Page 54 of Priest (Priest 1)
“No. But I can see it in you. You carry equal burdens of guilt and joy.”
Yep, that about summed it up.
I buried my face in my hands, not overcome with emotion, but suddenly overwhelmed by it all, embarrassed by my weakness in front of a man who would never cave to an
y temptation.
“Do you hate me?” I mumbled into my hands.
“You know I don’t. You know God doesn’t either. And you know I won’t tell the bishop.”
“You won’t?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what God wants right now.”
I raised my head, still overwhelmed. “So what do I do?”
Jordan looked at me with something like pity.
“You come back when you’re ready to confess,” he said. “And until then, you be exceedingly careful.”
Careful.
Exceedingly careful.
I thought about those words as I visited Mom and Dad, as I rinsed the dinner dishes in their sink, as I drove home in the dark. As I snuck across the park so I could fuck Poppy again.
Nothing about me was careful right now.
Careful.
A week later, I stared up at Poppy’s ceiling. She was pressed against me, her head nestled on my arm, her breathing slow and even. I had lain awake watching her after we’d made love, watching the soft lines of her face relax from ecstasy into peace, feeling nothing but mindless contentment. But now that she’d been asleep for several hours, the contentment had ebbed into an anxious doubt.
The last several days had been like something out of a dream or a fairy tale, where my days were chased by the structured benevolence that was my life as a priest, and where my nights were filled with gasps and sighs and skin sliding over skin.
At night, we could pretend. We could drink and watch Netflix, we could fuck and shower together afterwards (and then fuck again.) We could drowse next to each other and fall softly into sleep. We could pretend we were just like any couple a few weeks into their relationship, that there wasn’t anything keeping us from talking about normal couple things, like meeting each other’s parents or where we would spend Thanksgiving.
But we were acutely and painfully aware of our own acting, of our own pretense. We were faking it because facing the truth was so much worse, the truth that this paradise would end one way or another.
What if it didn’t have to end? What if I called the bishop tomorrow and told him I wanted to quit? That I wanted to be defrocked and made into a normal man again?
Laicized. That was the word for it. From the late Latin laicus, meaning layperson. To be made into a layperson.
What if a few months from now I could kneel in front of Poppy and do more than offer her an orgasm and offer her my hand in marriage instead?
I closed my eyes, shutting out the real world and letting my mind go where I hadn’t let it go before—to the future. To a future where it was her and me and a house somewhere and little Bell children underfoot. I would follow her anywhere, and if she wanted to work in New York or London or Tokyo, or stay in Kansas City, I would go with her. I was like Ruth with Naomi, I was ready to make her life and her desires my own, and any place Poppy wanted to go, we would make a home together. Spend our hours together fucking and loving. Someday watching her stomach grow with my child.
But what would I do? I had two degrees, both equally useless in the real world, useless everywhere except temples of God and temples of learning. I could teach, I supposed, theology or maybe languages. I’d always wanted to be a scholar, sitting in some dusty library, poring over dusty books, excavating forgotten knowledge the way an archeologist excavates forgotten lives. The idea excited me, blowing like rain across my thoughts, drops and splashes of possibility. New cities, new universities…a list compiled itself in my head of places that had the best classics programs and the best theology programs—there had to be a way I could fuse the two together, maybe apply for a doctoral program or take a job as an adjunct…
I opened my eyes and that pleasant, fantastical rain stopped, and the weight of everything I would have to leave behind crushed against me. I’d be leaving this town—Millie, the youth group, the men’s group, all the parishioners I’d so carefully courted back to God. I’d be leaving the pancake breakfast and clothes pantry and all the work on fighting predators in the clergy. I’d be leaving behind the gift of turning bread into flesh, wine into blood, of having one hand on the veil that separated this world from the next. I’d be leaving behind Father Bell, the man I’d become, and I’d have to molt him away like so much dead flesh and ruined feathers, and grow a new shape with painful new pink skin.
I had a life building treasures in heaven, beating myself like a runner for the race, and I was thinking of giving that up…for what? I tried to stop the verses I knew by heart crowding my mind, verses about sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption, verses about passions of the flesh waging war against my soul. Put to death what is earthly in you.
Put to death my love for Poppy.
My throat tightened and my mouth went dry; my anxiety spiked, as if someone was holding a knife to my throat and demanding that I choose, now, but how I could I choose when both choices came at such cost?
Because if I stayed where I was, I lost the woman sleeping next to me, this woman who argued about racial and gender disparities on The Walking Dead, who pulled obscure literary quotes from the air, who drank like she was drowning and who made me come harder than I ever had in my life.
