Sinner (Priest, #2)

by Sierra Simone

With the right pen, a man can rule the world.

I’m a sinner with a dimpled smile and perfect hair, and I know how to make sin feel like heaven.

“And I do want to get to know you better. I want to know if you scream or if you moan when you come; I want to know if you prefer my mouth or my hands; I want to know if you like it deep and slow or fast and hard.”

“I’ve wanted to fuck you since the moment I saw you today,” I say, watching her blanch with surprise at my blunt lewdness. “I can’t stop thinking about pushing that jumper up to your waist and nuzzling into your cunt until my face smells like you. I want to bite your tits through that white shirt. I want to see that cross necklace sliding around your collarbone as I find out if you prefer two fingers or three.”

“I want you to have sex with me,” she says. Well, shit.

Two: I watch a lot of GBBO (that’s The Great British Bake Off for you uninitiated) and by now I can recite the ingredients for most different kinds of pastry, bread, and biscuit by heart.

“Well, I do feel like I should mention that I think virginity in general is an arbitrary construct designed by men as a system of control and fear. And it’s heteronormative. And limiting, because why do certain sexual acts preserve virginity and some destroy it? What if I fucked a dildo every night, but I hadn’t fucked a man? Why doesn’t anal sex count? And what if I was with someone and penetration wasn’t an option, for any number of biological or emotional or identity reasons—would that make our sex less somehow? I’d be a virgin forever?”

The most selfless people, the most driven people, they need permission to take care of themselves; they need someone who will put them first because they won’t do it for themselves.

Of course I’m only joking that I want to spend the rest of my life with the most beautiful, fascinating, sexy woman I’ve ever met. It’s all a joke. Ha ha ha. Hilarious. Oh my God, I’m so fucked.

“I can’t get angry. If I get angry, then I’m the Angry Black Woman. If I admit to having my feelings hurt, then I’m being too sensitive. If I ask for people to treat me thoughtfully, then I’m being aggressive. If I joke back, then I’m being impertinent or sassy. If I cry, then I’m hyperemotional. If I don’t react at all, I’m intimidating or cold. Do you see? There’s not a way I can react where I win. I can’t win.”

God, the fucking irony of a sinner loving a nun. It’s agony. I’m dying. And as I’m both alight and aflame with loving her, these splashes of thought keep coming out of nowhere, like raindrops on a sunny day.

“Sean, faith and belief are the practices of committing a life in the face of no answers. God is and always will be outside of human comprehension. And loving Her is an act; it’s not stubbornly repeating creeds and trying to force Her into modern expectations or rational paradigms. She’ll never fit in the same boxes we apply to science and reason; She’s not meant to. And to try to force it only breeds spiritual violence in the end.”

“I love you,” I say. And the world comes to a crashing halt.

for the first time in my life—utterly heartbroken.

Belief is this. Praying when you don’t feel like it, when you don’t know who or what is listening; it’s doing the actions with the trust that something about it matters. That something about it makes you more human, a better human, a human able to love and trust and hope in a world where those things are hard. That is belief. That is the point of prayer. Not logging a wish list inside a cosmic ledger, not bartering for transactional services. You do it for the change it works on you and on those around you; the point of it is…itself. Nothing more and nothing less.