No Thoughts

You had attempted, repeatedly, to simply stop. To file Baelor back into some more appropriate category — priest, friend, safe harbour — and leave him there. Every attempt collapsed within the length of a single church visit. Something about crossing that threshold undid whatever resolve you'd built up in the days since your last one.

It wasn't even purely the sexualizing of him that troubled you most, not anymore. You'd spent the better part of your adult life harbouring a low, manageable fondness for older men, and it had never once presented an actual problem — a fact you could point to, if pressed, as evidence you weren't entirely unhinged. What actually alarmed you was the timeline.

Sometime after New Year's, without you quite noticing the transition, the thoughts had stopped being purely physical and started building something considerably more serious: an entire imagined life with him, constructed detail by unauthorized detail. What books he might like. What music he listened to when no one else could hear it. Whether he'd complain, the way older men supposedly did, about his knees aching before rain. Whether he'd learned to cook properly at some point in his years of rectory living, or whether the parishioners' casseroles were doing the heavy lifting entirely.

Lately, though, the questions had curdled into something with considerably less innocence to it. Whether he'd want you on your hands and knees or pressed flat against a wall, whether his hands would be gentle about it or not gentle in the slightest, whether that low, ruined register you'd heard exactly once, wrapped around a joke about a coroner in a half-lit church, would sound the same wrapped around your name in an entirely different context.

When those thoughts started arriving daily, you understood, with a certain grim clarity, that you were well and truly fucked.

Well — not fucked yet, you'd thought at the time, and then laughed out loud at your own audacity, alone in your kitchen, like the unhinged woman you were apparently becoming.

But God, the thought of it.

Baelor on his knees for once instead of you. That broad, imposing frame of his folded down to fit between your thighs, his face buried against you, his bearded jaw dragging rough and maddening against the softest skin you owned until the drag of it alone had you gasping for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold.

You imagined his mouth working with the same unhurried, devastating attention he brought to everything else he touched — no rush in him anywhere, nothing careless, as though he had all the time God had ever handed anyone and intended to spend every last second of it exactly there.

You imagined his fingers joining his mouth eventually, long and thick, exactly the kind of hands that had once closed entirely around your waist and lifted you like you weighed nothing at all, and you imagined his other hand gripping the curve of your ass hard enough to hold you exactly where he wanted you, keeping you trembling and open against him, his mouth on your pussy until you were begging.

You imagined him drawing back just far enough to look up the trembling length of you — that mismatched gaze finding yours from between your own legs, dark and wrecked and finally, entirely undone — his mouth wet and parting to say those three words you'd been quietly dying to hear him say for—

"Are you even listening to me?" Kiera's voice cut through with a mix of exasperation and amusement that suggested this wasn't the first attempt at your attention she'd made.

You blinked, hard, twice, dragging yourself back into the actual coffee shop currently containing you, the unglamorous February gloom of it, condensation fogging the window beside your booth, your own coffee gone entirely cold in front of you. The three of you had claimed this same booth most Wednesday afternoons since university, back when Kiera had still been dating the ex who'd eventually made her cry in this exact seat. Some traditions simply outlasted their original reasons for existing.

"What?" you managed, unconvincingly.

She and Rowan laughed together, that synchronized laugh of two people who'd been friends with each other roughly as long as they'd each been friends with you, and you picked up your spoon and stirred your ruined coffee anyway, mostly for somewhere to point your eyes that wasn't either of their faces.

"I know that look." Rowan — red hair currently escaping its bun in three separate directions, always the louder of the two — leaned across the table with open delight. "You're dick hungry."

You aimed a glare at her sharp enough to drill through bone and looked to Kiera for backup instead. Kiera only nodded in solemn agreement.

Betrayed, you thought. By your own friends. Who needed enemies.

"You've been living on some other planet this last month," Kiera said, not unkindly. "Whoever it is got you good. I think you should just make a move already."

Rowan nodded so enthusiastically her mug nearly sloshed over the rim. "You should suck his dick, honestly. Get it over with."

Kiera snorted into her own cup. You grimaced, mostly on principle and not because that same thought hadn’t lived in your head for a while now — Rowan's bluntness had exactly one setting, and you'd stopped expecting anything more delicate from her sometime around age nineteen.

"It's not that easy." You busied your hands with the spoon again. "He's not — completely available."

Rowan sipped, unbothered. "Ask his girlfriend for a threesome. What's the issue?"

You laughed, though it came out considerably weaker than you'd intended. "He doesn't have a girlfriend."

"Well then." Rowan raised an eyebrow over the rim of her mug. "Who exactly is stopping you?"

Your spoon traced slow circles through the coffee, watching the small whirlpool it made before it settled flat again. "It's — complicated."

"Complicated usually means married," Rowan said, entirely unimpressed.

"Worse."

Kiera frowned properly now. "How is that worse?"

You let the silence stretch a beat too long, long enough that both of them exchanged a look across the table before you finally sighed through your nose and gave it up.

"He's a priest."

Silence settled over the table, brief but total.

Rowan blinked. Blinked again. "You're fucking joking."

"I wish I were."

"Well." She leaned back, arms crossing, visibly recalibrating. "That's inconvenient."

"That's one word for it," you chuckled and said, flat.

"Other one might be fucked up," Rowan commented in her usual instinct to make everything a joke. "How does that even happen? Did you meet him at a bar in disguise, or—"

"I started going back to church. After dad." You shrugged, the explanation feeling both entirely true and wildly insufficient at once. "He was just — there. Kind, mostly. And then not just kind."

"And how long has 'not just kind' been going on?"

"Since October, if I'm honest about it. Properly honest."

Kiera did the math out loud, unimpressed. "That's four months."

"I could do the maths myself, thank you."

Rowan, who had gone uncharacteristically quiet through this part of the interrogation, finally spoke up. "Okay, but four months of what, though. Have you two actually — done anything?"

You felt your face heat despite the coffee shop's mediocre attempt at central heating. "There was a moment in December. Nothing happened, but it almost did."

"Almost? How almost?"

You decided not to add anything. You were in deep enough as it were to give any more details.

"I'm just saying," Kiera went on, tone gone thoughtful now, turning the information over properly. "That's not a crush, sweetheart. A crush doesn't survive four months on nothing. That's a whole relationship you've been quietly building in your own head, with a man who has no idea he's in it."

Does Baelor actually have no idea? Am I completely imagining the closeness and the way he looks at me? You thought about how he had returned to his initial self after the December incident. Well, not like his initial self, but warmer. But that might just be your brain playing games again with you.

You chuckled at your own inner monologue. Kiera, though, didn't laugh at all. She'd been watching your face for most of the conversation with an attention you'd been carefully not noticing, and something in her expression softened now, almost imperceptibly, into something considerably more serious than the moment strictly called for.

"No," she resumed quietly. "There has to be more than that."

You frowned. "What do you mean?"

She tilted her head, studying you the way she'd studied you across a thousand smaller crises over the better part of your friendship. "You don't want to sleep with him."

You looked away immediately. "Of course I don't." Liar, your inner voice all but screamed.

"No, I know you do,” she ignored your attempt at lying. “But you don’t want to just sleep with him, right?"

"I don’t know what you mean."

"Then why," Kiera said, gently, "do you look like someone just asked you to put down a dying dog?"

"That's a horrifying comparison," you said, mostly to buy yourself a few more seconds.

"Answer the question."

Rowan snorted into her coffee at that, but Kiera didn't so much as glance at her, attention fixed entirely on you with that infuriating, familiar patience of someone who'd known you half your life and had stopped falling for your deflections sometime around the same year Rowan had. "You have that face."

"What face?"

"The one you had after that loser of a boyfriend finally left. The one you get whenever you care far more than you're willing to admit to."

You opened your mouth to argue and found, with some alarm, that no convincing counter-argument presented itself anywhere in your head.

"I've..." You let the breath out, defeated. "I've caught myself wondering stupid things."

Rowan brightened immediately. "Like what? Whether he's good in bed?"

"No." It came out too quickly. "Not — not just that."

Both of them waited, patient in the specific way friends got when they sensed the real thing finally surfacing.

"I've wondered what music he listens to. Whether he likes old films. Whether his knees would complain every time it rains." You were aware, even as the list kept coming, of exactly how ridiculous you sounded, and couldn't quite manage to stop the momentum of it. "Whether he takes his coffee with sugar or black. Whether he'd—" You caught yourself, abruptly aware of the sentence you'd nearly finished out loud.

"Whether he'd what?" Kiera prompted, quiet.

You stared down at the cold coffee cradled between both hands, unable to look at either of them for this part. "... whether he'd be happy with me."

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. Rowan's teasing had drained entirely out of her face, replaced by something closer to sympathy than you were prepared to receive from her.

"Jesus Christ," she muttered, finally. Fucking ironic word choice, you thought, and nearly laughed despite everything. "You've got it bad."

You let out a humourless laugh of your own, resting your forehead against one hand. "I know."

"No," Kiera corrected, softly, reaching across the table to close her fingers around your wrist. "No, I don't think you do, actually."

The three of you sat inside that silence for a while, none of you in any hurry to be the one who broke it. You were the one who finally did.

"He's actually invited me to dinner with his brother's family, this Sunday." You said it fast, pushing through before either of them could interject. "It's my father's anniversary. My mother's going to be a wreck around the house, and I think — I think it'll be good for me to have somewhere else to be that day."

Rowan and Kiera exchanged another look, eyebrows lifting in perfect, damning synchrony.

"I'll be sending some very useful, very vanilla positions to the group chat," Rowan announced after a beat, entirely deadpan. “Wouldn’t want to be partially responsible for the death of a priest.”

You finally laughed — real, loud enough to turn a head at the next table over — for what felt like the first time all conversation.

Kiera's teasing had gone soft again, that same softness from a few minutes before. "How are you doing with that, by the way. The anniversary."

"Ask me again next week," you said, which wasn't really an answer, and she let it go without pushing, because she'd known you long enough to recognize which doors you'd actually open if she knocked and which ones you'd simply lean harder against.

The laugh helped, the way laughing with these two specific people always eventually helped, even when the thing underneath it hadn't changed even slightly.

Rowan reached over to steal a sip of your abandoned, cold coffee, grimaced dramatically at the taste, and marched off to order you a fresh one without being asked. Kiera didn't let go of your wrist for a while yet, her thumb tracing an idle, absent line back and forth over the pulse point — the kind of small, wordless anchor she'd been offering you in one form or another since the two of you were fourteen and she'd sat with you in a school bathroom for reasons neither of you discussed anymore.

You let yourself be anchored. It was, you thought, watching Rowan argue cheerfully with the barista about oat milk, one of the few things in your current life uncomplicated enough to simply enjoy without picking apart.

Baelor had three moles on the front of his neck.

They sat close together in a pattern that had struck you, the first time you'd properly seen them, as something almost deliberately celestial — a small constellation someone had pressed into his skin and then, for reasons known only to whatever cosmic sense of humour governed these things, tucked away beneath a collar for the rest of the world to never notice. It seemed, to you, something entirely unfair.

You'd caught sight of them only once, weeks ago now, on some ordinary afternoon when he'd shed the white for a few unguarded minutes and you'd happened to be standing close enough to see. Your mouth had gone dry on the spot. You'd spent an embarrassing number of hours since wondering whether there were more of them somewhere beneath the black — an entire private galaxy hidden under years of careful vestment, one you had absolutely no legitimate reason to want to map with your own hands. Or, if you were being fully honest with yourself, which lately you increasingly weren't inclined to be, your own tongue.

They joined a growing private inventory of him you'd been keeping without ever consciously deciding to start one.

Like the single, perfect beauty mark sitting just at the corner of his right cheekbone, isolated and precise, exactly midway between eye and beard as though God — or whoever handled such details — had placed it there with a ruler. The thin, pale scar interrupting the very end of his left eyebrow, source unknown, a story you'd caught yourself wanting to ask about and then never quite finding the nerve.

But it was his hands that had captured you first and had never fully released their grip since.

Big. Strong, by every piece of evidence you'd personally gathered — you still remembered, with a specificity that did nothing good for your composure, the afternoon he hadn't simply helped you down from a chair but had quite literally lifted you off it, like your own weight was a fact he'd found entirely negligible. Long fingers. Nails kept short and clean. Veins standing visible beneath the skin of the backs of his hands, ones you were fairly certain ran the whole length of his forearms if you ever got the chance to actually check. You had, if you were tallying honestly, imagined tracing every visible inch of them with your tongue often enough by now that you felt something close to acquainted with the whole geography of it, purely through repetition.

Your imagination had turned into something filthy these last months — not days, you corrected yourself, months, if you were being accurate about it. And right now, watching him from your pew as he worked his way methodically through reorganizing the parish bookshelf, the late afternoon light coming through the high windows gone thick and amber, the particular gold that only showed up an hour or so before the church emptied for the evening — it caught him now and then as he moved between shelves, reaching for a title on the top row that put the stretch and pull of him on full, unfair display, or crouching to sort something at floor level in a way that drew his cassock taut across his shoulders.

You were fairly sure the display wasn't intentional. You were also sure you didn't give a fuck whether it was.

Your imagination had already moved several steps past his hands and was currently occupied with putting those particular fingers to an entirely different use. Somewhere south of your navel, specifically.

You shook your head, hard, and shut your eyes for a moment, as if the gesture alone might physically dislodge the thought. When you opened them again you turned your face toward the familiar wooden cross above the altar instead, and let a small, unimpressed scoff escape you.

Do you test all your followers this hard, or is it just personal with me, you directed at Him, silently.

No answer arrived, same as always. You'd asked variations of that question more times than you could count these past months, and He'd maintained the same unbroken silence every time, which you'd come to interpret, perhaps unfairly, as tacit permission rather than disapproval. It was, you thought, a convenient theology to have arrived at, and you weren't about to examine it too closely.

