#vitiate

You don’t move.

If you move you choose.

If you choose you sin.

So you keep your breath like a trick candle — small, stubborn — while your eyes learn the dark again.

The air is colder by the door, warmer by the bed.

A vertical absence between you and the world, absorbing what little light the sky allows.

No scrape, no step.

Only the way your skin knows when a body is near — the little hairs on your forearms standing in agreement with your fear.

A priest arrived today.

Visitors bring stories and jars of honey and different incense that lingers in the chapel after they leave.

You tell yourself this is only the day’s scent turned strange by the hour.

“Jesus,” you mean to whisper, but your tongue feels a stitch in it. You close your eyes. You wait to be sure of anything at all.

When you open them, the dark is ordinary again, a square with a cross at the top and your own breath loud inside it.

In the morning you find the rosary coiled where you left it, the blanket smooth where it should be, the little crack in the plaster exactly the same length as yesterday.

If something happened, it left no footprint.

It sits in you instead, a wet thumbprint on the soul you scrub until Matins.

You decide it was a fever the body hasn’t earned.

The second Night

You arrange proofs before Compline the way other girls lay out clothes, a hair curled over the threshold, the smallest scrape of soap on the inside of the latch, your shoes toed together, heels aligned precisely.

You pin your veil on a different hook than usual, just to break the pattern and make the night trip over it.

You blow out the lamp and promise yourself you will not invent a demon to excuse an unclean want.

The cold comes first, like a polite guest.

Then the feeling of being regarded, which is colder.

You keep your eyes open because last night closed eyes made it worse.

The room breathes.

Something taller than the chair stands where the chair is not.

The darkness has weight and a listening to it.

You test the latch by imagining it, it does not answer. You test the hair by watching the seam under the door, no draft stirs it.

You test yourself by saying the words you were taught to say when trouble comes in a shape with no name — Deliver us, O Lord. Deliver us from daydreams, from vanity, from unnamed fire at midnight.

Your throat tightens the way it does before you speak in refectory.

You decide you are not afraid, fear is for the credulous.

You are only — what?

Alert.

Ashamed to be alert.

You are not naive.

You are not a girl who blames a shadow for the warmth that crawls up the spine and settles under the ribs.

The dark leans, only a hand’s breadth closer.

You feel breath without wind graze the left side of your neck, where your pulse wears your vow.

Your body answers as if a bell rope were tugged.

You hate it for how quickly it learns.

You stare at the crucifix and make a bargain you would never write down, if the little crack in the plaster to the right of Christ’s foot is longer by morning, then this is real and you must speak, if it is the same, then your mind is a theatre and you must board up its doors.

You don’t sleep so much as erase hours.

In the morning the crack is the same.

The hair on the floor is collapsed into itself the way hair does when a draft has had its way with it.

Your shoes are a finger-width apart, perhaps you did not align them as perfectly as you thought.

The soap on the latch is smeared by your own thumb, surely, when you checked it.

You drink the thin coffee, mouth dry as chalk, and stare at the priest across the refectory without staring at all.

He is exactly what a priest should be when others watch — courteous, precise, the voice people lean toward.

He never glances your way.

You put your want in a jar and screw the lid on hard.

You decide it is pride to think a priest could be the shape in your room.

Pride and a wish for the drama other girls confess about.

The Third Night

The abbess compliments your thoroughness in the sacristy.

Sister Yuki nods over your polished candlesticks as if they absolve you a little.

All day you go where you are meant to go, the good machine of obedience, and still you carry that other pulse, an extra syllable in your heartbeat that says awake awake awake.

You put no proofs out tonight.

Proofs are for people who can bear an answer.

You leave the window a little open because the room smells close and human after Vespers.

The night pushes a damp thyme-scented breath through the grate.

You lay on your side to face the crucifix. You count backwards, not sheep but sins you have not yet committed and would like never to, envy, sloth, despair, blasphemy.

You place lust last, like a child sneaking a sweet to the bottom of the basket.

There is a sound this time, very small — the click of wood that knows the exact complaint of your hinge.

Then silence like someone smiling.

You hear the kind of breathing that isn’t exertion or sickness but attention.

Your scalp prickles.

You pull the blanket to your chin because that is what people in stories do when something stands at the foot of the bed.

The blanket does not help.

