Saint (Priest, #3)

by Sierra Simone

Deep waters cannot quench love, nor rivers sweep it away.

There’s only the aching knowledge that you yourself are a kind of momentary prayer, uttered with reverence, spoken softly into the air, and then finished with a gentle and loving selah.

“God is the radiant dawn and the shepherd who finds every lost sheep—are you telling me that you can’t be alone with him in your cell? Or in a farmhouse, say? He can only find you in the middle of nowhere while you’re off playing Thoreau?”

“I was thinking about how strange it is that I used to lick the sweat off the back of your neck, and now you have to ask if it’s okay to share a bench with me.”

“Aiden,” he says softly, and I relish hearing my secular name from him because it was the name that belonged to him, to his lips and thoughts and even his fingers when he was scolding or flirting over text or email.

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF ELIJAH IVERSON What if What if he What if I still

His hands are so restless all over me, like he’s feeling me for the first time. Like he’s feeling me for the last time.

“So you are in chastity.” “Yeah,” I say, shuddering as his long fingers curl around my caged bulge. “I have to be.” “Why?” he asks breathlessly. “I think of you too much.”

I helped Elijah cheat—made him cheat even. On a Sunday school teacher who likes baking. Who does that? A bad man, that’s who.

I open my mouth, tongue out, like I’m ready to receive communion, and he groans, fisting himself again and pushing into my mouth with a slow but inexorable stroke.

So I answer the only way I can. “I will,” I tell him, like a fallen angel from a Milton poem, and open my mouth for him again.

It’s that indefinable flow of pleasure, that getting hot while doing hot things to someone else, that heady sense of power and love, knowing that you’re making someone else feel so good they can’t stand it.

how am I supposed to save my body for God when this feels so necessary, so inevitable? So right?

His tongue fucks into my mouth like my mouth was made for him to fuck with anything he wants, and I love it.

Isn’t that half the thrill of being in love? Being vulnerable?

I was thrilled, dizzy, sick from loving him. I’d survive a ride, head spinning, breathless and nauseous too, but then I’d want to do it all over again.

“Can you fix it?” I breathe, my lips ghosting over his as I speak. “The ache?” His other hand finds my hip and curls tight around it, holding me in place for his fingers to push against me. “Yeah,” he rasps. “I want you to fuck it away,” I tell him, pressing my forehead to his. “I want you to fuck me until I’m empty, until I’m drained all the way dry.”