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May 27

❝ 𝕻𝖆𝖙𝖗𝖔𝖓 𝕾𝖆𝖎𝖓𝖙 𝖔𝖋 𝕮𝖔𝖗𝖗𝖚𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 ❞

↳ a modern series

unholy ghost aka cate haunts sydney inside and out tags: girlcock, priest au, alternate universe, catholicism, religious imagery, religious themes, priest!sydney, forbidden relationship, age-gap, corruption, temptation, sacrilege, blasphemy, religious guilt, mutual obsession, slow burn, mutual pining, sexual tension, yearning, emotional repression, confessional booth, masturbation, sexual frustration, power imbalance, devotion as a love language, internalized shame, hurt/comfort, etc. 6.4k+ words

author's note: welcome to chapter two of the patron saint of corruption series! please enjoy father stark suffering spiritually, emotionally, and with absolutely no dignity<3

also! in case anyone missed it on the masterlist, there’s now an official playlist for this fic, along with a few others hehe, you can find them on each respective series masterlist under the ♫ icon!

patron saint of corruption masterlist | ao3 fic | sydney stark character profile

The rain held through the night, gentling to a hiss that sounded like penance trying not to say its own name. Sydney stood in the nave long after Cate’s heels stopped echoing, collar unfastened, fingers pressed against her sternum like she could force her heart back where it belonged. The sanctuary lamp burned steady. The pew smelled like beeswax and Cate. She hated that the scent didn’t feel like desecration so much as ownership—how a single body could leave its mark on wood that had outlived four pastors and two restorations.

The guilt did not arrive like thunder. It arrived like water finding seams. She felt it in the small places first: the ache at the hinge of her jaw, the ghost-pressure of Cate’s hand closing over her knuckles on the pew rail, the drag of her own muscles when she breathed too deeply. Worst of all was the low, traitorous hum still moving through her body, grateful where it should have been ashamed. The nave smelled like rain and wax and sex, and Cate seemed woven into every breath Sydney took.

Forgive me.

The words rose soundlessly and found nowhere to land.

She forced her feet to move. The sacristy light buzzed when she flicked it on. White cabinets, linen drawers labeled in her tidy handwriting, a steel sink where she usually rinsed out cruets and cups. Sydney closed the sacristy door and turned the lock because the smell had followed her in—wax, rain, sex, strawberry sugar, Cate—and already it felt less like evidence than a haunting.

She stripped like she could outrun the sin if she got the evidence off fast enough. Stole, collar, clerical shirt—buttons fumbled, cuffs shoved, black fabric rasping across skin that felt suddenly misfit. Her slacks stayed on only because the thought of baring any more of herself here, in the room where she prepared sacred things, made nausea climb her throat. She cranked the sink tap all the way to cold, grabbed two enamel basins and filled them. The water blued her knuckles. She washed the chalice and paten first with the hollow care of ritual, then set them aside and scrubbed her hands with the rough altar bread towel until her skin burned and the pads of her fingers felt newly scoured.

It didn’t help.

The memory arrived like a bell toll in a quiet town: Cate bent over the pew, good girl posture turned filthy with intent. Cate’s open mouth around her fingers, Cate’s smile when she said please like prayer and dare both. Sydney gripped the edge of the sink and bowed her head. A single drop fell from her chin and burst on steel.

“Enough,” she said to the empty room, and her voice nearly broke on the word.

When she could stand again, she hauled a wooden bucket from the closet, filled it from the slop sink, and added a cap of oil soap like a sacrament for sinners. She carried it to the front on arms that ached and dunked a cloth, knuckles whitening in the dilution. She cleaned the rail first, the way she prepared the altar: with care and reverence and a ridiculous, aching tenderness her vows had never taught her to expect. The rag traced the same curve where Cate’s ribs had rested, the same corner where Sydney had braced a palm to keep from falling to her knees. She polished until the dull sheen took on a shine and her shoulders shook. When the cloth went gray, she rinsed it in the bucket and started again.

