A slight twitch in his jaw. “No.”
“I mean it, Church. You ruined us, you ruined me, you ruined everything. Now please let me live my goddamn ruined life in peace.”
“And what is that life, Charlotte?” he asks, intensity burning beneath the surface of his voice. “What is this? I don’t understand how my little one is here in clothes that don’t fit, too pale, too tired, too thin. How could my supplicant, my brilliant one, end up in the shadows like this?”
Rage, white-hot and poisonous, floods my veins.
“You want answers?” I hiss. “You should have been there to ask the questions when it would have mattered.”
His jaw twitches again. He knows I’m right.
“So you answer your own question, Professor Cason, because I’m not your fuckable little prodigy anymore.”
“That was never how I thought—”
“I’m leaving now,” I interrupt. “Going back to my shadows.”
“Charlotte.”
I glare at him as I retuck my shirt into the waist of my skirt. “Don’t follow me, don’t talk to me. Don’t even think about me, or I’ll drive my knee so far between your legs you’ll have a dent in your heart, got it?”
His eyes narrow, ever so slightly—a god assessing a rebellious mortal—and then he nods, his eyes menacingly pretty.
“Good night, little supplicant,” he says softly, in a voice I know means he thinks it isn’t over.
But it is. It is over.
There’s no unsinning those sins of his.
Chapter Four
Church
There’s a Ray Bradbury story about God. Well, there’re several, actually, but one in particular captivated me as a child. It’s called “The Man.”
In the story, a rocket ship full of explorers lands on a planet, and upon landing, they learn that God has just been there. The planet’s inhabitants—joyous with their newfound revelations—invite the explorers to stay, to hear what The Man has told them. All of the explorers agree, save for the captain. Bitter and blustering on about proof, he decides to chase after The Man, to follow him to the next planet and the next and the next, until he catches Him. Until he can pin Him down and look at Him with his own two eyes.
The captain is clearly the villain of the story; a man incapable of humility and incapable of faith. He believes that if God can be chased, then God can be caught. And if God can be caught, then God can fix the unhappiness inside him. And the story says that’s bad for all the usual Bradbury reasons of humanity and love being more important than ambition and greed and so forth . . . but as a child, I couldn’t help but empathize with the captain. Couldn’t help but think I’d be climbing back into my rocket ship too, if I knew how to chase God through space.
So I grew up and taught myself how to chase God another way. Through time instead.
I became convinced that if I simply unearthed the right temple complex or cradled the right figurine in my hands, I’d finally behold the face of God. Not in an idol-worshipping sense, but in a sacred sense, a discarnate one—my mind able to brush against God’s mind, if only for a second, if only for a brief moment as I dusted ochre-stained dirt from a piece of bone or stood on a wind-whipped ridge overlooking a ritual landscape.
Unlike the captain in the story, however, I was perfectly content merely to chase. To chase was also to understand in its own way, and therefore the chasing became the singular goal of my life. To dig, to study, to write. To teach, because teaching was how one was able to dig and study. My career was more than a profession—it was a vocation as cherished and holy to me as a priest’s. It was the one thing that mattered, the only thing I held dear.
The only thing, that is, until I was manipulated into taking a group of visiting colleagues on a tour and I first laid eyes on Charlotte Tenpenny.
She was winsomely brash and happy and faking her way through that tour with adorable aplomb. She had wild, curling hair and a spray of freckles across her pale nose and rosy cheeks.
She had eyes the color of a rainy day. A nose ring and a dimple.
And most damning of all for me, a freckle on her lower lip.
I couldn’t stop staring at it. Of all the depraved shit I’ve done, all the men and women I’ve fucked and wrecked, somehow that freckled lip was the single most obscene thing I’d ever seen. She was the single most obscene thing I’d ever seen, and nobody else around me realized it. They were fooled by her friendly accent and her cheap business-casual clothes, by her confidence and sunniness.
She played the role of cheery intern well, but I could see the truth all over her.
She needed biting. She needed licking. She needed me.
And after she snapped back at me, held her ground against my admittedly unmannerly questions? Revealed that singular mind to me? Then I knew something much worse.
I needed her.
I tried to fight it—I did, and I’ll swear it to God Himself once I find Him—but I only lasted a day. And then I was back for her and that freckled fucking lip.
* * *
***
* * *
Yes, it’s as bad as you think. I did what you think I did, and I didn’t do it for some hidden, noble goal. If you’re looking for a reason to absolve me, you won’t find it. I can’t be absolved. I’m selfish, I’m vain, I chose that selfishness and vanity over Charlotte—and yet.
And yet.
The day my director presented the options to me—marry this bold, brilliant student of mine and lose everything, or break it off and keep the destiny I’d been promised—was the day my life ended. I didn’t know it at the time, I didn’t perceive the knife sliding cleanly between my ribs, but there it was, a blade so long and so sharp that it severed everything inside my chest, it bled me dry until I was a shell, a husk.
You could survive me. That’s what I told her last night at the gala.
A pointless observation, really, because what mattered in the end was that I couldn’t survive her. I didn’t survive her. I’ve spent the last four years in the opposite of survival, in the land of the dead, chanting her name to myself through the fog and incense of this netherworld I created for myself.
