Page 10 of Beneath His Robes

I followed his gaze in horror. The shower wall was painted with my seed, the white substance dripping down my tip like tears as they fell into the drain.

It did not matter if I washed this away. The sin branded me as much as the heat that burned through me.

I…was not pure. Not anymore. Maybe I never was.

Running from my feelings, past, and sins wasn’t an option, but the one thing I couldn’t be free of…was him. He would always come back to dim my light. I couldn’t pretend around him. He was right.

I was the biggest sinner because I lived a life of lies.

Stained with my own sin and now my blood, I sighed in defeat, letting the pain of my stupid hand throb. I deserved it.

I rifled through my closet one-handed, grabbing a simple black T-shirt and a pair of jeans. I needed to have my knuckles looked at by Doctor Mitter.

He would likely give me a few stitches, call me an idiot after accepting my lame excuse, and then call it a day.

But at least this way, I would have a cover-up for mass tomorrow.

I couldn’t exactly say, ‘I smashed the tile while thinking impure thoughts in the shower.’

ChapterFive

Ronan

Going to the small hospital was always a crap shoot. It was hard to gauge whether it would be a night that we’d have to wait twenty-four hours to be seen. Or if it was going to be a shift in which it was so dead that you had to wonder if healthcare workers were in the building. Monticello had a population of a whopping one-thousand and ninety-nine people.

I knew every single one of them from growing up here.

Most people stayed, trapped in the same vortex of their upbringing. I had moved to Vegas when I left this shit hole. My life had actually started on the stage of “Men of Sapphires.”

I learned how to be a man and, even better, how to manipulate men and women. I could fuck a woman just as easily as a guy, but nothing felt right.

They weren’t Elias.

When I started escort services, it was a slow, downward spiral of a lot of money and very little care for anything else. Bodies were all different shapes and sizes, and orgasms were a dime a dozen.

I respected the men and women who paid for my services and made sure they got every penny they spent on me, but when my clients started to want something other than sex, I had to run.

I knew sex.

I could bring someone to orgasm with my voice alone. I had done it too many times, but going on a date? Hell no.

Doctor Mitter’s nurse was as flirty as I remembered, finding ways to brush against me as she helped my mom into a spare room in the back.

“Oh, aren’t you the prodigal son as always, Mister Saint Clare.”

I forced a smile and wondered if this dumb bitch actually knew how far from the truth that was. I kept the idiot on the bed alive, but that was truly all I could offer her. I’d lost so much of my life more times than I could begin to count.

Jack wasn’t my biological father, and he reminded me every time he treated me as if I were insignificant. I was shackled with his last name when I was a baby. I never truly knew how to carry it.

My mom chose that leech over me.

Nothing changed year after year, and my return to this shit hole was purely to get her clean. Again.

She had stopped the hard stuff like ‘H,’ but she still had enough crap around the house to build a personal pharmacy. I might be an asshole, but I wasn’t going to let her drown in her own piss like everyone else, even if I should.

Maybe Elias would be proud that not all of me was a broken, damaged soul. What accounted for enough to be redeemed at the time of reckoning? Did God give sliding scales?

“What happened this time, Miranda? Fall down those pesky steps again?”

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