The pew came next. She knelt, the stone cold even through the black of her trousers, and worked her way down the length of wood, cloth catching in old nicks, the scent of orange oil lifting like a kinder ghost. Every so often she had to stop and breathe because her mind couldn’t stop overlaying images: the polished cherry of the pew and the pulse at Cate’s throat when she’d pressed a thumb there to silence her. It didn’t matter how hard she scrubbed, Cate was there, woven into the grain like a secret message you could only read with your cheek against the wood.

She made herself clean the confessional last. It felt like punishment—the little dark box that had been built for secrets now reeking of hers. Sydney unscrewed the hinges, lifted the screen with care, wiped every slat. She took the cushions out and beat them in the side yard until rain slicked her hair to her skull and mist lifted from the grass and she was shaking with exertion that didn’t feel nearly brutal enough.

In the rectory she showered with the temperature turned to penance. The spray knifed her shoulders, ran cold into the cup of her collarbones, plastered hair to temple and nape. She soaped herself twice and then again for good measure—shoulders, ribs, the soft underside of her breasts, the long line of her stomach, the heavy drag of her cock, which refused her attempt at erasure by thickening under her palm anyway.

“No,” she said aloud, a laughable, breathless denial that sounded like a lie even to her own ears.

She tried to think of anything else. The Liturgy of the Hours. The parish budget. The leak in the roof over the choir loft she kept pretending wasn’t as bad as it was. Cate’s mouth pressed to her thumb as she sucked. The sound Cate had made when Sydney sank all the way in.

She groaned like a sinner and braced her arm to tile. Her other hand betrayed her. She didn’t stroke with anything like leisure or indulgence, didn’t let herself savor it—it felt less like pleasure than triage. Sharp, ugly, necessary. Everything that made her human concentrated in the quick, helpless rock of hips she had tried to forget how to move. She came with her forehead on her forearm and her teeth clenched to spare the walls, the heat washed away instantly because the shower wouldn’t even let her have that. She shut the water off and stood there dripping and breathless, as if she might be wrung dry enough for peace.

When she finally made it to bed, the ceiling stared back blank and merciless. Every time she shut her eyes she got a stuttering reel: Cate’s lashes stirring against her cheek, the wet sound of that sweet mouth, the shock of softness when Sydney pressed her hand to the back of Cate’s head and felt her give. She rolled to her side and curled around a grief she didn’t have a name for except desire.

In the morning she woke before her alarm, sick with the thin, fast heartbeat of a woman who dreamt badly and remembered it all. The rain had cleared. The light had that washed, penitential quality the world gets after a storm—colors ironed flat, edges a little sharper. Sydney put on a fresh shirt and reached for an older cassock that had always sat a little too snug across her chest and shoulders. She worked the buttons closed one by one, each fastening an act of discipline, until the fabric pulled across her breasts and made her swear under her breath.

Sunday meant three Masses and coffee hour. It meant bulletins and awkward jokes and the old woman who wore purple every week and called herself Christ’s valentine. It meant everything she usually loved and now dreaded because Cate would be in it like a refrain.

Sydney ate a banana and half a stale muffin because she did not trust her stomach with anything more. She said Morning Prayer and meant it as best she could. She fastened her collar with hands that only trembled slightly.

In the sacristy, she checked the altar cloth twice, then the cruets, then the placement of the missal, busying herself with the tiny correctives of ritual as though an error small enough to fix might compensate for the one she could not. When she finally unlocked the church, she kept her eyes lowered, absurdly unwilling to meet the saints in the stained glass.

Mrs. Delaney was the first through the door, as she usually was, rosary wound neatly around one hand and curiosity folded beneath her piety. “Good morning, Father.”

“Good morning,” Sydney managed. She did not look toward the front pew. She did not look at the wood she had polished in the night with trembling hands, breath fogging its surface as she scrubbed at what could not be scrubbed away. Because if she looked, she would see Cate there again: hands braced on the rail, hair spilling over one shoulder, every elegant line of her body turned reckless beneath Sydney’s hands.

