#first omen

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned."

He can't help but feel the words on your tongue are loaded. A trap sprung apart should he dare lift his foot from the plate. Knuckles rapt hard for reaching towards the fruit dangled. Ripe and yielding. Dewdrop glistening early morning temptation.

"It's been... a while, since my last confession."

A formality scripted. He well knows when last your confession was.

The Sisters expect the girls to go once each week, if not every other. Your last confession with him was teetering on a month, another strike against you he didn't deem pertinent to inform the Sisters of. Coming at all and coming earnest is the bit that counts, is what he believes. Just as praying doesn't need to be done in a church to be heard. All it requires is heart, a desire sincere.

A soft smile you can't see, Father Brennan does his best to wear it on his voice for you instead. "No need to be shy, child. You're here now, and that's what matters."

This new generation of girls impresses more than their predecessors. A society streaked with rebellion, loud and out-spoken. But the broken-mold upheaval has claimed not a single of his lambs. They stick close by, and come when called. A feat to be proud of, it only demands his renewed obligation for his problem child. His personal interest in your case. Your faith is being tested. Belief you've stretched beyond recognition, you've come to him to bring it back to shape.

"I'm just... struggling, Father." The words need to be coaxed, a skittish babe hunkered under the brush. Sniffing at his hand, head tilted up towards the sound of his encouragement. Coarse in it's cadence, there's a comfort in the low tonality. He doesn't shun. He's an embrace. He's shelter.

His flock is prosperous, a responsibility he regards with the utmost probity. Curled white obedience, velvet soft fidelity. A gaggle of young ones whose eyes sparkle when he rounds the corner, or enters the class. Their kind shepherd come to herd.

And then there's you. You follow him, but straggle and catch in the fray. You stray to wolf dens and cliff-sides. You rear and butt at your sisters. You yip at the elder sheep who try to offer the grass, nose turned even in starvation. But to his out-stretched hand you gallop forth, wobbling coltish, your eagerness unfeigned.

He's taken with you. Your stubborn inclination. Your curiosity. Your black fleece.

He's always drawn to that. The contrarian. The outlier. The challenge. The one most in need of salvation. He tells himself it's commonality. Necessity. The mantle he takes up as one who guides, who cares.

The power of allure is an old friend to him now. Father Brennan is far better acquainted with the taint of temptation, and how easily the lost are lead astray, then he'll ever admit. A unique perspective to bolster a vigilance weaponized. Your behavior has made you undesirable for the Sister's to curtail, but he will not stand idle while you're ravaged by skepticism, and picked clean by doubt. He will not allow you to fall through the cracks. He will not fail you.

"What sort of struggle?" He must tread slow, deliberate. Earn back the trust he fears he's lost from negligence assumed, unintentional oversight. What else would see your devotion tested? "Is there something specific?"

"I'm just feeling... distracted, lately." A gentle throat clearing, a delicate sniff. "I'm not really sure how to explain, but... I feel...," you huff, and begin again. His lips twitch curved empathy, not that you can see. "The church, God - they don't seem as important as they once were." You then hurry to clarify. "It makes me feel guilty."

"Oh, child." He relaxes against the wall, looking off nowhere in particular as clasped hands dangle between his thighs. "That's perfectly natural at your age."

"So this is something I'll outgrow?" You make yourself sound just hopeful enough that his next heart-beat thumps a fissure to pull apart in the tissue. Something bleeds from him there; pooling within the chest cavity. An endless well. Bubbled up to spit and smother. Viscous, slippery. A beginning.

"Even those on in years can become estranged from their faith. No need to fret. So long as you open yourself to him, trust that his word is true, you'll never stray farther than his reach."

Precious hopefulness turns rabid on a dime. He throws a bone but you pounce him instead. Digging, pawing, sifting. A stomach hollowed and grumbling for exploitation. Starved for something you can't place, you can recognize the smell. Salivating and curled inward, you smell it on him. On good Father Brennan.

"Do you ever struggle, Father?"

Realization mounts steadily that this is less a confession, and more spiritual counsel. A test to see if broken pieces match. Still, he affords you his time, his shoulder. These crucial pauses to win your favor he can almost taste. Things unsaid, things ached to say, haunt your open-ended lilts. Candied praline and powdered sugar in every skipped beat. Faint, he parses it through the stuffy smog of the confessional. He thinks on it a moment, and decides to entrust with you his truth.

Priests are, of course, only men.

"Aye, that I do."

"You're teasing me."

A chuckle seeps from the width of his chest, vibrating around his collar. "Never." Amusement worn like pride.

He's approachable, he's flawed. He's human. There's a reason why the girls take to him the way they do. Why he's held his position for so long, and only becomes more beloved with time.

Complacency a sheet of ice above a lake, he can neither see nor feel it thinning beneath his soles, the haze of a dawning spring warming his shoulders and nape. Honey-bees orbiting chrysanthemum, lavender lemonade, gingham print and large, pretty bows. A sweet smell. A distraction.

"No temptation has overtaken you except something common to mankind; and God is faithful, so he will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it." He quotes to share with you his strength. "I give you my honest truth. Nothing in life worth having is easy. We already hold his faith, in who we are, in what we do. Trust in yourself, lass. Distractions are fleeting, you'll find your way back."

"What if I never do?" A moment of silence as he considers your plight. Whipped vanilla melting on the tongue. An indulgence that carries too long, it sheds you antsy from your side of the confessional. "I don't know if I can trust in myself, Father. Some days I don't even recognize who I see in the mirror. It only makes me wish I was someone else." You confess in struck chords. Plucks of youths tumults and woes he remembers from once upon a time.

"Conviction is always tested by greener pastures. Commitment to a love you cannot touch is a tall order." His fingers find his collar. Hard, shining white. A piece of his armor. A last defense against the distant tick-tock-tick-tock of utter catastrophe. The seconds before a disaster captured black and white and catalogued for future observation. A history that repeats. Cold sweat and crisis of faith in your lush decadence. A twinge sprouts in his stomach, a body chastised for skipping breakfast. "A servant to God is a servant to his children; I'll help you, child. You can trust in that."

It's a pledge made raw. An honesty as brutal as his own struggles. He's made a confession from the wrong side of the booth. Only one of you seeks repentance.

"Thank you, Father Brennan." He can hear your relief in the smile he can't see. Gooey and confectioner sweet.

There's a hole gaped and pulsing where reconciliation should be. Gnawing and troublesome. A dog he adores, house broken, whining next to her mess, tail between her legs. He dismisses how you devoured his truth. Became sated by the weakness, offered like scraps from the table.

A hunger identified by a hunger known. He forgets it just as quick.

November's chill burst bright and wondrous, nipping him blushed in the walk over from the rectory to the school. It's a pleasant jaunt that takes all of about five minutes with a brisk gait.

1971 is on the horizon, in the creep of sunlight that lifts like a veil over the Earth, flooding it pale and harsh. In the mild breeze that lingers a little longer, a little cooler, his black sport coat all he needs as protection. In the tree-lined perimeter dying slowly, beautifully. Decay romanticized.

The colds moisture will soon dry out, raw and bitter to January bleak. The start of a new year always held such promise, even in all its gray.

St. Mary of Mercy Preparatory School for Girls is a paradise. His Eden. A garden of kindred souls he tends by day. Vibrant and new, petals unfurled fragrant, these flowers stretch towards him like he's their sun; for his is the hand that waters and weeds, and he is the warmth that nurtures. A flock of little lambs whose deference borders fawning. He doesn't encourage, nor does he mind. His role in their lives is to keep them on the straight and narrow, and most importantly, keep them with God.

The former decade suggested challenge, as it's one seduced by hedonism. The newest senior class of girls, his elder flock, are a good lot. Fine Catholic girls who subscribe to the faith he's sworn to uphold.

The school day has yet to begun, and he surveys the domain in the hushed tranquility before the first bell tolls. The quiet halls and clean scent. Lemons and basil in the waxed floors and laundered upholstery.

The school, like it's staff, is pristine. Infallible. The picture of where both the affluent upper-class, and scrimping blue-collar Catholics alike come together. The place they want their darlings enrolled. The air of exclusivity no more than an illusion, for money is money, and the gold-plated tabernacle won't pay for itself.

Empty, sparkling classrooms. A vast auditorium, state of the art. A library, full and still, its glass doors opposite an open parlor bathed in sun from all the windows surrounding it. Father Brennan moves through the halls like it's the first time all over again.

When he'd arrived just a few months before the school year was set to begin, and the doors officially opened. He had been Father Brennan for a decade then, an Irishman abroad.

The Great Depression swept through all of Ireland without prejudice. A young lad such as himself with the duty of caring for his mother left him with few options. It was either employment at Dunlop Rubber, the factory that killed his father, IRA recruitment that combed through for young men in need of a cause for their zeal, or the cloth.

His household was one of devout Catholics, just like every other household in South Dublin. Not even the death of his father, nor the subsequent financial exacerbation to a family barely getting on kept them from church on Sundays. Going from not a care in his world to the role of patriarch left behind for him to fill. A life of devotion only made the most sense. Eight years in a seminary quelled his rampage, tempered his hunger. His ma had bragging rights, and an extra shine to her eye.

His priesthood, shining and new, sent him straight away on a mission to Africa. The war at it's height, a priest of neutral soil wouldn't be perceived as a threat. Two years later and his return home was celebrated, and the opportunity gifted.

A private school slotted to open for the end of 49', state-side. Lodging through the on site rectory. It's own church right on the premises for he and the students. And a flock to call his own.

All he had to leave behind were the memories of his youth. Minor celebrity in his hometown. A mother who couldn't have been prouder of her one and only son, the American-bound priest. Checks mailed every month like clockwork to keep her comfortable back in Terenure. The tie to his place of birth held knotted by letters and the odd phone call.

A sweeping stretch of land, the dormitories take the left, to the right the rectory where he resides full time, and situated smack in between is the crown jewel of it all. The church. Complete with an office specifically for him, where his his psychology degree hangs framed.

Set back behind the school, to forever cast it in it's shadow. A-frame, red brick. A large circle of stained glass the only south facing window. A sturdy cross of wrought-iron juts from the roofs peak like a weather-vane. A single statue of Mother Mary greets at the front steps. Just on the outskirts of the city proper, St. Mary's boasts accommodations for girls whose parents wish to board them, but not every girl does.

A small handful stays on with he and the Sisters. That number waxes and wanes negligible with every new year, every graduating class replaced by the latest freshman. Ages 14 to 18. Most are Italian-Americans, though there is a healthy mix. A handful of Irish-Americans slip into the fold, their immigrant parents tickled by the notion their second generation daughters would be led by one of their own. Another feather in the school's cap.

A roster of nuns that sing his praises, an administration of kind middle-ages that say his name with fondness, and smiles to match. Most of the faculty are women, save for no less than two male teachers. Mr. Bradner, the music teacher, and Mr. Amato who oversees second year chemistry. That just leaves him. Father Brennan. The priest of their comfortable, woman-dominated ecosystem. The one and only. The way it's been for the last twenty years and some change.

All the change to take place those decades were the new faces to replace the graduates, and the new principal ten years prior. Not only a woman, but a nun. Cutting edge progressiveness for the turn of the 60's.

Sister Annette was an interesting woman. Senior and unassuming, she wore high slacks and turtlenecks unlike the habit of her sisters. Ever unreadable in her malaise of authority, one could always tell from her lacking expression exactly how she felt when she addressed you.

In her office hangs two pictures, in the space between her desk, and the seats for those on trial before her. The insentient witnesses of her adjudication. A portrait of Jesus Christ, next to a landscape of the Philadelphia Eagles.

"Oh, Father Brennan, I didn't know you were a fan?" She once chirped, shadowing her own door as she caught him staring. The one and only time she regarded him with any sort of genuine fellowship.

"Oh no, not me. Not of the NFL in general, you see-I'm partial to college. You might call it boyhood loyalties, or some such."

Mates with the Notre Dame placekicker from way back in his heyday. A clarification she neither needed nor wanted, given the light of camaraderie promptly cut by blinked disappointment.

He stops in the parlor to gaze through the glass. Proper trees grown sturdy, and thickets of shrubberies wait for his appraisal in the glow of matured dawn. Amber-golden foliage swept to neat piles cleared of the paved walk, courtesy of the grounds keeper. He remembers when he arrived to the property, the day he moved in.

What's now a true and proper garden was then little more than saplings and fresh mulch. He likes to visit it each morning, to admire it's progress, how it fares each season. He's watched it sprout from nothing, after all. A sign of longevity. His accomplishments symbolized in flowered brush and leaves. He too sprouted from nothing much at all. Home grown and lived enough, his roots have taken hold, well nourished. Come the spring there will be even more blossoms than the last.

He carries his years in weary shoulders, broad but drawn. Creased by laughter even while stoic, and cracked by crows feet. An elder age that garners enough respect, but not decrepit enough to disconnect from the youth he is to shepherd. Both feet sunk firm in his fifties, he was a far cry from strapping. Features prominent and severe, the moths drew to his flame because of his nonchalance. A rigid academic structure whose spiritual head was prepossessing in his candor, his notorious blind eye. Blue that blinds. A crooked, gentle exasperation behind the Sisters shoulders. A push-over, he was often accused.

A swell of chatter muffled then rings loud and clear in time with the bell. Gaggles of laughter and the usual begins the day, pouring in from the double-doors of the main entrance. His lambs. Good catholic girls; kilts and cable-knit and crucifixes. Bare-faced, un-manicured, and sincere. A flock of pure white and pure hearts. Teens both finicky and unconcerned, just like their parents coming together to decide on St. Marys, the girls come together to decide on him. They prefer his guidance to the pinched face Sisters. Sour and serious at all times, such as their reputation hinges on dismal, closed off approaches. Disapproval down to the very ritual of eating their lunches in the lounge, a huddle of black and white that pick apart the girls' devotion over egg salad and iced tea.

Stood tall and dark before the windows to the garden is where they always find him. Good Father Brennan. Hands in the pockets of his slacks. He's a plain man. Acute stare softened by the rings in his trunk. His Irish once hot-blooded and quick was now lax, quiet as the halls in the early morning. Sharp edges honed blunt. Wolfishness subdued, old and tired. He greets the girls with sleep still heavy in his throat. It's surrender, but sweet surrender nonetheless.

The sparkling ewe eyes and deferential bleats sing in reply. A sonorous chorus that follows in his wake. Throughout the halls, they grin and giggle; "Good morning, Father Brennan." "Good afternoon, Father Brennan."

His smile is kind, his nod measured. "Good morning, girls." An accented baritone smokes the mundane just exotic enough to keep them interested.

To keep them listening. To keep them faithful.