The sense of a figure moves from foot to side, and now you are sure where it is — at your left shoulder, between you and the wall, where anyone would stand to speak into your ear.

You let your eyes unfocus until the dark loses its edges.

If you soften your sight just so, there is a deeper dark where a face could be.

The hallucinations you read about in a book once announce themselves as conversation, as coal-bright eyes, as breath.

You told Sister Shoko loftily that the mind can be shepherded.

The mind, insulted, has come to show you its teeth.

It feels like fever without heat.

Like wanting without a picture to peg it to.

You hold very still, the way you did as a child when the barn cats crept near, and listen for proof you can carry to daylight.

A shoe?

A ring tapping wood?

A sleeve brushing stone?

“Say it,” says a voice you do not hear with your ears.

You don’t move.

The syllables fall through you like a drop into a well.

You know that voice.

You do not know that voice.

It carries the pastoral cadence of a confessional and the private warmth of laughter.

It lives in the part of your brain where obedience stands ready to rise.

Say what? you think, and the thinking feels like answer enough to qualify as sin.

Your mouth goes dry.

Your eyes sting.

You consider sitting up, tearing the night like cloth, saying aloud, Father, are you in my room?

If the dark answers yes, the world will tilt forever

If it answers no, you become another hysteric, another cautionary tale about suggestible girls, a burden the community will carry with tender patience and secret relief that it isn’t them.

You keep your mouth closed because either truth would end something, and you are not ready to collapse any wave into fact.

Instead you do what you can do and still live with yourself in the morning, you move your hand two inches across the sheet until your fingertips meet the cool wood of the little table, and you slide the rosary into your palm.

The beads are warmer than the table, as if someone else’s hand left them so.

You tell yourself wood holds the memory of the day’s sun.

You count a decade without speaking.

Between each bead you insert a condition, If this is a test, keep me, if this is my pride, break it, if this is a man, expose him, if this is only me, quiet me.

When you reach the crucifix, you touch Christ’s feet with a thumb that trembles and think — clearly, for once — help.

The breath at your left ear retreats, the way a tide does not apologize as it goes.

You keep breathing.

You keep not moving.

The room widens by a fraction.

The open window admits honest cold.

Somewhere down the hall a sister coughs, the door at the end of the corridor opens and closes, too far away to be yours.

You sleep in the way falling sometimes feels like flying for the first second.

In the morning there is dew on the sill where no dew could reach if the window were as little open as you remember leaving it.

At Prime he passes in the cloister between you and the sky.

The light climbs his cheekbones the way painters like to show.

He asks the abbess after her hip, and his hands are folded just so, and a novice drops a book because she was looking at him instead of her feet.

His voice is the voice you heard through a lattice yesterday, instructing Sister Maki with such patience that even your envy admired it.

He does not look at you.

He does not look at anyone too long.

His restraint is a proof you wish you could make yourself not notice.

You decide two opposite things and keep both, that you are sick with a small unconfessed want, and that someone stood in your room and leaned close enough to teach your body a language you do not wish to speak.

You decide nothing at all.

You polish a candlestick until you can see your face in it, and your face looks like a girl who would prefer a fever to an answer.

The Fourth Night

You wake to the bell.

Not the one that calls Lauds at five — this is lower, closer, a soft iron knock from inside your chest.

The cell is the same little square it always is, whitewashed stone, the wooden crucifix above your cot, your folded habit on the chair, the rosary coiled like a tame serpent on the nightstand.

Moonlight drags the window’s grille across the floor in a ladder of pale bars.

Someone is in the room.

You do not move.

You have learned — three nights now, maybe four — that motion snaps the illusion and drops you down into a cold, heavy body that can’t lift its arms, can’t lift its tongue.

So you let breath pretend to be sleep, shallow and slow, and you watch the dark unspool.

He is a height, a weight, a blankness that eats starlight.

No scrape of boot on stone, no rustle of cloth.

Only the even hush of his breathing when he leans in, close enough that you can measure the shape of him without seeing — shoulders broad, a sleeve brushing the air above your cheek, a scent of frankincense threaded with something warm and human.

Your mind says — dream.

Your skin says — danger.

“Little dove,” he murmurs, and you feel it more than hear it, a vibration across the thin fur at the nape of your neck.

You close your eyes.

It is the only thing you can still do.

He attends, he hovers, he waits, as if the waiting is a touch.

Your heart kicks at your ribs.

