“Will they still let you take your vows if you’ve had recent, uh, ‘tastes of the world’?”
Zenny laughs a little. “Like I said, I have an unconventional novice mistress and my prioress is very, well, modern. She says she’d rather have women who choose this life in knowledge than who choose in ignorance.”
I have to concede that’s a fairly wise perspective on religious life—if anything about religious life can be called wise and not, you know, corrupt or pointless.
“Okay, so you feel like you haven’t, I don’t know, thoroughly interrogated this choice or whatever because you haven’t had doubts, and your mentors have encouraged you to go fuck someone to force those doubts into being.”
“Well,” Zenny says, flexing her hands on her knees and looking down, “it’s more like they think I’m so certain because I haven’t actually confronted what I’m leaving behind. And that’s not just sex. It’s money and close relationships and freedom and frivolous kinds of things. I don’t just want fucking, Sean,” she explains, her eyes finding mine again. “I want someone to show me everything I’m going to miss. I want someone to challenge me and test me. And if I’ve tasted everything the world has to offer and I still want to consecrate my life to Christ, then I’ll know it’s what I’m truly meant to do. It will be a mature choice and not a choice made out of naïveté.”
Her eyes are hypnotic, the copper rims darkening into pools so deep that I can barely separate where they blend into the onyx of her pupil. “If you really want this,” I say, feeling almost dizzy looking at her, “you should find a boy your own age. Or shit, at least a boy who believes in the same things you do.”
She shakes her head, and it finally breaks the spell. I stand up abruptly, going over to the window, because I can’t handle looking at her, being so close to her. Not when she’s asking for what she’s asking for, which is something I’d fork over my own soul to give her.
Unfortunately, that would almost certainly be the price. Not my soul per se, since I don’t believe in that shit, but you know. Whatever’s left of honor and morality inside me.
“It has to be you,” she pleads to my back. “I’ve been trying to take the Reverend Mother’s advice for the last six months. Wearing street clothes instead of my uniform to school, trying to flirt with the guys in class, even saying yes to a couple of dates, but no one interested me. No one challenged me. In fact, most of the guys I interacted with only reaffirmed that I wasn’t missing anything good. I never even got as far as kissing them, and that night at Elijah’s gala—it was me saying goodbye to the whole plan. I’d have that one last time to get dressed up and drink and pretend, and then I’d give up this idea of searching for doubt. I mean, if I’d been searching for it and still didn’t find it, then didn’t that mean something too? That God didn’t want me to doubt?”
I don’t believe in a god, so I obviously don’t believe in any predestination, “this is God’s path for me” crap, but by dint of the situation and my vested interest in trying to maintain a semblance of control, I find myself squawking in agreement. “Surely that’s the right answer. Surely you should give up this idea.”
“But see, then I saw you,” Zenny says, and her voice goes so soft and low that I turn to look at her. Her face glows up at me with a kind of self-deprecating helplessness, like she knows how silly it all sounds and yet she can’t stop herself from just coming out with it plainly. “I saw you, and you were the first boy I ever wanted, Sean. When I was a little girl, I thought we’d get married, when I was old enough to have a real crush, I had a crush on you. When I was in high school, it was you that my body first wanted. And seeing you at the gala was like…like the answer to my prayers.”
I’m greedy for this idea of her having a crush on me, of her wanting me with all this shy conviction over the years. The thought of it sends something spinning in my chest like a pinwheel, and I have to force myself to track the conversation. “You prayed for doubt?” I ask, hoping she can’t see how boyishly flattered I am.
“I prayed for a chance. A chance to prove I was stronger than doubt—but how could I prove it if I never had the doubt in the first place? And then there you are, the first man I ever wanted, the ultimate temptation. Powerful and experienced and so hot I could barely even talk to you without stammering.”
It should be shocking that this makes me embarrassed, this compliment, when I’ve had women call me a god or a hero or any number of insane things in order to get into my pants or my wallet. But it’s not shocking because—as I’m quickly learning—everything about Zenny seems to come with a different set of rules, a different set of experiences. It’s like I’m starting all over again with her, and I have no idea what to say.
