“To be your temple again.”
I think the noise she makes was meant to be a scoff, but it comes out like a choked sob. “You’ll never get that back from me.”
I know that. I know that like I know the feel of my own palm around my cock. But it’s gutting to hear her say it aloud, and I press my face back into her neck so she doesn’t see how she’s hurt me.
Her hands move back up to my chest, then my shoulders, then my hair, and I think this is it, this is the moment she’s going to push me away, and I won’t get to taste her, I won’t get to pour every hour of my emptiness and misery into the kinds of intimate kisses that I would rip my soul out to give her. I breathe in the sweet, soap-smelling warmth of her neck, I tell myself to enjoy this last moment of her body against mine, her hands in my hair, and I brace myself for the rejection I’ve earned. The rejection I deserve.
It doesn’t come.
Instead, she pushes my head down—down, down, down, until I’m kneeling at her feet. “Four orgasms,” she says as she pushes me down her body. “Four and I might consider not tearing your throat out with my teeth. And you only have fifteen minutes.”
I peer up at her like she’s a goddess who’s just spared my life, and I don’t miss the tremble in her chin as she looks back down at me. Nor do I miss the flush on her neck or the hard nipples pressing against her shirt. She hates me and wants me all at the same time, and I can’t blame her, because I hate myself and want her all at the same time too. Want her so much that atonement and morality are nothing right now, they are non-concepts, they can’t exist when heaven itself is a mere few inches away from my lips.
No, I have to taste her. I have to lick her and bite her and scent her and mark her and remember. Remember this holy ritual we used to act out faithfully every chance we got—sometimes in bed, sometimes with her cuffed and spread for me, sometimes in my office at the university—this sacred act where I drank of her like communion wine. Where I breathed her in like the divine air of Delphi. She called me her angry god, and I was, I was her jealous, fierce, imperfect god, but we’d both known the truth. We both knew who actually worshipped whom.
She was my wind-whipped ridge over the temple complex, she was my precious artifact. When I held her close, I held God close, when I was with her, God was with me. Experiencing her is experiencing everything I’ve spent my life chasing after, just like the captain in the story.
My little supplicant, I think wildly, pressing my mouth to the apex of her thighs and kissing her fabric-covered cunt. My little one. How I need you.
I don’t give her a chance to rethink this; I can’t. I reach for the button of her pants and unfasten them, tugging them around her hips and bottom to her knees and then I bury my face against her white cotton knickers. I inhale her, shoving my nose into her body and making her gasp with the coarse animality of it. The minute her scent kicks into my nostrils, my cock responds with a jerking leap in the leg of my trousers, wanting out to play.
“I smell you,” I murmur, angling so that I can bite gently at the cotton-covered folds. “I know you’ve been needing this. I know you’ve been thinking of me and how good it felt to fuck my hand last night.”
She shudders, her fingers tightening in my hair.
“You’ve always liked it a little wrong, Charlotte. A little bad. And you need it so often, my sweetheart. I’ve never met anyone who needs release as much as you.”
She shivers again, whimpering as I give her mound a final kiss over the cotton and then begin tugging her knickers down to reveal her gold-covered cunt. My own sweet chalice, my own reliquary. Gilded and gorgeous and protecting the real gift inside.
I kiss her as reverently as a priest kisses his stole, soft kisses along her silky curls until I get to her clit, which is plump and swollen, and sweet as any berry, a little fruit waiting to be plucked. I kiss it too, relishing her small jump as I do, and then I tease at it with the tip of my tongue, finally, finally tasting her. The unique, intimate taste that’s sweet and earthy and so goddamn addictive that I’ve been starving for it since before our ill-fated wedding day four years ago. And the moment it hits my tongue, I need more, I need so much more and I use my thumbs to spread her apart so I can lick deeper, farther, I need it to be the only thing I taste for the rest of my life.
She gives a cry and slumps back against the wall.
“Everything,” I breathe into her, barely able to stop myself from tasting her long enough to speak, “this is everything. Fuck.”
