Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
The wrong woman opened the window.
“What the fuck?” Jo stuck her head out the window of the second-floor apartment she shared with Molly,.
She scanned the street below, her eyes finally landing on Caleb where he stood guiltily holding a handful of pebbles, his mouth hanging open.
“Well, if it isn’t Father West,” she said, leaning her forearms on the windowsill.
“Why are you throwing rocks at my window, Father West?”
“I was trying to hit Molly’s window,” he said with a frown, dropping the few pebbles left in his palm.
“Molly’s the next window over.” Jo tilted her head in that direction. “But don’t bother. She isn’t there.”
Caleb’s stomach dropped. “What do you mean? Where is she?”
Jo grinned. Caleb had come to fear that grin, as any sane man would. Nothing good came from Jo Baker grinning like that.
“She had some urgent business over at the school,” Jo said. “She wanted to be sure her resignation letter didn’t get lost in No-Balls Bruce’s spam filter. I told her to wait until after Christmas, but you know Molly, once she’s made up her mind about something…”
Caleb stumbled back a step, his shoes sliding in the early morning frost. “What are you talking about?”
Jo pretended to examine her fingernails. “Turns out you’re not the only one who can quit their job.”
The blood drained from his face, his mouth opening and closing uselessly.
Jo rolled her eyes as though he were the most slow-witted person she’d ever spoken to.
“Come on, Father, did you really think she was going to keep working there? Actually, I’m mad at you,” she said, jabbing an accusatory finger in his direction.
“You’ve just cost me the best roommate I’ve ever had. ”
Everything in him went cold. “What are you talking about? Where is she going?”
Jo shrugged.
He dug into his pocket for his cell phone. The endless ringing on the other end scraped at his nerves. Why wasn’t she answering her phone? When it went to voicemail—again—he shoved it back into his coat pocket.
“I need to talk to her,” he pleaded with the woman in the window.
“Of course you do,” she said, grinning. Somewhere behind her, there was a bang, and Jo turned over her shoulder. “Looks like it’s your lucky day. She just got home.”
By the time Caleb rounded the building to the front entrance and climbed the two flights of stairs to the door of Molly and Jo’s apartment, the gingerbread house his friends had helped him make balanced precariously on an oversized sheet pan, Jo was waiting for him.
The door to the apartment was open, but she blocked it with her slight body, leaning one hip against the door frame.
She watched him, smirking, as she buttoned her peacoat and tugged on a knitted hat.
“Molly! You’ve got company!” she shouted before pushing off from the door frame and moving down the hall. “Merry Christmas, Father West.”
He stepped just inside the apartment. “Molly?”
He was struck by the sudden realization he’d never been in Molly’s apartment before, but his eyes were immediately drawn to the little touches he knew were hers—the poster of Shakespearean insults hanging on the wall over the couch, the perfectly arranged throw pillows, the open bag of gummy bears on the coffee table.
“Caleb? Is that you?” Her voice came from down the hall a moment before she appeared in the living room.
She was beautiful. Hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun, bags under her eyes like she’d been up all night, and she’d still never been more beautiful because she was there. “What are you doing here?”
He started towards her, then realized he was carrying the gingerbread house and set it down on the coffee table. Her eyes moved between him and the confection, confusion furrowing her brows. “I’ve been calling you since last night. You didn’t answer your phone.”
“I dropped it in the sink yesterday. It hasn’t turned on since,” she said slowly. “Are you alright?”
“No, I’m not alright. Jo said you quit your job.” He clenched his hands at his side, wishing he could take her into his arms, but just the night before she’d asked for space and he’d already shown up at her apartment uninvited in the early hours of Christmas Day—so much for space.
“I couldn’t exactly keep working there,” she said.
“She said you’re leaving.” The thought tore at his heart, an open wound in his chest he had no hope of closing.
Her eyes went wide. “What? I’m—”
“I know you’re scared, Mol. I’m scared too.
I’m fucking terrified.” His long strides ate up the distance between them.
Space be damned, he needed to touch her.
Her hands fit so well in his, their fingers intertwined.
