But you know what it means to him. His job is the literal manifestation of his desire to find God. Can you really blame him for that?
I want to. And I think I do, but in order to keep the blame bigger than the sympathy, I have to forget what an amazing teacher he was. How carefully he mentored all of his students and the pains he took to help each one of them improve. I have to forget about how he lit up on a dig site, becoming smiley and boyish and excited; I have to forget the awe in his voice and the humility in his face when he cupped fragments of forgotten worlds in his hands.
But I will forget it. I will if it’s the last thing I ever do. I’m not going to forgive him, and I’m not going to keep thinking about his cruel mouth and glittering eyes and smoky voice. I’m definitely not going to remember the jolt of pure rightness I felt when he told me that he belonged to me, that he wanted to be my temple again. I won’t remember the gouging agony in his expression as I told him exactly how hard the last four years have been, and I won’t remember his stern words when he refused to let me hide my pain from him.
I won’t apologize for having the audacity to be right, little one.
Nope. Not interested. Still a mean little bunny. Still smarter than falling in love with a broken, miserable god. I will forget the last two nights ever happened and go back to the safer—if lifeless—way things were before, and that’s just how it’s going to be.
* * *
***
* * *
Except the next morning, I wake up with a tender pussy and my heart in my throat. I wake up with Church’s words still whispering in my mind.
Am I cursed? Is this what a curse is?
It feels very Greek to me, very much like I’m the victim of some capricious divine whim. Doomed to long for someone who fucked me over.
Hungry for the touch of someone who thinks me worthless.
Okay, maybe that’s not . . . entirely fair.
Church was never the kind of man to be interested in something inferior; he didn’t waste his time with anything cheap or dull. He thought me brilliant and adept and his. And I know all that because he told me so. And the only time Church ever lied was the day he failed to show up for our wedding, and even then, he didn’t lie with his words, only his actions. In fact, for all his cruelty, all his arrogance, and all his ice, Church was always unfailingly, painfully honest.
Maybe he’s being honest now?
I’m so sorry, little one.
I am your temple no matter what.
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter how sorry he is, it doesn’t matter how right and alive I felt with him yesterday, it doesn’t matter how he sees me exactly as I need to be seen.
Because I’ll never forgive him for not seeing me when it mattered.
I get dressed with a huffy forcefulness, as if that will prove to some invisible audience that I’m really done thinking about Church and not at all noticing how my well-pleasured body twinges with every movement. I see my brother off to school, and then I stop by the landlord’s flat on the ground floor to drop off this month’s rent before I go in to work.
Roksana, my landlord, narrows her eyes when she opens the door to me. “You can’t take it back,” she says with a sniff. “I’ve already started spending it. Repairs, if you must know.”
“Uh,” I say, glancing behind me to make sure there isn’t some other tenant she’s talking to. Seeing no one, I decide to pretend the last ten seconds didn’t just happen. “I brought this month’s rent for you. I’m sorry I didn’t get it to you on Friday, but I got home from work so late, and I didn’t want to wake you—”
She doesn’t take the envelope from me. Instead she sniffs again. “You can’t take it back.”
“Take what back?”
“If you want to add it to what you’ve already paid this morning, you can, but you can’t take it back and then pay me for only this month instead. Like I told you, I’ve already spent a lot of it.”
“Roksana, I think there must be some kind of mistake. I haven’t paid you yet.”
She narrows her eyes even more and sucks her teeth. “First thing this morning, I was on the phone with a man who seemed to know you. I assumed it was a boyfriend at first, but he was quite cold with me, I’ll have you know, and very impatient. I thought then maybe he was a solicitor of yours, or a banker. He wired the next twelve months’ rent right into my account.”
Quite cold. Very impatient.
And could drop a year’s rent into someone’s account at the drop of a hat.
A white, angry static crackles in my vision and my hearing and I can feel it singe the inside of my veins. “He didn’t happen to give his name, did he?”
Roksana shrugs. “Church something. Churchwell? Churchhill?”
James Church Cason. My hand fists around the envelope and Roksana glances down at it, shrewd assessment in her gaze. “You could give me that for safekeeping,” she says. “In case this Church man changes his mind.”
“I think I better hang on to it,” I manage, anger coursing through me so hot and bright that I can’t even remember why I didn’t murder him the last two times I saw him. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to make a phone call.”
* * *
***
* * *
The walk to work is windy, with that kind of autumnal spatter that can’t decide if it wants to rain or what, and it matches my shitty mood perfectly when Church answers my call. A shitty mood that’s exacerbated by the fact that I still have his phone number memorized after four years. What is wrong with me?!
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demand, before he can say a single word. “This is way out of line, even for you.”
“Hello, Charlotte,” Church says softly.
“Don’t hello, Charlotte me. You had no right to pay for my rent. None.”
“It’s a gift,” he says. His voice is still soft, but threaded through the words is an unmistakable edge. The one that kept me coming back to Church’s bed over and over again—the cold imperiousness that thaws only for me. “It’s freely given. I don’t expect anything in return, little one.” Even with the strange combination of softness and arrogance, honesty still rings through his words. He’s telling the truth—or thinks he is.
