mima’s room !! @mimaa888 - Tumblr Blog

⸻ 𝐕 𝐈 𝐓 𝐈 𝐀 𝐓 𝐄, My flesh longs for thee

you're studying to be a nun at the monastery along the other sisters. you start to have what you think are night terrors, fever dreams, sleep paralysis — and they started the exact same day Father Ryomen stepped in as a visiting priest on retreat. ✟ — to listen to while reading | art by @sweetlandspos ✟ags: somno; religious; oral; creampie; piv; dubcon; fever dream; dead dove do not eat; amen

⸻ ✟ PART ONE. ⸻ ✟ PART TWO. ⸻ ✟ PART THREE. ⸻ ✟ PART FOUR. ⸻ ✟ EPILOGUE.

You wake up wrong.

Not in panic, not gasping like stories say.

Just… wrong.

Your body feels used in a way you do not have the language for, in a way a nun-in-training is not supposed to have the language for. Your thighs are tight, your nightdress clings, your breath is already a little shallow when you realize you are conscious.

For a moment, you lie perfectly still and do nothing.

You catalog.

Pulse, fast. Mouth, dry. Skin, too hot under the thin blanket. The cell, as it should be.

Crucifix above. Chair exactly in its place. Window barred and narrow, admitting a column of pale morning.

No proof. No mislaid object. No mark on the floor.

And yet.

You drag yourself upright, sit on the edge of the bed, and press the heel of your hand to your forehead as if you can push the images back down into whatever knot they crawled out of. You remember nothing clear. Only impressions — weightless pressure at your throat, the feeling of being split between terror and relief, a voice that doesn’t quite sound in your ears telling you to be still, be good, be his.

His.

You flinch at your own thought.

It has to be dreams.

It has to be your own unholiness looping back to haunt you.

You’ve been looking too often in his direction during the day, you scold yourself. You’ve been letting your eyes linger on the visiting priest when he reads at Mass — on the cadence, on the mouth that shapes the Gospel like it’s a private exchange between God and him.

You tell yourself a mind like that will invent punishment.

You wash quickly, more roughly than necessary. Cold water on hot skin, as if you can scour off something that isn’t physically there. You smooth your habit, braid your hair tighter, pin the veil until it hurts a little.

Pain is grounding.

Pain is simple.

You go to Lauds. You chant. Your voice doesn’t crack.

No one looks at you like you are stained.

Days stack. Nights blur.

You wake three mornings in a row feeling like you missed a conversation your body had without you. Sometimes there are fragments, a hand — no, not quite touching, just hovering above your ankle, your knees, your hip. The weight of someone seated on the edge of the bed but not denting the mattress. The sensation of lips near your ear without the actual contact, as if the dream is too cautious to commit.

Sometimes you think you remember him saying your name. Not “little dove,” not “child,” not anything a priest should say, but your actual name, carried all the way down to the part of you that still remembers being called it by people who did not wear black and white.

Every time you try to chase the memory, it dissolves into heat and shame and a pounding under your ribs.

You start to test reality in petty ways.

You place your wooden rosary on the floor by the bed before sleep, you wake and it’s on the nightstand, neat and coiled.

You tell yourself you must have moved it in the midst of dreaming.

You leave the window only barely open, you wake with the chill and the curtain breathing, and you are certain you didn’t rise to widen it.

You tell yourself you might have.

You’re tired. You’re stressed. You’re prone, apparently, to staging little dramas for yourself in the dark.

You never catch him.

You never see him.

You keep seeing him.

You keep waking up half in the middle of something.

It’s never the beginning.

One night you wake with his weight in the dark between your knees — not touching, just looming, breath low and steady while every inch of your skin remembers where you think he might have been.

Another night you wake with your own hand already traveling up your thigh, the ghost of a second hand over it, guiding, heavier, larger, not yours.

Sometimes you surface with the taste of a name on your tongue and no idea if you dared say it.

You never wake in time to catch him doing anything.

You wake in time to feel after.

After heat.

After terror.

