Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 5-2

His eyes glow down at me, a deep blue made even bluer by the pale light pouring in from the north-facing windows. He gives me another serious kind of smile. “I am more sure about you than I am about anything else apart from God himself,” he murmurs, and then he brushes his lips against my forehead—a kiss that could be priestly if not for the thigh pressing so perfectly against my cunt.

I don’t take my eyes from his face. He looks so wholesome and handsome and holy, and even though I’ve carved out my own lush and forgiving version of Catholicism, I know that’s not everyone’s Catholicism. I know that Becket will face internal and external consequences for what he’s done because of me and Thornchapel, and I’m torn between trusting him and wanting to take care of him.

“I don’t want you to regret this,” I say. “Just because we’ve done things before—just because we were together for Beltane—doesn’t mean we have to do it again.”

“Are you telling me,” Becket asks with a crooked smile, “that it’s never too late to repent?”

I don’t answer him because I don’t really know what I’m trying to tell him. I think it’s presumptuous for one person to try to be another’s conscience; I also think being a good friend means you feel concern for their future as well as their present. I keep searching those flame-blue eyes, and finally say, “I want to be good for you.”

His smile fades into a sigh, but it’s a tender sigh rather than an impatient one. “I don’t believe you could be anything else. Do you love me?”

“Of course.”

“Do you love me like you love Auden? Or St. Sebastian?” Before I can answer, he’s shaking his head, eyes closing as if he’s ashamed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.”

I chew on my lip. “Do you want me to?” I ask. “Love you like I love them?”

The priest drops his forehead to mine.

“Yes,” he admits, voice troubled. “I do.”

He sounds so miserable that I ache for him. I cradle his wonderful face in my hands and lift my lips to his, giving him all the love with my body that I can’t give with my heart. “Please don’t be in love with me,” I beg in between kisses. “Don’t hurt for me. Please.”

“It’s too late,” he whispers back. “But I’ll never ask you for what you can’t give. I just need you to know what these kisses are for me, because they’re not a sin. For me, they are a sacrament.”

And what can I say to that? What should I say to that? As much as I love knowing things, I wish I could unknow this, I wish I could unlearn that Father Becket Hess . . . loves me. Not in the way a friend loves a friend, not in the way an occasional paramour loves a lover, but love-loves. And I want to give him all the love he deserves, I want to love him back with every molecule of my being, but it won’t be what he wants from me, it won’t be the same.

He pulls up and studies my face. “I mean it, Proserpina,” he says gently, correctly interpreting my worry. “Just this—what it is, what you can give me—is something I cherish beyond measure. The last thing I want is for you to feel like I’m waiting for you to give me more or change how you feel.”

“Becket . . .”

“And I’m sorry I said anything at all,” he tells me, running a thumb along my lip and then trailing it down my jaw to my throat. “It’s ridiculous, wanting more when I already have so much. When I’ve already been so greedy . . . ”

His thumb moves farther down, his whole hand, and then he’s palming a breast as he gives me another sweet kiss.

I decide something then and there. “You can always say it,” I tell him, meaning it with everything I am. “You can always tell me and show me. You can always let me feel it.”

I find the hand not currently cupping my breast and guide it under my skirt. As per Auden’s earlier request, I’m wearing nothing underneath it, and so the moment I tilt away from his thigh, he encounters me bare and wet and hot.

“Proserpina,” he groans.

“Let me feel,” I tell him, letting go of his hand so that mine are free to slide through his hair. “Let me feel every bit of it.”

The next kiss he gives me is not so sweet. It’s ardent and harsh, and it feels like he’s unleashing weeks and months of longing into me. His lips mold over my own, his tongue strokes against mine. One hand squeezes at my breast as the hand under my skirt searches me relentlessly. From the firm bud at the top to the tightly pleated button in the back, Becket refuses to let any part of me go unexplored. Unprobed. And soon the same fingers I’m pressing against are charting the hidden well inside my folds, pushing inside and sending me to my toes.

“I was here,” Becket murmurs. “Just a couple nights ago, I was right here.”

I part my legs as much as I can while still standing, and he groans again, the hand on my breast now falling to his belt. It’s the work of seconds for him to have his belt undone and his pants opened, and then his hands are under my skirt again, shoving it up to my waist so that there’s nothing but cool library air brushing against me. But he doesn’t push his way inside me. Instead he kisses me again, gripping my thigh to hold it against his hip as he explores my mouth.

