I sink onto my couch and press my grandmother's locket between my palms. "What am I doing, Nana?" I whisper to the empty room. "What am I doing?"
She doesn't answer, of course. She's been gone four months now, and the silence where her voice used to be is the loneliest thing I've ever known. She raised me after my parents died when I was eight, and for fourteen years she was my whole world. My best friend. My only family. And now I'm here in this city where I don't know anyone, working at a bookshop that barely pays my rent, going to a church where I've developed an impossible, sinful obsession with the priest.
The worst part is that I've spent my whole life being good. Being quiet. Being the kind of girl who never causes problems, who follows the rules, who makes herself small so she doesn't inconvenience anyone. And for what? I'm twenty-two years old and I've never been in love, never had a real relationship, never let anyone close enough to hurt me. I'm careful and cautious and invisible, and it's kept me safe, but it's also kept me empty.
When Father Brennan looks at me, I don't feel empty. I feel terrifyingly full.
The night stretches on, and I try all my usual tricks for calming down. I make tea that I don't drink. I open a book that I can't read. I take a shower and let the water run until it goes cold, and still my mind keeps circling back to the confessional. To his voice. To the way he told me to come back tomorrow without giving me absolution.
Eventually, I give up on sleep and go to my window. The church is dark except for one window in the rectory. His study, I've learned from watching. I've noticed the patterns of his life the same way I notice everything about him. He reads late into the night. He takes walks around the church grounds at dawn. He smokes occasionally, though he tries to hide it, and I've seen him standing in the shadows by the entrance after evening mass, the ember of his cigarette glowing in the dark.
As I watch, a silhouette moves behind the curtain. He's there. He's awake. And I wonder if he's thinking about me the way I'm thinking about him. If he's replaying my confession in his mind. If he's horrified by what I told him or if some part of him, some small and secret part, wants me back.
My hand drifts to my throat, tracing down to my collarbone, and I think about how it would feel if those were his fingers. If he came to my apartment right now and pushed me against the wall and told me all the things I've been imagining him saying. My skin feels too tight, too hot, and I let my hand drift lower before I catch myself and pull away.
The guilt that floods through me is familiar and unwelcome. I've been feeling it for weeks now, every time I let my thoughts wander somewhere they shouldn't go. But beneath the guilt,there's something else. Something that feels dangerously like power.
He was affected. He didn't absolve me. He told me to come back.
I press my palm against the cold glass of the window, watching that single lit window in the rectory. "I'll go back," I whisper to myself, to Nana, to the universe. "God help me, I'll go back."
Below, in the shadows by the church entrance, something moves. A figure stepping back into the darkness. The brief glow of something that might be a cigarette, there and then gone.
I tell myself I imagined it. I tell myself it's nothing.
But my heart is pounding as I step away from the window, and when I finally fall into bed, I dream of gray-green eyes and hands that know exactly how to make me sin.
2
CILLIAN
I've heard thousands of confessions in my eight years at St. Augustin's. Sins of envy and greed, of lust and wrath, of petty cruelties and grand betrayals. After a while, they all start to blur together, and I find myself responding on autopilot, dispensing absolution like a vending machine that takes guilt as currency. It's a terrible thing to admit, but the truth is that I stopped really listening years ago.
Until her.
The moment her voice comes through the screen, my entire body goes alert. I'd know that voice anywhere now. I've been listening for it every time the confessional door opens, and when someone else enters, someone older or male or simply not her, the disappointment that washes through me is shameful in its intensity.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." Her voice is thin and nervous, and I can picture her on the other side of the screen, gripping her hands together, touching that locket she always wears. I've memorized the details of her without meaning to. The honey-brown curls she's always pushing back. The way shebites her lip when she's nervous. The soft curves she hides under modest clothes that somehow make me imagine them even more clearly.
"Go on, my child." I keep my voice measured, controlled. The same voice I use for everyone. The same voice I've been using for eight years to keep the world at arm's length.
She confesses small sins first, and I barely hear them. Something about lying to her boss, skipping mass. My mind is fixed on the fact that she's here, three feet away from me, separated by nothing but a wooden screen that suddenly feels like the flimsiest barrier in existence.
Then she says the words that change everything.
"I've been having impure thoughts. About someone I can't have. Someone forbidden."
My hands grip my rosary so hard the beads bite into my palm. She's going to tell me about some man she's met, some inappropriate crush on a coworker or a friend's boyfriend, and I'm going to have to sit here and listen while pretending I don't care. While pretending my stomach isn't twisting with something that feels dangerously like jealousy.
"Tell me about these thoughts," I say, and I hate how rough my voice sounds. How hungry.
"I think about him constantly. The way his hands move when he speaks. The way he looks at people like he can see right through them."
My hands. My eyes. She's talking about me. I knew it the moment her voice broke on "forbidden," but hearing her describe me, hearing the breathless wanting in her voice, issomething else entirely. Every word she speaks is a match striking against my carefully constructed control.
"I imagine what it would feel like if he touched me. If he said my name."
I should stop her. I should transfer her to Father Daugherty for confession. I should do anything other than sit here in the dark, listening to her describe her desire for me while my body responds in ways that my cassock thankfully hides.
