Luke
Ipick her up early in the morning.
It’s just me in the car. I know Rei told her he’d take her back to the restaurant’s parking lot so that she could collect her vehicle, but I want to speak to her one-on-one.
I made sure to text her about it and she didn’t seem to mind too much, so now we’re on the interstate and making our way to Winterhaven after deciding that it’s probably best if we go pick her car up in the afternoon, when we leave the Souter house for lunch.
She looks tired today. There are dark circles under her eyes, and she’s wearing a dark red dress with a denim jacket and combat boots that looks fancy. She’s beautiful—I like her like this, with strands of hair framing her pretty face, the only make-up on her face the bit of mascara on her curled eyelashes and the nude lipstick she’s wearing.
But I also know that this isn’t effort. Someone would only think that if they didn’t know women. I have three sisters, so I know this is the kind of outfit that doesn’t take long to decide on, and she’s wearing it because she didn’t have to think about it.
I’m not going to quiz her about it, though. I’m not an idiot. I don’t want to make her feel bad.
“Are you sure about this?” I ask. “You don’t have to go back to Tom’s at all. I know it was…difficult last time.”
“But you’re going back,” she responds. She turns the radio down as she speaks, and I catch a glimpse of her cleavage when she does. I tell myself to behave, trying to focus on the road instead. Being around her can be distracting, but I can’t let myself think about her the way my body wants to. It would make things…complicated. Far more than they need to be.
“Yes,” I reply. “Because this is my job, Trine. I do this for a living. Don’t you play bass for a living?”
She smirks. “Well, that’s charitable, but sure,” she says, then her expression darkens. “But no. I want to help. I can’t just stay home and not help; I would be thinking about this all day long.”
“But you don’t have to,” I say. “To be clear, you could be home, doing anything else—playing video games, reading a book, playing with your cat—and that would be fine. Nobody would blame you for that.”
She furrows her brow. “I would blame me for that.”
“This is not your responsibility,” I say. “Misha should’ve never brought you into this.”
She narrows her eyes. I think I’ve annoyed her. “I’m glad he did. I’m glad he’s answering my questions. I’m finally getting clarity about the things I dealt with and I’m glad,” she says. “If he hadn’t asked me to…”
“You could’ve dealt with it without seeing what happened to Tom,” I say. “I’ve worked dozens of exorcisms and it’s always hard to wrap your head around. I assume it must be particularly difficult if you’re not a person of faith.”
“How can you be okay with it?” she asks. “If you’re a person who believes in God, how can you sit there and still worship him when you know that he’s hurting people?”
Cars racing past us, the sound of the highway getting louder. Driving in this city is crazy. Everyone seems to be in a rush. “Did you grow up religious?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “No. We talked about religion a lot as a cultural thing because my mom’s an academic. She has a PhD in Folklore, and her main area of interest is like, ghost stories and stuff. That’s all loosely tied to religion.”
I look at her. I should ask her more about this later. “So you know that I believe in free will,” I say. “But it’s more complicated than that. We’re given choices, sure, and the ability to make choices might be divine. But the tools to make choices—those are mundane, not spiritual. That’s why some people are susceptible toward being possessed and some aren’t. Some are more pious than others, but they all have one thing in common.”
“They’re gullible?”
“No,” I say. I don’t miss the snark in her voice, or the fact that she’s talking down on herself. “They haven’t been given the tools. Everyone does the best they can with the information they have at the time. It’s why clergy is important, even now.”
“Why?”
“If no one teaches you your left from right, how can you know it?” I ask. “That’s the same as knowing right from wrong. Or making yourself vulnerable to possession, or to things you don’t understand.”
“But you still worship,” she says softly. “Knowing what he might…what happens to people.”
“Yes,” I say. “But I’m not like other priests, mostly because I don’t need to have faith. I know what I’m doing. I know this for a fact, just like I know we’re breathing air right now or we’re having this conversation in English. There are a lot of things I don’t know, but I know God is real.”
She considers that for a second. “Okay,” she says, shifting in her seat. “So you know he’s real. But how do you know he’s good?”
I smile. “That’s a longer conversation,” I say. “One we should have over coffee. How about, after all this is over, we go out for coffee? Just you and me. And we don’t even have to talk about this exorcism shit, but you can ask me whatever you want.”
She laughs a little. “That sounds good,” she says. “You swear a lot for a priest.”
“Yeah, well,” I reply. “Swearing isn’t a sin. Not really. It’s just words.”
She laughs, throwing her head back, and the sound of her voice makes my heart race.
Swearing might not be a sin. Wanting to grab a beautiful woman by the back of the head, press my lips against hers and pull her top down so I can see more than the outline of her lacy white brais not a sin.
But it isn’t great.
Especially not if you’re a priest.