After men’s group, I stopped by my office to grab a rosary and a small pamphlet containing some basic prayers and walked into the sanctuary, knowing that Poppy would probably be there early.
What I didn’t know was that she’d be standing directly in front of the altar, staring at the cross, the late-dusk light pouring through the windows and staining her in dark jewel tones, sapphire and crimson and emerald. I didn’t know that her shoulders would be shaking ever so slightly, as if she were crying, and I didn’t know that all the doors and windows would be closed, trapping the lush, incense-scented air inside.
I stopped, the greeting on my lips stalled by the stillness, by the heavy weight of the quiet.
God was here.
God was here, and He was talking to Poppy.
I felt every kiss of air across my skin as I walked closer to her, heard her every exhale, and when I reached her, I saw how goose bumps peppered her arms, how tears ran silently down her cheeks.
There were a thousand things I should say, but I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt whatever moment this was. Except that it wasn’t truly interrupting, because I felt invited into it, like I was supposed to be part of it, and I did what felt right: I wrapped my arms around her.
She leaned back into me, her eyes still pinned to the cross, and I just held her as we both let the moment wash over us, bathe us in the dying light and the silence. Shadows crept along the floor and pooled around our feet, and the seconds ticked into minutes, and slowly, slowly, we drew incrementally closer, until every inch of her back was pressed against me, until my nose was in her hair and her hands were twined through mine.
The closeness of her and the closeness of the divine all at the same time was euphoria, bliss, and I was almost dizzy with it, feeling both at once, intoxicated by her and intoxicated by my God. And in the face of this numinous encounter, there was no room for guilt, no room for critical self-analysis and recrimination. There was only room to be present, be there, and then she turned in my arms, tilting her face up to mine.
“You feel it too?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it always like this for you?”
I shook my head. “Once a week, maybe. Sometimes twice. I know people like my confessor who feel it every moment and people like my bishop who feel it never.”
“It’s beautiful.”
It was full dark now, and there was nothing but different shadows, but even in the shadows, the tear tracks on her face glistened. “You’re beautiful,” I whispered.
We were talking in hushed voices; the air was still heavy with holiness and presence. And I should have felt wicked for holding Poppy like this in the face of God, but our burning bush of a silent room somehow made everything seem more right, like it was the most perfect thing to do, holding her in my arms and staring down at her face.
I slid my fingers under her chin, keeping her face angled to mine, and leaned down just enough so that our noses brushed together. I could kiss her right now. Maybe I should kiss her right now. Maybe it was God’s plan all along for us to end up here, alone in this sanctuary, and forced to face the truth, that this was more than friendship, this was more than lust. This was something raw and real and undeniable and it was not going to go away.
She was trembling against me now, her lips parted and waiting, and I allowed myself a narrower margin now, lowering my mouth to a mere fraction of an inch above hers, tightening my arm around her lower back. We were so close that we were sharing breath, literally, our hearts beating in the same dizzy rhythm.
In spite of everything that had happened between us, this moment somehow felt more intimate, more vulnerable, than anything we’d yet shared. Everything else had happened while I pretended God wasn’t watching, but this—there was no pretending now. Sacred and profane were blending and blurring together, fusing and welding themselves into something new and whole and singular, and if this was what love was, then I didn’t know how anyone could bear the weight of it.
“I can’t stop myself, I’m sorry,” I said at the same time she said, “I tried to stay away from you.”
And then I kissed her.
I brushed my lips against hers once, just to feel the softness of her skin glancing past mine, and then pressed my mouth to hers in earnest, tasting her in the slowest, deepest way possible, until I felt her knees weaken and she made little noises in the back of her throat.
I kissed her until I saw static at the edges of my vision, until I couldn’t remember a time when we hadn’t been kissing, until I couldn’t feel where my mouth ended and hers began. I kissed her until it felt like we’d exchanged something—a promise maybe or a covenant or a piece of our souls. And when I finally pulled away, it was as if I pulled away reborn, a new man. A baptism by kiss rather than a baptism by water.
“More,” she begged. “More.”
I kissed her again, this time with hunger, with need, and I could tell by the way she made little sighs into my mouth, the way her fingers twisted in the fabric of my shirt, that she was as far gone for me as I was for her, and I never wanted to stop, never wanted this to end.
But it had to.
When we broke apart, she stepped back and wrapped her arms around herself, shivering a little in the blast of the air conditioning. The clouds outside had parted, sending a shaft of silver through the windows, and we were in a fairy pool of glowing moonlight. The God feeling was still there, but rather than a weight from the outside, it felt like sparks on the inside, as if the divine had seeped into my blood. I felt light-headed and drunk with it.