Luckily, my silence doesn’t seem to bother her and she keeps talking. “And it wasn’t just that I wanted you, although I did. I mean, I do. But I know how you feel about the Church, I know exactly how worldly and materialistic you are, and what could be more perfect? Who could be more perfect?”
She beams up at me, like a star pupil who’s just delivered a perfect answer, and I stare down at her, like a teacher trying very, very hard to suppress a boner he has for his student.
“Zenny, the answer is still no.”
Her beaming smile fades into a sigh. “I thought you might still protest. It’s about Elijah, isn’t it?”
“And you’re young. A thousand years too young. I know it’s hard to see at your age, but men like me are—”
Zenny holds up a hand to stop me. “Don’t give me some patronizing line about the ‘depraved nature of men’ or some bullshit. It’s a gender theory that’s about fifty years out of date, for one, and nothing more than a convenient excuse for you to avoid taking responsibility for yourself, aside from the way it neatly precludes the possibility that a woman might also be depraved. And aside from the obviously problematic binary construct.”
I blink. Star pupil indeed.
“I wouldn’t ask for this if I didn’t want it, and I can assure you that I’m just as capable of sexual energy as a man. I can also say that aside from being a legal adult, I’m under no illusions about the way you desire me. You made that very clear the night of the gala.”
Guilt rams through me like a railroad spike. “Zenny, I—”
“Don’t apologize. I liked it, I liked your honesty. I asked for it, and I mean the things I ask for, Sean. Like right now.”
She’s too articulate for me to argue with, and especially when it’s an argument I only halfheartedly want to win. By which, I mean that my heart feels like I should say no, while the rest of my body is throbbing with the urge to give her everything she’s asking for and then some.
Not halfheartedly, then. Half-cockedly.
“Elijah, though,” I mumble, trying to grasp on to some reason that she can’t talk her way around. “He asked me to keep you safe.”
“And what better way to take care of me than to help me when I ask for it?”
“I, uh—” Good God, where is the guy who dominates boardrooms? Who runs over lawyers and heirs and investors with sheer charm and willpower? Why can’t I formulate a response? Why can’t I vocalize any fucking words?
Zenny stands up now too, taking a step toward me. “Please, Sean. I’m only asking for a month, and I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to give. I’m asking you because you’re the only person who can help me, and the only person I trust to help me, and I need that. I need to trust the person I do this with, it can’t be with a man like…” she waves a hand as she tries to think of an example. “Like Charles Northcutt.”
Red.
Furious, jealous, protective red. Everywhere, in my eyes and choking my throat and tightening my fists. “Stay away from him,” I manage. “He’s a bad man.”
I’m so twisted up in my sudden fit of jealous fury that I don’t see her reach for me; I only feel it as she puts a gentle hand on my arm. “I can tell he’s a bad man,” she says matter-of-factly, “and I have no interest in him
anyway. I’m saying that men like him are exactly why I want a man like you to help me with this. You’re all the things being a nun is not…but I also feel safe with you. That’s a very rare combination.”
I look down at her hand, slender and dark and tipped with chipped gold nails. There’s the unmistakable streak of pink highlighter across the back of one pinky finger, and if I’m not wrong, a faint remnant of a list made across the back of her hand in Sharpie.
It’s the hand of a college student, the hand of a woman fresh out of youth, nothing like the chubby dimpled hand of a baby girl I once held in a friend’s kitchen. It’s the hand of a woman who’s still learning herself, who’s sometimes forgetful and sometimes daydreamy and sometimes bored. It’s the hand of a woman who needs to be kissed and caressed and loved down so thoroughly that she will never forget how to appreciate her own body and the feelings it can give her until the day she dies.
And the shitty thing is that I still know all the reasons I shouldn’t say yes; they are banging and parading around me like a marching band. But I still want to say yes.
Fuck, do I want it.
