Текст книги "Priest"

Автор книги: Sierra Simone

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“—but, I don’t know, I guess to talk about other things. I’m trying to start a new phase in my life, but I keep feeling like something is missing. Like the world I’m living in is flattened somehow, de-saturated. And after I spoke to you both times, I felt…lighter. I wonder if religion is what I need—but I honestly don’t know if it’s something I want.”

Her admission awakened the priestly instinct in me. I took a deep breath, telling her something I had told many people, but I still meant it every bit as much as the first time I’d said it. “I believe in God, Poppy, but I also believe that spirituality isn’t for everybody. You may find what you’re looking for in a profession you’re passionate about, or in travel, or in a family, or in any other number of things. Or you may find that another religion fits you better. I don’t want you to feel pressured to explore the Catholic Church for any reason other than genuine interest or curiosity.”

“And what about a crazy hot priest? Is that a sound reason for exploring the Church?”

I must have looked horrified—mostly because her words were nipping at my strained self-control—and she laughed. The sound was almost stupidly bright and pleasant, the kind of laugh bred to echo across ballrooms or next to a pool in the Hamptons.

“Relax,” she said. “I was joking. I mean, you are crazy hot, but it’s not the reason I’m interested. At least,” she gave me another up and down look that made my skin feel like it was covered in flames, “it’s not the only reason.” And then the light changed, and she jogged away with a small wave.

I was so fucked.

I went straight home and took the coldest shower I could stand, staying under the water until my thoughts were clear and my erection finally, finally relented. Although, if recent events were any indication, it would return the moment I saw Poppy again.

Okay, so maybe I couldn’t expunge this desire from myself, but I could exercise more self-control. No more fantasies. No more waking up to find that I’d fucked my mattress dreaming of her. And maybe talking to her would be exactly the thing I needed—I would see her as a person, a lost lamb seeking her God, and not just as sex on legs.

Perfect legs.

I pulled a pair of slacks over my boxer briefs and put on a fresh black shirt, rolling the long sleeves up to the elbows as I usually did. I didn’t hesitate before I reached for the collar. It would be a much-needed reminder. A reminder to practice self-denial and also a reminder of why I practice self-denial in the first place.

I do it for my God.

I do it for my parish.

I do it for my sister.

And that was why Poppy Danforth was so upsetting. I wanted to be the epitome of sexual purity for my congregation. I wanted them to trust the Church again; I wanted to erase the marks made on God’s name by awful men.

And I wanted some way to remember Lizzy without my heart shredding apart with guilt and regret and powerlessness.

You know what? I was making a big deal out of nothing. It was all going to be fine. I ran a hand through my hair, taking a deep breath. One woman, no matter how hot, was not going to unravel everything I held sacred about the priesthood. She was not going to destroy everything I’d worked so hard to create.

I don’t always go home on my Thursdays off, even though my parents live less than an hour away, but I did this week, mentally and physically strained from avoiding Poppy during my morning runs and also from taking approximately twenty cold showers over the space of two days.

I just wanted to go someplace—without the collar—and play some Arkham Knight and eat food that my mom had made. I wanted to have a beer (or six or seven) with Dad and listen to my teenage brother mope about whatever girl he was being “friend-zoned” by this month. Someplace where the Church and Poppy and the rest of my life was muffled and I could just relax.

Mom and Dad’s didn’t disappoint. My other two brothers were there as well—even though they all had places and lives of their own—drawn by Mom’s cooking and that unquantifiable comfort that comes with being at home.

After dinner, Sean and Aidan whipped my ass at the latest Call of Duty while Ryan texted the latest girl on his phone, and the house still smelled like lasagna and garlic bread. A picture of Lizzy watched us all from above the television, a pretty girl forever memorialized in 2003 with side bangs and dyed-blonde hair and a wide smile that hid all the things we didn’t know until it was too late.

I stared at that picture for a long time while Sean and Aidan chattered about their jobs—they’re both in investments—and while Mom and Dad played Candy Crush in their side-by-side recliners.

I’m sorry, Lizzy. I’m sorry for everything.

Logically, I knew there’s nothing I could have done back then, but logic didn’t erase the memory of her pale, bluish lips or the blood vessels that had exploded in her eyes.

Of walking into the garage looking for flashlight batteries and instead finding the cold body of my only sister.

