Page 9 of Priest (Priest 1)
I frowned. The Business Brothers and I (and a complaining Ryan) had done all the dishes after dinner expressly so that Mom wouldn’t have to. But when I got up to see if I could help, I saw that she was scrubbing the stainless steel in savage circles, steam clouding around her.
“Mom?”
She turned and I could immediately see that she’d been crying. She gave me a quick smile and then shut the water off, swiping at her tears. “Sorry, hon. Just cleaning.”
It was Lizzy. I knew it was. Whenever we were all together, the whole Bell brood, I could see that look in her eyes, the way she was picturing the table with one more setting, the sink with one more set of dirty dishes.
Lizzy’s death had nearly killed me. But it had killed Mom. And every day after that, it was like we kept Mom artificially alive with hugs and jokes and visits now that we were older, but every now and again, you could see that a part of her had never fully healed, never really resurrected, and our church had been a huge part of that, first driving Lizzy to kill herself and then turning their backs on us when the story went public.
Sometimes I felt like I was fighting for the wrong side. But who would make it better if I didn’t?
I pulled Mom into a hug, her face crumpling as I wrapped my arms around her. “She’s with God now,” I murmured, half-priest, half-son, some chimera of both. “God has her, I promise.”
“I know,” she sniffled. “I know. But sometimes I wonder…”
I knew what she wondered. I wondered it too, in my darkest hours, what signs I missed, what I should have noticed, all the times she seemed about to tell me something, but then sank into a fog of silence instead.
“I think there’s no way we can’t wonder,” I said quietly. “But you don’t have to feel this pain alone. I want to share it with you. I know Dad would too.”
She nodded into my chest and we stayed like that a long time, swaying gently together, both of our thoughts twelve years away and in a cemetery down the road.
It wasn’t until I was driving back home, listening to my usual cocktail of brooding hipster songs and Britney Spears, that I made the connection between Sean’s club and Poppy’s confession. She had mentioned a club, mentioned that most people would classify it as sinful. Could that be it?
Jealousy slithered inside of me, and I refused to acknowledge it, clenching my jaw as I maneuvered my truck onto the interstate. I didn’t care that Sean would get to see this club, this place where Poppy had possibly exposed her body. No, I didn’t.
And that jealousy had nothing to do with my sudden, out-of-the-blue decision to find her the next day and follow up on her request for a conversation during my office hours. It was because I was worried about her, I reassured myself. It was because I wanted to welcome her to our church and give her comfort and guidance, because I sensed that she was someone who was not easily lost, not easily broken, and for something to send her into a strange confession booth and bring her to tears…well, no one should have to bear those kinds of burdens alone.
Especially someone as sexy as Poppy.
Stop it.
It wasn’t too hard to find Poppy again. In fact, I did literally nothing except jog past the open tobacco barn on my morning run and collide into her as she rounded the corner. She stumbled, and I managed to stop her fall by pinning her between my chest and my arm.
“Shit,” I said, yanking the earbuds out of my ears. “I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”
She nodded, tilting her head up and giving me a small smile that gave me chills; it was so perfectly imperfect with her two front teeth peeking behind her lips and a sheen of sweat covering her face. At the same time, we both realized how we were standing, with my arms wrapped around her and her only in a sports bra and me without a shirt. I dropped my arms, immediately missing the way she felt there. Missed the way her tits pushed against my naked chest.
In the future: only sideways hugs, I told myself. I was already seeing another cold shower in my future.
She put her hand on my chest, casually, innocently, still giving me that small smile. “I would have fallen if it wasn’t for you.”
“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have been at risk of falling at all.”
“And yet I still wouldn’t change a thing.” Her touch, her words, that smile—was she flirting? But then her smile widened, and I saw that she was just teasing, in that safe, playful way that girls do with their gay friends. She saw me as safe, and why shouldn’t she? I was a man of the cloth, after all, bound by God to be a caregiver of his flock. Of course, she would assume that she could tease me, touch me, without bothering my priestly composure. How could she know what her words and voice did to me? How could she know that her hand was currently searing its outline onto my chest?
> Her hazel eyes flickered up to mine, green and brown pools of curiosity and intelligent energy, green and brown pools that reflected grief and confusion if you cared to look long enough. I recognized it because I had worn such a look for years after Lizzy’s death, except in Poppy’s case, I suspected that the person she was grieving—the person she’d lost—was herself.
Let me help this woman, I prayed silently. Let me help her find her way.
“I’m glad I saw you,” I said, straightening up as her hand fell away from my skin. “You said earlier this week that you wanted to meet?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “I did. I mean, I do.”
“How about my office in, say, half an hour?”
She gave me a mock salute. “See you there, Father.”
I tried not to watch her run away, I really did, but I promise I only looked for a second, an infinitely long second, a second long enough to catalog the gleam of sweat and sunscreen on her toned shoulders, the taunting movements of her ass.
