Everything is so soft. So soft. Like she might melt right onto my tongue, and I do my very level best to make her melt, I do. I suckle her clit and lick it, I swirl at her entrance and spear her opening with my tongue. I slowly introduce fingers and thumbs. I growl in appreciation as her hands lace through my hair and yank me closer; I moan and reach down to squeeze my cock as she starts fucking herself against my face because I’m going to come, I’m going to come just like this if I don’t suffocate my cock for a second.
Okay, maybe more like a minute.
And all the while, she’s fucking my face like it’s the last time she’ll ever have a face to fuck her pussy against—which it is.
“Sean,” she breathes around her finger. “Oh, fuck. Sean.”
She comes beautifully. Magnificently. A writhing, wet, gasping, happy little nun.
I wait for her to come down, nursing her through the peaks and valleys until her body goes completely soft and pliant under my lips, and then I stand up, wiping at my mouth with my arm. Her eyes blaze as they follow my movement, locking in on the sight of my wet lips. I curve them in a smirk.
“Did you like that?” I ask, leaning in close and circling the tip of my nose around hers. “Did you like having that poor pussy taken care of?”
“Yes,” she sighs happily. “Oh, yes. Please—” she pulls at my shirt, trying to chase me for a kiss, and I tease her by not granting it, moving my head whenever she moves so she can’t quite reach my lips. “Sean, please, I need you.”
For that, I let her kiss me, let her lick curiously at her own taste and clean it from my lips. “Say you love me,” I mumble against her mouth. “Say it again.”
“I love you,” she gasps out—gasping because before she can finish, I’m lifting her back up against the wall, my other hand fishing out my cock. Hearing her say it makes me crazed and tame all at once, feral and serene. I could listen to her say it for the rest of my life, I could survive just on the sound of those words alone, I could—
Wait.
Shit.
“I don’t have a condom, baby. I’m sorry.” I start to set Zenny down, and she clings to me.
“Don’t stop,” she pleads. “We’ve already been bare together before, so what does it matter?”
“Being bare inside your cunt carries a different set of problems.”
“I’m on birth control,” she argues.
“I’m not going to risk your future over this,” I tell her firmly. Between the teeth of my zipper, my cock gives a protesting throb. I ignore it. “You’re worth more than that. You’re worth everything.”
“Sean Bell,” she says, and her voice is sharp suddenly, not a little bit stern. I meet her eyes. “If I’m worth everything, then I’m worth listening to. I’m comfortable with the risks.”
“Fuck, Zenny. God knows I want to pin you flat to the wall and fuck you until neither us remember our names.” I’m shaking again, still holding her tight in my arms, and when she moves to hike herself more comfortably, the head of my cock drags through her wet center. I suck in a wounded breath through my teeth, my head falling onto her shoulder.
She bites my earlobe. “I want you,” she says. “I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”
I pull away so I can search her face. Her eyes are warm and urgent, her mouth drawn into a pout of tormented need.
Who the fuck am I kidding? I can’t resist her; I can’t resist giving her anything she wants, ever.
“Honest girl thing?” I ask, needing to be sure.
“Honest girl thing.”
I notch the naked head of me into her cunt and meet her gaze. “Kiss me,” I beg. “Kiss me while you let me inside you.”
She kisses me with the eagerness of a schoolgirl, her mouth open and her tongue seeking, and for a minute we are poised just on the edge of sin, our tongues meeting and mating and my penis only just breaching her. “You make me come apart,” she says against my mouth. “You make me more like myself.”
And that does it for me. I’m gone with loving her, gone with this tumbling, heedless fall with her.
I thrust inside.
There’s nothing between us.
Nothing at all, except for God and broken promises and two grasping, reaching hearts.
My teeth sink into the delicate slope between neck and shoulder, and she moans low and pleased. “I can feel you,” she says in some wonder. “I can feel your skin. Your heat.”
