Page 51 of Priest (Priest 1)
She opened the door and her face lit up with the most beautiful fucking smile I’d ever seen.
“Wow,” she said. “You’re here. Like a real person.”
“Did you doubt that I was real before?”
She shook her head, standing aside so I could walk in and then closing the door after me. “I’ve never dated someone whom I couldn’t actually date. I had half-convinced myself that you only existed inside the church walls.”
“Dating?” My voice came out too eager, too excited. I cleared my throat. “I mean, we’re dating?”
“I don’t know what you call it when you fuck someone’s ass raw, Father Bell, but that’s what I call it.”
A sudden fear dropped into my stomach, and I stepped towards her, grabbing her hand and pulling her into me, so I could look down into her eyes. “Are you sore?” I asked, worried.
She beamed up at me. “Only in the best ways.” She raised up to kiss my jaw and then moved into the kitchen. “Would you like a drink? Let me guess…a cosmo? No—a pomegranate martini.”
“Ha. Whiskey—Irish or Scotch, I don’t care. But neat.”
She gestured toward the living room and I went, taking the opportunity to look around her house as I did. It was still mostly boxes and paint cans, and despite the attractive furniture and tasteful pictures and paintings resting against the wall, it was fairly plain that Poppy didn’t find much interest in the domestic arts.
Stacks of books rested against the wall, waiting for a permanent home, and I ran my fingers down the ridged towers of their spines, both openly pleased and secretly jealous of how well-read this woman was. There were the usual suspects, of course—Austen and Bronte and Wharton—but names I would not have expected along with them—Joseph Campbell and David Hume and Michel Foucault. I was flipping through Thus Spoke Zarathustra (an old nemesis from both my mDiv and my history classes) when Poppy drifted over with our drinks.
Our fingers grazed against each other when I took my tumbler of Macallan, and then I set it down and set Poppy’s drink down, because I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to slide my hands up that slender neck and cup her face as I explored her mouth, and I wanted to walk her back to the couch so I could lay her down and slowly peel every layer of clothing off her body.
But I had come here to do something, not to fuck her (well, not only to fuck her) so I contented myself with a kiss and then pulled back to get my drink again. She looked a little dazed from the kiss, a dreamy sort of smile hanging around her lips as she took a sip from her martini glass, and then she declared that she was going to get something for us to snack on.
I continued my slow perusal of her living room, feeling relaxed and peaceful. I’m doing the right thing. This could be a new beginning for us, for me. Something official to mark our relationship—that’s how rituals worked, right? Something tangible to signal the intangible. A gift to show Poppy what she meant to me—what us meant to me—to show her the strange but also divine transformation happening in my life because of her.
The house was small, but it had been recently renovated, with sleek wooden floors and the original large fireplace and large, clean lines of trim. She had a wide wooden desk by a window, the only symbol of any true intent of unpacking and staying, with an iMac and a printer and a scanner, neat stacks of folders and a small wooden box filled with expensive looking pens.
Next to the desk, in an open cardboard box, were her framed degrees, neglected and buried amongst other castoff office items—half-used pads of Post-Its and open boxes of envelopes.
Dartmouth — Bachelor of Economics, summa cum laude.
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth — Master of Business Administration, summa cum laude.
And then one I didn’t expect, University of Kansas — Bachelor of Fine Arts, Dance. This one was dated from this past spring.
I held it up as Poppy returned with a cutting board loaded with cheese and sliced pears. “You got another degree?”
She actually blushed, busying herself with setting the tray down on the coffee table. “I had a lot of free time when I moved here, and once I started making so much money at the club, I thought I’d put it to good use. This time, my parents weren’t around to tell me not to get a dance degree, so I just went for it. I managed to squeeze it into three years instead of four.”
I came toward her. “Will you dance for me sometime?”
“I could do it now,” she said, pressing her hand against my sternum and pushing me down onto the sofa. She climbed over me, straddling me, and my cock immediately leapt with interest. But her thigh pressed against my slacks pocket and I remembered why I was there in the first place.
I trapped her with one arm around her waist, forcing her to hold still while I dug the small tissue-paper-wrapped packet out of my pocket.
She tilted her head as I handed it to her. “Is this my present?” she asked, looking delighted.
“It’s…” I didn’t know how to explain what it was. “It’s not new,” I finished lamely.
She unwrapped it, staring at the pile of jade beads nestled in the tissue paper. She pulled the rosary out slowly, the silver cross spinning in the low light. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“Everyone should have a nice rosary. At least, that’s what my grandmother always said.” I slid my hands to rest on the outside of Poppy’s thighs, mostly so I could look somewhere other than the rosary. “That one was Lizzy’s.”
I felt her body tense in my lap.
“Tyler,” she said carefully. “I can’t take this.”
