Page 74 of Priest (Priest 1)
“You’re right,” I conceded. “Okay.”
Jordan nodded, and he said a quiet prayer of absolution, and then we sat in silence for a few minutes. Most people were uncomfortable with silence, but Jordan wasn’t—he was at home in it. At home with himself. And that made it slightly easier to be with myself, even with all the unfelt feelings still looming above me.
At least until the phone rang.
Jarred out of our reverie, we both stared at Jordan’s phone on his kitchen counter. By this point, it was almost two in the morning, and Jordan stood quickly, because phone calls at this time of night were generally of the bad kind—car crashes, unexpected turns for the worse, hospice patients finally gasping their last breaths. The kinds of things where people needed their priest by their side.
I watched him answer the phone, silently saying a prayer that nobody was seriously hurt—a prayer purely out of habit, words spoken from rote—and then watched as his eyes flicked over to me.
“Yes, he’s with me,” Jordan said quietly, and my heart started beating in erratic staccato thumps, because it couldn’t be Poppy, it couldn’t be, but what if it was?
Oh God, what I would give if it were.
“Of course, just a moment,” Jordan said and handed the phone to me. “It’s the bishop,” he whispered.
My heart stopped beating then, plummeting down into my stomach. The bishop at two in the morning?
“Hello?” I said into the phone.
“Tyler,” and all it took was that one word for me to know that something was deeply, troublingly wrong, because I had never heard my mentor sound this upset. Could it simply be about me quitting?
“About that voicemail,” I said, “I’m so sorry for not waiting to speak to you properly. And now that I’ve had some time to think, I’m not sure that I do want to leave the clergy. I understand that I have a lot to explain and a lot to atone for, but things have changed for me today, and—”
The bishop’s voice was heavy as he interrupted me. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid that some other things have come to light…rather publicly, I’m afraid.”
Shit. “What things?”
“I tried calling you all day, and I called your parents and some of your parishioners, but no one knew where you were, and it wasn’t until tonight that I thought you might have gone to your confessor.”
It felt like he was stalling, like he was hesitant to tell me about whatever happened, but I had to know. “Bishop, please.”
He sighed. “Some pictures were released. On social media. You and a woman—your parishioner, I believe, Poppy Danforth.”
The pictures. The ones Sterling had blackmailed me with.
I knew that I was in serious trouble, that Sterling had made good on his promise and burned my life down, but at the moment, the chief thing that stuck out was the sound of Poppy’s name on someone else’s lips, as if her name spoken aloud was an incantation, and it was that incantation that finally ripped me open, punched a hole in my chest like bullet going through a pop can.
Tears started rolling down my face, hot and fast, but I managed to keep my voice steady. “Okay.”
“Okay, as in you already know about these pictures?”
“Yes,?
?? I managed.
“Dammit, Tyler,” the bishop swore. “Just—dammit.”
“I know.” I was actively crying now and then something was nudged into my hand. A tumbler of Scotch, amber-colored and with a single spherical ice cube in the middle. Jordan was standing over me, and he nodded his head at the glass.
Things were bad indeed if Jordan Brady was giving me a drink. I wouldn’t have even guessed he owned a single bottle of liquor to begin with.
“Tyler…” the bishop said “…I don’t want to have to fire you.”
His meaning was clear. He wanted me to quit. It will be that much cleaner for the press releases, I thought. The repentant priest who had already turned himself in made a much better byline than the sexually rapacious priest who had to be fired.
“Are those my only two choices? Quit or be fired?”
“I suppose…if the relationship were over—”
