He ignored that but probed on. He couldn’t help himself. “I still don’t believe that you’re not a nice girl.”
“I always want to do bad things.” She sighed. “My first instinct is always the wrong one.”
“That’s just being human,” he said. “The important thing is that you do the right thing.” He’d never seen her do the wrong thing. Although her mildly suggestive tone might be skirting the border. But she wasn’t religious. It wasn’t wrong for her. It was wrong for him to be having thoughts about it. He was a fucking mess.
“But how do I know if I’m doing the right thing if I don’t believe in anything?”
Patrick had to laugh at that. “Beats me. You know I need to have the rules.”
“I don’t want to live by the rules that my parents set out for me, and I don’t want to live by the rules of a church. How do I know that I’m a decent person?”
“You look inside and you look around. You think that you would have friendships that have lasted for fifteen years if you were a shitty person?”
“I mean, Jack is still friends with your brother.”
She made him laugh—again. This was starting to be a problem. He was pretty sure this confessional had never seen this level of mirth.
“You’ve got me there. I think that Jack is just too attached to the idea that Chris might grow and change. I hold out hope, too. But it’s very faint.”
“That’s really saying something—specifically, that your brother is a real jerk—if even a priest thinks he’s past saving.”
“I deal in hope and faith, but I can’t turn off my reason.”
“Is that why you were so cool with Bridget when she told you about her abortion?”
That was a complicated issue for him. There was what the Church believed—what he was required to preach—and what he believed in the privacy of his own heart. He liked to think that life-and-death decisions were between the person making the decision and God. He tended to think that forcing people to stay pregnant was petty, misogynist cruelty.
He avoided preaching about it in general and tried to take individual cases as they came. “Bridget did what she needed to do to save her own life, and I respect that.”
“Hmm.” Sasha was silent after that for long moments, until she said, “This is a cool confessional.”
Thank goodness, something that didn’t involve faith and redemption. “We don’t really use it anymore, but it’s a good place to hide.”
She gave one of those unexpected barks of laughter that made her sound both amused and world-weary. He could drink that sound and feel like his soul was new again. “What were you hiding from?”
“Baked goods. You’ve caused a bit of controversy bringing outsiders and professionals into the domain of the parish council.”
“I haven’t caused too much trouble for you, have I?”
A loaded question. Every time he thought about her, he was in trouble. It was the vague sense that his life wasn’t good enough. He knew what he should do about it—prayer, contemplation, reconciliation. But he couldn’t bring himself to cut off the source of his sinful thinking. It just didn’t seem like an option to lull himself back into a sense that he was here in this life and therefore that meant that his vocation was right with God.
“No, you haven’t.”
“Good. I actually came here to invite you to the Art Institute. They’re doing an exhibition of some of the items that were at the Met Ball the year that they did Catholicism as a theme, and I couldn’t think of anyone who would enjoy it more.”
* * *
—
SASHA HELD HER BREATH waiting for Patrick to answer. Once they’d started talking about God, she’d immediately regretted coming here. They had been flirting about God, and now she’d basically asked him out on a date.
He was definitely going to say no. He had to say no. He probably had plenty of generous, virtuous shit to do. And she’d asked him on a date.
Well, if the mortification killed her, she would at least know that she was headed straight to hell for asking a priest on a date.
“I’m sure you have other things to do—”
“I’d love to,” he said. “It’ll get me out of here and away from the clutches of Mrs. O’Toole’s rhubarb muffins.”
“That actually sounds really good.” She stepped out of the confessional, stretching her arms over her head. Those things had been built when people weren’t as well nourished in their youth—and thus they were too small for twenty-first-century Americans.
She caught Patrick’s gaze on the exposed skin between her sweater and jeans. At the same time that she delighted in the fact that he noticed her, she felt a stab of guilt.
She shouldn’t have come here. They were friends. He’d saved her life. She was helping him out by raising money for the preschool. But he was still a priest, and she was still a woman who had a crush on him despite the fact that he was a priest.
All of this was a very bad idea. “Are you sure you have time to play hooky?”
His gaze snapped up and met hers, and he smiled the smile of a man who hadn’t taken a vow of celibacy. Did he even know the effect he had on her and other people who liked black hair and green eyes and a cut-glass jaw?
“You can’t take the invitation back now. I am all excited about seeing the pieces on loan from the Met.”
Sasha decided to just go with it. He knew his limits, and he was the one bound to follow the rules. If he could keep this friendly and platonic, then she could as well.
CHAPTER TEN
SASHA MIGHT NOT BE a fan of Catholicism as an institution, but she was impressively knowledgeable about Catholic art.
“I was an art history major at Notre Dame, so half of the required courses dealt in iconography,” she said.
“I was an art history major, too.”
She stopped in her tracks and looked away from the tryptic taken from ruins in an old Eastern-sect church and stared at him with a narrowed gaze. “I thought priests weren’t supposed to lie.”
“I’m not lying. I took the first class to meet girls freshman year.” Sasha’s cheeks pinkened, and he wondered if she was thinking of him trying to meet girls. He would have been trying to meet a girl like her. If he was a betting man, he’d put money that they would have gotten together, given the right time and the right place.
Sasha looked back at the piece, which depicted the Madonna and Child, surrounded by rudimentarily rendered farm animals.