She hadn’t told him to lie about being a priest, however.
Anyway, the spectacularly handsome Maxence, with his full lips and dark eyes and black, softly curling hair, was standing in deacon’s robes at the altar, assisting a priest at the Mass.
Yesterday, even though he’d been wearing a Roman-collared shirt, a part of Dree hadn’t truly believed that Maxence was a deacon and planning to become a priest. His black suit had been fashionable and not altogether dissimilar to the clothes he’d been wearing in Paris. His shirt had been black, but he might have been a mafia hitman, which was more plausible than that energetic, enticing, tantalizing, intensely sexual man with a streak of kink wanting to bea priest.
He’d edged her for two days, denying her an orgasm.
He wanted to be edged and deniedforever.
Now, that was pretty dang kinky.
Impure thoughts.
No impure thoughts in church.
Dree glanced at Sister Mariam sitting beside her in the pew, but Mariam didn’t seem to have sensed Dree’s immoral musings.
She made a concerted effort and controlled the tempestuous thoughts rising in her mind until the gospel reading, when Deacon Father Maxence ascended the pulpit on the left side of the sanctuary.
Every eye in the church turned toward him, including Dree’s.
Morning sunlight streamed through the crazy-quilt stained glass windows, showering the sanctuary and the nave with trembling light.
Maxence was bathed in a sunlit glow that glistened on his dalmatic robe, purple for Advent, and was surrounded by gold glimmering in the air like angelic fire. He touched the page of the Bible in front of him and whispered a prayer before he began to read that day’s prescribed Scripture reading.
His rich baritone voice filled the church, which had gone unusually silent without even the common crinkling, sighing, and fidgeting of so many people sitting on wooden pews. Even the ladies wearing rustling silk saris didn’t move and barely breathed.
Dree listened to him read the passage, barely aware of the church around her or anything beyond the otherworldly radiance of the beautiful man standing before her, the music of his voice in her ears, and the taste of his words like honey in her mouth.
At the end of his reading, Maxence intoned, “The Gospel of the Lord.”
The congregation roused, and everyone replied with voices as shaky as if they had fallen into the depths of their very souls, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.”
Dree realized that she was clutching the back of the pew in front of her with her hands. Her knuckles were white and ached.
Every minute that Maxence had spoken, his voice had found her and filled her mind and spirit as if he had only been speaking to her.
From the rapt expression on Sister Mariam’s face, she had felt the same way.
And the rest of the sisters, too.
Dree twisted and looked around the church. Everyone seemed to be coming to terms with the experience they had just had, blinking and swallowing, while some had their eyes closed and head bowed as they pulled themselves together.
That wasnothypnosis, that thing that Maxence had done. Dree’s parents had taken her to a hypnotist when she was eight to get her to stop biting her fingernails. Hypnotism was a very specific, knife-like form of meditation where the hypnotist invaded Dree’s thoughts and supplanted them with her commands. It hadn’t worked. Dree finally stopped peeling her nails down to the quick with her teeth in high school.
No, what Maxence had done was not hypnotism.
He hadn’tdonesomething.
Maxence hadbecomesomething.
His reading reminded Dree of a rock concert, one of the best ones, where even though you’d only been able to afford tickets up in the nosebleed sections and you were jammed in with thousands of other lost souls in the thin skim of smoke near the ceiling, the bass and drums pounded in your veins, and the music flowed through your body, and the lead singer’s dark eyes bored into yours as he sang directly to you about love and loss and connection, and you screamed your adoration back at him with the multitudes.
When you remembered it afterward, it seemed like—
Air puffed through Dree’s lips.
It seemed like a religious experience.