My knees are close to buckling as I work my way into her belly; static and sparks flash across my eyes; I’m airless, airless, taut as a bowstring and perishing right here in front of God, with His nun pinned up against the wall and my pants down around my hips.
Gentle and invasive all at once, the bold tip of my cock kisses against Zenny’s womb, and I nearly stagger with the feeling and with the idea, and all that’s left to me are smashcuts of sensation—
her pussy in a wet, unrelenting squeeze
and
the hidden corrugations and patterns of her body, all soft, all tight, all wet
and
the plump rub of her clit above my cock
and
silk everywhere, her frothy skirt overflowing my arms and rustling and waving and the lush mounds of her breasts heaving under the silk bodice.
“Does it feel good?” I say huskily, looking up into her face as she looks down into mine with a faint red hue to her cheeks and her mouth parted. “Did you need to ride on my cock, baby?”
“Yes,” she pants out, her hips moving with me, angling and squirming. “God. I needed it so much.”
“Why?”
“I needed to be full—fuck yes God—you make me so full.”
“Shit,” I groan, flexing my cock inside her just to feel the stretch and hug of her tight body. “Shit yeah, I do.”
She squirms in my arms again, seeking, seeking, her head falling back and exposing a slender, delicate throat.
“That’s it, sweetheart,” I encourage her, watching with fascination as that delicate throat flutters with her lust-frenzied pulse. “Take what you need. Use my cock to make yourself feel all nice and good again.”
Her mouth opens once more, a silent cry, and she’s a writhing angel in my arms, falling from heaven and touching ecstasy all at once, and she sobs out a broken I love you as her body flings itself right into the mouth of hell, shuddering with illicit sin in the arms of a sinner, right in the very dress she wore to meet God.
Did I say I was reformed earlier?
I lied.
I’m about to fill up a nun with a week’s worth of pain and anger and loneliness. I’m going to put the tip of my cock right to the firmness of her womb and claim her from the inside out. I’m going to fuck her in this wedding dress that’s not meant for me, and fuck her until we’re sweaty and desperate and spent.
And I do.
I bounce her hard on my cock, I stretch that pussy around my thick, heavy erection until she’s shaking in my arms with her third climax, and then I let it go, all of it.
I let go of the loneliness and the loss.
I let go of the control and the chaos.
And with a juddering moan, I spend into her with several long, hot pulses, an entire week’s worth saved up for her. There’s enough that I feel it leaving me, that I feel it smearing between us, and I imagine the crudest, crudest things: making her drip with me, making her pregnant. It’s awful, but it’s all I can think of as I throb and release deep into her belly. It’s all that crowds my mind—that and the rose-scent of her throat, where my face is buried.
It ended too fast, I realize unhappily. My last intimate moments with Zenny, and they passed faster than I could grab at them, slipping right through my fingers.
Zenny seems to think this too, clinging tight to me, her hands twisting in my shirt and her heels still locked against my back. And we come down together like this, wet and shaky and temporarily whole. I could cry with the unfairness of it.
“It’s time, baby,” I re
luctantly murmur, helping her to her feet. It’s heaven to hold her, but she has a different heaven waiting for her and I can’t be the one who ruins it.
I help her clean up with some Kleenex, and I help her rearrange her panties, her dress, her hair, until the only evidence of what just happened is the barely perceptible blush on her cheeks and chest, and the spill of me inside her, invisible to everyone except God.
And then there are no more excuses. It’s time for her to go to her vows, and it’s time for me to leave.
I give her a final kiss, long and lingering, her soft lips yielding under mine and then I straighten up. “I love you,” I tell her. “I’ll always love you.”
“You’re not staying?” she asks, her lips trembling. “You won’t stay?”
“I think I’ve been very patient, all things considering,” I say. “But watch you forswear your love for me and pledge your heart to another? Even if that other person is God? I can’t bear it, Zenny. I can’t do it.”
A tear spills over, followed by another and another. “I haven’t been good to you, have I?”