You pulled out your phone instead, in search of a distraction that wasn't currently the man reorganizing a bookshelf ten feet away from you, and opened the group chat.

I'm at the parish and I can't stop imagining things, you typed.

Rowan's reply arrived almost before you'd finished sending it. Is the altar a good height for him???

You glanced toward the altar despite yourself, weighing the question with more genuine consideration than it probably deserved. Probably a bit low, honestly, you typed back.

A string of purple devil emojis followed, then, oh girl he tall tall.

Kiera's typing bubble appeared next. Don't do anything you'd regret later. Ever the careful one.

Girl that's easy for you to say, Rowan shot back before Kiera could add anything further. You've got Valarr pounding you senseless every other night and I’ve got Raymun eating out of the palm of my hand. Let the girl enjoy some of His divine creation.

Kiera's dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. All I'm saying is be careful. You know we'll be here if it goes wrong. I just don't want to pick up the pieces again, like with the last guy.

You sighed, quiet enough not to disturb the church's stillness. She wasn't wrong to say it. Your last boyfriend had left you in genuine wreckage, and it had been these exact two women who'd put you back together afterward, one slow week at a time.

That's fair, you typed. I don't want to make you pick up the pieces of me again either.

Girl don't you worry about that, Rowan sent back immediately, I've got no problem scraping your coochie off the ground if it comes to that, followed by a generous handful of winking emojis.

You had to physically suppress a snort, aware of exactly how loud any sound would carry in an empty church. Heat crept up into your cheeks anyway. You bit your lower lip and typed back before you could think better of it: My coochie wouldn't end up on the ground, because his mouth would be—

"Hey." Baelor's voice arrived directly at your left shoulder, close enough to nearly startle the phone straight out of your hand and yeet it across the church. "Would you mind giving me a hand with some of the new books?"

You turned to find him already looking, his eyes having clearly drifted to your screen mid-sentence, the message still sitting there half-finished and catastrophically incriminating. You slammed the phone face-down against your thigh with trembling fingers as fast as you were physically capable of and produced something you hoped read as a normal smile.

"Yeah — yeah, of course." You did not sound normal.

He was leaning against the back of your pew, his face closer to yours than you'd fully registered until he turned it directly toward you, close enough now that there was no possible way he'd missed the colour currently flooding your cheeks.

"Are you alright?" His brow drew together. "You seem a bit out of breath."

You were, in fact, out of breath, and having him this close was doing absolutely nothing to help the situation. "I'm fine. Probably just caught a bit of a cold," you tried, aiming for lightness and landing somewhere considerably less convincing.

He frowned, properly this time, and his right hand rose into your field of view before you'd fully processed it was moving — the back of it pressing gently to your forehead. He hummed, low, considering.

"You're definitely warm." His hand shifted, the backs of his fingers trailing from your forehead to rest instead against one cheek, and you felt the rasp of his knuckles against your skin, dry and warm, and had to consciously stop yourself from turning your face into the touch like some starved creature. His frown deepened even as something distinctly amused pulled at the corner of his mouth. "Warmer here, actually."

You wanted, quite sincerely, to die on the spot.

Hey, your own brain unhelpfully supplied, he could always check whether the lips run warmer than the cheeks. You get to pick which lips.

You extracted yourself from his grasp with more force than the moment strictly required, mourning the loss of contact even as you executed it, because you plainly could not be trusted to remain within arm's reach of him and your own treacherous brain simultaneously.

"Baelor, I'm fine," you said, a touch sharper than intended, though he didn't so much as flinch at the tone. "I don't want you catching anything."

He only smiled wider and made no move whatsoever to actually put distance between you. "I'd sooner risk a fever," he said, "than pretend I'm not worried."

Fuck, your brain supplied again, with feeling. We're definitely on fire now.

You stared up at his eyes and found something there you could only have described, if pressed, as adoration — open, unguarded, entirely unlike the careful public warmth he handed out to the rest of the parish. You shook your head, mostly to break the eye contact before it did any further damage.

"You mentioned books," you said, seizing the subject change for the sake of your own cardiovascular health. "Did you forget how to read? Need a hand sounding out the big words?"

He huffed something close to a laugh. "No, I remember perfectly well. I believe I've managed the Scriptures competently enough these past years." The corners of his mouth twitched further upward. "I simply wanted an excuse to monopolize your company for an hour or two."

Your heart did something undignified in your chest. "That sounds suspiciously premeditated."

He smiled fully at that, the expression finally reaching all the way to his eyes, those sharp canines catching the light for a moment as he did. He leaned his head a fraction closer to yours. "I knew you'd never suspect such villainy from a man carrying a Bible."

He straightened, then, rising to his full and considerable height in front of you, and your eyes — treacherous things, apparently incapable of behaving themselves for even a single uninterrupted minute today — tracked the movement of him without your permission, sweeping briefly over the whole of him as he rose.

He offered his hand to help you up, and as you took it, you found yourself thinking, not for the first time, that he'd grown noticeably warmer toward you since December — the careful, apparently ordinary distance replaced by something considerably closer and considerably harder to explain away as your own overactive imagination.

You couldn't, in fact, blame your imagination for a single part of it. Not for the way his fingers closed around yours now, certain and unhurried, and squeezed.

You let him lead you toward the bookshelf, matching your pace to his without quite meaning to, and told yourself, with the same shaky conviction you'd been running on since October, that you could absolutely handle whatever the next hour of shelving hymnals next to him was about to do to you.

You were, you knew even as you thought it, lying.

He was doing a spectacularly poor job of concentrating on the books.

He'd catalogued the entire top shelf twice now without retaining a single title — he could not, if pressed under oath, have named a single volume currently passing through his own hands — his attention snagging instead, over and over, on the woman standing four feet away from him, sorting hymnals into some system only she seemed to fully understand. Her hands, moving quick and sure between spines, the small, unconscious flex of her fingers each time she pulled a book free. The line of her neck where it disappeared into her collar, exposed each time she tipped her head to read a call number, a stretch of skin he had spent an unconscionable number of these last minutes wanting to press his mouth against. Her — simply her, the whole unbearable fact of her presence in a part of the church few people ever bothered to visit, close enough now that his own cock had apparently decided it was done deferring to whatever remained of his better judgment and was making its opinion known with a persistence that bordered on cruelty.

The old stacks sat tucked into a low-ceilinged alcove next to the sacristy, a corner of the building most of the parish had entirely forgotten existed. The hour had gone late enough that the last of the day's amber light had drained out of the high windows entirely, leaving them lit by nothing but the single bare bulb overhead. They were, as far as he could ascertain, entirely and completely alone, in a part of the building no one would think to look for either of them, for at least another hour.

He was aware of this fact the way a man is aware of a loaded gun left within easy reach. Not actively reaching for it. Simply aware, at every moment, of precisely how little effort it would take.

He could press her back against the shelving behind her right now, he thought, with the same detached, horrified clarity he brought to most of his worst ideas these days. Could close the four feet of distance still separating them in two unhurried steps, could feel the small, surprised sound she'd make against his mouth when he finally did what he'd been fantasizing about since October and simply kissed her — her mouth first, hard enough to bruise if she let him, and then, God help him, her throat, working down the column of it with lips and teeth both until he reached the collar of her shirt and whatever lay just beneath it that he'd only glimpsed once, entirely by accident, and had never once managed to forget since.

There was a mole, small and dark, resting in the shallow space between her breasts — visible for exactly as long as it had taken her collar to gape, that Christmas Eve, when she'd collapsed against his chest crying and he'd had nothing better to do with his own treacherous eyes than look down at the crown of her head and, in doing so, see considerably further than he'd had any right to.

He had not gone looking for it. He wanted that on some private record somewhere, for whatever it was worth. But he had seen it, and he had not forgotten it, and he had — he made himself think the words plainly, since plain honesty for himself seemed to be the only discipline he had any capacity left for these days — used the memory of it since. More than once. Three times, if he was counting accurately, which he was, because some perverse instinct in him insisted on keeping score even as the number itself made him wince.

He was not, he would freely admit, particularly proud of that fact. He had noticed, with some alarm, that he was growing steadily less ashamed of it with each repetition, the way any sin presumably grew easier to commit the second and third time a man permitted himself the first.

He had, somewhere in these last weeks, made his peace with the fact that he was absolutely and irreversibly finished.

There was very little dignity left in continuing to pretend otherwise to himself, whatever dignity he still managed to perform for the rest of the parish. And he had made his peace, too, with the considerably larger admission underneath the smaller one — that whatever this was, it had stopped being purely carnal months ago, if it had ever been purely carnal at all.

He loved her.

He had finally said the word to himself plainly enough that it no longer required euphemism to survive contact with his own conscience. He thought, sometimes, of the old theologians who'd insisted love and desire were properly ordered toward each other, that eros rightly directed eventually became something closer to caritas — and thought, with a bitterness that surprised him, that none of them had apparently accounted for a man in his exact position, wanting a woman with the whole of both registers simultaneously and having no legitimate direction left to order either of them toward.

It was, if he allowed himself to examine it with anything like clear eyes, a faintly absurd thing to have arrived at. He had constructed, somewhere in the private space of his own skull, an entire relationship with a woman who had no idea the structure existed — imagined conversations he'd never had, a whole domestic future built out of nothing but proximity and want, a life that existed nowhere except behind his own eyes. And yet he craved her the way his lungs craved air, an urgency that didn't diminish with acknowledgment the way most cravings eventually did, only sharpened. He needed her the way his heart needed blood moved through it — not as an indulgence to be rationed out and enjoyed occasionally, but as something closer to a constant, involuntary function, present in every single beat whether he attended to it or not.

He had grown considerably more reckless since December — since she'd come back to him on Christmas Eve, since whatever had broken open in the both of them that night had apparently not fully closed again in the weeks since.

He stood closer to her than strictly necessary whenever proximity presented itself as an option. He spoke to her now with a candour he extended to no one else in his life, not his brothers, not his own confessor, saving for her alone whatever scraps of real honesty he still had in him to give. And he had, God forgive him — he meant that literally, he hoped God was in fact prepared to forgive him for it, because he had not yet managed to stop doing it — begun making sure, every single time she knelt in front of him for Communion, that his fingers grazed the wet warmth of her tongue exactly the way they had that first involuntary time, months ago, when the contact had genuinely been an accident rather than something he now engineered with quiet, deliberate care.

He remembered, with a clarity that shamed him, the most recent Sunday — how her eyes had lifted to his at the exact moment his fingers made contact, how she'd held the look a half-second longer than the sacrament strictly required before dropping her gaze and returning, dutiful and quiet, to her pew. He had spent the rest of that Mass in a state of low, humming distraction he was fairly certain no one else in the building had noticed, though he supposed a man in his position had grown reasonably skilled at not being noticed for exactly this sort of thing.

He felt, doing it, precisely like what he was: a predator. A wolf who had spent years perfecting the exact cut and drape of sheep's clothing, using the one moment of the week she trusted him without reservation to take something small and illicit for himself, wrapped in the cover of the single most sacred rite he had the authority to perform.

And yet — and this was the part he turned over most often, searching for whatever exoneration might be hiding somewhere inside it — she had never once recoiled. Not so much as a flicker. If anything, something in the way she looked back at him afterward, dazed and a little too warm around the eyes, suggested the opposite of discomfort entirely.

He told himself, some days, that this meant something. Other days, more honest ones, he suspected it meant nothing at all — that she simply hadn't noticed, that a man well-practiced in reading exactly what he wanted into an ambiguous glance had found, in her, an extremely willing canvas for his own self-serving interpretation. He did not actually know which version was true. He had decided, with the particular cowardice of a man unwilling to test a comfortable theory against reality, not to find out.

Out here in the stacks, away from anything so freighted with meaning as the altar rail, his hands had taken to chasing hers with whatever flimsy pretext presented itself — a book exchanged between them that could easily have simply been set down on a shelf instead, a particular passage he suddenly needed to show her that required, apparently, both of their fingers on the same page at once. Once, reaching past her for a volume on the higher shelf, he'd let his forearm brush deliberately along the length of her own, slow enough that neither of them could reasonably have called it accidental, and she had gone very still beside him for exactly as long as the contact lasted, breath catching audibly enough that he'd heard it even over the creak of old shelving.

She never pulled away. Not once, in the better part of an hour they'd now spent  together, had she so much as flinched from the contact, and he was beginning to suspect his own hands of acting with an intention his conscious mind hadn't fully signed off on, some old animal logic operating several steps ahead of whatever restraint he still had left in reserve.

She was so warm. She smelled, up this close, like her usual jasmine and her own scent — floral, faintly sweet, entirely her own — and he was aware, with a fresh wave of something close to genuine self-disgust, that he had started arranging his own movements around the simple, animal pleasure of standing near enough to catch it. He must look, he thought, exactly like a stray dog trailing some kinder stranger's scent down an alley, hoping against all evidence that this time, finally, someone might actually decide to keep him.

It was, mercifully for whatever remained of his composure and considerably less mercifully for the rest of him, a small blessing that the books themselves were finite.

His cock had been pressing, hard and increasingly insistent, against the front of his trousers beneath the cassock for the better part of the last twenty minutes, and he found himself, not for the first time this year, sincerely grateful for the concealing yardage of black fabric the Church had settled on centuries ago, apparently with foresight he'd never once had reason to appreciate until now.

"You're still coming on Sunday?" he asked, watching her dust the last traces of shelf-dust from her hands together, the final book finally settled into its rightful place.

"Of course I am."

"Good," he smiled lightly.

She narrowed her eyes at him, suspicion visibly creeping across her face. "I can't believe you weaponized books against me, by the way."