Another successful service, the ceremony has long since ended. Pews empty and stiff. The setting sun floods the wood columns and stark white between pink and hazy. Blushed and content with his performance, as the afterglow of dusk soothes it reverent.

He had once heard a comedian liken the work of a priest to the crowd work of an entertainer. There is a certain finesse to engagement, and the act of worship is one for lovers. He loves his church, the voice she gives him. He's learned her architecture, familiarized himself with her needs. He's nothing if not astute. In the aftermath of a particular job well done, she purrs for him.

He busies himself at the altar, alone with his thoughts, in the bliss of a mass concluded. His sermon hummed in the stretch of his lungs, the blood pumped in his veins. The motes of dust suspended in the shafts of technicolor. Twinkling satiation provided by such finesse. His competence, his projection.

"Quod ore sumpsimus." Uttered grave and humble, low enough to keep the words between he and God. One such ray, yellow and gold with a splash of green, catches him as he purifies the Ciborium over the chalice. Wide palms and broad shoulders radiant in stained glass light, like he's every bit the redeemer he's hailed. A bell jar of relevance.

The Christmas season seems to start sooner each year. Orange clove and pine zing each inhale citrus clean and nostalgic. Poinsettias dot the dais red and white. Beautiful and lush, the curated bouquets consigned to a slow death on display. Wilted and frail like stale casket spray. Still lovely to look at, mind. To watch them perish. Stolen. Glorified selfishness, to impose upon them a purpose of temporary decoration. No more, no less.

Heels click the tile in brisk approach, luring his attentions to Mrs. Grady, an attendant of the main office, with you in toe.

The rubber soles of your mary janes fall silent in your step, though your head is held high behind her, assured with the saunter of your hips. You're but a girl, though your walk is a womans. You carry yourself with the oversized confidence of a fatale. One who looks into his tired eyes and wary posture and sees herself staring back, wicked and red. A devil. His devil.

You come upon him like you know it all. Wiser than your years, lethal in your innocence feigned. You fix yourself to Mrs. Grady's shadow as if the position offers you to him meek, but you hold yourself with a maturity that betrays you.

Father Brennan straightens with an amicable smile in greeting. Mrs. Grady returns it, though the quirk of her lips rises and falls so fast it's almost missed. Her skirts hem modestly swishes below the knee, three inches below to be exact. Three to four inches or so longer than yours had often been. Your waist band rolled twice to achieve the shortened length. An act of rebellion, a stab at the salacious you pretend yourself heedless of. Too pure to be deliberate.

The stunt with the skirt has landed you in the main office many times. Only until recently, when they turned to him for disciplinary action.

So began your routine.

Late to class? Go to Father Brennan

Lip gloss? Go to Father Brennan

Perfume? Go to Father Brennan

Gum in your mouth? Go to Father Brennan

He saw you so often he didn't even have to ask anymore, but he always did. A sighed; "What have you done this time, child?" Another sigh. "To the church then. Off with you, now."

The altar always needed dusting, a good vacuuming. The candlesticks polished, and missals organized. A place of calm, the labor kept idle hands busy, and the mind reflective. A watchful eye pinning you composed. His soft touch maintained even an arms length away, a strength bolstered by his sanctuary of rich mahogany and cobblestone. Warmth in the wood panels and glass that glowed with midday. Phthalo green veined marble so rich it shimmered velvet black in the light.

They came to him at their wits end, and suddenly, you behaved. So mild and pious, suspicious with how quick you bent the knee. Confirmation he loathed. Until the next pang of restlessness had you call down impudence, lightning fast and furious. Struck and scorching the ground at his feet. The Sister's called it a warning. He preferred to see it as a cry for help. The more agreeable scenario of the two.

Here you were, dragged before him once again. The same long walk to his domain, after school hours, when your studies wouldn't be interfered.

Not a walk of shame, but a strut.

"Good evening, Mrs. Grady." His eye shifts to you proper, the rhythm of his speech canting suspicion. "Lass. What seems to be the trouble?" Suspicion turned accusation, a bad habit worn in from the Sisters.

"She was caught sneaking out of the residence hall." Mrs. Grady answers for you, her foot tapping anxious to conclude a work day. Retreat to a home she's being kept from in order to deal with you. You remain quiet behind her. Quite adept at the foot taps and words put in your mouth.

Father Brennan nods, lips sucked inward. "I'll take it from here, Mrs. Grady. It's late, why don't you head on out." Sturdy arms cross his chest. A shirt tugged, he tosses the cut of his chin towards the altar not yet cleared. "I'll have plenty to keep her occupied."

A curt nod, relief released like a whistle. A spun heel, more clicks, and and the two of you are left alone.

Father Brennan clears his throat and shifts himself back before the altar. A corporal folded in thirds. The candles wicks are naked, the wax still warm and dripped. The purificator is picked back up in a wide palm, his damp skin leaches into the thread.

"What am I to do with you." A low rumble that's not looking for an answer, you sidle alongside of him and slip into banter so familiar it knocks him off guard.

"Paddle me like the Sisters do?" His head whips. A black shag grimace you recognize as a silent command to heel. So you heel. "I'm kidding, Father. Why beat the free labor?"

"Lass." Another shake of disbelief, it's slower, it's looser, it's lopsided. He hands you the cruets in a clink of metal and glass. "You're bound to become the exception." He grins crooked and waves you off.

This is meant to be unpleasant, but there's no reason why you can't be familiar.

Weakness.

No sooner does that thought blanket his mind cotton-candy fog does he notice the obscurity. Vision, and good-sense, skewed. Affronted propriety wailing alarm bell protest.

He watches your simper spread in full, teeth flash and cheeks crinkle. Eye-lashes too pretty for your own good. He knows he's a pushover, he knows he's soft.

His brow quirks to a step far too light and bouncing for a girl consigned to chores. To punishment.

As you disappear into the sacristy he wonders if you didn't get caught on purpose.

He remembers you as a little girl. The first time he met you.

He was asked, as he often was in those days, to visit Sacred Hearts Regional Catholic School. The co-ed grammar companion to St. Mary of Mercy, where the girls were expected to go, and St. Dominic's Prep for the boys.

"Are there any in God's kingdom whom he doesn't love?" A simple question, a soft open. A peek inside the minds the babes, some of which will join his flock when they come of age.

A hand sprouts upright. Thrust into the air, finger-tips wiggling to attention. Almost lifts you out of the seat by the sheer desire to deliver the answer you're so assured of. He looks to the body attached to the enthusiasm, and there you are. Fresh-faced anticipation. Lips licked in eagerness. Your hair pulled back and pleated in a french-braid.

Tipping his head to call on you, you then assert; "Bad people." Direct, the answer as obvious as the midday sun. A hint of attitude curls your statement, flames licking twigs in a bonfire, knobby and figure-less. You're missing a top incisor. He smiles.

"Oh child, he loves even them." He's smooth, rich warmth, a bourbon butterscotch melt for the ear. A chest-depth baritone that flips your stomach over as he amends with an honest smile. Crooked, but not a hint of placation. "Especially them."

The sourest pout challenges him, but Sister Martha cuts in on your behalf. Muzzling what was sure to be invigorating debate with her chirp of thanks for the good Father Brennan, and his time shared.

A tug at his pant leg pulls his attention down to that same, dissatisfied twist scowling up at him. The insistence in your tiny fist and the furrow of your brow tells him his answer has left you wholly unsatisfied. He'd heard of one such audacious, and though your introduction is hardly complete, he surmises he's just met her.

"Yes, little lass?" He tries then to be placative, affable even, in the way the wee-ones usually require. It bristles you, though your bark is clipped into pragmatism.

"Not little." Non-combative, your correction whistles his way like a bullet, unflinching, no holds barred. He can't help but blink in recoil at the warning shot fired from the pistol in a plaid jumper. "I'll be eight in two months, and my height's right on track."

Sister Martha's mouth pops open in audible mortification, but before she gets the chance to reign you in, Father Brennan laughs. A wheeze beneath his breath, his divided focus snaps back to a whole that he places on you. The weight feels good, important. Triumphant when he continues speaking to you, instead of over you, like adults love to do.

"Yes indeed. You'll pardon my mistake, I wasn't informed that there was an almost eight year old in this class."

You accept his reconciliation with a nod, a transaction complete. But there's still that bad people business that has you eye him with returned doubt.

"God can't love bad people." You begin, your inflection correcting, it perks a single of his brows and spreads his cheeks in a smile. He doesn't interject. He listens. "If he loves them, then what's supposed to stop them from being bad?"

"Ah." He understands, a tidal wave that wash away his ignorance. "His love is to be a reward then?"

"Isn't it?" You're incredulous.

He hunkers eye-level to you, the little girl who isn't buying it. Who doesn't understand. The gray world is seen through black and white, and he cherishes you for it. A luxury for only the innocent. He'll not let it blur and fade before its time.

He perches you on his knee, and little fingers ring around his collar. A face all too serious for being almost eight.

"We all sin, child. But that bad in us doesn't make it so." He tries to explain. "We're created in his image. We're created to sin."

"Even you?" Eyes slit, your challenge lilts more accusatory than questioning. Disbelieving that he - a priest - would admit to such faults. He's Gods right hand, of course, he couldn't possibly. So you must trick the truth out of him, if such a truth exists. Too smart for your own good, your aunt often says.

"Aye." Willful concession, not a hint of deceit or condescension. "Even me."

He has no idea then, but he's spoken the magic words. He's won you over. A little girl who thinks she's misplaced, and this black haired priest who reveals much the same about himself.

"So long as you're sorry for what you've done, and you promise to try harder, he'll forgive."

You ponder his words. Turn them over and over in your head as he waits in silent patience, balancing you on his leg, his other knee creaking at the floor. His forties have made a mockery of the spry man he played in his thirties. You think hard, careful, frowning at his black shirt.

"If you only apologize to get forgiveness, doesn't that mean you're not really sorry at all?"

He barks a laugh. A deep rumble of nicotine and booming projection. A reward for how precious, how honest. He smiles at you, one tender in sincerity. You grin back at him, the only one you've got, a hole where your top left incisor should be. He thinks you clever, and you feel the warmth of such adulation sugar rush high, spiraling crown to sole.

"Quick as a whip, you are. Very good." His praises an iron poker that prods something red hot and tingling, stoking an ember he can't yet see. Faint, flickering, smoke wisps from the smolder he feeds. His time and attention freely given dry, prosperous kindling. "We should all confess our sins, lass. But confession isn't the same as repentance. That's where the real work begins."

You don't keep him waiting long before your next cry for help sends you back to his office. Dumb as fox. The cat the got the canary more innocent then you appear at his door.

The Sisters warmed the classroom paddle on your backside, and when that no longer did the trick, to his office you were banished.

To Father Brennan's you go.

Father Brennan had a paddle in his office, same as all the classrooms. An archaic correction hung morbid and still on the wall, a dark stain in his peripheral for all the mind he paid it. Thin wood and dust, otherwise decrepit from disuse, and decrepit it would remain.

"Sister Barbara sent me to get paddled." You say, and his head shakes with a grumble.

Glasses perched on the tip of his nose, jacket hung from the chair back. All long, bare forearms and longer fingers, curled tight to his pen and papers, and a restraint turned to bite him. Nobility growling from the stench of his virtue, rotten and punctured. Laid in a field, still, infectious. A desiccated husk. He raises his head with an expectant look you will debrief him of your newest offense, as he tires of having to ask.

"I took the Lords name in vain." You're unbothered to even pinch the cloth of remorse, let alone drape yourself in it. You haven't for sometime. When you blink he swears he sees liner streaking your lash lines cat-like. An illusion that pits your stare coy, though contrived. A bit predatory. He grunts, dropping his look back to his splayed papers.

"No, there will be none of that today." His throat clearing discomfort. "I was told the paper towels in the women's restrooms were running low. You'll start there."

You pivot, curious hesitation. Fingers knotting. "Uhm, but... Sister Barbara said-,"

"Never you mind Sister Barbara." Eyes remain fixed to the paper before him. Scratching pen strokes, fast and deliberate, echo him. He doesn't even know what he's written. The oceans for his eyes swirl and swallow the words on the page. The stern tongue he's trying on for size. Cohesive thought. He's flying blind. "The restrooms, child. They'll not restock themselves."

You don't make a sound. He continues to distract himself with chicken scratch ink.

That same peculiar, stalled expectancy suspends you. Almost disappointment. You shift in place. The whiff of hunger lost to the wind and his dismissal. "Will that be all, Father?"

His face softens, brows quirked, breath held stuck in his chest. "Oh, only if you find it agreeable." Breath released slow, and with it, his octave drops. "I've plenty more for you to do, but that all depends on how long you plan to dally here."

You're a head bobbed and a twirl of skirt as you leave his office, the door catching with a soft click. He suspects it won't take you long at all to go about the first task he's given you.

Your disappointment lingers, a cloying haze he tastes as much as he feels. The reek of fluttering anticipation twisted up and left unfulfilled, empty and aching. A mess you leave for him to clean. Upon your return he means to get to the bottom of it.

"What's been troubling you, my child?

He doesn't recall when my began to precede child, but he notes the way you're alright with covetous pride, and it beams up at him through the white of your smile, and glint in your eye. He basks in it with rueful conflict, one whose favor tips the scale in disappointment, both in himself, and you. Or at least he tries to tell himself that, shift part of the blame.

He sits on the edge of his desk before you, a bold maneuver, a vulnerability, but one he subjects himself to willingly. A deliberate ploy to show he can. To assert you have no hold over him, a display of his strength, his determination. Lofty and unaffected by your wiles.

Wiles you somehow seem unaware of even as you wield them; in your blushed cheeks and gaped lips, sighing his name minty fresh and bubblegum sweet, from the chewing gum you sneak, and the tinted lip balm that has sent you to his office more times than he can count.

A little silver crucifix collars your neck, dainty and simple, it signals your virtue, brands you as one of his own. He finds himself captured by it, dangling from your throat.

"What has you acting out so?"

He observes with the same raw anguish settling in his gut like a brick with how you sit before him. Your leg crossed, one over the other. Foot bobbing from a small ankle, restless and blurring. Your kilt slides back over your leg, hinting bare thigh above the thin green cotton of your knee-high.

The girls of St. Marys are supposed to sit straight back, hands clasped and ankles crossed. Demure, innocent, juvenile. You've been told not to sit the way you do, as if the correction itself scolds you for the impurity of which he fears you implicit. The way you are now. Alone in his office. Looking up at him.

He wonders if he shouldn't correct it again himself, but thinks better of it.

Weakness. He thinks. He chants. He affirms.

Baseless, primal, profane. He shouldn't pay any mind to how you sit. Like a woman.

You sigh, long-suffering, and troubled. Pouty lips and pleading eyes. Your lashes flutter, jet black and spindly with mascara applied so light it might go unnoticed. It doesn't.