The emptiness against my cunt is excruciating.

“Please,” I beg. “Please, Becket—” and the rest is swallowed by another avid kiss—wet and hot and hard.

He breaks the kiss to suck at the pulse pounding in my throat, saying roughly against my neck, “It hurts, doesn’t it? It hurts to want something so much.”

I’m wild by now, trying to climb him, but he won’t help me, he won’t do anything to fix the need I have for him. I twine my arms around his neck; I bite his lips as much as I kiss them—and still he won’t relent.

Made brazen by the ache between my legs, I slide my hands down his chest until I find the hanging ends of his belt, and then I pull at the stiff fabric of his shirt until I feel bare skin. His lower belly is firm and flat, but not ostentatiously sculpted, and there’s a fine trail of hair leading down into his pants. I know without looking that it’s as golden as the hair on his head—I remember seeing flashes of it on Beltane night, made ruddy and copperlike by the flaring firelight, or made silver and pale whenever a wandering flashlight caught it in its beam.

“Touch me,” I whisper, going farther down until I feel the heat of his erection against my fingertips. Until I can fill my hands with his c**k and tug gently upwards.

He stiffens but he doesn’t relent. In fact, he barely reacts at all—just a small tensing of his stomach and a little hitch in his breathing.

“You’re made of stone,” I accuse.

He smiles against my mouth and pulls back enough that we can look each other in the eyes. “No. Not stone.”

Becket’s hands find mine, and he moves me like I’m a doll, cinching my skirt and curling my fingers around it and then placing my other hand against his heart. “This heart,” he murmurs, pressing me back into the shelves, “beats and pounds every minute of the day so that I can exist to love. I was created to love. And I know no other way to love than with my entire body.” His hips are against mine, and I can feel the dangling ends of his belt against my thighs. “I know no other way to love other than to be consumed by it, to throw my entire body on the altar of it. I want the blood in my veins to be burning with worship. I—” and here he drops his lips to my ear “—want—” and he finally pushes against me like that, sending the taut curve of his maleness pushing into my cunt “—ecstasy.”

I shudder as he pushes against me again—expertly, not penetrating me but teasing me, the tempting pressure of his erection sending me writhing against it. But every time I chase him, he moves with me, keeping us just at the edge of joining.

“I want nothing between me and what I love,” Becket whispers into my mouth. “Between you and me. Between me and God. Ecstasy always.”

I moan. “Becket, please—”

“But we can’t live day to day consumed by love,” Becket says, as if I hadn’t spoken. He cups my breast and slides his other hand into my hair. “So I have to keep my love at bay. I have to deny myself the full force of it.” His c**k pushes against me, but still he refuses to let me impale myself on him, even though I’m wet enough that he’s slid past my inner folds right to my very entrance. All it would take is one nudge. One tilt.

“Denial,” Becket murmurs to me, closing his eyes, “is the imprint love leaves on the world. It is love’s fossil. Its sign. Sacrifice is the heart of love.”

It’s the same voice that exhorts a flock to return their hearts to their god, and it seems to fill the cavernous library, all the way up to the plasterwork arching above us and all the way down to the gloomiest leather-scented corners.

Sacrifice is the heart of love, I repeat to myself, the words thrumming through me. I think of Estamond’s torc and the black roses covering the door. She who became the Thorn King so that the men she loved wouldn’t have to. Because she couldn’t think of any other way to keep them safe.

“Sacrifice,” I say, and rock myself against him, “sounds like a lot of work.”

“Sometimes,” Becket agrees, “it’s far too much.” And then he pierces me fully with his broken denial, driving me right to my toes.

My head falls back as he thrusts inside, and even at this angle, there’s a stretch and fullness that has me gasping. He has my bottom filling his hands as he lifts me higher and can finally stroke in all the way to his thick, golden base.

“Oh,” I mumble, feeling Becket’s invasion now, and the Beltane s*x a couple of nights before along with it. Becket is too gentle for real sadism, so the lingering soreness is all the roughness I’ll get. I hold on to it, I savor it. Use it to remind myself that I’m Auden’s May Queen, his and Saint’s little bride to be wedded by the Beltane fire. I don’t need pain to come—just kink, and being loaned out to a desperate priest is kinky enough—but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the reminders of Auden and Saint’s rough use of me don’t help me get there. And fast.

