For the first time in eight months, I almost flake on Family Dinner. Aiden and Ryan are incorrigible dinner skippers, but me, I’ve always gone. Every week. Not even work has kept me away—I’ll go to dinner and then go right back to the office if I have to.

But after Zenny leaves, I’m in a strange, restless limbo. My thoughts are running in circles. My boner is back and demanding attention. And the unfamiliar sensations of guilt and integrity chase each other in circles like dogs.

What is the decent thing to do?

Trust that Zenny knows herself and is capable of making decisions and choices? Help her on her quest for a deeper, richer relationship with her deity?

Or is the decent thing to interrupt her relationship with her deity, given that the deity is fake and also that the fake deity’s church killed my sister?

I stand at the window for a moment, then mutter a quick fuck it and unbelt myself, giving in to the need to tug on my cock again. The flesh is straining and aching and a dark, angry red, and I brace a hand against the window and smell the air as I start yanking on myself.

I smell the faint hint of rose.

I smell Zenny.

There’s nothing but the wild need to come jolting through my body as I imagine Zenny’s hungry, innocent kisses and the tight curves of her body and the inviting arch of her throat. Nothing but untrammeled lust coursing through my veins as I imagine the flash of her white panties, like some kind of sick “best friend’s little sister” fantasy brought to life. I imagine how her pussy would taste against my lips, how she’d smell, how she’d shiver when I circled my tongue around the dark rosebud between her cheeks after I suckled on her clit.

I’m nothing but a beast, a man possessed with the need to fuck.

So why is You were the answer to my prayers the last thing to run through my mind before I come?

* * *

“Is Mom okay?”

“Mom’s okay, man. Sorry to worry you.”

A few minutes later, I’m changed into different pants and a fresh shirt, cum wiped off the concrete floor, and I’m sitting in my home office, staring blankly at my bookshelves, which are about half the kind of businessy crap you see popping up on the non-fiction bestsellers’ lists and about half historical romance novels, categorized by subgenre (Regency, Victorian, American West) and then shelved alphabetically by author.

Oh, and I called my brother. Because I’m currently freaking the fuck out, and he’s the only person in my life that I trust to give me any kind of advice when it comes to clerical vocations and sex.

I can practically hear Tyler relax after I tell him Mom’s not back in the hospital. “What is it then?” he asks. “I know you wouldn’t call unless there’s something dire going on.”

It’s true, for better or for worse, and I’m not sure why. I like Tyler, but he’s never needed me the way that Aiden and Ryan do…the way that Lizzy did before she killed herself. And so I’ve gotten into the habit of being the de facto caretaker of the Bell boys—making sure Aiden gets some sleep occasionally, helping Ryan enroll in college classes and hunt for apartments, reminding them both to visit and call Mom—but Tyler’s exempt from my bossiness. When I trust and respect someone, when I value their time and their judgment, I’m more than content to let weeks go by without talking, because I know they’ll be just fine without me. Tyler falls into that category. Flaky, impulsive Aiden probably never will.

“Well, it’s a little embarrassing to ask,” I admit, “but I need advice. Uh. About a woman.”

“Do I need to remind you about that time I was a priest?” Tyler asks dryly. “I’m probably not the best person for dating advice.”

I stand up, feeling fidgety. “Well, she’s Catholic.”

“That’s hardly an alien race to us, Sean. In fact, I think Mom still has your ‘Best in Old Testament Trivia’ award from Vacation Bible School somewhere.”

That sends an automatic scowl to my mouth. I don’t like thinking about that boy, the one I used to be, the one who believed in God and spent Vacation Bible School gluing Popsicle sticks together and teaming up with Elijah to tease Lizzy and her friends on the church playground. And for the first time, I realize—like really, fully realize—that spending time with Zenny means that I’m going to have to remember that boy. If I’m going to coax Zenny into the land of doubt, I’m going to have to remember why I ever occupied the land of belief.

“Is she some kind of weird Catholic?” Tyler asks. “Like one of those pre-Vatican II people?”

“I’m annoyed I still know what that means,” I sigh. “And no, she’s fine with Mass in English and all that—at least I think so. More like, she wants to be a nun.”

I blurt it before I can hesitate any longer, but the awkward silence that ensues makes me wish I hadn’t said it at all. “You know what, never mind. I—”

“Sean,” Tyler interrupts, and I hear him walking into another room. A door closing. “I need to know before we go any further if you’re exaggerating. Be serious for once.”

I run my fingertip along a line of Sarah MacLean paperbacks. “I’m not exaggerating. She becomes a novice in a month.”

A long, long sigh from the other end of the line. “What have you done?”

