Which I can’t handle. I can’t handle her chanting my name like a prayer, not with that open, unshuttered expression on her face, not with her eyes like silver rain. Not with her body hot and wet and swollen with pleasure.
I make an animal noise against her skin as I use my free hand to tear open my trousers and pull my cock free. I shouldn’t come, I don’t deserve to come, I don’t deserve to feel anything other than grateful that she’s letting me do this, but as I said earlier, I’m not sure how moral I actually am. Like everything else in me, my morality begins and ends with Charlotte, and when I feel her tremble like a leaf caught in the wind when she realizes I’m beating off, that’s all the absolution I need. She always did like it more if I drained myself during oral sex, and she enjoyed watching me handle my needs so much that I’d reward her with it sometimes. A dirty show just for her peeping little heart.
My hips punch forward into my clumsy, left-handed touch as I use my other hand to wring my last climax out of Charlotte.
“Church,” she says again. “Oh fuck, Church, please fuck me. Please please please—”
Her broken words are changing into broken cries, and I relish the sound of them, relish the sound of her begging and craving even after three orgasms. I relish it so much that my starved body releases with a shudder and sends long, hot ropes of cum between her legs, marking the wall, her ankle, part of her pants.
It’s the first decent climax I’ve had in four years, and it wrecks me from head to toe. It ends all thought, all movement, all feeling except the dizzying, floating relief of coming home again.
I didn’t even realize I’d stopped eating her until my pulses slowed, and now she’s grabbing at my hand to fuck her again, her eyes wide and wild at the sight of my cock and also at my seed everywhere and also at my rough, lewd hand between her legs.
“God, I wish I could fuck you,” she says in a pant. “Really fuck you. Hours and hours, riding your giant cock until I can’t stop coming—” Her own words send her over, and the fourth orgasm detonates through her. The contractions around my fingers are hard and fast and merciless, and she bends forward at the waist, curling over me as she grips my hair hard and gasps through the sharp, biting pleasure of it.
She cries my name a final time—Church—as her body wrings itself free of all the adoration she’s soaked up from my touch. Everything is wet and sex-smelling and the pain in my scalp is nothing compared to the jagged joy I feel at seeing and feeling her like this—utterly carnal and completely euphoric. In a state of Church-induced rapture. And then her knees give out, and even though I can catch her before she falls, we end up rolling to the floor in a tangle of legs and arms and expensive wool and cheap uniform polyester.
She blinks down at me with something like bemusement, like she’s just awoken from some kind of spell and can’t remember how we got here. And I can see it—I can see the very moment self-loathing darkens her eyes and pulls at the nibble-worthy corners of her mouth. She’s angry with herself for succumbing to me again. It makesmefeel angry to witness—angry with myself and her and with everything—and I wish I could justatoneonce and for all, no matter the price. All my money, my property, a finger, a kidney—anything, I would pay any cost, because nothing is as costly as being without her.
Curls the color of white gold have worked their way free from her ponytail and now fly free around her face. They beg to be pulled and I ache to pull them.
I reach up, wind a curl around my finger, and tug.
Her lips part, putting my favorite freckle on delicious display, and then her eyes flutter and widen as the familiar cocktail of pain-induced neuropeptides and hormones lace her blood. Adrenaline, endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin—our altar wine.
I tug again for the sheer pleasure of it, for the drop in my own blood pressure, my own dopamine and oxytocin hits, for the deeper and beyond-chemical joy of seeing her release her clenched grip on her thoughts and hurts and sink completely into the here and now with me. Fuck, I love her. I love her when she wants to murder me, I love her when she resists me, I love her when she surrenders to me. If I were a cleric and not an academic—one of the faithful instead of whatever the skeptical but obsessed fuck I am—this is how I would feel about God too. Full of so much love and adoration that I’d do anything right now to show her, any scourging or fasting she asked.
“You asshole,” she whispers, and then fists her hands in my sweater and rolls to the side, so that she’s on her back and yanking me over top of her so that I’m braced on my forearms and caging her with muscle and will.
“You missed this,” I tell her. I don’t need to ask. One doesn’t pull a Dominant ex-lover on top of them if one doesn’t miss it.
“You asshole,” she repeats, but her eyes are shining with tears. She tries to look away, but there’s nowhere to turn her head that isn’t into my arms, so it’s more a nuzzle than an escape.
Tenderness—the thing I’ve only ever felt with her—surges up inside me. “You know this is what I meant when I said I wanted to be your temple,” I say, fingers finding her hair and stroking the silk there. “The temple to keep you and shelter you and protect you. The temple you could come to for safety and hope and rest. I wantedthis,” and I tighten my arms and legs around her to make my point. That if there was a way I could carry her through the world tucked up inside of myself, I would do it.
“You just want me to worship you again,” she sniffs.
That’s undeniably true, even if it’s not the only thing that’s true. “Well. Yes.”
“I knew it.”
“That doesn’t make me a liar, little supplicant. Temples are for the worshippers, not for the worshipped. Is it so hard to believe that I want to give you this more than I want to enjoy you taking it?”
“You left me,” she says into my arm, not looking at me. “You were supposed to promise to be my temple forever and you left me.”
This is also undeniably true. “I did.”
“Why?” she asks brokenly, finally turning her eyes up to me. They are every cloud I’ve ever seen, every drop of rain, every lonely puddle in the road. “Why?”
It’s those eyes that finally break me, that gut me. No longer a knife in the heart but through the soul. And I deserve it, because it’s as bad as she believes it to be. It might be worse.
“For work,” I answer after all these years, and I want to close my eyes right now, a cowardly move but one that’s almost irresistibly tempting right now. Because how pathetic it sounds, how stupid and how utterly mundane. She’s waited four years to hear that her fiancé and god was more concerned with keeping the right office in the right building than pledging his love to her.
“For work,” she repeats, looking confused. “Church, we fucked for a year before the wedding. I wasn’t even your student that semester. If you were really worried about work, then why propose? Why go through the whole song and dance of helping me find a venue? Paying for my dress?”
“You would have been my student again,” I point out, even though it doesn’t matter now. But with our department the way it was and with Charlotte as clever and driven as she was—and with me as possessive as I was—it would have been inevitable. In the classroom or on a dig—she would have been mine again. And I would have made sure it was so, because I never did trust anyone else with the jewel that is my Charlotte’s mind. “But that youhadbeen, that you were still enrolled at the university, that was damning enough. And I didn’t realize it until the director told me.”
Her brows pull together. “The director?”