I whimper into his mouth, and he pulls back to study my face, his own face so lovely and sculpted and intense, like I normally only see it when he’s saying Mass. Whatever he sees has that intensity growing, a hunger glassing his eyes while his pulse pounds even harder at the base of his throat.
“Turn around,” he says in a low voice that rolls through every secret place I have. “Hands on the wall.”
“Becket,” I breathe.
He looks at me like I’m the communion on his altar, the thing waiting to be made holy flesh. “Turn around,” he says again. “And you will see what comes of kissing a man marked by God.”
“Christ,” I whisper, knowing with twenty-two years of Catholicism under my belt that every single part of this is wrong, and still turning around anyway. I brace my hands flat on the stone wall next to the bay of candles, wondering how many candles I should light after this.
Becket steps close behind me, his shiny priest shoes crowding against my hiking boots. He carefully moves my hair off my neck and to the side; he ghosts his lips over the back of my neck until I’m shivering and shuddering and breathing hard, until my head has fallen between my shoulders and there’s only his perfect shoes and the dance of the candles at the edge of my vision.
He touches me. With utter certainty and knowledge, he touches me. He slides a large hand in front to stroke along the undercurve of my breast, to trace maddening circles around my nipple.
Everything is tightening between my legs now, gathering into a knot of heat and want. “Becket,” I whisper. I’m about to say we shouldn’t, but that’s not really the truth. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I think I left the rules behind the night we played Spin the Bottle,” he says, his lips light and warm on the nape of my neck.
We all did, in a way, we all left behind what normal friends did, what normal friends knew about each other’s bodies and mouths. But still . . .
“You didn’t fuck anyone on Imbolc,” I tell him. “I think you’re still—well you’ve only watched and kissed, and maybe that means you’re still . . .” God, I’m no good at this, and especially not with him fondling me. “I don’t want you to compromise your vows for me.”
The hand on my breast—big, so big, with a wide palm and fingers long enough to easily hold a communion chalice aloft—flexes. Squeezes again. My nipple hardens through my thin sweater to press against his touch.
“This is holy,” he says, in a low voice that rolls through every secret place I have. “And isn’t that the point? Holiness?”
I twist so I can look back at him. At his strong jaw and patrician nose and full lips. “Doesn’t holiness require rules? Denial?” But my voice is faint, my words weak. I don’t want to fight him on this. I’m keening for release, starving for it, and it’s so hard to think with that hand on me, on a place that needs so very badly to be touched.
“I used to think so,” he says, looking down at me. His eyes are so blue, a deep sapphire hue like the searing navel of a flame. “I used to think the harsher the rules, the greater the reward. I used to think the answer was smothering the fires that burned inside me, because surely I would be consumed? Surely if I let them burn, there’d be nothing left of me? But after Imbolc night, I knew the answer.”
“What’s the answer?” My breath hitches at the end of answer; Becket’s hand is moving from the curve of my breast to the softness of my belly. And then lower—his fingers find the hem of my sweater and start idling underneath, stroking along the skin above my jeans, popping open their button with a practiced movement.
“The answer,” the priest says, his lips warm against my ear, his fingers sliding under the zipper and into my panties, “is that we are born to burn.”
“Oh.”
His fingertips play over my curls—exploring me, learning me. And then before I can do something truly embarrassing, like whimper for more, a fingertip finds the plump bud of my clit and presses down.
I arch against him, barely able to breathe. After two weeks of only my own hand, this is too much, this is tumbling right off the cliff into lust.
“Is this okay?” Becket asks. He now sounds like any good priest should—concerned, gentle. Except he’s also working two fingers deep into my pussy as he asks. Not like a good priest.
“Yes,” I manage, trying to ride his hand.
“And it’s okay given where you are with Auden and Saint?”
Auden and Saint. Delphine and Rebecca. A month ago, I was a virgin. And now I’m about to have a fifth lover. It would almost be funny if I didn’t ache for it so much.
“We agreed,” I pant. “We agreed it wasn’t cheating.” Although the thought of Auden or Saint doing this with Becket is enough to make jealousy smolder in my belly, and how did my life end up like this? One poly relationship nestled inside a bigger one? I would say I don’t know how to feel about it, except Becket’s doing things to my cunt that make all thoughts vanish, so maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe it was always supposed to be like this.
“Good,” Becket says, his priest voice gone. Now he’s all rough, licentious man. “And surely no one would object to me ministering to you. Tending to my flock. You came to me in need and now I’m comforting you. Isn’t that right, sweet little saint?” He pulls out and presses against my clit again. “Hmm?”
“Yes,” I say, my eyes sliding closed. “Yes.”
He keeps fingering me like this—me with my hands braced on the wall and him with his hand in my jeans—and when he dips his fingers lower to play with my wet hole, to curl his touch inside me—I know I’m going to come right here in his church, right here next to the candles, with a bored dog laying on the floor and an unlocked door that means someone could walk in and see us at any minute. See their priest in his collar and everything, masturbating a woman’s pussy in view of the tabernacle.
