by Jenni Moen
“What’s so funny?” he asked. “It’s drama not comedy.”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t what I was expecting, I guess.” I’d assumed that his response would be The Passion of the Christ or something similar. I’d been so wrong about him.
He smirked as if he could read my mind. “Next.”
“You brought it up, so comedy.”
“Wedding Crashers.”
“Really?” I asked, laughing again.
He shrugged. “I like weddings and Owen Wilson.”
“Romantic comedy?” I asked, expecting to stump him this time.
“Keeping the Faith. Favorite movie of all time.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“You have no idea.”
“I’ll have to check it out.”
We approached my car, and I threw my stuff in it and turned on the ignition to get the air conditioner running. It was only a little after ten but it had to be over ninety degrees already.
“Ummm, Grace. There’s something wrong with Aurora,” Paul said. He was kneeling beside the dog who had laid down on the hot pavement of the parking lot. Her breathing was rapid, and every pant was accompanied by a strange noise I’d never heard before. It was something between a raspy cough and a click, and I became more and more panicked with each one.
“I think she’s too hot.” He rubbed the wrinkles of skin between her wide set eyes. She didn’t acknowledge him and instead looked straight ahead. “I think we better get her to a vet.”
I must have looked horrified because he stood and put his hands on my shoulders. “Chubs and I will go with you. Get in, and I’ll drive.”
He scooped Aurora up in his arms and carefully placed her on the backseat. I ran around the car and slid in beside her while Paul helped Chubs climb into the front passenger seat. While I waved cool air toward her face, he ran around to the other side and slid behind the wheel.
The air conditioning didn’t seem to have any effect on her. By the time we pulled up at the vet’s office, a white froth hung from her lips, and she’d begun to shake. The car was in park, and Aurora was back in Paul’s arms in a matter of minutes, but it looked as if it might be too late.
The nurse working the front desk took one look at Aurora and shouted for help from the back. Doctor Gage appeared and took the dog from Paul. He told his nurse to put us in a room, and then he disappeared with Aurora. It all happened so fast.
“This is not happening,” I muttered over and over as I paced the room with Chubs on my heels.
Somewhere between my third and fiftieth lap around the small room, Paul stopped me. “It’s going to be okay. He will take good care of her, Grace.”
I stood before him and wrung my hands. “How much can one person take? I mean, really. I can’t go home without her. I just can’t.” Tears welled in my eyes. “If we lose her, it will break his heart.”
“And yours,” he said.
“It’s stupid to feel this way about a dog.” With that, a torrential downpour of tears began their descent down my cheeks. I was so tired of crying. I was especially tired of crying in front of this man. For the third time in as many days, he pulled me into a hug.
“No, it’s not. You love her.”
“She’s all I have now,” I said, shuddering.
“No, she’s not, Grace. There are a lot of people that love you.”
“She’s easy. I can handle her,” I said into his chest. “She doesn’t ask me to talk about my feelings. She’s not scared to be around me. She doesn’t have to work to be my friend. She doesn’t press me to figure out if I’m having a good day or a bad day when she comes into the room. I don’t feel quite so alone when she’s around. And she doesn’t require anything from me either,” I continued on my teary rant.
“Do you feel alone now?” he asked, with his arms still wrapped around me. “Because you’re not.”
I pulled away and blinked up at him. “No,” I breathed. Using his thumbs, he wiped the tears from my cheeks.
I would never know what got into me at that moment. Would never be able to figure out whether it was the months of grief or the panic stemming from the situation with Aurora or just sheer lunacy. However, in a moment of madness, I forgot everything. I wasn’t a woman who’d lost everything. I wasn’t a woman who’d been hanging on by a thread these past five months. I was just a woman, locked in a room with a pacing basset hound and a gorgeous man who was saying all the right things.
With damp cheeks, puffy eyes, and a runny nose, I placed my hands on his chest and pressed up on my tiptoes. When I should have pushed him away, I kissed him instead. With his hands still cupping my cheeks and my hands now clutching his thin t-shirt, I kissed him with everything I had.
I put so much of myself into that kiss that I didn’t notice right away that he wasn’t kissing me back. But, eventually, it hit me. I released my grip on his shirt and pushed away, embarrassed and confused.
He stood rigid in front of me, not moving a single muscle, his arms now hanging limply by his side. His eyes were wide and round. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I don’t know why I did that.”
I shuffled backwards, trying to get away from him and bumped into the examination table. I was horrified for more reasons than I could count. I wanted to look away. I wanted to duck and hide under the table. I wanted to run from the room, but I could do none of those things. I was paralyzed by my own fear and embarrassment.
While I silently stared, his expression morphed from shock into something completely unexpected. He took one long step toward me until we were dangerously close again. With one finger, he tipped up my chin so that I had to look him in the eyes, and a palpable energy hummed between us. I had an almost uncontrollable desire to touch him. I gripped the edge of the table instead.
“I do,” he said in a low voice. The words were barely out of his mouth before his mouth was on mine again. There was no hesitation this time. His lips moved in perfect harmony against mine, and one kiss turned into a shower of unbearably sweet kisses. They were innocent but full of promise.
