Hot Under His Collar - Andie J. Christopher Page 0,28
just felt called. It was so obvious to me that I should be pursuing it that I couldn’t avoid it.”
“Did you want to avoid it?” Sasha couldn’t imagine trying to parse out a religious calling from her parents’ wishes. She’d been pursuing marriage to the “right kind” of man and having children so that she’d get their approval for as long as she could remember. Her parents would probably be thrilled if she decided to enter a convent—both because it would be something that they could brag about in the lobby of their church and they wouldn’t have to worry about her shaming them anymore. But they weren’t fervent believers, and neither was Sasha. If she believed and then felt called, it would be difficult to resist.
“Not at the time, no.”
Sasha knew one thing with certainty as she finished helping Patrick clean up and then went home—assured he could get back to the Church without her staying. Her crush on him had to go away, because he was where he belonged.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I WANT TO HAVE sex with a priest.” Sasha just said it. She wasn’t going to spend thirty minutes of their forty-five-minute session forcing her therapist to tease this dirty little secret out. Not like the time she’d admitted to lusting after her college English professor. Besides, whenever Sasha made Pam pull her deepest, darkest stuff out, Pam laughed like a drunken hyena when she got to the big reveal. Pam was an unconventional therapist, but her methods worked.
“Is this the beginning of a joke?” Pam inquired gently, after she stopped laughing. Sasha sometimes came in with jokes. Pam never laughed at those, but it helped Sasha acclimate to telling someone the truth about how she was feeling. Other than with Hannah—and not even with Hannah all the time—Sasha kept a very tight lid on her emotions.
That was what Finerghty women did. Needless to say, therapy was very difficult for her.
“No, I am infatuated with an actual priest.” Sasha wrung her sweaty hands in her lap and tapped her foot. The lust was like its own person in her body, with its own kinetic energy. The lust wanted to move.
“A Catholic priest?” Pam sounded incredulous.
The only sound Sasha could get herself to make was a squeak. Luckily, she’d been seeing Pam for a few years. She’d started seeing the septuagenarian Jungian when she’d realized that she had a habit of lying to herself and those close to her without even thinking about it. They weren’t harmful lies; they were the kinds of things she would say to make sure everyone around her was comfortable.
For example, she never told anyone that anything they were doing was a bad idea. She would tell them that she supported them and hope the concerned look on her face shone through enough for them to know that they were about to make a huge, catastrophic, gigantic, life-altering mistake.
It had a fifty percent chance of working—higher with her sister because facial expressions were their common language. Some families had love languages like acts of service or quality time; the Finerghtys had telling each other off with nary a raised voice. For that matter, after the age of thirty, there was nary a raised eyebrow due to the compulsory, preventative Botox.
Even after five years of sitting in Pam’s eclectic office once a week, learning to tell the truth, she couldn’t say the whole truth all the time. She had to dole it out in pieces. It often made things much more complicated.
“Well, does he want to have sex with you?” Pam’s question caught Sasha completely off guard.
“What does that have to do with anything?” It wasn’t as though they could sleep together, so what did him wanting to sleep with her have to do with her massive, unruly desire to rip off his collar and ride him like a pony?
“You’re both consenting adults.” Pam shrugged, even though Sasha knew for a fact that her therapist had grown up a devout Catholic. “It could be a whole lot worse.”
“The problem is that I’ve gone on three dates with a perfectly nice groomsman.”
“Do you want to have sex with the groomsman?”
“Not yet.” Sasha was at the point where she liked Nathan enough to hope that someday she would want to have sex with him. But the overpowering need to feel all of his skin against hers hadn’t shown up yet. Maybe it was a fake-it-until-you-make-it sort of thing. Not orgasms—she’d finally stopped faking those when Hannah and Bridget