I went into the sacristy and came out with a small rectangle of white cloth, a purificator. It was normally used to wipe the communion chalice after every sip of wine.
Tonight, I used it to clean Poppy.
You might think that having sex on my altar, using sacred things normally meant for rituals of the highest order, meant that I wasn’t taking my faith seriously, that I had slid straight past sin and into sacrilege, but that wasn’t the truth. Or it wasn’t the whole truth, at least. I couldn’t explain it, but it was like somehow it was all holy, the altar and the relic within and us on top of it. I knew that outside of this moment there would be guilt. There would be consequences. There would be the memory of Lizzy and all the things I had wanted to fight for.
But right now, with Poppy’s scent on my skin, with her taste on my lips, I only felt connection and love and the promise of something vivid and colorful.
After I finished cleaning her, I wrapped her in the altar cloth and carried her to the edge of the stairs, where I sat. I cradled her in my arms, brushing my lips against her hair and eyelids, murmuring the words I thought she should hear: how beautiful she was, how stunning, and how perfect.
I wanted to say I’m sorry, although my mind and soul still spun in dazzled wonder with it all, so I wasn’t sure if I was sorry I’d lost control and gotten so rough with her, or if I was sorry that we’d had sex at all.
Except I wasn’t. Because more than the transformative sex that we’d just had, this moment was worth sinning for. This moment where she was curled in my arms, her head on my chest, breathing contentedly against me. Where the altar cloth covered her in long, draping folds, but slips of pale skin still showed through.
She slid her fingers up my chest, resting them on my collarbone, and I held her close, as if I could press her straight through my skin and into my soul.
“You broke your vow,” she said finally.
I glanced down at her; she was both sleepy and sad. I pressed my lips against her forehead.
“I know,” I finally replied. “I know.”
“What happens now?”
“What do you want to happen?”
She blinked up at me. “I want to fuck you again.”
I laughed. “Like now?”
“Yes, like now.”
She twisted in my arms until she was straddling my legs, and it only took one of her deep kisses to make me hard again. I lifted her up and guided myself inside, groaning quietly into her neck as she sat back down.
Slivers of sensation became known to me. Warmth and wetness. Her ass against my thighs. Her tits so close to my mouth.
“What do you want to happen next, Tyler?” she asked me, and I couldn’t believe she was asking me this now, while she was riding me, but then as I tried to answer, I realized why. She didn’t want me to be guarded, she wanted me to be honest and raw and like this, I couldn’t possibly be anything else.
“I don’t want us to stop,” I admitted. She rolled her hips back and forth over me, and I did press my face in her chest then, feeling my climax building too fast, much too fast. “I feel like I…”
But I couldn’t say it. Not even now, when she had me completely at her mercy. It was simply too soon—and not to mention ridiculous.
Priests weren’t allowed to fall in love.
I wasn’t allowed to fall in love.
Her fingers twined through my hair and she pulled my head back so she could look at me. “I’ll say it if you won’t,” she said.
“Poppy…”
“I want to know everything about you. I want you to tell me what you think about politics, and I want you to read Scriptures to me, and I want to have conversations in Latin. I want to fuck you every day. I fantasize constantly about us moving in together, living every moment together. What is that, Tyler, if it’s not—”
I clapped my hand over her mouth, and in an instant, had her on her back with me pushing into her.
“Don’t say it,” I told her. “Not yet.”
“Why?” she whispered, her eyes wide and a little hurt. “Why not?”
“Because once you say it, once I say it, then everything has to change.”
“Hasn’t it already?”
She was right. It had changed the moment I kissed her in the presence of God. It had changed the moment I bent her over that piano. Maybe it had even changed the moment she stepped into my confessional booth.
But if I loved her…if she loved me…what did that mean for all of my work here? I couldn’t carry on a secret affair and still crusade against sexual immorality in the clergy—but if I walked away from my vocation, then I would lose the ability to crusade at all. I would lose the man I was.
The only other choice was losing Poppy, and I wasn’t ready to think about that yet. So instead of answering her question, I pulled out and flipped her over, driving into her from behind while I slid a hand around her hip and found her clit. Only three or four strokes like this and she was there, like I knew she would be; the more aggressive I was, the faster she came.
I followed her over the edge, chanting her name like a prayer and pumping the whole time, as if I could fuck the future and its horrible choices away.
Oh, God, what I would give for that to be true.
“I still can’t believe how clean your house is,” Poppy said.
We were in my bed after cleaning up the sanctuary and sneaking over to the rectory. I was fingering her hair with a fascination that bordered on reverence, worshiping those long, dark tresses with curls of my finger and brushes of my lips. We’d been talking lazy pillow talk, drifting from The Walking Dead speculations and favorite Latin texts to hushed recountings of all the ways we’d suffered in wanting each other this last month.
I had been about to kiss her again when she’d said that, so I settled for sliding a hand under the sheets and finding her breasts instead.
