes to us.
“Did you tell him it was him in your dream?” Aria asks.
“No. But I doubt he thinks I’m having dirty dreams about Father Mark or Father Peter.”
“How dirty was it?” Aria always wants the juicy details when it’s something more interesting than our daily chores.
“Three-rosaries-a-day dirty.”
“Oof.” She grits her teeth and then gives me a sympathetic look. “For how long?”
“Until the dreams stop or for a month. Whichever is longer.”
They’re stunned into silence, and I can feel the creep of embarrassment returning.