He blinked back at her with practiced, entirely unconvincing innocence. "Weaponized?"

"You admitted you only wanted an excuse to monopolize my company."

"I admitted no such thing."

"You did!"

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, infuriatingly smug even to his own ear. "I admitted I wanted your company. The books were simply—" he considered his next word with theatrical care, "—a fortunate opportunity."

She snorted. "That's a distinction without a difference, Baelor."

"Is it?"

"Absolutely."

He considered the accusation with exaggerated solemnity, weighing it as though it were a genuine theological question rather than the flirtation it plainly was, before inclining his head in mock concession. "Then I suppose I'll simply have to find another, more honest opportunity."

The words left him so matter-of-factly, so entirely without the caution he ought to have exercised around a sentence like that, that it took her a full heartbeat to register what he'd actually said. He watched the realization land — watched her eyes widen just slightly, watched the colour climb back into her cheeks, the ones she'd only just managed to ease down from their earlier crisis.

A complete, lovesick dog, he thought again, watching her. Utterly without shame left to spend on the matter.

He gathered the empty book crate at his feet, if only to give his hands something to do besides what they actually wanted to do, and followed her toward the main space of the church, watching the sway of her hips ahead of him with an attention he made absolutely no effort to redirect.

Whatever thin ice he'd been treading on these past months, he thought, following her into the ordinary light of the sanctuary, he had apparently long since stopped noticing the sound of it cracking beneath his own feet.

Sunday came, and he still hadn't decided, by the time they reached the end of her street, precisely how he intended to explain her presence to Maekar, because his brother actually didn’t know she was coming.

It was an ordinary enough Sunday on paper — one of the regular rotations his brother insisted on, dinner with him and Dyanna and all six of the children, a standing invitation Baelor accepted perhaps two Sundays out of every four and would, if he was honest with himself, have very likely declined this particular week. He had not been in the mood for the specific chaos six children under one roof reliably produced, not with everything currently occupying the greater share of his attention. And then she had mentioned, almost in passing, in the tone of someone determined not to make more of the fact than it deserved, that tonight marked a year since her father's death.

He had asked her before he'd finished fully deciding to. A single phone call to Dyanna, two additional plates added to a table that had never once, in his years as a priest, held a plate for anyone he'd brought there himself.

He had dressed for the evening in the plain black shirt and jeans he kept for the rare occasions he left the parish entirely — no collar, no cassock, nothing to announce what he was to anyone who happened to pass them on the street.

He caught his own reflection once, briefly, in a shop window on the walk over, and was struck by how thoroughly the absence of the collar changed the man looking back at him. Simply a man. Tall, greying at the temples, walking beside a woman toward his brother's house for Sunday dinner, indistinguishable from a thousand other men doing precisely the same ordinary thing on precisely the same ordinary evening.

He had to laugh the thought off almost as soon as he'd finished having it — a short, private huff of breath that she glanced over at, curious, and that he waved away with some invented comment about the cold. He did this often now, he'd noticed. Manufactured a small joke, threw some cheap comedy at whatever wreckage his own mind had just handed him, because the alternative to laughing was feeling the full weight of it, and he had learned these last months that he could not afford to feel the full weight of it while still upright and functioning in public.

She had gone quiet somewhere around the third block, uncommonly so, and he could see — the way he'd learned, over these months, to read the specific grammar of her silences — that she'd sunk somewhere deep into her own thoughts, some private country he had no map for and no legitimate right to enter uninvited.

He would have paid nearly anything, in that moment, for even a minute's access to whatever was moving behind her eyes. Did she think of him, he wondered, with anything like the frequency or the gravity with which he thought of her? Some desperate, starved part of him wanted — needed — to believe she did.

Another part of him, the part still bound tight by fifteen years of collar even when the collar itself sat folded in a drawer at home, rose immediately to scold the wanting. You are a debauched man, the voice informed him, without much interest in being argued with. How dare you imagine, even for a moment, that she thinks of you in anything like the way you think of her.

He fought the voice down the way he'd learned to fight most things down these days — not by winning the argument, exactly, but by refusing to let it finish making its case before he changed the subject inside his own skull.

She smelled so sweet, walking this close beside him — jasmine drifting up from her hair directly into his awareness with every small shift of the wind, the same scent he had, by now, come to associate so completely with her presence that he doubted he'd ever manage to smell it on anyone else again without his whole chest tightening involuntarily.

He wanted, with an intensity that frightened him a little, to bury his face in the crook of her neck and simply breathe her in until the scent embedded itself somewhere permanent — in his clothes, his skin, the actual blood running through him, indistinguishable from his own physiology by the end of it. He wanted to press his mouth to that same stretch of skin, to feel the give of it beneath his lips, the warmth and softness of her throat, and kiss it with the kind of reverence he had once reserved exclusively for—

"Is this the direction?"

Her voice cut cleanly through the thought, severing it mid-collapse, and he found her stopped in front of a door he recognized immediately even through the fog she'd just interrupted.

He cleared his throat, recovering himself with more effort than the simple question should have required. "Yes. This is Maekar's."

He rang the bell. Aemon answered — a boy no more than fifteen, all knees and elbows and the particular restless energy of that specific age — and turned immediately back into the house and hollered, at a volume that indicated he'd been doing this his entire life, "Uncle Baelor's here!"

Maekar’s voice answered from somewhere further inside, raspy and entirely unbothered by the volume of his own. "Let him in and make yourself fucking useful, Aemon!"

She laughed, quick and delighted, at that. Baelor cleared his throat again, glancing sideways at her with something between apology and fond resignation. "I should warn you in advance — Maekar runs a bit short-tempered. He loves those children with the whole of himself, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from the first five minutes."

She waved the concern away easily. "Don't worry. My dad was pretty similar."

They crossed the threshold together, and he pulled the door shut behind them. She shrugged out of her jacket, and his hands found the collar of it before he'd made any conscious decision to reach for it, hanging it automatically on the hook beside the door the way he'd hung his own coat there a hundred times before — the gesture so unthinkingly domestic that he only registered its full weight after he'd already completed it. He had never once, in years of visiting this house, hung anyone's coat but his own.

She thanked him, quiet, and smiled at him in a way that did something entirely unhelpful to his chest. He thought, watching her, that he would do anything currently within his power to be the recipient of that exact smile for the rest of whatever life he had left to live.

"Took you long enough." Maekar's voice arrived a moment before the man himself did, appearing in the entryway with the particular scowl he wore for approximately ninety percent of his waking hours, a scowl that had seldom, in Baelor's experience, actually indicated real displeasure. "What made you change your mind?" His eyes moved from Baelor to her, and back to Baelor again, something calculating already working behind them.

"I'm sorry," she said, glancing between the two brothers. "I thought Baelor had mentioned I'd be coming?"

Maekar said nothing to that. Only looked at him a beat longer than was entirely comfortable. It was Dyanna who broke the small, suspended silence, appearing at her husband's side with the warm, unhurried competence she brought to every room she entered.

"You were expected, don't you worry, dear." She came forward and pressed a familiar peck to his cheek, the same greeting she'd been giving him for as long as he could remember. "Baelor told me he'd be bringing company tonight," she added, directed pointedly at Maekar, who only frowned, apparently unconvinced, before shrugging the matter aside entirely. "Come on, then — dinner's getting cold."

Dinner unfolded with more ease than he'd allowed himself to expect.

Daeron kept himself uncharacteristically restrained with the wine. Aerion, normally the most reliably difficult of the older children, behaved himself with a courtesy Baelor privately attributed to the novelty of an unfamiliar face at the table. Maekar’s youngest girl, Rhae, had demanded to know whether she liked dogs, and upon receiving an enthusiastic yes, had spent the better part of ten minutes describing, in exhaustive and largely fictional detail, the dog she intended to campaign for come her next birthday. She had listened to the entire performance with a gravity that suggested she found it genuinely fascinating rather than merely tolerable, asking follow-up questions at exactly the right intervals, and Baelor had watched the whole exchange with an ache in his chest that had nothing at all to do with lust and everything to do with some quieter, more devastating type of want.

He watched her face ease, over the course of the meal, into something he hadn't seen on her some days — the tightness around her eyes loosening by degrees, her smile arriving more easily and staying longer each time, until by the time the plates were mostly empty she looked, for the length of an ordinary Sunday dinner, like a woman who had simply never lost anyone at all.

When the meal wound down, Maekar rose to clear the plates and threw Baelor a look that was less invitation than instruction. Baelor followed him into the kitchen without comment, the door swinging shut behind them and cutting the noise of the dining room down to a low, distant murmur.

Maekar set his stack of plates into the sink with more force than the crockery strictly required and turned to face him directly, arms crossing over his chest.

"Alright. Care to tell me what's actually going on?"

"Whatever do you mean?" Baelor attempted, with considerably less conviction than the deflection required to work.

"You have never, in the whole of your priesthood, brought anyone to one of these dinners." Maekar's eyes didn't leave his face. "Not once. Fifteen years."

"She needed a distraction tonight. She's having a difficult time at home just now."

Maekar made a short, disbelieving sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "A difficult time." He shook his head slowly. "Baelor. Who is she?"

"She's from the parish. I've been helping her through some things. That's the whole of it."

"'Helping her through some things,'" Maekar repeated, flat, each word landing with deliberate weight. "And can you explain to me, then, why you spent the entire meal looking at her the exact way you used to look at Jena?"

Baelor felt the name land somewhere just beneath his ribs, cold and sudden as a dropped stone.

"I was not—" he started.

"You absolutely were." Maekar spoke straight over him, giving him no room to finish even the denial. "Baelor. What is going on with you?"

How, Baelor thought, staring at his brother across a kitchen he'd known his entire adult life, was he meant to explain to this man — to anyone, to himself, if he was being fully honest — that somewhere in these last months he had begun quietly, seriously entertaining the idea of leaving the priesthood altogether. That the thought no longer arrived as blasphemy to be immediately confessed and dismissed, but as something he turned over at night with an attention that frightened him more than the sin itself did.

"She's a grown woman managing her own grief. She doesn't need you playing at whatever this is." Maekar's voice had dropped, losing some of its earlier sharpness, replaced by something closer to genuine concern. "I've watched you disappear into that collar for fifteen years, Baelor. I know what it looks like when you're actually present in a room, and I have not seen it — not once, not really — since before you were ordained, since Jena." He paused. "Until tonight. And you were looking at her the same way."

"Maekar, I—"

"I'm so sorry to interrupt." Her voice arrived from the kitchen doorway, and both men turned to find her standing at the threshold, apologetic. "My mother just called. I should probably be getting back."

Baelor nodded at her, grateful for the interruption in a way he suspected showed plainly on his face, and turned back to his brother. "I'll call you in the morning. Coffee, maybe, if you've got the time."

Maekar didn't look particularly thrilled by the proposition, but nodded once, gruff. "You'd better call. Or I'll be showing up at that church myself to drag you out of it bodily."

Baelor managed something close to a real laugh at that and turned back to her, crossing to the door and taking her jacket from its hook the same way he'd hung it — without conscious decision, simply reaching for the task as though it belonged to him now. Dyanna and Maekar saw them out with the easy warmth of people who'd done this a hundred times before, for a hundred other ordinary Sunday guests, and Baelor let himself, for just the length of the goodbye, pretend that was all this was.

He turned Maekar's question over for the first several blocks of the walk to her home, the way a tongue can't help returning to a sore tooth. The way you used to look at Jena. He hadn't realized, until his brother said it aloud, that his own face had apparently stopped being capable of hiding what the rest of him had been failing to hide for months now. He wondered, uneasily, who else might have noticed and simply chosen, out of kindness or discretion or their own discomfort with the implications, not to say a word about it.

She stayed quiet nearly the entire walk back to her house, and Baelor understood well enough why, without needing her to say it aloud — understood that whatever waited for her behind that door tonight, on this particular anniversary, was a considerably heavier thing than anything six loud children and a home-cooked meal could hold at bay indefinitely. He didn't comment on it. He simply walked beside her, matching his pace to hers, and let the silence be whatever she needed it to be.

When they reached her door, she stopped, hand hovering near the handle, and hesitated a moment before turning to face him instead.

"Thank you for tonight." She looked up at him properly, the porch light catching the tired, grateful set of her face. "I needed the distraction."

He smiled at her, aware of his own hands aching faintly where he'd kept them clenched at his sides for most of the walk, some last reserve of discipline spent entirely on the simple, exhausting effort of not reaching for her. "It's nothing. If anything, I owe you the thanks. Maekar behaved himself with remarkable civility, and I suspect you're entirely responsible for it."

She laughed at that, low and easy, and he could see — could feel, somehow, in the quality of the pause that followed — the machinery behind her eyes working at considerable speed, turning something over that she hadn't yet decided whether to act on.

She shook her head once, hard, like she was physically dislodging whatever argument had been running in there, and her body moved before the rest of her had fully caught up to the decision — closing the distance between them and wrapping her arms around his middle, pressing herself against him, her hands coming to rest flat against his back.

It took him a full second to react — or, more accurately, to keep himself from reacting with anything close to the force his whole body wanted to.

His arms came around her in turn, one settling at the small of her back, the other rising to cradle the back of her head, guiding her face gently into the front of his chest. He wondered, distantly, whether she could feel how unsteady his own heart currently was beneath her cheek, hammering against his ribs with none of the composure that years of discipline were supposed to have granted him by now.

He was fairly certain she could. But she didn't say anything about it, if she did.

He held onto the moment longer than was strictly necessary for the comfort of a distraught friend, cataloguing, with the same helpless thoroughness he brought to everything about her lately, the exact way she fit against him — how her head settled naturally into the space just below his collarbone, how her arms had found their way fully around him rather than offering the more restrained, careful embrace two people in their actual positions probably ought to have exchanged.