Sean’s low voice seeped into my grim reverie, and I gradually came back to the moment, listening to the squeaking of Dad’s recliner and Sean’s words.

“…invitation only,” he said. “I’ve heard rumors of it for years, but it wasn’t until I got the letter that I thought it was actually real.”

“Are you going to go?” Aidan was speaking quietly too.

“Fuck yes, I’m going.”

“Going where?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t care, priest boy.”

“Is it the invitation-only Chucky Cheese? I’m so proud of you.”

Sean rolled his eyes, but Aidan leaned in. “Maybe Tyler should know about it. He probably needs to work off a little excess…energy.”

“It’s invitation only, dick-hole,” Sean said. “Which means he can’t go.”

“It’s supposed to be like the world’s best strip club,” Aidan continued, unfazed by Sean’s insult. “But no one knows what it’s called or where it is, not until you’re personally invited. Word is that they don’t let you come until your annual clears a million a year.”

“Then why is Sean getting invited?” I asked. Sean, although three years older than me, was still working his way up through his firm. He made a very healthy salary (fucking incredible, from my standpoint) but he was nowhere near a million dollars a year. Not yet.

“Because—douchenozzle—I know people. Being connected is a more reliable form of currency than a salary.”

Aidan’s voice was a little too loud when he spoke. “Especially if it gets you choice puss—”

“Boys,” Dad said automatically, not looking up from his phone. “Your mother is here.”

“Sorry, Mom,” we said in unison.

She waved us off. Thirty-plus years of four boys had made her immune to pretty much everything.

Ryan sloped into the room, mumbling something to Dad about wanting the car keys, and Sean and Aidan leaned closer again.

“I’m going next week,” Sean confided. “I’ll tell you everything.”

Aidan, younger than me by a couple years and still very much a junior in the business world, sighed. “I want to be you when I grow up.”

“Better me than Mr. Celibacy over here. Tell me, Tyler, you got carpal tunnel in your right hand yet?”

I tossed a throw pillow at his head. “You volunteering to come help me out?”

Sean dodged the pillow easily. “Name the time, sugar. I bet I could put some of that anointing-of-the-sick oil to good use.”

I groaned. “You’re going to hell.”

“Tyler!” Dad said. “No telling your brother he’s going to hell.” He still didn’t look up from his phone.

“What’s the use of all those lonely nights if you can’t condemn someone once in a while, eh?” Aidan asked, reaching for remote.

“You know, TinkerBell, maybe I should find a way to take you to the club. There’s nothing wrong with looking at the menu, so long as you don’t order anything, right?”

“Sean, I’m not going to a strip club with you. No matter how fancy it is.”

“Fine. I guess you and your St. Augustine poster can spend next Friday night alone together. Again.”

I threw another pillow at him.

The Business Brothers left around ten, driving back to their tie racks and home espresso machines, and Ryan was still out doing whatever thing he had needed the car so badly for. Dad was asleep in his recliner, and I was stretched out on the couch, watching Jimmy Fallon and thinking about what movie to pick for the middle school lock-in next month, when I heard the sink running in the kitchen.

I frowned. The Business Brothers and I (and a complaining Ryan) had done all the dishes after dinner expressly so that Mom wouldn’t have to. But when I got up to see if I could help, I saw that she was scrubbing the stainless steel in savage circles, steam clouding around her.

“Mom?”

She turned and I could immediately see that she’d been crying. She gave me a quick smile and then shut the water off, swiping at her tears. “Sorry, hon. Just cleaning.”

It was Lizzy. I knew it was. Whenever we were all together, the whole Bell brood, I could see that look in her eyes, the way she was picturing the table with one more setting, the sink with one more set of dirty dishes.

Lizzy’s death had nearly killed me. But it had killed Mom. And every day after that, it was like we kept Mom artificially alive with hugs and jokes and visits now that we were older, but every now and again, you could see that a part of her had never fully healed, never really resurrected, and our church had been a huge part of that, first driving Lizzy to kill herself and then turning their backs on us when the story went public.

Sometimes I felt like I was fighting for the wrong side. But who would make it better if I didn’t?

I pulled Mom into a hug, her face crumpling as I wrapped my arms around her. “She’s with God now,” I murmured, half-priest, half-son, some chimera of both. “God has her, I promise.”

