Dirty Prayers

God Help Him

"I think you are a woman accustomed to getting what she wants. And I think you have decided to want something you cannot have.

And I think you find the obstacle..." a pause, weighted and brief..."entertaining."

"Is that what you are?" I asked quietly.

"An obstacle?"

Something moved through his expression...complicated and fast.

He looked away, toward the stained-glass saints in their lead frames, looking appropriately tortured.

"That is what I must be," he said.

Not what I am. What he must be.

I heard it. From the tension around his mouth, he heard it too.

I stood and moved slowly along the side aisle, fingers trailing the pew backs. I felt his attention follow me, unwilling, reflexive, helpless as a compass finding north.

"How long have you been in Valcross?" I asked.

A careful beat. "Two years."

"Do you like it?"

The question seemed to catch him off guard. As if it had become largely irrelevant whether he liked anything.

"It is quiet," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"No," he said, after a moment. "I suppose it isn't."

I stopped at the small alcove where the Madonna stood, serene and unhelpful, with votive candles burning at her feet.

I crouched and relit one that had gone out.

"I used to hate how quiet it was," I said.

"I couldn't wait to leave. To have a loud life." I straightened and looked at him. "I got that. Full calendar, husband, house. Noise in every room. A pause.

"Turns out you can be very loud and very lonely at the same time."

He was watching me differently now, not monitoring a threat but something more open.

"Why did you come back?" he asked. The priest is entirely gone from it. Just a man, asking something he actually wanted to know.

"Because this is the only place that ever felt like mine," I said.

"Even when I was desperate to leave it."

Thunder moved through, lower now. The storm beginning its slow migration away.

Johan stood six feet from me and looked at me with eyes that were not, at this moment, icy at all. They were unguarded and full of something he had not named and would not name tonight.

But he wasn't looking away.

"You should not be here," he said softly.

"The storm—"

"Not because of the storm." His jaw tightened. "You know that."

"Yes," I said. "I know."

The space between us was full and warm and heavy, like air before a fire caught up.

He looked at my mouth. He didn't mean to. Less than a second, then his gaze pulled back up immediately, but the color along his cheekbones was not candlelight.

"Sit down, Ivy," he said. Roughly. "I'll make tea."

I blinked. "Tea."

"The kitchen is in the sacristy." Already retreating, layering the priest back on with visible effort.

"It will be another thirty minutes at least. You might as well be warm."

I watched him disappear.

I looked at the Madonna. "He made me tea," I told her quietly.

She had nothing to say about it.

The tea was black and strong, and he brought it without asking how I took it.

Which meant he had thought about it. I said nothing and drank it exactly as it was.

We sat...him in the chair beside the lectern, me in the pew, six feet and an entire theology between us, and talked about small things. The village. The bakery with the crooked sign. A family I remembered from childhood, still in the same house on the hill.

He spoke carefully at first. Then less carefully. Then, once, almost easily, a dry, quiet observation about the village council and the ongoing argument over the cobblestones made me laugh out loud. He looked at the sound of it with an expression so unguarded it was almost painful to see.

Like a man remembering something he had forgotten he missed.

When the rain stopped, the silence it left felt enormous.

I stood, smoothed my dress, picked up my bag.

"Thank you for the tea, Father."

He stood too, and for a moment we were closer than the furniture had allowed. Close enough for sandalwood. Close enough to count the exact distance between his resolve and its end.

He looked down at me. I looked up at him.

"Ivy," he said. Low. Warning and something else entirely, braided together.

"I know," I said softly.

I didn't know which of us I was answering.

I walked to the door. The evening air was cold and clean, rain-washed stone, and autumn dark.

"Same time Thursday?" I said to the door frame.

Behind me is a breath. Long and slow and not entirely without something that sounded, if you were listening closely enough, like the very beginning of surrender.

"God help me," he said quietly.

I stepped into the wet evening and smiled all the way home.

Thursday came, and I dressed for it.

Not the white dress... I had already played innocent, and we both knew how that had ended.

Not the green silk either, which belonged to first impressions of being seen for the first time.

This called for something else entirely.

I chose black. A dress that crossed at the neckline and tied at the waist and left my shoulders and the long line of my collarbones entirely bare.

I wore my hair down, loose gold waves that I knew caught the candlelight in a way that was almost unfair.

I wore nothing at the throat except my own pulse, visible and unbothered.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment.

"You are going to confession," I said on my reflection.

My reflection looked entirely unrepentant.

Perfect, I thought. That's rather the point.

Saint Jude's was quiet the way it was always quiet, that deep, swallowed silence that felt less like peace and more like something holding its breath.

The candles burned their patient gold along the walls.

The stained-glass bled its purples and rubies across the cold floor.

The red light above the confessional was lit.

I crossed the church without hurrying, without looking toward the sacristy door, without giving myself time to reconsider something I had no intention of reconsidering.

I genuflected at the altar out of habit, or mischief, the line between them had always been thin for me, and then I pulled back the heavy curtain and stepped inside.

The booth was dark and close and smelled of old wood and candle wax and something warmer underneath.

I settled onto the kneeler, arranged my dress, and folded my hands in my lap with the practiced composure of a woman who had done terrible things and intended to describe them in detail.

The silence stretched.

"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

His voice, even reduced to a murmur through the carved lattice, did what it always did to the air. Weighted it. Filled it.

"When did you last make a confession?"

"Last Thursday," I said pleasantly.

A pause. "...Go ahead."

I leaned slightly forward. Through the lattice I could see the outline of him, the straight line of his profile, the set of his jaw, the hands folded in his lap with a stillness that was not calm but its opposite. Effort made invisible.

"Forgive me, Father," I began, soft and unhurried. "For I have sinned."

"God forgives—"

"I've been thinking," I continued gently, "about the things I've done. The men. A pause, just long enough.

"You said I should reflect on my sins in full. So I thought, "Why not do it properly?"

A silence. Then carefully, "Confession requires genuine contrition, Ivy."

"I know." I tilted my head.

"I'm getting there. I thought I'd start with the inventory."

"That is not how—"