On a day when my heart felt rent in two by the tragedy of Amelia and Cleo, Priest was allowing me farther past his defences than he ever had before. Idly, I wondered if he was doing it to distract me from my pain and guilt, but then I decided I didn’t care.
“Your mother’s?” I repeated to goad him along.
Priest’s pale eyes glowed, striated with darker strands of green like fallen pine needles in a clear lake. There were graveyards in those eyes, haunted eyes that few people could hold for long in any kind of stare. I found them lovely, melancholy, and peaceful as walking through a cemetery at dawn when the sky is giving birth to day in direct contrast to the eternal dead.
“Mam,” he said lowly, voice deep as if dredged up from some forgotten well. “Her name was Aoife. She had hair like mine.” He reached up absently to brush back a piece of that copper hair behind one ear. A grim reaper was tattooed beneath it on the skin at the side of his neck, and his fingers went there next as if shaking hands with it. “She was the first to die.”
The warehouse apartment was almost too cold to be habitable, but that wasn’t why I shivered. I held my breath as I waited for more of this veiled history to unravel.
His Adam’s apple bobbed harshly in his strong throat, but he continued, eyes still fixed on the open Bible as if he was reading from the pages.
“I was ten years old that winter and it was a wet one.” He’d dropped the biker speech I’d always heard him affect, his voice richer with the Irish brogue he usually tried to quell. “There wasn’t much to our life and home. We were poor. Da worked as a labourer at any farm that would take him and Mam stayed home with me and girls.”
His eyes flickered to me, gauging my reaction to the reveal that he had siblings. I kept my face carefully stoic, controlling my breath because I knew he could read more into a person than just their expression.
“Danae and Keely were four and six, still so wee. Pneumonia was common enough, especially in our home. You could feel the wind through the slates of wood.” His hand spread unconsciously as if he could feel the breeze move through his fingers. “Mam got sick first so she couldn’t take care of the girls. I tried, but we didn’t have the right medicines or the money to buy them. Da came home one day and the lot of us were sick, even me. We prayed.” He paused, jaw flexing, brows angled steeply over his eyes, pitted like a skull’s with deep shadow. “We prayed because that was our only fucking recourse. Other families, they had neighbours to help them. We were a religious county with a priest who was beloved. Father O’Neal. He dictated everything that happened and he could be benevolent.”
His hard-bitten laugh scuttling shivers down my back.
“Never with us. My parents had me out of wedlock, when they were too young and even poorer than we were later, too poor to marry. Father O’Neal never forgave them for that. He wouldn’t even marry them when the time came that they could. He made us pariahs and when Mam died, then Da right after, my sisters a few days later, no one lifted a hand to help us.”
He stopped suddenly as if he’d run into a mental wall. I didn’t push him to continue. I just stood there an inch away from touching him though I was desperate to wrap him in my arms. I wanted to respect this sacrifice he was making, summoning old demons just to show me why they existed.
“You’re cold,” he noted dispassionately. “Come.”
He didn’t touch me as he moved away to the back of the mostly open space to the only closed off room. I followed, floating over the floor feeling like a ghost mired in his past, watching it play out without the ability to do anything to stop it.
When I entered the bathroom, Priest was turning on the shower in a huge glass enclosure. Immediately, steam began to curl around him.
“Take off your clothes,” he ordered blandly as he adjusted the temperature and stepped back to close the door to the shower.
He watched me with arms across his vest in his Hephaestus Auto hoodie and black jeans, bare feet oddly erotic braced against the dark tile, strong and beautifully arched. Looking at them, I understood the sexual, submissive impulse to worship someone’s feet. I wanted to wash them and tend to them, thankful for their strength and surety as they carried Priest through his life to me.
I undressed for him, hands clumsy and weak as I shed the pink sweatpants and UBC hoodie I’d donned after the barbecue when everything had turned to chaos. Beneath, I wore white underwear patterned with little peaches.