Midnight Mass (Priest #2)

by Sierra Simone

  Rejection scraped its serrated blade along the skin of my heart. “Oh. Right. Of course.”

  “And you’ll get me all day tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that,” she added hurriedly. “And I’ll be all yours then. It’s just right now, Anton and I are still scrambling to lock everything into place for Saturday night.”

  Anton and I.

  Anton and I.

  “Of course, Poppy,” I said again, hoping she couldn’t hear how hurt and ashamed and angry I was. Not angry with her, but angry with myself. Why had I come on to her like a horny teenager, like me fucking her was the most important thing that she could possibly have on her mind? What kind of selfish prick was I?

  Anton would probably never come on to her like that.

  He’s not coming on to her, I told myself firmly. Every time you’ve met him, he’s been perfectly nice. Perfectly polite. You’re letting jealousy invent scenarios that aren’t happening.

  Except what if those scenarios were happening?

  Dammit, Tyler. Stop it.

  “And I’ll probably be late tonight, but I know that you’ll be working late at the library anyway, so I still may get home before you.” More muffled chatter, Anton again.

  “Okay,” I said, as evenly as I could. “I’ll definitely see you tomorrow then. For our trip to your parents’.”

  “It’s a date,” she affirmed, but despite the upward inflection of her tone and the sweet goodbye she added after it, I could tell that her mind was already back on her work. Back to Anton.

  “Goodbye, lamb,” I said softly and pressed end.

  She was right. I’d probably be working late anyway, so it didn’t matter that she would be doing the same. And we’d have Thanksgiving together.

  But as the student scheduled before me left my advisor’s office and I stood to gather my things, I felt that small bubble of hope pop, the space where it had been filling with the leaden weight of guilt and suspicion.

  Papers rustled. My chair squeaked as I leaned back, trying to relax. My advisor, Professor Courtney Morales, lifted her mug and took a sip of decaffeinated coffee.

  Finally she looked up. “This is strong work, Tyler. I’m very impressed.”

  I couldn’t hide my relieved exhale, and she smiled a little, shifting in her chair with a small wince. She was in her early forties, black and beautiful with a gorgeous halo of obsidian, corkscrew curls—and also nine months pregnant. She tapped her fingers idly on the firm swell of her stomach as she looked down at the last fifty pages of my thesis.

  I could see a few marks here and there—her penned-in notes and suggestions—but nothing insane. Could this mean that I wouldn’t have any major revisions before my defense? Could I be…done?

  Professor Morales flipped a few pages over, took another sip of fake coffee, and then looked up once more. “However, I think we need to revisit your conclusion.”

  I pushed down the initial swell of panic. The conclusion was twenty-seven pages and had taken me almost a month to write. “When you say ‘revisit’…”

  “It needs to be rewritten,” she said bluntly. “This is an amazing work, Tyler. I’ve watched it grow from an idea with raw potential into a fully rounded and layered piece. But you’re robbing yourself with this conclusion.”

  My mouth was dry. “How so?”

  “You spend almost two hundred pages systemically examining the difference between notional belief and religious practice in the Catholic Church. You deconstruct established dogma and retranslate St. Anselm’s credo ut intelligam as a pledge of commitment rather than a forced intellectual assent to said dogma. Yet, your conclusion is twenty-seven pages of passive circumvention.”

  I suppose I must have had a very dejected expression on my face, because she shook her head with a sigh. “I can’t handle those sad green eyes, Tyler. I’m not saying it’s poorly written; the prose, as always, is excellent and the logic is precise. On the surface, it’s impeccable. But it’s not what this work needs.”

  I was almost afraid to ask. “And what does it need?”

  “A call to action. You just spent a year exposing the weaknesses of the Catholic Church on a theological level, while simultaneously cataloging the things it does well. Synthesize those things into a coherent response. Into a vision for what the Church could be. Explicitly show us how your thoughts can be worked into practical action. And then I guarantee you’ll have a paper that will blow the board away.”

