"Father Brady," I said.

"I imagine you are here for a confession?"

"Yes." I stood and he looked me up and down. There was a long pause, a long moment where his face went from confused to sad to unreadable.

"Not today," he finally said and then turned and started walking toward his office.

I was confused. "Not today? Like no confession today? Are you busy or something?"

"No, I'm not busy," he said, still walking away.

My brows knit together. Was denying someone confession even legal according to ecclesiastical law? Pretty sure it wasn't.

"Hey, wait up," I said.

He didn't. He didn't even turn around to acknowledge that I had said something or that I was jogging after him.

We went into the small hallway lined with doors, and it was as I was following him into his office that I realized this was more than his usual reserved att.i.tude. Father Jordan Brady was upset.

He definitely hadn't been upset when I'd arrived.

"Dude," I said, closing his office door behind me. "What the h.e.l.l?"

He sat down behind his desk, the early afternoon light painting his blond hair gold. Jordan was a good-looking guy, with the kind of hair and healthy complexion that you usually only saw in Calvin Klein ads. He was fit too-we'd bonded in the first semester of our divinity program after we kept running into each other at the local gym. We'd ended up sharing an apartment for the next two years, and I was pretty sure I was the closest thing this guy had to a friend.

Which was why I refused to be blown off.

He kept his eyes down as he powered on his laptop. "Come back later, Father Bell. Not today."

"Canon law says you have to hear my confession."

"Canon law isn't everything."

That surprised me. Jordan was not a rule-breaker. Jordan was like two steps away from being the creepy a.s.sa.s.sin in The Da Vinci Code.

I sat in a chair across his desk and folded my arms. "I'm not leaving until you divulge why exactly you won't hear my confession."

"I don't mind if you stay," he said calmly.

"Jordan."

He pressed his lips together, as if debating with himself, and then he finally looked up, brown eyes concerned and penetrating.

"What's her name, Tyler?"

Fear and adrenaline spiked through me. Had someone seen us? Had someone figured out what was going on and told Jordan?

"Jordan, I-"

"Don't bother lying about it," he said, and he didn't say it with disgust, but rather with an intensity that unsettled me, put me more on edge than his anger ever could.

"Are you going to let me confess?" I demanded.

"No."

"Why the f.u.c.k not?"

"Because," Jordan said deliberately, bracing his elbows on his desk and leaning forward, "you aren't ready to stop. You're not ready to give her up, and until you are, there's no point in me absolving you."

I sank back in my chair. He was right. I wasn't ready to give Poppy up. I didn't want to stop. Why was I here, then? Did I think that Jordan was going to say some special prayer over me that would solve all my problems? Did I think going through the motions would change what was in my heart?

"How did you know?" I asked, looking down at my legs and hoping to G.o.d it wasn't because someone had seen Poppy and me together.

"G.o.d told me. When you walked in." Jordan said it simply, the same way someone might share where they bought their clothes. "Just as He is telling me now that you are not at the end of this. You aren't ready to confess yet."

"G.o.d told you," I repeated.

"Yes," he said with a nod.

It sounded insane. But I believed him. If Jordan told me he knew exactly how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, I'd believe him. He was that kind of man-one foot in our world, one foot in the next-and I'd experienced enough with him over our years of friendship that I knew he really was able to see and feel things that others couldn't.

It had been a lot less frustrating when I hadn't been one of the others in question.

"You've broken your vows," he said now, softly.

"Did G.o.d tell you that too?" I asked, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

"No. But I can see it in you. You carry equal burdens of guilt and joy."

Yep, that about summed it up.

I buried my face in my hands, not overcome with emotion, but suddenly overwhelmed by it all, embarra.s.sed by my weakness in front of a man who would never cave to any temptation.

"Do you hate me?" I mumbled into my hands.

"You know I don't. You know G.o.d doesn't either. And you know I won't tell the bishop."

"You won't?"

He shook his head. "I don't think that's what G.o.d wants right now."

I raised my head, still overwhelmed. "So what do I do?"

Jordan looked at me with something like pity.

"You come back when you're ready to confess," he said. "And until then, you be exceedingly careful."

Careful.

Exceedingly careful.

I thought about those words as I visited Mom and Dad, as I rinsed the dinner dishes in their sink, as I drove home in the dark. As I snuck across the park so I could f.u.c.k Poppy again.

Nothing about me was careful right now.

Careful.