She drew back eventually — reluctantly, he thought, or perhaps only hoped, unable to fully trust his own reading of it — and looked up at him again.

"I'll see you over the week," she said, and held his gaze a moment longer than the sentence strictly required.

If the embrace had nearly undone him, what came next very nearly finished the job entirely.

She rose onto her toes, one hand still resting light against his chest for balance, and pressed a slow, deliberate kiss high against his right cheekbone — brief enough, in isolation, that it could have passed for nothing more than an ordinary, friendly gesture between two people who'd simply had a long evening together.

It did not read that way to him. It did not read that way to any part of him currently paying attention, which, by that point, was the whole of him.

She turned and let herself into the house without waiting for a response, and Baelor stood exactly where she'd left him on the dark porch, reining himself in with what felt like the last available inch of restraint he currently had access to — because every other part of him, every part he'd spent years training into obedience, wanted nothing more than to close the distance she'd just opened between them, press her back against the nearest wall, and have her there and then, whatever the cost turned out to be.

It was, he thought, watching her door close between them, well and truly starting to get out of hand.

It was, when you allowed yourself to actually examine it, a fairly ridiculous state to be in.

Nervous — properly nervous, palms-damp, stomach-hollow nervous — over a dinner with a man's brother and his family. It wasn't a date. It was, by any reasonable definition available to you, simply a dinner, the kind people attended constantly without their hands shaking while they did up the buttons of their shirt.

So why, precisely, were you currently failing to manage even that?

Oh. Right. Because you were in love with a priest, and had been, if you allowed yourself the full and uncomfortable honesty of it, since sometime before December ever arrived to make the feeling official. That was the small matter currently underlying the larger, more manageable-sounding matter of nerves.

And it wasn't only that, either, if you were determined to be thorough about your own downfall this evening — you were also, plainly and inconveniently, so relentlessly attracted to the man that you couldn't actually remember, with any real confidence, the last time you'd touched yourself without his face arriving somewhere in the process, invited or not. You'd tried, a handful of times, to summon someone else entirely — an ex, a stranger from a film, anyone at all who didn't come with a collar and a vow of celibacy attached — and had failed, every single time, within the first several seconds.

Your own imagination, it turned out, had developed something close to a monopoly, and you'd stopped fighting it sometime around mid January.

"Fucking hell," you muttered to yourself, halfway down the stairs toward the front door.

Yeah, your own brain agreed helpfully, as your body went about the business of shrugging a coat on without waiting for the rest of you to catch up. That's where we're headed, all right. But have you seen him? The man is worth the eternal damnation, easily.

You shook your head at your own brain's editorializing and opened the door, and there he was, already waiting: tall, dressed head to toe in black, no collar anywhere in sight, already looking directly at you. You thought, with a clarity that should have alarmed you more than it did, that the single colour that would actually suit him best was his own bare skin, laid out beneath you, or above you — you weren't particular about the arrangement.

Your breath caught at the way he smiled. You had to physically suppress the impulse to launch yourself at him — to kiss him, to eat him whole, to do something considerably less appropriate than simply saying hello to a man on your own front step.

You genuinely wouldn’t remember much of anything past the third block.

Later, comparing notes in your own head the way you occasionally did after time spent with him, you'd realize that had apparently been happening to both of you simultaneously, each of you disappearing into your own private fog at exactly the same stretch of pavement — though in the moment you only knew that you were too deep inside your own head, fixated on the specific, aching want to simply lace your fingers through his, to notice much else about the walk itself.

He looked so good out of his usual attire. Available, somehow, in a way the collar never let him look, and your heart performed something close to a full cartwheel at the image your own mind kept helpfully supplying: the two of you, simply a regular couple, walking to a regular family dinner on a regular Sunday, nothing forbidden about any part of it.

The February cold had finally started loosening its grip these last few days, the air carrying the thin, specific promise of a season about to turn, and you let yourself, for the length of that walk, imagine an entire future built out of nothing but ordinary Sundays exactly like this one — dinners with his family, walks home in the early evening, his hand finding yours without either of you needing to manufacture a reason for it first.

You noticed, glancing sideways, that he'd gone quiet too, visibly somewhere deep in his own thoughts, and you caught yourself wanting, in a moment of pure and fairly horrifying selfishness, to be the only thing currently occupying his mind. What a genuinely terrible thing to wish for, you thought, because you were essentially wishing a whole life of lust onto a man who'd spent years actively training himself out of it, and doing so purely because you wanted the privilege of being its cause.

You allowed yourself a small smile at the image your own mind produced next, apparently determined to entertain you through the remainder of the walk regardless of your own better judgment: an old-fashioned scale, the kind with two brass pans hanging from a central beam, you seated in one and the Cross balanced in the other, and Baelor — helpless, without a second thought — abandoning the Cross entirely and rushing toward your side of the scale instead.

That's a rather pretty image, one part of your brain observed, pleased with itself.

Sure, another part answered, considerably further south and considerably less interested in metaphor, but the image of him actually eating your pussy would be better.

You didn’t berate your body for the obvious hyperfixation it had developed with that particular idea. You had to agree: it was a far better picture. One that assembled itself without your permission or consent — Baelor on his knees in front of you, buried between your thighs, eating you like a starved man finally given a proper meal, which you were fairly, privately certain he would be. You allowed yourself precisely three full seconds of indulging it before dragging your attention back to the actual physical world around you.

You came to a halt only once you registered that the street you'd been walking had turned into the exact one Baelor had described to you, days earlier, in case you'd decided against his company and needed to find your own way. You hadn't, not for a single second, considered going alone. It hadn't even occurred to you as an option worth weighing.

"Is this the direction?" you asked.

Baelor came to a stop beside you and nodded, seemingly taken out of his own thoughts by your voice. "Yes. This is Maekar's."

He rang the bell. A boy answered after a few seconds, no more than fifteen, and immediately turned back into the house to holler, at a volume that suggested long practice: "Uncle Baelor's here!"

A raspy voice answered from somewhere further inside, entirely unbothered by matching the volume. "Let him in and make yourself fucking useful, Aemon!"

You laughed as Baelor shook his head in what looked like long-suffering defeat. "I should warn you in advance — Maekar runs a bit short-tempered. He loves those children with the whole of himself, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from the first five minutes."

You laughed again and waved the concern away, wishing, in the same breath, that you could reach up and kiss away the small frown currently sitting between his brows. "Don't worry. My dad was pretty similar."

You crossed the threshold, and before you'd fully processed the intention to remove your own coat, Baelor was already easing it off your shoulders for you. Your chest did something warm and complicated at the gesture, and you turned to thank him properly as he hung it, giving him the widest smile you currently had access to. You could have sworn, for half a second, that his eyes went slightly wider in response — though you didn't get the chance to examine his face further, because a rough voice cut in from further inside the house.

"Took you long enough."

The man who came around the corner into the entryway was, you registered immediately, nothing at all like Baelor, either physically or in the general weather of him. He was tall too, broader through the shoulders if anything, but his colouring belonged to an entirely different register — hair so pale it read almost white under the hallway bulb, eyes a shade of blue so light they looked faintly lilac and unreal, an expression carrying a scowl you had genuinely never once seen cross Baelor's own face in the whole of the last six months.

"What made you change your mind?" Maekar's gaze moved from Baelor to you, the scowl deepening, and then back to Baelor again.

Shit, you thought, a spike of panic arriving fast and unwelcome. Did he not actually tell them I was coming?

"I'm sorry," you said quickly, glancing between the two brothers. "I thought Baelor had mentioned I'd be coming?"

A tense beat passed between the two men, neither willing to break first, before a second voice arrived — warmer, more musical, cutting cleanly through whatever standoff had been quietly assembling itself.

"You were expected, don't you worry, dear."

The woman who appeared at Maekar's side had to be Dyanna, exactly as Baelor had described her, and she was, you noted with a small unwelcome twist somewhere beneath your ribs, genuinely beautiful — warm-eyed, easy in her own skin, the kind of pretty that seemed entirely unbothered by its own existence. She crossed to Baelor and pressed a quick, familiar peck to his cheek, and you felt something ugly and possessive flare up in you before you could fully stop it — not jealousy over the kiss itself, or over who it came from, but over the sheer, uncomplicated permission behind it.

She was allowed to do something you very much were not, and the unfairness of that gnawed at you considerably more than you wanted to admit, even privately.

"Baelor told me he'd be bringing company tonight," Dyanna added, directed pointedly at her husband, before turning fully toward the dining room. "Come on, then — dinner's getting cold."

You filed the small, ugly flare of jealousy away somewhere you didn't intend to examine again tonight, mostly because you knew exactly how unreasonable it was. Dyanna was married. Dyanna had known him for years, had raised six children who called him uncle, had earned that casual cheek-kiss through decades of ordinary, accumulated familiarity you had no business begrudging her. But none of that logic made the feeling any less real while it lasted.

Dinner turned out to be genuinely pleasant, in a way that caught you slightly off guard — it reminded you, with a pang you weren't entirely prepared for, of the family dinners you used to have, back when you'd still had an actual family gathered around one table rather than the smaller, quieter arrangement you and your mother currently managed alone.

Maekar's children were, without exception, very funny. You were thoroughly charmed by the youngest, who introduced herself with enormous solemnity as Rhae and then spent the better part of ten minutes describing, in exhaustive and mostly fictional detail, the exact dog she intended to campaign for at her next birthday. Her father scoffed audibly at some point during the pitch. Egg, apparently the youngest of the sons, immediately rose to his sister's defence — he wanted a dog too, as it happened, and saw no reason her campaign shouldn't also serve his own interests.

You found yourself, somewhere around the second course, genuinely laughing for the first time in longer than you wanted to calculate — not the careful, managed laugh you produced for your mother's benefit most days, but something looser, unguarded, pulled out of you by children who had no idea they were doing anything remarkable at all.

You got thoroughly absorbed in adjudicating the resulting squabble, right up until you noticed a pair of warm, mismatched eyes settled on you from across the table. You'd been feeling them, if you were honest, for most of the meal already — a steady, low-grade awareness humming under everything else — and had made a deliberate point of not looking back too often, aware of exactly what currently sat behind your own eyes and entirely unwilling to let either Maekar or Dyanna catch a glimpse of it across a dinner table.

When the meal wound down, Maekar rose without a word, directed a look at his older brother that clearly wasn't optional, and the two of them disappeared toward the kitchen together. Their departure seemed to function as unspoken permission for the rest of the table to scatter as well — the older three, Daeron, Aerion, and the eldest daughter, Daella, vanished toward whatever corner of the house teenagers vanished to, and you were left at the table with Dyanna and the two youngest, Egg and Rhae, since Aemon, you'd learn, had gone missing somewhere into a book roughly ten minutes into dinner and could not currently be counted among the socially present.

Dyanna let out a low, fond chuckle into the relative quiet. "They're at it again, those two."

You looked at her, brow furrowing slightly, unsure what exactly she meant. She caught the confusion and smiled wider.

"Baelor and Maekar. They love each other completely, but they cannot, for the love of God, stop arguing like two old women at a supermarket checkout."

You laughed at that, surprised into it. "Is that fairly common, then?"

Dyanna closed her eyes for a moment, eyebrows lifting, and let out a long breath that suggested she was selecting from a genuinely extensive catalogue of examples.

"Years back, at one of Aerion’s friends' birthday parties, he got himself into a bit of trouble — started a fight with another boy over something entirely forgettable now. Maekar went in defending his own son, the way you'd expect. Baelor, though, sided with the other kid, because he'd apparently decided Aerion was in the wrong regardless of whose blood he shared." She shook her head, something between exasperation and genuine fondness in the gesture. "The two of them got so deep into arguing about it that they ended up properly fighting each other, right there at a child's birthday party. That's where Baelor's eyebrow scar comes from, if you were wondering."

Your mouth fell open, entirely involuntarily.

Well, your brain supplied, unhelpfully delighted with itself, now we know where the scar came from.

You filed the detail away with something close to tenderness — one more small, hard-won piece of a man who gave almost nothing away about himself voluntarily, gathered instead through the generous, unguarded testimony of people who'd known him far longer than you had.

"Say," Dyanna went on, her voice gone softer, more curious. "Have you known Baelor long?"

"Just short of half a year, actually," you played with the corner of your napkin.

She hummed to herself, considering that, something working behind her eyes that you couldn't quite read. "That explains some things."

"I'm sorry?" You frowned properly this time.

She waved a hand, dismissive but kind. "Don't worry — nothing bad, I promise." Her smile, when it came, was entirely genuine. "It's only that we haven't seen Baelor look this much like himself for a very long time. Years, honestly."

You wanted, badly, to ask her exactly what she meant by that — what version of himself she was referring to, whether it was a version you'd actually met or one that existed only in family memory, further back than you had access to. Before you could manage the question, your phone buzzed against your leg. A missed call from your mother, and a follow-up text that told you plainly enough that you needed to be heading home sooner rather than later.

"I'm so sorry," you said, already rising from your seat. "My mother's having a rough time tonight, and I should probably get back."

Dyanna nodded in immediate understanding. "Do ask Baelor to see you home — I'm sure he was about to leave shortly anyway." Something in the specific way she said it suggested an ulterior motive you couldn't quite locate the shape of, though you filed the observation away for later consideration rather than chasing it down in the moment.

You headed for the kitchen instead of the door, meaning to collect him yourself, and caught the tail end of a sentence in Maekar's voice as you approached. "—since before you were ordained, since Jena. Until tonight. And you were looking at her the same way."

Baelor's voice was already answering, low. "Maekar, I—"

You stepped into the doorway before you could hear whatever came next, some instinct telling you this wasn't a conversation you were meant to have overheard even the fragment of. "I'm so sorry to interrupt." Both men turned to find you standing there. "My mother just called. I should probably be getting back."

