kind to all of their friends—excepting his idiot brother. She gave him dirty looks because he’d hurt her friend, Bridget, when they’d broken up and after. And he couldn’t get the image of her reading to that preschool class out of his head. She’d been so fresh and lovely and excited and engaged. She’d made all those kids feel like they were the only ones in the room.
She made him feel that way every time she talked to him. And he didn’t deserve to feel that light on him because his brain was turning it into something prurient, when she probably didn’t mean it that way.
“I’m not a nice girl, Patrick.” She didn’t sound wistful about that. She sounded suggestive. “My sisters are nice. Marlena and Madison are very nice.”
“How did you escape an ‘M’ name?”
“My mother took one look at me, decided that I was the most dramatic child that she could ever contemplate, and gave me a name to match.” Sasha’s voice dripped with good humor, despite the fact that what she was saying was heartbreaking. “She decided that I didn’t belong in her cabal of M’s. My father’s name is Steve, though.”
He ignored that but probed on. He couldn’t help himself. “I still don’t believe that you’re not a nice girl.”
“I always want to do bad things.” She sighed. “My first instinct is always the wrong one.”
“That’s just being human,” he said. “The important thing is that you do the right thing.” He’d never seen her do the wrong thing. Although her mildly suggestive tone might be skirting the border. But she wasn’t religious. It wasn’t wrong for her. It was wrong for him to be having thoughts about it. He was a fucking mess.
“But how do I know if I’m doing the right thing if I don’t believe in anything?”
Patrick had to laugh at that. “Beats me. You know I need to have the rules.”
“I don’t want to live by the rules that my parents set out for me, and I don’t want to live by the rules of a church. How do I know that I’m a decent person?”
“You look inside and you look around. You think that you would have friendships that have lasted for fifteen years if you were a shitty person?”
“I mean, Jack is still friends with your brother.”
She made him laugh—again. This was starting to be a problem. He was pretty sure this confessional had never seen this level of mirth.
“You’ve got me there. I think that Jack is just too attached to the idea that Chris might grow and change. I hold out hope, too. But it’s very faint.”
“That’s really saying something—specifically, that your brother is a real jerk—if even a priest thinks he’s past saving.”
“I deal in hope and faith, but I can’t turn off my reason.”
“Is that why you were so cool with Bridget when she told you about her abortion?”
That was a complicated issue for him. There was what the Church believed—what he was required to preach—and what he believed in the privacy of his own heart. He liked to think that life-and-death decisions were between the person making the decision and God. He tended to think that forcing people to stay pregnant was petty, misogynist cruelty.
He avoided preaching about it in general and tried to take individual cases as they came. “Bridget did what she needed to do to save her own life, and I respect that.”
“Hmm.” Sasha was silent after that for long moments, until she said, “This is a cool confessional.”
Thank goodness, something that didn’t involve faith and redemption. “We don’t really use it anymore, but it’s a good place to hide.”
She gave one of those unexpected barks of laughter that made her sound both amused and world-weary. He could drink that sound and feel like his soul was new again. “What were you hiding from?”
“Baked goods. You’ve caused a bit of controversy bringing outsiders and professionals into the domain of the parish council.”
“I haven’t caused too much trouble for you, have I?”
A loaded question. Every time he thought about her, he was in trouble. It was the vague sense that his life wasn’t good enough. He knew what he should do about it—prayer, contemplation, reconciliation. But he couldn’t bring himself to cut off the source of his sinful thinking. It just didn’t seem like an option to lull himself back into a sense that he was here in this life and therefore that meant that his vocation was right with God.
“No, you haven’t.”
“Good.