Penance

“Shouldn’t you be preparing for the ceremony?”

“All done. Wrote everything right after your godmother called, actually. Didn’t want to be in a rush this time.” His grin was infectious and she smiled back warmly. 

He turned back the way he had come and joined her as she began making her way back to the house. 

“Were you looking for me?” She gave him a sideways glance out of the corner of her eye and caught his tiny smile. 

“Yeah. Wanted to check and see if you were okay after this morning’s collision.”

“Oh yeah, just dandy.” Dandy? Who the fuck says dandy? “That corner is a menace. They should really install a mirror or something.  It’s not the first pile-up that’s occurred in that spot. Once, when Isla was a baby…”

He held up a hand to gently interrupt her nervous babble. 

“I, um, hope I didn’t freak you out last night.”

Her first instinct was to deflect with a joke. It was her signature move, after all. Or had been. But she’d put in a lot of work these last ten years and, if he expected to find her unchanged, it was better to disabuse him of that idea now. Also, and she knew it was petty of her, but fuck it, he broke her heart - she did kind of want to poke at him a bit. He couldn’t just sail in and get in the way of her peace after a decade of radio silence without some repercussions. 

“It was an unexpected conversation,” she agreed, “but no, I wasn’t ‘freaked out’ by it. Startled, certainly. It’s not every day that someone you had a one night stand with pops back into your life and declares themselves still in love with you.”

He twitched when she said “one night stand” and she could tell it upset him. Too bad. 

“So that kiss last night…?”

She stopped at the edge of the tree line and turned to face him. She could see the hurt in his eyes and, while she could be petty, she wasn’t cruel. 

She took his hands in hers. “It was just a kiss.”

“Oh.”

She tightened her grip and shook his arms a bit. “Not oh. Not that way. But I believe I asked for time to think.”

He looked a bit guilty and softly agreed, “You did.”

“And it’s been less than twenty-four hours,” she continued. 

“Uhhhh…”

She gave him a pointed, expectant look. 

“I’ve just waited a long time to see you again and I might be a little...impatient.” At least he had the good sense to look embarrassed about it, otherwise...oh, fuck it. 

“Impatient?” she repeated, incredulous. “You...I...impatient? I haven’t heard from you in ten years. Ten. Years. And now you’re impatient? You know what? I think I feel a little speech coming on.” His eyes widened and she was gratified to see a flash of something akin to panic in them. Good. He needed to squirm a bit. “Let’s just take a little trip into the past, shall we? After that night, in the confessional? After I poured my heart out to you and you snogged me senseless and you seemed pretty damn keen to take it further than that until that damned painting fell? You went to my father’s house and broke up with him the day before his wedding just to avoid being around me. Then you followed me out to a bus stop and told me that you didn’t want to see me again and that I’m banned from your church. With the greatest of compliments, if I recall correctly.” He winced and opened his mouth. “Not done yet.” His mouth closed with a nearly audible snap. “Then you showed up at my door less than twenty-four hours later under the guise of explaining to me why you, a Catholic priest, couldn’t have sex with me, only to proceed to do just that. And it was…” She can’t help softening at the memory. “It was…” She looked him in the eyes and didn’t shy away from the happiness or the pain the memory still caused on the rare occasion she dusted it off. “It was everything. Everything that I never knew I wanted or needed. It was right there. With you. You said that if you had sex with me you would fall in love with me. And you said you did. And I believed you. But I fell in love with you, too. You stayed the night. You pinned me to the side of my father’s house and kissed me. Passionately. Then you followed me out to the same bus stop and told me that you loved me but that you chose god. And you walked away. Again.” She closed her eyes a moment and swallowed down the tears before opening them and whispering, “You told me it would pass and banned me from your church and walked away.”  She could see the anguish written in his face but continued before he could interrupt. “You set the terms for our entire relationship, such as it was. And now you show up and expect that I’ll just immediately drop everything to be with you again?”

He shook his head as his expression changed from anguish to denial. “That’s not… I didn’t… It wasn’t up to me.”

“But it was. You stopped me leaving that night at the restaurant and gave me your details. Told me if I needed someone to talk to, you were there. Invited me to the back for tea. Asked me to volunteer at the fête. Then you chased me down to give me a Bible and invited me to come round for a chat. You said you wanted to be friends and asked me shopping for holy dresses. You invited yourself to my café and kept questioning me about myself and my life but refused to answer my questions about yours in any meaningful way.”

“I didn’t invite you to the church that night.”

“You didn’t, that’s true. But I wasn’t there for you.”

The look on his face would have been comical if the situation were different. “Then why…?”

“Why was I there?”  He nodded and she took a steadying breath. “I told you. I was trying to have a little prayer.”

“But why? You never said. I assumed…”

“What? That I was looking for you? That I was on the pull? Trying to steal your virtue?”

He nodded cautiously. 

“Sorry, no. Claire and I...we’d had a row a couple of days before. Things had been going better and I’d thought..I’d hoped…well, that we could be friends. That we could mend our relationship. She said... we weren’t…” She sighed. “Doesn’t matter.  Then we had our...whatever it was. Spat? At the café. And it reminded me of how I kept losing people over and over. I’d lost mum. I was losing Claire again. And my, my selfishness had killed the only friend I’d ever had.” 

She was surprised when he untangled one of their hands to stroke a thumb down her cheek and saw that it came away wet. She swallowed and shook her head, trying to dispel the sadness. 

“I just started walking and found myself at your church. And I thought, why not? Prayer seemed to work for other people, maybe it could work for me. I knelt down. Folded my hands. Tried to find the words.”

He pulled his remaining hand out of her grip and stroked her face the same way he had a lifetime ago. She leaned in a moment, enjoying the care and warmth, then pulled back. He dropped his hands to his sides. 

“Then I heard your music. Decided I needed to apologize. Maybe explain what had happened. But you stopped me. Asked if I wanted a drink. Then went right back to poking and prodding and questioning me. Always, always on your terms.”

He frowned, but couldn’t deny it. Not now. 

“So if we’re going to do this…” She tried to ignore the hope that suddenly appeared on his face. “We’re going to do it on my terms. And I need time.”

He nodded excitedly. “Ok!”

“I mean it. I want to get to know you, properly. I need to take this slowly.”

“I can do that. I swear!”

“Let’s get through today and then…”

“Then?”

“We’ll see what happens next.”

He smiled broadly and offered her his arm. She accepted and they ambled slowly up the path to the house, comfortably silent.