You filed the name away without examining it too closely — Jena — a small, unfamiliar weight added to a growing collection of things about Baelor you didn't yet have full access to.

The two brothers exchanged a few more words — something about coffee, a shared morning — and then you were at the entrance again, Baelor already reaching for your coat and easing it back over your shoulders with the same unthinking care as before.

You were quiet for nearly the entire walk back to your own house, Dyanna's comment circling in your head on an insistent, repeating loop. Your mother, waiting at home; the date — your father's anniversary, a full year now — should have been occupying the whole of your attention instead. They weren’t. The only thing currently taking up any real space in your thoughts was the quiet man walking beside you, equally silent, equally somewhere else.

You stopped at your own door and looked up at him.

"Thanks for tonight," you said. "I needed the distraction."

He smiled — that warm, entirely disarming smile you wanted, with an intensity that embarrassed you slightly, to press your own mouth against — and thanked you back, simply, humbly, like you'd done him some enormous favour rather than the reverse.

How is he like this, you thought. How is he so humble. So good. So thoroughly, impossibly out of reach?

You shook your head at your own question before it could finish settling.

He wasn't out of reach. Not really. Not tonight, not standing this close to you on your own dark porch with nowhere else either of you currently needed to be.

And to prove it to yourself, if to no one else, you closed the small remaining distance between you and wrapped your arms around him, tight, pressing yourself fully against the solid warmth of his chest.

He went still, for one long, terrifying second, and you were nearly certain — nearly, achingly certain — that he was about to step back out of the embrace entirely. Before the fear could properly take root, though, his arms came around you instead, engulfing you completely, one settling at the small of your back and the other rising to cradle the back of your head, pressing your face gently into his chest. You breathed him in without meaning to — soap, a soft trace of frankincense and something warmer underneath it, entirely his own — and thought, with a clarity that startled you, that you could quite easily spend the rest of your life exactly here, in this precise configuration, and want for very little else.

You wanted, absurdly, ferociously, to bite him. To leave some small, visible mark exactly there, over the place where his heart currently hammered against your ear like something trying to break free of its own cage — to claim some tiny, permanent piece of him that no cassock or collar could ever fully cover again.

You pulled back eventually and looked up at him properly, and you could have sworn — you were nearly certain, though the porch light made everything slightly harder to read — that his pupils had gone darker, wider, blown open in a way that had nothing at all to do with the dim light between you.

"I'll see you over the week," you told him.

And before your own better judgment could catch up to your body, you were already rising onto your toes, one hand braced flat against his chest for balance, closing the last of the distance to press your mouth to his cheek — high, right at his cheekbone, exactly where that single isolated beauty mark sat, as if waiting for you.

You let the kiss linger. Warm, maybe a little too wet to pass entirely as innocent, held a full beat longer than a simple peck strictly required.

You lowered back onto your heels and turned toward your own door without waiting to see what your face might have given away, because you knew — not buried especially deep, not really hidden from yourself at all — that if you stood there in front of him one second longer, you would stop respecting, entirely and immediately, the plain fact that he was a priest, and therefore, however you personally felt about the arrangement, God's property rather than yours to claim.

You actually had to make yourself do the exercise — sit with it deliberately, the way you might work out a math problem you'd rather avoid — to remember the last time you'd properly seen that looming darkness sitting behind your own eyes. If pressed to pinpoint it, you'd have landed somewhere in the last days of December.

What a fucking coincidence, your brain supplied, entirely unhelpfully, though you couldn't exactly argue with it.

The harder exercise, if you were honest, was trying to remember the last time you'd seen that same darkness properly settled in Baelor's.

You were growing happier, day by day, in a way that still occasionally caught you off guard when you noticed it happening. Not easily — nothing about the last year had been easy, and you doubted anything ever would be entirely easy again in quite the way things had been before your father died — but manageable, in a way that felt genuinely new rather than simply performed for everyone else's benefit.

The season helped. It was spring now, properly, mid-April, the days stretching longer and brighter with each week that passed, and you felt the shift somewhere down in your own bones, a kind of thawing that had nothing to do with the actual weather and everything to do with it, simultaneously.

Walking to the parish that morning — Baelor had invited you to a garden party some of the nearby parishes were holding together, and you'd said yes without a second thought, had even baked cookies for the occasion, an act of domesticity that would have struck you as faintly absurd six months ago — your thoughts kept drifting, as they reliably did these days, toward him.

The carnal thoughts hadn't gone anywhere, exactly. You doubted, at this point, that they ever fully would. But they'd been quietly demoted to second place, the podium instead claimed almost entirely by something considerably more domestic — sweeter, sillier, the kind of idea that made Rowan cackle with delight and made Kiera's brow furrow with genuine worry in equal measure.

You've got the face again, Rowan had told you just last week, entirely delighted by the observation. The one where you're planning a whole wedding in your head and pretending you're just thinking about the weather. You hadn't been able to muster much of a denial.

Rowan's amusement made sense to you. She'd known you long enough to know that whatever your heart eventually settled on wanting, you generally found a way to go after it, obstacles notwithstanding. Kiera's worry made just as much sense, in its own way — she knew, too, that a man in Baelor's particular position would keep your brain permanently split down the middle, one half occupied with wanting him and the other occupied with the quieter, more responsible voice telling you to let the man be, to spare him whatever ruin loving you back might actually cost him.

Both of them were right, as far as it went.

You wanted Baelor. You'd stopped being especially shy about that fact, at least in the privacy of your own head, even if you still hadn't told either of your friends his actual name — some instinct in you insisting on keeping at least that much of him entirely yours, unshared, uncommented on by anyone but you.

You had grown bold these last months, showing up at the parish with the flimsiest pretexts imaginable — your class had been cancelled, your mother was deep-cleaning the house and needed the space, you were simply passing by and thought you'd pop in, three separate excuses you'd deployed inside the same single week without a shred of shame.

You were fairly sure, by now, that the parish secretary had started keeping a tally, judging by the look she gave you every time you breezed through the door with yet another flimsy justification in hand.

Baelor never once commented on the pattern. If anything, you could sense — somewhere underneath the surface of things, in the quality of his greeting whenever you appeared — that he not only tolerated the frequency but had come to expect it, maybe even to look forward to it in whatever quiet, unspoken way a priest was permitted to look forward to a parishioner's company.

You'd exchanged phone numbers somewhere in the middle of it all — you'd been mildly, delightedly surprised to learn he carried an actual smartphone rather than the old flip phone you'd half expected, which had earned you a low, amused I'm old, but not biblically ancient from him when you'd said as much aloud.

On the evenings you didn't manage to cross the church's threshold for one reason or another, a message would arrive from him anyway, late, simple and unassuming: asking whether you were alright. You'd taken to reading far too much into the exact minute his replies arrived, and further still into the ones that came stamped well past midnight, when any reasonable priest ought to have been asleep hours earlier. It was sweet. Endearingly, almost unbearably sweet, in a way that had your own brain working overtime trying to justify what it clearly, desperately wanted to be true — that maybe, just maybe, Baelor didn't think of you purely as a parishioner in need of pastoral attention.

It was beyond obvious, of course, that he enjoyed your company more than that of the parish's usual elderly regulars — a person could have been legally blind and still picked up on that fact from across the building. But what your own mind had spent these last months quietly, methodically doing was hunting for evidence of something considerably larger than mere preference.

You'd become something of an expert, without ever setting out to be, in reading the specific language of his eyes — you knew, now, the exact look that meant he was simply tired, the one that meant a sermon had cost him more than usual to deliver, the one reserved for a parishioner he was patiently, valiantly enduring rather than actually enjoying, and the one that meant he was, for whatever brief stretch of time, genuinely and uncomplicatedly content.

And there was another look, one you'd only started properly cataloguing these last few weeks, that arrived exclusively when he looked at you — something that resembled affection with a specificity that frightened you a little every time you caught it.

You remembered, with a level of detail that still made your chest ache pleasantly, the Tuesday two weeks back when he'd looked up from a hymnal mid-conversation and simply held your gaze a beat too long, something unguarded and helpless crossing his face before he caught himself and looked away, murmuring something about needing to check on a delivery you were entirely certain hadn't actually arrived that day at all.

Was Baelor in love with you? You weren't bold enough, not yet, to actually answer that question out loud, even inside the privacy of your own skull. You'd learned, the hard way, not to give the thought too much wing. You had no particular interest in becoming Icarus, flying straight into the one sun capable of melting you down to nothing.

Nearing the church that morning, you found yourself revisiting, for perhaps the fourth time, your choice of outfit for the day.

You'd stood in front of your own mirror a full ten minutes longer than the decision strictly warranted, turning sideways, second-guessing the length, before finally telling yourself, with as much conviction as you could currently manage, that you were simply dressing for spring and not for the specific effect you privately hoped it might have on one particular man's composure.

It was properly sunny out, the kind of clear April morning that made the whole prospect of an outdoor gathering genuinely appealing rather than merely tolerable, and you'd settled, eventually, on a floral sundress — nothing too revealing, paired with a sensible pair of tights, since Baelor had mentioned other priests would be attending, and while you were entirely, privately confident that Baelor himself qualified as considerably more than merely a cool priest — a fact you measured, these days, in the pooling heat that gathered between your thighs practically every time you stood near enough to him — you couldn't necessarily vouch for the other men of the cloth arriving with him.

You crossed the church's threshold and made your way to the sacristy, where you knew you'd find him, and there he was exactly as expected — dressed the way he always dressed for these excursions beyond the parish walls, all in black, dark denim and a black button-down, the white collar sitting in stark, deliberate contrast against the rest of him.

The sight of that collar still, even now, had you internally screaming bloody murder — a small, constant, entirely unwelcome reminder of the one fact standing between you and everything you currently wanted, which was that whatever else he was to you, he was not, strictly speaking, yours.

"Hi," you said, smiling, setting the cookie tray down on the nearest table.

He turned to look at you and smiled back, crossing the small distance between you to lower his head and press a quick kiss to your cheek — a habit he'd settled into without discussion since that night after the dinner with his family, one you privately treasured more than you were entirely willing to admit even to yourself.

You couldn't properly articulate the exact size of the gladness that small gesture produced in you every single time he performed it. If you had one complaint to register against the practice, it was only that your underwear stood in a state of comprehensive ruin every time he did it. But you weren't about to look a gift horse in the mouth over a technicality like that.

He stepped back after the greeting and turned toward the mirror to finish adjusting his collar.

"Is the venue very far?" you asked, turning away to take a cookie off the tray.

You couldn't have known it, not facing away from him as you were, but had you turned back a half-second sooner you would have caught Baelor's gaze tracking the whole length of you in the mirror's reflection, lingering, however briefly, at the hem of your dress sitting just above your knee. By the time you did turn, cookie in hand, he'd already turned too, expression settled back into its usual careful composure.

You closed the distance between you, and instead of simply handing the cookie over, you brought it directly to his mouth instead — an unconscious echo of Communion that struck you only after you'd already committed to the gesture, the cookie and the tip of your fingers grazing his lips as you set it between them. His mouth was warm. Soft, under the slight roughness of his beard. Your stomach performed a small, involuntary flip that something considerably lower down mirrored with rather more enthusiasm.

He took the cookie fully into his mouth and bit down, chewing thoughtfully for a moment before his brow furrowed. "Not a lot," he said, around the mouthful, and then, more decisively: "We'll take the car. This is bloody good, by the way."

You laughed, delighted, and nodded, gathering the tray back up and following him toward the exit.

His car turned out to be an old, black thing that had clearly seen better decades, and you waited beside it while he gave the young deacon left in charge of the parish for the day a final, thorough set of instructions — when to expect you both back, what to do if anyone came looking. You smiled at him as he finally crossed to join you, an easy, unguarded smile that fell from you with increasing frequency these days, and watched it get mirrored straight back at you without any hesitation at all.

The half-hour drive turned into the perfect occasion for reminding Baelor, at volume and with considerable enthusiasm, exactly which decade he actually belonged to.

The car had no Bluetooth to speak of, some relic of an era that predated the concept entirely, but your phone speaker did the job well enough once propped against the dashboard. You cycled through a playlist heavy on the kind of unapologetic nineties pop that had scored the whole of your adolescence, narrating your selections with running commentary about the considerable gap in your respective musical educations, and Baelor took the ribbing with far better humour than you'd expected, laughing properly at a couple of your choices before insisting, with mock offense, on queuing up a few of his own.

"You've clearly never properly experienced good music," he informed you, with the amused gravity of a man about to correct a serious oversight, and proceeded to play something considerably older and, you had to grudgingly admit after the first thirty seconds, considerably better than you'd expected.

You knew more of them than you'd let on at first — you weren't nearly as musically hopeless as your difference in years might have suggested — and somewhere around the third of his selections you found yourself singing along under your breath without fully deciding to. Baelor joined in a moment later, and you discovered, or more accurately remembered from some half-buried Sunday months back, that the man had a genuinely beautiful voice, low and sure and entirely unselfconscious about using it outside the confines of a Mass.

He was so beautiful like that. Relaxed. Genuinely happy, in a way you didn't get to witness often enough, with you specifically the cause of it rather than an accident of good weather or a decent homily landing well.

You arrived to find the venue already properly crowded, cars lined up along both sides of the lane leading in, and Baelor found a spot among them without much trouble. You climbed out and made for the boot to collect the cookies, but he beat you to it, already holding it open by the time you rounded the car.

You thanked him, taking the tray in both hands, and caught sight of a scatter of crumbs still clinging to his beard — evidence, you gathered, that he'd managed to steal a second cookie for himself sometime before pulling out of the parish lot. You balanced the tray against one hip and reached up with your free hand to brush the crumbs away.