With a new intensity, a hand wove through my hair, and he nipped at my bottom lip. My lips parted in response, urging him to do the same, begging him for more. He didn’t answer me. Instead, he pulled back, brushing a thumb across my lips as a parting gift.
He looked down at me, the want in his beautiful green eyes not masked in the slightest. My head spun. My heart raced.
I’d just kissed my priest.
No. I’d just kissed Paul.
And he’d kissed me back.
“What just happened?” I asked.
A contented and reassuring smile appeared. “Life,” he said. “Life just happened.”
]
INVITATION
Grace
“You kissed him? Just like that?” Kate sat down on the edge of my bed, and I tossed the book I’d been pretending to read. I hadn’t been able to focus on the words anyway and was reading the same paragraph over and over just for something to do.
She had come by my room under the guise of checking on Aurora, who was still recovering from her bout with heat exhaustion on my bed. The doctor had prescribed lots of rest and water for the next couple of days and limited outdoor activities. No more trips to the dog park for a while. Though Kate was concerned about the dog, I knew her more covert mission was to check on me. So, while she was still hovering over the snoring dog, I’d ambushed her by declaring that I’d kissed Father Paul. “Yes, just like that. I really don’t know what came over me.”
“I think I know what came over you,” she said under her breath. She eyed me cautiously. “You’re freaking out, aren’t you?”
‘Freaking out’ was putting it mildly.
I’d come home and put myself to bed, thinking that I was surely coming down with some sort of virus – a virus that robs you of your common sense and morality. But, of course, I couldn’t sleep. I kept replaying the kiss over and over in my head. And then I would berate myself for it. I couldn’t beli
eve that I’d done it. I was shocked. And ashamed. But mostly, I was guilt-ridden. The guilt was eating me alive and threatened to swallow me whole. In a perfect world, I could crawl under my bed and hide for the next ten years.
Actually, in a perfect world, none of this would be happening. In a perfect world, I’d be cooking dinner for the kids right now. Jonathan would stroll through the door in about thirty minutes, and it would be him that I’d kiss.
But the world wasn’t perfect. If I went downstairs and cooked dinner tonight, only my dad and sister would be there to eat with me. And to make matters worse, I couldn’t stop thinking about Paul. I unconsciously brushed my fingers over my mouth.
“Oh, my God, you’re thinking about it now!” she said. “You liked it!”
I threw my arm over my eyes. I desperately wanted to talk to Kate about it, but I was fearful of what she would say. Not because she would disapprove. Quite the opposite. My fear was that she would approve. That she would encourage me. Kate lived by a different set of standards than the rest of the world. Still, I needed to talk to someone, and there was no one really other than her. Arden would have loved to hear the sordid details of my kiss with Paul. However, her reaction at the coffee shop still bothered me.
“I’m not sure how I feel about it,” I said cautiously. “After all, I did just attack our priest. I guess I’m conflicted.”
“Our friendly neighborhood celibate priest,” she added.
I shifted onto my back, stared at the ceiling over my bed, and let out an exasperated sigh. “Thanks, Kate. Like I needed to be reminded of that.” Sarcasm oozed out of my every pore. “Besides aren’t they all?”
“The Vatican would say so. Though I’m starting to question everything I’ve ever known about everyone,” she said, crawling across me to lay down on the other side of the bed. “So details. I want all of them.”
She remained silent while I described how I’d jumped him in the vet’s office, trying not to leave anything out. “So I was acting like a sobbing maniac. He was giving me a friendly hug, trying to comfort me, and I basically attacked him,” I finished. “Just like that. He didn’t see it coming.”
“Wow.” Her voice was distant as if she was deep in thought.
“Yeah, so how hot is the room in hell for a woman who attempts to seduce a priest?”
“It doesn’t sound to me like you had to do much seducing. Sounds to me like he was a willing participant.”
“He wasn’t,” I said, wanting to protect him.
“So, he didn’t kiss you back?” she asked incredulously. “I don’t believe that.”
“Why?”
“Because I have a theory about Father Paul.”
“What’s that?”
“I think he likes you. In fact, I know he likes you. Whether he’ll do anything about it is a whole other matter. But I know for a fact that he likes you.”
“How do you know that?” I didn’t know why I was even asking. It was ludicrous. We weren’t two high school kids, and this wasn’t my first crush. We were grown adults. He was a priest. I was a widow. A new widow at that.
“Just tell me the truth. Did he kiss you back?”
“No … well not at first, at least. I think I shocked the pants right off him.”
“You wish,” she said, laughing at her own joke.
“Kate, stop!”
“Sorry,” she said, trying to gain her composure. “He’s just so flippin’ good-looking. It’s hard not think about him like that.”
“Well, I for one, never had that problem … until recently.”
“So you admit that he’s hot.”
“He’s attractive,” I conceded with reluctance.
“Uh, huh. And so after the shock wore off, what did he do?”
“He kissed me back,” I whispered. “But you can’t tell anyone, Kate. They’ll kick him out of the church. They will, right?”