Weakness.

Red flares within him, pointed, sleek. Igniting with a spark that fizzles and fades to gooey pink, soft and tender. And then golden again. Reverential. The sun setting on a dismissed mass. The aftermath of grace and due deference to his person leaving him hazy and contented. A school of faculty and students alike who adore him. Without them he's left to the sobering of an empty church, one whose light then shuns him. Daring him to continue to fester with the new, hungry monstrosity that swells and stiffens, ugly and blunt.

Heavy on his shoulders, digging at his back. A cross to bear, he drags it along his pilgrimage to the hill, where he will stake it in the ground, climb to its center, and crucify himself on the broad tines. And you're both the hammer and the nail. Sharp and unforgiving. A pierce of his flesh that damns his rotten soul. A giggle through his left hand, a sigh through his right, and a kiss through both feet. He takes the pain and bleeds. He bleeds for you.

Weakness.

"I don't know, Father." You surrender, fingers picking the pleated hem of your skirt at your knee. A budding chest rising and falling beneath your buttoned blouse. His molars crack as he clenches his jaw firm. "I don't feel like I'm supposed to be here. I don't feel like I do any of this right."

His brows bow and his eye droops. Frosted brilliance chilled in pity. How wistful and lost his little lamb bleats.

"Do what right?" His voice is old and hoarse, and it catches in his throat. He hopes you think its breaks from disuse. From solidifying, stoic and cold in his lonely office, his clearing throat and crisp strokes of pen all that keeps him company there.

And not because of the way you take your bottom lip between your teeth.

"Belong." You reply, plain and real. So ahead of your years, and the vapid nuance that fill the heads of your classmates. Boys and lunches and status. He sighs, his smile so thin it disperses imperceptible in the deep lines that etch his face.

"We all belong, lass." He lilts around the pet names, feeling one weight lift in place of the new.

His vow of celibacy is a mutt gone rabid, and you're the child unawares, as you pull his ear and yank his tail, pushing at the warning ripple of jowl to get at his canines. Slick and yellowed by marrow, the memory of it's taste a perpetual haunt from the decades since it last soaked his tongue.

You're no Jezebel.

He almost sinks to his knees and sobs in relief. You're wayward. Wayward he knows. Wayward he can curve, he can herd, he can appease. And all without so much as a scuff to his shining piety. His stirred faith settles. Balls back up tidy, and tamed.

"You speak of nothing the Lord cannot quell." He eases himself into this routine, to the familiarity in advice he's since taken to using as a shield against your temptation. Or a muzzle to his own. "You need not but turn to him."

His suggestion is reasonable. One any good mentor, or spiritual counselor, should provide. You shake your head before his graveled words have the chance to settle.

"I try." Your insistence is earnest, as is your defeat. It strengthens his pity. "He doesn't listen to me. He never responds."

"My girl, of course he listens." You remain unconvinced. He sees it in your furrowed brow, and pout. "Come, I'll show you." He holds both of his palms out and open to you, thick and creased and stable. "We'll talk to him together."

It's a small school, and he knows his flock by name. All his little lambs he counts by day. They gather before him eager for his lead, anxious for his grace. Divinity in the form of a tender smile, deepened crinkles at his eye. Basking in the fond blue that warms and tingles despite how they impose. Rich pigment gleamed wicked in the right light. Revealed a little devilish by candle flame.

A line of youths in uniform files in at the dais. One by one, hands cupped, right over left, looking up at him. Looking up to him. The ghosts of smiles that solidify to his own. He holds up the wafer and hushes; "the body of Christ." Each girl to receive is special, sacred, something to look after. Each communion given is intimacy. A sacred intimacy. One conducted just between he and them, even in the middle of mass.

You're next in line. You step before him, palms cupped and lashes fluttering. Lashes that turn less pretty, as images of Venus fly-traps click into place over you like film squares in the children's toy. Click after click cycles you further away from the harmless, virtuous lamb he's promised to protect.

A neutrality to your expression that makes him do a double-take. His flow interrupted. Just a hint. A hitch easily smothered, but he's snagged, and there are witnesses in you and God. A tight smile and narrowed gaze returns him back to the priest he's expected to be. You stand before him still, a scheme evident in your show of placidity.

"The body of Christ." Clears with his throat, the depth of an oncoming head cold. He feels as feverish as you open your mouth, tongue drawn, both powerful and needy. Needy for him, and what he's promised. A quiver in his thumb and forefinger he corrals just in time. The wafer touches the wet muscle curled towards him, and disappears within your smile. Mild and tender as a garden snake. A promised returned serpentine that you'll be good for him. His black lamb behaved. Perhaps his sudden chill and foggy head is just the onset of an illness. It is that time of year.

"Amen." You cross your self and slip away, from him, from the line, back to your place in the pew. He watches you get down on your knees, hands clasped, head bowed. Your eyes remain open, they shift beneath your lashes and lock on him. Tight and twitching, the spindly tines of your trap snapped around him. Your smile, small and friendly, isn't returned, yet you appear sated. Fended back with more scraps, regardless of how meager and bland. You got something from him. A blunder in your trap, given to receive. Your eyes close, you retreat into silent prayer.

He swallows whatever raised in his throat, a bitter tinge within him unending and slippery. Faltering. Something that bore a suspicious resemblance to his nerve. He turns away from the site of you knelt down. Fate-hung-in-the-balance careful. Vehement discretion.

He returns to his next lamb, one blindingly white. A luster dull in comparison.

Acknowledgment is confirmation he can't stomach.

"The body of Christ." He says to her, wafer held and focus rigid. He looks into her eyes but dwells on yours. There was a glimmer in them. Tongue shifting beneath your cheeks, swiped over your teeth. A simper restrained. He knows it now, because the difference between hers and yours are day and night. White and black.

His oaths, his virtues, solidify links in a chain that connect at his collar. Chastity, obedience. They groan and clink, hardened and heavy. Chains aren't meant to be comfortable. Restraint is meant to be felt. He'd almost forgotten. His clothes feels too tight. The humidity too clinging.

His throat burns in a promise no antacid would soothe. He grants this lamb her communion. He tries to forget about the chains again, but you're looking right at them.

A homely shadow darkens his door way; bespectacled and sniffing. Tired eyes and tired sighs, Mrs. Grady hesitates at the threshold in respect to the invitation he's yet given. A raised head and soft smile, perhaps a bit forced. He gestures to the empty seat before his desk, crows-feet crinkled kind.

"Mrs. Grady." His friendly acknowledgement persists, but a dread grouses from it's slumber. The air with her carries a fragrance, whipped and candied. His hackles raise. The mask of affability hangs by a nail. "I suppose I know the trouble, given that look you're sporting."

"As if I come to you with any other trouble these days."

Trouble. They speak in code and that's your new marker. Trouble. What you brew and what he's in for, any time you're mentioned. The ring of his desk phone, suddenly much too loud and angry. The knock at his door. The squirm in his gut, even when he's already eaten.

She produces a bottle of perfume. A pink glass triangle she waves for his inspection like contraband. It is. He supposes as well. Perfumes are not permitted to be worn, not unlike makeup, or jewelry that isn't of the self-effacing religious variety. Eyes roll behind horn-rims, and the pink prohibition clinks against his desk, slid towards him expectant. A bulbous atomizer in shimmered netting dares him.

He sets his pen down with a sigh that reclines him backward in his chair, as if too close proximity to the bottle risks contagion. Artificial vanilla that boils blood and stings him blind. Cotton-candy smothered mustard gas. Chokes the air thick and perfumed, saccharine vapor forming manicured fingers that pull his jaw wide and slithers down the back of his tongue, into his lungs to suffocate him from the inside. He wants to leave the room. He wants to spread his thighs beneath his desk, as that opened posture will allow him to better breathe. His pen rolls directly into the beveled crystal.

"I see." A palm catches his jaw, and the arm of his chair catches the elbow. He exhales, long, weary. It's barely midday.

"If it's not perfume it's lip gloss, and if it's not lip gloss, it's undone hair." He didn't mean to invite this conversation, but it wags from her tongue. Horse-tail head shakes swatting off the irritant of invisible flies. "Next it'll be fishnets under her kilt."

The thought brings finger-tips to rub circles at his temple. He's snagged in a wince, but there's still the matter of the perfume sat guilty between them, and it makes for a good cover, as it does a spasm in his skull.

"She's a good girl." Coming to your defense is all the deflection he's left. A fight he'll never give up, what chance is there for you if he does? It's soft and hoarse all at once, it's pleading as much as it's self-assurance.

Though he's hiding behind eyes that are shut, he feels hers snap to him.

"She's trouble."

Whispered mother hen panicked, clinging to her darling boy with palms over his ears, to protect him from having to endure so much as an utterance of your existence. An urban legend, a succubus come to steal purity. Sucked from a kiss. Like that of babes cats were once accused of ingesting the souls of through their lips while they slept.

She's trouble.

Spat in superstition. A warding to keep the skeleton in the closet, the bastard in the attic. Your actions are wretched, and therefore so are you. A cautionary tale spun around the campfire, a yarn so vivacious you'd never be able to measure up to your doppelgängers lasciviousness. Is what he tells himself.

All he can do is chuckle.

She is right, of course. You're trouble. Trouble that rumbles his stomach. Trouble that's wafting from the center of his desk noxious and sweet. Stray dogs are put down for less. Hunger is unpredictable, disloyal. Dangerous.

"She's troubled." A correction that peels his eyes back open, cobalt cloudy, the murk indicative of implosion. On his horizon storm swell inevitable. He wonders if they can't see how sick his stare has grown, how glassy and abyssal. "She's... young. A tender age that makes everything unbearable. We were all there, at one time or another."

She considers his insight, chewed with a jaw click and a sniff. "You think that's all there is to it? That it's all that simple?"

It's a genuine inquiry, though he can't help but stiffen like it's an accusation. Blunt force trauma that saps his energy and leaves him sore all in one blow.

"Aye, though there's nothing simple about growing pains." He reminds her and himself. "I'll keep at her."

Your weekly sessions of prayer commence, and then weekly turns nightly. After dinner when the sky bruises purple to black, you come to him hands clasped and penitent.

Even tamed to but a murmur, the presence of his voice in your ear throbs penetrative, each pause an emptiness that aches for more. His voice unlocks something in you. Something old and ancient, laying in wait. Latin read to conjure an entity he can no longer stave. His voice is electric. Quelling and stirring. A tempest forever in motion, it whips you like a cat tail caught in wind. You never stood a chance. A gravel you'd rest on with bare knees just to distract from how it's unaware sentience enters you. Fills you. Possesses you. The church, hollowed as it is, quivers to the sound of him, bends and ripples like black-top baked in sun. The church, it seems, is as eager for more of his sounds, rumbling and growling and infesting, as you are.

Towards the middle back in an empty pew, rubbing arms and elbows, he leads you in prayer, then consultation. He hides from your slip of leg behind the advice, offered like fingers forming a cross outstretched to ward off any sudden moves, any advances. Your fidgeting latches to a bracelet, a link of delicate chain, in hypnotic motion as you work it round and round, flicking your grip with your wrist pinched between. A wriggle in his stomach, the louder it growls the louder he prays. The Sarum Primer a mantra at the fore of his mind; God be in my head and in my understanding; God be in my eyes and in my looking-

You tell him so much in these moments of quiet, of reflection. You spill yourself for his judgment, you bask in his rumination. Thighs crossed, your body leans towards him, but you're focused straight ahead. You speak to the altar, to the crucifix hung heavy above it, obscured in the dark that seeps through stained glass. Once pretty things in sun muddle nightmarish in shadow.

You confess at large. To the church. The God.

But your words are exclusive. You breathe and bleat for Father Brennan alone.

You speak of your father, a born protestant aged non-practicing, and skeptical. And oh, how you yearn to please him. Daddy's girl. His mini, his shadow. He questions everything, and so must you.

But then there's your mother, and her sister, and their father. Three more members you'd do anything and everything so they might yet be proud to claim you. The three the reason you're in St. Mary's now. Three more you wish to please, to gift them the pretty package of a good catholic girl, who attends mass each Sunday and says her prayers by night.

Two sides or your coin, one that spins forever on its side. It doesn't land, it stays in a whirl, and therefore, so do you.

His listening ear uncorks you in the silence. You can't help the flood, the out-pour of restlessness raw and unfiltered. He remains quiet, offering thoughtful susurration, encouraging the flow, the mess.

You tell him of a third factor in the equation. Someone whom you trust, you admire, you revere. This mystery man fills you with a longing you've never known. A thirst that damns both sides. He tries to bring you peace, this character, solace in the faith that hangs from you in shambles. A little girl playing dress up, you tell him. Until he came along.

"He makes me feel... special." You decide on the word with a nod, satisfied. "He's not a bad man, not at all, but... well, Father, sometimes this other feeling he gives me, it's... I don't know if it's good, because I feel this guilt again. But not because of what I'm feeling, but because of how badly I want more of it."

He swallows. Hard. His habitual self-crossing forced inward from the spot-light eyes that strip him in fevered anticipation. For a sign, a hint, another bone thrown. He gives you no such assurance.

"Satan and all his temptations can take many forms." He tells you, strained. Looking more ashen than sage. "Even the sweetest surrender is still surrender, lass. You must hold to your vigilance; and when it's pulled harder, you cling tighter."

It's then and only then he sees the tables turn. Is he your devil? Is he the serpent in the garden of your purity? Your virtue? The thought makes him sick, and he sees red behind his lids. Burning and itching and aglow with your shape. This un-tampered thing you are, his little lamb.

Is he who is to blame for your corrosion? The one has maimed and maligned?

Is he at fault for the lust that festers within you?

The nightmares begin.

You're in a nuns habit, but for some reason he knows the black and white robes are meant to be fig leaves. Coverings to shame you were only made aware of because of him. His putrescence, his urge, his impurity polished reflective.

A smile turned to a sneer, you're upon in a blink. A wraith that glides from beyond his desk to knelt on top of it, leaning towards him perched, an exacting gaze that bores into his chest and pushes him back in his chair. Away from you. Far away, as if afraid to touch you. As if there's still time to save you both.

The chair squeaks, there's no where else for him to back away. Nowhere for him to run. He remains cemented in place, frozen at the intersection of both your scrutiny, and the portrait of Christ. He can't speak, and he's unsure if it's night terror paralysis or shame.

"You did this to me, Father Brennan." You grasp one large hand in both of your own and place it to your middle. Long, thick fingers splayed over where your womb should be through the robes. Ripe in fertility. "You've spoiled me."

Your anger pouts. A mask slips from your face. Indignation turned desperate whiplash quick and biting. You climb into his lap, and he remains still. Compliant by way of unresponsiveness.