His hand found your waist without any apparent forethought on his part — instinct, you might have called it, if pressed — settling there warm and wide, thumb resting just above your hip bone.

"There." You smiled, stepping back half an inch once the job was done. "We wouldn't want anyone accusing you of gluttony, would we?"

You finally met his eyes properly, and found he'd already been looking at you — that same expression you'd never quite managed to fully name, somewhere in the general country of affection, except now it carried something else layered underneath it, something you recognized immediately and without any need for translation, because you'd felt the exact same thing living behind your own eyes more times than you could count these last months.

Hunger.

Your breath caught somewhere high in your chest, and you genuinely couldn't have said what either of you might have done next — your blood had relocated itself entirely southward, leaving precious little available for higher reasoning — if a voice hadn't arrived from a short distance away and dissolved the moment entirely.

"Oh, God save us all." The voice was male, warm, clearly delighted with itself, and pitched for maximum teasing effect. "They've let you out."

Baelor retreated from you, half a step, no more, and turned toward the sound with a smile already forming.

The man approaching was tall — nearly matching Baelor for height — with a mass of dark, curling hair gone visibly grey at the temples, and a beard following the same pattern, which put him, you gathered, somewhere in the same rough decade of life as Baelor himself. He was dressed identically in the collar-and-black uniform of the day, save for one notable exception: a pair of startlingly, defiantly yellow socks visible above his shoes as he walked toward you.

"I was wondering how long it would take you to show up," Baelor said, easy.

"You're looking disappointingly alive." The man grinned, closing the remaining distance in a few long strides. "I'd been rather hoping to inherit your books." He reached you fully and threw an arm around Baelor's shoulders before he could think to evade it. "I've missed you, you sanctimonious bastard."

Baelor slanted him a sideways look, fighting a smile and losing. "I don't believe that's an appropriate greeting for a priest, Lyonel."

"No?" Lyonel's grin only widened. "Then peace be with you, you sanctimonious bastard."

You laughed before you could stop yourself, which was apparently enough to redirect the whole of Lyonel's considerable attention onto you. He looked you over for a beat, his grin somehow finding room to stretch even further.

"Ah." He pointed a single finger back and forth between the two of you. "So you're the poor soul who's been putting up with him."

You raised an eyebrow. "Poor soul?"

"Don't let him fool you." Lyonel leaned in, conspiratorial. "He looks terribly patient, but give him five minutes and he'll start lecturing you on the correct way to shelve books, the proper temperature for tea, or precisely why your commas are in the wrong places."

"I have never—" Baelor started.

He ignored Baelor. "He's done all three. To me."

You laughed properly this time. “He actually had some comments on my way of shelving books,” you admitted with a smile, much to Baelor’s patience. Lyonel barked a laugh and clapped his friend’s shoulder again, while Baelor pinched the bridge of his nose with the long-suffering expression of a man who had clearly weathered this exact exchange for years already.

"We haven't been introduced," Lyonel said then, offering you his hand with sudden, easy formality. "Father Lyonel Baratheon. Friend, occasional nuisance, and living proof that the seminary's admissions process has always been worryingly lax."

You gave him your name, shaking his hand with your free one.

"A pleasure." His teasing smile softened into something genuinely warm as he said it, and he glanced sideways at Baelor before settling his attention back on you. "Any friend of his is welcome here. Though I confess—" the grin came roaring back— "I was beginning to think he'd simply invented you."

"I assure you, she's very real," Baelor said, dry, though something in his voice suggested he was only half joking.

"Is she, though?" Lyonel squinted at you theatrically. "No, I suppose you're right — invented women don't generally bring baked goods. Very thorough of you, whoever you are," he said as his hands gestured to the whole of you.

The three of you joined the wider gathering, and the hours slid by pleasantly, easily, the whole afternoon settling into a loose, sun-warmed rhythm that outdoor parish gatherings apparently specialized in.

Baelor introduced you to more people than you could keep straight by the end of it, and every single one of them, without exception, had something warm to say about your cookies, which ran out well before the picnic lunch was properly served — though Baelor, ever resourceful, had managed to smuggle one away for you before the tray emptied entirely.

You even recognized a face in the crowd: Dunk, a classmate from a few of your university courses, there because Lyonel happened to be the appointed priest for his grandmother's parish. He'd nearly choked on his lemonade when he spotted you standing beside Baelor, clearly recalibrating several assumptions about your Sunday mornings in real time, and you'd had to fend off a solid ten minutes of gently incredulous questioning before he let the subject drop, more out of genuine curiosity than any real suspicion.

The afternoon carried on in that same easy register throughout. An elderly woman from one of the other parishes cornered you for a full twenty minutes to discuss, with startling passion, the proper ratio of butter to sugar in a shortbread recipe she was convinced your cookies had been secretly based on. A group of younger children recruited you into an elaborate, entirely incomprehensible game involving a frisbee in which appeared to be several invented rules that changed depending on who was currently losing.

You had, you could say honestly, a genuinely wonderful time.

But the thing you enjoyed most, more than the cookies or the introductions or the easy, sun-drenched pleasure of the day itself, was the experience of turning to find Baelor already looking for you across the crowd, every single time — as though some invisible thread ran taut between the two of you regardless of distance, pulling his attention back to you whether he'd consciously decided to look or not.

It was well into the last hour of the afternoon, the light gone long and gold across the grass, when you found yourself sitting a little apart from the main crowd, working through a pastry one of the children had pressed into your hands with an insistence you hadn't had the heart to refuse. Lyonel found you there and dropped down onto the grass beside you without much ceremony.

"Mind if I steal this spot?"

You waved him down, and he settled in easily, asking you a string of small, unremarkable questions you answered without much thought — where you were from, what you did, how long you'd been coming to Baelor's parish. He was, you discovered, remarkably easy to talk to, disarming in a way that made you forget, for stretches at a time, that you'd met him only a few hours earlier.

At some point you glanced across the crowd and found Baelor mid-conversation with a cluster of other parishioners, and smiled at him without thinking about it. He caught the look and smiled back, brief and warm, before returning his attention to whoever was currently speaking to him.

Lyonel noticed and the conversation pivoted, smooth as anything, straight onto the subject of Baelor himself.

"You found him rather quickly, didn't you." It wasn't quite a question.

You blinked. "I’m sorry?"

"Baelor," he said simply.

"I suppose he's making sure I don't get lost." You reached for an explanation that sounded reasonable even to your own ears. "I don't really know anyone else here."

Lyonel huffed something close to a laugh. "Neither do half the people currently here, and he hasn't gone chasing after any of them."

A short silence settled between you.

"He's always been like that," Lyonel said eventually, gaze drifting toward his friend.

You looked at him, waiting.

"Quiet," he clarified. "Seminary was full of loud men — you can imagine the type," he gestured to himself. "Baelor wasn't one of them. He'd sit in some corner with a book, pretend not to be listening to anything happening around him, and then turn out to remember every single word anyone had said, days later, when you'd least expect it."

You smiled. "That sounds like him."

"It is him," Lyonel affirmed simply. "Do you know how many parishes he served before the one he's at now?"

You shook your head.

"Six."

Your eyebrows went up. "Really?"

He nodded. "He cried, every single time, when he had to leave one for the next."

Your gaze drifted, unbidden, back toward Baelor, still deep in conversation a little further off. "He's never told me that."

"He wouldn't. Doesn’t like to make a martyr out of himself," Lyonel said simply. That, you could easily understand; you had been practising the same type of sacrifice for longer than you could remember. Lyonel followed your gaze for a beat before continuing, his voice dropping lower. "He's lonely."

That brought your attention snapping fully back to him. "What?"

"He'd hate me for saying it out loud." Lyonel shrugged, unbothered, curls bouncing with the motion. "He'd deny it until Judgment Day arrived personally to contradict him. But it's true."

"I'm sure he has friends," you said, a little defensively.

"Oh, certainly."

"He has you."

"He does." Lyonel nodded, something gentler crossing his face. "But friendship isn't the same thing as other kinds of company. Especially not after what happened with Jena."

Jena. That name again.

You'd tried, more than once these past weeks, to simply bury the name somewhere you wouldn't have to keep confronting it — some instinct warning you that curiosity, left unchecked, would eventually kill you outright. And here it was again anyway, resurfacing exactly when you'd least braced for it.

You turned to look at Lyonel more directly. "Is Jena Baelor's sister?" You reached for the most harmless explanation available, some cousin or close family friend, anything that wouldn't require you to examine the alternative too closely.

Lyonel's eyebrows rose, and he let out a warm, startled chuckle. "No, my dear girl." The amusement in his face faded as quickly as it had arrived. "She was Baelor's fiancée. Before he was ordained."

Whatever your face did in response to that must have been considerable, because Lyonel shifted his whole body to face you properly, the last of his teasing dropping away entirely.

"You don't know," he said. Not quite a question again.

You shook your head. "I heard him and Maekar talking about her once. I think Maekar was asking Baelor why he was looking at me the way he used to look at her. I assumed she was family. A close friend, maybe."

Lyonel's frown deepened, and he glanced toward Baelor for a long moment before returning his attention to you. He was quiet for a while after that, thumb moving in slow, absent circles around the rim of the paper cup in his hands.

"I probably shouldn't be the one telling you this," he admitted finally. "If Baelor ever found out, he'd murder me with his bare hands." The corner of his mouth lifted, briefly, before the expression sobered again entirely. "But I think you deserve to actually understand what Maekar meant."

He looked toward Baelor once more, still deep in conversation with a small group some distance off.

"Her name was Jena Dondarrion. They met at university. Together for years — everyone assumed they'd marry eventually, and honestly, so did they. They had a date set. Invitations sent. All of it."

He paused, visibly choosing his next words with real care.

"Baelor had always carried this — quiet doubt, underneath everything. Not because he didn't love her, but because some part of him kept wondering whether God was asking something else of him entirely. A few weeks before the wedding, he told her he was frightened. Not of marrying her — of standing at that altar and making promises while the doubt was still sitting there, unresolved. He wanted to postpone. Just until he was certain." Lyonel let out a slow breath. "He believed honesty would be the kinder choice, but what Jena actually heard was something considerably different — that the man she loved wasn't certain he wanted her at all."

You tried to picture it — a younger Baelor, unmarked yet by years of vestments and vocation, standing in some ordinary room trying to explain an uncertainty he could barely have had words for yet, watching it land as something entirely different than he'd intended.

You thought of your own father, the plain, uncomplicated faith he'd carried his whole life without apparently once doubting it and wondered what it must have cost a man to doubt something that fundamental and still try to be honest about it anyway, knowing exactly what the honesty might cost him.

Lyonel fell quiet for a beat before continuing, his voice noticeably lower now.

"She left. Baelor respected the decision — didn't fight it, didn't chase her. He assumed, in time, that she'd simply moved on with her life, the way people generally do. Months later, he found out she'd been pregnant."

Your breath caught somewhere in your throat, and your eyes went helplessly to Baelor, still laughing at something across the crowd, entirely unaware of what was currently being said about him. You thought of every quiet moment you'd caught in his face these past months and mentally, painfully, refiled every single one of them against this new information. The silences that weren't simply tiredness, the way he sometimes looked at nothing in particular during his own sermons, all of it suddenly slotting into a shape you hadn't had the pieces to assemble before now.

"She never told him," Lyonel went on, quiet. "She ended the pregnancy before he ever even knew there had been a child to know about."

Neither of you spoke for what felt like an eternity. The only thing that kept you grounded was the feeling of your heart beating loudly at your throat.

"He blamed himself," Lyonel said eventually. "For her pain. For the pregnancy. For all of it, really — he convinced himself every terrible thing that followed was simply the price owed for not having been able to choose in time." He shook his head slowly. "I've never, in my whole life, watched anyone grieve the way he grieved. He stopped eating unless someone physically sat with him while he did it. Stopped answering his phone. Stopped opening the curtains in his own flat. There were nights I slept on his sofa because I didn't trust leaving him alone with his own thoughts for that long. It took the better part of a year before he started resembling anything like himself again. And even then, something in him had changed permanently — he threw himself into the priesthood with a new, almost desperate intensity after that, as though enough devotion applied consistently enough might eventually fill whatever Jena's leaving had removed out of him. I don't think it ever quite managed to."

You understood exactly what he meant, in a way that landed somewhere painfully close to home — Kiera and Rowan had done precisely the same for you, once, at the worst of your own darkest stretch.

"He wasn't a bad man," Lyonel said, his gaze fixed somewhere out past the crowd entirely. "He was a broken one. Still is, I believe."

You stared at Baelor, trying and largely failing to reconcile the man he was describing with the one you actually knew.

"I've never seen him look at anyone the way he looked at Jena," Lyonel said, quieter now, his eyes finding yours again. "Until this day. Until you." He glanced back toward Baelor, who happened, at that exact moment, to laugh at something one of the children had just done.

You fought, hard, against the sympathetic tears building behind your own eyes, and lost anyway — one slipped free despite the effort, tracking down your cheek before you could catch it.

Lyonel noticed, of course.

"Are you in love with him?" he asked, after a single moment of silent grace.

Your face snapped toward his, eyes gone wide with something close to panic.

"Don't worry." He held up a hand, gentling his tone immediately and smiling warmly in your way. "This isn't a confession, and it isn't a trap either."

You fidgeted with your own fingers, found the gesture insufficient, and wrapped your arms fully around yourself instead. "He's a priest," you gave him.

"He is." Lyonel watched you carefully. "But that wasn't the answer you actually wanted to give, was it?"

"I shouldn't—" You cut yourself off.

"Shouldn't what?"

"It doesn't matter." You closed your eyes for a moment, shaking your head. "Shouldn’t you be trying to take this off my head? Threatening me with eternal damnation or something?"