After the kind of need that feels like an accusation.

It is a very specific kind of cruelty, to never give you the origin.

Your mind supplies it anyway — his mouth where no mouth belongs, his breath in places you’re not supposed to think about, his fingers moving you into shapes you shouldn’t know you like.

You picture him standing over you, hands braced on either side of the bed, the outlines of his shoulders cutting the night, collar open, that throat that speaks your penances working around something he doesn’t name.

They are only pictures in your head.

You have no proof.

You wake, you breathe, you fight your body down from the edge of something you will not admit to even yourself, and then you get up and make the bed as if neat corners could erase whatever happened between them.

By day, Father Ryomen is the exact man they say he is.

In refectory, you listen to the older sisters talk about him without meaning to. They keep their voices low, it still carries.

“Such a gift for confession,” Sister Yuki whispers behind her hand. “I told him things I’ve never managed to say out loud. He didn’t flinch.”

“The abbess says he’s been requested at three other houses already,” Sister Utahime adds, eyes bright with innocent admiration. “Imagine that. To be so trusted with souls.”

“Stern, but kind,” another sister says. “He sees through you.”

You sit very straight, very silent, spoon poised. Your ears are cages, every word flutters and strikes the bars.

You wait for someone, anyone, to say but there’s something off.

You wait for Sister Shoko, who notices everything, to frown and murmur that his eyes are strange, that his presence makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

You wait for someone to mention waking in the night with the sense of being watched.

Nothing.

They talk about his homilies, about how clearly he explains complicated doctrine, about how rare it is to host someone “so obviously favored by God.” The abbess’s face softens when she mentions his name.

This is all the evidence you get.

You smile when spoken to. You lower your eyes. You push bread around your plate because your penance forbids you from eating it, and you tell yourself that’s why your stomach is twisting, not because the man at the far end of the table lifted his head once and you thought he was looking straight at you.

You feel insane.

You try subtle, discreet inquiries.

On laundry duty, with your hands sinking into the cold soapy water, you lean toward Sister Shoko just enough.

“Do you… find anything unusual about Father Ryomen?” you ask lightly, like a girl making conversation about the weather.

She snorts softly.

“Unusual? Only in that he seems actually serious about God, unlike some who come preening through on their way to better posts.” She scrubs a collar harder than necessary, then adds, “Why? Has he reprimanded you?”

You flush, grateful that it could be misread as the heat from the steam.

“No. He’s been… perfectly correct.”

“Then count yourself blessed.” She flicks foam off her fingers. “Some priests like to make an example of novices. He hasn’t.”

Perfectly correct.

You nod, numb.

He hasn’t been anything, as far as anyone knows.

You could scream.

With another sister, you try a different angle.

“Do you ever have trouble sleeping?” you ask as you fold linens in the sacristy. “Strange dreams, perhaps?”

“Always, during Lent,” she laughs, unbothered. “The devil likes to rattle the bars when you’re tired and hungry. Just ignore it. He gets bored.”

You want to ask, Do your dreams ever smell like incense and sound like someone breathing at your ear? but you bite your tongue so hard you taste iron and say nothing.

All signs point to the same verdict — the problem is you.

Day after day you are a model of routine.

Lauds. Work in the sacristy, work in the kitchen, laundry in the yard, hands raw and red and blessedly busy.

Prime, Terce, Sext, None.

The swing of the bell, the hum of the sisters, the rising and falling of the psalms like lungs. You hold to the hours like a drowning woman holding on to a ladder rung by rung.

You continue to ask questions, very carefully.

“Father Ryomen seems… intense, doesn’t he?” you say to Sister Yuki while you fold altar linens, watching her face over the white.

“Oh, but so kind,” she answers without hesitation. “So learned. He speaks Greek, you know. The abbess says it’s rare for someone so… gifted to be so humble.”

Gifted. Humble. Night-thing.

You try again in the herb garden with Sister Utahime, the two of you kneeling in the dirt among the sage and bitter thyme.

“Do you find his sermons… different?”

