"Invite me into your apartment." My voice comes out rough, unsteady, barely recognizable as my own. The street lamp casts shadows across her face, and I can see the pulse jumping in her throat. "I need to be alone with you. I need to touch you without worrying about who's watching, who might recognize the priest standing on a street corner with his hands in a woman's hair. Please."
For a long moment that stretches into eternity, she just looks at me, her expression unreadable. I can see her chest rising and falling with each breath, can feel the warmth of her still standing close despite the inches I've put between us. Then, slowly, deliberately, she shakes her head.
"No."
The rejection hits like a blow to the chest. I release her and step back, trying to marshal my expression into something that doesn't show how much that single word has devastated me.
"Not until you decide this is what you want," she continues, and I realize she's not refusing me. She's challenging me. "I won't be your crisis of faith, Father. I won't be something you regret in the morning. If you come to me, it has to be because you've chosen this. Chosen me. Not because you're caught up in a moment and not thinking clearly."
She slips past me and disappears through the door of her building, leaving me standing on the sidewalk with my heart pounding and her taste still on my lips.
I press my palm against the door after it closes, feeling the wood vibrate with her footsteps as she climbs the stairs. She's right. I know she's right. I can't come to her like this, half-wild with wanting, making choices I'll regret when the sun comes up.
But I also know, with a certainty that goes bone-deep, that I'm not going to be able to stay away.
I don't sleep that night. I pace my study in the rectory, picking up books and putting them down, staring at the crucifix on my wall like it might offer answers. The taste of her is still on my tongue. The feel of her body pressed against mine is burned into my skin.
I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up again. I have her number from the parish directory. I could call her. Text her. Tell her I've made my decision. Tell her I'm coming.
Instead, I type out a message, delete it, type another, delete that too. My fingers hover over the keys as the hours tick by, and by the time the gray light of dawn starts filtering through my window, I know what I have to do.
I shower. I dress, not in my cassock but in civilian clothes. Dark sweater, jeans. She's never seen me without the collar. I wonder what she'll think.
I leave the rectory before Father Daugherty wakes, walking through streets that are just beginning to stir with early morning traffic. The air is cold and damp, and my breath fogs in front of me as I climb the stairs to her building.
I knock on her door.
She answers in sleep-rumpled clothes, her curls tangled, her eyes still soft with dreams. She blinks up at me, clearly confused by my appearance, by the early hour, by everything.
"You said to decide," I tell her. "I've decided."
"What did you decide?"
I reach for her, cupping her face in my hands the way I've been imagining for months. Her skin is warm and soft, and she leans into my touch like she's been starving for it.
"You," I say. "I chose you."
I step inside her apartment. The door closes behind me.
5
WAVERLY
The door clicks shut behind him, and suddenly my apartment feels impossibly small. He's here. In my space. Without his collar, without his cassock, looking like a man instead of a priest for the first time since I met him. The dark sweater stretches across his shoulders, and I can see the silver threading through his dark hair, and he's so beautiful it makes my chest ache.
"You're not wearing your collar," I say stupidly, because I don't know what else to say. My brain has short-circuited somewhere between opening the door and watching him step inside.
"No." His voice is rough from lack of sleep, and there's something raw in his expression that I've never seen before. "I thought about it. Whether to come to you as a priest or as a man. I decided you deserve to know who I really am."
"And who's that?"
He crosses the room in three strides and cups my face in his hands, his thumbs brushing over my cheekbones. "Someone who's been lying to himself for eight years. Someone whothought he could hide from life by putting on a costume and playing a role. Someone who's never felt as real as he does when he looks at you."
My hands come up to grip his wrists, feeling the pulse thundering beneath his skin. "Cillian..."
"I've been watching you," he says, and the words come out in a rush like he's been holding them back for too long. "I know I told you last night, but I need you to understand what that means. I followed you to the bookshop. I memorized your schedule. I stand outside your building at night and watch your window, and the only thing that gets me through the hours is knowing you're up there, safe, breathing."
I should be frightened. A man just confessed to stalking me, to learning the intimate details of my life without my knowledge. But all I feel is a warm, spreading relief that makes my knees weak.