A week later, I stared up at Poppy's ceiling. She was pressed against me, her head nestled on my arm, her breathing slow and even. I had lain awake watching her after we'd made love, watching the soft lines of her face relax from ecstasy into peace, feeling nothing but mindless contentment. But now that she'd been asleep for several hours, the contentment had ebbed into an anxious doubt.

The last several days had been like something out of a dream or a fairy tale, where my days were chased by the structured benevolence that was my life as a priest, and where my nights were filled with gasps and sighs and skin sliding over skin.

At night, we could pretend. We could drink and watch Netflix, we could f.u.c.k and shower together afterwards (and then f.u.c.k again.) We could drowse next to each other and fall softly into sleep. We could pretend we were just like any couple a few weeks into their relationship, that there wasn't anything keeping us from talking about normal couple things, like meeting each other's parents or where we would spend Thanksgiving.

But we were acutely and painfully aware of our own acting, of our own pretense. We were faking it because facing the truth was so much worse, the truth that this paradise would end one way or another.

What if it didn't have to end? What if I called the bishop tomorrow and told him I wanted to quit? That I wanted to be defrocked and made into a normal man again?

Laicized. That was the word for it. From the late Latin laicus, meaning layperson. To be made into a layperson.

What if a few months from now I could kneel in front of Poppy and do more than offer her an o.r.g.a.s.m and offer her my hand in marriage instead?

I closed my eyes, shutting out the real world and letting my mind go where I hadn't let it go before-to the future. To a future where it was her and me and a house somewhere and little Bell children underfoot. I would follow her anywhere, and if she wanted to work in New York or London or Tokyo, or stay in Kansas City, I would go with her. I was like Ruth with Naomi, I was ready to make her life and her desires my own, and any place Poppy wanted to go, we would make a home together. Spend our hours together f.u.c.king and loving. Someday watching her stomach grow with my child.

But what would I do? I had two degrees, both equally useless in the real world, useless everywhere except temples of G.o.d and temples of learning. I could teach, I supposed, theology or maybe languages. I'd always wanted to be a scholar, sitting in some dusty library, poring over dusty books, excavating forgotten knowledge the way an archeologist excavates forgotten lives. The idea excited me, blowing like rain across my thoughts, drops and splashes of possibility. New cities, new universities...a list compiled itself in my head of places that had the best cla.s.sics programs and the best theology programs-there had to be a way I could fuse the two together, maybe apply for a doctoral program or take a job as an adjunct...

I opened my eyes and that pleasant, fantastical rain stopped, and the weight of everything I would have to leave behind crushed against me. I'd be leaving this town-Millie, the youth group, the men's group, all the parishioners I'd so carefully courted back to G.o.d. I'd be leaving the pancake breakfast and clothes pantry and all the work on fighting predators in the clergy. I'd be leaving behind the gift of turning bread into flesh, wine into blood, of having one hand on the veil that separated this world from the next. I'd be leaving behind Father Bell, the man I'd become, and I'd have to molt him away like so much dead flesh and ruined feathers, and grow a new shape with painful new pink skin.

I had a life building treasures in heaven, beating myself like a runner for the race, and I was thinking of giving that up...for what? I tried to stop the verses I knew by heart crowding my mind, verses about sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption, verses about pa.s.sions of the flesh waging war against my soul. Put to death what is earthly in you.

Put to death my love for Poppy.

My throat tightened and my mouth went dry; my anxiety spiked, as if someone was holding a knife to my throat and demanding that I choose, now, but how I could I choose when both choices came at such cost?

Because if I stayed where I was, I lost the woman sleeping next to me, this woman who argued about racial and gender disparities on The Walking Dead, who pulled obscure literary quotes from the air, who drank like she was drowning and who made me come harder than I ever had in my life.

That realization made the panic bite at me hard.

Turning to face her, I stroked a hand along her side, down the slope of her ribs and up the curve of her hip. She stirred a bit and snuggled in closer, still fast asleep, and my chest clenched.

I couldn't lose her.

And I couldn't keep her.

This kind of fear, this specific brand of panic, shouldn't have made me hard, but it did. Hard enough that I had to reach down and stroke myself. I was engulfed with the need to claim my girl once again, to bury myself inside of her, as if one more o.r.g.a.s.m would make a difference in scaring away our doomed future.

I slipped a hand down between us as I turned my body towards hers, finding those soft lips below her legs, and I started teasing them apart, flicking my fingers across her c.l.i.t and over the frilled pink skin around her entrance. She shifted and sighed a happy, sleepy sigh, her legs falling open to grant me better access, although her eyes remained closed and her face relaxed. She was still asleep.

