by Lana Grayson
I remembered what lurked in that secret. The thickness had swelled and pulsed, agonized by a self-imposed abstinence. It pervaded my thoughts with everything impure, unjust, and treacherous.
I drew my gaze to his. It was wrong to worship anyone, anything, any ideal that wasn’t our Lord. But this man deserved to be an idol. He was a graven image of sexuality, power, and complete and total dominance.
He was no David…he was pure Goliath. Strength. Stamina.
Fearlessness.
He had a tattoo—a decorative cross. It spanned his right pec, over his heart. Latin inscribed on the inside. I recognized the words.
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…
Father Raphael watched as I shuddered in seduction upon his bed. His blankets and pillows smelled of cedar, sandalwood, and him.
He once preached that Mass was intended to be a full-bodied experience, complete with all senses. We were to breathe the incense, witness the awe of the church, hear the words of the priest, taste the body and blood, feel the holy spirit.
And I did.
Father Raphael’s scent filled me. His words enthralled me. His body delighted me.
I longed to taste him once more. The tease of his lips numbed my body to everything but heat, desire, and a fading shade of doubt which disappeared with his collar.
“The serpent deceived Eve by his cunning…” He warned with scripture. “Your mind is led astray.”
“Are we deceived?” I didn’t recognize the verse. “Have I misled you, Father?”
“Take off your clothes.”
I did as I was ordered. My bra had already fallen. I unhooked it, casting it away. I drew onto my knees. Facing him. Wanting him. My breasts bared for his pleasure, and the goose bumps chasing his stare centered on my nipples. They hardened and budded.
My panties were next. I trembled as I hooked my fingers in the soft material. My breath lost in a whimper, but he brushed my hair behind my back, offering more of my darkened skin for his inspection.
His worship.
His lips met mine, and I sunk into his kiss. He pulled away before I could offer more, before I could take my fill and give a timid flick of my tongue.
His hand wove over my curves, tickling my heated flesh. He tangled in my panties, tugging them down, down, down. He tugged the silk from my body.
“Truly, I say to you, tonight…” He whispered. “You shall be with me in paradise.”
Father Raphael moved over me, capturing a kiss, a breath, a whimper of overwhelmed hesitance. His strength rose over me, but I stilled beneath his hardened form, watching as a man of God and muscle commanded his body and mine.
His lips tickled, breathing prayers. My heart raced. Could he feel it?
Did he realize what his kiss tortured from me? What his hands trapped within his grasp?
I arched as his mouth searched lower, kissing my neck, my collarbone, lower and lower. The heat of his lips burned over my breast. I held my breath.
Was it temptation to let myself inhale and savor his scent?
Was it worse to arch my breasts to his mouth? How bad of a sin would it be to ask to feel his tongue curl over my nipple?
I didn’t have to ask. He fed his own temptations, his own demons which heated him from the inside and drove him to seek satisfaction from my body.
I welcomed him between my legs, groaning as the rough material of his slacks rubbed against a slickness far too hot and desperate for anything but the invasion of his soul.
He cupped my breast, striking upon my nipple with a nip of his teeth, grunt of his pleasure, and seal of his lips. With a free hand he aimed for his pants, drawing the zipper low. I wiggled. His tongue lashed over me, darts of pink cast against a rich darkness. Every moment of illicit attention sparked a deep pleasure.
The sensations tormented me. My soul bundled and knotted, desperately throbbing in my core and crazed for a freeing release. I groaned, arching, pressing my body to his.
Father Raphael understood. He soothed me with a caress of my cheek. His dark eyes narrowed, studying my reaction, my need.
His command teased and enthralled me.
“You will wait,” he said. “You will resist.”
“No…” My head fell as his lips trailed lower once more. “What else must I prove to you?”
“We will reach paradise together, my angel.”
I stiffened, but he pushed my thighs apart. I was exposed to him. Again. Completely. Shamelessly, though my shame was self-evident in the slickness of my slit.
The cool air brushed that sinful part of me. His eyebrow arched. Had he not expected to find me wet and wanting more of his attention, his words, his touch?
His control.
“This is our sin.” He breathed over me, a homily of truth and devious arousal. “This temptation, this moment, you were right. I dominated you with faith when I should have worshiped you in sin. You are my lost, beautiful angel…and I will guide you to Heaven.”
He spoke such sensual blasphemy. His head lowered, pushing my thighs further apart.
When his words silenced, his true prayer began.
He adored me, tasting me, offering his tongue to my petals as though I were the holy Host and he would have me melt with consecrated heat.
The shudders began at my toes, rippling through me as every lashed strike of his tongue blessed my folds. His mouth danced upon my slit, teasing the velvet and flicking across my swollen nub.
I jerked against the pleasure, realizing only what he did as I counted every whip against my sensitive secret.
I arched. Twenty swipes of his tongue, across the softness of my petals.
I groaned. Twenty-five deliberate and devout kisses upon my tightening core.
I sweated. Thirty agonizing suckles of my clit as he threaded me and used me and watched me thrash against his gifted pleasure.
I knew what he did. What he counted. Why he told me to wait.