Heat rises beneath your skin, mortification blooming with it, a secret you are sure must show on the outside even though he cannot see your face.

The dark leans nearer when your breath hitches.

Then it pulls back.

Then nearer again.

A game, patient and cruel, teaching your body a rhythm it will remember in the daylight and hate itself for knowing.

At last the bell for Matins sluices through the hall from the chapel below. The blackness draws away like a tide leaving you on wet stones.

You choke on air you can move again, your hands fumble for the rosary.

The beads are warm as if someone else’s palm just left them.

Again.

The Fifth Night

By breakfast you have convinced yourself it was a dream after all.

In the refectory, the novices are a flock of gray and black, eyes lowered, the long tables lined with bowls of soft bread and thin soup.

Sister Yuki reads from the Lives of the Saints in a voice that makes even martyrdom sound orderly.

You listen and nod and chew.

He sits two rows down — Father Ryomen, the visiting priest on retreat, the one the Abbess praised for his “gift for counsel.”

He lifts his spoon like everyone else, dips his head for the Gospel like everyone else, laughs softly at something the Abbess says like a man who belongs.

He looks like a painting in the chapel from far away.

Up close there is something ruinous under the paint.

He doesn’t look at you — not once.

Not when the spoon in your hand trembles loud against the bowl.

Not when you drop your napkin and it falls perfectly over the scuffed mark on the floor you made last night in your clumsy panic.

Not even when you pass him in the cloister and the small cool wind that lives under the arches shivers your veil and carries his voice — low, ordinary — over your shoulder as he asks Sister Shoko about the cracked bell rope.

Normal, you think savagely, clinging to the word like a plank in a swell.

He is completely normal.

You hold the plank all day.

You polish candlesticks until you can see your face sweat-shiny in the brass.

You shelve hymnals until your hands become paper.

You scrub the chapel floor on your knees until the stone soaks your kneecaps and numbs them.

Whenever shadow moves at the edge of sight your muscles flinch and then you shame them into stillness.

You are not a child.

You are not naive.

This is your vocation.

The devil is busy.

The mind is a house with trick mirrors.

You stack logic like bricks and feel the wind come through anyway.

By evening you are a string stretched too tight.

You make for the chapel like you always do, because it is either that or run to the gates and ring them.

The nave is empty, the lamplight tosses gold up into the ribs of the wooden ceiling, the confessional crouches at the side aisle like a box for swallowing sound.

You have not intended to go into it.

You are inside it before you know you have turned.

The lattice sets a delicate shadow over your face.

On the other side, the sliding screen rattles once and settles.

Silk over steel,

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Your voice surprises you. It is small and very clear.

“It has been—”

You falter.

What is time, when the night is a room and the room is a throat?

“Three days. I—I have had… thoughts. And dreams. I think they are dreams.”

Silence.

A silence that listens.

You can feel him lean the way one feels a storm lean toward a field.

“What kind of dreams?”

His tone is soft with concern, an instrument tuned to consolation.

It would calm a dying man

It would coax a confession out of a stone.

You swallow.

Heat climbs your throat.

“Unclean. Blasphemous.”

“Unclean how?”

The lattice is a net.

You catch on it.

You bleed on it.

Words snag and tear.

You are not supposed to speak like this, that is the worm in the hook he sets, and you know it and still you bite.

“Desire,” you manage. “I wake—no, I don’t. That’s the worst of it. I don’t know if I wake. He is there. Someone. A man. I can’t move. I can’t even look at him. And my body—”

Your breath breaks.

You clutch the rosary hard enough the crucifix bites your palm and nearly draws blood.

“My body betrays me.”

The exhale on the other side is the smallest thunder.

“And what does he do in these dreams?” he asks, so tenderly you could hate him for it. “Does he touch you?”

“No,” you whisper, appalled that relief sits right beside disappointment beneath your ribs. “He only watches.”

A smile, you think, can make a sound without making a sound.

You hear it now, a curve of mouth you cannot see.

“And what do you… feel, when you are watched?”

“I feel—” You choose a safe word and find it empty. “Afraid.”

“And?”

“Embarrassed.”

“And?”

You close your eyes.

The dark inside your head is kinder than the dark in your cell.

“Wanted,” you say, the truth a splinter that slides out and leaves your pulse raw.

He hums, like a scholar noting a fine point.

