The last several days had been like something out of a dream or a fairy tale, where my days were chased by the structured benevolence that was my life as a priest, and where my nights were filled with gasps and sighs and skin sliding over skin.

At night, we could pretend. We could drink and watch Netflix, we could fuck and shower together afterwards (and then fuck again.) We could drowse next to each other and fall softly into sleep. We could pretend we were just like any couple a few weeks into their relationship, that there wasn’t anything keeping us from talking about normal couple things, like meeting each other’s parents or where we would spend Thanksgiving.

But we were acutely and painfully aware of our own acting, of our own pretense. We were faking it because facing the truth was so much worse, the truth that this paradise would end one way or another.

What if it didn’t have to end? What if I called the bishop tomorrow and told him I wanted to quit? That I wanted to be defrocked and made into a normal man again?

Laicized. That was the word for it. From the late Latin laicus, meaning layperson. To be made into a layperson.

What if a few months from now I could kneel in front of Poppy and do more than offer her an orgasm and offer her my hand in marriage instead?

I closed my eyes, shutting out the real world and letting my mind go where I hadn’t let it go before—to the future. To a future where it was her and me and a house somewhere and little Bell children underfoot. I would follow her anywhere, and if she wanted to work in New York or London or Tokyo, or stay in Kansas City, I would go with her. I was like Ruth with Naomi, I was ready to make her life and her desires my own, and any place Poppy wanted to go, we would make a home together. Spend our hours together fucking and loving. Someday watching her stomach grow with my child.

But what would I do? I had two degrees, both equally useless in the real world, useless everywhere except temples of God and temples of learning. I could teach, I supposed, theology or maybe languages. I’d always wanted to be a scholar, sitting in some dusty library, poring over dusty books, excavating forgotten knowledge the way an archeologist excavates forgotten lives. The idea excited me, blowing like rain across my thoughts, drops and splashes of possibility. New cities, new universities…a list compiled itself in my head of places that had the best classics programs and the best theology programs—there had to be a way I could fuse the two together, maybe apply for a doctoral program or take a job as an adjunct…

I opened my eyes and that pleasant, fantastical rain stopped, and the weight of everything I would have to leave behind crushed against me. I’d be leaving this town—Millie, the youth group, the men’s group, all the parishioners I’d so carefully courted back to God. I’d be leaving the pancake breakfast and clothes pantry and all the work on fighting predators in the clergy. I’d be leaving behind the gift of turning bread into flesh, wine into blood, of having one hand on the veil that separated this world from the next. I’d be leaving behind Father Bell, the man I’d become, and I’d have to molt him away like so much dead flesh and ruined feathers, and grow a new shape with painful new pink skin.

I had a life building treasures in heaven, beating myself like a runner for the race, and I was thinking of giving that up…for what? I tried to stop the verses I knew by heart crowding my mind, verses about sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption, verses about passions of the flesh waging war against my soul. Put to death what is earthly in you.

Put to death my love for Poppy.

My throat tightened and my mouth went dry; my anxiety spiked, as if someone was holding a knife to my throat and demanding that I choose, now, but how I could I choose when both choices came at such cost?

Because if I stayed where I was, I lost the woman sleeping next to me, this woman who argued about racial and gender disparities on The Walking Dead, who pulled obscure literary quotes from the air, who drank like she was drowning and who made me come harder than I ever had in my life.

That realization made the panic bite at me hard.

Turning to face her, I stroked a hand along her side, down the slope of her ribs and up the curve of her hip. She stirred a bit and snuggled in closer, still fast asleep, and my chest clenched.

I couldn’t lose her.

And I couldn’t keep her.

This kind of fear, this specific brand of panic, shouldn’t have made me hard, but it did. Hard enough that I had to reach down and stroke myself. I was engulfed with the need to claim my girl once again, to bury myself inside of her, as if one more orgasm would make a difference in scaring away our doomed future.

I slipped a hand down between us as I turned my body towards hers, finding those soft lips below her legs, and I started teasing them apart, flicking my fingers across her clit and over the frilled pink skin around her entrance. She shifted and sighed a happy, sleepy sigh, her legs falling open to grant me better access, although her eyes remained closed and her face relaxed. She was still asleep.

I bent my head to take a nipple into my mouth, sucking gently, fluttering my tongue around the tightening peak, and she was squirming now, but still asleep and fuck it, I couldn’t wait any longer. I lifted one of her legs and slung it over my hip as I positioned myself at her entrance. Holding her still, I pushed myself in, and like a curtain falling over a sunny window or a door closed against the noise of a party, the doubts were immediately muffled. They vanished in the face of our connection, the sensation of her tight cunt gripping me. God, I could stay like this forever, not even moving, just being inside of her, feeling her rouse and stretch like a languorous cat while I held her hips fast to mine.

Finally, her eyes opened, drowsy but pleased. “Mmm,” she hummed, hooking her leg more securely around my waist. “I like waking up like this.”

“I do too,” I said huskily, reaching up to sweep a lock of hair off her cheek.

She put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back, rolling with me so that I was laying flat with her on top of me; she began riding me with slow, dozy undulations. Sleep and sex had tousled her hair, and it hung in tangled, messy waves around her white shoulders and soft breasts, and the streetlight streaming in through the window painted her curves in shades of light and shadow.

Sometimes she was too beautiful to look at.

I laid back, lacing my arms behind my head, just watching as she ground her pleasure out of me, as she start moving faster and faster, her eyes falling closed and her hands braced against my stomach. From this angle I could see the needy bud being rubbed against my pelvis, the tiniest glimpse of where I was filling her and stretching her, and fuck, I could lose it right now if I wasn’t careful.

“That’s my girl,” I whispered. “Use me to come. There you go. You’re so fucking sexy right now. Come on, baby, get it. Get it.”

Her mouth parted and I watched in fascination as the muscles in her stomach seized and tightened, as she moaned and quaked her way through her climax, eventually sliding forward to lay against my chest.

I held her tight to me and then rolled us back over, so that I was on top and she was on her back, and then I bent down and sucked on her neck. I reached under her and found what I wanted, the tight, little rim behind her cunt. She pressed herself into the mattress, as if trying to get away from my touch, but that wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all, because I had plans for that part of her that extended well beyond what one fingertip could do.

“Are you saying no?”

She bit her lip and then shook her head. “Not a no. Yes.”