I nearly wept, struggling against the pleasure as my muscles cramped and fingers twisted in the softness of his sheets.
He stopped at thirty-nine licks, a blasphemous and utterly sacrilegious number which wracked me in a forbidden ecstasy.
I edged too hard against the precipice of that peak, and he pulled away, tormenting me with the wickedness of his feast.
“Father…” My words, my body, my soul ached. “Please. Release me or let me go. I can’t do this anymore.”
“I won’t lose you, my angel. I can’t.”
He removed his trousers. His cock wrenched from the material, finally free to harden to its full glory. It throbbed, as intimidating as the rasping prayer he delivered over my quivering body.
“I will bind us together,” he whispered. “Trap us in depravity. But I’ll deliver you from this torment. I’ll take these sins as my own to shield you from everything but this forbidden pleasure.”
He spoke so solemnly. His words trapped me upon his bed, torn between my own reason and pleasure. My core ached. I needed him. More than salvation. More than absolution.
Father Raphael fisted his cock, pumping it in a deliberate and stoic movement. The thick shaft was too large to hide within his hand, and every motion left inches exposed.
Could I do this?
A woman was meant to take a man.
Eve was created to submit to Adam, and we knew what happened as a result.
How could I trust in God to protect me from this pleasure when it was darkness which controlled our lust? Sin fed our arousal, and yet I offered my silken slickness to his hardening cock?
Father Raphael gripped my hips with a deliberation that belonged in prayer. Every touch sanctified me. His stare, his whispered devotions, forged something holy inside me. He didn’t lean over me. He readied himself on his knees. Another prayer. Another sacrilege.
He guided my hips to him, and he lowered his cock to my quivering slit.
Every nerve in my body shocked me to my core. My blood pumped hard. My vision haloed.
And the softness of his skin blended with the fierceness of his hardened length.
I was to be made his.
And I arched to feel that damning, beautiful connection.
His every breath rattled the strength of his body. A raw heat entwined his movements. He tensed. I stared as the muscles of his arms, his chest popped and rippled.
This was a man who denied his instincts. Abandoned his urges. Deprived himself of the pleasures of the flesh to achieve a different type of salvation.
It pained him, just as it ached in me.
He fought his desires to take me, to rut me, to destroy me in pleasure and lose himself within my heat.
No longer.
I closed my eyes. The submission came easily. My fingers entwined with his. The rosaries clenched tightly in his fist as he trembled on the brink of immorality. I knew how to soothe him. I tucked my hand within his and tangled the beads over our fingers. Our touch was as sweet as the apple’s crisp bite.
It was all he needed. He prayed—Latin, a beautiful verse begging forgiveness—and pushed within me.
We lost Heaven in that first union of our bodies.
We found paradise in the first breath we took as one.
I expected pain. So did he. He thrust completely, tearing through what might have resisted our desire. The fullness stole my breath, and I whimpered a shocked gasp, more overwhelmed than frightened.
He leaned over me and stroked my cheek.
So sweetly.
So gently.
So reverently.
I gasped over him, squeezing his hand and shuddering as the thickness, the overwhelming presence of him, fractured my faith and rebuilt it in his name.
“My angel…” His words warmed me. A comfort. As beautiful and confident as any he delivered in prayer before our altar. “This is no temptation.”
No. This was something beautiful.
Something shared.
A devotion of flesh. A gift of a sanctified moment when the world stopped, the fears faded, and the only evils we committed were lost in the regret of not offering our bodies before this moment.
His movements began slow. Deliberately. Every withdrawal tested our faith. His size challenged us to stop, to turn away, to return to a world of fear and uncertainty. But his thrusts connected us once more. Together.
Cast from Eden to explore the world’s pleasure.
The rosaries bit our hands, but I clenched his tightly, squeezing my eyes shut as a bursting, crushing curtain of pleasure threatened to overwhelm me in that sinful darkness. His voice whispered within me, around me, through me.
“No, angel. Not yet.”
Pleasure turned to pain. Relief to frustration. I twisted, but the length of his cock invaded me, punctured me, pinned me to him and this moment and this sin. I couldn’t escape.
How was I supposed to fight the most natural submission in the world while his body covered mine, rose over mine, buried within mine?
“Please…” I licked my lips. It teased him, and he seized my kiss to silence me. “Father…”
His hips pushed onto mine, sheathing himself completely to hear my squeal. “You will wait.”
“How?” I didn’t understand much about my body, my desire, the building tangle of confusion and pleasure that heated my blood. “Can’t…you’re so…”
Big.
Powerful.
Everywhere.
Omniscient in this pleasure.
My world faded into him in that moment. His scent. His hands. The crash of his breath and the crush of his weight. His thickness invaded and pressed and forced through my core, dragging every blitzing spark of excitement through me.
I clutched at his hands. His movements shattered my mind, forcing me into the bed, against the sheets, under his strength.
He was right.
Sex was power. Sex was invasion. It was desire and surrender and giving of myself for another.
But it tore through both of us. His eyes widened, staring at me. He studied my face and kissed the desperation from my lips.
