Project Passion

by Dusty Miller

  Project Passion

  Dusty Miller

  Copyright 2013 Dusty Miller

  This Smashwords Edition was published by Dusty Miller

  Image Copyright 2013 Dusty Miller

  ISBN 978-9918999-3-7

  http://hotboox.blogspot.ca/

  The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The author’s moral right has been asserted.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Project Passion

  Dusty Miller

  Five minutes to pull into a truck stop, take a small bag into the restroom, and then it was out of the habit and into ordinary, even drab street clothes. Phase One complete. She was free. It was her life and she had dreams. She also had some rights. What a long strange trip it had been just to get this far.

  Normally she would be teaching third grade at St. Francis Xavier Girl’s Academy for about six and a half hours a day, but the rest of her time was taken up by the daily prayer rituals, feasts and holiday observances, or household duties, which were little better than maid work in their communal existence. She went to Mass every day. Four hours in the car were hardly a respite.

  She’d had too much time to think.

  Sister Heather was frankly terrified as she stumbled about putting up camp. Her hair, healthy and thick, was her best asset for what lay ahead. Otherwise she was pretty unremarkable as far as sexy women went. That was one problem. Tall, fairly fit, used to being on her own a lot of the time, and having been through a few tough spots in the vale of tears that was this life, she was having a hard time with the thoughts and fears of what might happen. Or worse almost, what might not happen. It was hard to convince herself that she could live with a failure. It was equally hard to believe that she could succeed. This was her first serious attempt.

  There was a lot that could go wrong.

  It all began innocently enough. Not that the desire for raunchy sex with a man was innocent—it was far from it, but Heather had fantasized about what sex might be like since she was very young. It was a priest she was in love with at the time who did that for her. It led to discovery. The thoughts she had entertained towards him! It was mental pornography. She had tried to imagine herself, beautiful, sensuous, raven-haired and so cool and sure. Thoughts of his dark olive skin, curling mustache…and with Father Alan or even some other man, perhaps hairier and more strongly built, making love to her...rather. The first orgasm scared her. The revelation was that she liked it. The sort of misgivings that it also aroused were predictable and she wondered how to ever get beyond that.

  Why didn’t she have any guts?

  For years it simmered on the back burner of her sexual consciousness, bubbling along at the level of private fantasy. One which she indulged in her solitude from time to time, although God knew it was wrong. But not to do it was so very much worse.

  Sex did wonderful things for her body and her soul and that was undeniable.

  Who knew, maybe it was understandable at some level. She was a lonely kid back then, and a horny teenager. It was the experimentation, and the discovery that it brought a pretty big bang for the buck, as the saying went. But she was in Orders. It was forbidden. Jesus Murphy, it was sin.

  This brought an awkward smile in the midst of driving in the tent-pegs.

  It was the forbidden fruit, the nameless and atavistic desire to be held, understandable in someone who had been geeky and awkward since she was seventeen. Torn from her family and isolated from the world. It was more than simple curiousity. It was the yearning to be desired. She wanted someone to want her, as much as anything. She wanted, needed, someone to want her body. It was a craving. She wondered what it was like to make a man drool, running rough hands all over her.

  Perhaps it was not unnatural, when she recalled. As a seventeen year-old she honestly believed that she would be alone forever…and it was natural for thoughts to stray, and to wonder if she was indeed a fallen woman, even without actually doing anything. She’d fallen in love with others. Men who were attractive but somehow those fantasies never worked out in tangible fashion. The notion that she was ugly and no one wanted her was one of the factors that led to her into entering the convent in the first place. It was honest confusion. Perhaps it was the fear of the unknown, the fear of life itself. It felt cowardly, looking back now.

  Heather was just old-fashioned. She knew all the words—she’d read a few books.

  The words came easily, words learned the first day of school, standing in the yard waiting for the bell to ring.

  All the usual words. Every kindergarten kid knew them.

  No, Heather was scared witless. And yet she had found the courage at last, to acknowledge the secret yearnings for what they were. She had found the courage to act. There were fantasy men she still loved, still missed, still wondered about after all these years, and all of that was a side issue.

  It was still difficult, of course, no matter what people said these days. She still thought of it in the old terms, in terms of revilement and hatefulness. Deep inside, she knew. She knew.

  Maybe it all came down to who you were born to be—and maybe Heather was fooling herself when she masturbated, dreaming of a certain someone whom she could never quite visualize except in the most obvious—and perverse—terms that she possibly could. It’s like they barely had faces. What a sad thought. One day her thoughts turned to black men. For some reason that really did it for her. It was Satan tempting her.

