Sinner (Priest, #2)

by Sierra Simone

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.”

Christ. I’ve turned into a teenager. I’ve turned into a teenager because of a girl who’s barely not a teenager, and now even the idea of seeing someone who also knows her is electric. Like her presence has infused itself into the city on a quantum level, and every place and everyone that’s connected to her makes me as skittish and eager as she herself does.

And then she turns her head and finds my mouth with her own, and my world catches fire and burns into a shrinking nothing; her mouth is all that’s left, her yielding lips, her searching tongue, her sweet taste.

It’s so very, very cliché, but kissing Zenny makes me feel younger, reminds me of the incendiary kisses one gets as a teenager, when every touch, every lick and caress is so fucking charged with excitement. As an adult, kissing can fade into something perfunctory, the prologue, the necessary foreplay to get a woman wet and squirming for what I really want—but as a teenager, I lived to kiss. Lived to make out. Even came in my pants once making out in a movie theater with a girl named Giana Saviano. I’d forgotten how fucking incredible just kissing is.

“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.”

I miss fucking her and kissing her and holding her. I miss her like a physical pain. Missing her is a cancer and it’s stealing my cells and breaking my bones. It’s eating me alive.

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.

“You make me come apart,” she says against my mouth. “You make me more like myself.”