Holy Sins

A Willing Temptation

AERIS

Two days.

Two whole days of telling myself I wasn't going to do it, and two days of thinking about absolutely nothing else.

I got up Monday morning and made myself useful, because being useful was the only thing keeping my head from replaying that conversation in the car on a loop like some kind of pathetic broken record.

You've been somewhere else for the last five minutes, Anne. I don't think it was Philip you were thinking about.

I heard it in the shower. I heard it pouring coffee. I heard it while I was supposed to be listening to my mother talk about somebody's tomato plants, and I nodded along like a normal functioning human being while my brain replayed a priest telling me he knew exactly what filthy thoughts I'd been having about him.

Ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. I was a grown-ass woman, not some teenager with a crush on her youth pastor.

I put on my scrubs anyway and drove to work like a person with her s**t together.

---

Renata clocked it before I'd even set my bag down.

"You look like hell," she said, not even glancing up from the chart she was flipping through. "The good kind of hell. The kind where a woman's thinking about something she shouldn't be."

"I'm fine."

"Sure you are." She finally looked at me, one eyebrow doing all the talking her mouth wasn't bothering with.

"None of my business, obviously. But whoever he is, tell him to either s**t or get off the pot, because you've reorganized the same supply drawer twice this morning without noticing."

"I have not."

"You have. Twice."

I looked down at the drawer in question. She wasn't wrong, and that pissed me off more than the observation itself.

The day dragged in that particular way when your brain has decided to check out and leave your body to handle the actual work.

I took blood pressure, charted symptoms, held a screaming toddler still long enough for Dr. Ella to check his ears, and the whole time some other part of me was running a completely different program underneath, replaying a low voice saying *come to confession, tell me everything* like it was scripture I'd already decided to worship.

Josie came in for her follow-up around noon, waddling in with a scowl that could've curdled milk.

"This baby better come soon," she announced to the entire waiting room, "or I swear to God I'm inducing myself with sheer force of will."

"That's not how it works," I told her, walking her back to a room.

"Don't care. Try me." She hoisted herself onto the exam table with a grunt. "You look like s**t, by the way. No offense."

"None taken. Everybody's very generous with that observation today."

I finished her appointment without giving her anything else to work with, though the smug little smile she wore on her way out told me she wasn't fooled for one damn second.

---

By the time my shift ended, I'd made and unmade the decision about forty separate times, and I was exhausted from arguing with myself about something that shouldn't have required this much internal debate.

Fine. Go to confession. That's what it was. A church thing. A completely normal, God-sanctioned, thousand-year-old ritual that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the man on the other side of the screen had told me, point blank, that he'd been having thoughts about me he shouldn't be having either.

I wasn't going there to confess a damn thing.

I was going there because I was tired.

Tired of lying to myself every morning like it did any good. Tired of pretending the thing sitting in my chest since that first Sunday was grief, or loneliness, or some understandable reaction to burying a husband, when I knew exactly what it actually was and had known for weeks.

I got home, showered off the clinic smell, and stood in front of my closet longer than any reasonable person should stand in front of a closet.

Scrubs, obviously not. Jeans felt wrong, too casual for whatever this actually was. I finally pulled out a dress I hadn't worn once since I got back to Larkhaven dark, fitted, the kind of thing that wasn't inappropriate for church but wasn't exactly modest either, sitting right on the line between respectable and deliberate.

I told myself I was picking it because it was clean.

I was lying to myself about that too, and at this point I'd basically stopped keeping track of how many lies I was telling in a single day.

I stood in front of the mirror, smoothed the fabric down, and looked at myself for a long moment.

"You're out of your goddamn mind," I said out loud, to nobody.

I grabbed my keys anyway.

---

My mother caught me on the way out the door, eyebrows lifting at the dress, the effort, the fact that I was leaving the house again after already having gone once today.

"Evening service?" she asked, not quite hiding the curiosity underneath it.

"Confession, actually."

"Since when do you confess?"

"Since now, apparently." I grabbed my bag before she could ask anything else. "Don't wait up."

She didn't push, though I caught the look she gave me on my way out, the one that said she had questions she wasn't going to voice yet, filed away for a night when I felt more like answering them.

The drive to Saint Michael's took twelve minutes. I spent gripping the wheel too tight and rehearsing absolutely nothing, because there was no version of what I planned to say that made a lick of sense outside my own head.

The church came into view the way it always did, stone and ivy catching the last of the evening light, bell tower silent for once. Only a couple cars sat in the lot. The evening confession wasn't exactly a crowd event .

I parked, sat there for a second with my hands still on the wheel, and looked at the front doors like they were about to make a decision for me that I already knew I'd made hours ago.

I'm tired of pretending, I thought.

I got out of the car, smoothed my dress down one more time out of pure nerves, and walked toward the church.