“Refreshing, I’d say,” she replies, pinching off a brown leaf. “He doesn’t drone. He makes one think. I’m grateful the abbess invited him. I’ve never heard anyone speak of thirst for God so vividly.”

You nearly drop the basil sprig.

You ask your closest friend, Sister Mai, who has known you since postulancy and would see through you faster than you can lie.

“Do you ever feel… uneasy around him?”

She thinks. You watch her face. She shakes her head.

“No. Why? Has he said something to you?”

“No,” you say, too quickly. “No, he’s only… so fervent. I suppose I feel unworthy next to such zeal. That’s all.”

Mai pats your arm.

“We’re all unworthy, dove. That’s the point.”

You want to tell her that unworthiness feels different in your cell with the lamp off and the window open, that it has teeth, that it speaks in a voice you know too well.

Instead, you nod, and she smiles, and the conversation dissolves into small talk about the new novice from the city who cries at night.

If you were sane, someone else would see it.

That’s what frightens you, no one does.

They see a good priest.

You see the shadow he leaves in your bed.

So when the abbess stops you after Terce, her veil haloed by the cold daylight from the cloister windows, your stomach drops before she even speaks.

“Child,” she says, mild and pleased. “Father Ryomen has praised your diligence in the sacristy. He’s asked if you might spare an afternoon to show him the grounds, the older parts of the estate. He’s very interested in the history of our house. Would you?”

Your first instinct is to refuse so sharply it would alarm her.

Your second instinct is the one that always wins — obedience.

“Of course, Reverend Mother,” you say. The words taste like swallowing something with too many bones. “It would be an honor.”

“Good.” She squeezes your shoulder. “He is a guest we must cherish.”

Cherish. Feed. Lay on the altar.

Your stomach is ice. Your hands are calm. You are good at this.

You spend the rest of the hour in a low-grade panic, scrubbing brass and mentally tracing paths — chapel, cloister, refectory, library, then the old wing with its disused cells, the root cellar, the gravel path down past the cemetery to the tree line where the forest begins.

The monastery is older than the country that surrounds it now, older than the maps the sisters keep in the library.

The stone remembers things the records don’t.

It looks like a place haunted in stories — high, dark roofs, gothic windows, long corridors where sound hops nervously from arch to arch.

The setting of a warning.

You meet him in the cloister.

Morning light slants through the arches and strips his cassock in pale bars.

He is exactly as he is supposed to be — hands folded, posture relaxed but respectful, cassock immaculate even though he’s been carrying wood for the kitchen that morning, if the smears on his sleeves are to be believed.

His eyes look perfectly normal from a distance, a deep, rich carmine that makes the novices sigh and cross themselves twice.

Up close, there’s something behind the red that the others do not seem to see.

“Sister,” he says, inclining his head just enough to be generous. “Thank you for indulging my curiosity.”

“Father,” you answer, eyes lowered the proper degree, your hands folded in front of you so no one sees them fist. “It’s no trouble.”

You lead him first through the newer parts — the chapel, the refectory, the library — because they have people in them. Safe witnesses. You explain the history you’ve been told, dates and benefactors and the story of the stained glass. He asks appropriate questions. Nothing strange.

Not yet.

It is only when you pass through the heavy door into the old wing that the air changes.

Here the ceilings rise higher, ribs of dark wood arching overhead like an upturned ship.

The stone is older, pitted, uneven. There is a smell of damp that the sun never quite chases.

Outside, through narrow lancet windows, the forest presses close — branch and shadow, all tangled.

You walk ahead, habit whispering around your ankles. His footsteps keep steady pace behind you.

Not too close. Not too far.

You are hyper-aware of every inch.

“This corridor is rarely used,” you say, because silence feels more dangerous. “The oldest cells are here. Some are still kept for retreatants.”

“And yours?” he asks mildly.

You don’t stumble, but it’s a near thing.

“Mine is on the second floor of the newer wing, Father.”

“Mm.” His tone is thoughtful, idle. “Do you prefer it?”

