I leaned my head down and caught the delicate skin of her neck in my teeth. “This is your blood,” I whispered in her ear.
I shoved all the way in, and she cried out as her back arched off the altar.
“This is you,” I told her and the empty sanctuary, “this is you, given up for me.”
We stayed still after that, absorbing the new feeling of each other, the feeling of my hips pressed to her softness, the feeling of her tight, tight channel around me. I was worried I was going to come just being like this, just being inside.
But then I noticed that she was biting her lip and breathing shakily, and I realized that she was adjusting to my size. I could hardly fit, and what’s worse, that was what made it feel so fucking good.
God, I was such an asshole. I hadn’t made her ready enough and part of me found that hot, so hot that I was barely able to attend to her the way a good man should. I had to lean down and bite her neck and shoulders repeatedly to force myself to stay still—all I wanted to do was pound into her like she was a little fuckdoll, pump into her like nothing existed except for her pussy.
But no, this was not how our first time should be. I told her I wanted to be rough, but the rough fucking I was dying to give her would be too much, and I couldn’t bear to abuse my lamb like that.
Finally mastering myself a little, I pulled out halfway, reaching down to rub her clit, thinking I would get her off and then finish another way that wouldn’t hurt her. She caught my hand. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t be the good guy. I told you what I wanted. Now give it to me.”
“But I want you to enjoy it too.”
“I will,” she said, her eyes wide and open and fervent. “Give me what I want, Tyler. I want this. Please.”
I groaned at her words, my dick surging, and I sank back into her slowly. My thighs and arms were trembling with the suppressed need, but I couldn’t be that guy, I didn’t want to be that guy, the guy who used a woman for himself and didn’t make it good for her. She said she wanted it, and I know I’d asked for and gotten permission, but still, she didn’t know how rough I could be, how hard I could go.
She slid her arms around my neck and pulled herself up to speak in my ear. “How can I push you over the edge? Hmm?” She wriggled underneath me, and I sucked in a breath, the sudden motion after the stillness almost too much.
“How can I convince you to tear me apart?”
Well, shit.
“I can tell that’s what you want,” she continued, purring in my ear. “I can feel you shaking. Do it. Just pull out and then push back in. Doesn’t that feel good?”
Fuck yes, it did. It felt so good that I did it again, and again, closing my eyes and exhaling slow ragged breaths. Each time I pushed in, I ground myself against her clit, pulling out slowly to drag against her g-spot, some gallant voice telling me to make sure that she would come, the rest of me fighting that voice and pleading with me to screw her mindlessly.
“Where’s the man who spanked me?” she asked. “Where’s the man who fucked my throat until my eyes watered?”
My eyes were still closed, but I opened them now, meeting her gaze. “Don’t want to hurt you,” I said, my voice rough with the effort of my restraint. “I care about you too much.”
“Tyler,” she begged. “You’ve done it before with me.”
“Not like this.”
“Look,” she demanded. “Look down at us.”
I did, withdrawing out to the tip, and it was a mistake because seeing where we were joined was so hot, so primal, and it clawed its way up my spine, and I didn’t even know what it was—lust or love or biology or fate—but my attempt at nobility fractured and the beast within broke through.
“Forgive me,” I muttered and then rammed myself home. She moaned in surprise and then I laid my body on top of hers, supporting myself with only my forearms now, our chests and stomachs pressed together, my hips digging into her inner thighs. Pinning her down like this, I stabbed into her over and over and over again, burying myself repeatedly in that velvet pussy.
“More,” she moaned, and I gave it to her.
I heard her heels tumble off and fall to the floor, and the altar cloth was sliding I was driving into her so hard, but I didn’t care, I was lost to myself, lost to her and lost to the world and everything except her grunts and squeals in my ear and the wet cunt underneath me.
It was perfect, and I was fucking that perfection, and I didn’t give a fuck about anything else but it and my dick and filling this woman with my cum, and why the hell did damnation feel so fucking good?
I don’t even know what I was saying as I rutted into her, Jesus, please and I’m sorry and you’re so tight and I have to I have to I have to.
And she was saying words back, words that spilled out in gasps and grunts and pants, right there and harder and close, I’m so close.
