Page 27 of Priest (Priest 1)
Knock knock BOOM.
The deafening thunder and preceding flash of light did nothing to alleviate my disorientation, and I stumbled into the table, the sharp corner burrowing into my hip. I swore, blindly reaching for a t-shirt (I was only in a loose pair of sweatpants) and groped my way down the hall to the living room where the front door was. I was just awake enough that I was beginning to register that someone really was at my door at three in the morning, and it was either a police officer coming to tell me that Ryan had finally rammed his car into a tree while texting or one of the parishioners needing last rites. Whatever reason they had for coming to the rectory, it probably wasn’t good, and I steeled myself for tragedy as I opened the door, awkwardly also trying to tug my t-shirt over my head.
It was Poppy, rain-soaked with a bottle of Scotch in her hand.
I blinked like an idiot. For one thing, after our fight this morning, the literal last thing I expected was Poppy at my door in the middle of the night bearing gifts. For another, she was wearing what I assumed were her pajamas—a pair of dancing shorts and a thin Walking Dead t-shirt—and the rain had thoroughly wetted both. She wasn’t wearing a bra and the rain had made her thin shirt almost transparent, her nipples dark and hard under the fabric, and once I noticed that, it was hard to think about anything else than those wet breasts, probably pebbled with goose bumps, and how that cool flesh would feel against my hot tongue.
And then I came back to myself and for a terrible moment, I warred between two impulses: shutting her out into the rain or shoving her to her knees and making her swallow my cock.
Flee the temptations of youth, we’d read at the Bible study earlier tonight. Pursue righteousness. I should shut the door and go back to bed. But then Poppy shivered, and a lifetime of respect and politeness intervened. I found myself stepping back and gesturing for her to come inside.
Pursue righteousness, the author of Timothy said. But did righteousness carry a bottle of Macallan 12 in her hand? Because Poppy did.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, stepping into the living room and then turning around to face me.
I shut the door. “I gathered.” My voice was gravelly from sleep and something less innocent. Predictably, my dick started to swell; despite everything that had happened, I hadn’t seen her breasts yet, and they were more tempting than ever under that wet shirt.
Fuck. I didn’t mean yet. I meant never. I was never going to see her breasts. Accept it, I mentally chastised my groin, which refused to heel, and instead kept sending these painfully vivid sense memories back to my brain, like how it had felt to grope Poppy’s tits when she was bent over the church piano.
Her eyes dropped to my hips, and I knew my sweatpants were not doing a very good job hiding my thoughts. Clearing my throat, I turned away from her to walk over to the kitchen. “I didn’t know you liked The Walking Dead,” I mentioned lightly, sliding my hand over the switch. A pale yellow glow wafted from the postwar-era light fixture, casting angled shadows into the living room.
“It’s my favorite show,” Poppy said. “But I don’t know why you act surprised that you didn’t know. We haven’t known each other that long, and most of our conversations have involved me telling you my darkest secrets—not what’s on my Netflix queue.”
She had come up to me and extended the bottle of Scotch, which I took, moving into the kitchen to search for glasses, trying to piece together a response—any response—but I literally couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“It’s a peace offering,” she said, nodding towards the Macallan. “I couldn’t sleep and I wanted to say I’m sorry for our fight today and I thought maybe whisky...” She took a deep breath and for the first time, my still sleep-fogged brain realized that she was nervous. “I’m so sorry for waking you up,” she said quietly. “I should go.”
“Don’t,” I said automatically, my mouth operating on instinct before my mind could catch up. A gratifying flush spread up her cheeks, and something clicked in my mind, and now I was fully and completely awake. “Go to the living room,” I said—not asked. “Turn on the gas fireplace and sit on the hearth. Wait for me.”
She obeyed without question and that simple act of obedience stirred up the old me, the me that was known on campus for a certain type of experience in the bedroom. I couldn’t help it, it felt so damn good to have a woman pliant to my demands, to see a woman as smart and independent as Poppy let me take care of her, trust me to direct her in exactly the right way. And then I felt like an idiot. I gripped the countertops, remembering my women’s studies classes in college, the feminist nun at the seminary who outlined every painful instance of misogyny in the Church’s history. I was being a pig, for more reasons than one. I needed to regain my control, go out there and tell her that after her drink, she needed to go. I would be honest about my struggle and hope that she would understand.
Even if she hated me for it.
Because I deserved her hatred.
But first, the drinks. While I enjoyed Scotch, I usually drank it alone or with my brothers, so I didn’t have the right glasses for it. In fact, I didn’t have any drinking glasses at all. So I brought the Scotch out in two chipped coffee mugs.
Be good be good be good, I told myself as I approached her. Don’t jump her bones. Don’t fantasize about fucking her tits. Be a good priest.
I offered her the Scotch. “Sorry about the mugs.”
She grinned. “But they’re so classy.”
I rolled my eyes and sat in the chair next to the fire, which was a bad idea because it meant that she was basically sitting at my feet and that was just reinforcing all the bad thoughts.
Now or never, Tyler, I told myself. You have to do this.
“Poppy—” I started but she interrupted.
“No, I’m the one who needs to apologize,” she said. “That’s what I came here to do, after all.” She tilted her head up to meet my eyes and the fire glowed through her hair, showing where it was drying into messy waves. “I feel terrible about this afternoon. I’m fucked up from what happened with Sterling, and for some reason, when you got all protective of me this afternoon, I panicked.”
You and me both.
“And I’ll be honest—since I am talking to a priest after all. It’s complicated by the fact that I can’t stop thinking about you all the goddamned time, and it’s killing me.”
Everything in me lit on fire, because these were both the first and last words I wanted to hear, and I flinched.
She cast her eyes down in a wounded way that knifed through my ribs. She thought I was rejecting her attraction, rejecting her. Shit, nothing was further from the truth, but there was no way to explain that without making things more tangled than they already were.