“Becket,” I say, and then I forget what I was going to say because Becket pins me against the side of the shelf again and gives me a taste of that mysterious expertise of his, stroking in and out of me until I can barely breathe for the climax building in my belly.

“You’re magnificent,” he says, his face so close to mine. “You’re heaven. You feel—so—good—” The smooth strokes of his hips grow jerky and abrupt, and I swear I feel him swell inside of me, bigger and harder than ever.

He’s going to come.

A small firecracker of panic flares and pops in my mind. I just started taking birth control pills yesterday, and I’m supposed to use a back-up method of contraception for seven days after starting to be on the safe side. s**t, s**t, s**t.

“I’m not—don’t come inside me,” I say, hoping it’s not too late, hoping he won’t be mad. “I should have said something earlier, I’m sorry, but—”

I forget that he’s a priest; I forget that he’s my priest, and the look he gives me as his hips go still is as patient and understanding as any shepherd’s. “Don’t apologize,” he murmurs. “I should have asked. Are you close?”

I nod.

“Do you want me to stay inside you while I make you come? There might still be some risk even then, but I’ll keep myself from coming.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes.”

I’m too horny to be a hundred percent safe right now. Mostly safe sounds good enough to my p***y. “Yes, I want you to stay inside.”

He needs no other encouragement, fingertips digging into my ass as he starts working me against him—not with short thrusts, but with deep, grinding rolls—strokes for me, not for him. Almost immediately, the earlier panic is replaced by pure, urgent pleasure.

“Is this okay?” I pant in his ear. “Will you be okay?”

“Do you mean,” Becket asks, his voice near-guttural with need, “will I be able to keep myself from pumping my release inside you once you go over the edge? Or will I just give in and give you everything I’ve been feeling all these weeks?”

I can’t answer him, because his obscene words—and in that voice, like he’s seconds away from throwing me on the floor and rutting into me however he wants—send me careening into bliss. The burst below my navel is bright and sweet and wonderful, and I ride it easily, my eyes open and my fingers clutched tight in his hair.

“Sweet saint,” he murmurs lovingly. “I’d give up everything for this, for you.”

Even in the haze of my orgasm, I know that’s not true. Even if I’d allow him to give up anything at all—which I wouldn’t—I know he could never give up serving God. Should never. Being a priest is too deeply rooted in him to weed out now; those roots are threaded through his nerves and veins and bones.

Becket pulls out of me, leaving me squeezing around nothing, and sets me back on my feet. There’s no time for words, for him explaining what he needs, and so he spins me around to face the shelves and uses a foot to kick my legs together. Before I realize what he’s up to, he’s sliding his slick c**k between my thighs from behind, f*****g my pressed-together thighs like he would a mouth or p***y.

Every surge sends the dusky tip of him emerging from the front of my legs, and on every stroke, the top of his shaft glides along my wet seam, making everything slicker and slicker. It peeks out a final time—huge and taut and near-painful-looking with how swollen he is—and with a moan that’s deep and rich and musical, he erupts. Thick jets of seed spatter against the shelves and run down my thighs; his hands—suddenly more forceful than they’ve been all day—press into my soft thighs and yank me back, over and over and over, so he can f**k every last drop right out of himself.

Semen runs down the front of my leg, and his breath is warm and fast on my neck as the last few shudders rack his frame.

He gradually goes still.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

His hands become gentle and careful on my legs, stroking up once or twice before he smooths my skirt down over them. He pulls back as he slides free from my thighs, and it isn’t until he makes a low noise in his throat that I realize it’s because he wants to watch. Both the act of him pulling through my flesh and also the inevitable ruffle of my skirt back over my exposed bottom, which is no doubt bearing the fast-fading reddish marks of his hands.

“I’m okay,” I reassure him, and turn to give him a hug. He’s warm—so warm—even through his shirt, and his heart is still beating fast. “Are you?”

I want to say something more—maybe about how he should try to stop loving me or about how I could attempt to love him like he wants me to—but both of those things would be wrong, and so all I can do is repeat what I said earlier. “Anytime you need me—anytime you need to show me how you feel . . .”

His lips find my hair.

“I know,” he says quietly. “I know.”