“I know,” she sniffled. “I know. But sometimes I wonder…”

I knew what she wondered. I wondered it too, in my darkest hours, what signs I missed, what I should have noticed, all the times she seemed about to tell me something, but then sank into a fog of silence instead.

“I think there’s no way we can’t wonder,” I said quietly. “But you don’t have to feel this pain alone. I want to share it with you. I know Dad would too.”

She nodded into my chest and we stayed like that a long time, swaying gently together, both of our thoughts twelve years away and in a cemetery down the road.

It wasn’t until I was driving back home, listening to my usual cocktail of brooding hipster songs and Britney Spears, that I made the connection between Sean’s club and Poppy’s confession. She had mentioned a club, mentioned that most people would classify it as sinful. Could that be it?

Jealousy slithered inside of me, and I refused to acknowledge it, clenching my jaw as I maneuvered my truck onto the interstate. I didn’t care that Sean would get to see this club, this place where Poppy had possibly exposed her body. No, I didn’t.

And that jealousy had nothing to do with my sudden, out-of-the-blue decision to find her the next day and follow up on her request for a conversation during my office hours. It was because I was worried about her, I reassured myself. It was because I wanted to welcome her to our church and give her comfort and guidance, because I sensed that she was someone who was not easily lost, not easily broken, and for something to send her into a strange confession booth and bring her to tears…well, no one should have to bear those kinds of burdens alone.

Especially someone as sexy as Poppy.

Stop it.

It wasn’t too hard to find Poppy again. In fact, I did literally nothing except jog past the open tobacco barn on my morning run and collide into her as she rounded the corner. She stumbled, and I managed to stop her fall by pinning her between my chest and my arm.

“Shit,” I said, yanking the earbuds out of my ears. “I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”

She nodded, tilting her head up and giving me a small smile that gave me chills; it was so perfectly imperfect with her two front teeth peeking behind her lips and a sheen of sweat covering her face. At the same time, we both realized how we were standing, with my arms wrapped around her and her only in a sports bra and me without a shirt. I dropped my arms, immediately missing the way she felt there. Missed the way her tits pushed against my naked chest.

In the future: only sideways hugs, I told myself. I was already seeing another cold shower in my future.

She put her hand on my chest, casually, innocently, still giving me that small smile. “I would have fallen if it wasn’t for you.”

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have been at risk of falling at all.”

“And yet I still wouldn’t change a thing.” Her touch, her words, that smile—was she flirting? But then her smile widened, and I saw that she was just teasing, in that safe, playful way that girls do with their gay friends. She saw me as safe, and why shouldn’t she? I was a man of the cloth, after all, bound by God to be a caregiver of his flock. Of course, she would assume that she could tease me, touch me, without bothering my priestly composure. How could she know what her words and voice did to me? How could she know that her hand was currently searing its outline onto my chest?

Her hazel eyes flickered up to mine, green and brown pools of curiosity and intelligent energy, green and brown pools that reflected grief and confusion if you cared to look long enough. I recognized it because I had worn such a look for years after Lizzy’s death, except in Poppy’s case, I suspected that the person she was grieving—the person she’d lost—was herself.

Let me help this woman, I prayed silently. Let me help her find her way.

“I’m glad I saw you,” I said, straightening up as her hand fell away from my skin. “You said earlier this week that you wanted to meet?”

She nodded enthusiastically. “I did. I mean, I do.”

“How about my office in, say, half an hour?”

She gave me a mock salute. “See you there, Father.”

I tried not to watch her run away, I really did, but I promise I only looked for a second, an infinitely long second, a second long enough to catalog the gleam of sweat and sunscreen on her toned shoulders, the taunting movements of her ass.

Definitely a cold shower then.

Half an hour later, I was back in my uniform: black slacks, Armani belt (a hand-me-down from one of the Business Brothers), long-sleeved black shirt with the cuffs rolled up to the elbows. And my collar, of course. St. Augustine gazed austerely out over the office, reminding me that I was here to help Poppy, not to daydream about sports bras and running shorts. And I wanted to be here to help her. I remembered her soft crying in the confessional and my chest tightened.

I would help her if it killed me.

