I smiled. “I think you would have.” But then my smile slipped away. “The weekend of the funeral, Sean and I decided we were going to escape the relatives at the house for a few minutes and go out for Taco Bell. I’d wanted to drive, but we didn’t think—we didn’t remember that she’d been the last person to drive the car. Her music came on and Sean was…he was upset.”

Upset wasn’t the right word for what my older brother had been. He’d just turned twenty-one and so he was mourning Lizzy’s death the Irish way, with too much whiskey and too little sleep. I’d turned the key in the ignition and the opening bars of “Oops, I Did It Again” came on, obnoxiously loud because Lizzy’d had the volume cranked all the way up, and we’d both frozen, staring at the radio as if a demon had just crawled out of the CD slot, and then he’d started yelling and swearing, kicking the dash so hard that the old plastic cracked, the whole car shaking with his fury and raw grief. They’d been the closest in age, Lizzy and Sean, and accordingly, they’d been best friends and bitter enemies. They’d shared cars and friends and teachers and finally a college, being only a year apart, and of all of us Bell siblings, her death ripped the biggest hole in his daily life.

So he ripped a hole in his car that day, and then we went and got Taco Bell and we never spoke of it. We still haven’t.

“I’ve never told anyone this story before,” I said. “It’s easier to talk about Lizzy like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like naked and snuggling. Just…with you. It’s all easier with you.”

She rested her head on my shoulder. We laid there for a while, and just when I thought she’d fallen asleep, she said in the darkness, “Is Lizzy why you are afraid to let go with me?”

“No,” I said, baffled. “Why would she be?”

“It just seems like she’s the motivation behind a lot of what you do. And she was hurt, sexually. I wonder if that makes you afraid of doing that—of making what happened to her happen to someone else.”

“I…I guess I never thought of it that way.” I found her hair again and played with it. “That might be why, I don’t know. It was in college that I discovered how I liked it, but it was difficult. If I found a girl who was confident and smart and full of self-respect, then she didn’t want the sex to be rough. If I found a girl who liked it rough, then the reason she liked it rough was because of some emotional issue, and yes, whenever I saw a girl like that, I thought of Lizzy. How many signs we’d missed. And if I ever found out that a guy had taken advantage of her when she’d felt like that…”

“It sounds like you had a lot of bad luck with women.”

“Not necessarily. I had a few really great girlfriends in college. But it was easier to lock that part of me away, to have the healthy, confident girlfriends and the vanilla sex. It was safer.”

“Then you became a priest.”

“And that was much safer.”

She sat up and looked at me, lines of shadow and streetlight across her face. “Well, you aren’t hurting me. I mean it. Look at me, Tyler.”

I did.

“I don’t like it rough because I’m emotionally damaged. I’ve been treated like a princess my entire life, coddled and praised and protected from every single thing that could ever harm me. Sterling was the first person who didn’t treat me like that.”

Sterling.

My jaw flexed. I didn’t like that he was so many of her firsts (which, I know, was totally unreasonable, but still. Maybe what I didn’t like was that she remembered so many of her firsts with him so intently.)

“Part of it is probably that it’s taboo and therefore dirty, so it turns me on. But part of it is that it makes me feel unbreakable. Strong. Like the man I’m with respects me enough to see that. And I’m strong enough to have that experience in the bedroom and also have a perfectly healthy life outside of it.”

“It’s too bad it didn’t work out with Sterling then.”

Whoa, Tyler. Low blow. But I was agitated and jealous and feeling like I was being told off for something that wasn’t my fault.

She stiffened. “It didn’t work out with Sterling because he can’t differentiate between the two, the bedroom and real life. He thinks because I liked the way he treated me during sex that was how I wanted to be treated all the time. That I only wanted to be a whore, when really, I wanted to be a whore for him only when we were alone. Which is why I walked away from him at the club.”

Not before you let him fuck you.

As if she could read my thoughts, she narrowed her eyes. “Are you jealous of him?”

“No,” I lied.

“You aren’t even supposed to be laying here with me,” she said. “We can’t hold hands in public, we can’t do anything together without it being a sin. You could lose your job and essentially be exiled from the one thing that gives your life meaning, and you’re worried about my ex-boyfriend?”

“Okay, fine. Yes. Yes, I’m jealous of him. I’m jealous that he gets to come back here for you, and I’m jealous that he can do that. He can pursue you. And I can’t.”

My words hung in the air for a long moment.

She dropped her head down. “Tyler…what have we done? What are we doing?”

She was there again. At that thing I didn’t want to think about.

I reached for her and pulled her over me, laying down so that she knelt over my face.

“We should talk about this,” she said, but then I flicked my tongue up and over her clit and she moaned, and I knew that I’d managed to freeze this moment again, push the conversation and all its decisions forward to another time.

Jesus said that what is done in the darkness will be brought into the light. And when I woke up alone in my bed that morning, I knew exactly what He meant. Because everything that I had managed to push away last night crowded back, front and center, and not only did I have to face it, but I had to face it alone.

Where was she? There was no note, no text, no coffee mug in the sink. She’d left without saying goodbye, and that twisted sharp and splintery in my chest.

She’s a layperson, I reminded myself. That was what laypeople did—they met, they fucked, and they moved on. They didn’t fall in love at the drop of a fucking hat.

Last night, she had been about to say it, though. She’d been ready to profess it to me…or had I imagined that? Maybe I had imagined that this spark between us was something mutual, something shared. Maybe I’d been a curiosity to her—the handsome priest—and now that she’d satisfied her curiosity, she was ready to move on.

I had broken my vow for a woman who didn’t even care enough to stick around for breakfast.

I shuffled into the bathroom, and when I looked up in the mirror, I saw two days worth of stubble and hair that had been tugged on and the unmistakable stain of a hickey on my collarbone.

I hated the man in that reflection, and I almost punched the glass, wanting to hear it shatter, wanting to feel the bright pain of a thousand deep cuts. And then I sat down on the edge of the tub and gave in to the urge to cry.

I was a good man. I had worked very hard to be a good man, devoted myself to living my life the way God wanted. I counseled, I comforted, I spent hours upon hours in contemplative prayer and meditation.

I was a good man.

So why had I done this?

Poppy wasn’t at morning Mass and I didn’t hear from her all day, even though I walked by the window more often than necessary to double-check that her light blue Fiat was still in her driveway.

It was.

I checked my phone for a text about once every three minutes, typed several aborted messages, and then berated myself for doing so. I had just cried—like a baby—in my bathroom this morning. Stupid, echoing-off-the-tile, hiccuping cries. It was for the better if we had space from one another. I couldn’t keep my focus when I was around her. I couldn’t keep control. She made me feel like every sin and punishment was worth it just to hear one of her husky little laughs, and what I needed to do right now was triage this mess that I called my life and figure things out. Embracing this distance was prudence and sexual continence and the first scrap of wisdom I’d exhibited since I met her.