“I know you think it’s too fast. I know you’re afraid I’m going to change my mind, but I’m not.
I promise you. Don’t run away from me, please.
” He leaned his forehead against hers, breathing in the spicy, citrus scent of her.
“Caleb, I—”
“Wait, don’t say anything. Not yet. I need to show you something.” He led her towards the coffee table. “I made this for you.”
Of all the Christmas gifts Molly had ever received, she never expected a structurally unsound gingerbread house to be the best.
The precarious structure wobbled on the sheet pan as Caleb nudged it closer to the couch.
He urged her to sit, before shrugging out of his coat and sitting beside her.
She drank in the sight of him, all six-plus-feet of the best man she’d ever known, worry clouding his eyes, his hair standing up in all directions, and his throat…
her eyes lingered on the place at the base of his throat where his clerical collar usually sat.
The place where, today, the top button was undone, freed from the white piece of plastic that had mocked her for so long.
“You said you didn’t want us to make a hasty decision.
That you thought I’d regret it because I hadn’t given it enough thought.
” He gestured to the lopsided gingerbread house.
“This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, Molly.
I’ve been falling in love with you for over a year, and I’ll prove it to you. ”
“With pastry?”
A flash of a smile crept through the anxiety tugging his lips into a frown.
He pointed to a cluster of yellow gumdrops on the candy house roof arranged in the crude shape of a flower.
“Last year, when I moved back, that first game night at Ethan’s house, you were wearing a dress covered in sunflowers.
” Her breath caught in her chest. “You looked like summer and I thought I’d never seen someone so beautiful.
The next day, I went to the florist and bought sunflowers for my kitchen. I’ve done it every Saturday since.
“And this—” He pointed to a little pile of hardened icing at the edge of the sheet pan where a gingerbread man stood on sour gummy candy skis with pretzel rod poles.
“—this is when we chaperoned the senior ski trip and we stayed up all night talking. Do you know, I’d never stayed up all night before?
The morning we got back, I told my confessor I was thinking about leaving the priesthood. ”
“You—what?” she breathed.
But Caleb didn’t answer her. He just continued, pointing out the window carved into the side of the house and filled with melted hard candy in yellow and red and green.
“This is for the first time you yelled at me.” She laughed, a broken sound colored by the tears gathering behind her eyes.
“It was in the chapel at school. You’d just found out sex ed was part of the religion curriculum and you were furious. You were also right.”
“Bruce was so mad when you overruled him and made it part of the phys ed curriculum instead.”
“Coach Eagles was pretty mad too,” he admitted with a chuckle.
“But you didn’t care that some of your colleagues might not be thrilled.
You knew it was wrong, and you pushed me to do something about it.
You shouldn’t have had to. I should have taken care of it without you needing to point it out.
But the point is, you made me better. You make me better.
“Last night, I instituted a policy to form a disciplinary committee with student, parent, and faculty representation. No student can be suspended without the approval of the committee, and any student who feels they are being unfairly punished can appeal to the committee. The Superintendent of the Diocese has agreed to oversee the committee’s formation and ensure it functions as intended, even though he wasn’t too thrilled to get my phone call in the middle of his Christmas Eve dinner. ”
Her throat constricted with unshed tears. “Caleb, that’s amazing. You did it,” she said, her voice breaking, as those tears began sliding down her cheeks. “You found a way to work inside the system.”
He wiped a tear away with his thumb, his big hand cupping her face and his fingertips lingering at the nape of her neck. “It was my last official act as the pastor of St. Anthony’s. I submitted my resignation just after Mass.”
She didn’t have words for the ways Caleb twisted her up inside, like he was weaving together her veins and nerves in new patterns, rewriting her genetic code and making her into something entirely new. Something entirely his.
And now he was entirely hers as well.
His eyes crinkled at the corners as he studied her, as though he could read her mind and could see the overwhelming sense of rightness filling her up at belonging to him and having him belong to her in return.
She half suspected she’d float away from the joy of it if he weren’t grounding her with his palm on her cheek.