“I like things to be clean.”
“I think that’s admirable. You just don’t see it very often in men like you.”
“Men like me? Priests?”
“No,” she shifted toward me, smiling. “Young. Charming. Good-looking. You would have been a fantastic businessman, you know.”
“My brothers are businessmen,” I said. “But I was never interested in that stuff; I never wanted money or success or power. I loved old things—old languages and old rituals. Old gods.”
“I think I can picture you as a teenager,” she mused. “I bet you drove the girls crazy—hot, athletic, and bookish. And also really clean.”
“No, I wasn’t always clean.” I debated for a moment about explaining, but we had just shared something so intimate, why would I hold this back from her? Just because it was depressing? Suddenly, I wanted to share. I wanted her to know every dark thing that I’d dragged around by myself, I wanted to show her all of my burdens and have her lift them from me with her clever mind and her elegant compassion.
I moved my hand from her breast and glided my fingers under her ribs, tucking her close against me.
“The day I found my sister,” I said, “was a Saturday in May. There was a strong thunderstorm going on, and even though it was daylight, it was dim all around, like nighttime. Lizzy had taken Sean’s car home from college—they were both at KU then—and so she was home for the weekend.
“My parents had taken Aiden and Ryan out for lunch, and I thought they’d taken Lizzy too. I’d slept in late, and I woke up to an empty house.”
Poppy didn’t say anything, but she nestled in closer, giving me courage.
“There was a bright flash of light and a huge noise, like a transformer had blown, and the power cut out. I went for the flashlight, but the stupid batteries were dead, so I had to go out into the garage to get more. We lived in Brookside, in an older house, so the garage was detached. I had to walk through the rain, and then when I got in there, it was so dark at first, I didn’t see her…”
She found my hand and squeezed.
“I got the batteries, and it was only luck that the lightning flashed right as I was turning away, or I wouldn’t have seen her. She was suspended there, like she was frozen in time. In the movies, they’re always swaying, and there’s a creaking noise, but it was so still. Just. Still.
“I remember running to her and tripping over a milk crate stuffed with cords, and then a tower of paint cans went rolling everywhere, and I picked myself up off the ground. There was a stepladder that she’d used—” I couldn’t say the words, couldn’t say the stepladder that she’d used to hang herself.
I swallowed and went on.
“I set it back upright and climbed it. It wasn’t until I’d gotten her down and had her in my arms that I realized my hands were dirty from when I’d tripped. Wet from the rain, and then they’d rubbed against the dirt and oil and grime, and I’d left smudges all over her face—”
I took a deep breath, reliving the panic, the rushed 911 call, the choked conversation with my parents. They’d rushed home, and my parents and Aiden had run into the garage only steps ahead of the police, and no one had thought to keep Ryan out. He’d only been eight or nine when he saw his sister dead on the garage floor. And then the red and blue lights, and the paramedics, and the confirmation of what the cold skin and vacant eyes had already told us.
Lizzy Bell—animal shelter volunteer, lover of Britney Spears, and all of the other thousands of things that made up a nineteen-year-old girl—was dead.
For several moments, it was just the sound of us breathing, the slight rustle of the sheets as Poppy rubbed her foot against mine, and then the memories slowly bled back into the ground of my mind.
“My mom kept trying to wipe the smudges away,” I said finally. “While we waited for the coroner’s men to come get the body. The whole time. But you can’t wipe off oil that easily, and so Lizzy had that smudge right up until we had to say goodbye. I hated that. I hated that so much. I made it my mission to scrub that fucking garage from top to bottom, and I did. And ever since then, I’ve kept everything in my life clean.”
“Why?” Poppy asked, moving so she could prop herself on one elbow. “Does it make you feel better? Are you worried about something like that happening again?”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t know why I still do it. It’s a compulsion, I guess.”
“It sounds like penance.”
I didn’t respond to this, turning it over in my head. When she phrased it like that, it made it seem like I hadn’t really let Lizzy go, that I was still grappling with her death, grappling with the guilt of sleeping in that day and not being awake to stop her. But it had been ten years and I wasn’t holding on to it that much, was I?
“What was she like?” Poppy asked. “When she was alive?”
I thought for a minute. “She was my older sister. So, sometimes she was mothering, sometimes she was mean. But when I was scared of the dark as a kid, she always let me sleep in her room, and she always covered for me when I broke curfew when I was older.”
I traced the backlit lines of the blinds on the comforter with my gaze. “She really, really loved terrible pop music. She used to leave her music in Sean’s CD player when she borrowed his car, and he’d get so irritated when his friends would hop in the car and then some boy band or Britney Spears would start playing when he turned it on.”
Poppy cocked her head. “Lizzy is the reason you listen to Britney Spears,” she guessed.
“Yes,” I admitted. “It reminds me of her. She used to sing so loudly in her room that you could hear it anywhere in the house.”