I close my eyes and that’s when she moves in for the kill. A soft, tentative kiss against my lips, sweet and teasing and then gone.
My eyes pop open. “Shit,” I say hoarsely.
“Please, Sean,” she whispers, and she’s so close to me. So very close, and if I wanted, I could pull her into my arms, I could bury my face in her neck and bite like a vampire, I could make her feel every hard, dangerous inch of why this is such a terrible idea.
And I think about how I still don’t know her, not really, not like I should. I don’t know anything about her except the barest biographical facts gleaned from Elijah’s random mentions of her…and of course, that she’s an almost-nun looking to find out what she’ll miss after she goes into those cloisters of hers.
“I need a day to think about it,” I say, taking a stumbling step back, away, my body immediately kicking up a fuss at the distance between us. “I’m not going to pretend I’m a good man, but this is something even I have to think about.”
She nods, and she doesn’t seem surprised or upset, and I realize she expected this. She expected me to need to think about it, and I’m a little relieved by that. Even if I am Make Me Doubt Guy, at least she wasn’t lying about feeling safe with me, about trusting me. She clearly thinks that I have a moral compass of some sort, and I’m weirdly proud of that, in a way I don’t want to examine too closely. In a way that whispers to me how much I already care what Zenobia Iverson thinks of Sean Bell.
“I understand,” she says. “Can I expect you to call?”
Even if it’s a stupid idea to see her in person again, I can’t bear to discuss something so personal and important to her over the phone. “Dinner here. Tomorrow at seven. We’ll talk again.”
“Dinner,” she says, a tiny smile pulling at her mouth. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
And she walks over to the door and I walk with her, telling myself that tomorrow I’ll find a way to let her down gently, that I’ll find a way to say no to this insane scheme of hers. There’s no way she’s going to come to dinner tomorrow and I’ll say yes.
I tell myself that and then I watch her ass under her modest jumper all the way back to the elevator.
Chapter 9
For the first time in eight months, I almost flake on Family Dinner. Aiden and Ryan are incorrigible dinner skippers, but me, I’ve always gone. Every week. Not even work has kept me away—I’ll go to dinner and then go right back to the office if I have to.
But after Zenny leaves, I’m in a strange, restless limbo. My thoughts are running in circles. My boner is back and demanding attention. And the unfamiliar sensations of guilt and integrity chase each other in circles like dogs.
What is the decent thing to do?
Trust that Zenny knows herself and is capable of making decisions and choices? Help her on her quest for a deeper, richer relationship with her deity?
Or is the decent thing to interrupt her relationship with her deity, given that the deity is fake and also that the fake deity’s church killed my sister?
I stand at the window for a moment, then mutter a quick fuck it and unbelt myself, giving in to the need to tug on my cock again. The flesh is straining and aching and a dark, angry red, and I brace a hand against the window and smell the air as I start yanking on myself.
I smell the faint hint of rose.
I smell Zenny.
There’s nothing but the wild need to come jolting through my body as I imagine Zenny’s hungry, innocent kisses and the tight curves of her body and the inviting arch of her throat. Nothing but untrammeled lust coursing through my veins as I imagine the flash of her white panties, like some kind of sick “best friend’s little sister” fantasy brought to life. I imagine how her pussy would taste against my lips, how she’d smell, how she’d shiver when I circled my tongue around the dark rosebud between her cheeks after I suckled on her clit.
I’m nothing but a beast, a man possessed with the need to fuck.
So why is You were the answer to my prayers the last thing to run through my mind before I come?
“Is Mom okay?”
“Mom’s okay, man. Sorry to worry you.”
A few minutes later, I’m changed into different pants and a fresh shirt, cum wiped off the concrete floor, and I’m sitting in my home office, staring blankly at my bookshelves, which are about half the kind of businessy crap you see popping up on the non-fiction bestsellers’ lists and about half historical romance novels, categorized by subgenre (Regency, Victorian, American West) and then shelved alphabetically by author.