Deeper, I had to get deeper even though I knew there was no actual, physical way I could be deeper, and then I took her mouth, kissing her with something violent and furious and worshipful. We could both hardly breathe but we refused to stop and I fucked her all the while, feeling her tighten and writhe and finally break underneath me. She bucked, crying out against my mouth, her fingernails gouging red lines of pain down my back, and we rode out her orgasm together because she was a wild thing, a woman possessed, and it was like having a tigress underneath me, but I kept riding her and then it was there, it was there, it was there and I still had her mouth as I jabbed in a final time and came.
Excruciatingly, I came.
Every pulse of my dick was like a pulse of my soul, and every muscle tightening and contracting was like a punch to the gut, and I was so bare with this woman in every way, my nerves flayed raw and my heart wide open and my eternal soul right alongside my bruising hips and thrusting dick and the cum that was now spilling everywhere, leaking onto the white altar cloth, and yes, this is why the Church wanted marriage and sex to go hand in hand because I felt as married to her right now as a man could be married to a woman.
I gave a few last thrusts, milking every last throb out of my climax, every last drop out of myself, and then I raised myself up on my hands to look down at her.
She was smiling a lazy, sated smile, and then she said, “Amen.”
CHAPTER 13
I went into the sacristy and came out with a small rectangle of white cloth, a purificator. It was normally used to wipe the communion chalice after every sip of wine.
Tonight, I used it to clean Poppy.
You might think that having sex on my altar, using sacred things normally meant for rituals of the highest order, meant that I wasn’t taking my faith seriously, that I had slid straight past sin and into sacrilege, but that wasn’t the truth. Or it wasn’t the whole truth, at least. I couldn’t explain it, but it was like somehow it was all holy, the altar and the relic within and us on top of it. I knew that outside of this moment there would be guilt. There would be consequences. There would be the memory of Lizzy and all the things I had wanted to fight for.
But right now, with Poppy’s scent on my skin, with her taste on my lips, I only felt connection and love and the promise of something vivid and colorful.
After I finished cleaning her, I wrapped her in the altar cloth and carried her to the edge of the stairs, where I sat. I cradled her in my arms, brushing my lips against her hair and eyelids, murmuring the words I thought she should hear: how beautiful she was, how stunning, and how perfect.
I wanted to say I’m sorry, although my mind and soul still spun in dazzled wonder with it all, so I wasn’t sure if I was sorry I’d lost control and gotten so rough with her, or if I was sorry that we’d had sex at all.
Except I wasn’t. Because more than the transformative sex that we’d just had, this moment was worth sinning for. This moment where she was curled in my arms, her head on my chest, breathing contentedly against me. Where the altar cloth covered her in long, draping folds, but slips of pale skin still showed through.
She slid her fingers up my chest, resting them on my collarbone, and I held her close, as if I could press her straight through my skin and into my soul.
“You broke your vow,” she said finally.
I glanced down at her; she was both sleepy and sad. I pressed my lips against her forehead.
“I know,” I finally replied. “I know.”
“What happens now?”
“What do you want to happen?”
She blinked up at me. “I want to fuck you again.”
I laughed. “Like now?”
“Yes, like now.”
She twisted in my arms until she was straddling my legs, and it only took one of her deep kisses to make me hard again. I lifted her up and guided myself inside, groaning quietly into her neck as she sat back down.
Slivers of sensation became known to me. Warmth and wetness. Her ass against my thighs. Her tits so close to my mouth.
“What do you want to happen next, Tyler?” she asked me, and I couldn’t believe she was asking me this now, while she was riding me, but then as I tried to answer, I realized why. She didn’t want me to be guarded, she wanted me to be honest and raw and like this, I couldn’t possibly be anything else.
“I don’t want us to stop,” I admitted. She rolled her hips back and forth over me, and I did press my face in her chest then, feeling my climax building too fast, much too fast. “I feel like I…”
But I couldn’t say it. Not even now, when she had me completely at her mercy. It was simply too soon—and not to mention ridiculous.
Priests weren’t allowed to fall in love.
Iwasn’t allowed to fall in love.
Her fingers twined through my hair and she pulled my head back so she could look at me. “I’ll say it if you won’t,” she said.
“Poppy…”