Priest (19 page)

Careful.

A week later, I stared up at Poppy’s ceiling. She was pressed against me, her head nestled on my arm, her breathing slow and even. I had lain awake watching her after we’d made love, watching the soft lines of her face relax from ecstasy into peace, feeling nothing but mindless contentment. But now that she’d been asleep for several hours, the contentment had ebbed into an anxious doubt.

The last several days had been like something out of a dream or a fairy tale, where my days were chased by the structured benevolence that was my life as a priest, and where my nights were filled with gasps and sighs and skin sliding over skin.

At night, we could pretend. We could drink and watch Netflix, we could fuck and shower together afterwards (and then fuck again.) We could drowse next to each other and fall softly into sleep. We could pretend we were just like any couple a few weeks into their relationship, that there wasn’t anything keeping us from talking about normal couple things, like meeting each other’s parents or where we would spend Thanksgiving.

But we were acutely and painfully aware of our own acting, of our own pretense. We were faking it because facing the truth was so much worse, the truth that this paradise would end one way or another.

What if it didn’t have to end? What if I called the bishop tomorrow and told him I wanted to quit? That I wanted to be defrocked and made into a normal man again?

Laicized. That was the word for it. From the late Latin
laicus
, meaning layperson. To be made into a layperson.

What if a few months from now I could kneel in front of Poppy and do more than offer her an orgasm and offer her my hand in marriage instead?

I closed my eyes, shutting out the real world and letting my mind go where I hadn’t let it go before—to the future. To a future where it was her and me and a house somewhere and little Bell children underfoot. I would follow her anywhere, and if she wanted to work in New York or London or Tokyo, or stay in Kansas City, I would go with her. I was like Ruth with Naomi, I was ready to make her life and her desires my own, and any place Poppy wanted to go, we would make a home together. Spend our hours together fucking and loving. Someday watching her stomach grow with my child.

But what would I do? I had two degrees, both equally useless in the real world, useless everywhere except temples of God and temples of learning. I could teach, I supposed, theology or maybe languages. I’d always wanted to be a scholar, sitting in some dusty library, poring over dusty books, excavating forgotten knowledge the way an archeologist excavates forgotten lives. The idea excited me, blowing like rain across my thoughts, drops and splashes of possibility. New cities, new universities…a list compiled itself in my head of places that had the best classics programs and the best theology programs—there had to be a way I could fuse the two together, maybe apply for a doctoral program or take a job as an adjunct…

I opened my eyes and that pleasant, fantastical rain stopped, and the weight of everything I would have to leave behind crushed against me. I’d be leaving this town—Millie, the youth group, the men’s group, all the parishioners I’d so carefully courted back to God. I’d be leaving the pancake breakfast and clothes pantry and all the work on fighting predators in the clergy. I’d be leaving behind the gift of turning bread into flesh, wine into blood, of having one hand on the veil that separated this world from the next. I’d be leaving behind Father Bell, the man I’d become, and I’d have to molt him away like so much dead flesh and ruined feathers, and grow a new shape with painful new pink skin.

I had a life building treasures in heaven, beating myself like a runner for the race, and I was thinking of giving that up…for what? I tried to stop the verses I knew by heart crowding my mind, verses about sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption, verses about passions of the flesh waging war against my soul.
Put to death what is earthly in you.

Put to death my love for Poppy.

My throat tightened and my mouth went dry; my anxiety spiked, as if someone was holding a knife to my throat and demanding that I choose, now, but how I could I choose when both choices came at such cost?

Because if I stayed where I was, I lost the woman sleeping next to me, this woman who argued about racial and gender disparities on The Walking Dead, who pulled obscure literary quotes from the air, who drank like she was drowning and who made me come harder than I ever had in my life.

That realization made the panic bite at me hard.

Turning to face her, I stroked a hand along her side, down the slope of her ribs and up the curve of her hip. She stirred a bit and snuggled in closer, still fast asleep, and my chest clenched.

I couldn’t lose her.

And I couldn’t keep her.

This kind of fear, this specific brand of panic, shouldn’t have made me hard, but it did. Hard enough that I had to reach down and stroke myself. I was engulfed with the need to claim my girl once again, to bury myself inside of her, as if one more orgasm would make a difference in scaring away our doomed future.

I slipped a hand down between us as I turned my body towards hers, finding those soft lips below her legs, and I started teasing them apart, flicking my fingers across her clit and over the frilled pink skin around her entrance. She shifted and sighed a happy, sleepy sigh, her legs falling open to grant me better access, although her eyes remained closed and her face relaxed. She was still asleep.

I bent my head to take a nipple into my mouth, sucking gently, fluttering my tongue around the tightening peak, and she was squirming now, but still asleep and fuck it, I couldn’t wait any longer. I lifted one of her legs and slung it over my hip as I positioned myself at her entrance. Holding her still, I pushed myself in, and like a curtain falling over a sunny window or a door closed against the noise of a party, the doubts were immediately muffled. They vanished in the face of our connection, the sensation of her tight cunt gripping me. God, I could stay like this forever, not even moving, just being inside of her, feeling her rouse and stretch like a languorous cat while I held her hips fast to mine.

Finally, her eyes opened, drowsy but pleased. “
Mmm
,” she hummed, hooking her leg more securely around my waist. “I like waking up like this.”

“I do too,” I said huskily, reaching up to sweep a lock of hair off her cheek.

