“Yeah. It was humiliating.”
“Never argue with a budding theologian,” my brother laughs. “We like being the smartest one in the room too much.”
I snort at my wall of degrees. I used to think I was a pretty smart guy, but this afternoon proved that I’ve got nothing on Zenny.
“What do you think you should do?” Tyler asks. “Maybe that’s the best place to start.”
“I should say no,” I say after a minute. “I should stay far away from her.”
“Why?” Tyler asks.
“What do you mean, why?” I say in my best isn’t it obvious voice. “She’s young, she’s Elijah’s sister, and she wants to be a professional non-sex-haver.”
“Twenty-one is hardly jailbait, Sean, and also I imagine that your connection to Elijah is precisely why she feels safe with you. As for her vocation and how it intersects with sex, I would suggest that you’re looking at the intersection with the wrong lens.”
“Are you going into Lecture Mode?”
Tyler ignores me. “You might think that you’re so liberated from the trap of Catholic morality, but you’re still acting like a man who thinks sex is dirty. Like a man who believes in the concept of purity.”
“I don’t think sex is dirty,” I sputter. “I fuck literally all—”
“—all the time, I know, but listen to me: you can still fuck a lot and unconsciously believe these things. You can smugly think you’re better than all the people trapped in repressive paradigms, but still believe, deep down, that you have the capacity to taint another person with your cock.”
“I don’t think that,” I say, not at all convincingly.
“Tell me, Sean. Do you fuck strippers and socialites only because they’re conveniently around? Or do you fuck them because you feel like they’re already impure and you won’t hurt them with just a little more impurity of your own?”
I don’t have a ready answer to that. And I don’t like what I’m finding in my mind as I search for answers, which are the clammy skeletons of half-forgotten beliefs and sermons from hypocrites. I thought I’d thrown away all that shit years ago.
“Okay, let me ask you this,” Tyler says when I don’t answer. “When’s the last time you fucked someone you cared about? When’s the last time you fucked someone and hoped to God you never had to stop holding them?”
I swallow. “A while,” I lie.
Never is more like the real answer.
“Okay, last question,” Tyler says, and his voice is kind. “How much of that do you think is about Lizzy?”
I nearly jolt off the bookshelves at the mention of her name, shock and grief sizzling through me. “It’s fucked up to bring her into my sex life, man.”
“Think about it. How can sex be anything but ugly, anything but perverted and twisted, when it took our sweet, happy sister and killed her? How could we not have the idea that she was pure, innocent, and the thing that destroyed her was a man’s predatory desires?”
“I know it’s different,” I whisper, closing my eyes. “I know it is, I know it is.”
“The place where you know that is not the same place where your fears come from. And until you untangle your fears—that you are like the man who hurt our sister, that you have the capacity to harm someone innocent—you’re not going to be able to untangle your beliefs about sex.”
“I—” I take a breath, my eyes still closed. This is too much to think about, God and Lizzy and all the ways that those two people have wormed their way into my adult identity without my permission. “Did you have to untangle anything?”
“Yes,” Tyler says after a minute. “Yes, I did. I thought by being a priest I could atone somehow, that I could erase all the scars Lizzy had left. And the way I wanted sex—I felt fucked up about that too. I wanted it rough and raw, and what if I hurt someone when I was like that? What if I was like that with someone who’d already been hurt?”
“So how did you get around it?”
“There’s no getting around anything,” Tyler says, and I hear the rueful tiredness in his voice. “There’s only getting through things. I had to admit to myself that I didn’t fully understand my reasons, I had to shine a light into very dark corners and just look. Just see. See myself, and all the ways fear and guilt had trapped me.