At the eight o’clock Mass, the faithful filed in as if they were trying to get the hard part over with so they could return home to mow lawns and make roasts. Sydney named the readings and quoted Paul and tried not to hear Cate in her head making some small, blasphemous noise at the word submission. She lifted the host and felt her shoulders lock into the posture years of priesthood had taught her, as if muscle memory could be a wall between the Holy and the hunger making her mouth taste like copper.

By nine, the older women had gathered near the votives in their usual bright little current of perfume and murmured judgment. Sydney heard her own name drift through it once, then twice: Father Stark. Young. Modern. She kept her smile mild and her voice gentle and lived ten years in the hour before Cate arrived.

Cate arrived for the ten, of course. She took her seat two pews nearer to the center than usual, as if challenging the light to find her. She wore something almost prim: a dove-gray dress with a white collar that would have disappeared in a crowd if not for the way it was fitted to a waist Sydney’s hands now knew intimately. A cardigan hung loose around her shoulders like a shrug of virtue. Her ankles crossed sweetly. Sydney swallowed, looked down at the missal, and tried to make herself read a single word instead of staring at a mouth she had taken in her own hands.

They did a hymn she hates because the melody climbs and never seems to come down. Sydney sang anyway. She delivered a homily about doubt and the thin line between piety and fear and those moments when God seems to disappear behind the work you do in His name. People nodded. They always nod when you tell them you too, are a person in a robe trying not to fall apart. It nearly killed her when she looked up from her notes and Cate’s eyes were on her steady and bright and—worse—understanding.

Communion was a gauntlet. The Body of Christ, the Body of Christ, the Body of Christ—and then Cate at the rail, Cate’s chin tipped like a chalice, Cate’s tongue barely peeking like it had last night when she’d opened for two fingers. Sydney’s hand shook so slightly she prayed it read as reverence. “Amen,” Cate whispered, and in it Sydney heard last night answering back, every please, every broken prayer, every filthy little tenderness they had left breathing in the dark.

After the dismissal, Cate didn’t leave. She lingered, which was apparently her talent. She found ways to exist near Sydney without looking like she was doing it on purpose. She slipped into the side aisle where the volunteer table sat with clipboards and sign-up sheets. Sydney watched, gut tight, as Cate wrote her name down on every list like penance and provocation both.

Altar guild. Flower committee. Bulletin folding. Children’s catechism assistant.

Of course.

By coffee hour Cate wore a smile that would have fooled anyone who hadn’t spent the night inside its orbit. She poured cups for old men with shaky hands and wiped spills with a competence that made something domestic ache deep in Sydney’s chest. When one of the altar boys came barreling through with a jelly donut near disaster, Cate caught his sleeve and said, “Hey, captain, donuts and white shirts are sworn enemies,” and the boy laughed and obeyed like he’d just been knighted. She looked like a girl the parish would trust with all its secrets. She was, Sydney thought with a sudden, treacherous jolt of gratitude, going to be very good at this. She was going to make herself indispensable—to the church, to Sydney. She was going to nest like a well-behaved bird in the rafters and wait for the right moments to drop feathers into Sydney’s path.

“Father?” Mrs. Harrison chirped in her heavy jewelry, the smell of rosewater rising around her. “The English ivy is overgrown near St. Joseph. Do you want the groundskeeper to—”

“Yes, please,” Sydney said, and tried to hear herself.

Cate drifted within arm’s reach twice and did nothing unseemly. She kept her hands to herself. She did not lick a lollipop. She did not open her knees while perched on a folding chair the way she had on a pew. She said, “Father,” with the appropriate cadence when she thanked her for the homily, as if she weren’t also whispering Daddy in the archive of Sydney’s body. It turned out restraint could be seductive if you wore it like a fitted dress.

By noon, Sydney had a headache blooming over one eye. She took aspirin and chased it with three sips of water and told herself that if she could just get through the noon Mass without destroying anything, she would go to the convent down the street and beg one of the sisters to hear her confession and teach her how to stop looking back before she turned to salt.