I bent my head to take a nipple into my mouth, sucking gently, fluttering my tongue around the tightening peak, and she was squirming now, but still asleep and f.u.c.k it, I couldn't wait any longer. I lifted one of her legs and slung it over my hip as I positioned myself at her entrance. Holding her still, I pushed myself in, and like a curtain falling over a sunny window or a door closed against the noise of a party, the doubts were immediately m.u.f.fled. They vanished in the face of our connection, the sensation of her tight c.u.n.t gripping me. G.o.d, I could stay like this forever, not even moving, just being inside of her, feeling her rouse and stretch like a languorous cat while I held her hips fast to mine.

Finally, her eyes opened, drowsy but pleased. "Mmm," she hummed, hooking her leg more securely around my waist. "I like waking up like this."

"I do too," I said huskily, reaching up to sweep a lock of hair off her cheek.

She put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back, rolling with me so that I was laying flat with her on top of me; she began riding me with slow, dozy undulations. Sleep and s.e.x had tousled her hair, and it hung in tangled, messy waves around her white shoulders and soft b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and the streetlight streaming in through the window painted her curves in shades of light and shadow.

Sometimes she was too beautiful to look at.

I laid back, lacing my arms behind my head, just watching as she ground her pleasure out of me, as she start moving faster and faster, her eyes falling closed and her hands braced against my stomach. From this angle I could see the needy bud being rubbed against my pelvis, the tiniest glimpse of where I was filling her and stretching her, and f.u.c.k, I could lose it right now if I wasn't careful.

"That's my girl," I whispered. "Use me to come. There you go. You're so f.u.c.king s.e.xy right now. Come on, baby, get it. Get it."

Her mouth parted and I watched in fascination as the muscles in her stomach seized and tightened, as she moaned and quaked her way through her climax, eventually sliding forward to lay against my chest.

I held her tight to me and then rolled us back over, so that I was on top and she was on her back, and then I bent down and sucked on her neck. I reached under her and found what I wanted, the tight, little rim behind her c.u.n.t. She pressed herself into the mattress, as if trying to get away from my touch, but that wouldn't do, wouldn't do at all, because I had plans for that part of her that extended well beyond what one fingertip could do.

"Are you saying no?"

She bit her lip and then shook her head. "Not a no. Yes."

"Then give me your a.s.s," I growled in her ear. "Give it to me and then I won't have to take it."

She gave a little gasp, a gasp that made me crazy, and then she stopped trying to fight my touch. "There's lube," she panted. "In the end table."

Not bothering to pull out, I simply stretched my weight over her as I reached for the end table drawer and grabbed the brand new bottle of lube. "Looks like you've been preparing, little lamb."

"It was either that or get my own specially blessed oil," she said, half-joking, half out of breath.

I withdrew from her, resting back on my knees and spreading her legs wider. I took my time warming her up, gradually working the lube into her while I rubbed her c.l.i.t with my other hand, fingering both her holes until she was a twisting, slippery mess. Then I grabbed her thighs and pushed into her a.s.s.

I should have stopped, given her a few moments to adjust, but I was so haunted by all the doubt and the dread, and the only things that would quiet my thoughts were the driving thrusts of my hips, her fingers digging into my back, the hot, hot heat of her like a vise around my d.i.c.k.

"Tyler," she breathed.

"Lamb," I said, rising up to my knees and curling my hands around her hips.

"I'm going to come again."

"Good." My own climax was almost there as well, a barbed throb in my pelvis, driven on by the sight of the goose b.u.mps rippling up her skin and the flush creeping up her stomach as she played with her c.l.i.t.

"Oh, that's so good, baby," I grunted. "You're such a good girl. Show me how much you like it."

Her eyes locked on mine. "f.u.c.k me like you want me to be yours."

Her words tugged at that ribbon, jerking against my heart, and I pressed my eyes closed. I could so easily f.u.c.k her like that, because I did want her to be mine-forever. We'd only known each other six weeks, and I wanted her for the rest of my life.

I was such a fool.

I pulled her closer, stabbing into her narrow opening over and over again, watching her crest and peak as she continued to beg me to make her mine, and how could she not see that she already was? That I was already hers? We belonged to each other, and as I watched her c.u.n.t pulse with her o.r.g.a.s.m, as I sank up to the hilt and shot my load inside of her, I realized that there was no undoing that, no untangling what had become so tangled over the past month and a half.