I still say, “Oh, really?” because that’s just who I am.
“Yes, really. I wanted to ease something for you that was in my power to ease, Charlotte. I wanted to make something—anything—better for you and Jax.”
I flush with more than anger, although I’m not sure what for. Embarrassment that he so easily peeled back the lid on my shitty, cash-strapped life? Or something much, much more dangerous?
Am I . . . touched? That he notices me and thinks of me? Am I turned on by the fact that he still wants to care for me? Am I grateful that he picked the single biggest source of my misery to ameliorate?
Ugh.
Maybe.
Stupid bunny.
My footsteps become more like stomps as my irritation with myself spills over to him again. “You still should have asked, you interfering prick.”
The silence following my insult scratches at me, if I’m honest. I’ve always been colorful with my language around him—prick, bastard, asshole, arsehole if I was in the mood to make fun of him—and I’ve never stepped back from provoking him. But my little rebellions and challenges were always met with scrumptious wrath; more often than not, I was hauled over his lap and spanked until I was begging to be fucked. Sometimes he would wait to punish me for my brattiness, letting the anticipation worm its way under my skin until I was near crazed with it, and then finally tying me to his bed and tracing rebuke all over my body with his tongue and teeth.
And yes, okay, sometimes I provoked him because I wanted some spanking and bondage. Sometimes a girl needs to savor the sweet displeasure of her god, what can I say?
But right now, he’s saying nothing. He’s not purring sexy threats into my ear, he’s not dryly musing aloud about
whether his bratty supplicant needs to be bitten or ridden or both. He’s quiet and I find that I hate it.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” I demand.
Church sighs. “What is there to say? That the only thing that kept me on this side of sane for the last four years was the mistaken hope that you were in the States building a life for yourself? That knowing you’ve been suffering, that you’ve been alone, that every day has not only been a struggle but a slow starvation of the things that used to feed you—that the knowledge is fucking damning? And I can barely swim through the hours knowing it?”
The pain in his voice saws right through me, and I stop walking.
“I don’t care if I’m the villain. I don’t mind being the bastard. If I can do anything to ease your suffering, if you sleep better for just one hour of just one night, then it is worth you hating me more than you did before.”
The insides of my eyelids burn a little at that, and I duck my head so no passersby will notice how fiercely my chin is wobbling. The words I don’t think I hate you are on the tip of my tongue and they sting more than the unshed tears.
“You can’t atone for what you did,” I say in a whisper instead.
“I’m not trying to, Charlotte, not anymore. I know I can’t buy your forgiveness. Now all that’s left for me is to live with myself and what I’ve done.”
It’s his raw but honest admission that pushes the first sob out of me.
“Little one,” he says, sounding as broken as I feel. “Are you crying? Are you that furious with me?”
“Yes. No.” Another wet, gasping sob. “I don’t know, Church. I don’t know. Some moments I think I hate you, and then other moments, like right now, I wish you were here.”
“That’s the pain talking,” he says gently. “You don’t really.”
The tears are flowing fast and freely now, mingling with the cool drops of rain. “You have no right to say what part of me is talking and what isn’t,” I say, knowing it sounds like nonsense and not caring.
“Of course,” he murmurs.
“And you have no right to decide what will ease any of my sufferings,” I mumble.
He hums in agreement, a soothing noise that immediately makes me feel safe and small and loved.
I’m reminded of all the times I showed up in his office, shaky and exhausted from a night guarding Jax from my father’s drunkenness, a sleepless night sitting against the inside of our bedroom door, terrified that my dad would beat it down at any moment. Me, I looked too much like his dead wife to scream at, but Jax? Jax was the perfect target. And Jax only had me to protect him. Which meant once or twice a month, I’d see Jax safely to school and then stagger to the one place I felt safe.
With Church.
He’d take one look at me and then somehow I’d end up in his lap, cradled against his chest as I cried myself to sleep right there in his office, and then I’d wake up on the settee he kept for students to sit on during meetings.
After the second time it happened, he took out one of the bookshelves in his office and bought a long sofa to replace the settee, so that then I’d wake up several hours later on plush cushions with a pillow under my head and a soft blanket pulled over me. Groggy but protected. Cared for. And he listened when I begged him not to get involved, although he did inform me that the next time my father did anything more than look at my brother, he’d be stepping in.
For a kinky, autocratic monster, he was always careful with the boundaries I needed him to be careful with. He only invaded the parts of my heart marked for invasion.
I miss him. I don’t hate him and I can’t forgive him and I miss him.
“Church?”
“Yes, Charlotte?”
“Will I still be your little supplicant even now? Now that I’ve told you to stay away? And now that you can’t ever make up for what you did?”
His voice is pure Church when he answers—like the still, small voice Elijah heard outside the cave: quiet and boundless all at once. “Always. You have the right to ask me to stay away, but there is one thing you can never ask of me, and that is for me to stop loving you. It would be easier to ask me to stop breathing.”