Legs sling along his hips to straddle his lap, the skirts of your robes hiked high on your thighs to reveal green knee socks and shiny mary-janes. Little fingers curl in the tufts of hair at his nape, knuckles dug above his collar, while the other disappears beneath the robes pooled black in his lap.

A tug, a zipper ripped, and his cock is bared. Soft-sheathed steel that throbs strong enough in your hand, that tears are pulled from his ducts with every pulse. Mist stinging his eye and breath choked from him in a sharp splutter. The only sound he's been able to make.

When you sink down on his rigidity and swallow it whole he croaks, a broken sound of unintelligible conflict. A plea, a curse, a cry for more - he couldn't say.

"You've spoiled me, Father." Repetition moaned, eyelids heavy and lips licked wet. Your fingers tighten in his hair in a pull of scalp that he welcomes, revels in the nip of pain. The waves in his eyes breach from the lash line and splash his gaunt cheek. Once charming cerulean leaks and stains himself bilious.

The hand that freed his ailing manhood snatches the dead weight of each of his hands, one at a time, to encircle your waist. Seeking his aid for no other reason than to taunt him, as he's useless beneath you. He can't move, he can't speak. He can feel, but only in fragments. Shrapnel punishment that splinters. Steals breath just as it's caught. It's too much, it's not enough.

He feels everything, and then he's left cold and lonely. It ebbs and flows. Peaks that push him to heights, only to force him back down to come under. And weep. Your hips cant forward with a pressure that grind his bones to dust. You press flush to his chest. The edges of his collar catching at his neck. He thinks you mean to kiss him, but you come up short. Just shy. Your words are all that brush his lips. "Don't forsake me."

He awakes in a clammy film, the heat in his room unbearable. Suffocation he wishes had actually smothered him, it's enough to force him from his bed. Those dreams but a taste of a purgatory he should be so lucky to be confined.

Slacks half stepped in with his heart still hammering, he stumbles out of the rectory and into the night. The cold needles at his exposed arms, his bare neck and feet. There's not a sound. An eeriness that accepts him so the stars may observe the onset of this infestation, one that rots from the inside out. Outside is not much better than inside. It's strangled breath and dead silence. Until his lighter clicks softly, and burnt paper and tobacco rush his nostrils.

He sucks it deep and holds it, until the ache in his chest matches the stifle of the night around him, the frigid disdain that regards his presence. The night holds, and so does his breath.

When he releases, its a steady thick plume of gray in the direction of the dormitories. He doesn't remember turning to face the building, but when his eyes open and he's exhaling, he's turned in your direction. A cursed north-star he follows entranced, his default trajectory.

Animi Cruciatus enters through the top of him and sinks like cinder blocks tied to his ankles, in an uncomfortable quiet that makes him stew. To wallow, and drown. Ice cracked beneath his heels. Affliction of the spirit. His spirit, trapped by a mind debauched, a prisoner of a body that aches in accordance. He thinks to shed his collar for sackcloth. Wear his remorse and his humility in a show of repentance he surely doesn't intend to commit to. But he should endure the discomfort. The least he deserves.

The smoke disperses visibly unhurried as he stares long and hard at the brick structure that houses you now. And he wonders, with a mist smearing his blue, and a sting at the back of an ashy throat, just how badly spoiled you are, and if it's from his hand.

"Are you feeling alright, Father Brennan?" He looks up to see Mrs. Grady, her bland features twisted concerned beneath her glasses. "There have been some cases of the flu making the rounds." A vague gesticulation reveals her implication, as well as her reason for coming to see him.

A small paperback the width of a novella. A lurid rendering of a man and woman embraced on the cover. The Final Temptation embossed in large flowering script. Red letters, two red A's. He wants to tell her to just bring these things to the front office, he doesn't know why they collect with him. Perhaps with his personal interest in you they feel it necessary he's intimate with your every transgression. His exhaustion has graduated transcendent.

"I'm alright, Mrs. Grady, I'm just not sleeping well these days." His sudden pallor does nothing to lend credibility, regardless of how it's a half-truth by way of technicality. He regards the book wearily, pushing away from his desk as far back into his chair as he can retreat. A preempt, knowing the book will soon plop square in the middle of his drafted sermon, backed once more in a corner. "I don't suppose that's school approved text."

"You suppose correct." She scoffs. Book thuds.

He sighs.

"I don't suppose I need to ask who it's been confiscated from." The man on the cover is clinging to the woman's body with a desperation that's too familiar. Seen in his nightmares, then burned behind his lids every time he seeks solace behind them. "This calls for suspension, if I'm not mistaken?"

She shakes her head to the contrary before his mouth shuts.

Her lips purse with a ripple of her brow, and her glance skews left. "Actually, you do. Sister Irene found it with Ms. Reid in the middle of class. It was opened on her lap, hidden under her desk."

Father Brennan's eyes widen as he slides off his glasses. The frames thick and black. Kate Reid was one of few second generation pups in the senior class, one who felt their common blood exempt her from the same standards of her peers. Platinum hair and stormy-eyed, she was striking as she was sharp. The angles of her bones, her smirk, her wit.

"Oh?" His fingers found his jaw, scratching to find mild stubble hooking nails in need of a clip. "And Sister Annette specifically asked for me to see to this, did she?"

"Just to have a quick word with her, if you could." Mrs. Grady has already turned on her heel. She never lingers. She would sooner choke on her own tongue than monopolize Father Brennan's time. Just as she would trip over her own heels before she overstayed her welcome in his office, as if his behavior had ever suggested she make such haste. "Sister Irene fears this could be symptomatic of a much larger, more disruptive presence in class."

"Ah." Then grateful for her retreating back, it's with a grim expression he catches her meaning, and angles it down at the paperback on his desk. His black lamb is rubbing off on the others. A vile contagion, they mean for him to staunch the spread. He's grown careless, obsessive, or both, and the garden is overcome with weeds.

A stray that's begun to bite. He can already hear the hissed verdict.

Put her down.

The latch of his door clicks shut and banishes him once more to his own devices. To the sermon left of scratched lines and unfinished thought then buried beneath what he can only assume is erotica.

Fingers reach, recede, then reach again in the finality of curiosity run rampant. A few dogeared pages catch his attention. Two thumbs dip inside and spread apart the first of the creases.

His hunger undulates like the sea, insatiability as vast and ruthless, it crashes over Cléo and drags her under. Under his body, chiseled and tanned, her yelps climb higher and reedier as his pace mounts to a gallop. A wild stallion betwixt her thighs, her nails scrape approval in red along his curved back, knotting reigns out of his chocolate mane.

Oliviero shudders and groans something obscene as he sinks deeper inside her. She smells of peaches and cream, and feels twice as soft. Tender and juicy like the meat of such fruit. Sin is considered impure, but with her it feels divine. If she is what lays between him and Heaven, he'll gladly sacrifice eternal salvation if only he gets to spend the rest of his finite mortality within the wet heat between her legs. She makes sin taste like peaches and cream-

He shuts his eyes, and then the book. The vision from his nightmares is there, waiting for his return. There isn't a doubt in his mind now it belongs to you, or that it was under your influence that Kate Reid's hand were caught red this time.

He knows you're behind this because of the way his stomach drops to his knees. Something so on the nose could only be your calling card.

He wonders what your sin tastes like.

Sister Irene and her English class halt in unison once he appears in the doorway. Formal acknowledgements are exchanged, the classroom erupts in wide eyes and wider smiles. His daily chorus of "Good morning, Father Brennan."

He nods, he smiles.

He pointedly does not look your way, though he found your exact position in the class before Sister Irene so much as he turned to see just who intruded upon her lesson.

"I apologize for the interruption." He says to Sister Irene, and the class, whom he still addresses without looking at you, but he feels you looking at him. A sharp gaze, one that slices accidental when it's startled from his next reveal. "I was hoping I could take Ms. Reid for a spell. Her and I need to have a chat."

"Not at all, Father." A tall and sinuous Sister in her middle-ages, Sister Irene singles Kate out and nods her forward. "Go on, child."

His looser verbiage. The general fluster that ripples from the class as Kate stands and approaches him in the doorway. He's surprised he has suit left to cover him from the cut of your stare across his back.

He doesn't bother to take her to his office. An offense that's serious only in theory, the hall just outside Sister Irene's door is as suitable a space as any to conduct his investigation. Wasted breath and wasted effort, Kate confirms what he already knew to be true. You're the one who lent her the book, you're the one who convinced her it was worth the risk. Your eyes pierced your culpability into his retreating shoulders. Your eyes pierce him with quite a bit these days.

And, well, Kate was a curious one. But please, Father Brennan, don't tell my parents.

He assured her with weariness rousing half a smile and hands raised to calm, that only repeat offenses required parental intervention.

A suspicion confirmed to the surprise of none. He releases Kate back to Sister Irene, but lingers in the hall. The question remains;

Just what is he to do with you?

Sister Annette stops him in the hallway between classes, just after the bell signals the changeover. In the flood he catches sight of you behind her shoulder.

You're so... pretty. A hard truth that erupts a fire in his belly. Of course you're pretty, you're young. Too young, much too young. A vernal treasure untouched by the hunger of the world at large, cruel and consuming.

Sister Annette prattles on about services and schedules, and sermons better suited to the particular passages of scripture the girls are being taught. For the school authority who commends his expertise on the surface, she does so love to tell him how to do his job.

It's never much bothered him, and it certainly doesn't now. For he's nodding at her, and humming in tune, but his eyes - trained, painstaking and exact to hers - are still cataloging you in the background at your locker. A glorious blur of tantalization, the suggestion of a dream. The whisper of fantasy teasing the fringes of lucidity. Surely all forms tailor made from the Devil to try his vigilance. A test of his obedience.

You look his way not once in a display that suggests you may not even know he's there, which he finds hard to believe. His height, his mass, his black. The giggles in the hall. He's a dark cloud that roams, a magnetism of the forbidden that lurks, suggestive, coaxing, even as he doesn't mean to be. Low breaths and rumbles of ignored hunger.

The father of a best girlfriend. A neighbor. A teacher, a mentor.

A priest.

A first whiff faint and inconsequential, he then catches it in full with nostrils flared. A tracker drawn to your scent. Too airy and strong to be perfume, certainly not as it sits leaking in his desk drawer. This is a different scent, a new scent.

Vanilla sugar cookies fresh out of the oven, clove and nutmeg spiced. Thick frosting, butter-cream stiff. You bathe yourself in the potent body-spray. Out in the hall tucked into your locker, he watches your show. Dousing yourself in temptation as though in secret, you revel in the oily mist, your shower made public. Flicking your head in a wave of your hair, bombshell full and free. Hair that is to be pulled up or back at all times. Corralled to a headband at the very least, one that often vanishes without a trace by midday.

A mist of sugar settling against your unblemished skin, you're satisfied with your fresh smell, a signature updated. Bending forward into your locker once more, a popped rear on tiptoes, you crane forward for height you don't really need to stick puckering lips at the little mirror on the door. Peachy and flecked with glimmer. Honey thick and sticky.

Heavy, hooded eyes sink into Sister Annette's face. Her gray brows, her bleach-blue eyes too small and beady for her face. The asinine deluge through an absent smile. He rests so much weight of his attention on her frail face he'd be surprised if the skin didn't tear. He stares at her like his very life depends on it, because it just might.

You tip forward to readjust your stocking, having slipped below your knee. Your hair falls over your shoulder, your crucifix dangles from the collar of your blouse, and you extend your leg outward. Perched as if on offer. Nimble fingers pinch the top of your sock and hike it back to it's proper place, hiding away those few inches of upper thigh in a gesture meant to incite the worst in him.

He refuses you that satisfaction, even if you don't seek it openly. He knows. It's with this insight he gives Sister Annette a little tighter of a smile, a nod, locked on her with such steely determination he can only assume she doesn't notice his agony because she doesn't notice anything much at all.

Phase two of your attack commences. It happens at the water fountain a little ways down the hall from where you just righted a uniform you never bother to heed the regulations of on a good day. You bend at the waist, and hold your hair back. Lashes flutter and lips purse as you bring your lips to the stream and wet them. Kitten laps and gentle suckling. A throat that bobs with your swallows. Your body poised to hold yourself still, a hip cocked, as you drink. Sister Annette's words dial to a low drone of obscurity. The whine of a television clicked on or off, the frequency only dogs could hear, he can longer decipher words. Hints, shells, but not whole pieces. He notices when her fingers are on his arm.

"I beg your pardon?" His only saving grace is that she assumes he's as disinterested in her drivel as he suspects she is in his. Not because he's caught with a hand in the cookie jar, drool at the corner of his mouth, crumbs dusting his fingers.

Her smile is patient, but only just. She hums in a belabored condescension, a state of being in which she reigns supreme. "I asked if you weren't chilly." The smile doesn't widen, nor does it fall. Plastered discomfort in having to repeat herself as much as it's having to linger on pleasantries for which her bandwidth is limited. "These halls are especially cold this time of year, and I'm not used to seeing you without your sport coat." She tries for a titter that sounds as stilted as he feels.

He then understands the false concern is a roundabout way to chastise him for his less than professional dress. His polish is tarnishing, and he's one of but a handful of St. Mary's most prestigious faces. Parents routinely tour the premises. Sisters from other schools come to marvel at the institution Sister Annette helms with strict sovereignty.

Every last detail, every rule, no matter how benign, is of full consequence.

And there he is. Good Father Brennan. His cuffs unbuttoned, and pushed to the elbow. A shirt tail in danger of becoming un-tucked. He knows his eyes are bloodshot because they burn as he blinks. Only once, and only after you've wiped your mouth on the back of your wrist and saunter away. Breaking the spell and leaving him hollow, throbbing. Cold.

"Yes, Sister Annette." His concession is a house of cards that an unguarded exhale will topple. He smiles at her, and she nods. His expression mimicked, though too clinched, too perturbed. "Forgive an old man his indiscretion, I forgot my coat in my office. If you'll excuse me?"

Her titter is little more sincere than her previous attempt, but at least this time she shows teeth. She's concluded her desire to exchange words, and brushes his arm once more as she dismisses him. Lest he forget his coat, the repeated touch to the offense should do the trick.

By the time he's safely back within his office, his silhouette has grown an unsavory bump where none should exist. Least of all over you, a child. And the hint of a little leg no less. Hands ball to fists at his sides, ignoring it as it swells to a more nagging chub. Flicking his inseam. The insistence of a dog nudging his leg with a leash in it's mouth.

Not now. Please not now.

Shaking fingers tug his sleeves back down the length of his forearms, ropy with lean muscle and sinew, as he implores his stirred cock to settle. He's not yet peeled himself from slumped against his door, eyes squeezed. He grasps at the vestiges of his rationale like straws, drawing reinforcement the only way experience has ever taught him.

