Trent gives me a slow, wary nod.
I hold up my hands. “I don’t want you to do anything shady. I just want to make sure that he’s not scheduled to meet with any of the Good Shepherd sisters before I can have a face to face with Valdman.”
This seems to resonate with Trent’s personal moral code, and he goes into Northcutt’s schedule, verifying that the nuns are safe until Tuesday, at least. Thus marginally reassured, I decide to call it a day and head home, even though it’s barely time for lunch. Tonight is Family Dinner, which is definitely not about checking up on Mom and extra definitely not about checking up on Dad. I’ve hired a company to provide all of Mom and Dad’s meals while she’s going through chemotherapy, which is pleasant and reassuring for a lot of reasons, but it does mean I don’t have an excuse to go over early to help with cooking. If I go over now, Mom will accuse me of hovering and flap at me until I stop making her “feel like she has cancer.”
No, it’s better just to stay away until dinnertime.
I get in my car, think of all the eggs and kale waiting for me in my fridge, and steer my car toward my favorite greasy food dispensary, an ancient joint called Town Topic. After devouring a triple cheeseburger and fries right there at the diner counter, I decide to head home and properly sort out this nun mess once and for all. I’ve already found a few good leads for a shelter replacement this week; I’m going to find the perfect spot, pitch it to Zenny (safely…like over the phone), listen to her voice light up in admiration and relief, and then I can extricate myself from this tangle.
It’s as I’m driving home that Aiden pulls out from the Kauffman Center (it’s unmistakably his car—a black Lexus LFA with the license plate BELLBOY and a healthy coating of gravel dust from his dumb farmhouse commute).
I lay on the horn until my center console lights up with a phone call.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Aiden says, by way of greeting.
“What is wrong with you? You’re the one driving a Lexus covered in dirt. Get a goddamned truck.”
“No.”
“Or maybe move back to the city?”
“No.”
“You’ve got probably the only LFA in this town, and you’re driving it covered in dirt and rock dings, and I don’t even want to know what the undercarriage looks like.”
“Don’t think about my undercarriage, you pervert,” Aiden says, but the insult lacks his usual levity. In fact, he almost sounds…nervous?
“Everything okay?” I ask, watching the back of the dust-covered Lexus as it turns off the street and into the parking garage for his firm’s office.
“Yep. Fine.”
“Were you at the Kauffman for a work thing?” I ask, and as I’m asking, I realize that what I really want to know is if he saw Elijah and if Elijah said anything about Zenny. Or, God, what if Zenny were there? What if Aiden had just seen her? And what if seeing him had reminded her of me? Or what if she talked about me? What if—
Christ. I’ve turned into a teenager. I’ve turned into a teenager because of a girl who’s barely not a teenager, and now even the idea of seeing someone who also knows her is electric. Like her presence has infused itself into the city on a quantum level, and every place and everyone that’s connected to her makes me as skittish and eager as she herself does.
Copper-ringed eyes spark through my mind as Aiden finally answers stiffly, “It wasn’t for work.”
“Did you see Elijah?”
“What would make you think that?” Aiden demands, and there’s a sharpness to his words that makes me think we’re beyond our normal brotherly ribbing.
“I don’t know, because he works there, asshole? And he’s my friend?”
There’s a pause.
Then he says, “I’ve got to go.” And hangs up.
God, what a fucking weirdo.
I’ll see him tonight at dinner and make him explain himself. And in the meantime—the shelter. Getting this Zenny problem all sewn up so I can stop thinking about her all the time. So I can stop imagining what it would be like to kiss her again, what it would feel like to hoist her on another counter and then drop to my knees and prove to her how little oxygen I need when I’ve got a pussy to eat.
And now I’m hard. Just fucking great.
I park the Audi in my building’s garage and limp over to the elevator, my stride hampered by my raging hard-on, and once I’m inside the elevator car itself, I can’t help but to give myself a couple rough strokes through the fabric of my trousers.
Those soft lips.