Lyonel laughed, and some of the tension in the atmosphere dissipated with it. "I think I mentioned that I am not the best example of a priest," he said. "And don’t change the subject, it matters to you."

You wanted, badly, to simply lie — to give him some easy, deflecting answer and let the whole conversation dissolve back into the comfortable teasing register you'd started in. You found, when you actually tried to reach for the lie, that you didn't have one readily available. Not for this. Not for him.

Silence settled between the two of you. Somewhere beyond the trees, a fresh burst of children's laughter went up. Plates clinked together nearby as people began gathering the remains of the picnic, folding the day toward its natural close. The whole ordinary world simply continued on, entirely unbothered, as though yours hadn't just quietly ground to a complete halt beside it.

Lyonel let out a soft sigh at the stretch of your silence. "My dear girl," there was nothing unkind nor patronising in his voice. "I didn't ask whether you thought you ought to love him."

You finally looked at him properly. His expression had gone fully gentle now, every trace of the earlier teasing stripped entirely away.

"I asked whether you do."

You looked across the crowd to Baelor one last time, and answered while your eyes were still on him — his own gaze finding yours at the exact same moment, brows drawing together at whatever he could read on your face from that distance.

"Yes." Your voice came out as a thin line, steadier than you'd expected. "I love him."

As the words left you, you watched Baelor start walking toward the two of you.

This was, without question, a disaster.

Not from any vantage point available to the rest of the party — nothing about the afternoon looked, from the outside, like anything other than a pleasant spring gathering, cookies and lemonade and the ordinary noise of several parishes mingling in good weather. But Baelor knew, somewhere deep in his own gut, exactly how thoroughly the whole of it could easily go wrong. Nothing escaped Lyonel. Nothing ever had, not in nearly twenty years of friendship, and Baelor had been fool enough to bring her directly into his oldest friend's orbit without properly accounting for that fact.

He couldn't stop looking at her. He'd tried, repeatedly, throughout the day, and failed every single time within minutes — his eyes finding her across the grounds as though some involuntary system in him had simply reassigned tracking her as its primary function for the afternoon.

She looked absurdly beautiful in that dress. Something in him refused, point blank, to look away from it for any length of time worth mentioning, the pull of her something closer to magnetism than mere attention. He wanted, with an intensity that frightened him fresh each time it arrived, to take her aside somewhere private and strip that dress carefully from her body, to worship every single inch of skin it currently concealed — lavish it with his mouth, with promises he fully intended to keep this time, whatever keeping them eventually cost him.

He thought, watching her laugh at something one of the children had said, of every specific way he'd catalogued her over these last months — the moles at the base of her throat, the give of her waist beneath his hands that December night, the sound she made when startled, which he had, God forgive him, engineered the occasion to hear more than once purely for the private pleasure of it.

He was, he thought with a kind of exhausted, resigned clarity, no longer capable of looking at her and seeing merely a parishioner in need of his care. He hadn't been capable of that in months.

He wondered, distantly, whether he'd ever actually been capable of it at all, or whether that had simply been the story he'd needed to tell himself in order to keep breathing normally in her presence.

That want occupied the greater share of his thoughts for most of the day. He thanked God, with real and specific gratitude, that circumstance hadn't handed him many actual moments alone with her — his flesh was weak today in a way that frightened him, weaker than it had been in weeks, and the thread holding the whole of his composure together seemed to fray a little further with every additional day she remained a fixture in his life rather than a passing temptation he might eventually outlast. He was a priest of fifteen years' standing, a man who had built an entire vocation on the discipline of wanting rightly rather than simply wanting. And here he was, watching a woman laugh across a churchyard, unable to remember the last time discipline had actually won a single round against whatever this had become.

It was well into the late afternoon when the unease first settled over him — some low, wordless instinct pulling his attention across the grounds before he'd consciously decided to go looking for her. He found her seated near Lyonel, the two of them deep in what appeared, from this distance, to be an easy, genuinely funny conversation — both of them laughing about something he had no access to.

He knew Lyonel. Knew, with the certainty of two decades' friendship, that his friend wouldn't say anything genuinely unkind to her, wouldn't overstep some obvious boundary out of simple carelessness. Or would he? Because one moment Baelor watched her smiling in his own general direction, easy and unguarded, and the next he watched her come dangerously close to tears.

Baelor felt something cold drop through his chest. Lyonel didn't look guilty, watching her — only worried, in the specific way Baelor had learned to read on his oldest friend's face over years of knowing every register that face could produce. Lyonel glanced up and met his eyes across the distance, and in that single look Baelor could see, with sudden and terrible clarity, that his friend understood exactly the size and shape of whatever currently sat between Baelor and her.

Baelor excused himself from the small knot of parishioners currently claiming his attention and made for them at something close to an outright rush. He was nearly at their side when Lyonel said something to her, low, that Baelor didn't catch — and she rose immediately, walking away fast enough that her shoulder nearly collided with his own as she passed, without so much as glancing up to acknowledge him.

He halted. Turned to follow her with his eyes, but she was already gone, swallowed into the crowd. He turned back to Lyonel instead, who had risen from the grass as well, and found his own confusion mirrored back at him from his friend's face.

"Lyonel. What happened?"

His friend didn't answer immediately, only regarded him with an expression Baelor couldn't fully parse.

"Lyonel," he pressed again.

"She's alright." Lyonel's voice had none of its usual ease in it. "She just needed a moment of silence. That's all."

Baelor didn't believe a word of it. "What did you tell her?"

Something in his own gut insisted, with real certainty, that whatever the answer turned out to be, it would matter considerably more than Lyonel currently wanted to admit.

Lyonel only looked at him for a long moment. "How long has it been since your last confession, Baelor?"

There was nothing of the earlier teasing left in his voice at all.

Baelor huffed something that only barely resembled a laugh. "Fuck my last confession. She wouldn't even look me in the eye, and I want to know why. What. Did. You. Tell. Her."

Lyonel ignored the question entirely. "Do you want me to hear it?"

Baelor found himself at a complete loss, anxiety climbing fast and unpleasant through his chest, the whole situation slipping visibly beyond whatever control he'd imagined himself still having over it. Before he could produce any kind of answer, Lyonel spoke again.

"Give yourself some grace, Baelor. If not for your own sake, then for hers."

Something in the specific phrasing of it — for hers — landed harder than anything else Lyonel had said so far, a direct hit to the exact place Baelor had spent the whole afternoon trying not to look at directly.

There was a plea buried in his friend's voice — genuine, unmistakable — and Baelor could not remember the last time Lyonel had actually pleaded with him for anything. He looked around at the grounds, noting the attendants already beginning their slow drift toward the exits, and nodded once, sharp and final, before following Lyonel inside the parish.

He stepped inside the confessional and lowered himself onto the narrow kneeler set within, the familiar close dark of the space settling around him in a way that felt, for once, entirely appropriate to his own current state.

He had heard perhaps ten thousand confessions himself, over more than a decade; had grown so practiced at the choreography of the sacrament that he sometimes forgot, standing on the other side of the screen, how differently the whole architecture of it felt from the penitent's chair — smaller, somehow, more exposed, despite the same darkness and the same careful anonymity the space was meant to provide. Through the mesh screen he heard Lyonel settle into the confessor's side.

"You do remember how this works, don't you?" Lyonel dared, one last flicker of his usual humour slipping through.

"Just start, Lyonel."

Lyonel huffed. "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

Baelor traced the same shape across his own chest — old habit rather than any presently felt conviction, the motion arriving from years of muscle memory rather than from anything currently living in his heart.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." The formula arrived easily enough, worn smooth from repetition. "It has been five months since my last confession."

He heard Lyonel suppress something close to a gasp on the other side of the screen, and was privately grateful his friend had the discipline not to comment on it directly.

Baelor gave him the list, the whole ordinary catalogue of it: impatience with a parishioner, eating meat on a Friday he'd forgotten was a day of abstinence, a wandering mind during Mass he hadn't managed to properly discipline. Small, manageable crumbs, offered up in place of the actual meal he had absolutely no intention of setting on the table.

"That's it?" Lyonel asked, when he'd finished.

"You asked to hear my confession. That is my confession."

"I heard nearly this exact list the last time you came to me. I'd wager good money it'll be identical again next time." Lyonel's voice had gone threaded through with real impatience now.

"It is an honest examination of conscience."

"It's an honest examination of the parts of your conscience you've already decided are safe to hand over." Lyonel didn't let the silence that followed settle for long. "I'm not asking you this as your friend right now, Baelor. I'm asking as the priest currently responsible for your soul, in this exact conversation, in this exact moment. Is there something else?"

It wasn't, in any real sense, a question. That was precisely what terrified Baelor most about it — the plain, unmistakable invitation to walk through a door Lyonel knew perfectly well stood open in front of him.

"No," Baelor said finally, and marvelled, distantly, at how easily the lie left him.

A beat of silence followed, and then the screen between them slid open with a sudden, decisive scrape — Lyonel's own doing, his eyes, when Baelor turned to find them, gone properly desperate.

"When are you going to stop hurting yourself with lies?"

Baelor turned fully to face him. "I am not lying—"

"Bullshit." Lyonel cut him off entirely, no patience left for the deflection. "That girl. The one you look at exactly the way you used to look at Jena—"

"That isn't confession material."

"Isn't it?" Lyonel let out a short, humourless laugh.

"Temptation itself carries no guilt," Baelor said, reaching for the old, familiar shelter of doctrine even as some quieter part of him recognized exactly what he was doing. "Attraction isn't a sin, Lyonel. You know that as well as I do — better, probably, given how creatively you've always interpreted your own vow of—"

"Don't." Lyonel cut him off a second time, sharp. "Don't hide behind good moral theology to dodge the truth. I learned half of that theology from you, which means I know exactly how it's meant to be used, and exactly how badly you're misusing it now."

Baelor found he had no answer ready. Lyonel was, infuriatingly, entirely correct.

The silence stretched out for what felt, to Baelor, like a genuine eternity before Lyonel spoke again.

"Do you love her?"

Baelor choked slightly on his own breath and found he couldn't meet his friend's eyes.

"I'm trying to deal with it," he offered, reaching for whatever honesty he currently had access to.

"You have never once been a hypocrite, Baelor." Lyonel's reply came fast, unrelenting. "And yet right now, while you sit in here trying to deal with it, there is a woman standing out there blaming herself for wanting something she believes she has no right to want. Something you are actively giving her hope for, whether you mean to or not." His voice had gone sterner than Baelor could remember hearing it in years — genuinely angry, in a register Baelor struggled to recall his friend ever occupying before. "So I'm going to ask you again, and I want the truth this time. Do you love her?"

Baelor opened his mouth around another deflection and discovered, searching for it, that he had none left in reserve.

He was so tired. Not the ordinary tiredness of a long day, or even the specific exhaustion four years of spiritual dryness had taught him to carry as a kind of permanent low hum beneath everything else — this was different, heavier, the particular fatigue of a man who had spent months performing a version of himself for public consumption that bore less resemblance to the actual truth every single day.

He was tired of standing at the altar and lying, calling what he felt for her pastoral concern. Tired of the specific effort it took, every single time she attended Mass, to arrange his face into something appropriately neutral while she knelt in front of him. Tired of performing an entire second liturgy of denial parallel to the one he actually believed in.

He had been lying to everyone for months — to Maekar that night, to Lyonel now, to God every time he performed Mass, to her since December and to himself, most thoroughly of all — and the lying had cost him considerably more than the truth currently threatened to.

Enough, he finally allowed himself. Enough.

"Yes." The word landed strangely in his own ears, foreign after so many months of careful avoidance. "Yes. I love her."

He braced, instinctively, for shame to follow the admission out into the open air. What arrived instead was relief — immense, bodily relief, the kind that made his own shoulders drop several inches he hadn't realized he'd been holding rigid.

He followed the thread of his own honesty further, since stopping now seemed considerably harder than simply continuing. "I've thought about leaving. Properly leaving the priesthood. Some nights I want it badly enough that sleep simply doesn't come."

Neither of them spoke for a long moment after that landed between them.

Lyonel swallowed, audibly, and let out a slow breath. "I know you threw yourself into this life because you felt you owed it to Jena, in the end — that becoming what you'd doubted, properly and fully, was the only way you could make any sense of what happened with her."

Baelor said nothing, because there was nothing to say — every word of it landed true, precise as a blade finding exactly the gap in armour it had been aimed at. He had never once, in four years of turning this over in the dark, allowed himself to hear it laid out quite this plainly by someone else's mouth. Lyonel raised a hand before Baelor could interject anyway.

"I know the crisis you've been carrying these past four years traces straight back to that. And I know you've been thinking about leaving for considerably longer than the last six months, whatever you've told yourself about the timeline." He paused. "But I need to be certain this girl isn't simply a scapegoat for a decision you were already circling long before you met her. I've watched you struggle with this for over a decade, Baelor. Much as I hate agreeing with your walking migraine of a brother on anything, he's right that you cannot keep going on like this. Not if it's going to end the way it nearly did the last time. We very nearly lost you, and I don't intend to watch it happen twice."

Baelor breathed deeply and made himself actually examine the question rather than flinch from it. Was she simply the excuse his own long-buried want for freedom had been searching for all along?

The answer arrived as easily and immediately as breath itself.

No. Absolutely not.

"She is not an excuse," Baelor said, admitting it not only to Lyonel but, for the first time, plainly to himself as well. "She is the reason I feel like I still have a heart."

Lyonel nodded slowly. "So why haven't you told her?"

"Because I'm afraid." The admission cost him something to produce, but it came anyway. "I am terrified of holding her happiness in my own two hands and throwing it away the same way I threw Jena's."

