Page 17 of Priest (Priest 1)
And then he said that wasn’t me. Said I screamed sex with my tits and my mouth, and not only did I always want it, but I always looked like I wanted it. And he couldn’t have that in the precious Haverford family portrait.
The worst thing was, I knew he wasn’t saying it like an insult. Those were just the facts. People like us weren’t supposed to be this way. We were supposed to be reserved and cold. Thin and bloodless. Sex was either a necessity or a calculated affair. And now Sterling wanted me to be his calculated affair. I had loved him and he wanted to keep me as his pet mistress, in a box that had no place for real love or a real future.
But while I was thinking all of this, he was unzipping himself, and he was so hard, so mouthwateringly hard, and I couldn’t help it—I knew he was married, I knew he was an asshole, but it had been so long, too long, and I had loved him once…
Are you judging me right now, Father Bell? Are you thinking about what a dumb bitch I am? I know you aren’t, you aren’t like Sterling and me. The words “dumb” and “bitch” have probably never even come out of your mouth in the same sentence. But I was thinking it then, just like I’m thinking it now. I was stupid. But I was also lonely and heartbroken and so fucking wet it was dripping down my thighs.
Then I let him fuck me. Because he was right, I do like it, I do always want it. And as he slammed into me over and over again, I told him to tell me the fantasy, this life he was offering me. And he did, goddamn him, and it all sounded so perfect coming from his lying businessman’s mouth. He told me about the lazy afternoons we’d spend together, the expensive restaurants he’d take me to, the orgasms he’d give me on top of smooth Egyptian cotton sheets. He told me about the flowers and jewelry and vacations in Bora Bora and expensive cars and everything else that would fill up our illicit life together, all while I ground myself on his cock, ground myself towards the best orgasm I’d had since college.
He was cursing by this point, folding me over the bench and driving into me from behind while he pressed my face against the leather and I felt the cold metal of his wedding ring against my hip. It was degrading and terrible and I came almost immediately.
And then I came again.
“And that’s my real sin,” Poppy finished. “That’s my real shame. I can’t sleep at night knowing that I let him—let myself—” She broke off and there was a moment of silence which I didn’t interrupt, both out of respect for her and also because I didn’t trust my voice. Her confession had been so raw—so fucking detailed—and I was filled with rage at this Sterling asshole and sorrow for her and also a fierce, unshakable jealousy that just weeks ago, he got to be inside her and he didn’t deserve it, not one bit.
But mostly I was so fucking hard I couldn’t think straight.
“I let myself come,” she said finally, in a quiet, sad voice. “He is a married man and he cheated on me for years and he wasn’t even sorry, but I still not only fucked him, but I came. I came twice. What does it matter that I made him leave right after it happened? What kind of girl still does that?”
I needed to say something, needed to help her, but fuck, it was so difficult to focus on anything oth
er than the image of her face pressed into the seat as she gasped her way through multiple orgasms. I was going to hell for even thinking this, especially since I wanted to punch Sterling in the windpipe for acting on it, but it was almost unbearably sexy that those rough kinds of things got her off. Because they got me off too, and it had been so long since I’d had a woman whimpering under my touch…
You’re no better than him, I castigated myself. Fucking get it together. Feelings, focus on her feelings. “How did it feel?”
“How did it feel? It felt amazing. Like he was claiming me from the inside out, and when he came inside of me, it felt like he was marking me as his property, and it was his climax that made me orgasm again. I can’t help it—a guy coming is the hottest fucking thing, especially when I can feel it inside of me…”
My head fell back against the wood of the booth with an audible thud. “I meant—” I said in a strangled voice “—how did it feel emotionally?”
“Oh,” and then the breathy little laugh, and then fuck it, I’d go to hell, because I couldn’t not rub myself now. I was so hard that I could feel every ridge and slope of myself through my pants. My other hand toyed with my zipper as I stroked, trying to keep my breathing silent. Could I unzip myself quietly enough that she wouldn’t hear? Could I jack myself right here in the booth without her knowing?
Because there was no way I could live without it at this point. Her words were carved into my mind, and they would be there forever.
“I guess it made me feel like Sterling was right. I am a whore, aren’t I? I had a debutante ball and my family was listed in the Social Register and I have dressage trophies—but that doesn’t change who I am on the inside. I think deep down, I always knew that Sterling didn’t really love me, but I was willing to accept sex in lieu of love because I wanted that just as much as I wanted the romance, and what woman thinks like that, Father? That I’d rather have sex without love than have no sex at all? So what do I do now? How do I carry the shame of all this while at the same time knowing it’s a fundamental part of who I am?”
Shame. Yes, I knew that feeling; I was feeling it right now, in fact. I forced my hands to my thighs, well away from my erection. Concentrate, I told myself. And when you’re alone, you can take care of your…problem.
“God made us as sexual creatures, Poppy,” I said, wishing my words sounded more soothing than they did. With my choked voice and barely controlled breathing, they came out sounding like a dark threat. A dark, imminent threat.
“Then He made me too sexual,” she whispered. “Even now, I—”
But she stopped.
“Even now, what?” And I was using that voice again, and there was no mistaking the danger now.
I could hear her shifting in her seat. “I should go,” she said. I heard her reaching for her purse and then the door handle clicking open, but I was out of the booth and over to her side in an instant, standing there as her door swung open. I braced my hands on either side of the door (what in the actual fuck was I doing?) blocking her escape because I had to know, I had to know what she was going to say, and if I didn’t, I would go crazy.
She looked up at me looming over her, her hazel eyes growing wide. “Oh,” she breathed. We stared at each other for a moment.
It could have ended right there. It would have, even with her red lipstick and her bright eyes and her nipples in tight little points under the thin silk blouse she wore. Even with my wide shoulders blocking the door to the booth, even with the surge of power and satisfaction and lust that came from positioning my body against a woman’s in this primal, dominating way.
It would have, I swear.
But then she bit her lip, those slightly-too-big teeth digging into her full lower lip, all pure white digging into the sharpest, bloodiest red imaginable, and then she rubbed her thighs together, a tiny noise coming from somewhere in the back of her throat.
I stopped seeing a penitent.
I stopped seeing a child of God.
