“How are you?” I manage to say through the pleasure-fugue. “How are you doing?”
“I’m—” She’s shivering too, covered in a thin layer of sweat, and I can hear her pounding heartbeat in the threadiness of her voice. “I’m good. Strange. But good.”
“I’m going to move now,” I say in a hoarse voice. “I’m going to fuck you.”
“Yes, please, I—” I’ve started massaging her clit in earnest now and her words fall away into a moan. I slide carefully out, all the way to the tip, and then slide back in.
There are no words for it.
There are no words.
And I’m going to come embarrassingly fast.
“I’ve never been bare with a woman,” I mumble, my eyes glued to where my cock powers in and out of her. My naked cock, and fuck, if I’d known how good a naked cock could feel inside a woman, I don’t know that I would have been such a saint about wearing a condom. It’s slicker, just more, and her ass is the tightest, hottest fucking tunnel, and knowing that when I come it will touch her, it will be inside her—
No, I can’t do that, I promised, I promised—
Fuck, fuck, why did I ever make such a foolish declaration? Because now it’s all I want, all I ever want, and it feels like if I can’t do this, if I can’t have this one thing, I’ll die. I’ll simply die.
“It feels so dirty,” she whispers. “You being back there.”
“You like it, baby? You like me back there?”
“Fuck—yes.”
“Filthy girl,” I growl, banding an arm around her waist and raising her up to near-standing, keeping her upright as I thrust with an arm against her chest and a hand around her throat. My other hand continues to rub her pussy, tease fingers at her sopping wet slit. “You’re wet all over my hand. You get so wet for me, don’t you? So wet to have my cock in your ass?”
My words and my hand have her squirming and tightening and her hands flying backwards to grab at my shoulders. And then, with me buried deep inside her, stretching her virgin asshole, she climaxes with a slow, rolling cry, low and earthy and long. My name comes out, so does God’s, but mostly it’s that long cry, a cry that could be a hymn unto itself. A cry I memorize like a prayer.
She is everything around me, not just the slick massage squeezing my cock, but the nubile press of skin and warmth in front of me, the rose scent in my nose, the sweet taste of her cunt still on my tongue. Her laughter still in the air, the evidence of her passion and devotion all around us. Her clever words and her contradictions and her bravery and her vulnerability and her determination—
The jagged lurch just behind my cock almost warns me too late, and I jerk myself outside of her right as I start ejaculating. Cum goes everywhere, thick ropes of it, and like the animal I am, I’m pressing her cheeks around my spurting cock and fucking the cum-covered cleft until the climax finally wrings itself out and my body relaxes by degrees.
We are sticky and slick with oil and cum, Zenny laughing weakly as she comes to standing and wipes a hand across her sweaty face. I know I look ridiculous completely naked, with a still-wet cock and moonstruck expression on my face, but none of that is enough to stop the stupid words from coming out. I’m just so happy and I feel so good, and she’s smiling and stretching like a cat, and I love her I love her I love her.
“I love you,” I say.
And the world comes to a crashing halt.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Zenny turns to me, her face frozen.
“What did you say?” she whispers.
I’m reaching for a handful of paper towels to wipe off the oil and…other things. “I said I love you. Now hold still for me, please.”
She bats my hand away before I can start trying to clean her. Her smile is gone, her eyes are wide, and her entire body is tensed—a frightened deer, ready to flee.
“You…love me?” She says it like I just confessed to fucking microwaved melons in my spare time; her words are filled with horror and near-revulsion.
“Zenny.” But before I can think of anything else to say, before I can even get a handle on the blistering, wailing hole in my chest—the hole that she made—she keeps going.
“You said, when we started this, you said we wouldn’t fall in love!”
“Let me clean you up first.”
She backs away from me. “You said,” she accuses.
I sigh and settle for extending the paper towels to her. She takes them warily. “I never said that,” I tell her. “You said that I hadn’t brought it up. And then I said I didn’t think it would be a problem for you.”
Something wounded flashes in her eyes, bounds away faster than I can trace it to its source. “And do you want it to be a problem for me?”
This feels like a trick question. One I should be old and wise enough to answer, and yet I can’t answer it safely, because I’m not wise. Everything with Zenny has been new from the start, and this is the newest thing of all. Loving her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask carefully.
She scrubs at her body without meeting my eyes. “You know what it means.”
She’s not baiting me, I know she’s not, and yet I can’t help but feel hurt. Hurt in the kind of way where you’ve made yourself vulnerable and someone else has made you feel foolish for it. And extra hurt because I knew better, I knew better, I knew I shouldn’t have forced her to hear this thing that only makes her life harder. And on top of it all, I know it’s stupid to have done this and then to pull the I’m a sad boy routine on her.
And then I see that crushed look on her face again and her trembling chin and she’s so young. So, so young.
“I don’t want you to have any problems, not a single one, not even me. When I told you I wanted to be your dragon outside of the castle, I didn’t mean it like…like I’m the only one who gets to keep you hostage. I meant it like I wish I could burn everything bad away in your life so you can do whatever you want.”