You keep your eyes on the worn stones beneath your feet.

“It is quiet. Simple. Suitable.”

“No draughts?” he asks. “No strange noises at night?”

The question is almost casual.

Your heart slams so hard you feel it in your gums.

“The house creaks sometimes,” you say carefully. “Old wood. Old stone. It is to be expected.”

“And you?” he says, and you feel rather than see his gaze brush the side of your face. “Do you creak, Sister?”

You falter. Just one step. Just enough.

“Father?”

He smiles, you can hear it without looking.

“Joints, I mean,” he clarifies smoothly. “The beds in the old wing are dreadful. I wondered if you had any complaints about the furnishings in the new cells.”

You are suddenly, violently certain he is enjoying this.

“No complaints,” you manage. Your cheeks burn.

You know — know — you are overreacting, this could be nothing but clumsy humor.

A test of your composure. A priest teasing a bit, as some do.

Or it could be the man who may or may not be in your room at night asking about your bed.

You guide him into an old chapel, small and half-disused. Dust turns the light into visible beams. A crucifix, larger than the one in your cell, hangs over a stone altar scarred by generations of elbows and folded hands.

He walks to it with the easy grace of someone who belongs in front of altars.

You stay back. Your skin feels too tight.

“Do you feel Him more in places like this?” he asks suddenly, not turning. “These forgotten corners. Or in the main chapel — the one everyone keeps tidy and bright.”

You swallow.

“God is everywhere, Father.”

“Yes.” He tilts his head, just enough that you catch a sliver of his profile. “And yet some rooms make Him louder, don’t they?”

You think of your cell. The night. That not-touch at your throat.

You think of how, in those moments, you can’t tell if what presses down on you is divine attention or something wearing it like a borrowed cloak.

“I don’t presume to know,” you say, the words precise, safe. “I am still learning to listen.”

He turns then, fully, and looks down at you.

His eyes are darker than a man’s ought to be, you’ve thought that before.

Carmine, the word pops up from some buried lesson about pigments — red with depth to it, like old blood, like wine.

When he meets your gaze now, something in them flares.

You could swear the pupils narrow, vertical, predatory, a slit like a cat’s or a serpent’s.

You blink.

It’s gone.

Perfectly round, perfectly human.

You tell yourself there must have been a trick of the light.

A reflection from the stained glass.

A shadow.

You also tell yourself you are not convincing.

He takes a step closer, not too close, just enough that you have to tip your head back a little to keep your eyes on his face.

“Tell me, Sister,” he says softly, “does your cell face the forest or the fields?”

“The—” You have to think. Your mind is a kaleidoscope, pieces turning, nothing aligning. “The fields.”

“Ah.” He hums, as if settled. “Then you are spared, perhaps, the sensation of being watched from the trees.” His smile is small, crooked. “Old houses and forests make good conspirators.”

“Do they, Father?”

Your voice is thinner than you’d like.

“They hoard things,” he says. “Secrets. Footsteps. Sounds that shouldn’t be there. I imagine nights can be… vivid. For someone with a lively conscience.”

There it is.

There you are.

Exposed and also nowhere, because he hasn’t said anything you could repeat to anyone without sounding foolish.

You look away first, under the pretense of gesturing to an old stone font.

Then his questions change shape.

“Do you think it is a sin,” he asks, “to want to be seen?”

You hesitate. The corridor is colder here. The air smells of dust and old soap.

“The Lord sees us,” you answer. “That should be enough.”

“But is it?” His head tilts. “For you?”

Your mouth goes dry. You can’t tell if he’s asking as confessor or inquisitor.

Or something else.

“I… don’t know, Father. I don’t… dwell on such things. We’re called to humility.”

“Humility is a virtue,” he agrees. “Invisibility is not. Be careful not to confuse them.”

Is that admonishment? Permission? A snare?

You walk on.

In the stairwell down to the root cellar, the stone steps worn by a century of feet, he asks,

“Have you ever felt God with your body, Sister? Not just with the mind. With flesh. A presence that made your knees weak, your pulse loud in your ears, your breath catch?”