And after that, I can’t speak. Me, the teacher. Me, the writer. And all my words are gone, totally subsumed. Burned away in the face of my need to drink her down, to mark every hidden corner of her with my kiss, and have her break apart against my lips. I keep her spread with one hand and then use the other to push her pants and knickers down to her ankles, enough to free one leg, which I sling over my shoulder. God, yes, this—this right here, with her thigh warming my ear and her hips angled just right against my face—I have to live the rest of my life like this. My face buried in her and my nose bumping her clit as I fuck her with my tongue, as I stab into her and swirl and lick, and then move up to suckle at her while her pleasure slicks all over my face.
“Church, you—I wanted this—so much—” Her words are barely there, just mindless pleasure words wrung from the circumstances, but I steal them for my jealous, bleeding heart anyway, I tuck them against the wounds there like bandages.
“You’re so soft,” I growl into her, before shoving my whole face back in again like a fucking animal. “You’re so soft and you’re about to get even softer, aren’t you? About to make this place all swollen and slick for me?”
“I—” She can’t finish. But she doesn’t need to—a long, lingering suck on her clit sends her over the edge and she starts riding my mouth like she paid for it. I groan into her as she comes, as spots dance before my eyes, as my cock strains against the fabric of my trousers and tries to get closer to the person who really owns it.
“That’s one,” I say, pulling back the slightest bit to breathe in the Charlotte-scented air. Then I start in again, this time slowly teasing her sheath with my finger, playing with her inner folds and pressing gently against the edges of her until she’s trying to drop herself onto my finger, until she’s making mumbling, fussy noises as she chases my touch with her hips. Finally I indulge her whining and press all the way inside, pulling my mouth away so that I can look up at her as she writhes on my hand.
“You wish it was my cock, don’t you?” I say in a low voice. “You wish you were impaled on me, feeling every throb of me. Every inch of me.”
“Too many inches,” she complains, but the hitch of excitement in her voice betrays how little of a complaint it actually is. “You’re abnormal down there.”
“Built for you,” I say. The honesty and longing in my voice must tug at her, because she blinks down at me with those raincloud eyes. “Every part of my body was built for you.”
“You don’t believe that,” she says, but she sounds a little uncertain. “You don’t believe in those kinds of things.”
“I do now,” I whisper, leaning back in to kiss around my finger as it works inside her. “I do after the last four years without you.”
“As if you’ve been pining. Please.” She tries to scoff, but it’s at the same time I add a second finger, and so it comes out as a moan instead.
I’m not wounded by this, but only because there’s nothing left to wound. I close my eyes and rest my forehead against her stomach. “I can’t sleep,” I confess, my lips brushing against her intimate skin as I talk, as if I’m confiding into her body. “I can barely work; I can barely even tolerate thinking about work because it reminds me of you. I had to stop drinking because I drank too much with you gone. And I hate every person I see that isn’t you.”
“Except for the people you fuck.”
It’s a fair comment—before her, fucking was as necessary to me as eating, as digging—and my particular tastes usual
ly entailed transactional liaisons with a myriad of partners. When one wanted to be worshipped in bed, one had to be careful only to find lovers who wanted to worship. Or more plainly put, I only inflicted myself on the willing. Those people whose tastes matched mine. But then I met Charlotte, and Charlotte became my taste, she become the only taste worth having.
“I haven’t fucked anyone in four years, Charlotte. Since the day I met you, you’ve been it for me. Even in your absence, you’ve been it.”
I say this into her skin, breathing the truth into her secret places as I continue to fuck her with my fingers, but she still hears me. She uses her fingers in my hair to pull my head back so she can search my face.
“What about your date at the gala?”
“A colleague.”
“She kissed you.”
I lift up a shoulder as I stare up at her. “Katie would like there to be more between us, but there’s not. I don’t push her away in public so I can spare her the embarrassment, but I’ve made it very clear that’s all she can expect from me.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says, but I know she does, I know the truth of it is etched into every part of my face.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, looking up at her. “Whether you believe it or not, it’s true. I was, am, and will always be your temple. Body and mind.”