Liturgy. Warm Guinness. Cold showers. Football players grunting mid collision - in the rain. Cold showers.

The phone chirps at his desk. I'm saved. He thinks.

His cock gives a kick in his slacks, as if to laugh at him.

He hobbles towards the blaring, doing his level best not to agitate the over-sensitivity with too quick and assured a gait. Snatching his sport-coat from his chair, he begins to shrug it on, the phone pinched between his ear and shoulder as he pushes an arm through the sleeve.

"Father Brennan." He announces, breathless. In a way he hopes is rushed-to-not-miss-the-call, and not from the swollen itch in his groin.

The words strike him from the other end, Mrs. Ritner, another main office nominal appointed by Sister Annette to liaison with the staff. She, unlike Mrs. Grady, finds the phone sufficient. The long paved walk from the front doors of the school to the front doors of the church, his office tucked to the far back, unfavorable.

Dead weight sinks into his chair by a grip on one of the arms. Hissing beneath his breath at the throb of his loins jostled by the motion, a jolt of live wire reignited by his friction.

You're on your way to his office as they speak. Perfumed and glossy. Hair free as a vixens.

Cold showers. Football. Famine.

You might as well enter his office in nothing but stilettos and a garter, for that's how his heart races as he wills his aggravated erection appropriately flaccid.

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned."

He waits, stewing in the captivity of silence, fraught and imprisoning. Heavy paws tracking ruts along the perimeter. Thinking to hold his breath.

The confessional a flimsy barrier between you, worn thin, such as the skin of Good ol' Irishman committed to the cloth. There's a prickling beneath, an itch; dark and matted that strains him taut, these confines he's bound. Midnight rich pressed and tucked, neat and clean, ivory at his throat keeping it all down. Pushing at his collar, constricting with every shallow breath he fights. Because every one indulged is sacrilege.

Sins of the flesh tasting of gingerbread and vanilla, thick gumdrop sweet. Every inhale scrapes frosting against the back of his teeth. He swallows to pretend he doesn't need to, doesn't want to. He can't feel the ridge of gums tear around sharpness that aches to push through. He can't hear the rustle of his chains.

No, such atrocity no longer resides in Father Brennan. He's noble, he's risen. He clutches his chains and tightens his bindings.

It's how you smell now. Invading his side of the booth, too cramped and stuffy for his tall, looming frame. The walls are tight, his collars tight, and if he breaths in any more of your smell, his trousers will grow tight as well. So he holds his breath. Until his lungs burn, and his eyes glaze, and the heaviness squirming in his gut settles. He waits for you to continue.

The pause stretches for an eternity, long enough for the hunger to gurgle and writhe, for the devil to burrow into his hunched shoulder.

Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. He minds himself, over and over and over.

The pause continues, indefinite, frail, stifling. He shifts with a loud groan of the wood protesting his weight, and it shatters the moment. He hears your puff of breath, mousy and timid, just quiet enough it might yet go undetected. It doesn't.

"Go on, child." He musters warmth, but not too much. He instills authority, but hopes - prays - its yielding, approachable. His gruff portrayal steeped to encouragement.

There's another tense beat, sucked in breath beyond the other side of the grate, shaky and tender and oh, so close to him. Close enough it sounds like you're pressed against the wall. Worming closer to his cracks, leaching through the barriers between you. Barriers he doesn't reinforce, not anymore. As it stands, the very intimacy that pits you voice to voice all but encourages your infiltration. Your secrets, your sins. Your lips to Gods ears. Your conduit to the very salvation he's indebted to bestow.

"It's been a three days since my last confession."

A choke pulls his chest. A fault splinters his decency. "Only three?"

You splutter, taken aback. A soreness over the Kate debacle persisting, it's turned you prickly on him. Wound tight. "S-shouldn't I come to confession as often?"

He'd be a liar if he said he didn't appreciate the turned tides. For once he's not the one knocked off kilter and held there. Not standing tall, nor falling. Just a fool.

He chuckles, though not one of mock or derision. His amusement is tender, and true. "Your willingness is absolving in it's own right. What sins have darkened your slate since last we cleaned it?"

"I spoke back at Sister Irene when she began to reprimand me."

"What was Sister Irene reprimanding you for this time?"

A pause. Your confession mumbled, petulant, of little consequence. "I fought with Allison. In the hall before her English class. Right outside her door."

He's already abreast of the scuffle with Allison Brown.

He knows because he was the one called to break it up. Child's play for all the mind you seem to pay it in the aftermath. Long arms wound around your middle. The under-swell of fresh breasts brushing his forearm, a skirted bottom wriggling at a dangerous proximity.

He feels an old dog and his bark rasps accordingly, but when he must lay down authority, it's unbending. Two pampered house kittens arched and spitting at one another. He wrestled you away claws drawn, Allison's golden curls twisted in clenched knuckles like mouse-tails.

He's already been instructed to keep you in the church after dinner to see to it that you're tasked with the appropriate punishment. He already knows he's headed for another long night of hiding behind the door of his office.

Knowing you're within arms reach. Knowing the only witness to keep him leashed and indifferent is God.

Knowing all of this doesn't change the fact that you've come to him to confess, and that he's obligated to hear your side of the story.

"Fought how, child?"

"I lunged at her. Pulled her hair." You feel the need to emphasize. "Hard."

He shakes his head though you can't see. You can hear, however, the shake of his words in a chuckle he knows better than to indulge. He's not amused, he's out of his mind.

"Is that all?" He says it in slight jest, though it manages to pluck one more of your unsavory feats.

"And I... I thought about not coming to confess at all."

"Aye." He gifts to you in understanding, but that's all he gives. Onyx wool, fledgling, glinting like spun silk. He thinks to run his fingers through it, and feel you nuzzle into his courtesy. "What had you and Allison come to blows?"

Your attack startles. No wind up, no preempt. The consequences un-assumed with how candid your delivery.

"My period."

He runs so hot it's burns him frigid. A cough swallowed to a grunt, eyes sent upward his closed lids. Drawing the curtain. Shrouding what is surely to be a punishing conversation. He grasps at tact to navigate such foreign soil, steadies to keep fumbling to a minimum.

He governs the spirituality of young women at an all girls school. He has for years. They've all had the social graces to not deign his listening ear with such impropriety. Another mold you shirk, vehement, defiant. Confinement's a shackle, one to which you're ill-suited.

"Yes, well... seeking repentance grants the absolution you seek-,"

You trample his flimsy rouse. You're having none of his gentility, his subtle discomfort.

"-she started it, Father."

"Come now, you're beyond these childish excuses-,"

"-she accused me of being a whore, Father Brennan-,"

"-Tongue, lass." He warns, a deep rigidity that thunders in the confessional. Shaken to hear such talk from you. More shaken still how your girlish warble dresses the filth into something... sensual. Hot and bubbling. Sugar that scalds a dipped finger. Goading a different challenge that cracks him like a whip as he juggles flipping approachable, then diplomatic. A coin spun on it's side. "Mind your tongue, or it's a bar of soap next you waggle such crudeness from it."

"Yes, Father." You breath, a mewling kitten meek as your insolence scruffed. "Forgive me."

The Sisters are known for harsh punishment, not all, but most. A switch, a ruler, hair grabbed in fist. He's never been one for such cruelty, he could never think to strike the doe-eyed and adoring. A crux and a folly, his gentle disposition endears him even more to his girls. An accent that charms and eyes so blue they bewitch like crystal, oceanic-endless, a balm to the souls turbulence. They now bleach feverish, anemic and hollow, arctic-bright.

He thinks of you yelping to the strike of a switch. A paddle glancing your peach-plump rear. He doesn't dare think of who he pictures the wielder, just as he doesn't dare think to suggest such a punishment. Because he's a soft touch. Is what he tells himself. Merciful. Lenient. Kind. He rattles down the list, pulling the attributes from the muck to rebuild his morality. Wipe them clean and stick them on like armor. Good. A good man. A simple man. A man of God.

He stills himself. Tugging his shirt cuff and repositioning with another grating of old wood. "How did she assert such of you? Might there have been a misunderstanding, perhaps?"

Your frustration huffs. "She said because I use tampons, that means I've been had. Whispered it to Melissa Sue behind my back like some scandal."

He crosses himself. A pregnant stretch of silence creeps between you like an ink spill, black and viscous and promising an even worse mess if he moves to sop it up too quickly. Rushed and unprepared. Black and glittering and endless, like your fleece.

Left standing in the pasture with blood in your teeth, and sisters at his back, demanding and impatient. Put her down. They insist. A rabid animal, a bad seed. This one bites. They hiss. A lost cause, kicking and screaming. Don't trouble yourself, Father. This ones not worthy of your time and attention. Oh, what are we to do with her?

He offers his time and attention like communion, the special treatment fed to you the body and blood of Christ. Ever since you were a little girl. He slips the wafer between lips stretched open, dissolving against your soft pink tongue, drawn to receive. A quick lap of muscle dragging beneath the pads of his fingers, hot and wet through a sigh that aches. That longs.

A smile. A wide beam, you've learned to wear many the last ten years, but it's still the only one you need. Blood stains the incisor that used to gap through it, once upon a time. A face he still sometimes sees. A little girl who remembers those promises made to her even a decade on. Kept close to your chest, lurid Polaroids of his dedication and shine to you like blackmail. Black fleece. Waves them under his nose like pornography you threaten to divulge. A reputation damaged for turning his back on you.

He'd sooner lay down in the grass and let the sisters eat him alive before he ever turned you away. Ground through his flesh and bone, pop cartilage and floss with sinew string before he'd dare allow them to wreath your head with his failings. Crown you Antichrist, the child bride to blasphemy, secularism's prize. A truth that shakes his soul with how heavy sincerity rests upon it. A weight of devotion that crushes; his collar, his composure, his chains.

Blood in your teeth. Ripped thread twined around your knuckles. Allison's hair, and his resolve.

"Three of the Lords prayer." Intoning the penance in deep gravel, with a suspicious emphasis of its usual throaty register. A strength that cracks and folds when he needs it most. His final instruction seethes outwards the pit of his chest like his final nerve, pitched nasal of a pinched nose and rubbed temples, done behind the cover of alleged anonymity. "And an apology to Allison, if you've not already done so."

He knows not what mockery you made of her in retort; but he can only imagine. As if the fresh ruts of nails to her arms and ripped hair was not enough battery sustained.

He hears you exit the confessional, followed by too short a journey of your rubber soles squawking the tile.

You come out to Sister Annette waiting. Arms crossed, brow twitched, patience evaporating by the second. A line of girls crane their necks behind her, eyes wide and wandering. A row of owls that snicker upon your face.

Her smiles, rare as they were strained, never reached her eyes. Her voice never rose nor fell, a flat-line of nasal rule.

The girls adore him, nothing has changed. But when in your shadow he fears they can smell his guilt. A shining crimson A you've kissed onto his cheek. Hot breath teasing a sick pallor that only grows sicker as you ask for forgiveness he knows you don't truly seek. Not as earnestly as he seeks healing from your infectious gall. Knees bruised and voice hoarse, he prays and begs and begs some more. Though he's still on the wrong side of the confessional. Realizing he's begging the wrong divinity for salvation he doesn't deserve.

"Father Brennan has other confessions to hear to, young lady." Monotone scolding through the suggestion of a smile, so slight it's more a hint sarcastic than encouraging. But he knows better. She really thinks shes making an honest attempt at masking her displeasure with you.

The snickers in-line behind her hush to scandalized looks once he reveals himself. Hot on your heel out of the confessional, weariness from the wrong side occupied.

"I know, Sister." You say, beginning to skip away. "But I'm his favorite."

Father Brennan is quite certain he's stopped breathing.

The pistol popping warning shots grew into a sawn-off shot-gun. Four little words that erupt, ringing-ears and vision pinched. A blare that deafens and sprays explosive, uncontained. Everything in him seizes, an engine stalled and spluttering before oncoming traffic. From the sincerity that lacquers your words pink pearlesence to the looks the girls in line exchange. A shock wave to ripple the flock. Six syllables that chew through him like buckshot.

That night swells with fervent intercession. Its for you he pleads, of course. Surely not himself.

That night he dreams of you, like he does every night he's lulled unconscious by exhaustion and Irish Mist.

Prophetic visions of destruction come in your form. Meek, nubile, untouched - he assumes. A weary head resting at your middle, a sturdy breadth caught harsh at the ground, knelt before you. Wide palms to hold you, he's breathing you in and breathing you back out.

His indecency, his ugliness. The beast of his burden a bastard he's put in you. A belly swollen beneath your uniform. A vile conception. The urge that won out over his polish, his piety. All the good he's striven to attain. Cast aside like dirty rags, discarded sackcloth in favor of burying within your pristine. Your plushness. Your virginity a sacrifice to his unjust hunger.

His form all in black like fairy-tail malignancy. Just a spot of white at his neck, a canine flashed like the ones that sink into the crook of your neck.

It's fast and furious. It's sloppy. It's greed. And worst of all it's devotion. A name hallowed by his abandoned virtue. Absolute. A damning sincerity for the religion of you he now subscribes. He's curled around you and he pressing hard, pointed. A thumb dug into a wound that makes you scream. He's splitting you open, huffing in your hair in sounds that turn more animal than man.

Footprints in fresh, untrod snow. A trail of his infidelity. His disobedience blunt and erect, it carves you hollow for him to fill back up. Red slick against the inside of your thighs, red his white will turn pink. Wide palms that cradle you, fingers that tear you open, white knuckled and shaking. Father, Father, Father! Whined in his ear, kissed at his throat, panted into his collar. Red searing as pink and glossy as the depths of you he splits down the middle. Abandoning his life's work, his vows, his oaths, his sanctity, all for your sex.

The good Father Brennan, his neat, pressed clothes and collar, dampen with sweat as he works himself inside you. Stroking your cheeks and petting your hair. You're bleeding for him, a virgin at the altar. The sacrificial lamb. Salty and sweet, iron pierces the heavenly aroma of your slick. A wetness he coaxes out of you. A wetness that stains him with your misdeeds. He was always better at making a bigger mess than he was at keeping clean. All he can do is groan at your neck and maintain his rhythm, kneading himself against the throbbing, the clenching, the pinching. A bloated ache he ruts away within you.

"Well done, my girl." He huffs, eyes squeezed shut as his praise makes you tighter. Makes you wetter. "Oh, well done."

Sometimes you're in fine lace and silk, and veiled. Other times your naked as the day you were born, wearing his descent like a cloak, your fevered ecstasy a pretty rogue that blushes every inch of you his mouth laves.