Those white cotton panties.
Fuck.
I stumble inside my penthouse already peeling off my suit jacket and reaching for my cock. Just a quick jerk to take the edge off, just a few fast strokes to clear my head, I won’t even think about Zenny—
That’s a lie. She’s all I can think of; it’s her kisses and her hands trembling and clinging around my neck and her legs parting for me to step between and the small scratch of her nose ring against my own nose as I claimed her mouth…
The way she lifted up her skirt to show me her pussy…
I drop my coat on the floor and fish out my cock, as fumbling and eager as if I were about to actually fuck her, my blood pounding raw and hot and urgent, my own hand shaking with excitement as I wrap it around myself. I shouldn’t be thinking of her like this, I shouldn’t be imagining it’s her slender fingers wrapped around me now. I shouldn’t be getting off to the thought of those fingers being nervous and inexperienced. I shouldn’t be swelling and leaking as I think about her showing me the cunt that she’s promised to keep pure and untouched for her church.
But I am, I am. I’m hard and aching over Zenny Iverson, someone I held as a baby, someone I’m supposed to keep safe, someone far too fucking young and also consumed with a faith I have spent my entire adult life rejecting. And after nearly two decades of screwing all kinds of women all over the globe—women who are paid to fuck and women who fuck like it’s their job anyway—I have no idea why it’s Zenny who’s got me like this.
Because I can’t fuck her, ever? Because I actually care about her wellbeing? Because she isn’t impressed by me and that makes me want to impress her?
Because she’s actually a good and interesting person, and stirs up a part of me that wants to be the same?
I tighten my grip around my cock, watching the fat, dark head pushing through my fingers. Fantasizing about Zenny’s fingers instead. About her pretty pussy, exposed for me and me alone—
Fuck. Gonna come.
I speed up my strokes, ready for it, ready, ready—and then there’s a knock at the door.
For a moment, I consider ignoring it. I’m three strokes away from spilling, and I need this, I need it bad, and there’s no way I can spend the afternoon thinking about Zenny without needing to come, so I just need to do it now. You know, for my wellbeing.
But then the knock comes again, and reality clears up the hormone mist a little. Realistically, it’s probably just a grocery delivery or the cleaning company coming early, but if there’s even the slightest chance it could be about Mom…
With a pained grunt, I zip myself back up into my pants, try to arrange myself so that my boner isn’t stupidly obvious (it still is) and go to open the door without bothering to check who’s on the other side.
And I open it to find Zenny standing there in her postulant’s jumper and bright yellow flip-flops, a nervous smile on her face.
Chapter Eight
My mind buzzes with panic.
Fucking PANIC, man.
And I shut the door right back closed.
“Uh, Sean?” I hear her say from the other side, but I’m too busy pacing in circles right now to answer. And I’m not even thinking, I’m just panicking, turning in circles like a dog walking into a room where the furniture’s been rearranged. All of my normal confidence is gone, all of my normal contingency-thinking, all of my charm and problem solving, it’s just fucking gone.
All that�
�s left is wanting Zenny and knowing I shouldn’t want her, and oh yeah, this idiot erection I have that is refusing to relent. If anything, my body and my dick are thrilled that Zenny is here in the flesh.
“Sean, I know your mother raised you better than this,” Zenny calls through the door, sounding amused. “Let me inside, please, or I’ll tell her how rude you were.”
Like Elijah, Zenny was somewhat exempt from the Bell-Iverson schism, and I can’t actually be sure that she wouldn’t tell my mom about this, so I spin around and yank open the door before I can think about it any longer.
Zenny gives me a sunny smile and pushes by, leaving that delicate rose scent in her wake. I have to fight myself not to sniff the air like a wolf after she walks past me and props herself against the back of my sofa. I pick up my crumpled suit jacket off the floor and hold it in front of my crotch, a move straight from the Adolescent Boy Playbook.
You’re thirty-six, not thirteen, I have to remind myself. Fucking act like it.