  So. I had ten days to rewrite from scratch something that had originally taken me thirty. I had a wife who was currently laughing her throaty laugh—a laugh that should belong to me, dammit—with Fucking Anton. And the coffee kiosk near the library closed early, so it was just me and a half-empty room-temperature bottle of Dr. Pepper in my dim library stall, tucked away back in the stacks.

  I had books piled around me, papers and highlighters scattered on every available space, multicolored Post-It flags sticking out of every book like flat neon fingers. And a laptop, with a blank Word document open, the cursor blinking accusatorially at me.

  A call to action…

  It was easier said than done. When my paper had just been about the academic—the dry examination of history and theology—it had felt removed from real life. It had felt safe.

  But writing about ways that the Catholic Church should change? To become healthier and more modern? That felt very, very unsafe.

  I wanted Poppy right now. I wanted her hands on my shoulders as she rubbed my anxiety away. I wanted to feel her solid, graceful faith in the divine and in me as we prayed together. I wanted to hide from this mess with her—fucking or drinking or cuddling or just listening to her amazingly articulate voice as she told me about her day.

  But Poppy was busy (with Stupid Fucking Anton), and so I called the next best thing.

  Father Jordan.

  Jordan Brady was maybe my best friend, although I wasn’t sure if I was his. His best friend was most likely a dead saint that probably visited him in his dreams or some shit, and it was hard to compete with a dead saint. Still, though, we were close, and he’d seen me through some of the worst parts of my life. He had the most genuine faith of anyone I’d ever met, and if anyone had a direct line to God, it was him. And if anyone could help steer me through this, he could.

  The phone rang a few times before he picked up, and when he did, I recognized the slightly dazed voice he sometimes had after performing Mass, as if the ancient rite had unmoored him from our time and space, and sent him drifting into another realm.

  “Tyler,” he said, a little dreamily. “I thought you’d call soon.”

  “You are so weird,” I told him. (Lovingly.)

  “Is this about Poppy?” he asked, ignoring me.

  “No, it’s about my dissertation.” I explained to him what Professor Morales wanted, and how I thought she was right, but also how daunting the rewrite felt. “Especially because I feel like I’m also criticizing people like you and Bishop Bove,” I finished. “When I have nothing but the greatest respect for both of you. But it doesn’t matter, right? I mean, no one reads these things except for board members. I could write anything, and it won’t affect a soul outside of Princeton.”

  Jordan took a long time to answer, and when he did, he sounded as if he were relaying a message rather than speaking his own mind. “It’s your task to write this, no matter how frightening it may seem. You should not be afraid to be critical, so long as you’re seeking authentic spiritual practice. And I think many people outside of Princeton are going to read this. This will have an impact crater, Tyler.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. “That’s very helpful.”

  “Take a break,” Jordan suggested. “Sleep tonight and pray, and when you wake up, things will be clearer.”

  I stared at my laptop for another thirty minutes after I ended my call with Jordan. And then I finally took his advice and gave up, slamming my laptop closed and shoving the piles of paper into my bag. I left the books on my desk sin
ce I could lock up my stall for the night, and then, after one last look around, I went home.

  It was after eleven, and the miserable drizzle had morphed into a miserable sleet. I walked the four blocks home, shivering and despondent, trying not to think about how shitty the next ten days would be as I attempted to construct something coherent and thoughtful in a third of the time that it had taken me to write the first version.

  Shit.

  All I wanted to do was go home and kick off my shoes and crawl into my warm soft bed, with my warm soft lamb. The thought of her—of her smell and her petite frame and of the red lipstick that she maybe hadn’t wiped off yet—hastened my steps. I’d get home, find my wife, and get warm again. Forget about this shitty dissertation and this massive, unexpected complication.

  But when I unlocked the door to the townhouse, I was greeted by silent darkness. No faint reading light from the bedroom, no running water in the shower. The kitchen and living room were exactly as I’d left them before I went to teach. Poppy hadn’t been home yet.

