She actually blushed, busying herself with setting the tray down on the coffee table. “I had a lot of free time when I moved here, and once I started making so much money at the club, I thought I’d put it to good use. This time, my parents weren’t around to tell me not to get a dance degree, so I just went for it. I managed to squeeze it into three years instead of four.”
I came toward her. “Will you dance for me sometime?”
“I could do it now,” she said, pressing her hand against my sternum and pushing me down onto the sofa. She climbed over me, straddling me, and my cock immediately leapt with interest. But her thigh pressed against my slacks pocket and I remembered why I was there in the first place.
I trapped her with one arm around her waist, forcing her to hold still while I dug the small tissue-paper-wrapped packet out of my pocket.
She tilted her head as I handed it to her. “Is this my present?” she asked, looking delighted.
“It’s…” I didn’t know how to explain what it was. “It’s not new,” I finished lamely.
She unwrapped it, staring at the pile of jade beads nestled in the tissue paper. She pulled the rosary out slowly, the silver cross spinning in the low light. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“Everyone should have a nice rosary. At least, that’s what my grandmother always said.” I slid my hands to rest on the outside of Poppy’s thighs, mostly so I could look somewhere other than the rosary. “That one was Lizzy’s.”
I felt her body tense in my lap.
“Tyler,” she said carefully. “I can’t take this.”
She tried to hand it back to me, but I caught her hand with my own, curling her fingers around it.
“After Lizzy died, no one wanted anything of hers that reminded them of what she had gone through at church. Her bible and holy cards and saint’s candles—my dad threw them all away.” I flinched, remembering his white-hot rage when he’d found out that I’d dug her rosary out of the trash. “But I wanted something of hers. I wanted to keep all the parts of her alive in my memory.”
“Don’t you still?”
“Of course, but after we talked the other night…I realized that I also need to let parts of her go too. And when I think about her—well, I know she would have loved you.” I met her eyes. “She would have loved you like I do.”
Poppy’s lips parted, her eyes wide and hopeful and scared, but before she could respond to what I said, I took her fingers in mine and said, “Let me teach you how to use this.”
Yes, I was a coward. I was afraid of her not telling me that she loved me, and I was afraid of her telling me that she did love me. I was afraid of the palpable tie between us, afraid of the ribbon that laced through my ribs and around my heart that was also laced and tied around hers.
Her eyes never left mine as I moved her hand from her forehead to her heart and then to each shoulder. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” I said for her. And then I put her fingers on the crucifix. “Now we pray the Apostle’s Creed…”
We prayed the entire thing together with her on my lap, her echoing faintly after me, our fingers moving together through the beads, and it was somewhere near the last decade that I became aware of how hard I was, of how her nipples showed through her soft flowing tank top. Aware of those big hazel eyes and that long wavy hair and the watchful intelligence that peered through each and every expression of hers.
This is love, I thought dizzily, wondrously. This is what laying down a cross feels like. This is what taking up a new life feels like…it feels like Poppy Danforth. And as I intoned the final words of the rosary, I almost forgot whom I was praying to.
Hail holy queen…our sweetness and our hope.
Later that night, when I was moving over her and into her, those words tumbled around in my mind, words that were so indelibly Poppy, so indelibly attached to the brightness of her mind and the paradise of her body.
Holy. Queen. Sweetness.
Hope.
CHAPTER 17
“Jordan.”
The priest kneeling in front of me didn’t stop praying or even turn to face me. Instead, he kept murmuring to himself in the same measured voice with the same measured pace, and I knew Jordan well enough to know that this was a polite way of telling me to fuck off until he was done.
I sat in the pew behind him.
Jordan was the only priest I personally knew who still prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, a practice that was so monastic as to be almost obsolete, which was probably part of the reason it appealed to him. Like me, he loved old things, but his fascination went beyond mere books and the occasional spiritual encounter. He lived like a medieval monk, a life almost completely and totally devoted to prayer and ritual. It was this mystical, unearthly nature that had brought so many young people into his parish; over the past three years, it had been his presence that had revitalized this old, inner city church that had been so close to closing when he’d taken it over into something thriving and alive.