“Temptation often arrives wearing the garments of our hunger,” he murmurs. “Have you entertained these thoughts beyond the dream?”

“No.”

The answer is too quick.

A lie will always run faster than the truth.

You hear it stumble.

“I mean—I try not to. I pray. I recite the Psalms. I sleep with the light on now, which is forbidden, I know, but—”

“But you are frightened.”

His voice gentles further, as if stroking a frightened animal.

“When did the dreams begin?”

“Four nights ago.”

Maybe five. Your scalp prickles beneath your veil.

“The night after you arrived.”

He lets that sit between you like a wafer on a tongue.

At last,

“Do you see his face?”

“No.”

The word is a fog. It fills the box. It dampens the wood.

“Sometimes I think I do, and then I blink and it is only the shadow of the crucifix, or the edge of the chair, or nothing at all. It feels like a fever. Like the opium tincture they gave me when I was sick as a child.”

“Little dove,” he says again, and the name is a hand under your chin, tilting your shame toward the light. “The mind is a trickster. It puts on masks. We must starve it of theater.”

A pause.

You feel, not hear, his knuckles brush the lattice.

“Describe the dream to me. All of it. Where he stands. What you feel. What you want.”

You flinch.

“Father—”

“For healing,” he says, and the phrase rings with such smooth authority that the scruple in you bows to it. “Bring darkness into speech and it loses teeth. Hold it in silence and it bites.”

Your mouth shapes the night.

Haltingly.

Sparingly.

You give him the temperature of the room, the shape of the shadow, the shame that crawls your skin.

He listens like a man in prayer.

He asks again where he stands.

He asks where your eyes go when you cannot move them.

He asks whether the sound of your breath is what wakes you or whether it is the silence between breaths.

Every answer you give him feels stolen from a place inside you you did not know had furniture.

When it is over, he does not absolve you at once.

“Your penance,” he says finally, almost thoughtfully, “is to sleep without the lamp. To leave your window open. To recite Psalm 63 before you close your eyes— especially the line about the soul that thirsts. Slowly. Let the thirst ache in your mouth when you say it.”

A small pause, merciful as a blade.

“And come to me tomorrow at the same hour. If it continues.”

“If?” It is pathetic, the way your voice lifts.

“If,” he repeats. The screen whispers as he slides it shut. “God keeps strange nights with those He means to refine.”

You step out of the confessional light and do not trip because you already know the way the floor rises and dips in the aisle, your feet learned it the first night you came here and begged “help me” into the grain of a pew.

You kneel.

You say Psalm 63 until the words are a dry stone rolled on your tongue.

You do not turn on the lamp in your cell.

When the dark arrives, it arrives like someone who knows the hinge, the latch, the pace of your breath.

He stands where he always stands.

The wind at the window faintly breathes the curtain.

Somewhere down the hall a door closes, close enough to be real and far enough to be meaningless.

You do not know if you are awake.

You know that he is.

You do not move.

You do not say the name you will not let your mind give him.

You lie there while he leans over you, perfectly normal all day, perfectly monstrous here, and you understand what he wanted in the confessional — not the catalogue of your sin, but the map of your night.

Your breath hitches and your body, once again, betrays you in a way it doesn't allow you to turn, to move, to even speak. It allows you to widen your eyes. It allows you to look at the shadow moving closer and closer.

It doesn't allow you to make difference from dream and reality.

The light, soft sheets slide off your fear stiffened body.

Warm, big and somehow gentle hands draw your knees up by hooking fingers behind them.

Another pressure in the mattress.

It sinks in the bottom of it as he kneels like he has been waiting to, reverent in a way that has nothing to do with altars.

Crimson eyes reflect the moonlight outside.

No lamp tonight.

Only the quiet night sky, the bright moon and spylike stars are witnesses for this obscene act.

Fingers at your hem, a pause for your eyes, then the cotton slipping and the night gathering close as he bares your thighs to it.

You feel petrified and the heat unspooling inside of you can not be named.

Your mind races trying to find every single exit and suddenly there are none.

Your voice is trapped behind your teeth and your chest rises and falls in shallow, quick moves.

Those same warm hands wrap your ankles now.

The pressure on the mattress gives and your body is pulled down, sliding until you feel chalk-cold stone on your calves.

You can't move, you try — your arms are made of lead.

Fingers trace smoothly from your knees to the middle of your thighs.