If you marry a student—one who was your student, the director had said, it’s over. You may scrape by with your job, but any hope of moving up, of getting funding—gone. You know how vicious academia can be. And her? Do you think she’ll ever command any respect or find a job of her own if she marries the Professor Cason? You’ll kill her future in this field before it ever starts.
He was right. If I married her, it was over, for both of us. But what I should have known was that it was over from the minute I saw her. From the first moment I beheld that freckled lip.
She’ll never forgive me. And she shouldn’t.
So then why did I take the trouble of interrogating her prick of a boss to find where she works during the day? Why am I here? Inside this dingy superstore listening to children cry and trolleys rattle through the aisles?
You know why.
Because last night, with my fingers inside her body and her body inside my arms, I felt alive for the first time in four years, for the first time since I let my slutty little supplicant face the worst on her own in that church.
And more importantly, she came back to life too, fucking my hand like a beautiful whore, murmuring husky threats as her body squirmed against my touch. There was no trace of the weary server then, no sign of that tearful, tired girl. She was once again my obscene little genius, my own pillar of flame.
If I had any heart in me left, it would have broken again seeing what the last four years had ground out of her, but those same years have turned me into a vessel of ashes, and so I felt only the usual bleakness, although it’s worse today. Emptier and grimmer than usual.
I suppose it could be remorse?
It’s not an emotion I’d particularly ascribed to my personality—I may be fascinated by religion and God, but I’m not a kind man or a warm one. I don’t even know if
I’m a moral one. My only compunctions about fucking Charlotte after I learned she was my student were intellectual, were concerned with the quality of education I’d be able to give someone I also needed to see tied to my bed on a regular basis. But seeing her unhappy and worn down last night . . .
That knife is moving between my ribs again as I methodically walk the aisles looking for her. I thought I’d saved both our futures by abandoning her, but last night demonstrated that I definitively hadn’t saved hers. Somehow she’d gone from horizons of unbounded academic ambition to—well, whatever the hell this is. Shelving cheap food and carrying trays around and making me want to crawl to her feet the way she used to crawl to mine.
Except her crawling was bedroom play. There would be nothing playful about my crawling. Nothing sweet about a dead man begging for one last glimpse of life.
Is this remorse, then? Does it even matter?
I find her at the end of a long aisle, stocking a display of discounted biscuits, wearing a blue shirt and black pants that should look completely boring but instead draw attention to the swell of her hips and the small, pert curves of her tits. She doesn’t see me yet; she’s straightening up to stretch her back and bat at the stubborn curls wafting into her raincloud eyes, and that knife-that-could-be-remorse severs something crucial inside of me, something that had grown back since I saw her last night.
I bleed out internally all over again, I die again, I die miserably like I deserve.
What would she have looked like in her wedding dress?
What kind of rain would I have seen in those eyes as she walked down the aisle to me?
And then she sighs and looks longingly down the aisle towards the front of the store, as if hoping to see that time has raced by and her day is almost done, and I see the freckle on her lip. A teasing flaw right in the middle of that plush pink mouth, and hot, dark urges whisper through me.
I have to bite her again. I have to taste her cunt.
Just as I acknowledge these things, she sees me. Her eyes widen fractionally—surprise and longing and anger all swirling through those gray depths—and then she narrows her eyes in a such a way that makes her look like an avenging goddess. She could be Ishtar or Lillit. She could be Nemesis or Morrigan or Kali.
Fuck, she’s beautiful.
It’s not that I’ve forgotten over the past four years—on the contrary, I torture myself to visions of her perfection daily and nightly—but confronted with it in the flesh . . .
Well, it unmade me last night. It’s unmaking me now.
Spots of pink glow under her freckles as she takes a step toward me. “What are you doing here?” she demands, keeping her voice down. She casts a quick look around to make sure we’re alone, which we are—mostly. Shoppers mill around us, but they’re too preoccupied with squirming children or their phones to pay us any mind.
I try to think of a good answer to her question. I used to be good at answers, I used to be better at answers than almost anything else.
I’m all out of answers now; all I have are formless, urgent questions.
Find something, Church. Find something to say.
“Last night wasn’t enough.”
It’s the wrong thing to say, and if I thought Charlotte looked furious before, it’s nothing compared to now. Her cheeks are red and her chest is rising and falling fast under her shirt. “Not enough?” she repeats in a low, dangerous voice. “You don’t get to even think about having more with me. Exactly who the hell do you think you are?”
The answer comes faster than any answer has in four years. “Nobody. I’m nothing and nobody, but I don’t even care about the nothingness when I can see your face. I’ll be nobody forever, Charlotte, if it means I can touch you again.”
Her lips part and purse and part again, like she doesn’t know what to say to this, and I don’t blame her. What is there to say? She shouldn’t let me touch her, she shouldn’t let me near her. We both know what I’ve done. But losing her has carved me up and scraped me clean, and I’m beyond doing the right thing now, I’m beyond everything but total honesty and raw need.
Anger settles back over her face. “Do you remember what you said to me when I returned the ring?”