He trembled as I did. Strained as I did. Begged of me the same mercy I asked of him and crashed in breathless amazements as our bodies slammed together.
Harder. Faster.
I arched to take more of his impossible length. My body struggled to fit him, too tight to afford him much movement but delighting him with every clenched strain. I squeezed the rosaries. Then I did as he commanded.
I let him overwhelm me as the force of his cock rent through my innocence.
I belonged to him.
Since the moment I first met him, I knew I’d give myself to him. I’d longed to lay beneath him as he thrust within me, through me, with me. This was as inevitable as sin and as inescapable as judgment.
My groans became whimpered pleas. He gripped me tighter as his thrusts beat against me in a new and furious force.
“Father…please…” I whispered to him, his straining body and angled jaw. His expression turned pained. Utterly animalistic. “Father, may I come?”
He thickened then. I hadn’t meant to tease him. I asked because I didn’t know. Was this still a test? A way to prove our faith wasn’t lost?
“No, my angel,” he grunted. “Be strong. I want to feel you for a moment longer.”
His movements quickened. I angled my hips, offering him a deeper, more torturous bliss from my weakening body. It exhausted me. It delighted me. I lost myself in the prayer for his permission as every filling moment conquered me for him.
His cock thickened. I needed it. My heat raged, and every thrust into my core wetted me, slickened me, prepared me for his release.
“Father, please.”
“Do I say. Exactly as I say.”
I would have followed him to the ends of the earth. I think I did. His motions blinded me in sin and repentant pleasure.
He gasped in a shuddered whisper. His chest strained, damned with sweat and heat. He prayed, words I couldn’t understand and a struggle I understood too well.
His eyes flashed, maddened with lust. He rutted through me. Completely.
Father Raphael stared at me, tensing and crashing and praying and gasping. We came undone, and his words whispered as blessings.
“Come, my angel.”
I cried out as he slammed within me once more.
The heat jetted from him. Once. Twice. Three times. Maybe more. I clenched upon him, called his name.
And I was lost into the paradise he promised.
Beautiful, sullen sacrilege.
Perfect, miserable desecration.
Unending, conquering pleasure.
No wonder it had been forbidden.
I tasted of this fruit and sacrificed my own body, my desires and thoughts, beliefs and needs, sins and virtues. It fell away in an instant, forsaken for that pin-prick of a moment in all of eternity where my soul belonged to him.
And I loved it.
I ached for it.
I crashed again and again in consuming lust, until my body ached, my soul cried, and I couldn’t breathe with the strength of him inside me.
We fell to the bed. Panting. He pulled from me, but a part of him stayed, a tremendous heat and delirious remembrance which coated me in seed.
I struggled to breathe, fought the tears, and surrendered to the crippling aftershocks of a body desecrated and blessed, lost to darkness and reawakened in the wonder of warmth.
He rested beside me as the world returned. Dim. Dark. Lost from the eternity that Heaven promised to us.
Was it a sin to admit that I was happy?
I would not have returned to that innocence. Not if it took me from him.
Not even if it cleansed my soul and protected me from the sins to come.
And there would be many.
14
Raphael
The silence stirred through me.
I expected hellfire. A rain of sulfur. A burning bush or a slithering serpent.
Instead, I covered our nudity a
s the scripture said, and I waited in the darkness for morning.
Honor napped, but her sleep was not deep or peaceful. I watched her, amazed and enlightened, terrified and lost.
Such a beautiful girl. Woman.
She offered me a wondrous gift, but I was not worthy of that virtue. Not worthy of her. Of my name. My collar. My thoughts. My prayers.
Or that sensual and gifted celebration of our bodies and desire.
Our union was something moving and unexplainable. As precious to me as my calling to serve the Lord, and as genuine as all of my vows.
How was it possible?
I took her, but she wasn’t in pain. I hadn’t frightened her. Honor didn’t look upon me with any disgust. I thought sex bruised and hurt. Left one sick and damned.
This was not what I remembered.
It was nothing that I had ever experienced.
“You look so sad.” Honor’s voice lifted my spirits, like church bells and song. She whispered to me as if she, too, feared the feminine sound in my home. “Did I do something…wrong?”
“No, my angel.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. My feet struck the floor, and I pulled the sheet over my waist to cover my nudity. It did little to hide me. The lovely sable brown of her skin contrasted with the ivory of my sheets, I hardened again.
One sin wasn’t enough.
Once would never be enough.
And that thought frightened me more than the realization of my broken celibacy, my lost soul, or how I threatened her with Hell.
“Did I hurt you?” I asked.
The words tumbled from my lips. I feared the worst, knowing how delicate she was as a virgin.
Knowing how it had been done to me.
“No, Father.”
She sat up and the sheet wrapped over her navel. Her hair cast loose, and she let it cover her chest. Just as the children’s Bibles drew Eve before she obscured her beauty with a fig leaf.
I didn’t believe her. “Are you sure I didn’t hurt you?”
Her words emboldened. “No. Just the opposite.”
I should have wept in relief. Instead, I gritted my teeth. I’d given her pleasure, and she gave her heat, her tightness, her need. She’d surrendered to me.
Christ, I was not worthy.