My hurt pride over her leaving without saying goodbye had nothing to do with it.

That night was the back-to-school party for the youth group, so I spent it eating pizza and playing Xbox One and trying to keep the boys from making total asses of themselves as they tried to impress the girls. After the last teen left the church, I cleaned the basement and went home, undressing and pulling on a pair of sweats. I stared out my bedroom window at Poppy’s driveway, lost in thought.

The Church said everything about her and me was wrong. It was lust and fornication. It was lying. It was betrayal.

But the Church also talked about the kind of love that transcended any and all boundaries, and the Bible was filled with stories of people who carried out God’s will and had very human desires. I mean, what even was sin? Who was being hurt by Poppy and me loving each other?

It’s a matter of trust, I reminded myself. Because while I wrestled with the epistemological nature of sin like the trained theologian I was, I was also a shepherd and shepherds had to be practical. The issue was that I had come here to build up trust in the church, to undo another man’s wrongs. And no matter how consensual and otherwise unremarkable my relationship was with Poppy, it would still ruin that. My work, my goals, my memorial to Lizzy’s death.

Lizzy.

It had felt so good to talk about her. We didn’t talk about her much in my family. In fact, not at all, unless I was alone with my mother. And talking about it hadn’t taken the pain away, necessarily, but it had made it different. Easier. I moved from the window and went to the bedside table to get the rosary I liked to use, an array of silver and jade beads.

It had been Lizzy’s.

I didn’t pray, but I ran the beads through my fingers as I sat, thinking and fretting and eventually letting my mind collapse into the worn runnels of worry and guilt.

Into the new thorny pain of her absence and all the fears that inspired. All of this to wrestle with, and the thing that haunted me most as I fell asleep was the possibility that Poppy was done with me.

The next day was the pancake breakfast, and Poppy did show up for that, although she avoided me, talking only to Millie and leaving as soon as the last guest walked up the stairs.

“She came to the Come and See meeting yesterday afternoon,” Millie said. “She seems quite interested in joining. I explained to her how the catechism would work, and I think she’s amenable, although she did ask if she could do it at another church.” Millie looked hard at me. “You two didn’t have a falling out, did you?”

“No,” I mumbled. “Everything is fine.”

“So that’s why the both of you looked like you were in physical pain this morning?”

I winced. Millie was sharper than most people, but I didn’t want anyone to notice the dynamic between Poppy and me, whether it be strained or friendly. We’d only had sex once, and already it was seeping through every possible crack in the dam.

“St. Margaret’s needs her, Father Bell. I certainly hope you don’t plan on fucking that up.”

“Millie!”

“What?” she asked, picking up her quilted handbag. “An old lady can’t swear? Catch up with the times, Father.”

And she left.

She was right. St. Margaret’s needed Poppy. And I needed Poppy. And St. Margaret’s needed me, and Poppy needed me. Too many people needed too many other people, and there was no way I could keep all the balls in the air; I would drop one and there would be catastrophic consequences.

It wasn’t until Sunday evening that my angst got the better of me and I sent her a text.

Thinking of you.

My chest and throat felt like they’d been stitched together, and I nearly jumped to my feet when I saw the three rotating dots on the screen, meaning that she was typing a response. And then they went away.

I let out a long breath. She’d stopped typing. She wasn’t going to answer.

I didn’t even want to think about what that meant. So instead I treated myself to a warmed-up Millie casserole, three episodes of House of Cards and a healthy slug of Scotch.

I fell asleep with Lizzy’s rosary woven between my fingers, somehow feeling further away from my own life than ever.

I hadn’t seen Poppy at Mass that morning, so the last thing I expected after Rowan’s confession was for her to slide in the other side of the booth.

It could have been the hesitant creak of the door or the unmistakable rustle of a dress against soft thighs or the electricity that immediately crackled across my skin, but I knew it was her without her even saying a word.

Her door closed and we sat in silence for a while, her breathing quietly and me anxiously tapping my thumb against my palm, hating that I was already half-hard just being next to her.

Finally, I asked, “Where have you been?”

She exhaled. “Here. I’ve been right here.”

“It didn’t feel that way.” I was embarrassed at how bitter and wounded I sounded, but I also didn’t care. Tyler Bell at twenty-one would have never let a girl get under his armor of pride, never shown a girl that she’d hurt him. But I was almost thirty now, and well past college, and what would have meant next to nothing to me then meant a lot more to me now.

Or maybe it wasn’t me who had changed. Maybe this was the effect that Poppy would have on me at any age, in any place. She did something to me, and I thought (a little petulantly) that it wasn’t fair. Wasn’t fair that she could just sit there and not be as torn up as I was about us, whatever us meant in our case.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked.

I leaned against the wall. “No.” I reconsidered. “A little. I don’t know.”

“You are, then.”

The words forced their way past my lips. “It just feels like I am risking everything, and you are risking nothing, and you are the one who’s walking away and it doesn’t feel fair.”

“Walking away from what, Tyler? From a relationship we can’t have? From sex that will destroy your career or worse? I’ve spent the last three days beating my head against the wall because I want you—I want you so badly—but if I have you, I’ll ruin your life. How do you think that makes me feel? Do you think I want to shred apart your livelihood, your community, all for my sake?”

Her outburst lingered in my mind long after she’d stopped talking. This hadn’t occurred to me—that she would feel guilty, that she would feel culpable. That she would want to avoid me because she couldn’t bear the guilt of taking part in this thing that would ruin me.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I was grateful and confused and still hurt all at the same time.

So I said the only thing that came to mind. “How long has it been since your last confession?”

An exhale. “So this is how this conversation will go?”

I didn’t care how this conversation happened as long as it happened, as long as I got to keep talking to her. “If you want it to.”

“You know what? I do.”

Poppy

Premarital sex is a sin, right? And I’m sure having sex with a priest is a sin. And probably altar-fucking isn’t anywhere in the Papal Encyclicals, but I’m guessing it’s a sin too. So I’ll confess those. I’ll confess about how delirious I felt on that altar, having you between my legs. Finally coaxing you into letting go. We were more human than ever—more animal than ever—but somehow I still felt so close to God, like my entire soul was awake and alert and dancing. I looked up at the crucifix, at Christ hanging from the cross, and I thought, this is what it’s like to be torn apart for love. This is what it means to be reborn. I stared at it over your shoulder, and you were piercing me, and Christ had been pierced too, and it all seemed like one secret and shimmering mystery—profound and acroamatic. I feel like we did something unfathomably ancient, stumbled onto some secret ceremony that fused us together—but how can I relish that feeling, how can I celebrate it, when it comes with such a high cost?