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“Is your mom cool with that?” I asked, more incredulous than certain.

“Why not?” He said, looking me in the eyes. “I’m not the first one in the family who’s joined the priesthood.

“What about making money?”

“For what? When I die I won’t be able to bargain my way into Heaven,” he said in a solemn tone.

His answers sounded like two plus two is five. Most guys our age only talk about iPods, MP3 players, video games, hockey, and their latest ‘personal’ scores. I’d never met anyone like him. He was a newly discovered species.

My thoughts, an invisible cobweb, were swept when Jacob said, “Are you religious?”

“I’m a hybrid,” I replied. “My mom is Catholic but my dad is an atheist.”Although I had been called ‘genius’ among family members, ‘heathen’ was not a label I wanted to earn with Jacob. I waited for some sort of reaction from him. He just looked at me.

“I was baptized. I guess that counts, right?” I said, trying to be facetious but in my head, it sounded more like a sarcastic remark. Dammit! My analytical side always gets the best of me.

“What I mean is, I am not a practicing Catholic but sometimes I wish I believed in someone or something.”

As I stand here now in the sacristy, in my wedding dress, I think that I made the right choice and so did Jacob. He had plenty of time to change his mind but lucky for me, he didn’t. We started seeing each other regularly a few months after we had met. Once, he took me on a personal tour of Montreal churches.

“You know, these churches wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for mathematicians,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Math is vital to the understanding of structural concepts and calculations.”

“And those mathematicians and architects created a beautiful harmony with the universe,” he said, pointing up.

When we entered the building, I was surprised to see how simple it was inside. The exterior and the interior were an incongruous mixture of architectural styles. I appreciated its simplicity, however. It’s one of Jacob’s favorite places. For a fleeting second, I understood Jacob’s desire to spend time here with a ‘God’ I’ve only known through Einstein.

Staring at the altar, I said, “Did you know that Albert Einstein once said that he wanted to know God’s thoughts because the rest is only details?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” he said as he sat in a pew in front of the altar. He patted the seat, inviting me to sit next to him.

We were the only ones there and, the overwhelming silence unnerved me. Someone once said that a moment of silence is not inherently religious, but for me it felt that way. I didn’t know what to do so I got closer to him, so close I could feel his apprehension. I took his hand and looked at him but his eyes didn’t meet mine. I started caressing his arm. He didn’t move. I moved my hand up to his face. I could feel the prickles under my palm.

“Grace, don’t…” he pleaded.

And just like that, in front of the altar, I turned his face toward me and gave him a passionate kiss. At first, he pushed me away but that only made me feverish. The smell of his skin was a hallucinogen impairing my thoughts. I inserted my hand in his pants and rubbed his manhood. He jerked like a frightened rabbit. The blue of his iris drowned in his pupils. I wondered whether the dim lights inside the church or my roving hand was at fault. I felt his organ swell in my hand. He is a man after all. That’s when he pulled me: his hands traveled up and down my back, his lips swallowed mine, and his breath was arrhythmic. Who would have thought that such a spiritual tour would have turned into ‘the temptation of the flesh’?

After our first steamy, sinful rendez-vous, I didn’t hear from Jacob. I didn’t want to lose him. No! I hadn’t calculated this outcome. I called him but I always got his answering machine. My e-mails went unanswered for several weeks. When I sought Father Michael, as my last resort, he told me it was best to leave Jacob alone. If I didn’t, my soul would pay on Judgment Day. It seemed to me Jacob was already doing all the judgment. I was in Limbo! I didn’t need the Bible or The Divine Comedy to tell me I was standing between Heaven and Hell. For me, I had definitely stepped into Hell’s threshold.

Finally I got a text message: “We gotta meet.”

My stomach turned. Those three words were more difficult to decipher than Nonlinear Systems of Two Ordinary Differential Equations. We went to the café where we’d first met.

“I want you to come over for Christmas,” he said, looking me in the eyes.

“I thought…”

He pressed his index finger against my lips, “Shhh.”

“Are you coming?”

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