Chapter Ten
The Pause
I couldn’t stop crying.
And I couldn’t stop apologizing.
The Reverend kept my head on his chest and stroked my hair, treating me more tenderly than he ever had. We were in the middle of our bed, him sitting with his back against the headboard, legs out straight, me half curled, half slumped against him.
“It’s alright, my Jezebel; it’s alright,” he kept repeating. “Whores too have limits.”
That afternoon, just a few hours earlier, I had said, “No.”
In the basement of my husband’s strip mall church, before his special congregation of twelve, secured, nude, to the X-frame altar, I had watched a man I can only call a giant emerge from the shadows at the back of the room, as naked as I had been, and walk slowly toward me, preceded by his rampant organ, which appeare