I don’t give her a chance to argue about this; instead, I prove my words true by kissing her and then teasing her with my tongue as I work my fingers inside her. I prove my words by drawing another culmination from her adorable, half-uniform-clad body.
I prove to her that our bodies know things our minds don’t.
She arches her back as she comes, her ponytail swishing against the wall as she thrashes through it, and before she’s even finished contracting on my fingers, I start up again, sucking on her juicy little bud until I can practically feel it throb on my tongue. Throbbing in time to the urgent ache in my cock, which is beyond hard at this point. Tasting her, smelling her, having her slickness all over my fingers . . . watching that flush crawl up her neck as she comes . . .
I have to close my eyes as her third orgasm peaks, because otherwise I’ll orgasm too. I might do it anyway, even with my eyes closed—the slightest contact from my trousers against my swollen tip has me rocking my hips—because it’s just too much to be tasting her and fingering her all at once. Too much to hear her low cries and gasps.
“One more,” I say. “Give me one more.”
She’s still clamping down on my fingers from the last one, and she tries to push my head away from her. “No,” she moans. “I can’t. I can’t take it.”
“You will,” I growl. I draw a finger through her pouty seam, and then use the gathered slickness there to press against the pleated rim behind her pussy. “You’ll give me my last orgasm, little one. You’re through running from me.”
The moment my finger breaches her tight rear entrance, she lets out a ragged sob. “Church,” she chokes out. “Church. Fuuuuck.”
She’s filled in both channels now, stretched around my knuckles as I kiss her everywhere, as I use my tongue on her plump button and on the sensitive petals gloving my fingers. “Keep saying my name,” I order her, chancing a look up to see her staring down at me in flushed, rumpled awe. Awe that shoots through my veins like a drug, a pure dose of heady worship going right to my heart and then back out to every square inch of me, sizzling through my bloodstream until my very skin is on fire with it.
“Church,” she breathes. “Church.”
Which I can’t handle. I can’t handle her chanting my name like a prayer, not with that open, unshuttered expression on her face, not with her eyes like silver rain. Not with her body hot and wet and swollen with pleasure.
I make an animal noise against her skin as I use my free hand to tear open my trousers and pull my cock free. I shouldn’t come, I don’t deserve to come, I don’t deserve to feel anything other than grateful that she’s letting me do this, but as I said earlier, I’m not sure how moral I actually am. Like everything else in me, my morality begins and ends with Charlotte, and when I feel her tremble like a leaf caught in the wind when she realizes I’m beating off, that’s all the absolution I need. She always did like it more if I drained myself during oral sex, and she enjoyed watching me handle my needs so much that I’d reward her with it sometimes. A dirty show just for her peeping little heart.
My hips punch forward into my clumsy, left-handed touch as I use my other hand to wring my last climax out of Charlotte.
“Church,” she says again. “Oh fuck, Church, please fuck me. Please please please—”
Her broken words are changing into broken cries, and I relish the sound of them, relish the sound of her begging and craving even after three orgasms. I relish it so much that my starved body releases with a shudder and sends long, hot ropes of cum between her legs, marking the wall, her ankle, part of her pants.
It’s the first decent climax I’ve had in four years, and it wrecks me from head to toe. It ends all thought, all movement, all feeling except the dizzying, floating relief of coming home again.
I didn’t even realize I’d stopped eating her until my pulses slowed, and now she’s grabbing at my hand to fuck her again, her eyes wide and wild at the sight of my cock and also at my seed everywhere and also at my rough, lewd hand between her legs.
“God, I wish I could fuck you,” she says in a pant. “Really fuck you. Hours and hours, riding your giant cock until I can’t stop coming—” Her own words send her over, and the fourth orgasm detonates through her. The contractions around my fingers are hard and fast and merciless, and she bends forward at the waist, curling over me as she grips my hair hard and gasps through the sharp, biting pleasure of it.