I feel like I can’t breathe myself. I certainly can’t speak. I can’t even cry properly; the tears are just leaking out now without any effort from me.
He makes another one of those noises that makes me feel like I’m tucked against him, listening to the steady, reassuring beat of his heart while he sifts through my hair. “I love you too much not to give you what you need. I won’t approach you, I won’t call, and you are certainly entitled to give back the money if you need.”
The rain comes down harder now, hard enough that it makes it difficult to hear his final words. But I do hear them. I hear them and begin weeping in earnest.
“Be well, little one,” he says, love and arrogance winding through his words in that way I adore so much. “You, Charlotte Tenpenny, smartest and bravest person I know, will always be my heart and my faith.”
And then he hangs up.
Chapter Six
Charley
I make it a week.
Barely.
The morning of the seventh day, I’m caught in a slurry of UCL students, tourists, and commuters pushing impatiently out of Euston Station as I make my way to the archaeology building to find Church. Gordon Square is spitting wet leaves in shades of red and gold onto the street, and I try not to think about how many peaceful hours I spent in that damp and rustling stretch of trees and grass while I was a student here. I try not to remember what it was like to stare at the window I knew belonged to Church’s office, a smile on my lips to match the secret tucked away in my chest.
I mumble apologies as I push past the students and make my way into the building, ducking through hallways filled with chatter about soil micromorphology and ceramic petrography. I pass by labs and lecture rooms; I catch the familiar scents of coffee and climate-controlled air. Longing for this place fills me up like heavy water as I climb the stairs.
I was happy here.
I could have been happier still.
No sense in rehashing all that now. I’ll be back. If not here, then somewhere else, and I’ll kick ass there instead. I’ll make up for all the lost time and then some.
Bolstered by the thought, I reach Church’s floor, taking deep breaths in an effort to steady my thumping heart. What will he say when he sees me? Will he be angry? Will he be frustrated? After all, it was me who demanded space, and now here I am waltzing right into his.
He’s a smart man, I remind myself. He’ll understand that just for today, I need to reopen communication, and anyway, if he’d asked for space, then of course I would respect that. But he didn’t, and a not-so-small part of me flutters at the thought that he didn’t ask for it because he wants me to change my mind. Because he wants to be open and available in case I do.
Which I am.
Because I have to give the rent back.
I wish it was because of pride. I wish I could say it’s because I’ve taken care of Jax and myself just fine for four years, and I don’t need to ruin my streak with some man’s guilt-money. I wish I could say that making any part of my life easier on his account irrevocably taints my honor and it just can’t be borne.
But none of that’s true. I’ve been poor my whole life and desperately so for the last four years; if everything else about me and Church were different, I’d take his money just like I took all those orgasms from him a week ago and walk away without looking back.
No, it’s a bigger sin than pride that compels me today.
I can admit it now, after this last awful week. I love him. Stupid bunny that I am, I love him and crave him and want to forgive him. And maybe . . . maybe I already have forgiven him? There’s a difference between forgiveness and trust, right?
I can forgive him without trusting him, I can let go of my pain without giving him the power to hurt me again.
The problem is that I want more tha
n just to forgive, bloodlessly and from a distance.
I want to curl up in his lap and sob into his strong chest. I want to be angry with him, I want to hate him, and I want him to be strong enough to take it, to hold me while I cry over the hurts he gave me.
And then I want every dirty, sacred moment I missed with him over the last four years. Every moment I’m owed.
But how can I want that without betraying the girl he hurt? I demand of myself. How can I want to be his again without betraying myself?
I can’t.
But I also can’t have his gift haunting me. It’s like the ghost of his smoky, spicy scent; it’s like the still-warm imprint of him in my bed. So long as the money is there, Church is there. And every moment free from worry is now laden with memories of him—the midnight eyes, the harsh mouth. The words.
I am your temple no matter what.
There is one thing you can never ask of me, and that is for me to stop loving you.
Fuck, I have to give that money back. I have to be free of this.
Church’s office is tucked away on an upper floor, on the side overlooking Gordon Square, and it’s impossible not to have a Pavlovian response as I approach it, even after all this time. My heart thuds wildly, my belly feels hot and tight, everywhere my skin begs for touch, for teeth. Sometimes I’d be summoned here, sometimes I’d surprise him, but more often than not, I was hauled here by the elbow and then covered with his trembling body the minute the door clicked shut.
That infinite god-hunger of his. How I delighted in being his sacrifice over and over and over again . . .
Fitting that it ended at a literal altar.
Maybe it doesn’t have to end, a traitorous hope murmurs. Maybe he’ll spread you out on his desk and . . .
I ache with the thought—a deep, shuddering ache that only Church can soothe. I should leave. I shouldn’t knock on his door like this, wet and ready for him to ease his heavy cock inside me, but I am knocking, I am opening the door, knowing full well if he so much as looks at me, I’ll fall to his feet and beg for just one more minute of supplication. One more act of worship.
Naughty Brits: An Anthology Page 54