Page 5 of Priest (Confessions 3)

Julien slipped off his seat, and when Priest turned in his direction, he stepped between his legs.

“Joel, mon amour,” Julien said. “You’ve done everything to protect your location. To protect us. You’ve changed your name. You cut all ties. You erased that life years ago. It doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I know. But I can’t get it out of my head. I can’t even believe it’s happening in the first place. And right when things with Robert were—”

“Stop worrying about Robbie.” Julien looked at the untouched plate in front of Priest. “Eat, so I can pour you something stronger than this wine. You could do with it.”

Priest raised the fork to his mouth and did as he was told, because he really did want the drink Julien was about to get him, and the food in front of him smelled divine.

“Robbie’s had a lot to deal with over the past couple of weeks,” Julien said, as he reached into one of the kitchen cabinets and grabbed a bottle of Jameson. “And now this? It’s a lot. I get it. Trying to wrap your head around Jimmy being connected to you in any way—let alone as your father—is unimaginable. I know how he feels.”

“What? Annoyed? Pissed off at me?” Priest said.

Julien took the lid off the whiskey and then poured some into a tumbler. “Maybe a little. He’s at that place in a new relationship where you get past the exhilarating feelings of being with a person, and try to decide if you want to stay once you find out all their secrets. You’ve been there, I’ve been there too.” Julien pushed the tumbler over to Priest. “He’s questioning everything right now—you, me, us—and we have to let him.”

“I don’t have to like it,” Priest said, and let out a frustrated sigh. “He seems so…distant.”

“I know. But at least he came home and stayed here with us,” Julien said. “He could’ve asked to be dropped at a friend’s house.”

That was true. Robbie had stayed when most people would’ve run in the opposite direction.

“Let me take him something to eat. He’s got to be hungry,” Julien said, as he picked up the third plate. “You, mon amour, alternate. Food then drink. Ok?”

* * *

AFTER PRIEST LEFT the en suite, Robbie had moved from the bathroom to the bedroom and stripped down for the night. He’d pulled on his pajama shorts and climbed beneath the covers with his phone, and then sat there looking at the blank screen for what felt like hours.

He could hear Julien’s and Priest’s muffled voices in the other room, and where that once would’ve enticed him to go out and join them, tonight he was content to know they were there while he worked through whatever it was he was feeling, and that was a whole lot of unknown territory.

Joel Alexander Donovan.

Joel Alexander Donovan.

It didn’t matter how many times Robbie said it out loud—or in his head—that name did not fit the face of the man he knew.

No. He’d put his trust in a Priest…or so he’d thought.

Robbie opened up the Internet and stared at the search bar so hard that his head started to hurt. It would be so easy to type in that name now that he had it. To type in Joel Alexander Donovan, a name he knew would bring up thousands of results, and read all about Priest. But something was holding him back.

It somehow felt like an invasion of privacy to go online and read about the tragic life of the man who sat just outside the bedroom Robbie shared with him and his husband. It felt wrong to read the news stories or watch clips of the TV documentaries based on the heartbreaking details of Priest’s childhood. And no matter how curious or how confused Robbie was about everything he had learned tonight, he refused to scour the Internet in search of salacious, gossipy details, when what he knew he needed to do was talk to the man himself and find out the truth—Priest’s truth.

A light knock on the door caught Robbie’s attention, and when he glanced over, Julien poked his head inside.

“I thought you might be hungry, princesse.”

God, it was going to be impossible to stay away from these two and think things over when they were all in the same house. Each man called to Robbie on too many levels to ignore, and being this close but not actually being, well, close was killing him already, and it had only been a couple of hours. “I—”

“Would love to eat this délicieux meal I cooked up for you? Oui, I know,” Julien said. He pushed the door open a little farther and walked inside carrying a tray with a plate and a glass of wine on it.

“Are you seriously bringing me dinner in bed right now?”

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