“Becket.” His name is a prayer, a breathless invocation, and it invokes something in him, something urgent and fierce and full of yearning. He uses his other hand to turn my face back, and he presses his holy mouth to mine. He kisses me fervently, reverently, seeking out my taste, my breath, my barely uttered cries as his hand moves between my legs. And then with blessed relief, my cunt contracts around him as my back bows and my thighs squeeze tight and my fingers scrabble uselessly at the stones in front of me, as if that’s going to hold my body to the earth while every part of it is trying to fly apart.
“Sweet saint,” Becket whispers against my mouth. “Sweet, wicked saint.”
I gasp against him, the flutters still pulling tight in my womb, my entire world a clutch of relief and warmth and incense. “You make me,” I breathe in between kisses. “You make me wicked.”
“Then I suppose I shall also have to absolve you,” he murmurs, and he pulls his hand free as my body finally stills, bringing his fingers up to his mouth to suck on them, keeping his gaze locked with mine as he does. As he cleans his fingers as solemnly as he would take communion.
“You,” I say. “Your turn.”
A flicker of doubt plays over his face. “That was the first—I mean, that’s the first time since . . .”
He doesn’t have to finish. The first time since he took his vows.
I feel a rush of tenderness at that. Guilt too. And proprietary delight. And lust. I feel everything, including doubt, but the doubt isn’t enough to stop me from turning and reaching for him.
“You ministered to me,” I say. “Let me lay hands on you.”
Something in him seems to snap. “Fuck,” he mutters, shoving a hand between us to find his belt. Delighted, I move to the side of him, my eager fingers already on the placket of his trousers before he can finish undoing himself. And then he hooks down the waistband of his underwear—as black as his priest’s clothes, as tight as the boxer things Auden wears—and frees his erection. His long, thick erection, with its arrow-straight shaft and dusky-red tip and tight coils of blond curls at the base.
He gives it a long stroke from root
to tip, a hard pull that sends color to his cheeks and a fresh moan to his lips. “Come here,” he says, yanking me close and kissing me once again while his other hand furiously works his cock. “Down on your knees. I need you to suck.”
I get down on my knees. And I suck.
I give him kisses along his shaft at first, though, I slide a hand underneath to cradle the delicate heft of his testicles, I lick at his tip, at the clear pre-cum beading there. And then I part my lips, and for the first time in my life, take a man’s body into my mouth.
His answering hiss is heaven; the low grunt after that hell, because I can’t see the undoubtedly delicious face he makes along with it.
I slide back down on him, relishing the velvety skin against my tongue, marveling at the way it moves around the steel core of him when I wrap my hand around his base. I think I could live off the noises he’s making alone—choked off little breaths and grunts that no scholar should ever make, no philosopher should be able to form. I’ve unwound him, the best of us, the holiest and the kindest, and I’ve stripped away his vows until he’s nothing but a man fucking my mouth in the very church he’s supposed to keep sacred.
He’s not meditative in his pleasure—he’s vivid and zealous. He rolls so that his cock shoves farther down my throat, and he’s making these beautiful noises that remind me of how rich and clear his voice is when he sings during Mass.
“I want to see your face, pretty saint,” he says, pulling my hair up and to the side so he can watch my lips move over his length. “Wicked, pretty saint.”
I’m breathless by this point, my eyes watering from my enthusiastic attempts to draw him deeper into my mouth, but I still manage to smile around him, smile because I’m happy, because there’s more than sadness and anger in the world and it’s in the warm bodies and hearts of the people I love.
“Poe,” Becket warns. “I’m going to—it’s going to—”
As much as I would love to see him climax all over his neat black shirt, to watch him pulse and spend all over himself like the filthy man he is, I also can’t resist the urge to swallow him down, to taste the evidence of what we’ve done together here in the nave of the church, to take him like communion as he took me.
“Sweet Poe,” he whispers, and then he tenses a final time, swells in my mouth and throbs his release. His hands in my hair hold me close, but I’m not pinned to him or forced—not as I fantasize Auden would hold me on his cock—and when I have trouble keeping up with his orgasm, he eases me back before I even realize I need to breathe. Even in his throes, he’s still tending to me.
His last few pulses are spilling out of the corner of my mouth, a warm trickle that feels like blood, and before I can stand, Becket uses his knuckle to wipe his cum away from my mouth. “You’re a miracle,” he says. He says it with awe, he says it like he’s about to write to the Vatican and let them know that he’s found a miracle right here in Devon and it’s my mouth.
I flush, just as happy as he is. I wondered while I was going down on him if he’d feel any regret, if he’d ejaculate and then horror and self-loathing would rush in to fill the void that his pleasure left behind—but not at all. He’s actually smiling a little as we do the awkward and ungraceful business of tucking and buttoning and rebuckling.
When we’re finished, he takes my hand and rubs his thumb along my knuckles. “Will this change anything between us?” he asks.
I don’t know the answer to that. “Do you want it to?”
“Yes.” He turns me so that I’m facing him, and once again, I’m struck with how classically handsome he is, this blue-eyed priest with equal parts philosophy and charm. A girl could fall in love with Father Becket Hess very easily.
