Page 34 of Holly Jolly Heresy
Caleb snapped his eyes back to his brother’s sympathetic face on the screen, his own surprise at Gavin’s reaction staring back at him.
“It’s been pretty damn obvious for a while. But you’re…you know,” Gavin said, gesturing towards Caleb.
“I know,” he said miserably.
“Is this the first time you’ve had feelings for someone since becoming a priest?”
“Yes! It’s not exactly something we’re encouraged to do.”
“Right, but it’s just a feeling. You can’t control how you feel.” Caleb’s face heated as his cheeks turned bright red on the screen. Gavin’s eyes grew wide. “Unless, it’s more than just a feeling?”
“I slept with her.” Gavin’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “I mean, I didn’t—technically, yes, we slept together but we didn’tsleep together, and then this morning, that wasn’t sleeping but—”
Gavin held up a hand to stop Caleb’s ramblings. “I’m sorry. I’m having trouble following here. Did you share a bed with her, or did you have sex?”
“Yes? I mean, I’m not sure exactly what qualifies as sex in this particular circumstance—”
“Did either one of you come?” Caleb glared at his brother, as if there was any world in which he was answering that question. Gavin blew out a breath. “Okay, so you had sex with her. Didn’t you…I mean, isn’t that against the rules?”
“Yes!” Caleb leapt to his feet and paced the length of the small room, his bare toes digging into the low pile of the carpet. “This whole thing is against the rules. This is exactly why I should let the Bishop transfer me.”
“Youwhat?”
“It’s not important.”
“I think it is fucking important, thank you very much,” Gavin snapped. “Since when do you not tell me things like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like major life things! Like you’re thinking about leaving Aster Bay again. Like falling in love with my wife’s best friend. Like breaking your vows—”
“I just told you!”
Caleb ran a hand through his hair, adjusted his glasses, and sank back down onto the bed. The weight of his decisions over the last twenty-four hours slammed into him like a wrecking ball, shattering bone and bruising skin. It was painful and awful and yet somehow also liberating, like he’d been encased in amber and had finally broken free.
“And so you took off your collar because—”
“Actually, she took it off.”
The brothers stared at each other for a moment in stunned silence before they both chuckled, Caleb’s need to correct Gavin on that particular detail only serving to highlight the absurdity of the entire situation.
“Merry Christmas, Father West,” Gavin teased as only a little brother could. “She’s one step away from jingling your bells.”
“Don’t be gross,” Caleb chided.
“So what are you going to do now?”
Caleb cast his eyes around the room as though the solution to his existential crisis somehow lay within the four walls of his rented bedroom. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to be with her,” he admitted, then just as quickly he wrote over the confession. “I want to go back in time twenty-four hours and never have gotten into this mess. I want to go back twenty-five years— I took a vow.”
On the screen, Gavin frowned. “Did I ever tell you what Mom said to me the night you told us you were going to become a priest?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You’d just come home from college for summer break and we went out for burgers at the Dockside Diner.”