You nearly miss a step.

You remember the breath at your throat at night. You remember the weight of the dark leaning over you. Your body responds to the memory before your doctrine can slap its hands.

“That sounds more like… emotion,” you say, grasping the railing until your knuckles ache. “We’re called to faith beyond feeling. Sensations come and go.”

“Do they?” He hums. “Some sensations are very persistent.”

He’s behind you on the stairs, one hand on the railing above yours.

You can feel the warmth of him at your back, the distance exactly proper and yet not nearly enough.

You imagine, vividly, how easy it would be for him to close that distance, to put one hand on your waist and one over your mouth and test the strength of your vows against the stone.

You swallow the image like poison.

He doesn’t touch you.

He just stands there until you manage to move again, then follows you down into the cool earth where sacks of potatoes and onions sit in neat rows, as innocent as anything in this place can be.

“The well is this way,” you say. “Some of the sisters still draw water from it on certain feasts.”

He follows you again, quiet as a shadow.

Out back, beyond the low stone wall, the fields roll away, patchwork green, then crumple into the dark line of trees. The forest is dense and old, a black-green mass that absorbs light. The house, from here, really does look like something from a story: too big, too lonely, too itself.

“The world forgets places like this exist,” he says, looking at the treeline. “So quiet. So devoted.”

“Do you ever wish you had chosen differently?” he asks softly. “Another life. A husband. Children. A body you didn’t have to pretend wasn’t yours.”

Your heart lurches, offended and tempted at once.

“I don’t pretend,” you say, too fast. “I mortify. There’s a difference.”

He smiles, small and knowing.

“Is there?”

You can’t tell if this is an examination of conscience or a slow, careful seduction of your sanity.

By the time you’ve circled back to the cloister, you feel flayed.

Your answers feel wrong no matter what you say.

He thanks you politely. Bows. Takes his leave to visit the sick sister in the infirmary, the very picture of pastoral care.

You stand under the archway, watching him walk away, cassock rippling around his ankles, hands folded behind his back. He looks like a painting again from this distance.

Holy.

Untouchable.

You realize you’ve stopped breathing.

After that, you make a habit of observing him from afar.

You tell yourself it’s vigilance. If you keep him in sight, he cannot be elsewhere.

He cannot be slipping into your room, bending over your bed, whispering things that turn your insides molten.

If he is in the garden, tending to the herbs with the abbess, then he isn’t at your window.

If he is in the confessional, you hear his voice there and nowhere else.

At meals, you note where he sits.

Always modestly off-center, never drawing attention, yet somehow the room’s orbit tilts around him.

In the chapel, you note how he bows.

Deep, unhurried, so sincere-looking your chest hurts.

In the garden, you note how he listens.

Head bent, eyes intent, as he lets novices and elders alike spill their small griefs into his hands.

You find yourself tracking him without meaning to.

The line of his shoulders as he carries wood, the precise way he turns pages at the lectern, the way his mouth tightens when someone misquotes Scripture.

You’re not the only one looking — other sisters’ gazes slip his way too, but theirs slide off easily.

Yours sticks.

In the morning, he is in the chapel alone, before anyone else.

Afternoon in the library, reading something too academic for you to understand from a distance.

Conversations with the reverend in her office. Sermons that alternate between terrifying and strangely kind.

From far away, he looks like every depiction of a serious priest you’ve ever seen. From up close — from inside the booth, from beside him in the hallway — you feel the edges.

You still go to confession with him.

Who else could you go to?

The abbess would be alarmed.

The other visiting priest is timid and half-deaf.

The remaining sisters are not ordained.

So you tell yourself you have to.

The abbess is pleased with the retreat — she encourages you to “take advantage of Father Ryomen’s presence” as much as possible. It would be suspicious not to.

It would bring questions you can’t answer.

So you kneel, week after week, and speak through lattice that presses its pattern into your cheek.

You tell him about your impatience, your stray thoughts, your doubts about your calling.

