Dirty Prayers

Kneel and Beg

The wood of the confessional soaked up my defiance, while the silence behind the grate became so thick it could be cut with a knife.

That is not how—"

"There was a man in the city," I said.

"After the divorce, dark hair, broad shoulders, the kind of man who fills a room without trying." I felt, rather than heard, the almost imperceptible shift in his breathing.

"He looked at me across a bar, and I thought, yes. Him. So I walked over, and I sat down, and I looked at him the way I sometimes look at things I've decided I want. A soft pause. "He didn't stand a chance."

The silence from the other side of the lattice was absolute. The kind that has texture.

"Ivy," a warning. Low and tight.

"I'm confessing," I said, all innocence.

"You are not—"

"He took me to dinner first," I continued, unhurried, my voice pitched low and even.

The tone of someone telling a bedtime story to someone who desperately needs to sleep and will not.

"He was very charming. Very attentive. He told me I was the most interesting woman he had ever met. "I let that sit.

"They always say that. I think it's because they don't know what else to do with me."

Through the lattice, Johan's folded hands pressed down against his knee. A small, controlled movement.

A man applying pressure to something that needed containing.

"After dinner," I said, quieter now and slower.

"He kissed me in the street outside the restaurant. Like he couldn't wait another thirty seconds. Like he had been thinking about it since I sat down.

I paused.

"I let him. I kissed him back and thought about almost nothing except how alive it felt. To be wanted like that. To take what you want and feel no guilt whatsoever."

"Stop." His voice dropped to something I had not heard before, not the priest's measured warning but something rawer beneath it. Like a man standing at the edge of something, looking down.

"But I haven't gotten to the sin yet," I said softly.

A breath. Sharp and swallowed.

"The sin," I continued as gently as a knife slid between ribs.

"Is that I felt nothing for him. Not really. He was beautiful and willing, and for one night I let myself be entirely selfish, entirely animal, and entirely free."

I let the word settle.

"And when I left in the morning, I didn't look back. Not once." A pause.

"Is that a sin, Father? To use someone who was entirely happy to be used? To take pleasure without pretending it was something more?"

The silence from the other side was different now. The silence of a man doing something very difficult with his entire body.

"There were others," I said.

"After him. Different men, different cities, different nights. Each one chosen deliberately.

Each one..." I searched for the word..." I enjoyed it. Thoroughly.

And left without apology." I tilted my head against the lattice.

"I never lied to any of them. I never promised things I didn't mean. I was simply honest about what I wanted, and they were simply grateful." A soft exhalation.

"Is honesty a sin?"

"What you're describing," he said, his voice so controlled it must have been costing him everything. "It is not... confession is not..." He stopped. Steadied.

"You are not seeking absolution. You are—"

"I am telling you the truth," I said. "Isn't that what this is for?"

"Not like this."

"Then how?" I leaned closer to the lattice, close enough to see the slight movement of his throat as he swallowed.

"Tell me how, Father. Tell me what the right way is to sit in the dark and tell a man the truth about your desires."

He didn't answer.

"And then," I said, very quietly, "there were the thoughts."

"Ivy—"

"The ones that came after I arrived back in Valcross." I kept my voice soft as a prayer.

"The ones that aren't about men in bars or strangers in other cities. The ones that are..." a pause—

"specific. Very specific. About a very specific man."

The silence pressed against the lattice between us like something alive.

"The thoughts come at night mostly," I continued.

"When it's quiet and dark and there's nothing to distract me from them. I think about a voice. Low, careful, controlled... a voice that fills empty spaces. I think about hands. Strong and warm and..." I paused...

"restrained. Always so deliberately restrained." A breath.

"And I think about what it would take to make that restraint break."

"Stop." Raw and uneven. Not a priest's instruction. A man's plea.

I stopped.

Not because he asked. Because the silence that followed was worth more than any word I could have added, ragged breathing and the creak of the wooden kneeler and the distant sound of the village outside these walls.

I waited.

"You need to go," he said finally. Quiet and devastated.

"My penance," I said softly. "You forgot my penance."

A long, fractured pause.

"Ten Hail Marys," he said. Almost steady. Almost.

"And a reflection on—?"

"On your mercy," he said tightly. "Pray for mercy, Ivy."

"For me or for you?" I asked quietly.

He didn't answer.

I pulled back the curtain and stepped out into the cool church air.

I knelt in the front pew, folded my hands, and pressed them to my lips.

I did not say ten Hail Marys.

I thought about his voice saying stop... raw and unguarded and completely human... and felt it low in my stomach like the first note of a song you already know is going to ruin you.

And then I heard it.

Soft, from behind the latticed door. Barely audible beneath the rain beginning again on the roof.

The sound of a man praying.

Fast and fervent and urgen... Latin words tumbling over each other with none of their usual measured grace.

A rosary clicked through with desperate speed, a man throwing himself at God like a drowning person throwing themselves at the shore.

Praying because of me.

Because of me.

I bowed my head and smiled at my clasped hands.

"Pray harder, Father. It won't help."

I listened to him losing his mind in that dark little box, the frantic clicking of his rosary beads following me all the way to the exit. But even after the heavy church doors shut behind me, I couldn't shake the sound of his wrecked, ragged breathing.

I knew exactly what I was doing to him. The man is completely done, he’s just too scared to admit it to himself.

He can stay on his knees and beg God all night for all I care, but we both know his c**k is hard for my sins right now.

Tonight, when he turns off the lights, he’s going to be thinking about throwing me against the wall of this exact church.

He belongs to me now. He just hasn't gotten to know yet.