Dirty Prayers

Hard for My Sins

I always knew I wanted Johan from the moment I came back, but watching him try so hard to play the holy priest at my family's dinner table made me want him even faster.

"Tell Father Johan about your photography, Ivy," my mother said. "Before the marriage."

I set down my fork.

"I traveled alone mostly," I said, looking directly at Johan. "I had a talent for finding beautiful things in places people had stopped looking at." A pause.

"I was always drawn to things that weren't supposed to be beautiful. Forbidden things. Broken things." I tilted my head. "I find they have more depth than the obvious subjects. More tension."

Johan's hand stilled on his wine glass.

"Why forbidden things?" my father asked.

"Because something forbidden has weight," I said, still looking at Johan.

"It means something made a choice...decided to become forbidden. And there's always a tension in that. Between what something is and what it wants to be."

Johan looked at me with those complicated winter-blue eyes and said nothing for a moment.

His shoulders held in that taut, effortful stillness that I had come to understand was not peace but its desperate opposite.

"That's a perceptive way to see the world," he said carefully.

"I find the world more interesting that way," I said softly. "Don't you?"

"Yes," he said. Quiet and low and completely honest. "God help me, I do."

My mother was already talking about dessert.

After dinner, my father poured something old and amber, and we moved to the sitting room.

My parents took the sofa. Johan chose the armchair by the window...the careful choice, the one farthest from me.

I settled on the larger sofa with my legs tucked under me, my silk dress catching the firelight, and said nothing and simply looked at him.

His eyes moved naturally across the room, reached me, and redirected with a precision that was just slightly too precise to be accidental.

My mother talked about the neighbors. My father dozed off.

And for ninety seconds, my mother was refilling coffee, my father's eyes closed... Johan and I were alone in the firelit room.

He looked at me.

Not the managed, redirected glances of the past two hours. A direct, unguarded look, and what lived in it had nothing to do with the priest. It was older and simpler and considerably more dangerous. Want, undisguised, in the eyes of a man who had been carefully disguising it for weeks and had, in this witnessed moment, simply run out of the energy to continue.

Four seconds.

The morning after dinner, I woke up thinking about his hands.

Not in the way I usually thought about men’s hands, not with the cool, appraising interest of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and was already three steps into getting it.

This was different. Softer around the edges. More inconvenient.

I lay in the narrow bed of my childhood bedroom and stared at the water stain on the ceiling that had been there since I was fourteen and thought about the way his hand had moved toward me in the hallway...that barely-there inch, that involuntary reach, the thing he caught and stopped and curled back into stillness at his side...and felt something in my chest that I had not budgeted for and did not particularly want to examine.

Please, Ivy.

I had been called many things by many men. Dangerous. Irresistible. Too much. Not enough.

I had been wanted and pursued and left flowers outside my apartment door by a banker in Milan who should have known better and did not.

I had been called a force of nature by a man who meant it as a warning and watched me smile at it.

No one had ever said please to me like that. Like the word came from somewhere honest and undefended. Like it was the most truthful thing he had ever said and the most painful.

I stared at the ceiling for too long.

Then I got up, dressed with purpose, and went to find some trouble.

Because that was what I did when something got too close to feeling like something real.

I moved. I sought out the simple, uncomplicated warmth of a man who wanted me without reservation and asked for nothing complicated in return.

I reminded myself that this was who I was... Ivy Blackwell, divorced and unrepentant, a woman who took what she wanted and left cleanly and answered to no one.

I was very good at reminding myself of this.

I have been finding it, lately, less convincing than it used to.

Valcross on a Saturday morning was the closest a town that size ever got to being festive.

The market stalls spread along the main square, the old cobblestones crowded with people and canvas bags and the smell of bread and coffee and cut flowers.

September light, pale and golden, lying across the stone buildings like something spilled.

I bought coffee from the corner café and stood outside in my camel coat, fitted, belted, and effortless in the way that requires considerable effort...with my hair loose and my eyes sharp and let the morning settle around me.

I was not, I told myself, looking for anyone in particular.

The square offered several points of interest regardless.

There was a man outside the bookshop, early thirties, dark-haired, with the kind of easy physical confidence that came from a life lived in his own body without apology.

He had taken his jacket off despite the September cold, loading boxes into a van with unhurried efficiency.

Strong hands. Good jaw. A smile that reached his eyes without trying.

I noted him the way I note useful things.

I was on my second sip of coffee when I became aware, with the particular animal instinct I had long since stopped questioning, that something had changed in the texture of the square behind me.

A stillness. A weight.

I knew that quality of presence. I had been cataloging it for weeks.

I did not turn around.

Instead, I looked at the man by the bookshop and let my gaze settle on him.

He looked up from the box he was lifting.

Found your eyes across the square.

I smiled. Not the full smile. Just the beginning of one. Warm and slightly questioning. The smile that said,

"I see you, and I’m interested, and you should try."

He set the box down. Smiled back, honestly, no artifice.

Pushed a hand through his dark hair and crossed the distance between us.

“You look like you could use someone to talk to,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a new one.”

He laughed easily. “I was going to say better coffee, but you already have some.”

“I know the owner. Good stuff in the back, for people he likes.” He tilted his head. “I could introduce you.”

“I’m Ivy,” I said, and watched the exact moment he decided to pursue this with everything he had.

“Luca.” He held my hand a beat longer than required. “You’re not local.”

“I grew up here. Been gone ten years.”

“Then welcome back.” Warm dark eyes, entirely uncomplicated. “Seriously, coffee. Homecoming gift.”

“And what do you want in return?” I asked because I had learned that asking directly was kinder than pretending.

He smiled slowly. “A local tour. From someone who actually knows.”

I let my eyes move over him in the frank, unhurried way I had perfected...the way that made men feel chosen rather than assessed, even though it was very much both. “I think I can manage that.”

His smile widened into something considerably more interesting.

And behind me, perhaps fifteen feet away, I heard footsteps stop.

I did not turn around. I laughed at something Luca said... genuinely, because he was funny... and let my free hand come to rest on the van beside his, close but not touching. That was almost anything.