“I’m tired,” Poppy said, though she didn’t sound tired so much as dazed. “I think that I should go home.”
“I’ll walk you,” I offered. She nodded, and together we left the mystery behind, as if by walking to the sanctuary doors, we were walking away from what had just happened.
“That was incredible,” she murmured.
“I’ve been told I’m a good kisser.”
She bumped my shoulder. “You know what I mean.”
We were in the narthex now, but I couldn’t shake the image of her standing in front of the cross, so open and receptive to an experience that most people would dismiss outright. “Poppy, I have to ask. Did something happen to draw you to the church? Did you go as a child and now you’re circling back?”
“Why?”
“It seems like…” I searched for the right phrasing, wanting to express how much a good thing I thought her interest was. “I think it’s marvelous that you’re jumping in feet first. It’s just not the way a lot of people do it.”
“It feels a lot more gradual on my end,” she said as we walked outside. I kept a careful space between us as we took the stone stairs down the hill the church was perched on. “My family isn’t religious—in fact, no one we knew was religious. I think they were always suspicious of it, like anything that that could inspire such fervor in people was gauche, at best. Dangerous, at worst. I guess I was always a bit more open to it. In college, I went with a friend to her Buddhist temple almost every week and in Haiti, I was working side by side with missionaries. But it wasn’t until the day I came in for confession that I’d ever sought it out on my own.”
“What made you come back after that?”
She paused. “You.”
I processed this as we hit the bottom of the stairs and walked into the wooded park between the church and her house. It was bright with closely spaced lamps and moonlight. I cleared my throat, wondering if my question ultimately made a difference, but deciding to ask anyway. “Was it me as a priest? Or me as a man?”
“Both. I think that’s what is so confusing.”
We walked in silence now, together but not together, our minds on the beauty of that moment in the sanctuary, on the way it felt to kiss when our souls were on fire.
Fuck. It was all so confusing to me too, except that parts of the confusion were starting to fall away, which should have been clarifying, but I worried that it was actually the opposite, that I was forgetting things I was supposed to remember.
Like my promise to be better.
“I want to hold your hand right now,” I said abruptly. “I want to wrap my arm around your waist and pull you close.”
“But you can’t,” she replied softly. “Someone could be watching.”
We were at the garden behind her house now.
“I don’t know what to do next,” I said honestly. “I just…”
I had literally nothing else to say. I didn’t know what I could do to explain how I felt about her, and also how I felt about my vocation and my responsibilities, and about how I was so ready to abandon them all because I wanted to kiss her again. I wanted to hold her fucking hand in the park at night.
She peered up at the stars. “I wish you could hold my hand too.” She shivered again and I could see that her nipples had pebbled in the slight evening chill, hard little furls just begging to be sucked.
The sweet feelings of a few minutes ago were starting to fuse with other, baser feelings that crowded up from my pelvis. It took every ounce of my self-control not to pin her up against the fence and kiss her again, not to yank down her pants and fuck her right here, outside, where anyone could see.
“I want to see you again,” I said in a low voice. There was no mistaking my meaning and she shifted, rubbing her thighs together.
“Is that…I mean, should we…”
“I don’t think I care anymore,” I said.
“Neither do I,” she whispered.
“Tomorrow.”
She shook her head. “I have to go to Kansas City for some club stuff—we’re switching over to new accounting software. But I’ll be back Thursday night.”
I wanted to groan out loud, but I managed to stop myself. “That’s three days from now,” I said.
She put her fingers on the latch to her back gate. “Come inside,” she said. “Let’s hang out tonight.”
“It’s late,” I said. “And I want plenty of time for what I have in mind.”
She exhaled slowly and her red lips parted, showing me those two front teeth, the tiniest glimpse of tongue.
I looked around to make sure we were truly alone, and then I grabbed her hand, opened the latch and tugged her inside the garden. I pulled her under the overgrown trellis, and then I spun her around so that her ass was pressed against me—pressed against my erection. I put one hand over her mouth and then unfastened her jeans with the other.
“Three days is a long time from now,” I said in her ear. “I just want to make sure that you’re taken care of until then.”
And then I slid my fingers down her stomach, slipping under her silk panties. She moaned against my hand.
“Shhh,” I said. “Be a good girl and I’ll give you what you want.”
She whimpered in response.
God, I loved her pussy. I’d never felt anything softer than the skin between her legs—and fuck she was wet. So wet that I really could pull these jeans down and take what I wanted, right here, right now. But no. She deserved better than that.
Not that I wouldn’t fantasize about it as I got her off.
