“And what is that life, Charlotte?” he asks, intensity burning beneath the surface of his voice. “What is this? I don’t understand how my little one is here in clothes that don’t fit, too pale, too tired, too thin. How could my supplicant, my brilliant one, end up in the shadows like this?”
Rage, white-hot and poisonous, floods my veins.
“You want answers?” I hiss. “You should have been there to ask the questions when it would have mattered.”
His jaw twitches again. He knows I’m right.
“So you answer your own question, Professor Cason, because I’m not your fuckable little prodigy anymore.”
“That was never how I thought—”
“I’m leaving now,” I interrupt. “Going back to myshadows.”
“Charlotte.”
I glare at him as I retuck my shirt into the waist of my skirt. “Don’t follow me, don’t talk to me. Don’t even think about me, or I’ll drive my knee so far between your legs you’ll have a dent in your heart, got it?”
His eyes narrow, ever so slightly—a god assessing a rebellious mortal—and then he nods, his eyes menacingly pretty.
“Good night, little supplicant,” he says softly, in a voice I know means he thinks it isn’t over.
But it is. It is over.
There’s no unsinning those sins of his.
4
Church
There’s a Ray Bradbury story about God. Well, there’re several, actually, but one in particular captivated me as a child. It’s called “The Man.”
In the story, a rocket ship full of explorers lands on a planet, and upon landing, they learn that God has just been there. The planet’s inhabitants—joyous with their newfound revelations—invite the explorers to stay, to hear what The Man has told them. All of the explorers agree, save for the captain. Bitter and blustering on about proof, he decides to chase after The Man, to follow him to the next planet and the next and the next, until he catches Him. Until he can pin Him down and look at Him with his own two eyes.
The captain is clearly the villain of the story; a man incapable of humility and incapable of faith. He believes that if God can be chased, then God can be caught. And if God can be caught, then God can fix the unhappiness inside him. And the story says that’s bad for all the usual Bradbury reasons of humanity and love being more important than ambition and greed and so forth...but as a child, I couldn’t help but empathize with the captain. Couldn’t help but think I’d be climbing back into my rocket ship too, if I knew how to chase God through space.
So I grew up and taught myself how to chase God another way. Through time instead.
I became convinced that if I simply unearthed the right temple complex or cradled the right figurine in my hands, I’d finally behold the face of God. Not in an idol-worshipping sense, but in a sacred sense, a discarnate one—my mind able to brush against God’s mind, if only for a second, if only for a brief moment as I dusted ochre-stained dirt from a piece of bone or stood on a wind-whipped ridge overlooking a ritual landscape.
Unlike the captain in the story, however, I was perfectly content merely to chase. To chase was also to understand in its own way, and therefore the chasing became the singular goal of my life. To dig, to study, to write. To teach, because teaching was how one was able to dig and study. My career was more than aprofession—it was a vocation as cherished and holy to me as a priest’s. It was the one thing that mattered, the only thing I held dear.
The only thing, that is, until I was manipulated into taking a group of visiting colleagues on a tour and I first laid eyes on Charlotte Tenpenny.
She was winsomely brash and happy and faking her way through that tour with adorable aplomb. She had wild, curling hair and a spray of freckles across her pale nose and rosy cheeks.
She had eyes the color of a rainy day. A nose ring and a dimple.
And most damning of all for me, a freckle on her lower lip.
I couldn’t stop staring at it. Of all the depraved shit I’ve done, all the men and women I’ve fucked and wrecked, somehow that freckled lip was the single most obscene thing I’d ever seen.Shewas the single most obscene thing I’d ever seen, and nobody else around me realized it. They were fooled by her friendly accent and her cheap business-casual clothes, by her confidence and sunniness.
She played the role of cheery intern well, but I could see the truth all over her.
She needed biting. She needed licking. She needed me.
And after she snapped back at me, held her ground against my admittedly unmannerly questions? Revealed that singular mind to me? Then I knew something much worse.
Ineededher.