He thought of Jena more than he let anyone know — not the version Lyonel had likely just given her out on that lawn, the tragedy reduced to its necessary shape for someone else's understanding, but the actual daily texture of it: the specific sound of her voice on the last phone call she'd ever return, the quality of silence that had followed his own honesty like a verdict.

He had told himself, for years, that what happened with her was the result of speaking a difficult truth too late and too clumsily — that the sin, if there was one, had been in the timing, in the delivery, some correctable failure of tact rather than in the truth itself. Sitting here now, he wondered whether that had ever been accurate. Whether the actual failure had been something closer to cowardice dressed up as honesty — offering her his doubt only once it had grown too large to privately manage alone, rather than trusting her with it from the beginning, when trust might still have given them both room to survive it together.

He did not know, watching that same fear rise in him now with someone else's happiness at stake, whether he had actually learned anything from what happened with Jena, or whether he was simply better at recognizing the shape of his own failure while still no better equipped to stop repeating it.

"You deserve happiness, Baelor." Lyonel's mouth had gone tight, something fierce and protective moving behind his eyes. "God knows, if anyone currently alive has earned it, it's you." He paused, softer now. "And for what it's worth, I don't think loving her makes you the villain of this particular story. I think it might be the first honest thing you've allowed yourself in years." The corner of his mouth twitched, the old humour creeping back in at the edges. "But you still need to get your shit together, my friend."

Baelor mirrored the small, rough chuckle that followed, though his own came out considerably more strained.

After a short pause, Baelor breathed in deeply. "And my penance?"

Lyonel laughed properly at that. "You've got penance enough built in already, being the patron saint of overthinking yourself into an early grave."

He gave Baelor the absolution — the old, familiar shape of it, mercy and reconciliation folded once more into words that belonged to the whole Church rather than to either of them individually, ending, as it always ended, with the small cross traced in the air between them and Baelor's own quiet Amen.

They stepped out of the confessional together and embraced, brief and firm, the wordless farewell of two men who'd known each other considerably too long to need actual words for it. Together they made their way out toward the parking lot, where they found her already waiting beside Baelor's car. Lyonel lifted a hand in farewell, and she returned the gesture with one of her own, faintly unsteady visible even from where they stood.

"Quite the good priest, you turned out to be," Baelor teased, low, as they walked.

Lyonel laughed and clapped a hand against his shoulder. "I believe I already told you — I've never claimed to be a good example of anything."

"No," Baelor agreed. "But you might be a good friend, on occasion, if the mood strikes you correctly."

Lyonel pressed a hand to his own chest. "Careful. Keep talking like that and I'll start believing you actually enjoy me."

Baelor managed a proper laugh at that and crossed the remaining distance to his car alone. She was already sitting inside, waiting, and he could read, even through the windscreen, the particular weight of whatever was currently sitting on her — something eating at her from the inside, quiet and unresolved, that he was fairly certain, walking the last few steps toward the driver's door, he was about to have to finally, actually address.

The half hour back to the parish was the longest you remembered living through. There was no music this time — the phone sat dark and silent in the cupholder between you — and no words passed between you and Baelor either. Only a thick, unbroken silence and a weight that seemed to settle heavier across your shoulders with every mile.

You turned everything you knew about him over and over in your head, examining it now against the shape of what Lyonel had told you. The darkness you'd caught behind his eyes so many times these past months, in sermons, in silences, in the specific way he sometimes looked at nothing at all — you understood it now, completely, understood exactly where it had come from and exactly how much it had cost him to carry alone for as long as he had.

The bigger part of you — you were completely certain it was the bigger part — ached for him. Of course it did. Whatever else was currently happening between the two of you, no decent person could hear what you'd just heard and feel anything but sympathy for the man who'd lived it.

But another part of you, smaller and considerably uglier, sat curled in some dark corner of your mind, asking a question you didn't especially want to be asking. Why hadn't he told you himself? You'd told him everything — every ugly, unmanaged piece of your own grief, laid bare in a confessional and then, later, laid bare again outside one more than once. He'd been the very first person you'd trusted with any of it, before Kiera, before Rowan, before anyone.

That small, ugly part of your mind wanted to know why the trust hadn't run both directions.

You thought of your father, of how he'd never once kept anything from you that mattered, not even the hard parts — not the money worries, not his own fear near the end. You had built your whole understanding of intimacy around that model: that love meant telling the truth even when the truth cost something. Baelor, apparently, had built his around something else entirely.

Traitor, that voice hissed inside you. Just like everyone else.

It wasn't fair, this feeling, and you knew it wasn't fair even as you felt it — knew Baelor owed you nothing, technically. Not his history, not his griefs, not access to every locked room in a life he'd been building for years before you ever walked through his door, but knowing that didn't make the feeling any quieter.

You chased the thought away, hard, the moment it surfaced, but you knew, even as you did it, that it would come circling back before the day was through.

You'd known, going looking for him earlier, that he'd gone into the confessional with Lyonel — a woman near the refreshment table had told you as much, unprompted, when she'd noticed you scanning the crowd. And the anxiety had gnawed at you steadily ever since, low and constant.

You knew, somewhere underneath all of it, that Baelor seemed happy with you. He had to be. Or he's delivering an award-winning performance, some other unkind voice supplied. Maybe he'd gone to Lyonel for guidance on how to be rid of you gently, that same voice continued, and your heart ached, physically, sharply, at the mere thought of it.

You hated how quickly your mind reached for the worst version of every possibility. You hated it, and you couldn't seem to stop doing it anyway, the habit worn too deep after a year of losing things without warning to trust that anything good might simply be allowed to stay.

By the time Baelor pulled the car into its usual spot outside the parish, the light had gone the bright beginning dusk of early evening, long shadows stretching across the gravel lot, and neither of you had said a single word to break the silence that had ridden the whole way back with you.

He cut the engine and sat for a moment, hands still resting on the wheel, knuckles pale with whatever grip he currently had on them, before turning to look at you properly.

"Are you alright?" His voice was careful, gentle in a way that only made the ugly voice in your head louder rather than quieter. "You've been quiet."

"I'm fine," you said, too fast, already reaching for the door handle.

"You're not." He caught your wrist before you could fully commit to escaping, his touch light enough that pulling away would have cost you nothing at all, and you hated, in that exact moment, how badly some traitorous part of you didn't want to.

You got out of the car anyway, needing the space more than you needed whatever comfort his hand might have offered.

The parish stood dark and entirely empty at this hour, every other soul long since gone home for the evening, and Baelor let the two of you in through the side door without a word, closing it quietly again once you'd both crossed the threshold. Neither of you discussed where you were headed. Your feet simply carried you, the way they so often did lately, toward the small side chapel and the tabernacle at its heart — the same quiet corner that had already held so much of whatever this had become between you these past months. Baelor followed a step behind, silent the whole way, until he called your name.

"Talk to me." Baelor stepped closer, quieter now. "Please."

He meant it kindly. You could hear that he meant it kindly, could see it plainly enough in the careful, searching way he was looking at you — and it was precisely the kindness of it that finally cracked something loose in you, some dam that had been holding since the moment you'd walked away from Lyonel on that lawn.

"What did you tell him?" The words came out sharper than you'd planned, aimed directly at him. "In there. What did you and Lyonel actually talk about?"

Something shuttered, briefly, behind Baelor's eyes. "Telling you would break the seal of confession."

"Of course." The laugh that came out of you had nothing funny left inside it. "How dumb of me to think you’d actually tell me."

You felt something give way in your chest, some seam that had been straining the whole drive back finally splitting open.

"Do you know how much of myself I gave you?" Your voice shook, but you kept going anyway, because stopping now felt more dangerous than continuing. "Everything. Every ugly piece of myself I've ever tried to hide from anyone else — my mother, my grief, the things I think about God that would probably get me struck down if He were even half as literal as people claim. I handed you all of it. I trusted you with all of it, because I thought that was the whole foundation of this," you gestured between you both, "that we told each other the truth. That was the one thing I actually believed about you, Baelor, and now I don't know if I was right to."

"That isn't—"

"You've made a career out of trusting people." You talked over him, unable to stop the momentum now that it had started. Your voice cracked, and you let it. "It's like you'd only ever trust me if I wore one of those collars myself."

"That is not true," he gestured towards you, coming closer.

"Isn’t it?" You threw your arms out, gesturing at the whole of the chapel around you — the tabernacle, the pew where you'd once knelt trying and failing to remember how to pray, the entire impossible shape of the last several months. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks exactly like that. It's always looked exactly like that."

He lowered his gaze, unable to look at you. Ah, so there was some truth in your words.

"It's more complicated than what you're—"

"Is it too much for your conscience to look at me now, Father?" you spat, words venomous even to your tongue.

He raised his eyes to you again. "Do not call me that." The words came out low, almost a hiss, like the title landing from your mouth specifically had physically wounded him in some way you hadn't intended. Or perhaps you had.

You blinked, startled by the force of it despite the fire that kept you going.

"Why not?" You pushed anyway, some reckless momentum carrying you past the point where you might otherwise have stopped. "It's what you are, isn’t it? And apparently it decides who gets the real you and who gets whatever's left over." You raked a hand through your hair and sighed. "I thought this could be different. God, I actually believed I was worth it," you said more to yourself than to him.

"You are. You definitely are," The words left him fast, almost involuntary, like he hadn't fully decided to let them out yet. His hands came toward you, trying desperately to reach you, to build the burnt bridges again.

"Then prove it." Your voice cracked around the demand. "Tell me something true. Right now. Just once, Baelor, be completely honest with me."

He didn't answer, turning half away from you instead, one hand dragging back through his hair. You watched the muscle work in his jaw, watched him visibly search for and fail to find whatever composed response he usually had ready. You watched him struggle, fight with himself. But you guessed that final wall that protected his innermost part stood too tall for him to jump it. Or for you to look above it.

"Baelor." Your voice softened despite the anger still sitting hot in your chest, some older, gentler instinct winning out over the wounded one. "Let me help you. Whatever this is, whatever you're carrying — you don't have to carry it by yourself. Not with me."

"I didn't ask for your help," he said. His voice was low.

"You'd never ask for help. That's the thing with us." You stepped nearer, some part of you still hoping proximity alone might make him understand what words apparently weren't managing. "We keep waiting for someone to notice we're drowning instead of just saying we can't swim anymore."

"No, you don’t understand. I don't need you to fix me." The words snapped out of him, defensive, louder than anything you'd heard from him before.

You stepped nearer to him, just a pace away. "I don't want to fix you. I want to love you!"

Baelor flinched at the tone of your voice, at the weight of your words, visibly, though he said nothing in response, his silence somehow louder than anything he could have actually said. Still, he didn’t look at you.

"And I know you love me." You pushed on anyway, because stopping now felt like a betrayal to yourself. "I know you do. So why do you keep walking away from it?"

He turned to face you fully at that, and his eyes, when you finally met them, were full of more than you had any hope of properly naming. There was anguish, anger, hope.

"Because every time I look at you—" his voice cracked around the words, "—every single time — I see the life I will never get to live. And it's driving me mad."

He advanced as he said it, closing what little distance had remained between you, and you found yourself rooted to the marble beneath your feet, eyes gone wide, tears already blurring your view of him. Your lip trembled, once, then twice. He stood close enough now that you could see clearly, for the first time all day, the exact difference in the colour of his eyes — the specific detail you'd catalogued a hundred times from a safer distance. Your gaze dropped, treacherous, to his mouth, before you dragged it back up to his eyes with real effort. You said nothing.

"Every time I close my eyes, I see your face," he went on, quieter now, almost helpless with it. "I hear your voice. Your laugh lives inside my head, constantly. Every single time you're near me it feels like I'm losing more of my own mind. You have condemned me to a life of yearning I am not permitted to act upon."

His voice broke on the last of it.

Your mouth fell open. "Condemned you?" You couldn't quite believe the word, couldn't reconcile it with anything that would have ever come from his lips.

"Yes." His eyes never left yours. "Condemned me. Condemned us."

A single, heavy tear finally spilled free and tracked down your cheek. A beat of silence stretched between you. And then, because it was the only true thing left in you to say, you said it.

"Baelor, we were already condemned."

Your voice came out barely above a whisper.

It was his turn to look at your mouth now, his own trembling faintly around whatever words he still hadn't let himself say. He was close — close enough that the smallest movement from either of you would have ended the distance entirely, would have ended the whole of the misery currently sitting between you in one motion. His jaw tightened once, twice. You watched him swallow. His lips parted around a breath that never became actual words before pressing closed again, as though he were physically restraining something.

You became suddenly, painfully aware of your own mouth — of how dry it had gone without your noticing. You wet your lips without thinking about it at all, an entirely unconscious gesture, and watched his eyes track the movement with an intensity sharp enough to make your own pulse stutter out of rhythm. You could feel the warmth radiating off him even across the last inches separating you, could smell the last trace of sun and grass and something underneath both that was simply him.

Neither of you spoke. Every word that tried to form arrived a full heartbeat too late, discarded before it ever reached your tongue.

He leaned forward, just enough that some part of you thought, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, this is it. Your breath caught before you could stop it. His did too. For one impossible, suspended heartbeat the entire world narrowed itself down to the single remaining inch separating your mouths.

Then something shifted behind his eyes.

He stepped back.

"We can't—" His voice had gone rough, wrecked. "God, I — I can't cross that line."

He turned away from you, both hands rising to cover his own face, and you let your breath out in a long, shaking exhale, the tears you'd been holding finally spilling freely down your cheeks with a mute sob. You gathered whatever strength you still had access to, turned toward the exit, and started walking, leaving him standing exactly where he was.

You did not look back.

← PART 1 | PART 3 →

A.N.: yes, I am leaving it there until part three *smiles deviously*

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