Page 45 of Priest (Priest 1)
Poppy cocked her head. “Lizzy is the reason you listen to Britney Spears,” she guessed.
“Yes,” I admitted. “It reminds me of her. She used to sing so loudly in her room that you could hear it anywhere in the house.”
“I think I would have liked her.”
I smiled. “I think you would have.” But then my smile slipped away. “The weekend of the funeral, Sean and I decided we were going to escape the relatives at the house for a few minutes and go out for Taco Bell. I’d wanted to drive, but we didn’t think—we didn’t remember that she’d been the last person to drive the car. Her music came on and Sean was…he was upset.”
Upset wasn’t the right word for what my older brother had been. He’d just turned twenty-one and so he was mourning Lizzy’s death the Irish way, with too much whiskey and too little sleep. I’d turned the key in the ignition and the opening bars of “Oops, I Did It Again” came on, obnoxiously loud because Lizzy’d had the volume cranked all the way up, and we’d both frozen, staring at the radio as if a demon had just crawled out of the CD slot, and then he’d started yelling and swearing, kicking the dash so hard that the old plastic cracked, the whole car shaking with his fury and raw grief. They’d been the closest in age, Lizzy and Sean, and accordingly, they’d been best friends and bitter enemies. They’d shared cars and friends and teachers and finally a college, being only a year apart, and of all of us Bell siblings, her death ripped the biggest hole in his daily life.
So he ripped a hole in his car that day, and then we went and got Taco Bell and we never spoke of it. We still haven’t.
“I’ve never told anyone this story before,” I said. “It’s easier to talk about Lizzy like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like naked and snuggling. Just…with you. It’s all easier with you.”
She rested her head on my shoulder. We laid there for a while, and just when I thought she’d fallen asleep, she said in the darkness, “Is Lizzy why you are afraid to let go with me?”
“No,” I said, baffled. “Why would she be?”
“It just seems like she’s the motivation behind a lot of what you do. And she was hurt, sexually. I wonder if that makes you afraid of doing that—of making what happened to her happen to someone else.”
“I…I guess I never thought of it that way.” I found her hair again and played with it. “That might be why, I don’t know. It was in college tha
t I discovered how I liked it, but it was difficult. If I found a girl who was confident and smart and full of self-respect, then she didn’t want the sex to be rough. If I found a girl who liked it rough, then the reason she liked it rough was because of some emotional issue, and yes, whenever I saw a girl like that, I thought of Lizzy. How many signs we’d missed. And if I ever found out that a guy had taken advantage of her when she’d felt like that…”
“It sounds like you had a lot of bad luck with women.”
“Not necessarily. I had a few really great girlfriends in college. But it was easier to lock that part of me away, to have the healthy, confident girlfriends and the vanilla sex. It was safer.”
“Then you became a priest.”
“And that was much safer.”
She sat up and looked at me, lines of shadow and streetlight across her face. “Well, you aren’t hurting me. I mean it. Look at me, Tyler.”
I did.
“I don’t like it rough because I’m emotionally damaged. I’ve been treated like a princess my entire life, coddled and praised and protected from every single thing that could ever harm me. Sterling was the first person who didn’t treat me like that.”
Sterling.
My jaw flexed. I didn’t like that he was so many of her firsts (which, I know, was totally unreasonable, but still. Maybe what I didn’t like was that she remembered so many of her firsts with him so intently.)
“Part of it is probably that it’s taboo and therefore dirty, so it turns me on. But part of it is that it makes me feel unbreakable. Strong. Like the man I’m with respects me enough to see that. And I’m strong enough to have that experience in the bedroom and also have a perfectly healthy life outside of it.”
“It’s too bad it didn’t work out with Sterling then.”
Whoa, Tyler. Low blow. But I was agitated and jealous and feeling like I was being told off for something that wasn’t my fault.
She stiffened. “It didn’t work out with Sterling because he can’t differentiate between the two, the bedroom and real life. He thinks because I liked the way he treated me during sex that was how I wanted to be treated all the time. That I only wanted to be a whore, when really, I wanted to be a whore for him only when we were alone. Which is why I walked away from him at the club.”
Not before you let him fuck you.
As if she could read my thoughts, she narrowed her eyes. “Are you jealous of him?”
“No,” I lied.