Luckily, Zenny doesn’t seem to notice my odd jacket pose. Instead, she seems taken with my apartment, gazing with large eyes at the clean, minimalist space. I look around myself, seeing it as she would—the stained concrete floors and giant windows, the long, low lines of the furniture—and I feel a spike of pride. It is a pretty nice place, even though it’s really nothing more than a convenient place to sleep and shower before I go back out to conquer the world.
“Nice, huh?” I say all cool and cocky like, and she looks back at me with an arched eyebrow that would have made a 1930s Hollywood starlet jealous.
“You know it’s nice already; you don’t need me to tell you that,” she says. “And I was really thinking it was kind of sad.”
“Sad? The two-million-dollar loft with an amazing view?”
“A two-million-dollar loft that looks like a model home. There’s no pictures or books or mail on the table, nothing personal at all. It makes me feel lonely for you, actually.”
Well, fuck, now I feel kind of lonely for me too.
“Anyway,” she says, straightening up, “I didn’t come by to see your apartment. I came by to talk to you.”
Okay. Okay. I can do this.
I can talk to her—just talk—without kissing her and without accidentally coming in my pants. And this is a good thing anyway: I can explain to her about the shelter replacement and I can warn her the fuck away from Northcutt. This will work, it will totally work, and this conversation will end without me betraying my promise to Elijah.
I gesture her over to a seat and then I offer to get her a drink, an offer she accepts. And it’s while I’m in the kitchen getting her a La Croix—carefully angling my body so she doesn’t see the heavy erection still pressing against my pants—when I causally ask, “So what is it you want to talk about?”
And just as casually, she responds.
“I want you to have sex with me,” she says.
Well, shit.
A few minutes later, she’s drinking her La Croix and I’m sitting on the chair across from the sofa, watching the hypnotizing clench and shudder of her throat as she drinks.
She finishes drinking, sets the can down, and dabs gently at her bottom lip with her knuckle. A simple act that has my cock throbbing.
“Okay, so,” I say in a choked voice. It’s the first I’ve spoken since she dropped her giant, nun-sex bombshell. “Obviously the answer has to be no.”
She looks at me, the sunlight catching those metallic glints in her eyes, the gold of her nose ring. “But why?” she asks, and God help me, it’s that mixture of soft and direct of hers that I have no defense against. The headiest blend of vulnerability and confidence.
“Zenny. Be serious.”
“I am being serious. Why can’t you have sex with me?”
“You’re Elijah’s little sister,” I say, holding up a finger. “You’re far too young for me. And you’re a nun.” I add a finger to each point, until I’m holding three in the air together, like I’m reciting the weirdest scout pledge of all time.
Zenny stands up and walks over to me, wrapping my three fingers in her own, and it’s so much like how I imagined her fingers wrapping around my shaft earlier that I have to close my eyes for a second. “Can we at least talk about these things?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I mutter, my eyes still closed. “Those aren’t things that can be talked around.”
“I don’t like lying, even by omission, but if it’s crucial, then…Elijah doesn’t have to know.”
I open my eyes.
“I’m not asking for a proposal, Sean, or even a boyfriend. I need help.”
“Yeah, but sex help?”
She sits on the coffee table in front of me, her flip-flopped feet crowding against my dress shoes and her jumper-clad knees rubbing against the expensive wool of my suit trousers. “Will you let me at least explain it? Please?”
I’m so distracted by the feeling of her knees brushing against mine that I can barely speak. I manage a nod.
“Okay,” she says, taking a breath and then blowing it out in a nervous huff and sending a lone curl up in the air for a moment. “So here’s the thing. I’m going to become a novice soon, in about four weeks. And even though it’s not the final step, it’s still a very big step. Maybe the biggest. I’ll put on a wedding dress and change my name. At the end of the semester, I’ll move out of my dorm room and into the monastery full time; I’ll start wearing the habit. It’ll be the end of my life as Zenny and the beginning of my life as a bride of Christ.
