Hot Under His Collar - Andie J. Christopher Page 0,58
always needed someone there to keep him organized and on track. First, it had been his mother. After she’d passed away, the responsibility had fallen to Patrick and Chris. As the baby of the family, Chris’s help was more in the form of worrying than helping. He just blasted that worry onto everyone else and let them worry about the consequences.
He totally understood why Jack’s sister, Bridget, had dumped his ass, and he hadn’t found anyone else to take him on.
It was a real bitch to be able to see everyone else’s problems clearly, and not be able to solve his own. That must have been why he turned to Jack and said, “I have a lot on my mind.”
“The pre-K program?” Jack picked up the ball, dribbled it, and took a shot that missed. “I thought Sasha had you almost sorted with that.”
“Yeah, she does.” And that was the problem. “It’s bigger than that.” It was hard to say that his own petty problems were bigger than his vocation and his parish. Wasn’t God supposed to be bigger than everything?
Jack certainly looked shocked that he’d revealed something about his inner life. “Whoa,” was his only response.
Patrick felt guilty for laying this on him. Chris had wandered off to practice layups. Patrick’s father was a man of few words, and his brother didn’t have enough range to listen to problems beyond client development that would help him move up the ladder at his law firm, so Patrick wasn’t used to revealing himself. What was the point?
But when Jack inclined his head toward the bleachers, Patrick knew his best friend (since they were in diapers) saw him. And Patrick thought it was maybe time to let him in.
They sat down and Patrick took a few seconds while toweling off the back of his neck to figure out what he should say.
In the end, he figured it was best to just spit it out. “I have a thing for Sasha.”
“Well, obviously.” Jack said that like it was clear as day, and Patrick had to go back and comb his mind for times he would have slipped up with Sasha in front of Jack and/or Hannah. “The only real question is what you’re going to do about it.”
“Obviously,” he said, mocking his friend’s derisive tone, “I’m going to do absolutely nothing.”
“See, that’s not what I think you should do at all.”
“Dude, you know I’m a priest, right?” Patrick was almost ready to take his friend’s temperature. “You were at the ordination and everything.”
“Yeah, but dude. I supported you and all, but I never really thought that this was the right thing for you.”
“I can’t believe that you’re telling me this now.”
“I couldn’t really tell you anything after your mother died and Ashley left you practically at the altar.” That was true. Before his mother had died, telling him in one of her last lucid moments that she could only rest easy if one of her sons took orders, he’d never really thought about becoming a priest. His behavior certainly hadn’t been anything close to celibate.
But he couldn’t understand why it had seemed to fit him so well for the last decade until—BOOM—everything changed. And Jack was right, he wasn’t really hearing reason after his mother’s death. The only person in the world who he felt really understood him was gone, and he hadn’t trusted his friends enough to open up.
In addition to giving him a way to let his mother rest easy and feel closer to her, becoming a priest had been an extremely convenient way to shut off his own needs—to shut out the world.
But the world had a way of crashing back in. This thing with Sasha felt like a tidal wave. He didn’t understand how he could feel so in tune with her while spending so little one-on-one time with her. Not that he’d have any more of that now that he’d screwed it all up.
“Has anything happened between the two of you?” Jack, his friend the journalist, was always going to dig a little bit deeper. He should have told Chris, who would have shrugged and told him to “nail Sasha and worry about it later,” or his father, who would have grimaced and gone back to worrying about money.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” And he didn’t. He also shouldn’t. What had happened between the two of them was wrong in the eyes of the Church—no question—but it was also between the two of them.