She did not make it to the convent. After the noon Mass, when the late-risers and the guilty and the families whose soccer games had been rained out finally drifted toward the doors, Sydney sat in the confessional instead. For one brief, wild moment, she considered locking the church and walking straight out the side entrance before anyone could find her. Instead she drew the curtain closed and pressed her thumb into the notch in the wood worn smooth by decades of frightened hands.

The first penitent was not Cate. Neither was the second. For a little while, ordinary sorrow anchored her: resentment, dishonesty, impatience with a husband, a daughter spoken to too sharply, a woman ashamed of how much she envied her sister’s easier life. Sydney found the voice that could still live inside the collar. She listened. She counseled. She offered mercy she could not imagine applying to herself.

Then the hush changed.

She heard the quiet shift of fabric on the other side of the screen, the delicate settling of a body Sydney knew too well now for the sound to be innocent. Cate drew one careful breath. The door clicked shut.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Cate said in the voice she always used here—sugar softened into velvet, a low voice that sounded like obedience trying on glamour. “It’s been…” She let the pause become illicit. “Several hours.”

Sydney should have taken it away from her immediately. She should have steered them both into safer liturgy, said, Say your Hail Marys and let me get on my knees on my own time. Instead she said, “What sins are you confessing?” and winced at how rough it came out.

“Impure thoughts,” Cate whispered. “About authority. About mouths. About…yesterday.”

Sydney closed her eyes and thought: you’re going to burn, but you won’t burn alone.

“You’ll say three rosaries,” she said, harsher than she meant, because harsher felt safer. “All fifteen decades. And then you’ll come back next Saturday and confess again.”

Cate made a sound like she was biting back a smile to keep from becoming mischievous. “I can do that.”

“And you’ll help the altar guild this week. The linens need pressing. The brass needs polishing. You’ll do it.”

“If I told you pressing linens makes me think about pressing my knees together while you—” Cate caught herself, laughter not quite escaping. “Yes, Father.”

“You will not call me—” She stopped before she said daddy by accident inside a sacrament. Even thinking the word here made the world feel so thin she could have put a thumb through it. “You will not call me that again.”

Cate’s silence glowed. “No, Father,” she promised softly.

The title slipped neatly beneath Sydney’s prohibition, formally faultless and filthy now in ways they both understood. Sydney closed her eyes. Cate had found the narrowest inch of permission and pressed her pretty mouth to it.

Sydney should have sent her away. She should have snapped the little door back and breathed clean air for a change. Instead she sat with a palm flat to the wall and listened to Cate breathe, the chamber too small for that kind of intimacy, the box catching the quiet like a cupped hand. She had led herself here. She could hardly pretend to be surprised that the only way out seemed to lead further in.

“Anything else?” Sydney asked, because she apparently hated herself.

Cate went silent, and for one foolish second Sydney thought perhaps she was granted mercy. The little booth held only breath and old wood and the dim hush of the church beyond the curtain. Maybe Cate would let the penance stand. Maybe she would leave with her rosaries and her pretty bowed head, and Sydney could stagger through the rest of the day with only the damage they had already done.

Then Cate spoke, her voice threading through the dark like she knew exactly what buttons to press. “I wanted to tell you I…volunteered. To be near you. To help. I’ll be good.”

The simplicity of it almost undid Sydney more than the night before. The promise in it. The lie.

“You will be obedient,” Sydney corrected, too fast. “Goodness is not the same thing.”

“Oh,” Cate said, delighted. “A lesson.”

“Cate.” Sydney let the name breathe. It made the air in the booth taste like something she wasn’t ready to name. “If you disobey me in this, I will—”

“You’ll what?” Cate asked quickly, hungry—for a threat, for a promise, for the confirmation that last night had not been a mistake but the beginning of a catechism of its own.

Sydney dropped her head back against the wooden wall with a muted thud, too frustrated to stop herself, too careful to let it hurt. “I’ll decide after you disobey me.”

