Blinded

FIFTY-THREE

This was going to be a first. Holly and her husband had talked about doing something like it a couple of times, but the discussions were always more joke than anything else. But this guy from California? He was serious. Right from the start, she could tell.

Totally serious.

She thought about his proposal overnight. Excitement overcame fear, fear became excitement, and she e-mailed a simple lowercasedyes.

It had been a Saturday afternoon in September a year before. Notre Dame was playing Michigan in Ann Arbor. The date for the date was Holly’s idea. The university campus would be empty. The students and faculty and staff who weren’t in Michigan for the football game would be holed up watching the annual tussle anyplace that had a big screen and plenty of beer.

One-thirty to two-fifteen. That was the window she’d given him. She’d be there by one-thirty. She’d leave by two-fifteen. They had to be gone before Saturday afternoon confessions began.

In between? For Holly, the sweetest of all aphrodisiacs: anticipation.

“What are you going to do while you’re waiting for me?” he asked in one of his e-mails.

He knew all about anticipation. She’d figured he would.

“Pray,” she’d responded.

Some secular universities have chapels; some Catholic universities have elaborate churches. Notre Dame University has a basilica.

Holly was waiting for Sterling opposite the Chapel of the Reliquaries in the vaulting nave of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Ten minutes before two o’clock he knelt in the pew that was right behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach. He was the church mouse.

“Don’t turn around,” he whispered. “No, don’t.”

Her lungs felt bottomless. She was breathing so deeply that she had to open her mouth to get enough air.

She already knew from experience that the fire of anticipation consumed immense quantities of oxygen.

She hadn’t spent the time praying. No, she’d been counting the other people in the church. Currently, there were thirteen. One lovely woman in a dreadful purple suit was only a few feet from her in the Chapel of the Reliquaries. Thirteen was just right. Not too many, not too few. Just right.

“Sex in churches shouldn’t be reserved for priests,” he whispered to her in an over-the-top Irish brogue. “Should it, now?”

She’d been thinking that they’d use the confined space of the confessional for their tryst, but she wasn’t so sure she wanted to be in the dark with him.

Fear? No. That wasn’t it. Not at all.

She wanted to be able to see him.

Without a word Holly stood, walked down the length of the nave, and climbed the stairs toward the pipe organ. Her idea.

A few minutes later he followed.

She knew he would. They always did.

As his footfalls brushed the stairs, one by one, she knew that what she’d been thinking about, fantasizing about, since she was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl was about to happen.

Holly didn’t actually see his face until they were finished. Until anticipation was nothing but sweat on the cold church floor. When she finally turned toward him and saw the white slash of his Roman collar and the ruby light from the stained glass that limned his profile, his physical beauty almost took her breath away again. She thought,Mark would have vetoed him for sure.

For sure.