Needing to see something other than him so I can justthink, I turn so that I’m facing the wall, which is stupid, because what’s my plan here? To stare at the wall until he goes away? To hope that if I can’t see his sculpted mouth or haunted eyes I might regain my will to murder him? Or at the very least go back downstairs to Twyla and my champagne duties?
The other reason this is a stupid plan presents itself immediately; a large hand plants itself on the wall by my head, and I feel the ghost of a warm finger trace the curve of my shoulder.
As if Church needs my mouth or even my full attention to work his god-magic on me. Fully clothed and staring at a blank wall, I’m still trembling on the edge of senselessness and all from a single brush of his finger.
“I first found you here,” he says, his finger following the seam of my shirt to its collar. “In this very room. My greatest treasure, and like all great treasures, I nearly missed seeing you, buried as you were in the crush of the ordinary and the mundane.” The pad of his finger—warm and rough—whispers across my nape, and a shiver skips all the way down my spine. “I nearly walked away, and if I had, some other lover would have found you and your mind, not me.”
His fingers move around the edges of my hairline, and then suddenly my ponytail holder is tugged free and my hair is loose and sifting down around my shoulders. He runs his fingers through it, he massages at my scalp and rubs away the tenderness from where it’s been pulling all night.
My eyes flutter closed at the pleasure, but I still manage to say, “You ended up missing me anyway. At the church, remember?”
He ignores this, still rubbing and stroking along my scalp until my toes are curling. Or they would curl if my damn shoes weren’t so tight. “The night after we met, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t come back. You were too young, and I’d been a churl to you. And on top of it all, I wanted to tie you to the bed and make you talk about religious iconography while I buried myself in your cunt—and never, ever have I wanted something as powerfully as I wanted that. As I wanted you.”
His fingers follow the curve of my jaw until they get to my chin and then my head is tilted back to rest against his shoulder. With one hand still against the wall and his other now toying idly with the top button of my shirt, I’m enveloped in his embrace. His chest is warm against my back, even through his tuxedo, and against my skirted bottom—
I shiver again, unable to resist the urge to press against him. Just a little. Just to confirm that his erection is as thick and hard as it ever was, a beautiful, massive thing that proved Church’s divinity, because no mortal could have a cock like that. It wouldn’t be fair to the other men of the world.
His breath catches as I press against him, but he doesn’t move otherwise, he doesn’t hoist me over his shoulder to find the nearest spot to fuck me in, he doesn’t shove me to my knees to fix the problem I made—all things he would have done four years ago.
He does none of this, and that’s when I know I’m in real trouble. He’s going to exploit that horrible, all-consumingthingthat’s always been between us. That thing when a supplicant finally finds the temple in which to prostrate herself, when a wolf finally finds a bunny that will hop after him and seek shelter between his paws. He’s making me feel it all over again.
His fingers drop to my hip, now to my thigh, now to my knee.
“You have a date here tonight,” I say, pointlessly.
“And?”
Typical Church answer. Asshole.
“I—I was going to murder you,” I say as his fingers hook under the hem of my skirt and trace maddening circles up my bare thigh. It’s a place where I haven’t been touched in years, and my body is having all kinds of wet, shivery feelings about him touching it now.
I should stop this. Yes, I should definitely stop this.
I’m going to stop it so hard.
In, like, a minute.
“You can still murder me,” Church says soothingly, his fingers now stroking along the line of my panties. My head is lolling against his shoulder and my hips are pushing against his touch, trying to get his fingers to more interesting places. “I’ll let you murder me all you want. But let me make you feel better first, hmm? Just rub it all better.”
He emphasizes his point by sliding a single finger under the cotton and running it over the curl-covered swell he finds there.
I gasp, and in the space of that gasp, he’s rucked my skirt up to my waist and slid his whole hand down the front of my panties. He cups me hard, like he used to do every chance he got before, and my body remembers. My body remembers what my mind tries so hard to forget—that this is a man I used to trust so completely, with every cell in my body, and there was a time he rewarded that trust with a breathless worship of his own. A fierce adoration and pride.
Pride.
It was always pride with us. Pride that irritated him into aggressing a poor tour guide, pride that made me fire back. Pride that kept both of us from backing down from danger when I walked into his classroom a week after the tour and realized the mysterious man I’d been fucking for the last six nights was my new professor.
“I shouldn’t teach you.”
“I promise to behave.”
“Liar. Luckily for you, I don’t trust anyone else with your education.”
So we’d done it—we’d played the promising student/flinty professor game during his lectures, and then the moment we were alone, footsteps of my classmates still echoing down the hall, I’d be yanked onto his lap and bitten and licked. In between bites, he told me everything I got wrong in my last assignment. At his flat, we’d punctuate arguments about Mircea Eliade’s approach to comparative religion with hard squeezes and strokes and orgasms, and I’d tell him he was wrong about human symbolic thinking in the Lower Paleolithic while he wrapped me in rope and then fucked me however he saw fit. He graded my papers while balancing his laptop on my back as I lay limp and well-used in his bed. And whenever I said something insightful in class, whenever I won an argument, whenever I hit on something clever in my papers, I was rewarded just as ferociously as when I was corrected.
No, not rewarded.Reverenced.
Revered and venerated and cherished.