What I didn’t know was that she’d be standing directly in front of the altar, staring at the cross, the late-dusk light pouring through the windows and staining her in dark jewel tones, sapphire and crimson and emerald. I didn’t know that her shoulders would be shaking ever so slightly, as if she were crying, and I didn’t know that all the doors and windows would be closed, trapping the lush, incense-scented air inside.

I stopped, the greeting on my lips stalled by the stillness, by the heavy weight of the quiet.

God was here.

God was here, and He was talking to Poppy.

I felt every kiss of air across my skin as I walked closer to her, heard her every exhale, and when I reached her, I saw how goose bumps peppered her arms, how tears ran silently down her cheeks.

There were a thousand things I should say, but I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt whatever moment this was. Except that it wasn’t truly interrupting, because I felt invited into it, like I was supposed to be part of it, and I did what felt right: I wrapped my arms around her.

She leaned back into me, her eyes still pinned to the cross, and I just held her as we both let the moment wash over us, bathe us in the dying light and the silence. Shadows crept along the floor and pooled around our feet, and the seconds ticked into minutes, and slowly, slowly, we drew incrementally closer, until every inch of her back was pressed against me, until my nose was in her hair and her hands were twined through mine.

The closeness of her and the closeness of the divine all at the same time was euphoria, bliss, and I was almost dizzy with it, feeling both at once, intoxicated by her and intoxicated by my God. And in the face of this numinous encounter, there was no room for guilt, no room for critical self-analysis and recrimination. There was only room to be present, be there, and then she turned in my arms, tilting her face up to mine.

“You feel it too?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it always like this for you?”

I shook my head. “Once a week, maybe. Sometimes twice. I know people like my confessor who feel it every moment and people like my bishop who feel it never.”

“It’s beautiful.”

It was full dark now, and there was nothing but different shadows, but even in the shadows, the tear tracks on her face glistened. “You’re beautiful,” I whispered.

We were talking in hushed voices; the air was still heavy with holiness and presence. And I should have felt wicked for holding Poppy like this in the face of God, but our burning bush of a silent room somehow made everything seem more right, like it was the most perfect thing to do, holding her in my arms and staring down at her face.

I slid my fingers under her chin, keeping her face angled to mine, and leaned down just enough so that our noses brushed together. I could kiss her right now. Maybe I should kiss her right now. Maybe it was God’s plan all along for us to end up here, alone in this sanctuary, and forced to face the truth, that this was more than friendship, this was more than lust. This was something raw and real and undeniable and it was not going to go away.

She was trembling against me now, her lips parted and waiting, and I allowed myself a narrower margin now, lowering my mouth to a mere fraction of an inch above hers, tightening my arm around her lower back. We were so close that we were sharing breath, literally, our hearts beating in the same dizzy rhythm.

In spite of everything that had happened between us, this moment somehow felt more intimate, more vulnerable, than anything we’d yet shared. Everything else had happened while I pretended God wasn’t watching, but this—there was no pretending now. Sacred and profane were blending and blurring together, fusing and welding themselves into something new and whole and singular, and if this was what love was, then I didn’t know how anyone could bear the weight of it.

“I can’t stop myself, I’m sorry,” I said at the same time she said, “I tried to stay away from you.”

And then I kissed her.

I brushed my lips against hers once, just to feel the softness of her skin glancing past mine, and then pressed my mouth to hers in earnest, tasting her in the slowest, deepest way possible, until I felt her knees weaken and she made little noises in the back of her throat.

I kissed her until I saw static at the edges of my vision, until I couldn’t remember a time when we hadn’t been kissing, until I couldn’t feel where my mouth ended and hers began. I kissed her until it felt like we’d exchanged something—a promise maybe or a covenant or a piece of our souls. And when I finally pulled away, it was as if I pulled away reborn, a new man. A baptism by kiss rather than a baptism by water.

“More,” she begged. “More.”

I kissed her again, this time with hunger, with need, and I could tell by the way she made little sighs into my mouth, the way her fingers twisted in the fabric of my shirt, that she was as far gone for me as I was for her, and I never wanted to stop, never wanted this to end.

But it had to.

When we broke apart, she stepped back and wrapped her arms around herself, shivering a little in the blast of the air conditioning. The clouds outside had parted, sending a shaft of silver through the windows, and we were in a fairy pool of glowing moonlight. The God feeling was still there, but rather than a weight from the outside, it felt like sparks on the inside, as if the divine had seeped into my blood. I felt light-headed and drunk with it.

“I’m tired,” Poppy said, though she didn’t sound tired so much as dazed. “I think that I should go home.”

“I’ll walk you,” I offered. She nodded, and together we left the mystery behind, as if by walking to the sanctuary doors, we were walking away from what had just happened.

“That was incredible,” she murmured.

“I’ve been told I’m a good kisser.”

She bumped my shoulder. “You know what I mean.”

We were in the narthex now, but I couldn’t shake the image of her standing in front of the cross, so open and receptive to an experience that most people would dismiss outright. “Poppy, I have to ask. Did something happen to draw you to the church? Did you go as a child and now you’re circling back?”

“Why?”

“It seems like…” I searched for the right phrasing, wanting to express how much a good thing I thought her interest was. “I think it’s marvelous that you’re jumping in feet first. It’s just not the way a lot of people do it.”

“It feels a lot more gradual on my end,” she said as we walked outside. I kept a careful space between us as we took the stone stairs down the hill the church was perched on. “My family isn’t religious—in fact, no one we knew was religious. I think they were always suspicious of it, like anything that that could inspire such fervor in people was gauche, at best. Dangerous, at worst. I guess I was always a bit more open to it. In college, I went with a friend to her Buddhist temple almost every week and in Haiti, I was working side by side with missionaries. But it wasn’t until the day I came in for confession that I’d ever sought it out on my own.”

“What made you come back after that?”

She paused. “You.”

I processed this as we hit the bottom of the stairs and walked into the wooded park between the church and her house. It was bright with closely spaced lamps and moonlight. I cleared my throat, wondering if my question ultimately made a difference, but deciding to ask anyway. “Was it me as a priest? Or me as a man?”

“Both. I think that’s what is so confusing.”

We walked in silence now, together but not together, our minds on the beauty of that moment in the sanctuary, on the way it felt to kiss when our souls were on fire.

Fuck. It was all so confusing to me too, except that parts of the confusion were starting to fall away, which should have been clarifying, but I worried that it was actually the opposite, that I was forgetting things I was supposed to remember.