Sexting The Priest

Chapter Three: E

I wake up at nine with a headache, last night's mascara doing its best impression of a crime scene, and the specific, full-body dread of a woman who has some vague memory of saying something significant to someone and no memory of who that someone actually was.

Then I check my phone and remember everything, in order, like a slideshow narrated by my own worst instincts.

The thread is still there. Unlabeled number, no photo, twenty-some messages deep, ending on *I can live with that* at 2:14 in the morning. I read the whole thing twice, waiting for the mortification to fully land.

It doesn't, not the way I brace for. What lands instead, underneath the headache, is something closer to disappointment that there's nothing new since I fell asleep.

I hate that. I hate it enough to put the phone in the kitchen while I make coffee, like distance is a personality trait I can borrow for twenty minutes.

It buzzes before the coffee finishes brewing.

*Word of advice,* it says. *Drink water. Whoever you were texting last night sounds like she's going to regret the wine more than the honesty.*

I laugh into an empty mug, alone, at nine in the morning, which is either a red flag or the first genuinely nice thing that's happened to me in three weeks. Possibly both.

*Already ahead of you,* I type. *Also — did you just refer to me in the third person?*

*Felt safer. Less likely to get attached to a first person I don't have.*

*Bold strategy for a man who spent an hour last night being suspiciously good at comfort.*

*I contain multitudes. Most of them tired.*

That's day one, if I'm counting, which I am, even though I'd never admit that out loud to anyone who isn't a stranger with no name.

Day two starts with him first — a message waiting when I wake up, which does something warm and unearned to my chest before I've even had coffee. *Survive the hangover?* it says, and I spend an embarrassing amount of time deciding how casual to sound in response.

We don't talk about the wrong number again. We don't talk about Reid, or whoever he almost lost his composure over the night we met, or anything that would let either of us build a real person out of the other. Instead we invent a kind of game without naming it a game: questions allowed, identifying details not. What's the worst meal you've ever pretended to enjoy. What's a rule you followed for years before you noticed you were the only one still following it. What's the last thing that made you cry that you'd never admit to a person who actually knew you.

He's good at it. Unfairly good — the kind of good that makes me wonder, more than once, what he does for a living that's taught him to ask a question and then actually wait for the real answer instead of the polished one.

*Your turn,* he writes, on day three, somewhere past eleven. *Tell me something you've never told anyone.*

I think about it longer than the question probably deserves.

*I still have the earrings I was going to wear to the wedding I thought I was eventually going to have,* I type. *Bought them two years ago. Never told him. Never wore them either.*

The dots take a while.

*I made a promise when I was twenty-two that I haven't questioned once, out loud, to another living person, in eleven years,* he writes. *Until you.*

I stare at that until my eyes actually sting, which is an absurd thing to have happen over a text from a man whose name I don't know, sent from a number I got by accident, about a promise I understand nothing about.

*That's not fair,* I type. *You can't out-vulnerable me. I had a whole plan.*

*Apologies. I'll aim lower next time.*

*Please don't. I take it back. Keep doing that.*

He signs the next message — a small, throwaway thing about getting up early, nothing important — with a lowercase *e*, tucked under the last line like muscle memory, the kind of habit a person doesn't notice they still have until it's already sent.

*e?* I write back, three dots up before I can stop myself.

*Ignore that,* he says, fast enough that I know it embarrasses him. *Old habit. Force of muscle memory, not information.*

*Too late. You're E now. I need to call you something and you just handed me one for free.*

*That feels like it's breaking the rules.*

*It's one letter. It's not even a real clue. I could know six hundred men whose names start with E.*

*Comforting,* he writes, *and also concerning, depending on how I choose to take it.*

*Take it as: you're E. I'm — * I pause, thumb hovering, and land on the only thing that feels true enough to send. *I'm the woman with the earrings.*

*I can work with that.*

Four days of it. Four days of falling asleep to a stranger's version of honesty instead of the actual honesty I owe my sister, my mother, myself — the kind that would require admitting out loud that I'm doing better because of a wrong number, not despite one. I don't examine it too closely. Examining it feels like the fastest way to make it stop.

My mother calls on the fifth day, while I'm still deciding whether telling E about the earrings was the single most honest thing I've done all year or the single most reckless, and her voice has the specific, careful pitch she uses when she's about to say something she doesn't want to say.

"It's Grandma Peggy," she says. "She had a fall Tuesday. She's okay — she's stubborn, she's fine — but the doctor's using words like *can't live alone much longer*, and I can't get up there for at least three weeks because of the Denver trial, and I hate to ask—"

"I'll go," I say, before she finishes the sentence, because some decisions make themselves the second you're offered them, and because I am, apparently, a person who currently has nothing tying her to this city except a closet with one unworn dress in it and a job I can do from anywhere with decent Wi-Fi.

"You don't have to decide right this second."

"I already did."

I hang up and sit on the edge of my bed for a long minute, doing the math on a life that's about to get smaller in some ways and, I suspect, larger in others — my childhood bedroom, my grandmother's stubborn independence, a town I haven't lived in since I was eighteen and couldn't wait to leave it.

My phone is still open to the thread when I pick it back up.

*Change of plans,* I type. *Might be quiet for a bit. Family thing. Nothing dramatic, just — moving, sort of. Temporarily.*

*Everything okay?*

*Will be. Grandmother, mostly stubborn, slightly less mobile than she'd like to admit. I'm going to go make sure she eats something other than crackers and pride.*

*That sounds like the kind of thing that says more about you than you meant it to.*

*Don't psychoanalyze me, E. I'm fragile today.*

*Wouldn't dream of it. For what it's worth — I hope wherever you're headed is good to you.*

*It's a small town. Nothing ever happens there.*

*Small towns have a way of surprising people,* he writes, and I have no reason on earth to read anything into that, so I don't.

*I'll still have my phone,* I add, because I realize, with a small jolt, that the idea of the thread going quiet bothers me more than the idea of packing my entire life into two suitcases by Friday. *Don't go anywhere.*

*I wasn't planning on it,* he says. *I'm fairly committed to where I am.*

I don't know yet how true that is, or how much weight is sitting underneath it, or that in eight days I'll be sitting in a pew close enough to touch him, wondering how I ever managed to miss it.

I just close the app, start pulling suitcases down from the closet shelf, and let myself feel, for one more night, like the best part of my day is still ahead of me instead of two hundred miles behind.