“All of the other sisters—and the novice mistress and the prioress—they’ve told me to expect periods of intense temptation and doubt before I go through the novice process, they said it was natural and healthy even, but it hasn’t happened. If anything, I feel surer than ever that this is what I’m meant to do with my life.”
“I—okay. That seems like the exact opposite reason to have sex with some old stranger.”
“You’re not a stranger,” she says, smiling—and fuck, that smile. Huge and sweet and so very, very kissable. “But I can see why it doesn’t make sense yet. The thing is that I feel like I should be doubting, I should be tempted to leave, and I’m worried about the fact that I’m not. It makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.”
I can feel my brows pull together. “I mean, I personally think that anyone who believes without doubt is lying to themselves, but surely that’s the goal, right? To believe without doubt?”
Her smile grows bigger, as if I’ve said something that proves her point. “See? That’s exactly what I’m looking for!”
“Wait—what?”
“The whole ‘you’re lying to yourself’ thing! The whole ‘God isn’t real and you’re wasting your life’ thing! I feel like if being around anyone can make me doubt my vocation, it’s you.”
I…I don’t know if I like that.
I don’t know why, because if you’d asked me an hour ago whether I’d like to keep innocent people from wasting their lives on a fake deity (and a corresponding religious bureaucracy that doesn’t give a shit about them), the answer would be yes. Hell yes, even. But now that I’m in front of the hypothetical innocent person, hearing her say I’m good for making her doubt the things she holds valuable…I don’t know, it doesn’t feel so nice.
She continues, unaware of my inner struggle. “I think that a belief tested by doubt is the strongest possible belief, and my novice mistress agrees. She also thinks that I haven’t had—ah—” there’s heat in Zenny’s face as she looks down at where our feet touch “—enough, um, experience to actually face what I’ll be giving up to join the sisters. She thinks I need to taste more of the world before I leave it behind.”
I’m still processing being Make Me Doubt Guy, and so it takes me a moment to sift through what she’s saying. “Your novice mistress is telling you to have sex?”
Zenny looks up at me, and she’s trying to be cool and worldly as she talks, but the shy flick of her eyes away
from my own betrays her. This topic clearly makes her bashful, which is rather charming considering how determinedly and boldly she broached it in the first place. “She is kind of an unconventional woman, and a very unconventional nun. But being a virgin isn’t a requirement for joining a monastery—celibacy is only a requirement for staying there after you’ve taken your vows.”
“Will they still let you take your vows if you’ve had recent, uh, ‘tastes of the world’?”
Zenny laughs a little. “Like I said, I have an unconventional novice mistress and my prioress is very, well, modern. She says she’d rather have women who choose this life in knowledge than who choose in ignorance.”
I have to concede that’s a fairly wise perspective on religious life—if anything about religious life can be called wise and not, you know, corrupt or pointless.
“Okay, so you feel like you haven’t, I don’t know, thoroughly interrogated this choice or whatever because you haven’t had doubts, and your mentors have encouraged you to go fuck someone to force those doubts into being.”
“Well,” Zenny says, flexing her hands on her knees and looking down, “it’s more like they think I’m so certain because I haven’t actually confronted what I’m leaving behind. And that’s not just sex. It’s money and close relationships and freedom and frivolous kinds of things. I don’t just want fucking, Sean,” she explains, her eyes finding mine again. “I want someone to show me everything I’m going to miss. I want someone to challenge me and test me. And if I’ve tasted everything the world has to offer and I still want to consecrate my life to Christ, then I’ll know it’s what I’m truly meant to do. It will be a mature choice and not a choice made out of naïveté.”
Her eyes are hypnotic, the copper rims darkening into pools so deep that I can barely separate where they blend into the onyx of her pupil. “If you really want this,” I say, feeling almost dizzy looking at her, “you should find a boy your own age. Or shit, at least a boy who believes in the same things you do.”
Sinner (Priest Book 3) Page 8
