Priest

by Sierra Simone

  Which was stupid. He was a visitor to my church. All I needed was to be friendly.

  I strode forward and shook his hand, which he seemed to welcome, a small, appraising smile on his lips.

  “Can I help you with anything?” I asked. “Unfortunately, you missed our morning service, but we will have another service tomorrow.”

  “No, I think you’ve already helped,” he said as he stepped past me, his head swiveling to take in every corner of the church. “I just wanted to meet you and see for myself what this Father Tyler Bell was like.”

  Uh…

  Uneasiness knotted in my gut. Even though I knew it wasn’t possible, I couldn’t help but worry that somehow he was a result of Millie and Jordan knowing the truth, that he was here to finally tug on the thread that would unravel my life.

  The man turned on his heel and faced me. “I like to know the size and shape of my competition.”

  “Competition?”

  “For Poppy, of course.”

  It only took the barest instant for my mind to catch up, to reassess this encounter, and calculate that I was talking to Sterling Haverford III. To size up his body (in good shape, fuck that guy) and his clothes (expensive, fuck that guy again) and his bearing, which was almost absurdly confident, confident to the point of hubris, and there was the chink in this man’s armor. He had no doubt that he would be successful, he had no doubt that he would leave here with what he wanted (and yes, I suspected that Poppy was a what to him and not a who.) In that bare instant, I knew exactly where we stood, exactly what weapons he’d be fighting with, and I also knew that one of those weapons was the emotional hold he had on Poppy, and that I could very well lose this battle…this battle I had no right to fight.

  And that bare instant was all Sterling needed to feel like he had the upper hand. His mouth curled into a sneer, subtle enough to be ignored, but present enough to demonstrate in exactly what light he held his competition.

  However, I wasn’t an idiot, whatever Sterling might think, and I certainly wasn’t going to conform to his expectations of how he thought I would behave.

  “I’m afraid you are mistaken,” I said, giving him an easy smile. “There’s no competition. Ms. Danforth has been attending my church and she’s interested in pursuing the path to conversion, but that’s as far as our friendship extends.” I almost hated how easily the lie rolled off my tongue—lying was something I used to pride myself on not doing, but there was a lot I couldn’t be proud of anymore. And this moment wasn’t about morality, this moment was about survival.

  Sterling raised an eyebrow. “So this is how it’s going to be.” He put his hands in his pockets, everything about his posture screaming boardrooms and yachts and arrogance.

  Good Guy Tyler, be Good Guy Tyler, I told myself. Better yet, be Father Bell. Father Bell wasn’t jealous of this man, jealous of his good looks and expensive clothes and the claim he had on Poppy. Father Bell didn’t care about a pissing match with a stranger, and he certainly wouldn’t engage in something as barbaric as competing for a grown woman, who was capable of making her own choices and exercising her own agency.

  I leaned against a pew and gave him another smile, knowing my posture conveyed an easy control and a casual friendliness, while also reminding him that I was just as tall and built as he was.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand you,” I finally said. “Like I just told you, there’s no competition.”

  He took my words in a different way than I’d meant them. “You would like to think that, wouldn’t you?” He looked me over once again, and then seemed to change tack, leaning against a pew himself and crossing his arms.

  “Has she talked about me?” he asked. “I’m sure she has. Confession—that’s a Catholic thing right? Did she mention me in her confessions?”

  “I’m not at liberty to—”

  He waved a hand and his wedding ring glinted against his skin. “Right. Of course. Well, maybe she wouldn’t want to confess things about me after all. How many times I can make her come. How loudly she cries my name. All the places I’ve fucked her. You know I once fucked her mere feet away from a U.S. Senator? During an art opening at The Met? She was always good to go. For me, at least.”

  It was only years of cultivated compassion and self-discipline that kept me from driving my fist right into this guy’s classically square jaw. Not only from jealousy, but from the equally macho urge to protect Poppy’s dignity and stop her choices from being reframed by this asshole.

