It’s her. It’s her, and immediately, I remember the feel of her in my arms, the tentative touch of her fingers on the nape of my neck, the silky give of that tempting mouth under my fingertip. My body responds in an instant, my cock giving a lazy jolt and thickening behind my zipper, my tongue running along the edge of my top teeth.
“Mary,” I say again, and my voice has changed, just enough to make her bite her lip, just enough to send that faint rosy hue to her cheeks.
She swallows, meeting my eyes. “Sean,” she whispers.
“This was the job you wouldn’t tell me about.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a nun.”
She lets out a breath. “Well, I’m a postulant. And this order is semi-apostolic, so sister is really more correct than nun. We usually use the word nun to refer to someone in a contemplative order.”
I blink at her for a minute, willing all the words she just said to make some kind of sense. But they keep floating around in my brain, totally divorced of context and meaning. “So…you’re not a nun?”
A quick, flickering smile. “I’m not a sister yet. I’ll be a postulant for another month before I enter the novitiate stage.”
“And then you’ll be a nun?” I ask.
“And then I’ll be a novice for two years.”
“And then?”
The smile turns into a laugh. “Then I take temporary vows. If I still want to take permanent vows after three years, then I’ll be a full sister of the order.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She laughs again. “Well, yes. He is kind of the point.”
I give a not-so-discreet glance around the sad waiting room, circling back to the young, interesting woman in the window in front of me. Even in her plain postulant’s jumper, even with the white headband holding her curls away from her face, she’s stunning. In fact, something about the starkness of the setting, the starkness of her clothes, makes her even more beautiful than she was last night. My dick gives an insistent throb, reminding me that I never got a chance to kiss her, reminding me that I never got a chance to sling her leg over my shoulder and taste her.
And you’ll never get to now, Bell. She’s a fucking nun.
“Why?” I ask, trying to understand. Because why would anyone choose this? Old plastic chairs and boring routines and a life without sex? A life without sex, and for what? For the dubious pleasure of getting to wear a gabardine jumper? “You could do anything you wanted. You’re so young, Mary. You’re smart. You’re in school. Why would you throw all that away?”
Her flickering smile is snuffed out like a candle. She looks away. “I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand.”
“Damn right, I don’t understand,” I say, beginning to feel genuinely irritated.
No, not irritated.
Upset.
I’m upset that I met this girl, that I want her, that I want to kiss her and I want to fuck her and I want to dance with her again, and I can’t do any of those things because she wants to offer up her life to a nonexistent deity. I mean, it’s obviously not about me and it’s obviously none of my business, but still.
“I should have known,” she mutters. “You were like this when Tyler became a priest too.”
Tyler.
My brother.
The words drip through my mind with slow, chilling realization.
“How do you…?”
But even as I say the words, even as she tilts her head impatiently, and even as the sun shifts behind the clouds and throws her face into a new relief of light and shadow and I see the echoes of Elijah’s cheekbones and eyes and forehead—even as all this happens, I know.
Fuck me.
“Zenny?” I ask. And then again, because it still doesn’t seem real. “Zenny?”
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t need to, because I can see it now. Not just her similarity to Elijah, but her similarity to the little girl I used to know. But shit, she’s no little girl now. Fourteen years is apparently a long fucking time, which is something I know intellectually, of course, but seeing the evidence of it like this is disorienting. Unreal.
Zenny is a woman. A woman I wanted to fuck last night.
Little Zenny! And I almost kissed her, I almost—
Oh God. I clap a hand over my mouth as the real impact of it all sifts through my thoughts.
“Elijah is going to kill me,” I mumble through my fingers. “Oh my God. He’s going to kill me.”
I see the tiniest flash of amusement in her gaze before it goes serious again. “It’s fine, Sean. Nothing happened anyway.”
“Nothing happened? Jesus, Zenny, I just about kissed you! I had no idea—” I turn away from the window for a moment and then turn back. “Why didn’t you say anything? You obviously knew who I was—why didn’t you tell me it was you?”
“You didn’t recognize me,” she replies calmly. There’s something challenging in her eyes when she looks up at me. Or maybe it’s not challenging—maybe it’s…hurt? But that’s ridiculous. Why would she be hurt that I didn’t recognize her after fourteen years? “And I didn’t see any reason to tell you. Especially in light of what’s going on with the building.”
“But you still wanted me to kiss you,” I point out (and yes, I say it to be a dick). “Even though I’m the big, bad wolf trying to take your building away.”
Her eyes flash again, but this time not with amusement. She walks away from the window, and next to me, I hear a door open. She stands in the threshold, looking more sweetly glamorous than any girl has any right to be, and she’s gesturing me inside. “Shall we get started?”
“No! Zenny, you owe me more than that, for fuck’s sake.”
“I’m not talking about this with you,” she says. “It’s over with and it’s not happening again…and nothing happened to begin with, anyway. We’re past it.”
I’m not past it! I’m not past the memory of her touch, the memory of wanting her—which isn’t even a memory right now, it’s real, it’s present, wanting her is my current state of being—and how the fuck am I ever supposed to get past the fact that this is Elijah’s little sister? Someone I held as a baby?
Oh my God, I’m going to hell. I don’t even believe in hell and I’m going there, and what’s worse is that she believes in hell, probably; she believes in all this stupid stuff, she’s giving her life to the same church that killed my sister.
How can I still want her after all that? Knowing she’s little Zenny, knowing that she’s choosing the one institution on this earth that I want to see razed to the ground? But God, want her I do.
She gestures again and I finally accept her invitation, catching the smell of something rose-like and delicate as I walk past her.
“I just want you to see the shelter before we talk about anything else,” she says matter-of-factly, closing the door to the waiting room and leading me down a short hallway. We pass a small office with a woman sorting through boxes inside; presumably the same woman Zenny was talking to earlier. “It’s pretty quiet in the summer,” Zenny continues, “unless there’s a run of rainy days or we get another group of women waiting for permanent placement.”