She cries my name a final time—Church—as her body wrings itself free of all the adoration she’s soaked up from my touch. Everything is wet and sex-smelling and the pain in my scalp is nothing compared to the jagged joy I feel at seeing and feeling her like this—utterly carnal and completely euphoric. In a state of Church-induced rapture. And then her knees give out, and even though I can catch her before she falls, we end up rolling to the floor in a tangle of legs and arms and expensive wool and cheap uniform polyester.
She blinks down at me with something like bemusement, like she’s just awoken from some kind of spell and can’t remember how we got here. And I can see it—I can see the very moment self-loathing darkens her eyes and pulls at the nibble-worthy corners of her mouth. She’s angry with herself for succumbing to me again. It makes me feel angry to witness—angry with myself and her and with everything—and I wish I could just atone once and for all, no matter the price. All my money, my property, a finger, a kidney—anything, I would pay any cost, because nothing is as costly as being without her.
Curls the color of white gold have worked their way free from her ponytail and now fly free around her face. They beg to be pulled and I ache to pull them.
I reach up, wind a curl around my finger, and tug.
Her lips part, putting my favorite freckle on delicious display, and then her eyes flutter and widen as the familiar cocktail of pain-induced neuropeptides and hormones lace her blood. Adrenaline, endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin—our altar wine.
I tug again for the sheer pleasure of it, for the drop in my own blood pressure, my own dopamine and oxytocin hits, for the deeper and beyond-chemical joy of seeing her release her clenched grip on her thoughts and hurts and sink completely into the here and now with me. Fuck, I love her. I love her when she wants to murder me, I love her when she resists me, I love her when she surrenders to me. If I were a cleric and not an academic—one of the faithful instead of whatever the skeptical but obsessed fuck I am—this is how I would feel about God too. Full of so much love and adoration that I’d do anything right now to show her, any scourging or fasting she asked.
“You asshole,” she whispers, and then fists her hands in my sweater and rolls to the side, so that she’s on her back an
d yanking me over top of her so that I’m braced on my forearms and caging her with muscle and will.
“You missed this,” I tell her. I don’t need to ask. One doesn’t pull a Dominant ex-lover on top of them if one doesn’t miss it.
“You asshole,” she repeats, but her eyes are shining with tears. She tries to look away, but there’s nowhere to turn her head that isn’t into my arms, so it’s more a nuzzle than an escape.
Tenderness—the thing I’ve only ever felt with her—surges up inside me. “You know this is what I meant when I said I wanted to be your temple,” I say, fingers finding her hair and stroking the silk there. “The temple to keep you and shelter you and protect you. The temple you could come to for safety and hope and rest. I wanted this,” and I tighten my arms and legs around her to make my point. That if there was a way I could carry her through the world tucked up inside of myself, I would do it.
“You just want me to worship you again,” she sniffs.
That’s undeniably true, even if it’s not the only thing that’s true. “Well. Yes.”
“I knew it.”
“That doesn’t make me a liar, little supplicant. Temples are for the worshippers, not for the worshipped. Is it so hard to believe that I want to give you this more than I want to enjoy you taking it?”
“You left me,” she says into my arm, not looking at me. “You were supposed to promise to be my temple forever and you left me.”
This is also undeniably true. “I did.”
“Why?” she asks brokenly, finally turning her eyes up to me. They are every cloud I’ve ever seen, every drop of rain, every lonely puddle in the road. “Why?”
It’s those eyes that finally break me, that gut me. No longer a knife in the heart but through the soul. And I deserve it, because it’s as bad as she believes it to be. It might be worse.
“For work,” I answer after all these years, and I want to close my eyes right now, a cowardly move but one that’s almost irresistibly tempting right now. Because how pathetic it sounds, how stupid and how utterly mundane. She’s waited four years to hear that her fiancé and god was more concerned with keeping the right office in the right building than pledging his love to her.
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