“Beats me. I’m sure they have programs to try to reform him before they kick him out. Jeez they probably wouldn’t do anything to him with all the problems the Catholic Church is having with their priests I seriously doubt the Pope is going to get his panties in a bunch over one kiss with one woman. They’ve got bigger fish to fry than that.”
“This is serious, Kate.”
She flopped onto her back beside me. “I know. I’m not trying to make light of it. But it’s only a problem if you want to kiss him again.”
“I’m not going to kiss him again.” I wasn’t. I had no intention to do so, but even as I said it I knew that I didn’t want it to be true. And then the guilt crashed over me again. “It was just a one time thing.”
“You just said ‘I’m not going to.’ You didn’t say that you don’t want to.”
I groaned. “You know what I meant.”
“Sure I do. And, what I’m saying is that it doesn’t have to be a one time thing if you don’t want it to be,” she said in true Kate fashion.
Kate would never allow an edict from the Vatican to get in the way of her happiness. She went where her heart led her with no thought to the consequences. It wasn’t even that she was a rule breaker because the rules never applied to her in the first place. I’d always admired that about her. However, admiring the trait in someone else doesn’t mean that it’s a trait you’d want to adopt for yourself even if you could. I doubted that I could ever live my life the way she did.
“The priest thing is sort of a huge obstacle.”
“It’s a doozy,” she agreed. “But it’s funny that you are facing this particular dilemma today because I was just researching the whole Catholic celibacy thing yesterday.” She waved her hand in the air as if ‘the whole Catholic celibacy thing’ was a fly buzzing around us, annoying but of no real consequence.
“Why?” I asked, my voice dripping with suspicion.
“I was curious,” she said, shrugging innocently. “We’ve been hanging out with Paul a lot this week. I bet when he was younger, he could have had any woman he wanted. Shit, he practically still can. But he’s chosen this path for his life instead. The Mystifying Minister baffles me.” The amount of thought that she’d put into this baffled me. However, she wasn’t the only one who’d recently become mystified by Paul.
I knew better than to plant ideas in Kate’s head. Hers was already full of enough bad ideas to last the both of us a lifetime. She didn’t need to know that I’d thought of nothing but him all afternoon. That even though I knew it was an impossibility, I’d wondered if he would kiss me again when I dropped him off at his car, and I’d been disappointed when he hadn’t. She didn’t need to know that the kiss had been nagging at me all afternoon.
I could do the same research myself, but I didn’t want to wait for her to leave. Besides, she’d already done it. There was no reason to duplicate efforts. “Okay, I wouldn’t say that I’m facing a dilemma, but what did your research teach you?” I asked, trying to be as nonchalant as possible.
“Well,” she started, “surprisingly, the whole celibacy thing isn’t even rooted in religious doctrine like you’d think. It wasn’t even put into place until 900 years after Jesus. One theory is that priests were required to be celibate so they wouldn’t produce heirs that would get in the way of the church getting their estates when they died. It was as much about money as it was about discipline.”
“That is interesting,” I said. “But it’s immaterial, Kate. The fact is he’s a priest and priests aren’t allowed to kiss their parishioners. End of story. The history of the church is irrelevant.”
“Okay, but –,” Kate pressed on.
“But nothing.” I was starting to get annoyed. We could kick this dead horse around all night, and nothing would change.
“No, wait. Let’s just say … hypothetically … that he wasn’t a priest. Just pretend for a second. Do you like him like that?”
“No.” I paused, and she arched her eyebrows at me, repeating the question I had just answered. “Okay, I don’t know. But we don’t even need to go there because
that’s not the only obstacle in our way.”
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
I wanted to thump her on the head. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m a freaking mess, Kate. There’s no getting around that. Until this week, I’ve spent every day either in bed or at the cemetery. I cry myself to sleep every night, and that hasn’t changed. And on top of everything else, I just found out that my dead husband was in love with someone else. I’m in no condition to be kissing anybody.”
“So get yourself straightened out.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Well, I think you’re making progress,” she said. “Besides, you can’t schedule love. It happens when it happens.”
“I’m certainly not in love with him,” I scoffed.
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
I rolled my eyes at her. Paul and I barely knew each other. In fact, until this week, we’d never even talked to each other outside of church or Karen’s Kitchen.
As if she could read my mind, she asked, “Tell me this. When you were still going, how often was he at Karen’s Kitchen?”
“Almost every night,” I conceded. “But that’s just because he cares about the people we were helping. He’s a giver. ”
“He is a giver. I wonder though,” she said, tapping her chin with her finger, “exactly how much he’s willing to give up.”
“I need to feed Aurora,” I said, rolling off the bed to end a pointless conversation.
_________________________
I tossed and turned all night and was awake before the alarm went off. I was anxious about seeing him again. I worried he wouldn’t show up to run with us. I worried he would.
I opened the door to my room and glanced down the hallway toward Kate’s cracked door. I tiptoed across the wood floor, careful not to make any noise that would wake my dad downstairs. Before I got to her room, the bathroom door opened at the end of the hall. She shuffled toward me in a tank top and sleep shorts. “You better get dressed. It’s almost six,” I whispered.
“You’re going to have to go without me today. I’m not feeling well.” She gripped her stomach and moaned dramatically.