“Look, I haven’t done anything—”

“Sure.”

“I swear. It’s more like…I need to make sure that I keep not doing anything. Or if I do something, that it’s the right something.”

I’m only asking for a month.

I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to give.

I’m asking you because you’re the only person I trust to help me.

I scrub my fingertips through my hair, trying to gather my thoughts. My feelings. My wayward cock cravings.

“So you’ve met a girl,” Tyler prompts after I don’t speak for a bit. “Met a nun, I mean.”

“Well, the word met,” I say, turning to lean against the bookshelf and stare at a wall lined with diplomas and academic awards. “That implies we didn’t know each other before.”

“Sean.”

Just tell him.

“It’s Elijah’s sister,” I force out.

“Zenny? But she’s only—”

“She’s not a kid anymore, Tyler. She just turned twenty-one, it’s her senior year of college. And before you ask, no, Mom and Dad haven’t reconnected with the Iversons.”

Tyler grumbles something on his end that sounds like, well, they should, which I ignore. Maybe, when looked at rationally, the Iversons weren’t to blame for the schism, but no one was thinking rationally the day of Lizzy’s funeral, and after the fallout, it seemed safer not to touch the still-smoldering pieces. Safer just to side with my parents and keep my friendship with Elijah separate from all the pain and alienation. Tyler had been the lone voice of dissent in the Bell clan, being the Mr. Conscience that he was, and it hadn’t changed a thing, it only made life harder for him.

That’s what having a conscience will get you.

Which is why it’s super inconvenient that I’ve grown one now.

Before Tyler can spin off into Lecture Mode, I explain to him about the gala and then about the issues with the Keegan property and the Good Shepherd shelter. And then, in a voice that is more faltering and faint than I care to admit, I tell him about her visit today. Her situation.

Her request.

Tyler listens quietly through it all, and it gradually becomes easier and easier for me to talk, and I have a moment when I wonder if this is how his parishioners felt when they gave their confessions. If he made it this easy for all people to talk to him, to stumble through their messy thoughts and lusts and regrets. I could almost resent him for it, except right now I’m nothing but grateful. I need this, I need the unloading and confessing and just to talk about it, because I can’t with anyone else.

“So then I told her I’d think about it and that we’d talk over dinner tomorrow night,” I conclude.

Tyler takes a breath. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

There’s more silence on the other end, and I’m done with the silence, I’m done with the uncertainty. It’s only been an hour since Zenny left, and I think I’ll be ripped apart from the sheer insanity of it all if I don’t find a way to fix it.

“So what do I do?” I ask impatiently.

“Well,” Tyler says carefully, “it sounds like she was able to neatly shut down all of your objections.”

“Yeah. It was humiliating.”

“Never argue with a budding theologian,” my brother laughs. “We like being the smartest one in the room too much.”

I snort at my wall of degrees. I used to think I was a pretty smart guy, but this afternoon proved that I’ve got nothing on Zenny.

“What do you think you should do?” Tyler asks. “Maybe that’s the best place to start.”

“I should say no,” I say after a minute. “I should stay far away from her.”

“Why?” Tyler asks.

“What do you mean, why?” I say in my best isn’t it obvious voice. “She’s young, she’s Elijah’s sister, and she wants to be a professional non-sex-haver.”

“Twenty-one is hardly jailbait, Sean, and also I imagine that your connection to Elijah is precisely why she feels safe with you. As for her vocation and how it intersects with sex, I would suggest that you’re looking at the intersection with the wrong lens.”

“Are you going into Lecture Mode?”

Tyler ignores me. “You might think that you’re so liberated from the trap of Catholic morality, but you’re still acting like a man who thinks sex is dirty. Like a man who believes in the concept of purity.”

“I don’t think sex is dirty,” I sputter. “I fuck literally all—”

“—all the time, I know, but listen to me: you can still fuck a lot and unconsciously believe these things. You can smugly think you’re better than all the people trapped in repressive paradigms, but still believe, deep down, that you have the capacity to taint another person with your cock.”

“I don’t think that,” I say, not at all convincingly.

“Tell me, Sean. Do you fuck strippers and socialites only because they’re conveniently around? Or do you fuck them because you feel like they’re already impure and you won’t hurt them with just a little more impurity of your own?”

I don’t have a ready answer to that. And I don’t like what I’m finding in my mind as I search for answers, which are the clammy skeletons of half-forgotten beliefs and sermons from hypocrites. I thought I’d thrown away all that shit years ago.

“Okay, let me ask you this,” Tyler says when I don’t answer. “When’s the last time you fucked someone you cared about? When’s the last time you fucked someone and hoped to God you never had to stop holding them?”

