Her lips part but no sound comes out. Her eyes are wide and searching mine, and she’s breathing fast, so fast that I know for sure that she’s hearing and understanding every word.
“Has Elijah told you how many women I’ve fucked? How many women I’ve made come? It’s a big number, Zenny, because I love to fuck. I love to make women come. I love to see their snug little cunts, I love to taste them and push my big cock into them until they stretch. I love having my hands full of their hair while I fuck their mouths. I love feeling a girl’s ass clench around my finger as I tongue her clit.”
She swallows.
“And I want all those things with you. Right now.” I unbutton my suit jacket, parting it so she can see exactly how urgently I want it. Want her.
“Oh,” she breathes, her eyes dropping to the thick outline in my trousers. “Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.”
She can’t stop staring at my erection, her teeth sinking into that plush lower lip as she looks.
“So you see the problem,” I say in a businesslike tone as I button my jacket again, mostly concealing the aching hard-on that’s currently dripping precum at the sight of her biting her lip. I can’t stop thinking about how those lips would give and mold under my own, how they would yield to my teeth, stretch around my organ as I carefully, tenderly slid in to the back of her throat.
She struggles to drag her eyes back up to my face, and when she gets there, she finds me smirking a little. Her cheeks warm again, possibly in embarrassment or in arousal, or some combination of the two. “The problem is you being turned on?”
I take a step forward, my hands back in my pockets. “I’m a dirty man, sweetheart. I fuck strippers. I’ve taken conference calls with another man’s wife sucking me off under my desk. You think I’m ashamed of my cock? That I’m ashamed of wanting to fuck? Nothing’s further from the truth.”
Her pupils are huge now, her eyes just the barest rings of copper around massive pools of black. “Then I don’t understand,” she whispers.
I take another step forward, and another, until we’re toe to toe. I reach up, moving slowly enough for me to catch her gaze and raise an eyebrow. Is this okay? I’m asking silently, and she gives me a slow, wide-eyed nod. I trace a line down the point of her chin, dropping to finger the starchy collar of her shirt. “The problem isn’t that I want to fuck you. The problem is that I care about you. I care about Elijah.”
“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.”
“But I do want you to touch me,” Zenny says, crowding me against the stove. “I know you’re selfish and sinful, and that’s why you’re the perfect person to give me this. You’ll give it to me and then leave, and you won’t be offended that I’ll never ask you for another kiss again. In fact, if anyone should understand wanting to do something for the simple, momentary pleasure of it, I’d think it would be you.”
“But—”
“Just once,” she coaxes, her eyes so big and pleading. “I promised myself I’d get this one last thing before I was invested as a novice. One last kiss.”
“But—”
“And who better than you, my brother’s best friend? I know you’ll keep me safe.” Her eyelashes flutter and she puts her hand flat on the middle of my chest.
And then slides it down my stomach.
“Zenny,” I grunt. “Shit.”
My dick is practically drilling a hole through my pants, and it’s like I can feel every single whorl of her fingertips through all the layers of my clothes as her hand moves down, down, down—
“Please,” she murmurs prettily, and how did she suddenly get all the power here? How did she end up taking control and how did I end up trapped and feebly protesting?
And then she says, “Sean,” in this way like she’s said it to herself before. Like she’s murmured it into her pillow, like she’s doodled it in notebooks, like she’s imagined what it would be like to breathe my own name back into my lips.
“Sean,” she says again and the heel of her palm hits my belt and it’s over, it’s done, my control is snapped like a cord.
I groan.