Oh, and I called my brother. Because I’m currently freaking the fuck out, and he’s the only person in my life that I trust to give me any kind of advice when it comes to clerical vocations and sex.
I can practically hear Tyler relax after I tell him Mom’s not back in the hospital. “What is it then?” he asks. “I know you wouldn’t call unless there’s something dire going on.”
It’s true, for better or for worse, and I’m not sure why. I like Tyler, but he’s never needed me the way that Aiden and Ryan do…the way that Lizzy did before she killed herself. And so I’ve gotten into the habit of being the de facto caretaker of the Bell boys—making sure Aiden gets some sleep occasionally, helping Ryan enroll in college classes and hunt for apartments, reminding them both to visit and call Mom—but Tyler’s exempt from my bossiness. When I trust and respect someone, when I value their time and their judgment, I’m more than content to let weeks go by without talking, because I know they’ll be just fine without me. Tyler falls into that category. Flaky, impulsive Aiden probably never will.
“Well, it’s a little embarrassing to ask,” I admit, “but I need advice. Uh. About a woman.”
“Do I need to remind you about that time I was a priest?” Tyler asks dryly. “I’m probably not the best person for dating advice.”
I stand up, feeling fidgety. “Well, she’s Catholic.”
“That’s hardly an alien race to us, Sean. In fact, I think Mom still has your ‘Best in Old Testament Trivia’ award from Vacation Bible School somewhere.”
That sends an automatic scowl to my mouth. I don’t like thinking about that boy, the one I used to be, the one who believed in God and spent Vacation Bible School gluing Popsicle sticks together and teaming up with Elijah to tease Lizzy and her friends on the church playground. And for the first time, I realize—like really, fully realize—that spending time with Zenny means that I’m going to have to remember that boy. If I’m going to coax Zenny into the land of doubt, I’m going to have to remember why I ever occupied the land of belief.
“Is she some kind of weird Catholic?” Tyler asks. “Like one of those pre-Vatican II people?”
“I’m annoyed I still know what that means,” I sigh. “And no, she’s fine with Mass in English and all that—at least I think so. More like, she wants to be a nun.”
I blurt it before I can hesitate any longer, but the awkward silence that ensues makes me wish I hadn’t said it at all. “You know what, never mind. I—”
“Sean,” Tyler interrupts, and I hear him walking into another room. A door closing. “I need to know before we go any further if you’re exaggerating. Be serious for once.”
I run my fingertip along a line of Sarah MacLean paperbacks. “I’m not exaggerating. She becomes a novice in a month.”
A long, long sigh from the other end of the line. “What have you done?”
“Look, I haven’t done anything—”
“Sure.”
“I swear. It’s more like…I need to make sure that I keep not doing anything. Or if I do something, that it’s the right something.”
I’m only asking for a month.
I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to give.
I’m asking you because you’re the only person I trust to help me.
I scrub my fingertips through my hair, trying to gather my thoughts. My feelings. My wayward cock cravings.
“So you’ve met a girl,” Tyler prompts after I don’t speak for a bit. “Met a nun, I mean.”
“Well, the word met,” I say, turning to lean against the bookshelf and stare at a wall lined with diplomas and academic awards. “That implies we didn’t know each other before.”
“Sean.”
Just tell him.
“It’s Elijah’s sister,” I force out.
“Zenny? But she’s only—”
“She’s not a kid anymore, Tyler. She just turned twenty-one, it’s her senior year of college. And before you ask, no, Mom and Dad haven’t reconnected with the Iversons.”
Tyler grumbles something on his end that sounds like, well, they should, which I ignore. Maybe, when looked at rationally, the Iversons weren’t to blame for the schism, but no one was thinking rationally the day of Lizzy’s funeral, and after the fallout, it seemed safer not to touch the still-smoldering pieces. Safer just to side with my parents and keep my friendship with Elijah separate from all the pain and alienation. Tyler had been the lone voice of dissent in the Bell clan, being the Mr. Conscience that he was, and it hadn’t changed a thing, it only made life harder for him.
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