Cate’s breath caught. The smallest scrape of movement—she had shifted, knees pressing together, or spreading apart. “Yes,” she said, as if the threat itself were an invitation. The reverence in it made Sydney regret giving her anything to anticipate. “Understood.”

Sydney pronounced the absolution like a woman trying to staunch a wound. It still bled, still smelled of iron. Cate’s Amen sounded sweet on her tongue, something she would take home and savor later with her eyes closed and her knees parted.

They left the booth at different times as if that could fool anyone. Sydney went to the sacristy and touched every vessel. Cate went to the volunteer table and read every list like a menu of new temptations, each one another sanctioned reason to put herself within Sydney’s reach.

The week that followed turned into slow torture disguised as service.

On Tuesday afternoon, Cate arrived at the empty church with a basket of linens balanced on one hip and a look of concentration on her mouth that said she intended to earn her place near the altar the way good girls do.

Sydney retreated to her office with an inbox full of unanswered emails and the virtuous intention of staying there. It should have been easy. There was a hallway, a closed door, and no reason in the world she needed to supervise a grown woman pressing linen. But the sacristy carried sound too well: the soft mechanical sound of the iron, the hiss as steam found fabric, the neat slide and scrape when Cate aligned one perfect square of corporal with another. Each little noise made Sydney imagine the movement that caused it: Cate’s hand smoothing a crease, her head bent over the table, her pretty mouth pursed in concentration as she handled the white altar cloths with a care Sydney had no business finding unbearable.

She lasted twelve minutes before she invented a reason to pass through.

Cate stood at the folding table in a plain white tee and a skirt that would have been modest if it didn’t hug her hips the way reverence hugs a sin it likes. Her hair was up. Her throat was bare. She had no lipgloss on and still looked like a confessional hazard. She lifted the iron. Pressed. Lifted again.

“Brass next,” Sydney said, aiming for brisk. “When you’re finished.”

“I like the smell of polish,” Cate said. “It’s…clean.”

“Yes.” Sydney’s mouth went dry. She could picture Cate on her knees in front of the altar rail rubbing circles into candelabra that would haunt Sydney later with their insistence. “Don’t overdo the paste.”

“I won’t.” Cate glanced up at her, quick and bright. “I listened to your homily twice on the parish YouTube channel.”

“Cate.” It was supposed to be a warning. It sounded like affection wearing its collar crooked.

“What?” Cate smiled with such mild innocence Sydney might have believed her if she hadn’t known exactly what that mouth was capable of. “It was about faith.”

“Go easy around the base,” Sydney said, because she needed to leave or she was going to put her hands on the girl’s hips and teach her penance with her mouth.

On Thursday Cate folded bulletins with two elderly volunteers who adored her instantly and sent her home with half a banana bread wrapped in foil. She stayed after to dust the stations of the cross and got high on lemon cleaner in the best possible way. Sydney passed under the choir loft and looked up just as Cate stood on tiptoe to dust one of the carved frames along the wall. Her shirt lifted enough to bare a sliver of skin above her skirt waistband, a pale crescent that made Sydney remember the give of Cate’s hips under her hands, the pew braced beneath her, the terrible ease with which she had pushed forward and taken what Cate offered.

She fasted that night as if ordinary hunger might punish the obscene one into submission. She knelt on the thin rug in her bedroom until her knees hummed with that low, mean pain she might once have called devotion. Now even kneeling had been ruined for her. Now it conjured Cate on the stone floor of the church taking Sydney like worship was something a girl could give with her tongue. She slipped a knotted cord around her wrist and pulled it tight enough to remind. She wouldn’t call it punishment. It was too small for that, too private, only a narrow little ache she could fasten around her pulse and pretend meant discipline. It left a welt that should have satisfied her and instead tasted like acid in the back of her throat. Because it didn’t bring God closer, and it didn’t put Cate farther away.

Friday, Cate assisted the catechism teacher with the children. Sydney stood in the hallway and listened to the low buzz of young voices, the bright clatter of crayons against paper, and every so often Cate’s laugh, clear and effortless, slipping out of the classroom and down the corridor until it reached the nave. The church seemed to gather the sound and give it back to her softer, stranger, almost intimate. Sydney had spent the week trying to rid the building of Cate and now there she was again, caught in its acoustics, bright as a bell and twice as difficult to ignore.

