He complained that he was too busy for college dropouts.
I was a dime a dozen now.
I assured him I wasn’t.
Begged him to give me a chance, desperation cracking my voice.
A chance at what? I wasn’t sure, but the naïve part of me hoped for a secretarial job or maybe personal assisting. But within minutes of climbing into his black Suburban, I recognized the error in my judgment. His hand was crawling up my thigh, fingertips tickling the nape of my neck, and he was telling me he required a taste of all the goods before he hired anyone to work for him.
Flames of fury lit in my stomach, and I’d done the very first thing I could think to do.
Balled up my fist and nailed him in the balls with all the rage I could muster.
He probably could have pressed charges against me.
He barked at the driver to pull over and kicked me square on my ass on the curb. I’d walked the dozens of blocks to where I’d left my car parked, then driven to every shelter I could think of, before finally landing at St. Mike’s. It was all fortunate, really, because Father Bastien had been clearing the steps of St. Michael’s when I’d, almost literally, landed at his feet in the morning light.
My in the flesh, real-deal, cassock-wearing saint.
He was my guardian angel.
The last time I had been under the roof of St. Michael’s, I was eight and innocently blabbing the reality of my existence to Father Martin. The idea that the pious man here now was somehow becoming special to me felt like utter nonsense.
Because it was.
Whatever else Bastien and I were, at the heart, we would always be nonsense.
TWELVE
Tressa
Some mornings, I woke up justifying our secret brand of sin. My footsteps all day were filled with hope ending with nights that inevitably left me raw, my heart a little bloodier for even considering a love for him after I watched him skirt my presence each day. Living alongside Bastien without beingwithhim had, itself, become a form of suffering. My mind grew a little more determined to find a way out.
I’d considered every possible option. Staying with my mom was off the table, her life since I’d left for college worse off than when I’d been with her. Countless medical issues after a lifetime of abusing her body were finally taking their toll.
I hadn’t seen her since I’d left anyway, and usually, the only time she called was when she needed money. I was okay with that, and on the rare occasion I could help her out, I did. But more often than not, I was forced to tell her no out of pure necessity. There were plenty of nights I had no choice but to eat noodles out of a cup just to buy textbooks for class, and still, those days seemed simpler than now.
I swallowed down the ache that always gripped my throat when I thought about things from my past lives. My eyes drifted to the file on my computer that held the application for low-income housing in a newer development across town. I’d found the article about the new apartments on the newspaper’s website, so the likelihood I would be picked wasn’t great, mostly because I didn’t have a salary to support much of a monthly rent payment.
I’d been thinking, if Bastien was willing to train Lucy, maybe she could take over some of his office work, and coupled with the nursery and the event organizing I was trying to implement, perhaps a full-time position at St. Michael’s was possible for her. At least enough to get her through the pregnancy with a roof over her head and a small community to look out for her.
The sense that it was time for me to move on was growing greater by the day. I felt it deep in my bones every time I locked eyes with him across the church pews during Mass.
And maybe down even deeper than that, I was running from a familiar rut.
A rut my mother had been stuck in all too often during my childhood. A rut where staying and loving a man who didn’t love her back was easier than leaving.
Well, maybe our circumstances weren’t quite the same, but at the core, as I saw it, they were.
I refused to stay the course when the course finished in a dead end.
Maybe even with a few epic crash and burns along the way.
That was not the life I intended to live.
Not the one I’d wished on stars for.
I wouldn’t stay and love a man who couldn’t love me back.