The invisible knife between my ribs jabs at me. “Yes.”
“You said you couldn’t marry me, but you wouldn’t tell me why.”
Because I knew it was a shitty reason even then, I want to tell her. I couldn’t bear seeing your face when I told you that I’d chosen our careers over our worship. But I don’t tell her this. Maybe I’m still a coward.
“And then you said,” Charlotte continues, and there’s a thickness in her voice that betrays the tears she’s pushing back, “that we could still fuck. Do you know what that was like to hear? That you’d condescend to screw me, but not to marry me? For some reason you wouldn’t bother to explain?”
Knife, knife, knife. Right into the heart.
“I couldn’t fathom giving you up,” I admit. I’m not proud of how hoarse and desperate my voice sounds, but pride was the first thing to die after I realized what I’d done to myself and to her. I drowned it in gin and hours-long runs; I strangled it nightly as I fucked my fist to memories of her. “The idea of being without you was beyond contemplation.”
“But you wouldn’t marry me? After you asked me to marry you? God, do you even hear how fucked up that sounds?”
“Yes,” I say, almost angrily. “I’m well aware.”
Her eyes blaze like molten silver. “And now here you are, four years later, wanting . . . what, exactly? To berate me for not surviving you? To tie me to your bed when you still won’t tie me to your life?”
“Charlotte—”
“This is why I told you I was going back to America,” she says, spinning half away from me and yanking on her ponytail in frustration. “Because if you’d found a way to say that shit to me again, if you’d shown up with this whole ‘we can still be lovers’ line, I would have torn out your tongue and thrown it in the river.”
“Charlotte.”
“And I’m better than that. I was better than being left embarrassed and hurt in a church. And I’m better than being your hookup girl now.”
“Charlotte.”
She finally turns and looks at me, tears shimmering over her glare. My heart kicks and bleeds and aches, and my cock gives a lazy, yawning stir and starts lengthening down the leg of my trousers. Her tears always did get me hard, but to be fair, they were usually tears from a good spanking or a deep, mascara-smearing blowjob. Tears that we agreed to.
But we didn’t agree to these tears, and I caused them anyway—and I’m hurting for her and hard for her and so fucking ashamed and also so fucking obsessed and there’s nothing that can break this miserable, muddy tide between us, nothing that can ease her tears and my hunger for her at the same time. Nothing that can make me deserve her and nothing that can make me stop wanting to deserve her.
I take her hand and pull, and she’s off-kilter enough that she lets me, she lets me drag her back to the hallway that leads to the break room and staff toilet, and it isn’t until I’ve pulled her into an empty manager’s office that the murder threats start coming.
“I’m going to kill you,” she says. “Let go of my hand so I can kill you.”
I kick the door shut and let go of her hand—so I can plant my own hands against the wall on either side of her head. “Twenty minutes,” I say. “I need twenty minutes.”
She glares at me. “Twenty minutes before I kill you?”
Four years ago, I would have spun her around and seared her bottom pink with my palm for a comment like that. But I’m immediately and painfully distracted by the track of a lingering tear on her face as it rolls down her cheek to the corner of her mouth.
And then onto that goddamned freckled lip.
With a growl, I’m on her, I’m against her, I’m biting and sucking on that lip—my entire world the taste of her tears and her mouth—and she doesn’t murder me even i
n the slightest. The minute I kiss her, her hands weave through my hair and tighten, not trying to pull me away, but keeping me close. Her hips begin rocking mindlessly against mine and she pants into my mouth whenever we separate long enough to suck in a breath.
“Shit,” she hisses, and I know she’s furious with herself. But even in her fury, she can’t stop grinding her needy cunt against my clothed erection. It swells to full hardness to meet her. “Fuck.”
“Twenty minutes,” I demand in between bites. “Give me twenty minutes with you.”
“And just what do you think you’ll accomplish in twenty minutes?” she gasps out, hands sliding beneath my coat and sweater to tug at the buttons of the Oxford shirt I wear underneath it all. She’s always been a glutton for my body. Matched only by my terminal gluttony for hers.
“Orgasms,” I promise, moving to her neck and sucking the skin there until she groans. “One for every year we’ve been apart.”
Her hands are under my shirt now, running up and down my abdomen with greedy caresses. The caresses are awkward because our lower halves are still grinding and mashing together, but she keeps rubbing her sex against me anyway, arching her back to get a better angle against my cock.
“You,” she pants, “don’t get”—pant pant—“to just come here”—pant—“and fuck me with your giant penis.”
I move my mouth to her ear and feel how she shudders with the tiniest licks, the smallest of nips. “Who said anything about that? I’m going to lick those orgasms out of you. I’m going to kiss them right out of your little pussy. I’m going to fuck you with my mouth, and you’re going to be so soft and swollen and hungry for more after that you’re going to give me what I really want.”
I pull back so I can look into her eyes—silver and glistening even in the cloudy light coming in through the office window—and so I see how they war between wary and aroused. “And what do you really want?” she asks. Her hands are roaming down to my arse now, like she can’t help herself even when she’s supposed to be negotiating—or murdering me, according to her.
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