Page 50 of Holly Jolly Heresy
“I know you’re scared, Mol. I’m scared too. I’m fucking terrified.” His long strides ate up the distance between them. Space be damned, he needed to touch her. Her hands fit so well in his, their fingers intertwined. “I know you think it’s too fast. I know you’re afraid I’m going to change my mind, but I’m not. I promise you. Don’t run away from me, please.” He leaned his forehead against hers, breathing in the spicy, citrus scent of her.
“Caleb, I—”
“Wait, don’t say anything. Not yet. I need to show you something.” He led her towards the coffee table. “I made this for you.”
Of all the Christmas gifts Molly had ever received, she never expected a structurally unsound gingerbread house to be the best.
The precarious structure wobbled on the sheet pan as Caleb nudged it closer to the couch. He urged her to sit, before shrugging out of his coat and sitting beside her. She drank in the sight of him, all six-plus-feet of the best man she’d ever known, worry clouding his eyes, his hair standing up in all directions, and his throat… her eyes lingered on the place at the base of his throat where his clerical collar usually sat. The place where, today, the top button was undone, freed from the white piece of plastic that had mocked her for so long.
“You said you didn’t want us to make a hasty decision. That you thought I’d regret it because I hadn’t given it enough thought.” He gestured to the lopsided gingerbread house. “This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, Molly. I’ve been falling in love with you for over a year, and I’ll prove it to you.”
“With pastry?”
A flash of a smile crept through the anxiety tugging his lips into a frown. He pointed to a cluster of yellow gumdrops on the candy house roof arranged in the crude shape of a flower. “Last year, when I moved back, that first game night at Ethan’s house, you were wearing a dress covered in sunflowers.” Her breath caught in her chest. “You looked like summer and I thought I’d never seen someone so beautiful. The next day, I went to the florist and bought sunflowers for my kitchen. I’ve done it every Saturday since.
“And this—” He pointed to a little pile of hardened icing at the edge of the sheet pan where a gingerbread man stood on sour gummy candy skis with pretzel rod poles. “—this is when we chaperoned the senior ski trip and we stayed up all night talking. Do you know, I’d never stayed up all night before? The morning we got back, I told my confessor I was thinking about leaving the priesthood.”
“You—what?” she breathed.
But Caleb didn’t answer her. He just continued, pointing out the window carved into the side of the house and filled with melted hard candy in yellow and red and green. “This is for the first time you yelled at me.” She laughed, a broken sound colored by the tears gathering behind her eyes. “It was in the chapel at school. You’d just found out sex ed was part of the religion curriculum and you were furious. You were also right.”
“Bruce was so mad when you overruled him and made it part of the phys ed curriculum instead.”
“Coach Eagles was pretty mad too,” he admitted with a chuckle. “But you didn’t care that some of your colleagues might not be thrilled. You knew it was wrong, and you pushed me to do something about it. You shouldn’t have had to. I should have taken care of it without you needing to point it out. But the point is, you made me better. Youmakeme better.
“Last night, I instituted a policy to form a disciplinary committee with student, parent, and faculty representation. No student can be suspended without the approval of the committee, and any student who feels they are being unfairly punished can appeal to the committee. The Superintendent of the Diocese has agreed to oversee the committee’s formation and ensure it functions as intended, even though he wasn’t too thrilled to get my phone call in the middle of his Christmas Eve dinner.”
Her throat constricted with unshed tears. “Caleb, that’s amazing. You did it,” she said, her voice breaking, as those tears began sliding down her cheeks. “You found a way to work inside the system.”
He wiped a tear away with his thumb, his big hand cupping her face and his fingertips lingering at the nape of her neck. “It was my last official act as the pastor of St. Anthony’s. I submitted my resignation just after Mass.”
She didn’t have words for the ways Caleb twisted her up inside, like he was weaving together her veins and nerves in new patterns, rewriting her genetic code and making her into something entirely new. Something entirely his.
And now he was entirely hers as well.
His eyes crinkled at the corners as he studied her, as though he could read her mind and could see the overwhelming sense of rightness filling her up at belonging to him and having him belong to her in return. She half suspected she’d float away fromthe joy of it if he weren’t grounding her with his palm on her cheek.
Before she could say any of that, though, he spun the sheet pan around to reveal a collection of Easter bunny marshmallow peeps wearing gumdrop Santa hats arranged in a semi-circle around a mini chocolate Santa laying in a bed of frosted shredded wheat. On the wall of the house behind them was the image of Santa Mouse painted in royal icing, and beside the chocolate Santa, a tiny wedge of Swiss cheese.
“The last two days with you have been the best days of my life. I can’t go back to how things were before, and I don’t want to,” he said.
She couldn’t help the laugh bubbling up inside her, like champagne bursting from a newly opened bottle. He’d unlocked her in ways she didn’t know she’d been closed before. “You made me a marshmallow peep nativity scene.”
His smile was radiant, lighting up his whole face. “I did.”
She swallowed back a sob, ducking her head as the tears fell faster, but he wouldn’t let her escape his searching gaze. He caught her chin with his thumb and forefinger, lifting her eyes to his. “I didn’t decide to change my life overnight, but youhavechanged my life, Molly Proulx. I could never regret that.”
She gripped his forearm and closed her eyes, letting it sink in. He was here, choosing her, and it was still scary—maybe love always was—but the thought of being without him, even for another day, was even scarier.
He brushed his lips over her temple. “Please, love. Say something.”
“I made you something too.”
Relief danced in his eyes as he stroked her jaw with his thumb. “Yeah?”
“Come see.”
She tugged him to his feet and led him into the small kitchen where the remnants of her whirlwind girls’ night cluttered the counters. But Caleb didn’t seem to notice the mess of dirty dishes and half-drunk bottles of wine on the counter—he was too focused on the project on the dining room table.