  Heather was more scared now than that first time, when she went on the internet. She turned on ‘Private Browsing,’ not that that would ultimately deter the marketers. But they didn’t care who or what she was, not nearly so much as she did. She knew no other life…

  Always careful to delete her browsing history, in case someone else would click on it and know who had been on it. Feeling dirty and dishonest using the house laptop in her room late at night…it always turned on something deep inside of her, though. This much was undeniable truth.

  Quickly snapping off the page almost as soon as she had seen it, and then when she sat thinking about it for a long time afterwards. The truth was that this was just fantasy, one she had never dared to act upon in even the slightest way. The obvious conclusion was that she never would. When she met men in the wild as she thought of it, sitting around in bingo, or attending out of a sense of duty, Saturday bazaars and such, all about in the greater world once or twice, she’d actually gotten an oddly passionate feeling while talking to them in vague terms. Sooner or later, they always told you if they were married or if they had a girlfriend, or if they had children.

  The thought of them as men always hit her. It always came back to sex.

  It was like home schooling. They always told you. Heather had never mentioned her thoughts to anyone. That was for sure.

  When she was young and insecure, the knowledge that she was a wanton thing was too much information. She didn’t want to know. She was so unsure of it either way. It’s not like she was going to suddenly leave her calling, meet a man, and have a string of babies anytime soon, but this was just something she had always wanted to do. Everyone had their Mount Everest—something that they just had to do once in their lives. At least make the attempt.

&n
bsp; Deep down inside she wondered if there was revulsion, and just what exactly made a perfectly sensible woman ldo this to herself.

  Surely that must be it. It must be personal revulsion.

  #

  After taking time off for a doctor’s appointment, Heather stopped at a cash machine in a local strip mall and took out three hundred dollars from an account that was surprising in its liquidity. She had inherited a little money and had no idea of what to do with it. A pilgrimage to Rome, or Jerusalem had been suggested. Taking off her headgear in the car, and with some objective observation, she thought she could pass for an average woman, if she just kept her long coat done up. She was merely plain, but not obviously a nun in Holy Orders.

  Heart pounding in raw fear much of the time, she drove the house’s spare utility sedan eighty miles, and at darned near eighty miles an hour too, to a regional town on a dull, late autumn day. It was one where she was pretty sure she didn’t know anybody. Having studied all the flyers online, she went straight to Green’s Pharmacy, which was several hundred thousand square feet in size and known over the tri-state area. The supplies, as she thought of them, were inserted as an afterthought in a long list of cheap items which included diapers and a famous brand of tampons. She bought a case of Similac, some kind of baby formula. She spoke to no one. She would blush or give the game away somehow. The checkout girl barely looked up and she was out of there in twenty minutes. Most of which was spent simply going up and down the unfamiliar aisles. It’s not like she didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. She had a list, or surely she would have forgotten something in her hyper state of mind. She went to two or three different stores in town, so as not to give herself away buying panty-hose and condoms, hair remover and stuff like that, all from the same teller.

  To run into a cousin or something would have been sheer disaster. Most of the items she could donate at a local drop-box. It was just cover for what she thought of as The Project.

  Suitably emboldened, and after a while a lot more confident that no one in this particular hick town would ever see her again, Heather checked a phone book in a booth standing in front of a Seven-Eleven gas bar and then went looking for the lingerie store. In the end, she couldn’t stand around all day looking in the window, and so, stammering and blushing something fierce, she ended up not buying anything except a narrow black ribbon with a bow on it for her neck. She wished she could have been cooler then, but that would be her costume. A proper dildo would have been priceless, but she just couldn’t do it. She would be the perfect present for the right guy. Stealing jeans and other small items from the rummage bin in the church hall front closet was somehow easier to live with. It was a small package and easy to hide in their big old building. Down in the basement, it was tucked into the rafters, carefully leaving the spider webs in front of the opening intact. She always used a chair from another room and always put it back right on its giveaway little dust circles. The long winter nights were used for research and planning.

  #

  Heather shook her head. How brave she was in bringing her packages home. To park the car, and walk in from outside on knocking knees, loaded with shopping bags. To push the button and wait for the elevator…it was all kind of a letdown when no one came along and she had the lobby all to herself. Would it have been better if Mother Superior was standing there with arms crossed and right foot tapping?

  Oh, have you been shopping?

  She hadn’t even been missed. Everyone accepted her presence at face value. She’d been gone three of four hours. No one said a word. When the elevator door opened, again she was sure someone would be in there, but no.

  That was nothing compared to this. There was that fear again when she went back on the internet late at night, and started, possibly kidding herself as to its seriousness, but looking for men.