“And I came to understand something while I was going through it. To be fully human is to be fully sexual, and while that doesn’t mean having sex or even sexual desire, it does mean being fully in your body. It means recognizing that there’s nothing any less holy about your body than there is about your soul, that as long as your body is treated with consent and respect and affection—and that you treat the bodies of others in the same way—there’s nothing inherently sinful about your flesh. About its desires or lack of desires. About what it does or does not do. You do not have the ability to tarnish her or yourself; that right isn’t given to any mortal person. She’ll be no more or less holy for sex; the same goes for the lack of it.”
“Try telling her Church that last part,” I mutter.
“Abstinence is asked of everyone at some point in their lives. Maybe a partner is not emotionally ready for sex, or maybe they temporarily aren’t able, like with Mom and Dad right now. And for some people, celibacy is not a struggle, just like fasting isn’t the same struggle for everyone…or giving up money or giving up spare time or giving up sleeping in late or—or, or, or…do you see what I’m saying? A life consecrated to God is a life where you give up personal desires to serve God instead, and there’s nothing more or less special about celibacy than there is about poverty or seclusion or sleep.
“And,” my brother adds, “it’s not always easy to discern God’s desires for us. Because He or She wants us to be fully human and love each other as fully human, and that takes as many different forms as can be imagined. You can consecrate a life to God and have sex seven times a day. You can consecrate a life to God and go live in a cave for the rest of your life. No way is any holier than another, because our bodies are holy no matter what, and our lives are holy no matter what. Monasticism and lay life are just different ways of loving the same God and showing His love to the world.”
“This is not an answer, Tyler.”
“I know.”
“For real.”
“It’s because there’s not an answer,” he replies. “Not one I can give you at least. I do have some advice, though.”
“How can you possibly have more to say after all that?”
“Ha. Ha. But here it is: don’t make Zenny part of your story with Lizzy, okay? It’s not fair to her and it’s actually not fair to you, either.”
I want to argue with him, I want to tell him that of course I’m not doing that, that of course I’m not dragging my Lizzy baggage into this—but I can’t speak the words.
Because they’re not true.
This is a world apart from what happened with Lizzy, and yet there’s a young woman—a little sister figure, even—and the Catholic Church and sex involved, and I can’t pretend that my reflexive fears of hurting her or discovering something monstrous about myself aren’t tied up in what happened with Lizzy. I never did therapy after Lizzy’s death; I was young and stubborn and certain I didn’t need it. Instead, I buried the pain and anger with drinking and sex and chasing after money.
And surprise, surprise, now it’s coming back to bite me.
“Okay,” I finally agree. “Okay. I won’t.”
“Good. She deserves to be treated like herself. Not as a proxy for a girl who died fourteen years ago.”
“Ugh. Stop being such a know-it-all.”
“I told you not to argue with a theologian.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
We say goodbye and hang up, and then I glance at the clock and see it’s time to go to Family Dinner. I text Aiden to make sure he’s coming and then I head out the door.
Chapter Ten
voice message 7:23 p.m.
Sean—
Hi. It’s Zenny.
I don’t know if you have my number yet, and so I didn’t know if you’d know who this was, and I…um, I’m rambling now, sorry. I was actually kind of relieved when you didn’t pick up the phone because it’s easier to talk into the void, as it were, than to talk directly to you, especially when your voice does that thing. You know the thing? Where it goes low and rough and the tiniest bit hoarse, almost like you’re already in bed. Do you do that on purpose?
Uh…this is not why I called. To talk about the voice thing.
I called to talk about me.
When I got home this afternoon, I started flipping through my prayer journal. It’s something my novice mistress has me keep, and for the last year, I’ve kept it faithfully. But even though I’ve been detailed and diligent with it, I realize there’s something missing.
Openness.
You know my family, you know my parents. Dad is Dr. Jeremiah Iverson, physician-in-chief at the city’s top teaching hospital, and Mom is the Honorable Letitia Iverson, and they wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up...as long as it was a doctor or a lawyer.
So when I chose nursing and midwifery—and then when I decided I wanted to be a nurse-midwife for God—they were so upset. The private schools, the Jack and Jill meetings—it was all supposed to a make a certain kind of young black woman—and the young black woman I wanted to be was something different.