“Your shame smells like incense. Lift it to me.”

His voice is low, rough.

His hands warm.

His breath warmer.

The first kiss pressed to the inside of your thigh like an anointing and the second higher, and then—

Then the fever is not an excuse.

It is a fact.

There is nothing gentle about his hunger, there is nothing rushed either.

He is a scholar with a mouth, a sinner with a litany.

He parts you with his thumbs and devotion, opens you like a book no one else is allowed to read, and reads.

Tongue slow, then precise, then unholy in its patience when you gasp and try to clutch at the bedsheets because it’s too much, not enough, too much again.

He listens to your breath the way he listened in the box, learns you, returns to what makes your heel kick, avoids it until your body begs, returns again.

Your voice cracks the barriers that are your teeth and lips and tongue.

You breathe God and mean him.

You say Father and mean the same.

“Good,” he murmurs into your core, voice rough with his own undoing. “There’s my little dove. Say your psalm.”

“I—” The word falls apart when he draws a long, devastating line with the flat of his tongue from entrance to clit, and then down again. You cough up scraps of scripture between panting. “My—my soul thirsts—”

He hums into you at thirst, a wicked benediction, and you break open on the sound, clutching, shaking, shocking yourself with the force of it, with how shamelessly your body sings into his mouth like a bell that forgot it ever tolled for anything else.

“Confess into my mouth, I’ll absolve you in a different tongue.”

The tip of his tongue presses against your slit and another hum tells you that he's waiting for your words.

He didn't tell you to stop saying your psalm.

"And my mouth— s-shall praise thee with joyful— ah! lips"

You feel your eyes flooding with tears and soon after your ears are wet, and so are your temples and the line of your hair.

Moonlight reflects the glinting of your damp face and of those fiery orbs searing his gaze into you.

His tongue works around your swollen nub and your body feels a little less like it's made of lead, a little more like it's made of molten lava.

This can't be real.

This feels very real.

You can't move.

Your voice seems muffled like it's being echoed beneath a body of water.

His palm grabbing and squeezing the plush of your thighs as his mouth latches over your clenching cunt feels very, very real.

Your voice, the psalm and the wet, blasphemous noises are the only ones filling your chambers that night.

You remember rolling your eyes when your core tightened and your stomach felt like sinking and your whole body trembled as his lips sucked your sensitive clit until you became undone.

And when you wake up in the morning, you are covered neatly, tucked in your sheets.

Your undergarment is in it's place.

You are comfortable in your bed like nothing ever happened.

A dream, then.

Shame sluices in, cold as the flagstones.

You taste iron where your teeth bit your lip.

The room is the same cell as every night — the crucifix watching, the folded habit patiently waiting, the window indifferent as ever to human ruin.

You try to sit, to speak, to apologize to a God who must have turned His face.

Your dreams are nothing short than unholy, devious, dirty.

You go on about your day.

You do your chores.

You pray and you don't meet his eyes when you pass near him.

Later, you choose the far box because the wood there is older, darker, and you hope the dark will take pity on you.

The screen slides.

A small square of lattice turns your face into a pattern.

His voice arrives through it, low and warm and pastoral — habit dressed as mercy.

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Your hands are neatly folded and still they look guilty

“I’ve… continued to dream. I try to pray. The lamp stays off, as you said. The window is open.”

“How faithful,” he murmurs, the words soft as a finger on a throat. “Tell me, little dove. From the beginning. Leave nothing out. Where does the dream come from? Where does it touch you first? With fear? Or the warmth you won’t name?”

Heat rises under your veil.

“With watching.”

“Good.” A pause, the kind that listens on purpose. “And then?”

You try to make a narrative that behaves, an order of images, the steady light of an honest inventory.

"With warm hands… gentle touches—" you feel your body reacting and you press your nails inside your palms to keep your faith and focus. "With hot breath—"

But the room has a second pulse today, not yours and not the chapel’s.

You hear it the way one hears a clock that shouldn’t be ticking — faint, regular, a repetitive hush of cloth, a small scrape, the briefest catch of breath that is not prayer.

The rhythm discovers you, and your mouth goes dry.

He speaks where the sound leaves off, his questions slotting into the quiet like beads onto a wire.

“How does your body answer? Which breath tells on you? Does your stomach lift? Do your knees tremble? Do you swallow before you admit it, or after?”

