Page 8 of Midnight Mass (Priest 1.50)
I parked my truck in front of the townhouse, the wipers still squeaking in slow, disconsolate arcs, thinking about what Millie had said. My guilt was my language, my sustenance, my pulse. And maybe Millie was right—I was letting it bleed into parts of my life where it didn’t belong.
I leaned my head against the steering wheel, not sure what to pray for. It felt wrong to pray for my guilt to disappear, just as it felt wrong to pray that Poppy would indulge this ridiculous degree of mine for just a couple weeks longer.
Help, I prayed instead. Help me.
Today was not a magic day. There was no well-timed song on the radio with lyrics that fit my life just so. There was no bright chink in the steel-gray clouds above me. There wasn’t even that feeling I sometimes I had that at least my prayer had been heard, had been logged away in some heavenly messaging system.
Today there was just more drizzle and the eternal November cold and the whirr and squeak of the windshield wipers.
Today there was just me and my guilt, and God was nowhere to be found.
I called Poppy after the undergraduate lecture I taught and before my advisor meeting, and when she picked up, her voice was sunny and polished and breathy all at once.
“Tyler,” she said, her voice half smile, half murmur. I got hard just hearing it, casually crossing my legs as I waited outside my advisor’s office.
“Lamb,” I murmured back, relishing the way her breathing increased, wishing I could see if a flush was creeping up her chest and neck. “I wanted to see how your day was going.”
“It’s been busy, but very good,” she said. “Just trying to get everything together for Thanksgiving and then the gala right after that, but things have just been falling into place. People here have been supporting this whole event so much…supporting me so much. I really have the best staff imaginable. And the best job. And I love it. And I love you.”
A glow settled somewhere in the middle of my chest. Poppy was honest and elegant and thoughtful, but she was rarely this overtly cheery, and hearing that husky voice I loved so much filled with happiness…well, it made me happy just to hear it. A bubble of hope floated in my mind: Millie was right, of course. I had been projecting. Poppy was fine. My marriage was fine. It would all be okay—better than okay even.
Buoyed by this thought, I teased, “You’re in a good mood for only having gotten a few hours of sleep.”
She laughed and I had to reach down to adjust my slacks. Fuck, that laugh got me so hot for her. “Maybe I’m in a good mood because of the reason I missed so much sleep,” she teased back.
“I love hearing you like this,
” I said. “I love hearing you happy.”
“You better get used to it,” she said, a little coyly, and that glow in my chest intensified. So she realized that this trial of my PhD was almost at an end. That things would be back to the way they should be soon.
“Trust me, lamb, the minute my defense is finished, I’m dragging you off to bed and I’m not letting you leave for a month. I’m going to be yours, body and mind and soul, for as long as it takes to prove to you—”
Her laugh echoed in the earpiece again and I stopped, a smile on my face, to ask her what she thought was so funny about my plans to make up for lost time, and then I heard muffled chattering, as if she were talking with her mouth pointed away from the phone.
And then I heard a male voice.
Anton Rees.
The smile slowly slid off my face as I listened to their indistinguishable back-and-forth, the warm and friendly cadence of their words, the earnest tone he used with her. And suddenly it occurred to me that all of the things she said about having a great staff, about having so much support—she meant Anton. Anton was there, being great and supportive, and here I was, a thirty-three year old PhD candidate with an erection in a fluorescent-lit hallway.
Jealousy stabbed at me. Stabbed and stabbed, until finally Poppy said, in that merry kind of voice that meant she’d been laughing, “Sorry, Tyler. Anton came in with some news.”
“I want you this evening,” I cut in, without bothering to transition from one subject to another. “I want you ass up with your hands clawing at the bed while you come around my cock.”
I didn’t care that only a door separated me from my advisor or that another student could walk by at any moment. I only cared about staking my claim. About showing her how supportive Tyler Bell could be while he gave his wife back-to-back anal orgasms.
Her breath hitched. “Jesus Christ.”
“So that’s a yes?”
There was a pause, a pause where I could feel her palpable want even through the phone, as if it were pulsing through whatever satellite waves made phones work. But when she answered, she was regretful. “You know I want to, but there’s still so much to do for the gala…”
Rejection scraped its serrated blade along the skin of my heart. “Oh. Right. Of course.”
“And you’ll get me all day tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that,” she added hurriedly. “And I’ll be all yours then. It’s just right now, Anton and I are still scrambling to lock everything into place for Saturday night.”
Anton and I.