I knew I’d be disappointing them, and I guess it made me a little stubborn. Defensive. But it’s the first time I’ve ever chosen things for myself, you know? When it came to school and clothes and even my first boyfriends—it was all to make them happy, to earn their approval, and it wasn’t until I was staring at the Spelman application my mom gave me that I realized how limited my choices had become. Mom went to Spelman, so I should go to Spelman. Dad studied abroad his sophomore year, so that’s when I was going to study abroad. I would have one year to pick pre-law or pre-med, and I would date a boy from Morehouse, and I would be Catholic but not too Catholic, and I would volunteer for one charity and one political campaign, but it had to be a national one—
Do you see? Can you feel it? It was like my entire life was decided for me before I’d even lived it, and I was suffocating under the weight of the future Zenny, the Zenobia Iverson everyone wanted me to be. But then I realized that there was one person who wanted differently for me, who would want me to find my own path and find something that made my soul sing with excitement.
I know you don’t believe, so I won’t say much about that moment except that it was maybe the moment I became truly aware of God. God wasn’t just a word anymore, a reason to get up every Sunday and sit in the first row. Not just a theory behind the all-girls Catholic high school I went to and the charity events my parents helped organize. He or She became real. I could feel Him or Her or Them—or whatever the best pronoun is—I could feel God’s presence like fingertips across my own fingertips. I could hear God like whispers from another room.
Except that changed somewhere, and I don’t know where, just that it did. I’m going through the pages of this journal and I’m seeing someone say: I’ll do anything for God…as long as it’s what I want too.
I’ve refused to be open to possibility. To God’s whispers.
Anyway, none of this substantially changes what we talked about this afternoon, but I wanted you to know and to hear why this is so important to me. I have to make sure that I’m listening for God everywhere and I want to make sure that I haven’t made an idol out of my own Future Zenny the same way my parents did.
I want to be my own Zenny. And I think this is how I do it.
Okay, this was long, way longer than I thought it would be. Um, I’m excited and hopeful about tomorrow and I hope you’re having a good night, and I’m just going to hang up now because I have no idea what to say next. Goodbye, Sean.
Chapter Eleven
I’ve never been more nervous than I am right now.
Never.
Not before my basketball championship game senior year of high school, not before I got up to read the eulogy at Lizzy’s funeral, not before my interview with Valdman. Not even during that terrible doctor’s appointment after Mom’s first scan when they said here’s how bad it is, here are the few options we’ve got left.
Even though I usually keep my kitchen stocked with efficient and nutrition-dense options, I don’t want to serve Zenny grilled, skinless chicken breast and chard. I want to give her something stylish, something good, something that says you thought Sean Bell was awesome before, well, look at him smoldering at you over the fancy dinner he just made.
Yes, I said made. Because even though I don’t do relationships and never really have, I know enough from my mom and Tyler talking about Poppy to know that ladies like it when you cook for them.
Plus, given the topic of our discussion, I figure it’s best if we avoid a restaurant tonight. I want Zenny to be comfortable. I want to comfortable. And I could order something in, yes, but like I alluded to earlier, I want to impress her. All that trust and affection that she has for me that I don’t deserve? I want to start deserving it.
The only problem? I don’t really cook. Like ever.
But I’ve got two things going for me:
One—I know my way around a kitchen decently well after years of sous-chef-ing for Mom. So even though I may not have a cooking instinct, per se, I know how everything works.
Two—I watch a lot of GBBO (that’s The Great British Bake Off for you uninitiated) and by now I can recite the ingredients for most different kinds of pastry, bread, and biscuit by heart.
So to that end, I decide on a curried chicken pot pie topped with homemade puff pastry and some expensive cheese imported from somewhere. I’ll serve with a couple craft beers, since she’s probably sick of wine, and voila.