I look away. “You’ve been very good—”
She shakes her head, forcing a rueful smile through her tears. “No. I haven’t. I don’t know if I can say sorry for all of the times—I don’t believe they were wrong—but I know sometimes I was…deeply inconsistent. Hot and cold.”
“You had reasons to be wary,” I say tiredly. “You wanted something transactional between us, and I broke that.”
“But I broke it too,” she confesses. “I couldn’t tell you because I was terrified of feeding it…this fire inside my chest. But, oh Sean, every time you said one of those things—”
“Things?”
She waves a hand. “You know what I mean. Or whenever your voice would get low and rough, or whenever your eyes would get so big and open, like a sky after rain… Every time, I would feel that fire trying to burn and claw its way free. You do that to me. You tear me open and it was all I could do to hold on to the edges of my soul as you did. I loved you and I was scared, and if I had been honest…well.” She sucks in a deep breath and takes my hand in hers, pressing it to her heart. “Maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much.”
Her heart thumps quietly inside her chest, a tired and mournful bird, and I can’t help it, just one more kiss, one final brush of lips and one final taste of her.
“It was always going to hurt, Zenny-bug,” I whisper against her lips. “Always.”
I soak in a last vision—dark, shining eyes and a tart little nose and a sweep of lush, ticklish curls—and then I surrender her to the hands of God and her sisters. I close the door to the waiting room behind me, effectively slicing our love apart for good, and as I do, my heart breaks
one
last
time.
Chapter 34
I can’t get out of the monastery fast enough, half-running through the central hallway to the front door and pushing through that as if I were running out of air.
I am. I am running out. I’m choking on my own pain, my own bittersweet regrets. And I can’t even summon the strength to listen to the singing and praying echoing from inside; I hurl myself down the stairs and onto the old, broken sidewalk, willing the city noise of traffic and wind to drown out the melody of Zenny’s marriage to Christ.
Why did you do this to me? I demand of God. What possible reason could there be for this?
There’s no answer, and of course there’s not. If there’s anything I’ve learned during my detente with God this week it’s that He very rarely answers fussy prayers right away.
Although He better get used to them. I’m much more Jacob than I am Abraham, ready to fight and wrestle with God at a moment’s notice; I’m much more Jonah with his dead plant and his surly I’m so angry I wish I were dead. But I’m beginning to think that’s okay now. That honesty and angst and rage and all the other messy human feelings are preferable to lifeless piety.
So I think sullen, hurting thoughts up to God, which turn into sad, lonely thoughts as I get closer to my car at the edge of the block.
I’m never not going to love her, I think with sorrow. She’s the only one my heart will ever hold inside itself, for as long as I’m alive.
God finally sees fit to answer, and Kesha erupts noisily from my phone. I don’t recognize the number offhand, and my chest deflates so fast my ribs crack, which is stupid. Like I really thought Zenny was going to call me in the middle of her ceremony? What kind of sad idiot am I?
I answer, not bothering to muffle my mopeful tone. “Sean Bell.”
“Sean Bell,” a creaky voice says back. An old woman’s voice. A familiar voice. “I think you’d better slow down.”
“I—what?”
“Slow. Down,” the voice repeats as if I’m maybe not all that bright, which maybe I’m not, because I still don’t understand what she means until I turn around to face the monastery, and I’m very strangely certain now that this is the Reverend Mother talking to me, and why would she be talking to me—
A flash of white flutters out of the front door of the monastery and I freeze.
And then the flutters resolve into froth, and the froth resolves into a nun in a wedding dress, her hands balled up in the skirt and holding it up as she runs toward me.
She looks like something out of a movie—or a dream. The sun gleams along her skin and catches the silk in shimmering flashes, her hair bounces and spills around her neck and face, and the wind strokes her affectionately, making the dress billow behind her.
I am rooted to the spot, emptied out of everything, even hope, as she runs breathlessly up to me.
