But right now, with Poppy’s scent on my skin, with her taste on my lips, I only felt connection and love and the promise of something vivid and colorful.
After I finished cleaning her, I wrapped her in the altar cloth and carried her to the edge of the stairs, where I sat. I cradled her in my arms, brushing my lips against her hair and eyelids, murmuring the words I thought she should hear: how beautiful she was, how stunning, and how perfect.
I wanted to say I’m sorry, although my mind and soul still spun in dazzled wonder with it all, so I wasn’t sure if I was sorry I’d lost control and gotten so rough with her, or if I was sorry that we’d had sex at all.
Except I wasn’t. Because more than the transformative sex that we’d just had, this moment was worth sinning for. This moment where she was curled in my arms, her head on my chest, breathing contentedly against me. Where the altar cloth covered her in long, draping folds, but slips of pale skin still showed through.
She slid her fingers up my chest, resting them on my collarbone, and I held her close, as if I could press her straight through my skin and into my soul.
“You broke your vow,” she said finally.
I glanced down at her; she was both sleepy and sad. I pressed my lips against her forehead.
“I know,” I finally replied. “I know.”
“What happens now?”
“What do you want to happen?”
She blinked up at me. “I want to fuck you again.”
I laughed. “Like now?”
“Yes, like now.”
She twisted in my arms until she was straddling my legs, and it only took one of her deep kisses to make me hard again. I lifted her up and guided myself inside, groaning quietly into her neck as she sat back down.
Slivers of sensation became known to me. Warmth and wetness. Her ass against my thighs. Her tits so close to my mouth.
“What do you want to happen next, Tyler?” she asked me, and I couldn’t believe she was asking me this now, while she was riding me, but then as I tried to answer, I realized why. She didn’t want me to be guarded, she wanted me to be honest and raw and like this, I couldn’t possibly be anything else.
“I don’t want us to stop,” I admitted. She rolled her hips back and forth over me, and I did press my face in her chest then, feeling my climax building too fast, much too fast. “I feel like I…”
But I couldn’t say it. Not even now, when she had me completely at her mercy. It was simply too soon—and not to mention ridiculous.
Priests weren’t allowed to fall in love.
I wasn’t allowed to fall in love.
Her fingers twined through my hair and she pulled my head back so she could look at me. “I’ll say it if you won’t,” she said.
“Poppy…”
“I want to know everything about you. I want you to tell me what you think about politics, and I want you to read Scriptures to me, and I want to have conversations in Latin. I want to fuck you every day. I fantasize constantly about us moving in together, living every moment together. What is that, Tyler, if it’s not—”
I clapped my hand over her mouth, and in an instant, had her on her back with me pushing into her.
“Don’t say it,” I told her. “Not yet.”
“Why?” she whispered, her eyes wide and a little hurt. “Why not?”
“Because once you say it, once I say it, then everything has to change.”
“Hasn’t it already?”
She was right. It had changed the moment I kissed her in the presence of God. It had changed the moment I bent her over that piano. Maybe it had even changed the moment she stepped into my confessional booth.
But if I loved her…if she loved me…what did that mean for all of my work here? I couldn’t carry on a secret affair and still crusade against sexual immorality in the clergy—but if I walked away from my vocation, then I would lose the ability to crusade at all. I would lose the man I was.
The only other choice was losing Poppy, and I wasn’t ready to think about that yet. So instead of answering her question, I pulled out and flipped her over, driving into her from behind while I slid a hand around her hip and found her clit. Only three or four strokes like this and she was there, like I knew she would be; the more aggressive I was, the faster she came.
I followed her over the edge, chanting her name like a prayer and pumping the whole time, as if I could fuck the future and its horrible choices away.
Oh, God, what I would give for that to be true.
“I still can’t believe how clean your house is,” Poppy said.
We were in my bed after cleaning up the sanctuary and sneaking over to the rectory. I was fingering her hair with a fascination that bordered on reverence, worshiping those long, dark tresses with curls of my finger and brushes of my lips. We’d been talking lazy pillow talk, drifting from The Walking Dead speculations and favorite Latin texts to hushed recountings of all the ways we’d suffered in wanting each other this last month.
I had been about to kiss her again when she’d said that, so I settled for sliding a hand under the sheets and finding her breasts instead.
“I like things to be clean.”
“I think that’s admirable. You just don’t see it very often in men like you.”
“Men like me? Priests?”
“No,” she shifted toward me, smiling. “Young. Charming. Good-looking. You would have been a fantastic businessman, you know.”
“My brothers are businessmen,” I said. “But I was never interested in that stuff; I never wanted money or success or power. I loved old things—old languages and old rituals. Old gods.”
“I think I can picture you as a teenager,” she mused. “I bet you drove the girls crazy—hot, athletic, and bookish. And also really clean.”
“No, I wasn’t always clean.” I debated for a moment about explaining, but we had just shared something so intimate, why would I hold this back from her? Just because it was depressing? Suddenly, I wanted to share. I wanted her to know every dark thing that I’d dragged around by myself, I wanted to show her all of my burdens and have her lift them from me with her clever mind and her elegant compassion.
I moved my hand from her breast and glided my fingers under her ribs, tucking her close against me.
“The day I found my sister,” I said, “was a Saturday in May. There was a strong thunderstorm going on, and even though it was daylight, it was dim all around, like nighttime. Lizzy had taken Sean’s car home from college—they were both at KU then—and so she was home for the weekend.
“My parents had taken Aiden and Ryan out for lunch, and I thought they’d taken Lizzy too. I’d slept in late, and I woke up to an empty house.”
Poppy didn’t say anything, but she nestled in closer, giving me courage.
“There was a bright flash of light and a huge noise, like a transformer had blown, and the power cut out. I went for the flashlight, but the stupid batteries were dead, so I had to go out into the garage to get more. We lived in Brookside, in an older house, so the garage was detached. I had to walk through the rain, and then when I got in there, it was so dark at first, I didn’t see her…”