Poppy was one minute early, and the easy but precise way she walked through the door told me that she was accustomed to being prompt, took pleasure in it, was the kind of person who could never understand why other people weren’t on time. Whereas three years of waking up at seven o’clock had still not transformed me into a morning person and more often than not, Mass started at 8:10 rather than 8:00.

“Hi,” she said as I indicated a chair next to me. I’d chosen the two upholstered chairs in the corner of the office, hating to talk to people from behind my desk like I was a middle school principal. And with Poppy, I wanted to be able to soothe her, touch her if I needed, show her a more personal church experience than the Ancient Booth of Death.

She sank into the chair in this elegant, graceful way that was fucking mesmerizing…like watching a ballerina lace up her slippers or a geisha pour tea. She had on that igniting shade of lipstick again, bright red, and was in a pair of high-waisted shorts and a blouse that tied at the neck, looking more ready for a Saturday yachting trip than a meeting in my dingy office. But her hair was still wet and her cheeks still had that post-run flush, and I felt a small swell of possessive pride that I got to see this polished women slightly unraveled, which was a bad impulse. I pushed it down.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” she said, crossing her legs as she set down her purse. Which was not a purse but a sleek laptop bag, filled with strata of brightly colored folders. “I’ve been thinking a lot about seeking something like this out, but I’ve never been religious before, and part of me still kind of balks at the idea…”

“Don’t think of it as being religious,” I advised. “I’m not here to convert you. Why don’t we just talk? And maybe there will be some activities or groups here that match what you need.”

“And if there’s not? Will you refer me to the Methodists?”

“I would never,” I said with mock gravity. “I always refer to the Lutherans first.”

That earned me another smile.

“So how did you end up in Kansas City?”

She hesitated. “It’s a long story.”

I leaned back in the chair, making a show of settling in. “I’ve got the time.”

“It’s boring,” she warned.

“My day is a praxis of liturgical laws that date from the Middle Ages. I can handle boring. Promise.”

“Okay, well, I’m not sure where to start, so I guess I should start at the beginning?” Her gaze slid over to the wall of books as she worried her lower lip with her teeth, as if she were trying to decide what the beginning really was. “I’m not your typical runaway,” she said after a minute. “I didn’t sneak out of a window when I was sixteen or steal my father’s car and drive to the nearest ocean. I was dutiful and obedient and my father’s favorite child right up until I walked across the stage at Dartmouth and officially received my MBA. I looked at my parents, and I finally really realized what they saw when they looked at me—another asset, another folder in the portfolio.

“There she is, our youngest, I could picture them saying to the family next to them. Graduated magna cum laude, you know, and only the best schools growing up. Spent the last three summers volunteering in Haiti. She was a shoo-in for dance at Juilliard, but of course she chose to pursue business instead, our level-headed girl.”

“You volunteered in Haiti?” I interrupted.

She nodded. “At a charity called Maison de Naissance. It’s a place for rural Haitian mothers to get free prenatal care, as well as a place for them to give birth. It’s the only place besides the summer house in Marseille that my boarding school French has come in remotely useful.”

Dartmouth. Marseille. Boarding school. I had sensed that Poppy was polished, had guessed from her mention of Newport that she had known privilege and wealth at some point in her life, but I could see now exactly how much privilege, how much wealth. I studied her face. There was a thriving confidence there, an old-fashioned bent toward etiquette and politeness, but there was also no pretentiousness, no elitism.

“Did you like working there?”

Her face lit up. “I did! It’s a beautiful place, filled with beautiful people. I got to help deliver seven babies my last summer there. Two of them were twins…they were so tiny, and the midwife told me later that if the mom hadn’t come to MN, she and the babies almost certainly would have died. The mother even let me help her pick out names for her sons.” Her expression turned almost shy, and I realized that this was the first time she’d gotten to share this pure form of joy with anyone. “I miss it there.”

I grinned at her. I couldn’t help it, I just rarely saw anyone so excited by the experience of helping people in need.

“My family’s idea of charity is hosting a political fundraiser,” she said, matching my grin with a wry one of her own. “Or donating enough to a pet cause so that they can take a picture with a giant check. And then they’ll step over homeless people in the city. It’s embarrassing.”

“It’s common.”

She shook her head vehemently. “It shouldn’t be. I, at least, refuse to live like that.”