  This shouldn’t have bothered me. She said she was working late; hell, even I knew that she needed to work late. I knew how important this gala was to her. And yet a selfish, terrible part of me wanted her here, now, because I needed her. I was upset and frustrated, and she was my anchor. She was my harbor. She was every metaphor, nautical or otherwise, that made life worth living.

  And she wasn’t here for me tonight.

  But as soon as I thought that, I hated myself, thinking about all the nights she’d waited up for me. She’d been here for me every other night. No, I needed to realize that her work was as high a priority for her as my dissertation was for me, and it would be good for me to get a taste of my own medicine, so to speak. I’d earned this loneliness, this sense of abandonment. It was my penance.

  I graded a few papers, took a long shower and then crawled into my empty bed, closing my eyes against the silent darkness. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep like this, with my impending revision pounding against the inside of my skull and my skin prickling with the unpleasant awareness of the vacant space next to me.

  Poppy had traveled before, yes. And there had been a few times when I’d flown home without her, sleeping alone in my twin bed from high school. But for some reason, it felt different tonight. It felt deliberate or hurtful or maybe neither of those two, but something like those. And the end result was me growing less and less tired, and more and more frustrated, until finally I got out of bed, tearing off the covers in one violent motion.

  I made myself an Irish coffee—adding a bit more than the traditional splash of whiskey—and sat at our high-top kitchen table while I slowly set out my dissertation papers on my laptop.

  The window by the table looked out onto the cemetery, the stones sedate and stately and ancient in the cold moonlight. The sleet had ended and the occasional snowflake spitted by, coming from the hazy, thin clouds stretched across the moon. I could see the faint glaze of ice on the blades of grass and along the tops of the grave markers. Somewhere out there, Aaron Burr and Grover Cleveland slept, famous men who were now no more than bones and ice and fragments of ragged clothing.

  They didn’t have dissertation conclusions to rewrite, lucky bastards.

  I turned back to my laptop, flexing my fingers and started typing.

  One way the Catholic Church could transform within this framework…

  Backspace backspace backspace.

  The Church already has many kernels of these seemingly modern conceptions…

  Delete delete delete.

  Tyler Bell, the priest who deserted his post, has no fucking right to talk about what the Catholic Church should or shouldn’t do.

  There. That was better. Professor Morales would surely accept that as a conclusion, right?

  With a sigh, I turned back to the body of my dissertation, even though I could practically recite the entire thing from heart by now, trying to figure out what to say. And how to say it authentically. But all of my words seemed to blend together in the same meaningless drabble, blurs of what seemed now to me to be obvious and quotidian observations. Was it too late to run away? To take Poppy and disappear somewhere where the dissertation panel couldn’t find me?

  I’m not sure when I fell asleep. It happened sometime after the third Irish coffee but before dawn. When the scratch of a key in the doorknob woke me up. I had a partial imprint of the laptop keyboard on my cheek and a large yellow highlighter stain on my pajama pants from where the hand holding it had fallen off the table and into my lap.

  I chafed at my face, trying to rub away the feeling of the keyboard, and only gradually did I become aware of another sound besides the usual key and purse shuffling and unlocking noises.

  A man’s voice.

  “Thank you so much for the ride home,” Poppy was calling as the doorknob turned. And then that fucking laugh—the laugh that should belong to me—she was giving him her low, rich laugh again as she told him goodbye.

  I was on my feet in an instant, walking to her, walking to the door, because as much as I was trying not to be jealous, to be Understanding and Calm Tyler, having Anton Rees with my wife at my doorstep at five in the morning was a little much.

  Who was I kidding? It was a lot much, and I wanted to know why it was happening.

  But the door opened, and Poppy glided in, and there was only the tail end of the blue McLaren as it pulled away from our house. I hated that my eyes immediately slid over to my truck, I hated that I immediately calculated the cost difference between our cars. I hated that I wondered if Poppy had calculated it too.