She looks down at the used paper towels in her hands, and I hate how cheap this moment feels, how tawdry. “Honest guy thing, Sean. Do you want me to love you back?”
Desperation crowds inside me, murders of flapping ravens’ wings in my chest.
There’s no right answer. I can lie and say no—a lie she’ll see through, and a lie given when she’s asked for truth. Or I can say yes, and lose her trust anyway.
I don’t know what a good man would do in my place. I can only guess at what an unafraid one might do.
“Yes,” I let out in a long rush of breath. “Of course, yes.”
“Which means what exactly?” she whispers, and she finally looks back up at me, her eyes full of tears. “I leave the order? I don’t take vows? Surely you don’t mean that you’ll be content to hang around the sides of my life, wearing my favor to tournaments and writing me poetry? Because I can’t give you anything after my vows—not my time or my body or my heart. It will all belong to God.”
God again. Stepping in and claiming everyone in my life with His jealous demands.
I close my eyes, trying to hold back this wall of—I don’t even know what. Fear and loneliness and anger and love, just so much fucking love. But the wall is there, it’s looming, it’s crashing down on me.
“Yes,” I finally let out. “Yes! Dammit, Zenny, why shouldn’t I want you to stay with me? Why shouldn’t I want you to love me back?”
“Because loving you back would mean giving away myself,” she whispers.
Cold silence follows her words, and we both stand naked, awkward, still damp with each other. Let it go, Sean, my better nature cautions me. I’ve read enough romance novels to know that it never goes well for the hero when he pushes the heroine, and I’ve absorbed enough human decency to know it’s not my place to ask her to give up anything—especially not something she’s risked her family’s approval and all her time and energy to work for. And I know enough about myself to know I’m feeling anger and grief over my mom, another person God is taking, a
nd that’s not Zenny’s fault.
I know I’m not being fair. I know what I want is not as important as what she wants.
But.
But but but—
“I don’t think that’s true,” I say, letting the wall crash down on me, crash down on us both. And I’ve just fucked up everything by saying that, so I keep going, keep burying us in the rubble of my selfish wants. “You know what I think? I think you’re frightened. I think even the possibility that you might not be suited for a nun’s life terrifies you. I think you’re still worshipping an idol of that Future Zenny, because not worshipping her means all the pain and hard work you’ve done has been for nothing.”
A tear spills out one eye, tracking slowly down her cheek and along her jaw, where it drips onto the used paper towels. “You’re just like the rest of them,” she says thickly. “Just like my parents. Just like my teachers. You want me to have any other life than the one I’ve chosen.”
“I just want there to be some kind of middle ground,” I say, stung that she’d lump me in with the other people in her life who’ve held her back. “Look at my brother! You can still serve God and—”
“And what? Be your whore at the same time?”
“Shit, Zenny,” I say, really hurt now and really furious. “Is that all you think I want? Does my love seem that cheap to you? I want you to be my fucking wife.”
“No, Sean,” she says, fully crying now. “You just like having sex with me. You think that’s love, but it’s not.”
I take the paper towels out of her hand and throw them away because I’m sick of looking at them, sick of looking at my cum-rags in her hands.
“Maybe I don’t have any experience with love, but here’s what I know. You are the most interesting person I’ve ever met, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And if you told me right now that I could never fuck you again, I wouldn’t bat an eye because it’s not your body I want—it’s you.”
I come back, and I can’t stop myself from reaching for her because those tears, those tears, but she steps back again, not letting me touch her.
“Come here,” I say in a low voice.
“You don’t get to do Bossy Sean right now,” she says. “Not even a little bit.”
Something claws at the pit of my stomach. “I wish I could,” I say fiercely. “I wish I could tell you to stay.”
“You don’t get to control me,” she seethes back immediately, her hands curling into determined fists at her side.
“And you don’t get to throw me away just because I admitted something you must have already known!”
“I can’t do this,” she tells me, tears blurring her voice, shining on her face. “I’m not going to choose you, Sean. I can’t. It’s not the plan.”
“Right,” I bite out bitterly. “Who am I compared with God?”
She bends down, jerkily grabbing at her clothes. “This was a mistake,” she says. “This whole month was a mistake.”
“So now you’re just writing me off? You’re just going to quit me because it’s gotten hard?”
She whirls on me, eyes blazing underneath her tears. “I’ve never quit a fucking thing in my life because it was hard. I’m cutting you out because you’re hurting me. Because I thought you were the one person who knew me and understood what I wanted, and now I know you’re only thinking about yourself!”
“You asked me to do this precisely because I don’t understand why you’re doing it,” I retort, leaning in. “You can’t be upset that I still don’t understand.”
“No,” she whispers, her voice fading. “The problem is that you understand, but you still want me to be something different. And that’s worse than not understanding at all.”
That silences me faster than a hand around my throat.
She pulls her shirt and jumper on and steps into her sneakers. “I’m going to swing by your apartment tonight to get my things. Please don’t be there.”