You do not tell him that you sometimes wake up pressing your thighs together because you dreamed his hand was between them.

You do not tell him that his voice in the box and the voice in the dark sound increasingly alike.

You skirt the edges.

You say,

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” and you tell him, haltingly, about your thoughts, your dreams, your thirst.

You do not tell him that you think the one you thirst for might be him.

He makes a soft, sympathetic noise and coaxes details from you like splinters from a wound..

“What shape does the temptation take, little dove?” he murmurs. “Is it always the same presence? Does it speak? Does it touch? Does it smell of anything?” you hesitate, then he goes on. “Shame without clear cause can be a snare,” he says. “Describe what you can.”

Sometimes you comply, haltingly, giving him vague outlines. Sometimes you refuse, mumbling that you truly can’t recall. Either way, his questions probe just far enough to make you heat from the inside, never far enough that you could accuse him.

“Do you feel observed in them?” he asks once.

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you like it?”

You swallow. Your hand tightens around the crucifix.

“I hate it,” you say. It is half true. It counts.

“Mm.” The sound curls. “Then we must teach you to hate it more effectively. Is there more to it? Do you wish there was more to it?”

The box feels smaller every time.

“I… don’t know. I don’t always remember. I wake… already shaken. Already… wanting.” The word scorches your tongue.

“You wake wet,” he says, as calmly as if he were saying you wake tired. “Say it.”

Your cheeks flame.

“Yes.”

“Good.” His voice doesn’t change, but something in it enjoys the crack in you. “Have you given this desire a name?”

Your lungs forget their work.

“No.”

“Wise. Names have power. Better to bring the thing itself into the light piece by piece.” A soft rustle, perhaps he shifts, perhaps he simply likes you to imagine it. “Do you feel this unease near anyone by day? Or only at night?”

Your mind skates dangerously close to the image of his pupils narrowing in the field.

“Only at night,” you lie. “By day it feels like… nothing happened. Like I imagined it.”

“And yet your body remembers,” he says gently. “And your conscience. You are tormented both ways — by the thought that it is real, and by the thought that you are inventing it.”

You flinch at how precisely he says it.

“Yes.”

“Then your penance is the same,” he tells you. “Psalm 63. Before sleep, on waking, and whenever the line about thirst comes to mind. Let it burn honestly. Do not pretend it isn’t there. Offer it. And leave the lamp off. And keep the window open. God does His best work in the dark, you know.”

You leave the box shaken and no closer to clarity

You bite back the urge to cry.

Or laugh.

You can’t tell which wants out more.

At night, the visits — if they are visits, if they are not — continue.

Sometimes you feel the dip of weight near your hip, not quite a touch.

Sometimes you hear the faintest murmur, syllables you can’t catch, like someone speaking from the bottom of a well.

Once you wake with your cheek wet, as if someone had pressed a kiss there and left either breath or tears behind.

Sometimes you wake with the sense of a hand on your ankle, retreating the moment you notice.

Sometimes you wake with your heart racing and no idea why, the impression of lips on your throat fading as quickly as candle smoke.

Sometimes you sleep through, and the absence of him — or of it, or of your own dramatics — bothers you more than the visitations.

You don’t know.

You never know.

You imagine him.

You imagine what he might do if he truly stood there, if he were as depraved and cruel as the worst parts of your dreams suggest.

You imagine the way his hands might feel, the way his mouth might shape your name when no one else is around.

Then you recoil from yourself, appalled, fingers digging crescent moons into your own palms in the dark.

You whisper the psalm he gave you until the words lose meaning.

My soul thirsts. My flesh longs. Dry and weary land. No water.

You loop the lines until they feel like a mockery, until you half expect to hear a chuckle against your neck.

You never catch him. You never catch yourself.

You start to feel like there are two of you.

The calm, dutiful novice who answers bells and peels potatoes and smiles faintly when Sister Yuki tells a joke.

And the creature who lies in the dark, pulse thudding in her ears, wondering if the sound in the corner is God, the devil, or herself.