Cue impressed admiration.
Except when Zenny knocks on the door at seven o’clock, there’s nothing to be impressed about. I’m covered in flour, my vegetables refuse to brown up in the roasting tray like Alton Brown said they would, and I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve folded the puff pastry. I think it’s only two—Mary Berry says in her cookbook that I at least need three folds—but I drank a couple of the craft beers in nervous desperation before Zenny could get here, and now time and previous pastry-folding events are all fuzzy.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m worth twenty million dollars! I’ve snapped companies in half like kindling over my knee, and yet I can’t even be cool for one dinner? For long enough to make a fucking pot pie?
But when I open the door and Zenny catches sight of the flour dusting my Hugo Boss suit pants and the steaming wreckage that is my kitchen, she laughs so hard she has to slump against the doorframe, and that laugh makes it all worth it. Her laughter is light, happy, still the tiniest bit girlish, and her smile is like a shot of sunshine right to the heart.
I start laughing too.
“What happened?” she finally manages to ask, her eyes roving over me again. Except this time they linger not on the dusty smears of flour, but on the tapered lines of my waist. On the places where my sleeves are rolled into crisp, straight rolls, showing off the forearms I pay an ungodly trainer’s fee for.
Watching her drink in my body is headier than any eight-point-five percent beer, and I have to remind myself to focus.
Dinner. Pastry folds. Right.
“I’m cooking,” I say with dignity, closing the door behind her. “And it’s going very well.”
“I can see that,” she says, and when I turn, she lifts her eyes to my face very quickly as she blushes.
She was just checking out my ass.
The knowledge sends hot blood south, and my fingers are burning with the need to touch her, hold her, yank her into a kiss.
I walk toward the kitchen as quickly as I can…away from her and her sweetly roving eyes. “Would you like something to drink while I finish up?”
“A sparkling water would be nice.”
She comes to sit at the large island in the middle of my kitchen, pulling up a tall chair and sitting across the work surface from me as I hand her a LaCroix and go back to rolling out my piecrust. I’m giving myself a silent pep talk, trying to run through all the decisions and phrases that I’ve decided on in the last twenty-four hours, when she breaks the quiet with one of her determined yet vulnerable questions.
“So are you going to do it?” she asks.
I pause the motions of the rolling pin, looking up at her. She’s in jeans and a worn St. Teresa’s Academy T-shirt; no headband or scarf today, just curls everywhere. She looks like a college student. She looks young. And the expression on her face—hopeful and nervous and filled with shy attraction—it’s not doing anything to help either my conscience or my stiffening cock.
“Do you mean, am I going to have sex with you, Zenny?” And once I say it, I hear it—the voice thing she mentioned in her message. My words have gone all husky and a little dangerous. “Am I going to fuck you like you asked me to?”
Her tongue peeps out to lick her lower lip, pink and wet, and she breathes hard. “Yes,” she whispers. “That’s what I mean.”
And here we come to it, the thing, the reason she’s here tonight and the reason I couldn’t sleep after Family Dinner and the reason I spent today punishing myself in the gym and later in the office.
I don’t know what a good man would do in my shoes.
I can only guess at what an unafraid one might do.
I walk around the island to her, taking the back of her chair and turning it so that she’s facing me. I brush the curls away from one side of her face so that I can cup her cheek and lean close. “Yes,” I breathe against her lips.
“Yes?” she repeats in a trembling voice, as if she doesn’t quite believe me. She pulls back the tiniest bit to search my eyes. “Really? Yes?”
“Yes. For the next month, my body is yours.”
“Oh, Sean,” she murmurs, throwing her arms around my neck. Her lips are against my cheek now, impossibly soft, impossibly tempting, and my cock surges against my pants, reminding me that I’m only a half-step away from being able to grind against her inner thigh. Against the place where the denim seams meet right in front of her precious pussy.
Sinner (Priest Book 3) Page 10