“I’ll get a jacket and walk you home.” His voice was firm with staccatoed structure, quiet reservation.
Like a gunshot wound to my heart, his words blasted apart in my chest as we faded back into our normal rhythm without missing a beat.
“Sure.”
Tears welled in my eyes when he slid his tweed and wool jacket over my shoulders.
“After you.”
I nodded, feeling the cool, casual tone and tight smile down to the tips of my frozen toes.
Bastien and I walked side by side down the short walkway to the cottages that dotted the perimeter of St. Michael’s. Shadows hung heavy on our shoulders, amber glow reflecting from the streetlights on our shoes as we walked a path we’d walked at least ninety of the last hundred days.
But this walk was different.
Our footsteps slower.
Our fingers brushing softly, flitting like fireflies over my skin and making me uncomfortable and hot everywhere.
I gulped when I rose the three steps to the porch of my cottage, light already burning softly from the kitchen.
“Thank you,” I murmured. Glad, at least, that Lucy hadn’t flipped on the porch light when she got home and we were shrouded in some small sense of shadow.
Bastien’s eyes hung heavy on mine, lips inches away and pressing closer as his chest grazed, layers of puffy warmth doing little to douse that fire that ignited between us. “I’ll be reliving this night with you more times than I’ll ever admit.” A half smile cracked my face, and that cocky grin he reserved only for me twisted his mouth. “Thank you.”
Bastien’s thumb, the thumb he’d used to bring me to my knees, swept the seam of my lips.
I shuddered, recognizing the taste of me clinging to his flesh. I shifted my thighs with the memory of his deft fingers.
“Don’t do that,” he husked, tortured eyes darkening.
“Do what?” I could hardly croak.
“Those eyes beg me to forsake all that’s holy and succumb to everything sweet that isyou.” He traced the pad of his thumb over my eyebrow with a wry smile. “I want to bring you home and take care of you. Maybe in another life, we could have, but in this one, my job is clear. In my worst moments, I wish it weren’t so. But in my best, I know my greatest good is spent—” He nodded to the small neighborhood of homes that surrounded us.
“They need you.” I knew it was true with all of my heart.
They needed Bastien’s love much more than I did.
And that was why I was leaving.
“They need me.” Bastien’s gaze surrounded me, eyes drifting to the hollow of my throat and then up to the heavens. “I’m good for them.”
You’re good for me, I screamed, but instead I let silence fill the room.
THIRTEEN
Tressa
“Do you think you’ll ever leave Brooklyn?” I slipped the point of the scissors against the edge of the paper and made my first slice the following afternoon. “Maybe move to Philly—Bastien talks about you all of the time.”
“Uncle Bash is cool, but I don’t think I could leave my girlfriend Rose—she talks about California sometimes, but Brooklyn is my only home—even if it hasn’t exactly treated my mom well—it’s better than where she came from, it seems like it anyway.” Cruz arranged the plastic silverware and plates in disposable cups as we prepared for the church’s winter festival.
“I thought Rose was supposed to come this weekend—I’m so anxious to meet her.”
“She was,” Cruz frowned, darkness shading his irises whenever he talked about his girlfriend. “I guess that’s why I came this weekend even after she said she had a music gig in the city and couldn’t come—I wanted to get Uncle Bash’s opinion on,” his eyes finally caught mine briefly, “some things.”
“Uncle Bash,” I smiled, “it’s weird to think of him as anything but Father Bastien.”