Very easily indeed.
Becket cradles the side of my face in his hand, his thumb rubbing the faint concavity of my temple as he does, the motion both strangely erotic and vaguely sacramental, as if he’s marking me for a blessing. “Yes,” he says again. “I want it to change something at least.”
He drops his mouth to mine and gives me a slow, searching kiss, his lips warm, his hand holding my head to his as he explores my mouth. As he tastes me like it’s the last time he might ever have the chance.
Could I love him? I wonder. Do I already? Is there a limit to the people you can love? The people you can share your body with at one time? Is love like planets and stars, everything whirling so fiercely through space that the lesser, cooler loves spin out toward the edges while you keep the vast and fiery ones close?
Can I be in love with all five of the people here at Thornchapel and not be yanked apart by the inevitable gravity of it all?
And is that what happened to my mother all those years ago?
Chapter 16
Proserpina
Present Day
* * *
I wish I could go to London and just tell Auden everything. That I had Becket’s fingers inside me, and that oh, by the way, Becket saw his father burying my mother’s body in the chapel ruins. But as much as I know I theoretically could, I won’t. I don’t.
I stay at Thornchapel and try to bury myself in work, in packing up my room. I find Saint and we spend long hours together walking around the estate or working in the library. A couple days later, when I finally manage to tell him, Saint says simply, “Ralph was a monster.”
“So you believe he killed my mom?”
Saint pulls at the bottom ball of his lip piercing. “When they were in town for the summer or Christmas, they came to the same church my mother and I did. And for weeks on end I’d watch Auden’s mother grow sadder and sicker, and I watched as Ralph refused to give her a single scrap of affection—not a kiss, not holding her hand, not helping her out of a pew—none of the normal things partners do.” He sighs, shaking off the memory. “She died because she drank, but she drank because of Ralph. If you’re asking me if he could kill a woman, I’d say he’s done it before.”
I can’t believe I’m defending Ralph, I can’t believe that I’m actually trying to find a reason why this can’t be true, but I am. I’m trying to find any reason, because I don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe that someone who loved my mom could kill her. I don’t want to believe that she knew the face of the person snuffing out her life. I don’t want to believe that someone could be that evil.
“He was a terrible husband, but maybe he didn’t—maybe he just found her body, you know? Already dead?”
“Poe.”
“Maybe it was some kind of accident and he just didn’t want to get in trouble—” I break off, knowing how naive that sounds.
“You want to believe the best of everybody,” Saint says gently. “You want to because you know the alternative is accepting that some people are wrong inside. Just bad.”
“I don’t believe that,” I say, lifting my chin. “I don’t believe that people can be all one thing—all good or all bad.”
Saint’s expression softens, and he pulls me into his lap. A little hesitantly, like he’s not sure if I’ll let him, and then when I do, he wraps his strong arms around me and nuzzles my shoulder. “Good people don’t do evil things,” he says. “Evil people do evil things. And we already know Ralph was evil.”
I curl myself against him and rest my head on his shoulder. “I think you’re wrong. I think good people can be more dangerous, because they think they’re doing the right thing.”
“Do you think a good person killed your mother?”
“I—” I exhale. “No. No, I don’t think that.”
Saint kisses my head, a slow kiss that keeps his lips against my hair for a long time. “When are you telling Auden?”
“Tomorrow.”
“When will Becket tell the police?”
Becket.
I close my eyes, wishing there was some kind of nap you could take where you fell asleep and then your problems were all solved when you woke up. Murdered moms. The men you love hating each other. Getting fingered by a priest in the village church. “His interv
iew with them is the day after tomorrow. I asked him to wait so that I could tell Auden first. Saint . . . “
“Yes?”
“Becket—I was really upset when he told me. And he comforted me.” I lift my head so I can look at Saint’s face. His eyes, normally a stark winter brown, are almost amber in the spring sunshine coming in through the windows. I’m all over filled with guilt, even though we agreed it was okay, and I wish to God that it had been Saint or Auden who’d fooled around with someone first, not me.
You’re a sex monster, Poe.
I swallow and make myself continue. “Becket and I kissed, and we—we made each other come.”
Saint is very still underneath me, but his eyes give away nothing. “How?”
“Becket made me come with his fingers. I sucked him.”
Saint ducks his head for a minute and takes a deep breath that shudders his chest on its way in. Then he lifts his face again, his amber eyes soft.
“You look like I’m about to tie you to the stake,” he says, rubbing a thumb along the fullness of my lower lip and then catching my gaze. “I’m not mad, Poe.”
“Maybe you should be,” I say miserably. “What are we doing? What was I doing?”
“Did it make you feel good?” Saint asks.
I flush. “Yes.”
“Did it make Becket feel good?”
“Yes.”
“And did you break anyone’s trust?”
“Well, not technically—”
Saint kisses me on the mouth, quickly and softly, to interrupt me. “Then you didn’t do anything wrong. And I’m jealous, but I’m not mad.”
Feast of Sparks Page 16
