Zenny stands up now too, taking a step toward me. “Please, Sean. I’m only asking for a month, and I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to give. I’m asking you because you’re the only person who can help me, and the only person I trust to help me, and I need that. I need to trust the person I do this with, it can’t be with a man like…” she waves a hand as she tries to think of an example. “Like Charles Northcutt.”
Red.
Furious, jealous, protective red. Everywhere, in my eyes and choking my throat and tightening my fists. “Stay away from him,” I manage. “He’s a bad man.”
I’m so twisted up in my sudden fit of jealous fury that I don’t see her reach for me; I only feel it as she puts a gentle hand on my arm. “I can tell he’s a bad man,” she says matter-of-factly, “and I have no interest in him anyway. I’m saying that men like him are exactly why I want a man like you to help me with this. You’re all the things being a nun is not…but I also feel safe with you. That’s a very rare combination.”
I look down at her hand, slender and dark and tipped with chipped gold nails. There’s the unmistakable streak of pink highlighter across the back of one pinky finger, and if I’m not wrong, a faint remnant of a list made across the back of her hand in Sharpie.
It’s the hand of a college student, the hand of a woman fresh out of youth, nothing like the chubby dimpled hand of a baby girl I once held in a friend’s kitchen. It’s the hand of a woman who’s still learning herself, who’s sometimes forgetful and sometimes daydreamy and sometimes bored. It’s the hand of a woman who needs to be kissed and caressed and loved down so thoroughly that she will never forget how to appreciate her own body and the feelings it can give her until the day she dies.
And the shitty thing is that I still know all the reasons I shouldn’t say yes; they are banging and parading around me like a marching band. But I still want to say yes.
Fuck, do I want it.
I close my eyes and that’s when she moves in for the kill. A soft, tentative kiss against my lips, sweet and teasing and then gone.
My eyes pop open. “Shit,” I say hoarsely.
“Please, Sean,” she whispers, and she’s so close to me. So very close, and if I wanted, I could pull her into my arms, I could bury my face in her neck and bite like a vampire, I could make her feel every hard, dangerous inch of why this is such a terrible idea.
And I think about how I still don’t know her, not really, not like I should. I don’t know anything about her except the barest biographical facts gleaned from Elijah’s random mentions of her…and of course, that she’s an almost-nun looking to find out what she’ll miss after she goes into those cloisters of hers.
“I need a day to think about it,” I say, taking a stumbling step back, away, my body immediately kicking up a fuss at the distance between us. “I’m not going to pretend I’m a good man, but this is something even I have to think about.”
She nods, and she doesn’t seem surprised or upset, and I realize she expected this. She expected me to need to think about it, and I’m a little relieved by that. Even if I am Make Me Doubt Guy, at least she wasn’t lying about feeling safe with me, about trusting me. She clearly thinks that I have a moral compass of some sort, and I’m weirdly proud of that, in a way I don’t want to examine too closely. In a way that whispers to me how much I already care what Zenobia Iverson thinks of Sean Bell.
“I understand,” she says. “Can I expect you to call?”
Even if it’s a stupid idea to see her in person again, I can’t bear to discuss something so personal and important to her over the phone. “Dinner here. Tomorrow at seven. We’ll talk again.”
“Dinner,” she says, a tiny smile pulling at her mouth. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
And she walks over to the door and I walk with her, telling myself that tomorrow I’ll find a way to let her down gently, that I’ll find a way to say no to this insane scheme of hers. There’s no way she’s going to come to dinner tomorrow and I’ll say yes.
I tell myself that and then I watch her ass under her modest jumper all the way back to the elevator.
Chapter 9
For the first time in eight months, I almost flake on Family Dinner. Aiden and Ryan are incorrigible dinner skippers, but me, I’ve always gone. Every week. Not even work has kept me away—I’ll go to dinner and then go right back to the office if I have to.
But after Zenny leaves, I’m in a strange, restless limbo. My thoughts are running in circles. My boner is back and demanding attention. And the unfamiliar sensations of guilt and integrity chase each other in circles like dogs.
What is the decent thing to do?
Trust that Zenny knows herself and is capable of making decisions and choices? Help her on her quest for a deeper, richer relationship with her deity?
Or is the decent thing to interrupt her relationship with her deity, given that the deity is fake and also that the fake deity’s church killed my sister?
I stand at the window for a moment, then mutter a quick fuck it and unbelt myself, giving in to the need to tug on my cock again. The flesh is straining and aching and a dark, angry red, and I brace a hand against the window and smell the air as I start yanking on myself.
I smell the faint hint of rose.
I smell Zenny.
There’s nothing but the wild need to come jolting through my body as I imagine Zenny’s hungry, innocent kisses and the tight curves of her body and the inviting arch of her throat. Nothing but untrammeled lust coursing through my veins as I imagine the flash of her white panties, like some kind of sick “best friend’s little sister” fantasy brought to life. I imagine how her pussy would taste against my lips, how she’d smell, how she’d shiver when I circled my tongue around the dark rosebud between her cheeks after I suckled on her clit.
I’m nothing but a beast, a man possessed with the need to fuck.
So why is You were the answer to my prayers the last thing to run through my mind before I come?
“Is Mom okay?”
“Mom’s okay, man. Sorry to worry you.”
A few minutes later, I’m changed into different pants and a fresh shirt, cum wiped off the concrete floor, and I’m sitting in my home office, staring blankly at my bookshelves, which are about half the kind of businessy crap you see popping up on the non-fiction bestsellers’ lists and about half historical romance novels, categorized by subgenre (Regency, Victorian, American West) and then shelved alphabetically by author.
Oh, and I called my brother. Because I’m currently freaking the fuck out, and he’s the only person in my life that I trust to give me any kind of advice when it comes to clerical vocations and sex.
I can practically hear Tyler relax after I tell him Mom’s not back in the hospital. “What is it then?” he asks. “I know you wouldn’t call unless there’s something dire going on.”
It’s true, for better or for worse, and I’m not sure why. I like Tyler, but he’s never needed me the way that Aiden and Ryan do…the way that Lizzy did before she killed herself. And so I’ve gotten into the habit of being the de facto caretaker of the Bell boys—making sure Aiden gets some sleep occasionally, helping Ryan enroll in college classes and hunt for apartments, reminding them both to visit and call Mom—but Tyler’s exempt from my bossiness. When I trust and respect someone, when I value their time and their judgment, I’m more than content to let weeks go by without talking, because I know they’ll be just fine without me. Tyler falls into that category. Flaky, impulsive Aiden probably never will.