  She doesn’t need you to defend her honor, Feminist Ally Tyler told me. But regular Tyler, the Irish-American one who enjoyed fucking and whiskey and roaring obscenities at soccer games, didn’t care. It didn’t matter if she needed me to and it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a right to—the universe had been knocked off-balance by this guy’s assholery and my fist itched to correct that.

  “Did that strike a nerve?” Sterling asked, amused.

  “I consider Poppy one of my flock,” I said, inclining my head in admission. Luckily, my voice betrayed nothing but mild disapprobation. “It pains me to hear any of them spoken of disrespectfully.”

  “Oh, certainly,” Sterling said. “And I admire how committed you are to your story. I’m a man of appearances myself.” He pulled a manila envelope from the inside of his suit jacket and handed it to me. “However, I’m also a man of means, and so we can move past this initial posturing and right into the heart of the matter.”

  I stared at him as I unwound the string at the top of the envelope and pulled out the large glossy pictures inside. Part of me worried that they would be pictures of Poppy and him, more evidence of their past to unsettle me, but no. No, it was much, much worse.

  A broad-shouldered man crossing a small park at night. That same man at a darkened garden gate. A shot through a kitchen window of a man and a woman kissing.

  I exhaled.

  There was no nudity, thank Jesus, and nothing more sinful than a kiss, but it didn’t matter, because it was clearly my face in all of them and that was enough. In fact, they were more than enough—they were damning.

  “And be reassured that I have all the digital files of these,” Sterling said cheerfully. “So feel free to keep those. As mementos.”

  “You had us followed,” I said.

  “I told you that I was a man of means. When Poppy kept refusing to answer my calls, even after I told her I was coming for her, I started to wonder if she’d met someone else. So I looked into it. Since she hasn’t agreed to my arrangement—yet—I wouldn’t have minded if she’d been fucking someone. But falling in love with another man…well, I know Poppy and I know what kind of obstacle that would present.”

  “You had us followed,” I repeated. “Do you even hear yourself? That is insane.”

  Sterling seemed baffled. “Why?”

  “Because,” I said, my anger getting the better of me and making my words tight and forced, “people don’t have other people followed. Especially their ex-girlfriends. That’s stalking—that’s actually the legal definition of stalking. I don’t care that you’re wealthy and can pay for someone else to do it for you—it’s the same damn thing.”

  He still looked confused. “That’s what you’re upset about? Not that I have evidence that can ruin your life? Not that I’m going to inevitably walk away from this town with Poppy at my side?”

  “You are so assured of this outcome,” I said, forcing myself to move past him having Poppy followed. “But you forget, it has nothing to do with you or me—it’s her choice.”

  Sterling shrugged one shoulder, as if I were being either deliberately obtuse or deliberately precious, and he didn’t have time for it any more.

  “So what’s the heart of the matter?” I asked, sliding the photos back into the envelope.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said you wanted to move past the posturing.” I tossed the pictures on the pew next to me and stood up straight, crossing my arms. I was happy to see that Sterlin
g also straightened up, as if unhappy with the extra inch I had on him. (In height, I mean. [Although a really awful, crass part of me was ridiculously pleased to know that I was the biggest Poppy had ever had.])

  “Yes. Well, here it is, Father.” He said the word father as if it had quotation marks. (I allowed myself another brief fantasy where I slammed my fist into his eye socket.) “I want Poppy to come home with me to New York. I want her to be mine.”

  “Even though you’re married.”

  He gave me that look again, that slightly incredulous are you an idiot look, and it would have bothered me if I didn’t have the moral high ground in this competition. Except…I couldn’t really claim any part of any moral ground now, high or low, could I? That thought depressed me immensely.

  Luckily, Sterling didn’t notice and continued on. “Yes, even though I’m married. Marriage isn’t a sacrament in my family—it’s a tax write-off. And I have no intention of holding a legal arrangement above what I want out of my life. I’ve never loved my wife and she feels the same way about me.”