Good for her. I refused as well, but I also had grown up in a household of religion, of volunteering. It had been easy for me; I didn’t think this conviction had come easily to her. I wanted to stop her right then, hear more about her time in Haiti, introduce her to all the ways she could help people here at St. Margaret’s. We needed people like her, people who cared, people who could volunteer and give their time and talents—not just their treasure. In fact, I almost blurted all this out. I almost fell to my knees and begged her to help us with the food pantry or the pancake breakfast that was so chronically short-staffed, because we needed her help, and (if I was being honest) I wanted her at everything, I wanted to see her everywhere.

But maybe that wasn’t the best way to feel. I steered us back to her earlier and safer topic of conversation. “So you were at your graduation…”

“Graduation. Right. And I realized, looking at my parents, that I was everything they had wanted. That they had groomed me for. I was the whole package, the manicured, sleekly highlighted, expensively dressed package.”

She was all those things. She was indeed the perfect package on the surface…but below it, I sensed she was so much more. Messy and passionate and raw and creative—a cyclone forced into an eggshell. Small wonder the shell had broken.

“I adorned the life that already had too many cars, too many rooms, too many luncheons and fundraiser galas. A life already filled with two other children who’d also graduated from Dartmouth and then proceeded to marry fellow rich people and have little rich babies. I was destined to work someplace with a glassed-in lobby and drive a Mercedes S-Class, at least until I got married, and then I would gradually scale back my work and scale up my involvement with charity, until, of course, I had the little rich babies to round out the family portraits.” She looked down at her hands. “This probably sounds ridiculous. Like a modern Edith Wharton novel or something.”

“It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all,” I assured her. “I know exactly the kind of people you’re talking about.” And I really did—I wasn’t just saying that. I’d grown up in a fairly nice neighborhood and—on a much smaller scale—the same attitudes had been at work. The families with their nice houses and their two point five children who were on the honor roll and also played varsity lacrosse, the families that made sure everyone else knew exactly how successful and delightfully American their healthy Midwestern offspring were.

“I rejected that entire reality,” she confessed. “The Wharton life. I didn’t want to do it. I couldn’t do it.”

Of course, she couldn’t. She was so far above that life. Could she see that about herself? Could she sense it, even if she couldn’t see it? Because I barely knew her, and even I knew that she was the kind of woman who couldn’t live without meaning, powerful and real meaning, in her life. And she wouldn’t have found it on the other side of that Dartmouth stage.

“I was heartbroken over Sterling, yes,” she continued, still examining her hands, “but I was also heartbroken over my life…and it hadn’t even happened yet. I took the fake diploma they give you before they send you the real one, walked off that stage and then right off campus, not staying for the requisite hat-throwing or the pictures or the too-expensive dinner that my parents would insist on. And then I went to my apartment, left a definitive voicemail on my father’s phone, stuffed my things into my car and left. There would be no more internships for me. No more $10,000-a-plate fundraisers. No more dates with men who weren’t Sterling. I left that life behind—along with all of Daddy’s credit cards. I refused to touch my trust fund. I would stand on my own two feet or not at all.”

“That was brave,” I murmured. Who was this Sterling she kept mentioning? An ex-boyfriend? A former lover? He had to have been an idiot to let Poppy go, at any rate.

“Brave or foolish,” she laughed. “I threw away a lifetime of education—expensive education. I assume my parents were devastated.”

“You assume?”

She sighed. “I never spoke to them directly after I left. I still haven’t. It’s been three years, and I know they’d be furious…”

“You don’t know that.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said, her words chastising but her tone friendly. “You’re a priest, for crying out loud. I bet your parents were ecstatic when you told them.”

I looked down at my feet. “Actually, my mom cried when I told her, and my father didn’t speak to me for six months. They didn’t even come to my ordination.” It was not a memory I liked reliving.

When I looked up at her, her red lips were pressed in a line. “That’s awful. It sounds like something my parents would do.”

“My sister…” I stopped and cleared my throat. I’d talked about Lizzy countless times in homilies, in small groups, in counseling sessions. But somehow, explaining her death to Poppy was more intimate, more personal. “She was molested by our parish priest for years. We never knew, never suspected…”

Poppy put a hand over mine. The irony of her comforting me was keenly palpable, but at the same time, it felt nice. It felt good. There had been no one to comfort me when it had happened; we’d all been in our separate worlds of pain. There had been no one to just listen, like it mattered how I felt about it. Like it mattered that I still felt about it.

