Page 15 of Midnight Mass (Priest 1.50)
“So, Tyler,” one of the guests said, angling his head to me. “Tell us more about Princeton these days. I’m a Yale man myself, but I have to admit, their Bendheim Center is doing some pretty impressive things.”
Poppy flushed pink and tried to shift away from my touch, but I kept rubbing her while I leaned my other forearm on the table and turned toward the man who’d spoken.
“The Bendheim is excellent,” I answered conversationally. “I honestly think they’ll be adding more programs beyond a master’s soon. The demand for finance and business education is simply too high to ignore.”
“Princeton doesn’t care about demand,” another man said, in that half bluster, half chortle that these kind of men got after three or four glasses of wine. “They only care about academia.”
I shrugged, using the movement to disguise the shift in my arm and shoulder so that I could—oh fuck there it was—press one finger slowly inside her pussy. Her ragged breath was surely undetectable to anyone but me; it was their loss, because it was the loveliest sound in the world, lovelier than the piano still playing softly, lovelier than the sound of the sea-whipped wind against the glass.
Just feeling her turned my semi into a full erection, which was thick and long and fairly uncomfortable in my narrow, low-waisted slacks. But I relished the discomfort, the feeling of being hard for her while she was so wet for me, and her held helplessly captive by my hand alone.
I pushed farther in, wiggling it a little, as the men started arguing about what Princeton’s lack of a proper business school meant about its place in the Ivy League. Her hand came up and gripped the edge of the table as I finally pressed up against her G-spot, pushing against it and then dragging my finger out again to rub against her clit in hard and fast circles, then plunging back in to toy with her G-spot again.
Those perfectly imperfect front teeth dug into her lower lip so hard that I thought she might bite through it, and her knuckles were white as she held on to the table, all while I chatted casually about Princeton politics and tossed a few Harvard jibes out there, much to the amusement of the tipsy faux-aristocrats.
“And Poppy, are you still a Dartmouth girl through and through? Even with a Princeton husband?”
She swallowed, those teeth letting up on her lip for just a second, long enough for her to manage a weak, “Still a Dartmouth girl, Richard.”
I loved every millisecond of this, of my proper wife in her proper home surrounded by all these proper people, while I slowly finger-fucked her under the table. All these people talking about Ivy League colleges and investment plans and the increasing costs of yacht maintenance while the daughter of the house had her pussy stroked in the very same room.
Her head was bowed now, one hand clenching the table and the other wrapped tightly around her water glass, her cheeks pink and her breathing fast, her dress revealing the erect buds of her nipples. If anyone was paying close enough attention—which they weren’t, thankfully—they’d see that something unusual was happening to her. They’d see the subtle tilt of her torso as her body overrode her mind and tried to get my fingers deeper, faster, harder.
I was so fucking hard that I thought my dick would drill a hole right through my pants, but I didn’t care. I only cared about her, about owning her with just these small movements of my fingers and wrist, about making whatever had caused that tear vanish, about replacing it with pleasure.
And, if I admitted it to myself, there was something appealing about making her come only a handful of seats away from the same bastard that took her virginity. Something addictive about bringing this well-heeled young woman to the brink right in the middle of this American shrine to wealth and influence. Who is Nick Fucking Carraway now? I wanted to shout. Now who doesn’t belong?
Just as I parried some man’s joke about the Princeton rowing team with a riposte about Harvard’s, I felt it. The tell-tale tightening in her core, that abrupt clenching, and then she was closing her eyes as I shoved two fingers inside for her to ride out her climax on. Silently, she rocked against my fingers, eyes squeezed shut and teeth buried in her lower lip. And I bit my own lip, because it was so wet down there and I could feel every pulse and quiver, every single ripple of her coming, and that drove me fucking crazy.
So fucking crazy.
I wanted to pull her onto my lap and then I wanted her to bounce on my dick until she came again. Or maybe I’d be happy with her on her knees in between my legs, sucking me off like she’d done in the truck yesterday. Or, honestly, even a quick hand job through my slacks. At this point, my dick was not too interested in the particulars.
But instead I laughed and nodded with the other people at the table while Poppy ground out the last of her orgasm, and then when she finished, I gently withdrew my fingers, pulling her panties back into place and smoothing her skirt over her legs. And when the coast was clear, I lifted my fingers to my mouth and licked her taste off of them.
Her eyes widened, but so did a shy, creeping smile, and I sat back, satisfied that I’d cheered her up, even if it was at the cost of a raging erection that had no hope of being tended to any time soon.
“What are your plans, Tyler?” one of the anonymous wives asked right as I’d finished licking my fingers. I struggled to remember her name, but honestly, they all looked the same—carefully coiffed, subtly Botox-ed, expensive brooches pinned to their wool dresses. “After you finish your doctorate? Will you teach?”
Just like that, my satisfied mood vanished, replaced by something much more ambiguous. Something much more anxious.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said delicately. “I’m still focused on finishing my dissertation, so I haven’t given too much thought to what comes after.”
I could feel Poppy’s eyes boring into the side of my face, but I didn’t turn to look at her. What happened after this degree was something we didn’t talk about, the proverbial elephant in the room. Poppy would want me to do something big and meaningful and authentic, and other words that people like her and Jordan threw around like parade confetti. To them, those words were fluttering and light, easy to grab out of the air and hold onto.
Not for me.
For so long, I’d built meaning around this one singular goal—working to make sure what happened to my sister didn’t happen to anyone else. Systemic change. Institutional reform. Large scale awareness and activism.
And then came Poppy. And then came seven months digging wells and building schools in Pokot. And I started to see how seemingly small things, ordinary things, kisses and pick-up games of soccer and shoveling dirt, could be important and fulfilling.
; So I didn’t know what meaningful and authentic looked like for me anymore. I’d given up trying to know God’s plan for my life, but I hadn’t given up trying to live a godly life, and I wasn’t sure what that meant in my new context. Did I stay in academia and guide other people in their discoveries? Did I go back to mission work? Did I find a non-clergy role in a church, maybe in administration or as a youth director?
The hard, cold truth: the only job I felt suited for—the only job I felt made for—was being a priest.
And I could never be one again.
