“Press your legs together,” I commanded. “Make it tighter.”

She obeyed, and I sank in with a groan. “So tight like this,” I managed. “You make it so good for me.”

I shoved in again, hard enough that her feet came off the floor, and I kept going like that, her beautiful ass filling my hands and her satin cunt around my cock and her moans as she ground her clit against the firm arm of the sofa.

And in this moment of her Esther-like love for us and a future that was so ephemeral as to be nonexistent, it came to me that there was no sin here. This was love, this was sacrifice, the opposite of sin, and maybe it was fucked up to feel like God was here with us in the back room of a strip club, but I did, like He was bearing witness to this moment where Poppy opened herself to the worst of me and erased it with her love, just like God did for us sinners every moment of every day.

That feeling that Poppy and I had felt in the sanctuary, that God-feeling of presence and promise, it was here right now, making my chest tight and my head swim with the potency of the air itself, and once again I felt like a bridegroom, the man shouting his joy for all his friends and family to hear, and this room was our chuppah, our marriage tent, the faint blue lights the lamps of the ten virgins, our bodies echoing the joining God had already forged between our immortal souls.

How was this not marriage? How was this not more binding and more intimate, us bare with each other in the presence of God? At the very least, this was a betrothal, a promise, an oath.

I spanked my betrothed, wishing I could drink her squeals like Scotch and eat her moans afterward. I fucked her hard, taking in the blue hair tumbling over her back, the delicate lines of her small waist as they swelled into her perfect hips and ass, her wet cunt gripping me, and the pink aperture of her asshole—all of it mine. I was the monarch of all I surveyed—no, I was the master of all I surveyed, and I spanked and scratched and stabbed her over and over again with my cock until finally, finally, she made a noise that was half gasp, half wail, pulsing around me, her hands scrabbling at the leather as she was lost to everything but her body’s response to me.

I was lost to it too—this moment where I had rewritten history, her body’s history—where I had made this room belong to me and the orgasms that I’d given her. Where I’d made her mine and no other man’s, where I had taken an oath of marriage in my heart, and it was that mine that made me pull out and force her on her knees. I wanted her to witness my orgasm, I wanted her to see what she had given me.

The leash in one hand, the other hand with its rough grip and brutal pressure on my cock, using the wetness she’d left on me as lubrication, and it only took a few rough tugs before I shot streams of semen on her waiting lips, on her swan’s neck, on the fringes of her long eyelashes.

The tip of her tongue, pointed and pink, licked a drop off her upper lip, and then she gave me a soft, happy look that sent one more jet of come out to land on her collarbone.

We both breathed heavily for a moment, pleasure still thick in the air, but it was the only thing thick in the air now: the tension and bitterness and anger from earlier were gone. It had worked—Poppy’s game had worked. I had burned away the jealousy and primal urges, and in the interim, also burned away something else. My guilt maybe, or the feeling of sin. Something had shifted, like it had for me those moments on the altar, where the line between sacred and profane blurred completely, and I felt like I’d just participated in something holy, just pressed my naked hands to the mercy seat in a cloud of incense and sweat.

I knelt in front of her and untied the silk leash, using the material to carefully dab my climax off her face. “Game over,” I said gently, running the tip of my nose along her jaw.

“Who do you think won?” she murmured.

I wrapped her in my arms and pulled her into me, kissing the top of her head. “Do you even have to ask? It’s you, little lamb.” She nestled into me, and I rocked her back and forth, my precious one, my sweet woman. “It’s always you.”

The autumn night pressed against the outside of the car as we drove home, and I kept my eyes on Poppy’s profile, which was lit by the lights on the dash and silhouetted against the velvet night outside.

What had happened in the club…it had been dirty and cathartic and galvanizing, although I couldn’t articulate to myself exactly why. The answer hovered just out of reach, shimmered beyond a veil that I could only graze with the fingertips of my thoughts, and as we passed out of the city and into the countryside, I stopped trying and just let myself take in the majesty that was my Esther, my queen.

I wanted her to be my bride.

I wanted her to be my bride.

The thought came with the clarity of cold steel, certain and true and no longer something I felt in the moment of sex and God, but something I felt sober and calm. I loved Poppy. I wanted to marry her.

And then the veil finally fluttered down and I understood. I understood what God had been trying to tell me these past two months. I understood why the Church was called the Bride of Christ, I understood why Song of Songs was in the Bible, I understood why Revelation likened the salvation of the world to a wedding feast.

Why had I ever felt like the choice was between Poppy and God? It had never been that way, it had never been one or the other, because God dwelled in sex and marriage just as much as He dwelled in celibacy and service, and there could be just as much holiness in a life as a husband and a father as there was in a life as a priest. Was Aaron not married? King David? Saint Peter?

Why had I convinced myself that the only way a man could be useful to God was in the clergy?

Poppy was humming along with the radio now, a sound barely audible over the dull roar of the Fiat on the highway, and I closed my eyes and listened to the sound as I prayed.

Is this Your will for me? Am I giving in to lust? Or am I finally realizing Your plan for my life?

I kept my mind quiet and my body still, waiting for the guilt to rush in or for the booming voice from Heaven to tell me I was damned. But there was nothing but silence. Not the empty silence I’d felt before all this, like God had abandoned me, but a peaceful silence, free of guilt and shame, the quiet that one had when one was truly with God. It was the feeling I’d had in front of the tabernacle, in the sanctuary with Poppy, on the altar as I’d finally claimed her for my own.

And as we were in her bed later, my face between her thighs, it was 29th chapter of Jeremiah that finally surfaced as the answer to my prayers.

Take wives and have sons and daughters…for surely I have plans for you, plans for your happiness and not for your harm, to give you a future full of hope…

I didn’t tell Poppy about my epiphany. Instead, after making her come time after time, I left for my own bed, wanting to sleep alone with this new knowledge, this new certainty.

And when I woke up early that morning to prepare for Mass, that certainty was still there, glowing clear and weightless in my chest, and I made my decision.

This Mass would be the last Mass I ever said.

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell…and if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the Kingdom of God with one eye than have two eyes and to be thrown into hell…”

I looked up at my congregation standing before me, at the sanctuary that was full because of me, because of three years of unceasing toil and labor. I looked back down to the lectionary and continued reading the Gospel selection for today.