We were in the narthex now, but I couldn’t shake the image of her standing in front of the cross, so open and receptive to an experience that most people would dismiss outright. “Poppy, I have to ask. Did something happen to draw you to the church? Did you go as a child and now you’re circling back?”
“Why?”
“It seems like…” I searched for the right phrasing, wanting to express how much a good thing I thought her interest was. “I think it’s marvelous that you’re jumping in feet first. It’s just not the way a lot of people do it.”
“It feels a lot more gradual on my end,” she said as we walked outside. I kept a careful space between us as we took the stone stairs down the hill the church was perched on. “My family isn’t religious—in fact, no one we knew was religious. I think they were always suspicious of it, like anything that that could inspire such fervor in people was gauche, at best. Dangerous, at worst. I guess I was always a bit more open to it. In college, I went with a friend to her Buddhist temple almost every week and in Haiti, I was working side by side with missionaries. But it wasn’t until the day I came in for confession that I’d ever sought it out on my own.”
“What made you come back after that?”
She paused. “You.”
I processed this as we hit the bottom of the stairs and walked into the wooded park between the church and her house. It was bright with closely spaced lamps and moonlight. I cleared my throat, wondering if my question ultimately made a difference, but deciding to ask anyway. “Was it me as a priest? Or me as a man?”
“Both. I think that’s what is so confusing.”
We walked in silence now, together but not together, our minds on the beauty of that moment in the sanctuary, on the way it felt to kiss when our souls were on fire.
Fuck. It was all so confusing to me too, except that parts of the confusion were starting to fall away, which should have been clarifying, but I worried that it was actually the opposite, that I was forgetting things I was supposed to remember.
Like my promise to be better.
“I want to hold your hand right now,” I said abruptly. “I want to wrap my arm around your waist and pull you close.”
“But you can’t,” she replied softly. “Someone could be watching.”
We were at the garden behind her house now.
“I don’t know what to do next,” I said honestly. “I just…”
I had literally nothing else to say. I didn’t know what I could do to explain how I felt about her, and also how I felt about my vocation and my responsibilities, and about how I was so ready to abandon them all because I wanted to kiss her again. I wanted to hold her fucking hand in the park at night.
She peered up at the stars. “I wish you could hold my hand too.” She shivered again and I could see that her nipples had pebbled in the slight evening chill, hard little furls just begging to be sucked.
The sweet feelings of a few minutes ago were starting to fuse with other, baser feelings that crowded up from my pelvis. It took every ounce of my self-control not to pin her up against the fence and kiss her again, not to yank down her pants and fuck her right here, outside, where anyone could see.
“I want to see you again,” I said in a low voice. There was no mistaking my meaning and she shifted, rubbing her thighs together.
“Is that…I mean, should we…”
“I don’t think I care anymore,” I said.
“Neither do I,” she whispered.
“Tomorrow.”
She shook her head. “I have to go to Kansas City for some club stuff—we’re switching over to new accounting software. But I’ll be back Thursday night.”
I wanted to groan out loud, but I managed to stop myself. “That’s three days from now,” I said.
She put her fingers on the latch to her back gate. “Come inside,” she said. “Let’s hang out tonight.”
“It’s late,” I said. “And I want plenty of time for what I have in mind.”
She exhaled slowly and her red lips parted, showing me those two front teeth, the tiniest glimpse of tongue.
I looked around to make sure we were truly alone, and then I grabbed her hand, opened the latch and tugged her inside the garden. I pulled her under the overgrown trellis, and then I spun her around so that her ass was pressed against me—pressed against my erection. I put one hand over her mouth and then unfastened her jeans with the other.
“Three days is a long time from now,” I said in her ear. “I just want to make sure that you’re taken care of until then.”
And then I slid my fingers down her stomach, slipping under her silk panties. She moaned against my hand.
“Shhh,” I said. “Be a good girl and I’ll give you what you want.”
She whimpered in response.
God, I loved her pussy. I’d never felt anything softer than the skin between her legs—and fuck she was wet. So wet that I really could pull these jeans down and take what I wanted, right here, right now. But no. She deserved better than that.
Not that I wouldn’t fantasize about it as I got her off.
I started in on her clit in earnest now, circling it hard and fast, loving the way she bucked against my hand. I knew it was more pressure and speed than was comfortable, but I also knew that she would like it that way, savor that tiny, tiny bite of pain with her pleasure.
“I could do this all day, little lamb,” I told her. “I love reaching down the front of your jeans, playing with your cunt, making you come. Do you like it?”
She nodded, her breathing jagged against my hand. She was getting close.
“Thursday night,” I said, and I almost felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, listening to myself say these words. But I was beyond caring, or more accurately, beyond the place where the rules I cared about mattered. “I want to be with you. I want to fuck you. But only if it’s what you want.”
She nodded again, eagerly, desperately.
“I can’t wait,” and my voice was hoarse now. “I can’t wait to be inside you. Feel me. Feel how hard I am just thinking about it.” I ground my cock into her ass, and she shuddered against me, my words and my hard dick pushing her over the edge. She made a tiny cry that was muffled by my hand, quaked under my touch for a long minute, and finally came down, sagging against me.
I kept my hand in her panties for a minute or two longer, loving the way it looked, loving the way it felt, and then I reluctantly withdrew, zipping and buttoning her back up. I sucked on my fingers as she turned to face me, eyes bright and cheeks clearly flushed even in the dark.
“Go to bed, Poppy,” I said when I could see that she would protest me leaving. “I’ll see you Thursday night.”
It hit me like a ton of obvious, kiss-sized bricks as I recited Mass the next morning: I was falling in love with Poppy Danforth.
I wasn’t just desperate to fuck her. I wasn’t just happy to help her find faith. I was well and truly on my way to being in love with her.
After a month.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And now that she wasn’t here, not anywhere near here, I found my obsession spiraling out of control, like a drug addiction that demanded to be fed.
I imagined her voice filling the sanctuary after Rowan and the grandmothers left morning Mass. I pictured her face and her messy braid as I ran off copies of the Bible study worksheet for the next men’s group. I found myself googling pictures of Dartmouth and Newport instead of trawling through The Walking Dead forums. I even (creepily, I know) googled her family, scrolling through pictures of polished people at polished charity events, finally finding an old picture of her at what looked to be some sort of fundraiser for a politician. Her and a cluster of attractive people who were obviously her parents and siblings—her father, silver-haired and broad-shouldered, and her mother, svelte and elegant. A brother and a sister with the same expensive clothes and expensive, high-cheekboned faces.