You’re not sure which is the real one.

You’re not sure which one he wants.

You wake, you do your chores, you pray, you watch him.

You live in that narrow corridor between fever and fact, between the man everyone else sees and the presence that haunts your nights.

You tell yourself that if you were truly losing your mind, someone would notice.

You tell yourself that if he were truly what you suspect he might be, someone would notice that too.

No one does.

So you go on, obedient and cracked, a girl with a rosary in her pocket and a sleep-paralysis demon shaped like a holy man.

You start to think the stone is in on it.

How else do you explain the way the corridors seem to tilt whenever he’s near?

The monastery has always leaned a little — settling on its old bones, sighing in frost and in summer heat — but now it tilts specifically toward him.

As if the walls themselves are as interested as every novice who suddenly realizes there is a handsome priest in residence.

You tell yourself that’s all it is.

A trick of attention. A trick of hunger.

Not yours, of course. Never yours. Other people’s.

You just happen to notice.

You are good at noticing.

You catch yourself doing it more and more — tracking the fall of his sleeve as he lifts the missal, the way his hair never quite lies flat at the nape of his neck, the precise care with which he folds his hands after the Gospel.

You don’t stare. That would be obvious. That would be something Sister Shoko might nudge you about with a joke and raised eyebrows.

You glance. You measure. You look away.

Except he keeps meeting you in the middle.

It’s nothing you can prove. It’s the sensation of walking toward someone in a narrow corridor and realizing they have adjusted, without looking, to pass you just close enough that the sleeve of his cassock might brush your arm if you don’t press yourself more tightly to the wall.

It’s the way his gaze lifts from the breviary at the exact moment your eyes slide over the page and land on the curve of his mouth, and suddenly you are looking directly at him, at a little smile that might be absentminded or aimed.

It’s the way, when you watch him from the garden through the chapel doors — only because he is there and you are there and you have eyes, that’s all — his head turns slightly, as if he has heard something.

As if your attention has weight.

He never makes you feel caught.

That might be the worst of it.

He doesn’t smirk or tilt his head or do anything you’d expect from a man who knows a girl is looking at him.

He holds your gaze just long enough to be polite — nothing more, nothing less — and returns to what he was doing.

A courteous nod in the refectory. A faint, warm curve of his mouth when he passes you a broom or a stack of psalters. A soft “Sister” that lands exactly where it should.

Never rude. Never harsh.

He is the example of a priest people preach about when they remind each other that the clergy is not all corruption and scandal and headlines. He is attentive, thoughtful, rigorously patient with the eldest sisters who forget their lines and the youngest who stumble over Latin.

He is careful with his hands. He doesn’t touch anyone without cause.

Except you.

You tell yourself you are imagining that part as well.

You try, very hard, to believe it all the way up until the mass where he gives you the host.

The chapel is full of whispering fabric and light, that particular washed-out gold that leaks through the stained glass in the late afternoon.

You kneel, you sit, you stand — your body knows the choreography so well you could be thinking of anything else and still hit every beat.

You are not thinking of anything else.

You feel him at the back of your head like a weather system, a pressure.

His voice when he preaches about longing for God makes something in your chest seize and throb in a way that makes you ashamed of your own blood. When he lifts the host, his profile is sharp and severe, holiness painted in bone and shadow.

You stare at the white circle and tell yourself — That is the only body that matters here.

You join the line to receive communion.

The nave is thick with incense and candle smoke by now, a haze that turns lamplight into halos. Sisters line up in two neat rows for Communion, hands folded just so, faces composed.

The chant curls along the ribs of the ceiling and comes down again like a low tide.

He stands at the head of the line, gold paten in one hand, the small round hosts stacked like pale moons on its surface. He moves from sister to sister with that same careful gravity — “Corpus Christi” — as each opens her mouth or extends her hands.

You are somewhere in the middle.

Your thoughts are locked down tight — it’s just the host, just the sacrament, just God. Not him.

You focus on the scratch in the wood of the pew in front of you.

