Page 18 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“And you don’t fuck women you care about?”
“No. I don’t.”
“That seems strange,” she murmurs, her breath catching as my finger goes slightly lower than her collar and starts toying with the chain of her necklace.
I shrug. “It’s how I’ve always done things. And…”
“And?”
I roll the cross pendant between my fingertips, keeping my eyes on hers. “And there’s this.”
“Is it a problem because you respect my choices and my beliefs? Or because you don’t respect the Church?”
I use the cross to tug myself just that much closer to her. “Both,” I tell her.
“So there’s more than one problem,” she says, her voice a bit breathless. “You care about me and my brother. And you don’t care about God.”
“Mmm,” I agree. I’m watching her mouth now, the way her lips crease ever so slightly as she talks, the flick of her tongue as she shapes her words. My cock is painfully aware of how close it is to her; just a few inches more and I could press right into her belly, grind away the ache she gave me.
No. Bad.
Elijah.
Nun thing.
“I never got my kiss,” she whispers. “And I’d already planned on committing that sin. What if you kissed me now and we pretended it was still last night? That you didn’t know it was me?”
Fuck.
My body responds before my mind, my heart hammering quick and my memories whirring like a merry-go-round, bringing up half-forgotten feelings. Feelings of magic and mystery and more-ness, as if this girl holds inside her a larger universe than the one I live in, as if she speaks a language I only hear in dreams I pretend I don’t dream.
She reminds me of the way I used to be. Before. Before Lizzy died. Before I rejected all the stupid and naïve things that had kept our family blind to the truth and her pain. Before I made my own idol of money and ambition and $1500 neckties.
Fuck. Fuck.
I jerk back as I realize what I’m doing, how close I am to her mouth, how close I am to grabbing my own cock just to rub at the need throbbing there.
How the hell could temptation incarnate be a fucking nun? How fair is that?
“No fucking way,” I say raggedly. “Elijah will kill me. You’ll kill me once you realize what a bad man I am and what you let me do.”
“What do you mean?” She comes off the wall, taking a step forward, her head tilted.
“I mean it would not be a good thing for me to kiss you.”
“Because of my brother?”
“Yes.”
“And my vocation?”
“Yes.”
She takes another step forward and now I’m the one forced to take a step back.
“We’re going to pretend you don’t know those things yet, remember?”
“And,” I say, stepping back far enough that my heel hits the stove behind me and I’m trapped, “let’s not forget that I’m selfish and dangerous and far older than you. I like sin. I like corruption. You don’t want someone like me to touch you.”