“That ought to do it,” comes the satisfied voice of the Reverend Mother through the phone, and I hear her hang up.
Wordlessly, I let my phone drop to my side and stare.
“Don’t lose your joy,” Zenny says, coming to a stop in front of me.
“What?” I ask dumbly.
“It’s what your mom said to me before she died.” Zenny takes a deep breath, stepping forward. “She said we made joy in one another, that she could tell just from the way you’d talked about me.”
“Zenny—”
She shakes her head—not at me, but at herself. “I even said it. I’m more myself when I’m with you. I got to the front of that aisle and I realized that I wasn’t more myself there, not like when I’m with you. I realized the walk down to the altar wasn’t going to be a walk of joy.” She looks up at me, her eyes meeting mine. “You give me joy, Sean. You give me the space to be strong and to be safe and loved and please say it isn’t too late, please say I’m not too late for us—”
But I’m already gathering her into my chest, I’m already kissing her. I take her by her upper arms and hold her apart from me after a moment, trembling. “You’re not taking your vows? Truly?”
She nods bashfully, a slow smile on those perfect lips, and I yank her back into me for more kisses. “Oh Zenny,” I breathe, my lips everywhere in gratitude—across the bridge of her nose and her jaw and her collarbone. “I’ll make you every vow in the world in exchange, I promise. I’ll be everything for you.”
“Everything is tempting,” she laughs under my kisses. “But I think Sean Bell is quite enough for one girl to handle all on his own.”
Epilogue
One Year Later
“Again?” I ask, amused.
“I’ll have you know,” Zenny says, crawling into my lap, “that it’s very common for a woman in my condition.”
My cock—sleepy from the two-round quickie just an hour ago—wakes the fuck up right away. Zenny’s wearing some kind of loose tank top thing that allows me to see right down her shirt and she’s in shorts so short that I can’t believe I let her out of the house, because I’m a jealous, possessive bastard like that.
(Okay, I do know why I let her out of the house. It’s because we were going to the same place together.)
“Everyone’s out of the office,” she purrs, her hands fin
ding my tie and yanking at it. “We’re alone.”
“All of our one employees is gone, hmm?” I tease, but I let her pull me into a slow, deep kiss. Emmett only comes in two mornings a week to help us sort mail and work on filing—he’s working part-time to save up money for his new twin great-grandchildren. (And one time he brought them into the office, and I held one of the little lumps for three hours while the lump dozed and I made some phone calls. Don’t you dare tell anyone that.)
I run my hands up Zenny’s legs and grip the curve of her ass. “These shorts of yours are killing me,” I say against her lips. “Are you trying to murder your husband?”
“No,” Zenny says briskly, her hands dropping to my zipper and exposing me with hurried movements. “I need his dick too much for that.”
“That’s reassuring. Ah, fuck, baby, just like that. God, that’s good.”
She’s got my thickening length in her slender fingers, jacking me slowly and tauntingly. Outside my ground-floor office, I see the humdrum roll of a delivery truck to the tire repair warehouse next door. And okay, did I ever imagine myself working on the ground floor of a forgotten building under an overpass in an office carpeted in nubby gray-blue bullshit, and oh, it just happens to be next to the Kansas City franchise of Tires, Tires, Tires?
No. No, I did not imagine this. And I wouldn’t trade it for the fucking world.
Because I also didn’t imagine myself married, and now I’m married to the smartest, sweetest, bravest, and most beautiful woman I know. And because I also didn’t ever imagine myself a father, and yet here’s Zenny perched in my lap with a naughty glint in her eye and a swollen belly pushing at her tank top.
(I know, I know, she’s too young to be pregnant. But let’s be real—her being too young has never stopped me before.)
So I actually don’t mind that I’m now the owner of a new nonprofit in an office that’s as far away from glamorous as possible. I love it. I provide and source additional funding for charities across the Metro—charities like the shelter belonging to the Servants of the Good Shepherd—and what I do actually helps people.
Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2) Page 141