“I think I would have liked her.”
I smiled. “I think you would have.” But then my smile slipped away. “The weekend of the funeral, Sean and I decided we were going to escape the relatives at the house for a few minutes and go out for Taco Bell. I’d wanted to drive, but we didn’t think—we didn’t remember that she’d been the last person to drive the car. Her music came on and Sean was…he was upset.”
Upset wasn’t the right word for what my older brother had been. He’d just turned twenty-one and so he was mourning Lizzy’s death the Irish way, with too much whiskey and too little sleep. I’d turned the key in the ignition and the opening bars of “Oops, I Did It Again” came on, obnoxiously loud because Lizzy’d had the volume cranked all the way up, and we’d both frozen, staring at the radio as if a demon had just crawled out of the CD slot, and then he’d started yelling and swearing, kicking the dash so hard that the old plastic cracked, the whole car shaking with his fury and raw grief. They’d been the closest in age, Lizzy and Sean, and accordingly, they’d been best friends and bitter enemies. They’d shared cars and friends and teachers and finally a college, being only a year apart, and of all of us Bell siblings, her death ripped the biggest hole in his daily life.
So he ripped a hole in his car that day, and then we went and got Taco Bell and we never spoke of it. We still haven’t.
“I’ve never told anyone this story before,” I said. “It’s easier to talk about Lizzy like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like naked and snuggling. Just…with you. It’s all easier with you.”
She rested her head on my shoulder. We laid there for a while, and just when I thought she’d fallen asleep, she said in the darkness, “Is Lizzy why you are afraid to let go with me?”
“No,” I said, baffled. “Why would she be?”
“It just seems like she’s the motivation behind a lot of what you do. And she was hurt, sexually. I wonder if that makes you afraid of doing that—of making what happened to her happen to someone else.”
“I…I guess I never thought of it that way.” I found her hair again and played with it. “That might be why, I don’t know. It was in college that I discovered how I liked it, but it was difficult. If I found a girl who was confident and smart and full of self-respect, then she didn’t want the sex to be rough. If I found a girl who liked it rough, then the reason she liked it rough was because of some emotional issue, and yes, whenever I saw a girl like that, I thought of Lizzy. How many signs we’d missed. And if I ever found out that a guy had taken advantage of her when she’d felt like that…”
“It sounds like you had a lot of bad luck with women.”
“Not necessarily. I had a few really great girlfriends in college. But it was easier to lock that part of me away, to have the healthy, confident girlfriends and the vanilla sex. It was safer.”
“Then you became a priest.”
“And that was much safer.”
She sat up and looked at me, lines of shadow and streetlight across her face. “Well, you aren’t hurting me. I mean it. Look at me, Tyler.”
I did.
“I don’t like it rough because I’m emotionally damaged. I’ve been treated like a princess my entire life, coddled and praised and protected from every single thing that could ever harm me. Sterling was the first person who didn’t treat me like that.”
Sterling.
My jaw flexed. I didn’t like that he was so many of her firsts (which, I know, was totally unreasonable, but still. Maybe what I didn’t like was that she remembered so many of her firsts with him so intently.)
“Part of it is probably that it’s taboo and therefore dirty, so it turns me on. But part of it is that it makes me feel unbreakable. Strong. Like the man I’m with respects me enough to see that. And I’m strong enough to have that experience in the bedroom and also have a perfectly healthy life outside of it.”
“It’s too bad it didn’t work out with Sterling then.”
Whoa, Tyler. Low blow. But I was agitated and jealous and feeling like I was being told off for something that wasn’t my fault.
She stiffened. “It didn’t work out with Sterling because he can’t differentiate between the two, the bedroom and real life. He thinks because I liked the way he treated me during sex that was how I wanted to be treated all the time. That I only wanted to be a whore, when really, I wanted to be a whore for him only when we were alone. Which is why I walked away from him at the club.”
Not before you let him fuck you.
As if she could read my thoughts, she narrowed her eyes. “Are you jealous of him?”
“No,” I lied.
“You aren’t even supposed to be laying here with me,” she said. “We can’t hold hands in public, we can’t do anything together without it being a sin. You could lose your job and essentially be exiled from the one thing that gives your life meaning, and you’re worried about my ex-boyfriend?”
“Okay, fine. Yes. Yes, I’m jealous of him. I’m jealous that he gets to come back here for you, and I’m jealous that he can do that. He can pursue you. And I can’t.”
My words hung in the air for a long moment.
She dropped her head down. “Tyler…what have we done? What are we doing?”
She was there again. At that thing I didn’t want to think about.
I reached for her and pulled her over me, laying down so that she knelt over my face.
“We should talk about this,” she said, but then I flicked my tongue up and over her clit and she moaned, and I knew that I’d managed to freeze this moment again, push the conversation and all its decisions forward to another time.