He jolts awake, stifling heat that smears his skin in an oppressive film. A hardness between his legs he deigns with touch not once. No matter how stiff it twitches, how it throbs for friction, for heat, for you. Meek and mild beneath his weight. Pretty petals in fresh blossom he crushes with eagerness reawakened.

He lays there on his back in a dark bedroom with a painful length of temptation he prays for strength to ignore, even as visions of you tease the tenuous edge of fantasy, calling him back to bed. Even as fresh pulsation floods from tense loins trembling. Aching. A need ignored, a need left to fester.

Denied for decades.

Your sessions of consultation is what he takes to calling them, how he refers to them for the Sisters benefit. You've moved from the church, cold and exposing, to the sacristy. A room unfrequented by most, it's one of few places he truly feels at peace these days. Perhaps it'll settle the both of you. Surely that's why he brings you in there.

He sits across from you and feels so bold as to grasp your hands and keep them. Soft palms and warm fingers swallowed by his mitts, wide and meaty with knuckles sharp and veins dark. He holds you without force in his grip, lame and lax as you clutch at him for guidance, for understanding.

Crazed by righteousness he thinks of anointing you. Callouses and greed slick with oil he paints over your flushed face, your nakedness. A false modesty that blushes and burns under his trail, candle light caught in the glisten. Lubrication for his annexing, forbearance that dismantles you piece by piece.

Each limb, each plane, each pore singled and sanctified for consecration, catalogued for future adoration. Scrupulous passes down the bridge of your nose, along the ridge of cheekbone. Tracing your lips curve, dragging a stripe down your chin. He'd lay you down on the dais, in the stained-glass rays then painted over you. A cornucopia of color and light then made holier for your body caught between.

Splayed on his altar, butter melted liquid in cupped palms, he pours over your scalp. A drizzled crown of decadence, divine nourishment dripping down your hair and throat in rivulets. He refused his mouth your savory in his fasting. Denied himself your sweetness. Abstained from your pleasure he's ready to ingest, a starved tongue flat up your neck, velvet and butter. Hair woven in his fingers like rings. Reins. New shackles.

Milk, warmed and creamy, spilled against your bosom, blooming across your ribs a sheath of silken purity. Ivory cream whiting out the black. The black he so adores, the black that taunts him, wicked and forbidden.

Sinking down to his knees before you, a blessing crafted by his tongue in reverence to you. "Sprinkle me with a wand of hyssop, and I shall be clean; washed, I shall be whiter than snow." as he places green sprigs and violet buds to your thighs, gentle and deliberate like his kisses might be. Clean and refined. His fealty pledged. The patron saint of attrition. You already have your own prayer, one he repeats from dusk till dawn. Hushed and fervent, proclaimed veneration in between whimpers for mercy.

The Sisters laud him for his service, for the burden he assumes in such personal interest with their problem child, their black sheep. Poor Father Brennan, God bless his soul, for having to beat the devil out of the girl. They pray for him as much as they pray for you, maybe more. A kindness. A warranted precaution. But not for the reason they expect.

"How do you remain so vigilant, Father?"

Your smile attests you don't know what you ask, what slinks at the end of your words. He returns one much weaker, rueful in a worldly way. The experiences that followed his vows of devotion, tar black that stained, no matter how hard he scrubbed. How earnest. So he threw himself into abstinence instead. He couldn't become cleaner, so he'd just refrain from more mess.

"I pray, my girl." A frayed cadence to match his unraveling. His sigh of one who carries the burden of your soul and his, heaviest of all. "I pray until I cannot bear the words on my tongue, and then I pray some more."

Your nod is thoughtful, an understanding indicative of something too atrocious to face. So like a coward he retreats, he lets it lay.

Until the lonesomeness creeps back. A spirit trapped in unrest come back to him, alone with his thoughts. Called back to him. Left vulnerable to the temptation he scorns.

Weakness.

The linger of your heat buzzes in his fingers long after you leave. Vanilla hand cream softens his cracks and callouses with meticulous femininity. A throb at his temple, the whites of his eye veined like shattered glass. The pink bottle of perfume in his desk drawer.

It's enough to pull the flask of Jäegermeister from the top shelf of his bookcase. The first swig flooding his throat in a syrup he pretends is yours, 70 proof and licorice bitter. A burn to match the trail of your touch to his hand.

A hand that still smells and tingles with your memory, one he rubs over his face and then under his nose. Down his body to his groin, where it stops. Twitching and hot in his slacks. It's enough to bring him to the edge but not enough to push him over.

He's anger and devastation in every rigid inch he denies. He abstains from a lover's touch, he swore to it when he made his oaths. Oaths that shackle him, shadow his trail with a rustle and wail. Unmistakable chastity in his collar, and solemnity to uphold the burden. And burden it is.

It's meant to throb and ache, its meant to be agony.

He's handled it with exemplary prowess and grace. Until you came along.

You touched his chains, held them up to light, ran the links between your pretty fingers. Hard, cold, unbending in ways that make you pout and pull. Each loop a vice hardened and soldered repentant. Virility, pride, ego, lust. He wares them in a heed of what he promises to shed, risen above the lure of mortal men a devout phoenix from the flame and ash. As priesthood ordains, rebirth that strips pure and noble from weak and debauched.

He's not holy. He's repression, the victim and the assault. He's the worst of what mankind has to offer. Selfishness and misery. Appetite disguised in black suits and crosses. A title that only worsens the insatiability after decades of believing he'd tricked it sated.

You see them as a challenge revealed. Attributes of a compatible mate. Hungers aligned, agitation matched. Of the spirit. Of flesh burned red. Locks that promise the existence of keys. Of indentured servitude of which he can be freed. Should be freed.

You're before him in his office. Hands clasped behind your back. A wad of chewing gum tucked behind a wry grin. Thick digits card through his black shag before it drags down his face in a show of exasperation. His shirt strains around heavy shoulders as he rubs his eyes beneath glasses, and then the bridge of his nose.

The moment the frames hit the desk he's spun sideways and pushing out of his seat with a click in his knee. A trick joint worn thin, inflamed by all the prayer he's thrown himself into as late.

He's never been on his knees so much until you.

The thought still nags in the back of his mind, a monster breathing heavy and snorting from the foot of the bed, that whenever he finds himself on his knees these days, he's vulnerability, and you're inevitability. He thinks of his maw buried in your girlhood, his prayers muffled in your folds. If the sin of you doesn't taste like peaches and cream, or Oliviero was just more far gone than him.

He scoops down and straightens with the waste basket in his clutch. He extends it to you, over his desk kept between, a buffer, a safe distance away. Stares slot and lock like ram horns, but his gentle weariness holds. He's not angry, just doomed.

At last you acquiesce. Leaning forward, the gum drops from your lips into the bin, and he thanks God, if he's even still listening to good Father Brennan, that you refrain from holding his gaze while you spit.

Dropping the basket back to it's place, one hand falls to his hip while the other outstretches to you. Sighing expectancy once more.

A playful eye roll sends you into the pocket of your kilt to fish out the packet with the rest. He stands in wait, palm opened, until you deposit it with him and he utters his thanks for your cooperation.

"Will that be all for now, Father?"

"For now." He leans over his desk, a weight held by palms splayed under him against the surface, shoulder width apart. He's without his coat again, and his sleeves are forced up his forearms, sloppy cuffs that are beginning to unroll. He looks every bit as tired as he feels. "I was hoping we could keep today's office visits to an even, agreeable two. And this is already strike one."

You grin as a single of his eye-brows lift in an agreement he hopes you've reached. A suggestion he believes you may yet follow. Just to shake things up. You don't answer. You're all grins headed for your door. He stops you with a tut just as your hand hits the knob.

"Lass?"

The pet name sees you halt, then turn back to face him. His expression is tweaked to merciful assertion, a brow arched in the understanding he believes is mutual. You arch one back at him.

"Yes, Father?"

His chest rises and falls with a silent sigh as he draws back to full height. Worn haggard in posture, but one that still imposes. Stifles. He opens a drawer at his right and produces a ruler. You swallow, smoothing your hands on the front of your skirt as he approaches.

Hooded eyes, impossibly blue and barely concealed longing, holds yours captive as he strides the distance. He doesn't release them when he reaches you, nor when he lowers to a knee before you. Another pop of the cartilage as broadloom carpet cushions his descent.

He brings the ruler to the side of your leg at the knee, and sighs once more as he examines the length between the hem of your kilt and the top of your knee. And the two inches higher than it should be.

His look alleging a deliberation your smooth innocence protests before any accusations are spoken, much less pointed. He's not touching you but the proximity stalls both your breath and his. Even knelt before you he swallows you whole. His angled gaze an ocean surge, sweeping you in and pulling you under. Brisk and dark, but once it surrounds you its a calm, still comfort. An overwhelming mass even in how soft and lean age has dulled him.

"You know the rules." He rumbles, a long-suffering exasperation that's softened immeasurably by the threat of a kind smile, even as he denies it. He stands with a creak in his joints that deafen when compared to the click on his way down. The ruler still curled in his fist, he crosses his arms across the broad expanse of his chest, matte black and buttoned, and cocks his head to the side. "So would you kindly fix your skirt, then?"

A little smirk and down-cast eyes is all the fight you put up. "Yes, Father."

His gaze flickers on your face, a dying ember tantalized by the whip of rogue wind. Eyes fall from your face where it's safe to your midriff. Nimble fingers dart to your waistband as you begin to unroll the band in an outward perimeter, from hips around to your back. He realizes his watching turns lecherous when he can hear the hoarseness of his breath.

"You know the Sisters are strict with the dress code. Don't you tire of making the trip to my office?"

He tries for levity, but the little smirk you let slip with your head still down expresses to him just how severe his miscalculation was made.

"Not at all, Father. In fact all the girls would rather be with you then the Sisters." Your boldness lifts you back up to his stare, and something akin to victory blushes you about the bridge of your nose as you catch the ripple in his jaw. "But you already knew that."

His silence betrays how careful he begins to craft his navigation. "It's a blessing to have the respect of you girls, truly." He means every word of that. "But the Sisters care, my girl. They want to see you all staunch in your faith."

"Which is why they beat me?" Smiled small, innocent eyes then peek devilish through the curtain of lashes. He's not the only one who knows that party trick.

He bites. "Aye, they're strict. But that's only because you've left them no other choice, I reckon."

A cutesy shrug to pick your shoulders, hands clasp behind your back. Your head tips ingratiating and tilts up at him cat-like. He's not felt the canary a day in his life until he found himself on the receiving end of that look. Your head tilt just so.

"Mm, I guess you're right. If they weren't so fed up with me I wouldn't get to see you nearly so much."

He deflects, fancying himself seasoned when it comes to evading traps you set. "If it's my council you seek, you need only request it. The other girls seem to have no trouble reaching me that way."

"Yes, Father. I know."

"You don't see the others doing themselves up like brassers, and torturing the Sisters."

You smile. One slow and sly. "No, you're right. I guess not. But I still see you more than they do, even with all their scheduled time." You shrug. "I'm just the most committed to finding my way back to you."

Another day. Long and more eventful than he'd like. Another day that concludes with a migraine. A twinge pinching the vein until the skin there pulls and prickles. Glasses yanked away, finger-tips burning to replace the wire frames with the thin flask tucked neat in the top row. The schools empty save for the janitor. Mrs. Grady had already poked her head in on her way out, shrugged in her jacket a jingle of her keys.

No one would be there to happen upon him seeking solace from another healthy gulp or two of Jäger to the drone of the floor being waxed just beyond the chapel entrance. At least the anise settles his stomach.

His desk drawer slides open to discard his folded readers and that's when he sees it again. The little pink perfume bottle. Carved glass and oil, insentient and coy. Flirtation. Your wrist turned open and extended under his nose with a purr. Do you like it, Father?

His glasses fall against it and the draw shuts with a hasty slam. He should bring it to the main office instead, really. There's no good, sound reason why he should have your possessions. Forbidden as they are at St. Mary's, he's amassing a small trove that now feels more like a shrine. Chewing gum, bubble gum, lip gloss. And now the perfume. It somehow is too much like you. So much so that it feels like your spirit split, and one half resides in his office just to haunt him when you're off duty. Merciless and impish and cruel, a djinn locked away in pink crystal. One that lurches free to wreak havoc on his poor susceptibility whenever he faces it the beginning and end of each day. Its your smell and its overpowering. Right at his hip as he works, the proverbial palm of his hand. A suggestion to what lurks within him.

The prowling mange that looks at you and licks its chops. That remembers the time when he was more man. Just a man. Just Brennan. Simpler times, unburdened by duty and obligation. Chastity and obedience.

Dark hair and darker eyes, lean and mean. A tomcat fixed by one mates sister, and another's cousin. A scoundrel, their mothers branded him. He wasn't the most handsome or the most charming, but he was the most cunning. Gone without a trace. The only way to know he had even been there the odd bruise sucked to a neck. Whiskey-stickey tongue tracks dried between a set of breasts. Sets of glistening eyes heart-shaped and gooey stuck to him during mass on Sunday mornings. Maybe that's why he decided to pursue the priesthood.

He still gets that same look, those same gazes drizzled over him like honey, thick and golden sweet. No sucked tit or hand up a skirt necessary. He fears he misses the latter more than he enjoys the former.

He pushes up and away from his desk, and the taint of you emanating from the top left corner. Stalking hunched and hallucinative he rifles through thick leather binders until his fingers slip thin cool metal hidden away. He pries it loose, flicks the stopper unscrewed in one fluid stroke before he's tipping it back. Desperation in an Adams apple bobbing a dipping so erratic it catches the edge of his damned collar.

He gulps the thickness, the syrup like it's medicinal. He's not looking at the place in his desk where you are, pointedly. He has to think about it to not catch himself wandering. He's thinking about you in the form of pink crystal to make sure he's still not looking. Thinking about you just to make sure he's not thinking about you too long, too hard. His eyes ping around his office over the rim of his flask. He finds a spot on the ceiling, one where the wood paneling on the wall meets the crown molding. Where shoddy workmanship sees it cracked. He stares long and hard as he sucks every last drop, and all the while he thinks about pocketing the perfume and taking it home.

The Jäger is self-medicating, but he's steadily building immunity.

"Your sweater, girl." Sister Barbara snips, thin skin wrinkled vexed. A scowl you could depend on like you could the sunset. "I don't want to hear any excuses now."

He doesn't need to see to know who Sister Barbara's scolding. He pauses mid step for a minute and sighs, crosses himself a quick ward of protection, and continues around the bend, en route to Sister Jean's classroom.

You're not wearing the cardigan. Your back to him, he watches with eyes burning and shoulders tensed as the silhouette of yours teases him. Shoulders through the thin cotton of a crisp blouse that turns translucent in the light you're standing in.