You stare at the lattice and see nothing, you stare past it and see too much.

“This is obscene,” you whisper.

“Shame can be a teacher,” he says gently. “Let it deliver you to the actual words.”

The second pulse keeps time.

Wood creaks a little, as if a knee shifted.

Metal touches wood — faint, the clink of a ring or a buckle against the panel — and then his breath slips, recovers, continues.

You can’t see him.

You don’t need to.

The knowledge lands in your body like a sacrilege you didn’t invent.

You never witnessed such an act, yet, you are sure of it — the sound of self pleasure.

You could stop.

You could rise and step out and cross the nave and kneel until your knees split.

You could say his name aloud in daylight and end the night forever.

Instead — obedient, ruined — you tell him what he asked for.

“I feel it first in my throat,” you say, because it is the smallest truth and the truest. “Like I’m going to speak and can’t. And then in my chest. And then—”

You falter, and the other rhythm answers your falter as if pleased.

“And then it’s everywhere. Like it’s a prayer I don’t remember learning, but my body knows it by heart.”

A hush that isn’t empty.

“And the moment you know you will let it happen?”

“I don’t let—” You stop lying. “When he breathes on my neck.”

“On the right or the left?”

“Left.”

“Ah.” Reverence, wicked and sincere at once. “And what does your mouth do then?”

“Nothing,” you say, but your lips have parted, and he hears it.

You can tell he hears it because the tiny steady sound falters again, and his own breath shortens, and the knowledge of that — that slip — sends a white crack through your shame that feels nothing like remorse.

“Say the line,” he murmurs, as if he can smell your thought. “From last night.”

You shut your eyes and say it because your treachery is now a discipline.

“My soul thirsts for You, my body longs for You in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”

The lattice presses its little geometry onto your skin.

His answer comes in the hush between syllables, a low noise you would never hear in public, a swallowed sound that trembles with thwarted triumph.

The faint rhythm quickens once, then stills, and all at once the box is full of normal again — the faint, pious odor of wood wax, the stiff quiet of old velvet, the sense of a man seated properly, hands folded, collar straight, mouth composed.

It makes you dizzy.

He lets the dizzy have you for a count of five.

Then his voice returns, priestly, polished, not a seam showing.

“You did well to bring this into speech. You have not sinned by being tempted, you have only sinned where you consented. Penance, Psalm 63, as before, once before sleep, once on waking. Leave the lamp off. Keep the window open. And—” A kindness laced through with wire. “Abstain from bread for three days.”

“Bread?”

Your voice is small.

It feels like he is taking the one thing that keeps your hands from shaking at breakfast.

“So that you may know the ache of hunger without feeding it,” he says mildly. “It sharpens prayer.”

You swallow.

The room smells like clean wood and a lie you cannot prove.

“Father—”

“Yes, little dove.”

“I think—” Your throat tightens. You force it open. “I think you… enjoy my shame.”

Silence folds its hands.

For a moment you think he won’t answer at all.

Then,

“I rejoice that you tell the truth,” he says softly. “And I rejoice that you know when you are telling it.”

It isn’t an admission.

It is worse, permission for you to know what you know.

The box seems smaller, the chapel larger, the space between the two of you elastic and obedient to his touch even when he is still as stone.

“Your absolution,” he says, and gives it to you in a voice so even you could weep with rage.

He makes the sign you can’t see, and you make it for yourself with a hand that trembles.

When the screen closes, it moves like a mouth.

You step out into the nave and the air is cold enough to sting, honest air, clean stone.

The altar lamp wavers.

Somewhere a novice coughs.

You kneel in the pew because your knees know how.

You begin the psalm because your tongue obeys.

My soul thirsts.

Behind the lattice, wood settles.

A chair leg scuffs.

The door of the box gives a little sigh.

Footsteps cross the tile — measured, decorous, a priest’s.

He passes you in the aisle without looking.

You could set your watch by his restraint.

You could die of it.

You clench your hands until the astringent bite of your own nails gives you back your shape.

The shame comes like weather.

The wanting sits under it like a spring that never runs out.

When you stand, your legs are steady.

When you walk, you don’t falter.

You keep your eyes on the altar the way shipwrecked men keep their eyes on shore.

But in the clavicle-deep hollow where the night lives, you carry the knowledge like a coal, you couldn’t prove it, you don’t have to.

