But when Jack inclined his head toward the bleachers, Patrick knew his best friend (since they were in diapers) saw him. And Patrick thought it was maybe time to let him in.
They sat down and Patrick took a few seconds while toweling off the back of his neck to figure out what he should say.
In the end, he figured it was best to just spit it out. “I have a thing for Sasha.”
“Well, obviously.” Jack said that like it was clear as day, and Patrick had to go back and comb his mind for times he would have slipped up with Sasha in front of Jack and/or Hannah. “The only real question is what you’re going to do about it.”
“Obviously,” he said, mocking his friend’s derisive tone, “I’m going to do absolutely nothing.”
“See, that’s not what I think you should do at all.”
“Dude, you know I’m a priest, right?” Patrick was almost ready to take his friend’s temperature. “You were at the ordination and everything.”
“Yeah, but dude. I supported you and all, but I never really thought that this was the right thing for you.”
“I can’t believe that you’re telling me this now.”
“I couldn’t really tell you anything after your mother died and Ashley left you practically at the altar.” That was true. Before his mother had died, telling him in one of her last lucid moments that she could only rest easy if one of her sons took orders, he’d never really thought about becoming a priest. His behavior certainly hadn’t been anything close to celibate.
But he couldn’t understand why it had seemed to fit him so well for the last decade until—BOOM—everything changed. And Jack was right, he wasn’t really hearing reason after his mother’s death. The only person in the world who he felt really understood him was gone, and he hadn’t trusted his friends enough to open up.
In addition to giving him a way to let his mother rest easy and feel closer to her, becoming a priest had been an extremely convenient way to shut off his own needs—to shut out the world.
But the world had a way of crashing back in. This thing with Sasha felt like a tidal wave. He didn’t understand how he could feel so in tune with her while spending so little one-on-one time with her. Not that he’d have any more of that now that he’d screwed it all up.
“Has anything happened between the two of you?” Jack, his friend the journalist, was always going to dig a little bit deeper. He should have told Chris, who would have shrugged and told him to “nail Sasha and worry about it later,” or his father, who would have grimaced and gone back to worrying about money.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” And he didn’t. He also shouldn’t. What had happened between the two of them was wrong in the eyes of the Church—no question—but it was also between the two of them.
“Dude, she’s Hannah’s best friend.”
“And what of it?”
“Hannah will gut you like a pig if you hurt her best friend, and I don’t think being pregnant has slowed her down at all.” His friend said that with a smile meaning he was very happy to be married to a woman who threatened to gut priests like pigs.
Patrick allowed himself to wonder if he and Sasha could be that happy if he wasn’t a priest. If he could just wave this one huge obstacle away, what kind of couple would they be?
He’d had an idea of who Sasha was—polite, contained, upper-crust girl from the East Coast. Part of him must have known that she had the potential to blow up his life because he’d never allowed himself to dig deeper. Even though he knew that everyone he met had a secret story in addition to the one they told the world.
“I need what I’m about to tell you to stay in the vault.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
Patrick needed to talk about this, and Jack was really his only option right now. It wasn’t like he could call up any of his friends from seminary with girl problems. “It would hurt her if she knew I told you and Hannah rode in trying to fix things. And you know Hannah would try to fix things.”
Jack leaned back on the bleacher behind them and said, “All right. Shoot.”
“Her family is way fucked up. More than like most families.”
“That’s not a secret, my good dude.” Jack shook his head. “I could have told you that from the way she usually looks at the phone when one of them calls her. And they call her on the phone instead of texting. It’s weird.”
“Yeah, but she’s got this idea that she’s a bad person because she wants—”
Patrick was at a loss for what Sasha wanted that was bad enough to make her think that she was a bad person. It wasn’t like she’d taken vows. And she wasn’t a true believer. There was a whole other fucked-up system in her head—aside from the Church’s misogynist teachings on women and sex that had trapped him. Since when had he started feeling trapped?
“Anything. She feels guilty for wanting anything.”
Jack blew out some air. “She sounds like someone else I know.”
“Who, me?” Patrick certainly didn’t think that he’d been describing himself. He’d always thought that his needs and wants were simple enough that he could make do with what he had. He’d always had enough—maybe not all that he wanted, but enough.
“Yeah, you.” Jack laughed again, and Patrick sort of wanted to punch him. He wanted to punch a lot of people these days. “You’re both dummies.”
“Says the dummy who lied to his now-wife for almost a month about why he was acting like a bozo.”
“She was lying, too. And we cleared that up.” Jack put up a hand. “This isn’t worth arguing about, and you’re changing the subject.”
Caught. “It was a bad idea to mention anything.”
“Why?” Jack looked hurt. “I’m your friend. If you’re worried about something, I want to hear it.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, because I can’t change anything about the situation.” He could only try to forget how Sasha made him feel—made him want—and go back to his life by plowing forward. Besides, how he’d acted at the bar after Sasha had come made sure that she wouldn’t want to change anything even if they could.
“You can change anything. People change all the time. You changed after your mom died. Who says you can’t change again?”
“The Catholic Church.” It wasn’t a guarantee that the Church would allow him to be laicized. It was a big fucking deal. But that wasn’t the only thing stopping him. If he left, he was pretty sure his mom’s spirit would become a ghost and haunt him. That wasn’t a part of the catechism, and it was likely blasphemy. But he still believed it. And who was to say that he couldn’t walk out of the Church a free man and end up alone anyway? Thinking about it made him dizzy. “And what if it doesn’t work?”