“Maybe next time we’re in Paris,” he said, rolling up and contracting all those amazing abs of his while he grabbed a tee-shirt from the end of the bedroll and sniffed it.
“Yeah,” Dree scoffed while she stuffed her legs into her ski bib.“Maybe next time we’re in Paris.”
He twisted in his sleeping bag and looked at her, meeting her eyes with absolute seriousness. “We could go to Disneyland in Paris sometime.”
She dragged her ski jacket over her arms and shook her head. “Max, I’m the last person who should be talking because I don’t know what I’m doing with my life nextweek.I think half the reason I’m so adamant that this mission needs to continue is because I need the time to think about what to do.”
He was smiling at her. “You could stay in a hotel in Kathmandu for a week, or Sister Mariam would take you in as a roommate in a heartbeat. That’s not the reason.”
“Yeah, okay. Anyway, after this week, I don’t know if I should beg Sister Annunciata to find me another trip into the far outback or go back to Phoenix to face the music of my dead, idiot, ex-boyfriend’s drug dealers, or maybe go hide on my parents’ sheep farm in New Mexico. But you, my friend,youneed to make some decisions about your life.”
“I can’t,” Maxence said, wrestling his tee-shirt over his head. He rested his arms on his bent knees that were still in the sleeping bag and stared at the back of the tent.
“Oh my God, youcan’t,”she mocked him. “Can’t died when he was a pup,”
“I beg your pardon?”
Fine,the Jesuit with a doctorate didn’t know old country proverbs. She explained, “A momma dog had two pups: Can and Can’t. Whenever Can encountered a problem, he hopped up and said, ‘I Can!’ and he tried it. He didn’t always succeed, but he tried and he learned. Whenever Can’t was faced with a problem, he laid down and whined,‘I Can’t.’So he never learned how to run, escape, hunt, or eat. Thus, Can’t died when he was a pup.”
“Ah,” Maxence said, laughing. “I am schooled.”
“Yeah, you are. The problem is that you ‘slip’ a lot. Like, every chance you get. I mean, I totally shouldn’t be so easily led down the garden path or the happy trail—”
Maxence lifted his shirt and frowned at his lower belly, where a fine trail of hair was forming between his abs. “I should have made time for waxing in Paris, too.”
“—because I’m going to get my heart broken at some point, but you’re an ordained deacon. Youreallyshould not. I mean, deacons aren’t supposed to have relations unless they’re already married, and if they aren’t, they aren’t allowed to get married.”
He shrugged. “My Holy Orders to be a deacon were a little different than the usual rite.”
She rolled her eyes. “There are no ‘different’ Holy Orders. It’s a sacrament. Sacraments are, like, set in stone by God or something. If the priest screws up and says the wrong words during your baptism, it doesn’t count and you have to get it done again. You can’t get kind-of married or just a little baptized, or sort-of some Last Rites. Either they were done right, or they weren’t.”
Maxence cocked his head to the side and shrugged. “I’m not a priest yet, they assure me. Pope Vincent de Paul assured me that if I want or need to marry, he’ll do it himself.”
“You can’t do tha—Wait,you’ve metthe Pope?”
He nodded, still staring at the back of the tent. “We met ten years ago when he was a cardinal, and we’ve kept in touch. He’s a nice guy.”
“Wow.”
Maxence shrugged.
“Okay,did he—was he—okay, that’s beside the point. The point is that you keep saying you’re an ordained deacon, which is a degree of Holy Orders. Father Booker and your school friends seem to believe it. You’re not even supposed to be bopping your tallywhacker. I mean, we all aren’t, butyou,especially.”
Maxence snorted. “All my friends who are priests express less remorse about their ‘solitary sins against chastity’ than their solitary sins against pasta. You can be absolved after sawing one off.” He slapped his flat, muscular stomach. “Carbs are forever.”
She pulled on her gloves and motioned between the two of them with one puffy finger. “This isn’t solitary.”
“I know,” he sighed. He struggled out of the double-wide sleeping bag and grabbed his pants.
“What are we going to do?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never had this problem before. I’ve always had this life,” he gestured toward the side of the tent where he’d inserted a silver crucifix suspended on a chain of black rosary beads between the tent wall’s fabric and the tension-sprung rib holding it up, “and then I’ve had, that life.” He gestured between the two of them like she had. “They’ve never crossed before. For months or years at a time, I do this.” His open hands encompassed the mission and the crucifix. “And then, if there is a week or a weekend that is unaccounted for between assignments, sometimes, Islip.”
“So, I’m just a ‘slip,’” Dree said, knowing it was true in her heart. “And that’s okay, but you need not toslipanymore. You shouldn’t play with my heart like that, and you shouldn’t do it to other people, either.”
“No,” he said quietly. “You were never a slip.”
“Then, what am I, Deacon Father Maxence?” she asked, staring straight at him.