"It was due to be laundered." You explain, and cross your arms over your chest. Your back is still to him, and Sister Barbara mimics the stance. She hasn't noticed him, neither of you have, perhaps he can weave through this minefield unscathed.

"So you didn't think to put on your spare?"

"I couldn't find it."

She tsks her disapproval, but has no counter, other than to gesture at your down hair, her eyes rolled. A huff and puff to another audacious display of insolence.

"Comb that nest back. You know the rules." Her tone is ice cold and twice as dry. "Otherwise you'll be spending another class period in Father Brennan's office, not that I don't already have half a mind to send you there now."

He thinks then to retreat. Please God don't send her back to me. He can see Sister Jean later in the day with a decent excuse and a wonderful apology. But you bend, you comply.

"Yes, Sister."

And then you're sweeping your hair off the back of your neck, and it's bared to him. A length of flesh, a column of muscle. Wisps of hair at your nape.

Your head tilts demure, only as far as your shoulder, and the line of jaw twitches something inside.

Low, below the belt. The rush of heat blossoming like an open wound. His collar pulls taut around his swallows, each one turning his throat parched. Your fingers rake your hair and tie it up. A naked neck, a bare jaw, and the hint of shoulders. He sees his hand coming to grip your shoulder, the other slipping under your jaw. Snatching your jaw. Sliding over to slip between your lips and down your throat, your whimpers vibrating his thick knuckles. Gagged on his intrusion.

Twitching. A squirm low in his stomach that breaches the division between gut and groin. A heat that slithers, coiled upwards a scrotum that squeezes it sprung loose.

Teeth-marks jagged and wet break the skin at your nape, the junction where neck meets shoulder from a blouse collar yanked away.

He's spun on his heel, and retracing his path back around the corner from where he's just come. The mens restrooms a safe haven, as there are hardly any men at all in the building at any given time. A tall body hunched and sagged against the door, slammed shut not a moment too soon. Wetness erupts at his groin, a slick sensitivity milked painful from the friction of tight black slacks. A zipper raking engorgement.

He shoves knuckles into his mouth to stifle his cries, and it backfires to thoughts of doing similar to you. Sat in a pew at the back of the church, speared in his lap, your crude joining hidden beneath the cream and hunter green of your kilt.

Animals, like dogs, bite the nape of their mates. They mount, jaws latch the scruff, and they rut. Until exhaustion drags them limp and boneless, until the knot pops. That's what he's thinking when he comes, a release reached by colorfully lewd imagination, your bare neck, and shoulders teased beneath thin cotton.

His sounds are labored and whimpering as he spends himself down his left pant leg. A length throbbing and tender, busted skin at his knuckle. There's a portrait of Jesus Christ on the opposite wall that watches this wretched display, one he averts the oil-painted judgement of. There's a picture of Christ in every room of the school, he realizes.

He's running out of places to hide.

There's no longer refuge in abstinence. Refusing himself touch does not save him.

He holds his office door open for Kate to exit out of. Splayed fingers, a shirt cuff buttoned around the thick of his wrist.

"God keep you, child." His eyes skim the top of her head, a blonde ponytail swishing back and forth as she skips, drawing his eye to you. Prowling outside his door, waiting. Watching. The threat of a pout quivering and eyes blinked hot with the fury of catching a man claimed with another pretty youth. Long legged, grinning around his name. Marked territory invaded.

"Lass?" His acknowledgment is of one of genuine perplexity. You march inward and he stumbles aside to clear your path. Allowing you in, gesturing an invitation he doesn't wholly want to give. He hadn't received a call you were coming.

"What was she doing here?"

Your tongue strikes like a clap to the cheek. An accusation that strangles she spitting and serpent-like. The green-eyed monster has come to collect, and you drag it to his feet. A tangle he must sort. A mess you bring for him to clean.

He blinks. Slow, startled, digesting the situation with labored understanding he must piece together with context clues that oppose. Jagged lines that refuse to slot together.

"She sought spiritual council." He divulges the explanation in calm that's had its edges singed, hands raised in defense of both himself and Ms. Reid. Whatever you believe took place behind his closed door must be a misunderstanding, but that implication roils in his stomach all the same. "It's a service I'm certified to provide, if you'll recall. One you're always welcome to receive."

For a moment he watches you look around his office. Arms crossed. Irritation coiled in a posture looking to lash forth at something. He stays quiet, a raised brow trained on you.

As always, you come out swinging.

"Am I special, Father?"

He blinks, throat closed cold. Careful steps and a steady hand. Easy, old boy.

"All you girls are special." It's still his honest truth. Another shield, the breastplate of his armor he clings tight.

Your eyes glance down at the floor between you. Your voice is so quiet he has to strain to hear you, not something he's used to with your boldness, your unapologetic candor. "That's not what I asked you."

There's more quiet between you. It goes on for longer than before. A sensation eases him, one he recognizes as calm, of all things. Turns out it has the opportunity to reveal itself in your shared company if you're both quiet for long enough. Before he decides if it should thrill him or frighten him, you're tear the calm and silence away. You try again.

"Am I worthy, Father Brennan? Of your attention?" Eyes widening doll like in desperation. There's a right and a wrong answer. You need him to know the difference, and face it. Brave it. "Am I special to you?"

He doesn't give you either answer. Just a look. It's longing. It's pain. It's hunger. Ocean eyes spilling, not of tears - but secrets. Confessions not made, not voiced. So much held at bey. The white at his throat keeping it all down. The moment he dares to utter even a hint, one word that slips passed, it all falls down. It's begging you as much as it's telling you everything you need to hear in words that stay buried. Stay under the collar.

It's not enough for you. You need the words. The confirmation. Something for your teeth to sink into.

"Do you love me, Father Brennan?" His stunned silence makes you smile. A smile that instills more dread. Not because it's malicious, but that it's hopeful. "Don't you want to?"

"Lass-,"

"You said yourself that committing to a love you can't touch is a tall order." A tangle of words turned against him, he breaks through the web. Wet-tissue paper pried apart by the dead weight of a dropped hand. He's stronger than that, at the very least.

"Aye, a test of our faith. A sacrifice. But one made because we must."

"But why must we? Where is loyalty in suffering? Our honest faith in pain? How could that make it more real? How could that make it worth all of this?" A wild, vague gesture that he assumes means to be between you and him. The emphasis on agony a peek behind your curtain. You poor child. He almost thinks to offer that it wasn't so dishonest.

Like the pain recognized isn't one shared.

You're demanding answers he not only doesn't know how to give, he's incapable even if he had them. His tongue is cotton un-spooled against his teeth, down his throat. A chewed up useless thing that rends him mute. He only realizes you've begun to stalk towards him in scuffed mary-janes until his low back knocks the ledge of his desk.

"I don't understand, why is touch wrong when I need it, Father?"

He's run out of ground to stick between you. He has no where else to hide. He'll give you whatever you want so long as you don't come any closer, don't ask him for the one thing he absolutely cannot give you. Will not give you.

Ribs crunching as he rips them from his side with a bloody grasp and skin peeled open. His sternum, long and flat, clattered to the ground at your feet like a ceremonial dagger. His heart. Still beating in shaking palms. Still slick and red, even with all the fissures you've since opened along it's glisten. Yours, all yours. He'll take himself apart piece by piece on his knees for your hurt, for how he's failed you. He'll give it all if only you'd give him even a scrap of mercy in return. A kindness for all he's fed you. All he's given to your satiation.

Your anger pouts.

You cock your head, cat-like. "Don't you want to?"

"No." It's not even a lie. God help him, you're pushing him over a line, and he'd sooner dive across it, head over heels, before he'd lay a hand on you to catch himself from falling. "No, child. This is wrong."

Self-cannibalized malignancy. He'd feed himself to you if it fixed you. A sacrifice made to turn you docile, trick your appetite sated like he had done his own. It could work. He reasons. It's sterilization. It's lobotomy. But it works.

His look is begging you to yield, to show him mercy, but you step closer. A hard swallow and a sturdy body brought to trembles once your hand comes up to flatten against his chest. Over his heart as it hammers the breast bone. You feel along the heavy cross that hangs heavy from his neck on heavy chain. You're wading through his ocean eyes as you do. As you touch him.

Instinct makes him want to growl. Reason, the shreds that remain, think to pry your hands from his person and distance you as gently as he can.

The heart that hammers is slippery and viscous. It's rotting. It's sick. It somehow strong arms both instinct and reason.

In a move that stuns you, he touches you back. Palm cupping your lower back, he pulls you closer. Not into his body, but close enough your toes touch.

He presses a kiss to your hairline.

Gentle, fleeting. A father's quick-pecked affection to a child shirked and throwing a tantrum.

Startled, but only for a beat. You look up at him in a beam. His payment satisfactory.

And it is payment, a toll exacted. It was on the forehead, he barely touched you for longer than it would have taken to push you away, but he pulled you instead.

He pulled you in, and he kissed you.

"Thank you, Father."

You're barely a whisper through his door before he slumps to his knees to the ground. Tipped back to catching himself on the heel of his palm. His fingers rake through his hair, rough and erratic, trying to shake himself from a nightmare. Pinch himself awake, only to the horror that he already is.

He's shaking. Anguish, hot and wet, streaks down his cheeks from raw eyes. Eyes like ocean waves, flash frozen so still they'd shatter with a touch. He'll shatter with a touch. His lids fall heavy and he retreats to his arms, his knees. Long, creaking limbs he tangles himself within, and hides there. He mourns himself, he mourns you.

He licks his dry lips and tastes peaches and cream. His sobbing wrenches to a hard torrent.

He abstains from a lover's touch, but he can take his own.

An old act he hasn't felt beneath himself to oblige since before he joined the priesthood. Its big and thick and worsens the ache for yours, as its meant. Self pleasure always has and always will be disdainful, as by design. The weight and scratching of the chain. The weight and scratching of his palm up and down himself under the shower spray.

Forehead pressed to the tile, eyes held shut to the water and the filth. Debauched grunts and snarls turn rasping pathetic as he sprints to the finish, a name clogging his throat that he refuses to profane by saying it aloud, even though you're the one he prays to have and hold.

Angry flesh bloated from neglect, a bruised complexion contusing to his battery. That's what this is after all. Yanking and tugging to furious abuse. He means to beat away the urge, strip it from the tingling skin and salivating glans. An ailment of a fevered mind, strayed focus. The infection of sin.

Thick and slimy ropes coat his fist and swirl along the drain at his feet. He loathes the smell, the sensation. The clarity that settles around his shivering body cold and needling. The showers turned cold, the water pelting him in a sting. Insult to injury. He'll not be able to conjure the sensation of shower droplets, icy and thick, to calm his swollen girth from thereon, a realization made grim.

Good. He thinks. He's meant to suffer. It's meant to be unpalatable. Good. He thinks again.

The taint hasn't spread. It's but an illness, and illness can be cured. He'll mend. He'll overcome. His soul is sick, not damned. His mind races fire and brimstone and the fetid depths of Hell. Depths he'll leap to before he thinks of yours again. Tight velvet. Delicate virginal tears. Young flesh and hot blood that turns him haggard ancient. Comparison isn't meant to be kind. Touching himself isn't meant to bring him pleasure. Despite the rumble in his gut, the itch in his fingers. Black curls and black eyes and red, every blink, every breath, every squeeze, every stutter. Semen drools between his trembling fingers.

Chastity and obedience. Chastity and obedience.

The once sacred turned laughable. Is it still chastity if he rubs himself raw to the taste of your name? Is it still obedience when he fingers his cross with one hand and jerks himself with the other?

You've taken those precious oaths of his and eaten them. Sucked your fingers clean for him to see, hypnotic motions of swirled tongues and moans seethed shrill and breathy.

He has to will himself to remember that he's the one who fed them to you.

The chains creak and groan. A once harsh, sterile dissonance now a beautiful sound. Restraints remembered, restraints that protect. That keep him held back. A stray dog permitted to live so long as he can't reach the meat.

He rattles them on purpose. Rattles them to remind, to feel the confines. He means to hide. His cock limp, pathetic. It hangs deflated between his thighs another bleak reminder.

You're back alone with him in the church. At night. One echoing and confined. The stiff cushions lining the pews could use a vacuuming. The sort of labor that seems fitting for the offense of indulging strawberry bubble-gum out in the open hall between classes.

Father Brennan rakes you over the coals of a cobalt smolder, eyeing you for the stench of sin. A hound snarling in preempt for a hand to strike as you set to work, bent over in a ruffle of plaid kilt. The hem dragging higher up along the back of your stretched, spread thighs as you lean further along the seat cushion. Hose attachment in hand and the drone of suction, caught in the hollow shell and spit back out in piercing reverberation. A church that screams at him to take himself and his hunger far away.

At least it's loud enough to muffle the low groan as your knee lifts to the pew and you climb forward. Balanced on one hand and knee each, his vision hazy and ensnared by bands of thigh peeking between the top of your stockings and bottom of your skirt.

A common lecher, an old sick dog made to starve. The cross around his neck, between his shirts, hangs heavier by comparison. His collar a flimsy restraint that only paints him more lascivious, regardless of how earnest he tries to look away. And oh, how badly he wants to touch you.

Stroke. Tickle.

Force wider apart to fit his stance between.

Kiss you again.

He's traded his sport coat for a green sweater. School colors, of course, and a stereotype he's unable to escape. An Irishman in black and green. You match. The church is large and drafty, and with the absence of body heat and candle flame, it's desolation has a particular chill. A place of supposed worship honed razor-edged repellent. A former love whose resplendence turned frigid at the presence of his new mistress. Once a shelter it then shuns him. The vacuum whines louder and shrill, it bounces off the rafters; get out get out get out! And take the whore with you!

A similar thick knit of hunter green cotton hides your upper body, but only from the back.

He must look guilty. His loitering irrefutable. He had dismissed you already, set to retreat back to his office to hide. But there he stands. Looming behind you in a position most compromising should anyone happen upon you, and good Father Brennan.

A genuine Lolita, humming in blissful ignorance. In doe-eyes and a back turned. A body presenting a gourmet delicacy to the slobbering hound aching and stiff behind you. He's lived on meat and potatoes. Hallion's Irish Red whenever the gum line around his sweet tooth got that itch for fake caramel malt. God's love and acceptance, blind and unflinching. He must be flinching now, a blind eye turned away from Father Brennan's indulgence. Soft, tender veal. Crushed velvet. Fine wine. A virginal sex blossomed to womanhood in his lap. In his mouth. In his nightmares.

All he can think of when he gazes upon your position is Quod ore sumpsimus.

Lord, may I receive?

He's begging for you where he should be begging for salvation. Deliverance from your evil. Jittery, in pain from how badly he wants to mount. Leering at the precipitous lift of skirt, and young, supple thighs. Would the vacuum be loud enough to cover your cries? His forgiveness huffed and begged as he sinks inside you, deeper and bloodier and selfish. A wilting poinsettia crumbled on the dais.

