Page 24 of Priest (Priest 1)
I placed my hand on her head, about to murmur a standard blessing, and then her eyes lifted to mine and everything shifted. The floor and the ceiling and the cincture tight around my waist to encourage pure thoughts and her hair feather-soft under my fingertips and my skin on her skin. Electricity skimmed down my spine, and every sense memory of her—her taste and her feel and her sounds—shocked through me.
Her mouth parted. She felt it too.
I could barely get the blessing out, my throat was so dry. And when she turned to walk back to her pew, she also looked stunned, as if she’d been blinded.
After Mass, I practically bolted back to the sacristy, not looking at anyone or anything as I did. I took my time removing my vestments, hanging the way-too-expensive embroidered chasuble on its hanger and folding my alb into a precise, neat square. My hands were shaking. My thoughts were incomplete fragments. Things had been so good this week. And things were going so well during the Mass, even with her all adorable and devout and so fucking close, and then I touched her…
I stood for a minute in my slacks and shirt and stared at the processional cross, (feeling a bit betrayed, if I was being honest.) If I was forgiven, why hadn’t God also removed this temptation from me? Or given me more strength to bear it? To resist it? I knew it wasn’t fair to hope that Poppy would move away or become a Baptist or something, but why couldn’t God eliminate my attraction to her? Deaden my senses to the way she’d felt under my blessing…deaden my eyes to those red lips and bright hazel eyes?
Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me. Even Jesus had said those words. Not that they had worked out so well for him…why was God so willing to leave bad cups all over the place?
I left the sacristy in a strange mood, trying to summon that ethereal, distinctly nonphysical tranquility I’d felt earlier, and then I turned the corner and saw Poppy standing in the center aisle, the sole parishioner remaining.
I honestly didn’t know what to do. We were urged to flee temptation, but what if my job was helping the temptress? Was it more wrong to sneak away, to leave her without help, and avoid the lust and desire? Because of course, the lust was my own problem, not hers, and no excuse to be cold to her.
But if I did go to her, what else was I risking?
More importantly, was I risking it because I wanted to risk it? Was I only telling myself I cared about her spiritual development, so that I could be near her?
No, I decided. That for sure wasn’t true. It was just that the actual truth was so much worse. I cared about her as a person, as a soul, and I wanted to fuck her, and that was the recipe for something much worse than carnal sin.
It was a recipe for falling in love.
I would go to her. But I would put her in contact with the leader of the women’s group, direct Poppy to seek guidance from her instead of me, and hopefully the occasional Mass would be the extent of our interactions.
Poppy stared at the altar as I approached.
“Aren’t there bones inside there?”
“We prefer the term relic.” My voice had that unintentionally deep timbre again. I cleared my throat.
“Seems a little macabre.”
I gestured towards the crucifix, which depicted Jesus at his most bloody, broken, and tortured. “Catholicism is a macabre religion.”
Poppy turned toward me, face thoughtful. “I think that’s what I like about it. It’s gritty. It’s real. It doesn’t gloss over pain or sorrow or guilt—it highlights them. Where I grew up, you never dealt with anything. You took pills, drank, repressed it all until you were an expensive shell. I like this way better. I like confronting things.”
“It’s an active religion,” I agreed. “It’s a religion of doing—rituals, prayers, motions.”
“And that’s what you like about it.”
“That it’s active? Yes. But I like the rituals themselves too.” I looked around the sanctuary. “I like the incense and the wine and the chants. It feels ancient and holy. And there’s something about the rituals that brings me back to God every time, no matter how foul my mood is, no matter how badly I’ve sinned. Once I start, it all sort of fades away, like it’s not important. Which it isn’t. Because while Catholicism can be macabre, it’s also a religion of joy and connection, of remembering that sorrow and sin can’t hold on to us any longer.”
She shifted, her flat bumping against my shoe. “Connection,” she said. “Right.”
In fact, I was feeling connection right now. I liked talking religion with her; I liked that she got it, got it in a way that a lot of lifetime churchgoers didn’t. I wanted to talk to her all day, listen to her all day, have her breathy words whisper me to sleep at night…
Noooooo, Tyler. Bad.
I cleared my throat. “What can I help you with, Poppy?”
She held up the church newsletter. “I saw that there was a pancake breakfast tomorrow and I wanted to help.”
“Of course.” The breakfast was one of the first things I’d started doing after coming to St. Margaret’s, and the response had been overwhelming. There was enough rural poverty and poverty in nearby Platte City and Leavenworth to guarantee a steady need for the service,
but there were never enough volunteers and we were slammed the two times a month we hosted it. “That would be so much appreciated.”
“Good.” She smiled, the hint of a dimple appearing in her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
