Sinner (Priest, #2)

by Sierra Simone

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.”

want to see if you’re sensitive enough that I can get you off through the silk; I want to see if I can lick you through the fabric.” I lower my voice. “I want to taste you. I want to taste you so badly that I’m hard just thinking about it. I want to see how your little pussy unfurls when I part it with my fingers. I want to know if your clit gets hard and plump when I suck on it. I want you to feel the place my nose presses into you as I eat you out from the front…and from behind.”

So yes. I believe in cancer now. It’s too late for me to believe in God.

she wants to know the answer so badly that she’s willing to expose her own curiosity and desire—and more than desire itself, but the desire to be desired.

“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.”

it’s fucking hot that I shouldn’t be kissing her, I shouldn’t be begging to see her most secret place, my hand shouldn’t be covering hers as it slides up her thigh—but it’s also bad. Bad even for Sean Bell.

I don’t just want fucking, Sean,” she explains, her eyes finding mine again. “I want someone to show me everything I’m going to miss. I want someone to challenge me and test me. And if I’ve tasted everything the world has to offer and I still want to consecrate my life to Christ, then I’ll know it’s what I’m truly meant to do. It will be a mature choice and not a choice made out of naïveté.”

I’m nothing but a beast, a man possessed with the need to fuck. So why is You were the answer to my prayers the last thing to run through my mind before I come?

“You might think that you’re so liberated from the trap of Catholic morality, but you’re still acting like a man who thinks sex is dirty. Like a man who believes in the concept of purity.”

You can smugly think you’re better than all the people trapped in repressive paradigms, but still believe, deep down, that you have the capacity to taint another person with your cock.”

Do you fuck strippers and socialites only because they’re conveniently around? Or do you fuck them because you feel like they’re already impure and you won’t hurt them with just a little more impurity of your own?”

“This mouth. I want to eat it and fuck it and worship it and abuse it.”

I don’t say it and I don’t show it, but knowing what a shitty experience she had the first time ups the stakes. It transforms this into something more than just a doubt experiment, an exploration, and it makes me feel like I’ve been given some kind of cosmic task to undo the wrongs of someone who came before me.

I’m never going to be able to compete with her God for love. She’ll fuck me, use me to whatever purpose she needs, and then go back to her church with a deeper faith than ever. I don’t doubt that for a second.

I haven’t thought of it like that, and the surge of fierce pleasure at the thought of Zenny being my girlfriend, being mine, is impossible to ignore.

“I want to feel what a woman of yours would really feel.”

My sort-of virgin, my almost nun, trying to be naughty and instead looking more innocent than ever.

“I get a lot dirtier than that, darling. So buckle up.”

worked for this body because I craved the pride that came with it; I craved the admiration and the petting I earned from women delighted by my shape.

I throw my arms over my face so I can’t see her because even her clumsiness is fucking hot, everything about her is so much, too much, and I should be worried. I should be terrified that she has this power over me, but I’m not, and maybe that’s the scariest part of it all.

I’m losing my mind over her, but for Zenny, I’m merely a stop on the road to sainthood.

But the reason it scares me is that I would never ask you to reconfigure your beliefs to fit mine.” “I know.” “So then please don’t ask me to do the same for you,” she murmurs, looking up at me and squeezing my hand weakly. What can I say to that? Nothing. Nothing at all.

commit so that I may understand.’

engage with this because it is the kind of thing that can only be understood by engaging with it.’”

“You can stop trying to prove your parents wrong and stop this nun thing and just marry me instead?”

“Zenny, Sean says you can make this sinner change his ways,”

have a moment of real doubt all of a sudden. Why am I working with these people? Why have I made it my goal to be Valdman? Do I really want to be a gouty lecher with no meaningful relationships in my life when I get older? Is there any amount of money that’s worth such a hollow life?

I don’t like this, I realize, and the realization is like a leviathan circling my raft. I don’t like these people and I don’t like this life.

“I said,” I say (again, in a voice that I think is graciously calm, given the circumstances), “get your hands the fuck off my date. And don’t you ever fucking insinuate she doesn’t belong somewhere ever the fuck again.”

want to build a tower around you, and then build a castle around that tower, and then dig a moat around that castle, and then I want to guard you like a dragon. Burn anyone who tries to hurt you into ash and then scorch those ashes a second time.”

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. I’m shaking because—wait. Wait. Am I in love with Zenny?

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.

“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.

“Are all those muscles just for show or are you actually strong, my son?”

That sex isn’t apart from God, it’s not separate, that somehow the God that’s prayed to and sung to and served by charity and love can also be a god that’s inside of sex and exists just as much inside fucking as He does inside a prayer or a nap or a meal or anything else a human might do in a human body.

But there will be no child, and there is no claiming. God claimed her first.

“It won’t change it,” I say. “That I love you. Just tell me, please, before you go—do you love me? Could you ever love me?” For a fleeting moment, I think she’s going to answer. Her eyelashes flutter and her breathing catches and her face is all delicate longing and hope and pain. But then it shuts down, snuffed out like a candle. She pushes past me without answering, and I’m left in the kitchen, naked and alone and—for the first time in my life—utterly heartbroken.

miss her like a physical pain. Missing her is a cancer and it’s stealing my cells and breaking my bones.

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.

how something could have an and. How something could be flawed but still good, how something could be imperfect but still worth loving.

anything less than forever with her is too short.

Anything less than everything is not enough.

They tell us girls to watch out for wicked men, but they don’t tell us what to do when those wicked men are secretly perfect and hopelessly obsessed with us. They don’t tell us what to do when it turns out that we’re just as wicked too.

Salvation in the form of a nursing student with a dream for helping her city.

And what sinner doesn’t grab at salvation with both hands?