Jordan finished his prayers and made the sign of the cross, standing with a purposeful slowness to face me.
“Father Bell,” he said formally.
I refrained from rolling my eyes. He’d always been like this—aloof and intense. Even the one time he’d accidentally drank too much at the seminary barbecue and I’d had to babysit him as he puked all night. But what appeared to be haughtiness or coldness was actually just a symptom of his vibrant inner life, the constant atmosphere of holiness and inspiration that he lived in, an atmosphere so palpable to him that he didn’t understand why other people didn’t sense it as he did.
“Father Brady,” I said.
“I imagine you are here for a confession?”
“Yes.” I stood and he looked me up and down. There was a long pause, a long moment where his face went from confused to sad to unreadable.
“Not today,” he finally said and then turned and started walking toward his office.
I was confused. “Not today? Like no confession today? Are you busy or something?”
“No, I’m not busy,” he said, still walking away.
My brows knit together. Was denying someone confession even legal according to ecclesiastical law? Pretty sure it wasn’t.
“Hey, wait up,” I said.
He didn’t. He didn’t even turn around to acknowledge that I had said something or that I was jogging after him.
We went into the small hallway lined with doors, and it was as I was following him into his office that I realized this was more than his usual reserved attitude. Father Jordan Brady was upset.
He definitely hadn’t been upset when I’d arrived.
“Dude,” I said, closing his office door behind me. “What the hell?”
He sat down behind his desk, the early afternoon light painting his blond hair gold. Jordan was a good-looking guy, with the kind of hair and healthy complexion that you usually only saw in Calvin Klein ads. He was fit too—we’d bonded in the first semester of our divinity program after we kept running into each other at the local gym. We’d ended up sharing an apartment for the next two years, and I was pretty sure I was the closest thing this guy had to a friend.
Which was why I refused to be blown off.
He kept his eyes down as he powered on his laptop. “Come back later, Father Bell. Not today.”
“Canon law says you have to hear my confession.”
“Canon law isn’t everything.”
That surprised me. Jordan was not a rule-breaker. Jordan was like two steps away from being the creepy assassin in The Da Vinci Code.
I sat in a chair across his desk and folded my arms. “I’m not leaving until you divulge why exactly you won’t hear my confession.”
“I don’t mind if you stay,” he said calmly.
“Jordan.”
He pressed his lips together, as if debating with himself, and then he finally looked up, brown eyes concerned and penetrating.
“What’s her name, Tyler?”
Fear and adrenaline spiked through me. Had someone seen us? Had someone figured out what was going on and told Jordan?
“Jordan, I—”
“Don’t bother lying about it,” he said, and he didn’t say it with disgust, but rather with an intensity that unsettled me, put me more on edge than his anger ever could.
“Are you going to let me confess?” I demanded.
“No.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because,” Jordan said deliberately, bracing his elbows on his desk and leaning forward, “you aren’t ready to stop. You’re not ready to give her up, and until you are, there’s no point in me absolving you.”
I sank back in my chair. He was right. I wasn’t ready to give Poppy up. I didn’t want to stop. Why was I here, then? Did I think that Jordan was going to say some special prayer over me that would solve all my problems? Did I think going through the motions would change what was in my heart?
“How did you know?” I asked, looking down at my legs and hoping to God it wasn’t because someone had seen Poppy and me together.
“God told me. When you walked in.” Jordan said it simply, the same way someone might share where they bought their clothes. “Just as He is telling me now that you are not at the end of this. You aren’t ready to confess yet.”
“God told you,” I repeated.
“Yes,” he said with a nod.
It sounded insane. But I believed him. If Jordan told me he knew exactly how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, I’d believe him. He was that kind of man—one foot in our world, one foot in the next—and I’d experienced enough with him over our years of friendship that I knew he really was able to see and feel things that others couldn’t.
It had been a lot less frustrating when I hadn’t been one of the others in question.
“You’ve broken your vows,” he said now, softly.
“Did God tell you that too?” I asked, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
“No. But I can see it in you. You carry equal burdens of guilt and joy.”
Yep, that about summed it up.