  “But you love Poppy?”

  Sterling pressed his lips together. “Love and want are essentially the same thing,” he elided. “Not that a man like you would know that.”

  “I respect your honesty, at least,” I said. “You’re not lying to yourself, and I assume you won’t lie to her.”

  This unexpected compliment seemed to surprise him, but he quickly recovered. “Poppy doesn’t care about that as much as she thinks she does,” he told me. “You may labor under the illusion that she won’t come back with me unless I love her, but she’s not like you. She knows numbers, sense, mortgages. I’m offering her the currency she knows—money and lust and security—and that is why I will win.”

  I thought of her crying in the confessional booth, of the moment we’d stood together in the sanctuary, bathing in God’s presence. She wasn’t merely a spreadsheet with spread legs, and Sterling was an idiot if he’d grown up with her and managed to miss all the deeply spiritual, deeply emotional facets of Poppy Danforth.

  “She’s so much more than that.”

  “That’s sweet. That really is.” Sterling put his sunglasses back on. “And just so you know, you are so much less than I expected. Here I was, expecting Alexander Borgia, and instead I find Arthur Dimmesdale. I was so prepared to fight dirty, and yet I suspect I won’t have to fight at all.”

  “It’s not a fight,” I said. “It’s a person.”

  “It’s a woman, Father.” Sterling flashed me a white, wide grin. “Soon to be my woman.”

  I didn’t respond, even though every neuron was firing you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong. Instead, I simply watched as he tossed me a wave and strode easily down the aisle to the door, his hands in his pockets as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  The difference between envy and jealousy is subtle but distinct, once you know the flavors and contours of both. Jealousy is wanting what someone else has, like for example, wanting the same kind of car or house as a neighbor. (Or wanting to be the man who owns your girlfriend’s heart rather than some WASP-y asshole who probably has a drawer just for all of his cuff links.)

  Envy is hating the fact that someone else has something you don’t, and hating them for having it, like wanting to slash your neighbor’s tires because he doesn’t fucking deserve a BMW and everyone fucking knows it, and if you can’t have it, then it’s no fucking fair that he gets to have one either.

  Sterling fell into this last category. It’s not that he wanted Poppy necessarily, not beyond the way he probably wanted other things in his life—a new vacation home, a new yacht, a new tie bar. But the idea of someone else having her chewed away at the inside of him, an insatiable parasite of possession worming away in his gut.

  I had a lot of time to think about this today because Poppy was apparently MIA. At first, after Sterling had left, I’d tried to play it cool, pacing in my office and calling her and then texting her, the manila envelope like a scarlet letter burning a hole on my desk. What would I say if she picked up? I would simply tell her that Sterling paid me a visit, and oh, also he’s been stalking us, and oh, also he’s blackmailing me into letting you go, totally normal Friday, want to watch Netflix tonight?

  But she didn’t answer my calls or my texts, and answering promptly was something she normally did, and I spent a long hour walking tight circles around my office. I should just go over to her house. This was really important, and we needed to talk about it right now, but with Millie’s confrontation still front and center in my brain—not to mention this fucking black-hole-burning-pyre-beating-guilty-heart of an envelope inches away from me—I was too frightened to walk over to her house lest we be caught…again.

  And then I wanted to yell at myself for being such a pussy. We needed to figure this out and that was more important than anything else. And I would just go on another run, that was all. Everybody was used to seeing me running at all hours of the day and night, and if I happened to run past the old Anderson house, nobody would think it odd at all.

  I quickly changed into my running clothes and strapped my phone to my arm, and I was at Poppy’s house in less than two minutes. Her Fiat was in the driveway, but when I slipped into the garden (grateful once more for the overgrown shrubs that provided such great cover) and knocked on her door, there was no answer. Where the fuck was she? This was pretty important shit and she was unavailable? Was she taking a nap? In the shower?