He is filthier than your worst guess, holier in daylight than anyone needs, and you are already learning the liturgy of both.

Two more nights pass before his hands are slowly dragging your nightgown up, bunching it above your chest before his lips are again tasting yours.

Two more nights, and you feel his knees straddling your torso.

You feel a thumb pressing your lips — first soft, a mere brush on the lower lip, a ghost of a chuckle and then a pressure that parts them.

The pad of his thumb caressing the flat of your tongue.

Above you, just shadows and the red, scornful glare of those eyes.

Your mouth opens, obedient, no sound leaves.

Your breath hitches and his palm rests against your cheek, soothing an ache he is the sole responsible for causing.

“Thirst, little dove. Let me be the blasphemy that quenches.”

His voice is drenched in malice and soon his thumb, covered in your spit, leaves your mouth.

A shuffle of fabric, the clink of a buckle.

Heat pulsing near your face.

Heat crawling up to your face matches it.

His smell, musky, virile, obscene — it fills your lungs and you can almost see the spit coated thumb circling the glistening crown of his manhood.

You pant once and he notices.

A dark little sneer rolls from his lips and his free hand is soon entangling long fingers in your hair like a vice. Steadying, grasping firmly before pulling you up with little effort just enough so the back of your head rests against the headboard, no longer on your pillow.

You feel the hot tip of his dick — slick with pre and a little bit of your saliva — brushing against your still obediently parted lips.

You could close your mouth.

You don't.

He slides his tip in and you let your jaw slack to sheath him entirely, eyes closed, head spinning as you repeat your psalm again and again in your head, praying it will clean you from this impurity.

Praying it will keep you from sinning as if there isn't a cock being shoved inside your throat in less than ten seconds.

As if you weren't gagging and convulsing around his shaft as he bottoms out inside your mouth, hissing lowly and pressing his hips against your face as his hand pulls your head to swallow him to the limit.

As if your holy little head isn't bobbing at his hand's mercy, grip firm making it go up and down and up and down, the swollen tip rubbing against your palate, punching the back of your throat and sliding velvety skin against your tongue as he lets low groans and moans roll from his lips directly into your chest where they will echo for days.

“Keep that throat soft for me— yes, take the blessing.”

He snickers breathlessly as he keeps thrusting, hips rolling when he pushes against your soft lips and pulls your head to feel once again your throat working his length.

Pre and saliva froth in a rim around the base of his cock where your lips are wrapped once he bottoms out again, letting out a deep sigh, almost reverent.

You feel dizzy with the lack of air and he lets you breathe when the convulsing of your throat becomes too frequent.

He wants you conscious.

“Hold still— let me use that pretty mouth like a chalice.”

Your vision is unfocused, he is ruthless.

The schlick sounds of his cock fucking into your skull rise and fasten until you don't have time to feel the gag reflex anymore.

He uses your mouth and throat as he wishes.

His other hand lays on your cheek, palm firm, fingers digging under your jaw, guiding so he can get the best angle to take his pleasure from you.

His breath gets uneven, faster— his groin hits your nose tip and presses your lips once gain, burying himself deep inside you before releasing his seed directly inside your tight throat, tainting your esophagus as your constricting walls milk him and your eyes roll back.

You can't do anything but swallow his filth.

You close your tear barred eyes and relax your body until he unsheathes his cock from your throat.

He gets off your bed, settling by its side, and you feel his body leaning in, breathe hitting the crown of your head where his grip was relentless a few seconds ago.

He presses his lips there, shameless, and it's not a kiss.

He smiles where you can’t see it, only feel it on your skin like the echo of heat.

You think it's over.

His hands tell you otherwise.

His grip on your hipbones is firm and you are laying on your stomach with a low gasp. Your face hits the softness of the pillow and now you can feel your body becoming a body and not a stone. You can move your fingers, hands, legs and arms — yet, you don't.

You keep still as those same filthy hands slide the hem of your garments up.

You keep unmoving as the palms map the curves of your waist, hip, ass and thighs, leaving a searing trail that burns beneath your skin.

You keep very, very quiet as the mattress dips once again, his knees spreading your legs before you feel the weight burdening your body, pressing it and sinking you down on the place made for you to rest and pray and find peace.

It's wrong.

Obscene.

You should feel dirty.

You feel dirty.

You also feel… wanted.