  I could be a worldly man sometimes, I could be a sinful man almost all the time, but materialism was not among my sins. Jealousy, yes—lust, certainly—but never greed. And so it was an uncomfortable feeling now, wishing I made more money, wishing that I could offer Poppy more than what an ex-holy man, now student could offer, which was next to nothing. As opposed to Anton, who came from the same world that Poppy did, who drove the kinds of cars and wore the kinds of suits she’d grown up surrounded by.

  Poppy was smiling as she walked in, humming as she set down her purse and shrugged off her cherry-red wool coat. But then she saw me and her smile faded.

  “Tyler? I didn’t think you’d still be up.”

  I tried out a smile but it felt strange on my face, so I stopped. “I fell asleep at the table. I only woke up when you got home.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to hang up her coat in the entryway. “We were just working so late and then late turned into early, and Anton offered to drive me home rather than me taking the train…Oh.”

  When she’d turned, I had been right behind her, so she turned right into my bare chest. And now I leaned forward and ran the tip of my nose along her jaw, feeling her shiver under my touch.

  Is she shivering because she’s turned on? Or because she has something to hide?

  I was too tired to tell my brain to shut the fuck up. Instead, my jealous masculine instincts took over and I inhaled the scent of her skin. Lavender and coffee—no trace of cologne, no trace of alcohol or cigarette smoke. She hadn’t touched another man, they hadn’t gone out to a bar or anything similar.

  She was telling the truth.

  This should make me feel better. This should remind me that my tendency towards jealousy would, in Millie’s words, invent doom where there was none.

  But I pushed the reminder aside, picked up my wife and carried her to bed, determined to wipe away whatever supportive, friendly, McLaren-driving Anton had done with her tonight at work. Determined to bury the jealousy with every thrust and push of my cock into her pussy.

  And when morning came, that sultry laugh would only belong to me.

  The drive to Newport was brutal. Sleet and intermittent snow turned I-95 into a miserable crawl of traffic, a slow-moving river of honking and merging and near-accidents. After Stamford, it opened up a little, but not a lot, and Poppy fell asleep listening to my audiobook about
ancient Greek mythology. So I navigated through the drizzle and stroked her thigh as she snored softly and the narrator droned on about the fucked up familial politics of the Olympians.

  Around Westerly, she roused, her hair adorably mussed and her large hazel eyes blinking away sleep. Yawning, she looked out the window. I didn’t need to tell her we were almost here; she knew this part of New England as intimately as I knew the neighborhoods and fountains of Kansas City. I flipped the stereo from my audiobook to the Bluetooth audio. Blues rock, loud and raw and lo-fi, started pounding through the speakers.

  “This should help you wake up, sleepyhead,” I said, steering my truck onto US-1.

  I couldn’t see her smile, but I could feel it as she stretched in her seat. “Well, someone kept me awake last night.”

  She was talking about me, and the fact that I’d fucked her until the day finally dawned gray and wet outside our window. But for a minute—an instant really—I thought someone meant Anton, and white-hot anger pricked at my chest.

  I swallowed it down. “We should be to your parents’ in about an hour.”

  She nodded, reaching over to squeeze my thigh. I swore I could feel her every finger through my jeans, I swore I could feel the heat of her palm searing marks onto my skin. And with my jealousy beating its restless rhythm inside my chest, it only served to make me agitated in a very particular sort of way.

  I glanced over at her, at her perfectly applied lipstick and sparkling eyes, and then said, “Unzip me.”

  She licked those flawless crimson lips and complied, her hands pale in the fading light as she unbuckled herself and reached for me.

  I leaned back, giving her better access to my zipper and also so I could get the view I wanted: those manicured hands on my jeans and then parting the fly and taking hold of me. There’s something incredibly hot about driving fast with a woman unzipping your pants, something powerful about having your foot heavy on the gas and your vehicle eating up the road and a beautiful face about to be buried in your lap.