  I knocked and waited. Texted, knocked and waited. Paced and waited and knocked some more and then growled fuck it and unlocked the door with the key under the bamboo plant pot.

  But I could tell the moment I walked in that she wasn’t napping or in the shower. There was the kind of silence filling the corners that only came with emptiness, with absence, and sure enough, I saw that her phone and purse were gone from the place she usually kept them on her desk, although her keys were still there. So she’d gone somewhere without her keys. Had she walked into downtown? To the coffee shop or maybe the library?

  I turned to leave, and then a thought formed and stabbed me in the chest like an icy blade.

  What if she was with Sterling?

  I actually sagged against the wall. It made sense. What, I had thought he’d come all the way up here just to warn me? That he’d declare battle and then wait a few more days to fire his opening salvo? No, he’d probably gone straight to Poppy after leaving the church, and while I had been pacing the worn carpet in my office like an idiot, he’d been here persuading Poppy to go somewhere with him. To dinner. To drinks. To some sleek hotel in Kansas City where he’d fuck her against a floor-to-ceiling window.

  That icy blade stabbed me over and over again, in my throat, in my back, in my heart. I didn’t even bother to fight the twin dragons of jealousy and suspicion as they coiled around my feet, because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was right. There’s no other reason she would be ignoring my calls and texts.

  She was with Sterling. She was with Sterling and not with me and I was utterly powerless to make it otherwise.

  After realizing that Poppy wasn’t at home that afternoon, I’d run by the coffee shop and the library and the winegarden, just to double-check that she hadn’t stepped out to work someplace other than her desk. But no, she hadn’t been any of those places, and when I’d gotten home and unstrapped my iPhone, she still hadn’t texted or called.

  Bishop Bove had.

  I didn’t call him back.

  That night at youth group, I was a mess. An angry, distracted mess, but luckily it was Xbox game night, and my frustration and tension blended in with those of the rowdy teenagers also playing with me. And at the end of the night, I made our prayer brief and to the point.

  “God, the psalmist tells us that your word is like a lamp to our feet—that even though we don’t always know where you are leading us, you promise that you will show us the next step. Please keep your lamp burning for us, so that our next step, our next ho
ur and our next day, is clear. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the teens mumbled, and then went home to their concerns that (to them) were as troubling and stressful as mine. Homework and crushes and unsympathetic parents and a graduation date that seemed too far away. I remembered those problems acutely, even though they’d been so massively overshadowed by Lizzy’s death. Teenagers felt differently than adults—they felt keenly and powerfully, without the frame of experience to remind them that they wouldn’t be broken by a bad grade or an unrequited love.

  But I had that frame of experience. So why did I still feel like I could be broken?

  After youth group, I sat in my living room with my phone in my hands, wondering if I should call the bishop back, if he’d called because Millie or Jordan had told him about my shattered vows, wondering if I could even keep up my own pretense if he didn’t know. And that’s when I saw it—the picture message.

  It came from an unknown number, but I knew who it was the second I opened the message and saw the picture, a shot of Poppy in a car, her face turned away toward the window. The light was low, as if the person taking the picture hadn’t used a flash, and it appeared to be taken in a back seat, which made me think that they had a driver. I could just barely make out the wisps of hair around her neck and ears, the glimmer of the small diamond studs she sometimes wore, the pearlescent sheen of her tie-neck blouse.

  Sterling wanted me to know that he was with her. And I knew it could be something as innocent as dinner and conversation, but honestly, when was dinner with an ex ever completely innocent?

  I tried to swallow down my feelings of betrayal. What claims did I have on her time, when I could only give her stolen slices of mine? I was not the kind of boyfriend—or whatever I was—to want her to account for every one of her minutes, every one of her thoughts, in the jealous hope that this would keep her faithful. Even if I had the right to demand her fidelity—which I didn’t, given that I was unfaithful in my own way, cheating on her with the Church—I still wouldn’t. Love is freely and unconditionally given, and even I knew that much.