“FATHER.”
“Lucian?” Cristian cleared his throat from the other side of the confessional. “What brings you here today?”
The words didn’t come easily. I hung my head and tried to feel even a scrap of the solace I’d once found in this booth, but it wasn’t there anymore. Overnight, I had gone back to old addictions. Sweeter addictions. The kind of addictions that could ruin me if I didn’t get them under control.
“I think I’ve regressed,” I said.
Cristian waited for me to explain, but it wasn’t so easy this time.
“Tell me,” he encouraged.
“I consummated my marriage.”
More time went by, and I knew Cristian was struggling with what he should tell me. In the eyes of God and the Catholic church, we were married, so there wasn’t a problem. But it wasn’t that simple for him. He wouldn’t paint my actions in a favorable light just to spare my feelings, even if he didn’t know the worst of them yet.
During all the years I’d come here to confess, I’d never exposed the challenges I faced with intimacy. It didn’t seem right, considering he was a man tormented by his own constant battle to remain untouched.
“Was it consensual?” Cristian asked.
“Yes.” I turned toward the grate. “I would never take her against her will.”
But the words I spoke so decidedly didn’t ring true to myself. I had already crossed so many lines with her. I tied her up. I poked at her raw wounds. I’d allowed her to feel insecure in my devotion to her because I was too afraid to show it myself. Already, I felt like a failure, and last night only compounded the situation.
When I took her to that club, there was no coming back from it. I exposed her to a world that she didn’t need to see, and I forced her into a corner where her jealousy was the only catalyst upon which she could act.
“You’ve told me many times that you have been unable to find joy in your everyday life,” Cristian said. “I’m tempted to wonder if you feel so conflicted because perhaps maybe this time, you felt something else?”
I stared at the wall, silence my answer. He was right, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it. For years, every hour had been gray. I’d lived under a cloud of perpetual rain until she came along, and now my life was filled with color. A storm of passionate red. She was changing the landscape of my life, and I didn’t like it.
“Tell me what burdens you with guilt,” Cristian directed.
My throat felt too thick, and it was difficult to force the words out. “I never meant for it to happen. In the beginning, you told me I might hurt her, and I said I only wanted to help her. But this path I have taken is a dark one.”
“It’s not the only one.” Cristian shifted closer, adjusting his voice accordingly. “It’s not too late to change your intentions.”
I closed my eyes and sank forward. “They aren’t intentions. They’re compulsions. I can only show her what I am.”
“And what are you?”
“Pain,” I gritted through my teeth. “To her, I am pain. It’s the only way I’ve learned to suppress my rage.”
“If you can learn once, you can learn again,” he replied. “Just as you believe Gypsy can change, so can you. How can you ask her to be vulnerable if you aren’t willing to do the same?”
“She still has her whole life ahead of her,” I argued.
“And you have the rest of yours as well.”
He didn’t get it, but why would he? Cristian might be aware of the demons who lived inside me, but he wasn’t intimately acquainted with them. He didn’t live with them every day.
“Perhaps love is the alternative you are afraid to face,” he continued. “But the one you need the most.”
“I don’t know how to love,” I reiterated. “I only know how to fuck.”
Cristian opened the grate between us, eliminating the shadow of secrecy that no longer existed. “If you let hate continue to rule your life and poison anything good, your past still wins.”
I laughed, and it was cold. “Don’t you understand, Father? She already won. I died long before I ever stood with one foot in the grave.”