Page 70 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“Making you very, very…” her voice is a seductive whisper as she leans close enough to my face to kiss me “...very, very…sticky.”
The next week passes in a tightrope walk of longing and release. I refuse to allow myself to be the reason Zenny falls down on any of her responsibilities, and so I drive her to all of her clinical rotations, classes, and shelter shifts to make her life easier, and I make her do her schoolwork at night before we get to fool around, sitting at the kitchen table with me as I work on contracts and review client emails. It’s agony to miss her all day and then to be so close and still need to keep my distance, but it also assuages some of the guilt I feel about our unusual arrangement. I feel like I’m helping her, supporting her and taking care of her, and feeling that way about a woman I like the way I like Zenny is beyond addictive.
But sometimes Elijah’s face will flash in my mind, like a big YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE warning, and then I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a terrible thing that I’m so addicted to Zenny.
“Am I big brothering you too much?” I ask over breakfast.
Zenny looks up from the nursing textbook in her lap, blinking. “Explain,” she commands.
“Making you move in. Driving you places. Making sure you finish your homework. Fixing your coffee in the morning.” I bring said coffee over to her to punctuate my point.
She accepts her coffee with a grin. “It is very, very terrible having a sexy millionaire play personal
barista, personal chauffeur, and personal orgasm attendant with me.”
I sit down in the chair across from her, leaning forward on the table and wrapping my hands around hers, which are currently wrapped around the warm mug.
“I’m serious, Zenny-bug,” I say.
“Alright,” she says and seems to give it some thought. “Okay, well, I chose to move in here for the month, and yes, that was under the influence of many orgasms, but I don’t regret it. I actually like that my success matters to you as much as it matters to me. I’m used to—” her hands flutter under mine as she searches for the right words “—going it alone, having to be the best but also having to make it look easy, you know? I get tired, and it’s nice to feel like someone’s in the game with me, like it’s not all on my shoulders anymore. Which it still is in a practical sense, but at least it feels easier. At least it’s less lonely. And a lot more fun.”
I perk up. “Really?”
“Really.”
“I just…” Why can’t I get over this? “You’re so young.”
“Hmm.” When I look up, she’s got her head tilted and her lips pursed as if this is an academic problem and not a deeply personal one. “Well,” she asks, “I suppose the question is if you’d be like this with any other woman you cared about?”
I think of my lovers in the past, and while I’ve slept with women all across the range of race, religion, and age, there’s a problem with that question, and it’s a simple one. “There are no other women I care about like this,” I explain. “You’re the first, and frankly, given my age, I think you’ll probably be the only one.”
Her mouth parts but she’s not breathing, as if I’ve said something monumental or something insane—or something monumentally insane—but I haven’t. It’s just a plain statement of fact. And it’s a fact that I thought she already knew.
She finally takes in a breath and averts her gaze to the window. The morning light plays across her face, burnishing the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones with the faintest luster of gold. “Sean, I don’t know what to say to that.”
My eyebrows furrow in puzzlement. What does she think she needs to say? It was just an objective truth, like the color of the sky or the reading order of the Wakefield Saga novels. It doesn’t need a response.
But then I realize that perhaps she thinks I would like her to respond in kind, to make some kind of declaration about her feelings in turn, which of course I don’t expect…
I mean, I definitely don’t expect it, and it hadn’t occurred to me before, but now that it has occurred to me, I can feel this thing inside my chest, a gap. It’s almost like a physical space, and somehow I know that if she said something back to me—that she liked me, that she cared about me, anything—it would fill up that mysterious chink, and somehow that would make me feel better.
“Back to my age,” she says, and I nearly let out a bleak laugh. We’ve ventured into strange territory indeed if our massive age gap feels like a safer topic of conversation.
“Yes?”
It’s her turn to cup my hands now and she gives me a smile, one of those Zenny smiles full of contradictions, because I can tell she’s trying to be reassuring but that she’s also troubled about something. I don’t like this, any of it, the troubled smile or knowing I’ve made her uncomfortable, but I also can’t bear to take back what I said about her being the only one for me.
“I appreciate you checking in with me, and while there might be some women in my position who would feel stifled or patronized, I’m okay with it. I like it, actually. I feel rather, well, doted on, and it’s nice. And I also trust that if I ask you to back off, you will.”
“Anything. Anything you say or want, and I’ll do it.”
“I believe you,” she says, and I wish that she didn’t look so worried as she said it.
Three weeks left, I remember. Only three weeks left.
As the days go by, she’s growing bolder and bolder in bed, using those words I like: pussy, dick, come. Fuck. She’s growing antsy for my cock, which is exactly what I wanted, for her to be peeling apart with lust, bursting with it, aching and heavy and ripe with it—and tonight’s the night I’ll finally give her what she’s so eager to have.
But two things first.