You turn to face him in a sudden swirl of skirts and open cardigan flaps. An unfortunate effect of the chill has sunk it's tendrils into your body. Your young, fertile body, in the two pinched peaks of nipple through your blouse.

Bras are certainly a strict staple of the dress code. The obvious. Standard. A conclusion. One so forgone it remains unspoken. And surely, Father Brennan's tongue is unwilling to make mention. His eye falls to the poked fabric with a mouth set to water before he rips them away, a blink that sends them - forces them - back to your eyes. You have the audacity to look innocent. His lamb, his little black lamb, meek and mild, even as she offers her purity. Her nubility granted with such nonchalance he has to look away. A display too obscene in its innocuity.

"Is something the matter, Father?" Strawberry bubblegum breath. Your crucifix caught and glinting from overhead florescence. Innocence a five-course meal.

An Hors d'oeuvres of silhouette, one-bite to whet the appetite. His title, his name, hushed yearning, pornographic. The appetizer. A snarl and gnashing teeth to taste it from your glossy, plush pout. A palate cleansed. He dives to gorge himself on the entrée. Gasped bleats, scratching nails, an arched back. Oh God cried in response to the ravenous set loose. A collar that shocks and stings as punishment for his straying, his brazen disobedience. But he doesn't stop, he can't stop. Licking, slurping, chewing, swallowing.

For dessert he finds room to lap up the cherry, popped and smeared. Sticky on your thighs. Syrupy sweet on his tongue.

He coughs, or chokes. Either way it's painful, and disgraced. Tired eyes and pale cheeks. "No, lass. Carry on." He takes his leave you, forcefully, heavy heels strikes that drive his needs to run with every clap against tile that separates. "If you need me, you know where to find me." Called cordially over the resumed drone of the vacuum. Intoned in a way that grumbles don't need me, don't find me, don't come looking.

1971 is chomping at the bit in the bitter gusts of a December on its way out. Classes proceed in the standard flow; coursework persists steadily and the Sister's remain pedant, however the attitude in the classrooms have slackened, and the halls buzz anticipatory and restless. Halls that would soon empty. Arterial structures attached to the heart of the school, the organ stalled, the veins deflated. A hibernation until next year.

Christmas a week to the day and the holiday vacation slotted to begin after mass, the girls of St. Mary's have shelved their retention, their focus closeted. The same sort of languor that overtakes them on Friday afternoons.

Father Brennan has never appreciated the sound of his own voice like the Sisters seem to, but the concluding rite is cut and rolled with a particular brevity that suspends the mass in hesitation, even once it's ended. He then remembers a smile, reassuring and warm, it only heightens the lines of his face drawn deeper, the dark around his eyes heavier. The church doesn't hum or blush for him.

It echoes instead of hushed conversation, wishes of Merry Christmas. The Sisters bidding the girls farewell until school resumes in the new year.

Sisters Jean and Barbara, along with himself, suggested to your parent's a holiday home might be good for you. His relief upon their agreement was born of a much needed break from you. For the sake of his sanity. He wears it lamely, tatters limp and stretched gossamer thin.

You sneak into his periphery, whisper quiet and all the dread of an unidentified shadow. Unfortunately for him, familiarity isn't the issue. Your silhouette is in his dreams, his shut eyes, and now - his prayers. Every curve, and dip. Every peak and valley. Unexplored territory he's now consumed with the thought of charting.

He's defenseless. Sleeves pushed to his elbows, a collar that blisters his neck as it begs to be removed. He clutches the bible in a wide palm like he means to make a shield of the leather bound word.

"Father Brennan," your cadence brokers no negotiation. You will not be shirked, despite your parents awaiting you in the front office to take you home. To take you away from him. "I have something I need to confess."

He closes his eyes and counts to ten. His posture stiffens defensive, his back put up at you. "The mass has ended." It's weak, but if weakness isn't all he has left. He turns to face you, miraculous in finding he's still able to even look you in the eye. "Go on home, lass." He doesn't know if he hopes you can or can't hear that it's a plea. "I'm sure it can wait until you come back."

"It can't." Your insistence fails as nothing in him gives, or softens. So naturally you change tactics. "Please, Father. Am I not still worth your time or attention?"

A dirty trick that turns his look of hesitation sidelong and begging. You lock into him, unflinching. You never back down, and you're not about to start. You're carrying the weight of the world in your heart; your limp trembling, your eyes glassy. He sees you. He knows this particular brand of desperation.

Shoulders sagged and head hung he ushers you into the confessional beside him. Crossing himself on his way in.

"Bless me, Father. For I have sinned." It's a whisper, it's weak and wet and shaking. His heart blips arrhythmic in alarm. You've never sounded this way before. Breath labored in a guilt that saps you of your pluck, a candor sagging under a burden. He can't see you but he imagines you on the other side of the screen, brittle. A sheet of ice suspended seconds before a shatter, splintered outward from one press held too long, pushed too hard. Your silence all that holds you from going to pieces, but the cracks are formed. They wait.

He waits.

"It's alright, my child. You're alright."

Bowed brows, a hand held to a skittish animal quivering in the corner. The toes of his loafer catches his eye, and he bores into the sight. Polished shining black, the hard gleam of blue soon to burn a hole clean through, he'll not look away until he does. He listens to your breath, and stares at his shoe. Hard.

He waits.

"Father, I tried not to do it. Really, I did, I..."a pause to collect yourself, moving slow. Slow so that you do not burst cold crystal, slick and weeping. Melting at his feet. "Well it's just... I can't help myself, you see?"

"Did what, lass?" He shakes at his shoes, slumped forward. Elbows catching his thighs heavy, fingers laced between his knees. Hung like his head. "Can't help yourself from what?"

You swallow. He hears the slurry of muddled admission and secrecy. It's burning a hole in your pocket, much like his shoe. You want to spill yourself, but for once, there's hesitation. Something great hangs in the balance. If you shatter there will be fragments, sharp and biting from which he'll need to shield himself. A retreat deepened. If you wait too long you'll simply wither. The heat, the unbearable, forbidden heat will melt you down, a sopping mess before him he can't make heads or tails of it.

You take a breath. You decide, not to shatter, not to melt, but to explode. A hail of buck-shot.

"This ache inside me, Father. I'm out of my mind, I don't know what to do." You're whimpering, voice hushed but strong, and clear. Oh so clear. Bright and gleaming, a reflection of himself he's forced to gaze upon. "It's only... it's only getting worse."

His shoes won't save him now. He shuts his eyes to the spinning, but somehow the black behind his lids only make it worse. His stomach sour, he sees red, swirling and lurching and burning. There's no where for him to step now. His tact, like his armor, is lost back in the muck. There's nothing to say that won't damn him. There's nowhere to step that won't give. A patch of garden, virtuous and pure, trampled underfoot of his own weakness.

"I touch myself, Father. It just... it hurts so much."

His ears ring. A spot of black in the corner of the cramped booth. A blotchy, uncontained spread, fuzzy and dank on the tile in the corner. Allowed to foster in the shadow. Black mold, he assumes. More black.

Acknowledgement is confirmation he can't stomach.

"I touch myself to you, Father." Your agony almost suggests this confession perhaps doesn't gratify you like you might have fantasied it would. You've shattered, but the mess is only announced, not seen. Not witnessed. Nuance and a heart bloodied lost in the grate of pretend anonymity.

"Child." A warning that begins and end in one word. It's all he can get out before he's choked silent. He hopes it's enough, he prays. You can't name him. Identification is the beginning of the end. He's begging you. On the wrong side of the confessional, but a desire sincere.

"I know your job is to lead me closer to God, but I only want to be closer to you." A hushed whisper that knots whimpered and soft. "I can't stop thinking about you."

He stalls out. He mouths at the dead space separating you, gaping. Tongue a mangle of cotton. The passage of Final Temptation floods his loss for words, and adds pressure to the crush of a confession he's still not sure he's heard correctly. Of Olivero's vast, ruthless hunger that means to drown Cléo. An unceasing tidal wave that floods your lungs and sinks you, waterlogged. Spoiled.

His spluttered silence goads you to continue when that's the last thing he means for you to do.

"Won't you help me, Father Brennan?"

"You," his cadences wobbles and stubs, forcing him to catch a breath his lungs aren't able to hold and barrel onward, "my child, you don't know what you're asking for."

"I want you, Father."

His collar catches. The pattern of tile between his toes slowly come to life and twist. Writhe. Bleed indiscernible. Bleeds as he bleeds for you. Bleeds as he wants you to bleed for him.

"I need you."

Weakness.

You jump on his shoulders. You bite the back of his neck. "I love you."

His face is in his hands.

He is damned, he knows it now.

He loves you. He loves you.

Temptation, slithering and snake-skinned. Around his ankle. Up his leg between his thighs. Heavy, hot, aching. Coiled to knots that burn his gut and lump cold in the throat. Right at the ivory, still keeping it all down. His armor peels free and falls at his feet one piece at a time. Clanging metal, loops in the chain sprung open. Slack, weak-points, faults. You've sniffed it out and destroyed it all.

A final sniffle and a creak of wood and he's then aware you're fleeing. Rubber mary-jane soles striking the tile like heel clicks. More languid than a heart bared and broken would stand for. You want him to catch you.

With eyes shut and fingers trembling, the tips brush himself protected in the sign of the cross. Rapid-fire warding. Furrowed brow. A heart swollen and sick. Left shoulder to right, both sagging heavier with each second that passes.

Weakness. Shameful. Reprehensible. Worthy of naught but eternal damnation.

Father Brennan all but falls out of the confessional. The floor shifts and the walls sway with the fit of the sea has engulfed the church. The sea from his eyes, spilled and flooding. His church. Shining and new like his priesthood once upon a time. Dust gathers in the corners, hairline cracks splinter from the crown molding. His shelter, his purpose, his empire falling to disrepair. A slow rotting. Negligence regarded with a blind-eye and denial. He sees it now. He sees you. He sees too much.

His Eden is poisoned, by it from he or he from it, he doesn't know. It casts him out all the same, this impurity. A humbly devout servant turned traitorous and vile. Slithering. Hissing. Venom in his lure. Condemnation in his touch.

He keeps his distance but he calls after you.

"Lass-," He must sound as sick as he feels, for you stop. He can't say more. He can say nothing else.

Then you turn.

The smile you give him almost pulls him to his knees.

Everything in him feels like it's dropping, every organ every bone every sluggish vein tries to force him to the ground. every part of him aches to submit to you. Old knees crashed to hard tile. He wants to bury his face in your middle and sob. A confession made to you in exchange, in his brows bowed pleading, his clenched jaw, his bleached eyes. All color in him has paled, flushed down the drain with his sin. He's stark. Black hair and black cloth and the ghastly pallor in between. He thinks he needs you if he wants his color back ever again.

You see it all. And then you're gone.

You've broken him down piece by piece. His yellow ribs and brittle sternum and oozing, gaped heart. And then you skip away into the holiday break. Skipping and smiling. Face stinging from watery eyes.

That night swells with fervent invocation. This time it's himself who he prays for.

He wants you. God help him, he wants you.

To say his prayers in the dampness between your legs. To feast from your body like the alternative is famine. A life abstained from your lush decadence is a life sentence, one deprived. Starved.

He's knelt at his bedside with knees that creak and shoulders heavy as his hoarseness is stripped and frayed. He reeks of Irish Mist and disdain. Whiskey makes him see you writhing and arching and still straining Father on your stilted breath. Tongue-numbed and slack-jawed he fumbles into the shower, blinking back sopping black shag from eyes so tired they glow red. Burn against the back of his lids red. Red that bursts with a pop and a hiss. Red that dribbles down your legs. Red that coats him, the spoils of war, an ill-gotten conquest. A concubine for the beast.

Black shrouds him in thin cotton that weighs heavy against his cracked soul. Clings to his huddled drunkenness wet with shame. He only realizes he's stumbled into the shower with clothes still on when he has to wrangle the soggy layers to bare himself to the spray. An old weight slotted in his palm. He can't breath beneath the pelting heat and the throbbing swell that screams under his touch, but he doesn't stop.

He sees more red. So much of it all the time. Blood in your teeth, blood between your thighs.

Would you be virginal? Would you bleed for him as he bleeds for you?

Ripping you apart. A lamb he's sworn to protect then a feast, a sacrifice to the altar, a purity he's sullied. Broken and mended back together in his image. Someone as sick and hungry as he is.

Failing joints cracking the shower's roar makes for an unpleasant melody, but it's not enough to drown his obscenities. His curses. Forgiveness he begs you for even though you're only there in a shaking hand cupped tight. An approximation of slick flesh and giggles from recall. Moans from nightmares. A body from fantasy.

He's a black spot in the corner. Smudged, uncontained, amorphous. Leached poison spread, the blue drained from his eyes. He can't tell if they prick from the water or from tears. He didn't even cry half as hard or twice as much when his father dropped dead. He's begging you to forgive him again. Humping his hand, too wide and calloused to trick him. Slick tile cradling his forehead instead of your breasts. Hot water rivulets down his clothed back, tendrils of steady pressure, pretending they're your fingers.

The cramped tile an echo chamber that forces him to bear witness to his unearthed depravity, the soil loosely churned, the fetid stench invasive. He works himself from wiry root to bloated tip, and every inch between. Rutting, jerking his hips sore. The shower is scalding. This drunken stupor saw fit to burn the fever from him instead of ice it out.

His feet slip and squeal under him. His head lolls and shiny black glints from the shower pan. Laces limp and shiny, black pleather so wet it looks like he's standing in ink. He went in with his shoes on as well.

He squeezes his tip hard, puckered raspberry pinched white, and the grunt he makes is unlike any sound he's heard from his own mouth. The water floods down upon him without mercy. Heat blistering raw, it's sinks marrow deep. In from the top of him, all the way down through. Black hair, black clothes plastered to his body. A stain of weakness, he is. A mold. The thatch at his base draws his focus. Curled and thick, salt and pepper black. Black fleece. He tries not to think how it reminds him of yours. A correlation that builds behind his eyes until they twitch. A rotten core pulsing towards expulsion. Trembling fingers snatch the collar from his throat to rip it off just in time.

A half-sob half-roar announces what he has just done, the evidence riding itself post-haste down the drain. Every inch of him quivers to an imperceptible weight, an exposed nerve twitching and glistening vulnerable. He shakes like a wet dog, his hand still grabbing a hold of himself.

He's a wet mess in the shower, thrown in the corner. Crumbled and shamed. Wet clothes weighing heavier as he stands under the spray. Honey whiskey and spiced bile raise in warning up his throat, but he chokes it back.

He only wishes it would have choked him instead.