You feel your body hot, you feel wetness pooling on your puffy folds, you feel your heart beating so hard against your chest you think you will pass out.

You feel his hand crossing between your sternum and the bed and encasing your throat.

You feel his tip pressed against your pussy, then rubbing up and down, rutting slowly to collect your slick before aligning perfectly to your entrance.

“I was patient,” he murmurs. “Patience makes saints and monsters. I have never pretended to be a saint.”

It's sudden and it's brutal.

His hand presses your neck, your vision blurs and he slams his hips against your ass in a single thrust where he bottoms out inside your pussy.

Your back arches, eyes roll and the screeching moan you'd let out dies before reaching your throat. He waits two beats before allowing the bloodflow to return perfectly, releasing the pressure, allowing you to feel — and oh, how much you feel.

You feel his girthy length stretching you with a stingy pain that slowly becomes something else.

“Tell me you like being ruined in your good girl sheets.” he whispers against the shell of your ear, breath hot, a little squeeze of his pads on the sides of your neck. “I’m not stopping until you give me your amen shaking.”

He rolls his hips and you mewl, body shivering, hands grasping at the bedsheets and legs bending up. You feel the tip of his cock kissing slowly your cervix, you feel every bulging vein brushing against your velvety walls, you feel yourself clenching around him, impossibly wet, impossibly lustful.

You feel like this is the holiest moment of your entire life.

“I’ll write my absolution on your hips.” his teeth nibble at your lobe and he starts moving — shallow, yet brutal thrusts that press you into the mattress. He makes sure to grind into you, to roll his hips and rut into your cunt like an animal.

You feel like you're melting around his dick.

Your moans dissolve into the fingers he slid inside your mouth, wantonly playing with your tongue and mirroring the rhythm he fucks you into the bed.

The wet, profane sounds of his cock being buried again and again inside your wet pussy fight the slaps of skin against skin. You feel your asscheeks hot with each hit of his hips. You feel your body aching when he snakes down his hand to your navel and soon find your clit to play with.

You surrender to his sacrilege so easily — all it takes is his heat, his mouth, his fingers and his cock.

You're arching your back and offering yourself to him like a common whore and he lets out a scathing chuckle before burying his face in your nape.

“Every time you breathe, you take me deeper into your vows.”

You whine and suck on his fingers.

You feel your body aching and your skin prickling and your stomach tightening once again.

Soon, it's all heat and silence. You orgasm as he pounds you mercilessly, never once stopping or slowing his pace — his stamina second to none.

You hear his breath hitching as you ride your orgasm and you know he's chasing his own as he ruts into you with a brutal, mercurial force and rhythm.

“Say you belong to the hands that unmake you.”

You say, or you think you do. You may have babbled the words because his fingers keep circling your sensitive bud and he keeps fucking into you and you feel so overwhelmed you don't think you're surviving the night.

But of course you are.

And he's ripping another orgasm from you as he finally reaches his own.

Your cunt clenches and milks him dry. You bite down his hand when he muffles your mewl and you feel the ropes of his thick, unholy seed spurting inside you, flooding your pussy and tainting every single inch with his hot, profane release.

You pant, gasp and feel yourself drenched in sweat and sin.

You feel his breath and his heartbeat as his body slacks over yours, heavy, soothing.

“Tell me one filthy thing you loved and one you want filthier next time.”

His voice is wrecked and a little undone when he rasps against your nape, muffled by your hair.

You don't answer.

He waits.

"Your weight on me," your voice is small, a whisper "Your… words…" you bury your face in your pillow but he brings it back up with a hand on your jaw.

“Good girl— now give me your amen.”

You give and that hands turn your face until he can meet it. He ruts once again inside you and when you moan involuntarily he takes your lips in his and chuckles in your mouth when you gasp as he steals your first kiss.

When he leaves, he doesn’t creak a floorboard.

The night closes over the shape he made in it.

He is gone.

You lie there with the cross looking down, lips buzzing with the aftertaste of prayer turned inside out.

Regret is a flood, yes, but under it something has taken root and refuses to drown.

You know what it is.

You know who fed it.

You roll onto your side and face the window and whisper the psalm until thirst is the only word that means anything at all.

The next day is like nothing happened once again.

Your lips don't feel swollen, but feel desecrated.

You wake up tucked in, rested, clean, but you feel defiled.

You do your chores.

You don't have bread.

You confess.

You sleep.