  At first, she searched sites which were clearly in other towns. She scrolled through a few of them, as she did sometimes for porn, and saw the odd guy that might have been interesting. Most of the pictures were garbage, a lot of penises, mouths full of semen didn’t shock her, but this was a fantasy and not just a meat-market kind of thing for Heather.

  She eventually checked out a site in her area of the state, almost frightened of what or who she might find. If she ever saw a familiar face, she wondered what she might think of them, or herself, again. The nun who looks at porn. I saw you on there. Your IP address has been logged…

  A terrible thought it was, too.

  They were all mostly the wrong type of guys. She was looking for something very specific. It wasn’t an openly normal lifestyle she was looking for. There was no way she could ever handle that.

  This was pure fantasy, and if she was going to do it, then she was going to do it right and have it just exactly the way she had always imagined it. She would be willing to pay for it, if it was done properly. It was a terrible risk. It was to be lust for its own sake. She would suffer in Hell for eternity and that was that. But it was a price she had come to accommodate herself to…however all that came about.

  In the final analysis, it was better than just being lonely, and slowly growing old, and quietly and fearfully masturbating once a week, if she was lucky, for the rest of her life. Raw sex of almost any kind, with almost anyone, might make up for being alone a lot of the time.

  It was better than not knowing. She had nothing to lose.

  #

  When the chat box popped open and Braden appeared, Heather sort of took it amiss at first.

  Her initial thoughts were not good, and she’d never answered any of the alleged women that did that on girlie websites where she went looking for male bodies to fantasize about. Some of the other sisters had strangely intimate relationships. No one really talked about it. She wondered what they would think of her now!

  But as her pulse rose and her heart pounded, Heather’s thoughts raced and she thought, why not?

  Why not? She clicked on the chat box.

  If nothing else, she could at least ask a few questions. That was what had always killed this project in the past, many times in fact.

  She didn’t know how to go about picking up a man. Very few men had the nerve to make passes at a nun. Of the few that did, it was rare to have it happen at a convenient time and more especially, the right sort of place. Those men were usually repulsive at first glance.

  #

  There were days when it was hard to believe she was thirty-eight years old and still cared what people thought.

  When she arrived in the parking lot at the dock on Lake Bonsett and didn’t see Braden’s vehicle, she wondered how long she could wait around. She only had so many days leave. She had reservations in the park and she was an occasional canoeist anyway. Their charity dragon-boat team was always a hit, and known to be competitive. She’d half expected the guy not to show. She struggled herself; the last few miles, even breaking off once and driving five miles back the other way. The trouble was, she’d made it this far, so she turned around, barely able to breathe, and kept going. The car was rented for a week. It was all paid for. It was her Uncle Daniel’s canoe. It had to be accounted for. Seven days alone in the bush, meditating on the nature of Christ. That’s what she told them and so that’s what she had to do…

  She could go into the woods and kill herself. She could go into the woods and cry for a week. She could go into the woods and God might talk to her…she had a few foul words of her own.

  Braden had mentioned that he wasn’t much of an outdoorsman. Heather had wondered which of them was most likely to chicken out and for what reasons. Not everyone was into the outdoors, but it was part of her vision. It was for safety and privacy. She would have thought she would have been the first to back down, obviously that was the most likely. Braden had fooled her by not being there.

  Feeling slightly relieved about the whole thing, Heather loaded the canoe after a half-hour or so, and set off up the lake in search of a viable campsite, determined, come what may, to enjoy a few
days of vacation in the wilderness. That was the sensible thing to do. She still had the end of a broken shovel, hastily sawed off at about fourteen inches. She found it in the garden shed while she was doing spring cleaning and smuggled it up to her room under a folded rain-coat. It was in the bottom of her pack. A flutter went through her abdomen at the thought of it.

  It was an escape from reality. Of course, that isn’t really possible, is it?

  #

  Her heart faltered. She contemplated the unthinkable. In the soft evening air came the unmistakable pop and rattle of a small outboard motor. The place was deserted this time of the season.

  She could do nothing, for the odds were it was nothing, probably just a fisherman or more likely two of them, out for an evening troll. They would go up one side and then go back down the other side of the lake.

  The word troll stuck in her mind. Yes, an apt word. She could troll for cocks…there was nothing stopping her.

  With a quiver in her midriff, Heather turned and bolted up to the tent. In the unlikely event that it was Braden, and that in spite of finding Heather not there and just giving up, he was coming after all, there were a couple of things she’d been putting off. If it wasn’t Braden, there was small likelihood of them coming ashore anyway. She could always get a little kinky later on and masturbation in the wilderness could be very good. It had enough temptation of its own. That was an idea she was more comfortable with…

  Aware of the pun, she was too terrified to smile. Braden was coming ashore. It had to be him. Please God, let it be him. She raced to get ready.