“Nice, huh?” I say all cool and cocky like, and she looks back at me with an arched eyebrow that would have made a 1930s Hollywood starlet jealous.
“You know it’s nice already; you don’t need me to tell you that,” she says. “And I was really thinking it was kind of sad.”
“Sad? The two-million-dollar loft with an amazing view?”
“A two-million-dollar loft that looks like a model home. There’s no pictures or books or mail on the table, nothing personal at all. It makes me feel lonely for you, actually.”
Well, fuck, now I feel kind of lonely for me too.
“Anyway,” she says, straightening up, “I didn’t come by to see your apartment. I came by to talk to you.”
Okay. Okay. I can do this.
I can talk to her—just talk—without kissing her and without accidentally coming in my pants. And this is a good thing anyway: I can explain to her about the shelter replacement and I can warn her the fuck away from Northcutt. This will work, it will totally work, and this conversation will end without me betraying my promise to Elijah.
I gesture her over to a seat and then I offer to get her a drink, an offer she accepts. And it’s while I’m in the kitchen getting her a La Croix—carefully angling my body so she doesn’t see the heavy erection still pressing against my pants—when I causally ask, “So what is it you want to talk about?”
And just as casually, she responds.
“I want you to have sex with me,” she says.
Well, shit.
A few minutes later, she’s drinking her La Croix and I’m sitting on the chair across from the sofa, watching the hypnotizing clench and shudder of her throat as she drinks.
She finishes drinking, sets the can down, and dabs gently at her bottom lip with her knuckle. A simple act that has my cock throbbing.
“Okay, so,” I say in a choked voice. It’s the first I’ve spoken since she dropped her giant, nun-sex bombshell. “Obviously the answer has to be no.”
She looks at me, the sunlight catching those metallic glints in her eyes, the gold of her nose ring. “But why?” she asks, and God help me, it’s that mixture of soft and direct of hers that I have no defense against. The headiest blend of vulnerability and confidence.
“Zenny. Be serious.”
“I am being serious. Why can’t you have sex with me?”
“You’re Elijah’s little sister,” I say, holding up a finger. “You’re far too young for me. And you’re a nun.” I add a finger to each point, until I’m holding three in the air together, like I’m reciting the weirdest scout pledge of all time.
Zenny stands up and walks over to me, wrapping my three fingers in her own, and it’s so much like how I imagined her fingers wrapping around my shaft earlier that I have to close my eyes for a second. “Can we at least talk about these things?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I mutter, my eyes still closed. “Those aren’t things that can be talked around.”
“I don’t like lying, even by omission, but if it’s crucial, then…Elijah doesn’t have to know.”
I open my eyes.
“I’m not asking for a proposal, Sean, or even a boyfriend. I need help.”
“Yeah, but sex help?”
She sits on the coffee table in front of me, her flip-flopped feet crowding against my dress shoes and her jumper-clad knees rubbing against the expensive wool of my suit trousers. “Will you let me at least explain it? Please?”
I’m so distracted by the feeling of her knees brushing against mine that I can barely speak. I manage a nod.
“Okay,” she says, taking a breath and then blowing it out in a nervous huff and sending a lone curl up in the air for a moment. “So here’s the thing. I’m going to become a novice soon, in about four weeks. And even though it’s not the final step, it’s still a very big step. Maybe the biggest. I’ll put on a wedding dress and change my name. At the end of the semester, I’ll move out of my dorm room and into the monastery full time; I’ll start wearing the habit. It’ll be the end of my life as Zenny and the beginning of my life as a bride of Christ.
“All of the other sisters—and the novice mistress and the prioress—they’ve told me to expect periods of intense temptation and doubt before I go through the novice process, they said it was natural and healthy even, but it hasn’t happened. If anything, I feel surer than ever that this is what I’m meant to do with my life.”
“I—okay. That seems like the exact opposite reason to have sex with some old stranger.”
“You’re not a stranger,” she says, smiling—and fuck, that smile. Huge and sweet and so very, very kissable. “But I can see why it doesn’t make sense yet. The thing is that I feel like I should be doubting, I should be tempted to leave, and I’m worried about the fact that I’m not. It makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.”
I can feel my brows pull together. “I mean, I personally think that anyone who believes without doubt is lying to themselves, but surely that’s the goal, right? To believe without doubt?”
Her smile grows bigger, as if I’ve said something that proves her point. “See? That’s exactly what I’m looking for!”
“Wait—what?”
“The whole ‘you’re lying to yourself’ thing! The whole ‘God isn’t real and you’re wasting your life’ thing! I feel like if being around anyone can make me doubt my vocation, it’s you.”
I…I don’t know if I like that.
I don’t know why, because if you’d asked me an hour ago whether I’d like to keep innocent people from wasting their lives on a fake deity (and a corresponding religious bureaucracy that doesn’t give a shit about them), the answer would be yes. Hell yes, even. But now that I’m in front of the hypothetical innocent person, hearing her say I’m good for making her doubt the things she holds valuable…I don’t know, it doesn’t feel so nice.
She continues, unaware of my inner struggle. “I think that a belief tested by doubt is the strongest possible belief, and my novice mistress agrees. She also thinks that I haven’t had—ah—” there’s heat in Zenny’s face as she looks down at where our feet touch “—enough, um, experience to actually face what I’ll be giving up to join the sisters. She thinks I need to taste more of the world before I leave it behind.”
I’m still processing being Make Me Doubt Guy, and so it takes me a moment to sift through what she’s saying. “Your novice mistress is telling you to have sex?”
Zenny looks up at me, and she’s trying to be cool and worldly as she talks, but the shy flick of her eyes away from my own betrays her. This topic clearly makes her bashful, which is rather charming considering how determinedly and boldly she broached it in the first place. “She is kind of an unconventional woman, and a very unconventional nun. But being a virgin isn’t a requirement for joining a monastery—celibacy is only a requirement for staying there after you’ve taken your vows.”
“Will they still let you take your vows if you’ve had recent, uh, ‘tastes of the world’?”