Sinner (Priest, #2)

by Sierra Simone

“I don’t want to miss any parts of you,” she says. “Even the parts other women haven’t wanted.”

I’m not Mr. Brooding Romance like Tyler and I’m not Mr. Impulsive like Aiden, and the disconnect between the man I am with Zenny and the man I always thought I was is jarring. Jarring…and pleasant. One night in and I’m like a fucking convert to the Temple of Zenny.

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’m shaking because I need to fuck; I’m shaking because the woman I need to fuck is a woman I’m feeling uncontrollable things for; I’m shaking because I’m going to fuck a woman I’m in love with for the first time in my life.

She’s Elijah’s little sister and much too young for me, and she only wants me for sex, but I love her. And she’s going to leave me for her God, but I love her.

I stay awake for a long time, my brain still spinning and reeling with this new thing, this new love. This new love that I can’t ever, ever keep.

And it’s a stinging thing to note that even as I try my hardest, even as I throw every reason I ever hated God or despised the Church at her, I can’t crack her faith the way her love cracks me. I can’t carve away her connection with God the same way she’s carved a gap into my heart that she refuses to fill.

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.”

If Zenny can be brave enough to reveal how she feels in the face of this, then I can be too. I can set her free. And I’ll never recover, sure, because she’s it for me; she’s all a sinner like me gets—my one and only chance flashing like a firefly in the dark, too high up to catch. I’ll spend the rest of my life hurting with wanting her, missing her with swift and fierce aches. I’ll spend the rest of my life jealous of God, no matter what fledgling truces He and I have struck. But I don’t want that for her; I don’t want her to waste any of her precious heart on an old sinner like me. I want her to live free and happy and full. Without me.

Pray for us sinners, the prayer goes, and dammit if someone didn’t pray for me and scoop me up into a life of joy and giving.