She put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back, rolling with me so that I was laying flat with her on top of me; she began riding me with slow, dozy undulations. Sleep and sex had tousled her hair, and it hung in tangled, messy waves around her white shoulders and soft breasts, and the streetlight streaming in through the window painted her curves in shades of light and shadow.

Sometimes she was too beautiful to look at.

I laid back, lacing my arms behind my head, just watching as she ground her pleasure out of me, as she start moving faster and faster, her eyes falling closed and her hands braced against my stomach. From this angle I could see the needy bud being rubbed against my pelvis, the tiniest glimpse of where I was filling her and stretching her, and fuck, I could lose it right now if I wasn’t careful.

“That’s my girl,” I whispered. “Use me to come. There you go. You’re so fucking sexy right now. Come on, baby, get it. Get it.”

Her mouth parted and I watched in fascination as the muscles in her stomach seized and tightened, as she moaned and quaked her way through her climax, eventually sliding forward to lay against my chest.

I held her tight to me and then rolled us back over, so that I was on top and she was on her back, and then I bent down and sucked on her neck. I reached under her and found what I wanted, the tight, little rim behind her cunt. She pressed herself into the mattress, as if trying to get away from my touch, but that wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all, because I had plans for that part of her that extended well beyond what one fingertip could do.

“Are you saying no?”

She bit her lip and then shook her head. “Not a
no
. Yes.”

“Then give me your ass,” I growled in her ear. “Give it to me and then I won’t have to take it.”

She gave a little gasp, a gasp that made me crazy, and then she stopped trying to fight my touch. “There’s lube,” she panted. “In the end table.”

Not bothering to pull out, I simply stretched my weight over her as I reached for the end table drawer and grabbed the brand new bottle of lube. “Looks like you’ve been preparing, little lamb.”

“It was either that or get my own specially blessed oil,” she said, half-joking, half out of breath.

I withdrew from her, resting back on my knees and spreading her legs wider. I took my time warming her up, gradually working the lube into her while I rubbed her clit with my other hand, fingering both her holes until she was a twisting, slippery mess. Then I grabbed her thighs and pushed into her ass.

I should have stopped, given her a few moments to adjust, but I was so haunted by all the doubt and the dread, and the only things that would quiet my thoughts were the driving thrusts of my hips, her fingers digging into my back, the hot, hot heat of her like a vise around my dick.

“Tyler,” she breathed.

“Lamb,” I said, rising up to my knees and curling my hands around her hips.

“I’m going to come again.”

“Good.” My own climax was almost there as well, a barbed throb in my pelvis, driven on by the sight of the goose bumps rippling up her skin and the flush creeping up her stomach as she played with her clit.

“Oh, that’s so good, baby,” I grunted. “You’re such a good girl. Show me how much you like it.”

Her eyes locked on mine. “Fuck me like you want me to be yours.”

Her words tugged at that ribbon, jerking against my heart, and I pressed my eyes closed. I could so easily fuck her like that, because I did want her to be mine—forever. We’d only known each other six weeks, and I wanted her for the rest of my life.

I was such a fool.

I pulled her closer, stabbing into her narrow opening over and over again, watching her crest and peak as she continued to beg me to make her mine, and how could she not see that she already was? That I was already hers? We belonged to each other, and as I watched her cunt pulse with her orgasm, as I sank up to the hilt and shot my load inside of her, I realized that there was no undoing that, no untangling what had become so tangled over the past month and a half.

As we both came down, we stared at each other, and whatever solace I had managed to eke out vanished in an instant. I got up to get a warm washcloth, and when I came back, Poppy was watching me thoughtfully.

“Tyler.”

“Yes?” I sat on the bed and started cleaning her.

“I don’t know how long I can do this.”

I froze. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, and there was a quaver in her words. “I want to be with you. I want to claim you. I’m in love with you, Tyler, and the fact that there’s no future for us is killing me.”

I finished cleaning her as I thought of a reply, tossing the used towel onto a nearby chair. “I don’t know what the future looks like,” I finally said. “I know that I love you…but I also love my job and my life. Poppy, what I have here…it’s more than just charity or prayer. It’s a way of life. I get to live my entire life for my god, every minute of every day, and I don’t know if I can live without that.”

We both avoided the fact that these past few minutes had hardly been lived for God, that they’d been for us and us alone.

“Don’t you think I know that?” she said, sitting up. She didn’t bother to cover herself with the sheet, and I forced myself to look away from those perky tits so I could focus on what she was saying. “It’s all I think about. I can’t make you give this up—I can see that you love it. Hell, it’s what I love about you. That you are passionate and giving and spiritual, that you’ve devoted your life to God. But then I worry—” and there were real tears now “—that you’re going to give me up instead.”

“No,” I whispered. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

But I didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear. I didn’t know if I would give her up or not, because while it would kill me, being discovered and losing everything I’d fought for would kill me too.

I could see the moment she realized it, that I wasn’t going to tell her that we would stay together, and before I could say something else—I don’t know what, but
something
—she laid back down, turning on her side so that her back was to me.

“I want you so badly that I can taste blood when I think about it. But I won’t be the reason you lose your life,” she said, her voice reverberating like a bell in my mind. “I won’t be the reason for any regret. I don’t think I could bear it…looking at you and wondering if there was a part of you that hated me just a little bit for being the reason you laicized.”

She even knew the right word for it…she’d done her research. That heartened me at the same time it saddened me.

“I could never hate you.”

“Really? Even if I made you choose between me and your god?”