I started in on her clit in earnest now, circling it hard and fast, loving the way she bucked against my hand. I knew it was more pressure and speed than was comfortable, but I also knew that she would like it that way, savor that tiny, tiny bite of pain with her pleasure.
“I could do this all day, little lamb,” I told her. “I love reaching down the front of your jeans, playing with your cunt, making you come. Do you like it?”
She nodded, her breathing jagged against my hand. She was getting close.
“Thursday night,” I said, and I almost felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, listening to myself say these words. But I was beyond caring, or more accurately, beyond the place where the rules I cared about mattered. “I want to be with you. I want to fuck you. But only if it’s what you want.”
She nodded again, eagerly, desperately.
“I can’t wait,” and my voice was hoarse now. “I can’t wait to be inside you. Feel me. Feel how hard I am just thinking about it.” I ground my cock into her ass, and she shuddered against me, my words and my hard dick pushing her over the edge. She made a tiny cry that was muffled by my hand, quaked under my touch for a long minute, and finally came down, sagging against me.
I kept my hand in her panties for a minute or two longer, loving the way it looked, loving the way it felt, and then I reluctantly withdrew, zipping and buttoning her back up. I sucked on my fingers as she turned to face me, eyes bright and cheeks clearly flushed even in the dark.
“Go to bed, Poppy,” I said when I could see that she would protest me leaving. “I’ll see you Thursday night.”
It hit me like a ton of obvious, kiss-sized bricks as I recited Mass the next morning: I was falling in love with Poppy Danforth.
I wasn’t just desperate to fuck her. I wasn’t just happy to help her find faith. I was well and truly on my way to being in love with her.
After a month.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And now that she wasn’t here, not anywhere near here, I found my obsession spiraling out of control, like a drug addiction that demanded to be fed.
I imagined her voice filling the sanctuary after Rowan and the grandmothers left morning Mass. I pictured her face and her messy braid as I ran off copies of the Bible study worksheet for the next men’s group. I found myself googling pictures of Dartmouth and Newport instead of trawling through The Walking Dead forums. I even (creepily, I know) googled her family, scrolling through pictures of polished people at polished charity events, finally finding an old picture of her at what looked to be some sort of fundraiser for a politician. Her and a cluster of attractive people who were obviously her parents and siblings—her father, silver-haired and broad-shouldered, and her mother, svelte and elegant. A brother and a sister with the same expensive clothes and expensive, high-cheekboned faces.
I clicked the picture to see the image on its own, see a larger version of Poppy’s face. She was clearly younger, though not too young—in her early twenties maybe, and she was clearly unhappy. While everyone else flashed their wealthy, happy smiles at the camera, Poppy had only managed a firm press of her lips, her eyes directed somewhere behind the cameraman, as if absorbed with something only she could see.
A wave of unwanted jealousy and suspicion surged in my chest. Was she looking at Sterling? This seemed like the kind of event he would be at, from the little I knew. Or maybe she was merely gazing at the specter of her own unhappiness, her own dull future, spelled out in seating arrangements and menu cards?
I thought of the picture the rest of the evening, as I set up for the youth group. I also thought of her, of getting to see her on Thursday, and every few minutes I would catch myself smiling, smiling for no reason at all except that I would get to see Poppy again.
Tonight in youth group, we talked about Jesus being tempted in the desert, and in a dramatic turnaround from last week, I felt completely removed from the verses. I wasn’t in a desert…I was in a place with rustling green leaves and clear, rushing water.
What had changed? I wondered. Between last week and this week, between yesterday and today?
It was last night. It was the praying, the magic, the smell of her hair. The kiss that had sealed something, something that transcended the physical and the spiritual. They were no longer separate and divided, but one…and with that, the experience of her had crossed over from being confusing as hell to wonderful. Awesome. Not awesome in the cool sense, but awesome in the sense that it filled me with awe.
She filled me with awe. She made me see the world with a new sense of wonder, every tree greener, every angle sharper, every face more pleasant and delightful to help.
It wasn’t that the guilt had disappeared, however. I zigzagged from fantasy to recrimination, punishing myself with more runs, more pushups, more chores around the church, spending hours in prayer searching for an answer.
Why would God bring Poppy here if I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with her?
Was it truly so terrible for a man of God to have sex? The Protestants had been doing it for half a millennium and they seemed no more hell-bound than the Catholics for it.
And was it so wrong to want both? I wanted to lead this church, I wanted to help people find God. But dammit, I wanted Poppy too, and I didn’t think it was fair that I had to choose.
God didn’t answer. Whatever magic had been lingering in the sanctuary these past couple weeks hid itself from me, and in a way, that was its own answer.
I was meant to figure this out on my own.