When Sydney finally ducked her head into the classroom, she found Cate seated cross-legged on the carpet between two six-year-olds, helping them cut pink and red paper hearts with safety scissors. She wore the cardigan she’d worn the night they sinned, sleeves shoved up to the elbows. Glitter on the heel of her hand.

“Love is patient,” one of the kids recited proudly. “That means you wait for somebody even if they take forever.”

“It does,” Cate said, smiling as she helped her press a crooked paper heart flat. “But love gets impatient sometimes, too. Then it has to be brave enough to say sorry.”

“Miss Cate?” The other little girl said solemnly, “Did Jesus have to have a time-out?”

Sydney left before she could laugh and cry at once. She closed herself in the parish office and stared at the ledger until the numbers swam. Her hand went instinctively to the phone in her pocket, thumb already searching for the Bible app, before something in her recoiled. The phone felt too immediate, too tempting, too easily turned toward other hungers.

She set it facedown on the desk and opened the bottom drawer instead, digging beneath old bulletins and a folder of receipts until her fingers found the worn leather cover of the Bible she had kept since seminary. She needed the bracing hit of David’s bad behavior. Psalm 51 opened beneath her thumb with the ease of an old wound: Against you, you alone have I sinned. A clean heart create for me, God. She read the lines three times, then pressed her palm flat over the page and whispered, “I’m trying,” into the silence that followed, waiting for mercy to feel like anything at all.

Saturday, Cate came back for the brass.

She wore jeans and a battered T-shirt with a small hole near the hem and knelt on a foam pad she had brought from home as if she had a past life in altar guilds. Sydney hovered near the back of the nave pretending to inspect hymnals. Cate slid a cloth around the base of the tall candlesticks with tidy circles, polishing until her wrist ached. The smell of polish rolled through the air, sweet and metallic. There was nothing erotic about a girl on her knees cleaning brass. Sydney’s body, treacherously, disagreed.

Sydney stood near the back of the nave until even she could no longer pretend the hymnals required so thorough an inspection. Across the church, Cate kept her head bowed over the candlestick, cloth moving in slow, careful circles, the brass brightening beneath her hand. She didn’t look up. She didn’t have to. Sydney felt pulled toward her anyway, each step an admission she disguised as punishment. If she stood close enough to see Cate’s concentration, to smell the polish on her hands, to hear the soft drag of cloth over brass, perhaps the wanting would grow ugly enough to cure itself. Instead she came to stand beside her and found that nearness only made the ache more precise.

Cate kept her head bowed over the brass, intent and unhurried, as if being good required every ounce of her attention.

“More pressure,” Sydney found herself saying, voice too low.

Cate bore down, obedient. “Like this?”

“Yes, like that.” Sydney knelt beside her before she could decide not to, crossing the small sacred distance she had pretended would protect her. She took the other candlestick, dipped a cloth, rubbed it clean. Their shoulders bumped once, twice, a domestic accident that felt like sacrilege. When Cate’s knee brushed hers, Sydney tightened her grip on the cloth, refusing to let such little contact mean anything her body wanted it to mean.

They worked in silence long enough to make Sydney believe she might survive it. Then Cate said, very softly, “I can’t get you out of my head.”

Sydney’s hand froze. She pressed the cloth to brass and pretended that pressure could undo the pressure building elsewhere. “You’re not trying hard enough.”

Cate was quiet for a moment. She set the cloth down and curled her hands in her lap, as if keeping them there was the only thing stopping her from reaching for Sydney. “I am trying,” she said quietly. “I just don’t know if I’m trying to stop anymore.”

