Page 11 of Midnight Mass (Priest 1.50)
Tyler Bell, the priest who deserted his post, has no fucking right to talk about what the Catholic Church should or shouldn’t do.
There. That was better. Professor Morales would surely accept that as a conclusion, right?
With a sigh, I turned back to the body of my dissertation, even though I could practically recite the entire thing from heart by now, trying to figure out what to say. And how to say it authentically. But all of my words seemed to blend together in the same meaningless drabble, blurs of what seemed now to me to be obvious and quotidian observations. Was it too late to run away? To take Poppy and disappear somewhere where the dissertation panel couldn’t find me?
I’m not sure when I fell asleep. It happened sometime after the third Irish coffee but before dawn. When the scratch of a key in the doorknob woke me up. I had a partial imprint of the laptop keyboard on my cheek and a large yellow highlighter stain on my pajama pants from where the hand holding it had fallen off the table and into my lap.
I chafed at my face, trying to rub away the feeling of the keyboard, and only gradually did I become aware of another sound besides the usual key and purse shuffling and unlocking noises.
A man’s voice.
“Thank you so much for the ride home,” Poppy was calling as the doorknob turned. And then that fucking laugh—the laugh that should belong to me—she was giving him her low, rich laugh again as she told him goodbye.
I was on my feet in an instant, walking to her, walking to the door, because as much as I was trying not to be jealous, to be Understanding and Calm Tyler, having Anton Rees with my wife at my doorstep at five in the morning was a little much.
Who was I kidding? It was a lot much, and I wanted to know why it was happening.
But the door opened, and Poppy glided in, and there was only the tail end of the blue McLaren as it pulled away from our house. I hated that my eyes immediately slid over to my truck, I hated that I immediately calculated the cost difference between our cars. I hated that I wondered if Poppy had calculated it too.
I could be a worldly man sometimes, I could be a sinful man almost all the time, but materialism was not among my sins. Jealousy, yes—lust, certainly—but never greed. And so it was an uncomfortable feeling now, wishing I made more money, wishing that I could offer Poppy more than what an ex-holy man, now student could offer, which was next to nothing. As opposed to Anton, who came from the same world that Poppy did, who drove the kinds of cars and wore the kinds of suits she’d grown up surrounded by.
Poppy was smiling as she walked in, humming as she set down her purse and shrugged off her cherry-red wool coat. But then she saw me and her smile faded.
“Tyler? I didn’t think you’d still be up.”
I tried out a smile but it felt strange on my face, so I stopped. “I fell asleep at the table. I only woke up when you got home.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, turning to hang up her coat in the entryway. “We were just working so late and then late turned into early, and Anton offered to drive me home rather than me taking the train…Oh.”
When she’d turned, I had been right behind her, so she turned right into my bare chest. And now I leaned forward and ran the tip of my nose along her jaw, feeling her shiver under my touch.
Is she shivering because she’s turned on? Or because she has something to hide?
I was too tired to tell my brain to shut the fuck up. Instead, my jealous masculine instincts took over and I inhaled the scent of her skin. Lavender and coffee—no trace of cologne, no trace of alcohol or cigarette smoke. She hadn’t touched another man, they hadn’t gone out to a bar or anything similar.
She was telling the truth.
This should make me feel better. This should remind me that my tendency towards jealousy would, in Millie’s words, invent doom where there was none.
But I pushed the reminder aside, picked up my wife and carried her to bed, determined to wipe away whatever supportive, friendly, McLaren-driving Anton had done with her tonight at work. Determined to bury the jealousy with every thrust and push of my cock into her pussy.
And when morning came, that sultry laugh would only belong to me.
The drive to Newport was brutal. Sleet and intermittent snow turned I-95 into a miserable crawl of traffic, a slow-moving river of honking and merging and near-accidents. After Stamford, it opened up a little, but not a lot, and Poppy fell asleep listening to my audiobook about
ancient Greek mythology. So I navigated through the drizzle and stroked her thigh as she snored softly and the narrator droned on about the fucked up familial politics of the Olympians.
Around Westerly, she roused, her hair adorably mussed and her large hazel eyes blinking away sleep. Yawning, she looked out the window. I didn’t need to tell her we were almost here; she knew this part of New England as intimately as I knew the neighborhoods and fountains of Kansas City. I flipped the stereo from my audiobook to the Bluetooth audio. Blues rock, loud and raw and lo-fi, started pounding through the speakers.
“This should help you wake up, sleepyhead,” I said, steering my truck onto US-1.
I couldn’t see her smile, but I could feel it as she stretched in her seat. “Well, someone kept me awake last night.”
She was talking about me, and the fact that I’d fucked her until the day finally dawned gray and wet outside our window. But for a minute—an instant really—I thought someone meant Anton, and white-hot anger pricked at my chest.
I swallowed it down. “We should be to your parents’ in about an hour.”
She nodded, reaching over to squeeze my thigh. I swore I could feel her every finger through my jeans, I swore I could feel the heat of her palm searing marks onto my skin. And with my jealousy beating its restless rhythm inside my chest, it only served to make me agitated in a very particular sort of way.