There’s a moment, both grossly selfish and possibly righteously hurt, when I think about my mom in her new ICU bed—and then I realize Zenny doesn’t know. I didn’t tell her this afternoon; there wasn’t a good time and I didn’t want to weigh her down with it, and I just feel like there has to be a rule against having your heart broken while your mom is dying.
Except when I open my mouth to say that, nothing comes out. And it shouldn’t. I don’t want Zenny to stay with me out of pity. I don’t want this heartbreak hanging over my head like a sword of Damocles while I wait for my mother to get better. No, it’s better if she doesn’t know Mom’s in the ICU, it’s better that she’s able to be honest here, no matter how much her honesty drills right through my guts.
“Zenny, please,” I say. I beg. My voice is strangled. “Wait—”
“It was going to end next week anyway, Sean,” she says, not meeting my eyes. “We might as well do it now.”
“It won’t change it,” I say. “That I love you. Just tell me, please, before you go—do you love me? Could you ever love me?”
For a fleeting moment, I think she’s going to answer. Her eyelashes flutter and her breathing catches and her face is all delicate longing and hope and pain.
But then it shuts down, snuffed out like a candle. She pushes past me without answering, and I’m left in the kitchen, naked and alone and—for the first time in my life—utterly heartbroken.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Aiden’s farmhouse is mostly dark when I pull up, with only a single bedroom window upstairs glowing faintly against the night. Everywhere else there are stars. Stars and stars and stars, and as I park my car and climb out into the warm summer air, I think I can almost understand why he likes it here. It’s like another world, and right now, another world is exactly what I need.
My hands are shaking as I try to hit the lock button on my key fob, and I make myself stop, take a moment to drag in a long breath of air. It smells like grass and wind and Kansas.
No city.
No roses.
No Zenny.
I finally succeed in locking my car and make it onto the porch, letting myself inside with the key Aiden keeps under a planter filled with dead plants. It might be ridiculous that I’ve driven almost an hour outside the city just to use my brother’s shower and steal some of his clothes, but Zenny asked me not to be at the apartment, and Sean Bell that I am, I still don’t feel comfortable sitting in my mother’s ICU room smelling of sex and used vegetable oil.
So shower and fresh clothes it is.
It is literally the only thought I’ve let myself have since Zenny left me naked in the shelter kitchen. The only decision I’ve allowed myself to make. I’m buried in the rubble of my own making, the destructive wall of my anger and love and need, and I can’t breathe. I can’t live.
Just get to the shower. Shower and then go to the hospital. Don’t think about her don’t think about her don’t think about her…
“Aiden?” I call out, tossing the key onto his coffee table. The man makes a lot of money but he’s too scattered to do things with it, like furnish his house properly. His coffee table is made from nailed together wood crates, and his couch is a stained lump from his college apartment. His walls are still the basic farmhouse white they were when he bought it.
“Aiden?” I call again, getting ready to go up the stairs. I saw his car in the driveway, but with Aiden those usual signs of human behavior are completely useless. He might have decided to Uber to Canada or go cow-tipping a mile down the road, there’s simply no way to tell. And just when I think for sure that he’s not here, a light flicks on and he comes skidding out of his doorway, still yanking up some pajama pants. A penis definitely flaps around in the process.
“Aw, Jesus,” I say, throwing my hand up over my eyes. “Why, man? Why?”
“What do you mean why, you—you cat burglar!” he splutters, stomping down the stairs to me. “Haven’t you heard of fucking knocking? I don’t know, calling maybe?”
I drop my hand, assuming it�
��s safe, and then Aiden pauses on the stairs, looking at me.
“Have you been crying?” Panic floods his face. “Is Mom okay?”
“She’s fine. I called Dad on my way here. They’re settling her into her room now.”
He visibly relaxes. Then grows suspicious. “So why are you here again?”
“I—I need your shower. And some clothes.”
He stares down at me, eyes narrowed. “But you have a shower at your house…” he says slowly, as if I’m trying to trick him somehow. “And clothes.”
“Zenny’s at my place right now. Getting her things. She doesn’t want me there. And I can’t go back to Mom and Dad like this.”
“Like what?”
I gesture impatiently at my rumpled clothes. “All post-fuck.”
“So wait, you fucked and then you broke up?”
“Goddammit, Aiden, can you just like—I don’t know, shut up for half a second and let me use your shower?”
“Ah,” Aiden says sagely, leaning against the staircase wall. “You’re hurting.” And then in the voice of someone in the throes of a dawning realization. “You’re in love with Zenny Iverson.”
The sudden, sharp urge to kill Aiden and bury him in his bucolic paradise outside nearly overwhelms me; I’m still fighting it off when a third voice comes from Aiden’s bedroom.
“Who’s in love with who now?”
“He’s in love with Zenny—oh shit—” Aiden’s face goes pale as Elijah comes out of Aiden’s bedroom, shirtless and very obviously in the throes of his own dawning realization once he sees me standing at the foot of the stairs. I am also being dawned upon. Because Elijah and Aiden may have been peripheral friends for a long time, but peripheral friends don’t wander out of each other’s bedrooms shirtless at night.
Sinner (Priest Book 3) Page 27