Sydney turned her head. Cate’s face was bare of every practiced sweetness, every teasing little performance. Sydney could have survived being wanted as a fantasy, as a conquest, as the forbidden woman in the collar Cate had set her sights on ruining. She could have called that vanity. She could have called it youth, appetite, the wicked delight of making someone holy fall from grace. But Cate was looking at her with an earnestness that stripped the game out of it entirely. She did not want a priest. She did not want a conquest. She wanted Sydney.

“You’ll go to confession again,” Sydney said, because it was a line she could still find, a familiar length of rope in a room suddenly gone bottomless. “Today.”

For a moment Cate only looked at her. Then the corner of her mouth lifted, not quite wicked this time, something quieter and more knowing. “Yes, Father.”

The title struck Sydney like a finger pressed deliberately against a bruise. It returned the collar to her throat, the rail between them, the structure she had just reached for because Cate’s bare, unguarded wanting was too much to meet without one.

“Cate.” Sydney meant it as a warning. It escaped her sounding too much like a plea.

Cate’s expression changed, leaving her soft in a way Sydney found infinitely more dangerous. “Sydney,” she said. Not Father. Not a game now. Just her name, spoken low enough to belong only to the two of them. “Tell me what to do.”

Sydney looked down at the candlestick in her hand, at the smeared dark residue on the cloth, the clean brass beginning to emerge beneath the work of Cate’s fingers. Anything was easier to face than that blue, earnest gaze. Anything except the truth.

“Stop coming.”

The words fell between them with no authority behind them at all. They sounded thin even to Sydney, a rule offered after the breach, a door she was asking Cate to close because she could not trust herself to do it.

Cate didn’t flinch. Her hands stayed curled in her lap, knuckles faintly pink from polish and pressure. “Do you want me to?” she asked.

Sydney’s jaw tightened. Outside, somewhere beyond the old stone walls, a car went by on the wet street. Inside the nave, nothing moved except the small unsteady rise and fall of Cate’s breathing.

“That isn’t the point.”

“I think it is.” Cate’s voice remained soft. Even now, she didn’t reach for Sydney. That was its own form of mercy, and its own kind of cruelty. “You asked me to come back. You told me to kneel. You gave me penance. You keep finding reasons to stand close enough to touch me.” Her gaze dropped briefly to where their knees had been pressed together, then rose again. “I’m trying to be obedient, Sydney. I just don’t know which thing you want me to obey.”

Sydney closed her eyes. The sound that left her was rough and low, almost a prayer and not remotely fit for church. Because there it was, stated with terrible gentleness: she had made rules only to keep Cate inside them. She had called it discipline while drawing the girl nearer every time she tried to send her away.

“Finish the brass,” she said at last. Her voice came out scraped clean of everything but effort. She pushed herself to her feet too quickly, her knee cracking in the hush. “Then go home.”

Cate looked up at her from the foam pad, pretty and quiet and still devastatingly on her knees. “And confession?”

Sydney’s hand tightened around the soiled cloth. She should have said no. She should have told Cate to find another priest, another parish, another place to pour that luminous, ruinous wanting. Instead she heard herself say, “When you’re finished.”

Cate’s mouth softened into the faintest smile. Not victory this time. Something worse: gratitude. “Yes, Sydney.” She bent again to the candlestick, obedient even now, polishing the brass with slow, careful circles as if Sydney had given her something precious instead of one more way for them both to fail.

Sydney fled.

She went to her office and shut the door behind her, then stood with her forearm braced against it, absurdly, as though the danger were still kneeling outside in old jeans with polish on her hands and not already living inside Sydney’s ribs. She inhaled until the sharp edge of air scraped through her lungs. Then she knelt—she was going to bruise the floor into permanent halos—and folded her hands and said, simply, “I can’t do this alone.”

It was as honest as she knew how to be.

When Cate came to the confessional that afternoon, the rain had returned, soft against the windows, and the church still smelled faintly of citrus polish and brass. Sydney was already waiting in the dark of the booth. She hadn’t even bothered telling herself she would stay away. She heard Cate settle on the other side of the screen, the quiet slide of denim against wood, the measured breath she took before the door clicked shut like a secret sealing itself between them.