“She killed herself when she was nineteen,” I went on, as if Poppy’s touch had triggered a response to share that couldn’t be stopped. “She left a note, with the names of other children he’d hurt. We were able to stop him, and he was put on trial and sentenced to ten years in prison.”

I took a breath, pausing a moment, because it was impossible not to feel those twin dragons of rage and grief warring in my chest, heating my blood. I felt a fury so deep whenever I thought of that man that I honestly believed myself capable of murder, and no matter how many times I prayed for this hatred to be lifted from me, no matter how many times I forced myself to repeat I forgive you I forgive you as I pictured his face, it never truly went away, this anger. This pain.

Finally mastering myself again, I went on. “The other families in the parish—I don’t know if they didn’t want to believe it or were humiliated that they’d trusted him, but whatever it was, they were furious with us for calling for his arrest, furious with Lizzy for being the victim, for having the gall to leave a note outlining in sick detail what had happened and who else it was happening to. The deacons tried to block her having a Catholic funeral and burial, and even the new priest ignored us. The whole family stopped going to church then—my dad and brothers stopped believing in God altogether. Only my mom still believes, but she will never go back. Aside from visiting me up here, she hasn’t been inside a church since Lizzy’s funeral.”

“But you have,” Poppy pointed out. “You still believe.”

Her hand remained on mine, warm in the drafty air conditioning of the office. “I didn’t for a long time,” I admitted.

We sat in silence for a while, jostling shoulders with dead girls and disapproving parents and tragedies that lingered like the smell of old leaves in a forest. “So,” she said after a while, “I suppose you do know what it’s like to face your parents’ disapproval.”

I managed a smile, trying to keep it from faltering when she withdrew her hand. “What did you do after you left Dartmouth?” I asked, needing to talk about something else, anything other than Lizzy and those painful years after her death.

“Well,” she said, shifting in her chair. “I did a lot. The thing was that I was able to find tons of work on my own, work using my MBA, but how could I be sure that it wasn’t my scores of fancy internships and my expensive degree they wanted and not to have a Danforth working in their office? After six months in a New York office, feeling like DANFORTH was tattooed across my forehead, I left, as abruptly as I’d left New Hampshire, and I drove until I didn’t want to drive any more. Which was how I ended up in Kansas City.”

She took a breath. I waited.

“I never meant to end up at the club,” she finally said, her voice going low. “I thought maybe I’d find a small nonprofit to work at or maybe I’d do something prosaic, like waiting tables. But I heard from a bartender that there was a club hidden somewhere in this city—private, exclusive, discreet. And they were looking for girls. Girls who looked expensive.”

“Girls like you?”

Poppy wasn’t offended. She laughed that throaty laugh again, the laugh that kindled a low heat in my belly every time I heard it. “Yes, girls like me. WASP-y girls. The kind that rich people like. And you know what? It was perfect. I got to dance—I hadn’t danced anywhere other than a gala for so long. It was, all told, a fairly classy place. A mandatory $500 coat check. $750 for a table, $1000 for a private dance. No patron-initiated touching. A two-drink maximum. It catered to a very specific clientele, and so I found myself stripping for the same men who would have employed me, married me, donated to my pet charities, in another life. I loved it.”

“You loved it?”

Filthy girl.

The thought came out of nowhere, unbidden but refusing to leave, whispering itself over and over again in my mind. Dirty, filthy girl.

She turned those hazel eyes back to me. “Is that wrong? Is that a sin? No, don’t answer, I don’t really want to know.”

“Why did you like it?” I was asking merely out of a counselor’s curiosity, of course. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Why would I mind? I offered to tell you, after all.” She adjusted herself, the shorts exposing more of those firm legs. Dancer’s legs, I now knew. “I liked how it felt. Having men watch me with hooded eyes, wanting me and only me—not my education or my pedigree or my family’s connections. But even more than that, on this raw, primal level, I loved the way the men responded to my body. I loved that I made them hard.”

I loved that I made them hard.

I nearly choked, my mind fracturing into twin minds—one determined to see this meeting through with grace and compassion and the other determined to let her know how hard she made me.