CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
BOTTOMLESS MIMOSAS WOULD HAVE to wait for another day. When Sasha called Hannah and filled her in on the morning’s events, she enlisted Jack, Matt, Bridget, and Kelly to come help them start packing up. For her part, Hannah came with food and drink and insistent instructions.
Patrick was surprised that everyone dropped whatever they’d planned to do that Sunday to help him and Sasha. It wasn’t that he thought that any of their friends disapproved of him leaving the priesthood or of his relationship with Sasha. But he’d never allowed himself to count on other people to help him. He guessed that was something he would have to get used to as a layperson.
He was in Sasha’s living room, boxing up her extensive stash of books—mostly romance—when Jack approached him. “I didn’t think you would actually do it.”
“Leave the Church?” Patrick turned to his best friend. “Or shack up with Sasha?”
Jack laughed and patted him on the back. “Either.”
Patrick felt the need to explain himself. It wasn’t that he felt guilty about anything other than leaving St. Bart’s temporarily without a pastor, but he thought he’d been careful about hiding his feelings for Sasha when he actually hadn’t been. He had never lied to Jack about that, but he hadn’t been open with his friend either. And Jack had always come to him with his problems. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” Jack picked up a bookend and wrapped it. “I kind of feel bad that it took me as long as it did to realize how unhappy you were.”
“I wasn’t unhappy for a long time. And Sasha wasn’t the only reason it was right for me to leave—but she was the catalyst.”
Jack paused before asking, “What are you going to do for a job?”
“Other than bartending?” Not that it wasn’t a noble profession. “I was thinking about going back to school to become a therapist.”
The wait for Jack’s answer was agonizing because he wanted his friend to approve of his plans. Vulnerability was weird, but he guessed he would have to get used to it, not being seen as an infallible messenger from God.
“Are you going to start charging me for our talks?”
Relief washed over him. “Never.”
An hour later Bridget and Matt left. Fifteen minutes after that, his brother shocked everyone by showing up. With more snack food.
“Thanks for being here.” Patrick wasn’t about to make Chris squirm when he’d done something nice that wouldn’t benefit him for the first time in forever.
“A former priest has told me for years that I’m a selfish asshole, so . . .” Chris sort of shrugged, and Patrick hugged him. The Dooleys weren’t huggers, so Chris stiffened up before patting his brother on the back a few times. He cleared his throat. “Put me to work.”
After Sasha sent Chris and Jack on a trip to her storage unit, Patrick found her and planted a kiss on the back of her neck. When he looked up, Hannah was watching him with a look on her face that he would characterize as scary. If he was scared of her. Which he was not.
“Stop with that look,” Sasha said.
Hannah popped some cheese into her mouth. “What look?”
“The look that says you’re about to warn Patrick about what you’ll do to him if he hurts me. I almost scared him off well enough on my own, and I don’t need your help.”
“Well, he needs to know that you’ll have help burying his body if it comes to that.”
Patrick’s heart warmed that Sasha had someone who was so on her side after seeing how her family treated her. He would always have her back, but it was good that he wasn’t alone in that. Sasha deserved all the good things—and he wouldn’t be alone in giving them to her.
He hugged her from behind and whispered in her ear, “I promise I won’t make you have to ‘Goodbye Earl’ me.”
Sasha laughed and he couldn’t help kissing her, even with an audience. He couldn’t even stop himself when Hannah huffed and said, “Now that’s just so cute that it’s gross,” and walked away.
* * *
—
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS were a blur of activity. Sasha moved out of the condo where she’d lived for over a decade. It was bittersweet because she was moving in with a very hot man who loved her and had a decade of sex to make up for. She really couldn’t complain.
Maybe it was all the sexing that softened her up enough to answer the phone when her mother called a week after the scene at the condo. Moira didn’t apologize, of course. “Sorry” wasn’t a word that fit very well in her vocabulary. She did, however, invite Sasha and Patrick to their house for Labor Day weekend. Sasha knew it was a huge thing for her mother to just gloss over all the choices that Sasha had made of late. But it wasn’t quite enough yet.
Sasha declined, but said that she would keep Thanksgiving open. She wasn’t quite ready to share Patrick with her family yet.
There was one wrinkle in their bliss, though, when they were unpacking in the second bedroom of the apartment above Dooley’s that they were going to share. Sasha was pulling Patrick’s books out of a box on the side of the room where they would be stored. She couldn’t allow his books on philosophy and religion to mingle with her romance novels. It would be unseemly—for the romance novels. She wouldn’t want Lisa Kleypas to be bored to death sitting next to Thomas Aquinas.
She pulled out one of Patrick’s five bibles, and a hunk of hair fell out. She was holding it and trying to figure out if she needed to find a way to fake her own death—the only option if Patrick was some weird hair fetishist—when he walked in and blanched.
He took the hair from her hand and said, “This is not what it looks like.”
“So, you don’t collect weird strands of hair?”
He looked down at it. “This is your hair.”
“From the time I cut it off? You kept it?” She didn’t know if she was flattered or horrified.
“Yeah, it’s gross and weird. I’m sorry.” He looked so embarrassed. It was so adorable that she was less creeped out by it.
“It’s some real Derek Craven shit.”
“Who is Derek Craven? Is that one of your ex-boyfriends?”
As a priest, Patrick probably didn’t read very many romance novels. She had so much to teach him. “Derek Craven is not one of my ex-boyfriends, Patrick.” She grabbed him by the upper arms. “I know that you’ve read all the important works by dead white guys, but if you don’t read Dreaming of You immediately, we’re going to have to break up.”