“Bless me, Father—”

“Say it all,” Sydney said. The interruption came out rougher than she intended, but she could not endure another confession built from implication and restraint, another hour of Cate giving her only enough to imagine the rest. “Don’t spare me. Tell me every way you’ve thought of me since that night.”

Cate obeyed with a care that felt more dangerous than any amount of teasing. She had learned already that obedience could be its own kind of power, that giving Sydney exactly what she asked for could make her suffer more exquisitely than defiance ever had. She spoke softly, steadily, without flourish, like confession and not performance: how the pew had left a line across her hipbones that she kept touching in the shower, how she could still remember the taste of Sydney’s thumb on her tongue, how folding bulletins had made her think of being folded over the pew, how she had wanted to wear a modest dress to church only to ruin it deliberately in the alley behind the sacristy, with Sydney’s hand covering her mouth. She offered each thought like prayer, and Sydney understood every obscene word of it far too well.

“Enough,” Sydney said when she could no longer seem to draw a full breath. She said it because she had to. She said it because she wanted the opposite, and because some desperate, faithless part of her still believed refusal could sound like righteousness if she spoke it firmly enough.

Cate went obediently quiet. The confessional hummed. The lamp burned red in the nave like a chest lit from within.

“You will say three full rosaries,” Sydney managed. “Slowly. You will—” Her voice frayed, and she had to swallow before she could force the rest out. “You will not touch yourself afterward. You will go home and sleep with your hands above the covers.”

A soft, breathless laugh escaped Cate, so helplessly pleased that Sydney hated the tenderness it stirred in her. “Yes, Father.”

“And on Sunday,” Sydney forced out, “you will wear something that won’t make me angry.”

“I have a blue dress that’ll make you ache,” Cate said before she could stop herself. Her breath caught on the little betrayal, but there was no calling the words back once she had offered Sydney the image. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” Sydney said, and the tenderness in her own voice was more damning than anger would have been. “That’s the part that will ruin me.”

She pronounced absolution like a surrender. Cate received it like permission to return.

They left separately again, and again it meant nothing. Sydney sat in the dark of the nave until the church turned charcoal and the storm leaned hard enough against the windows to make them tremble. She stared at the crucifix and searched her memory for martyrs whose suffering had ended in mercy, as if one of their stories might tell her how to survive her own.

She didn’t sleep well. The night gave her Cate in fragments: hands slipping beneath hems, a soft mouth shaping Sydney’s name, blue eyes bright with the terrible sincerity Sydney had failed to refuse. Every dream brought her back to the edge of surrender and left her there, aching and ashamed, with Cate rooted a little deeper beneath her ribs each time. She woke before dawn, watched the sky turn pale beyond the bedroom window, and thought: I am haunted.

Sunday came like a tide. Parishioners came like habit. Cate came like the sweetest little member of the flock, blue-eyed and obedient, as if she had not spent the week teaching Sydney how much more dangerous goodness could be than sin.

She wore the blue dress. Of course she did. It was soft as a hymn and mean as a dare. Somewhere near the second reading, a startled, helpless laugh moved through Sydney without ever reaching her mouth. There was something almost funny in the precision of her ruin, in the way Cate had promised to make her ache and then arrived dressed like proof she intended to keep every promise. Sydney loved God. She loved her collar. She was also in terrible, terrible love with a girl who had made every holy thing in the church feel capable of tearing her apart.

She said the words. She lifted the host. And when Communion began, Cate was first in line, her gaze lifted with such quiet certainty that Sydney could not help reading the message in it: there is no world in which I am not yours now that you have let me be.

The saints in the windows looked down with their dreamy mercy, witnesses and accomplices both, while rain traced bright, wavering lines through the colored glass and made the whole church seem to tremble around them. Sydney had prayed all week for Cate to loosen her hold. Now, with Cate waiting below her in blue and the Body of Christ trembling between Sydney’s fingers, she understood the shape of her failure: she might still refuse Cate her body, but she no longer wanted her absence. If those were the only choices left to her, she would rather be haunted than healed.

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