I swallow. “A while,” I lie.

Never is more like the real answer.

“Okay, last question,” Tyler says, and his voice is kind. “How much of that do you think is about Lizzy?”

I nearly jolt off the bookshelves at the mention of her name, shock and grief sizzling through me. “It’s fucked up to bring her into my sex life, man.”

“Think about it. How can sex be anything but ugly, anything but perverted and twisted, when it took our sweet, happy sister and killed her? How could we not have the idea that she was pure, innocent, and the thing that destroyed her was a man’s predatory desires?”

“I know it’s different,” I whisper, closing my eyes. “I know it is, I know it is.”

“The place where you know that is not the same place where your fears come from. And until you untangle your fears—that you are like the man who hurt our sister, that you have the capacity to harm someone innocent—you’re not going to be able to untangle your beliefs about sex.”

“I—” I take a breath, my eyes still closed. This is too much to think about, God and Lizzy and all the ways that those two people have wormed their way into my adult identity without my permission. “Did you have to untangle anything?”

“Yes,” Tyler says after a minute. “Yes, I did. I thought by being a priest I could atone somehow, that I could erase all the scars Lizzy had left. And the way I wanted sex—I felt fucked up about that too. I wanted it rough and raw, and what if I hurt someone when I was like that? What if I was like that with someone who’d already been hurt?”

“So how did you get around it?”

“There’s no getting around anything,” Tyler says, and I hear the rueful tiredness in his voice. “There’s only getting through things. I had to admit to myself that I didn’t fully understand my reasons, I had to shine a light into very dark corners and just look. Just see. See myself, and all the ways fear and guilt had trapped me.

“And I came to understand something while I was going through it. To be fully human is to be fully sexual, and while that doesn’t mean having sex or even sexual desire, it does mean being fully in your body. It means recognizing that there’s nothing any less holy about your body than there is about your soul, that as long as your body is treated with consent and respect and affection—and that you treat the bodies of others in the same way—there’s nothing inherently sinful about your flesh. About its desires or lack of desires. About what it does or does not do. You do not have the ability to tarnish her or yourself; that right isn’t given to any mortal person. She’ll be no more or less holy for sex; the same goes for the lack of it.”

“Try telling her Church that last part,” I mutter.

“Abstinence is asked of everyone at some point in their lives. Maybe a partner is not emotionally ready for sex, or maybe they temporarily aren’t able, like with Mom and Dad right now. And for some people, celibacy is not a struggle, just like fasting isn’t the same struggle for everyone…or giving up money or giving up spare time or giving up sleeping in late or—or, or, or…do you see what I’m saying? A life consecrated to God is a life where you give up personal desires to serve God instead, and there’s nothing more or less special about celibacy than there is about poverty or seclusion or sleep.

“And,” my brother adds, “it’s not always easy to discern God’s desires for us. Because He or She wants us to be fully human and love each other as fully human, and that takes as many different forms as can be imagined. You can consecrate a life to God and have sex seven times a day. You can consecrate a life to God and go live in a cave for the rest of your life. No way is any holier than another, because our bodies are holy no matter what, and our lives are holy no matter what. Monasticism and lay life are just different ways of loving the same God and showing His love to the world.”

“This is not an answer, Tyler.”

“I know.”

“For real.”

“It’s because there’s not an answer,” he replies. “Not one I can give you at least. I do have some advice, though.”

“How can you possibly have more to say after all that?”

“Ha. Ha. But here it is: don’t make Zenny part of your story with Lizzy, okay? It’s not fair to her and it’s actually not fair to you, either.”

I want to argue with him, I want to tell him that of course I’m not doing that, that of course I’m not dragging my Lizzy baggage into this—but I can’t speak the words.

Because they’re not true.

This is a world apart from what happened with Lizzy, and yet there’s a young woman—a little sister figure, even—and the Catholic Church and sex involved, and I can’t pretend that my reflexive fears of hurting her or discovering something monstrous about myself aren’t tied up in what happened with Lizzy. I never did therapy after Lizzy’s death; I was young and stubborn and certain I didn’t need it. Instead, I buried the pain and anger with drinking and sex and chasing after money.

And surprise, surprise, now it’s coming back to bite me.

“Okay,” I finally agree. “Okay. I won’t.”

“Good. She deserves to be treated like herself. Not as a proxy for a girl who died fourteen years ago.”

“Ugh. Stop being such a know-it-all.”

“I told you not to argue with a theologian.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

We say goodbye and hang up, and then I glance at the clock and see it’s time to go to Family Dinner. I text Aiden to make sure he’s coming and then I head out the door.