On the way Sister Yuki’s veil is slightly crooked.

On anything but the approach of black sleeves and red eyes.

You step forward.

Each step forward is a little act of will.

Sister Yuki before you, Sister Shoko behind.

The creak of the kneeler. Hands folded. Eyes down.

You can feel your own tongue, suddenly too big in your mouth, suddenly too aware of its softness.

The sister in front of you bows, opens her mouth, receives her God, moves aside.

Your turn.

You kneel.

You look up, because you must.

His face is right there, close, the lamplight catching on the pale lashes at the corners of those impossible eyes.

He looks at you like he looks at everyone, calm and serious, and for a heartbeat you think you are safe inside the same ritual everyone else is in.

“Corpus Christi.” he says softly.

You say “Amen,” and open your mouth.

His fingers hover over the paten, pick up a single host, and for one heartbeat you see the pads of them, calloused slightly from work, faint ink stains near the nail of his index finger, the suggestion of strength under restraint.

The host comes down toward you between his fingers, that small, perfect circle.

It touches your tongue. You think that’s all it’s going to be, the clean, practiced movement you’ve received a thousand times.

It is not.

The pad of his thumb drags — just barely — across the wet surface of your tongue as he withdraws. It’s a feather’s worth of pressure and still it feels obscene.

Your whole body jolts like he has put his hand between your legs instead of on your tongue.

It doesn’t stop there.

As he pulls back, his thumb skims the center of your lower lip, slow enough to leave a little shine. The rest of his fingers brush the point of your chin, tilting it just that fraction higher, coaxing your eyes up to meet his properly.

The world narrows to the span of his hand.

You look up, because what else can you do with his fingers under your chin?

The chapel disappears into blur.

It’s just his face, the stern line of his mouth, the sharp cut of cheekbone, and those eyes.

For a moment they seem darker, deeper, almost redder than they have any right to be. For a dizzy second you swear those pupils flare narrow, as if whatever looks out through them is not quite human.

The air thickens between you.

You think, wildly, that if he says anything now — with his thumb still barely touching the place where God is dissolving on your tongue — you will agree to it.

It lasts less than a second.

His hand is gone.

He has already turned to the next sister, the picture of reverence once more.

You stagger back to your spot in the pew on legs that feel like they belong to someone else. The host, which has always tasted faintly of paper and flour and holiness, slides down the back of your tongue with a copper tang that makes you think of bitten lips and altar wine and something darker.

Blood, your mind whispers.

Blasphemy, your conscience snaps.

You bite the inside of your cheek until it hurts. You keep your eyes on the floor for the rest of the mass.

You kneel. You bow your head. You try to focus on gratitude, on sacrifice, on anything but the way your lips still remember the drag of his thumb. The chapel feels suddenly too full, too hot, like there isn’t enough air to go around.

When the sisters file out, you go with them like a sleepwalker.

After Mass you scour your tongue with prayers. You add an extra decade of the rosary for impure thoughts, for imagining what you might have imagined. You scrub your teeth harder than necessary.

None of it removes the ghost of his touch.

You say nothing.

Who would you tell?

“Mother Abbess, I believe Father Ryomen’s thumb brushed my tongue for too long.”

You can already hear the silence that would follow.

The careful questions.

The reconsidered tone when she asks if you are sleeping enough.

You aren’t, of course.

You try not to think about why.

You force yourself through the rest of the day with mechanical efficiency. Chopping carrots until they blur. Folding linens until the edges of your nail beds are sore.

When the bell rings for Vespers, you feel hollowed out and overfull at once.

Your thoughts will not behave.

They slither back to the press of his thumb. To the way his fingers felt under your chin. To the sensation that he had been holding you in place not only physically, but in time, pinning you to that moment until he decided to release you.

You avoid the mirrors.

You pray twice as long in the chapel that evening and still walk back to your cell with a stomach full of hunger that has nothing to do with food.

It goes on like that for days — tiny contacts, tiny kindnesses, tiny cruelties.

You startle when he says your name.

You drop your knife while chopping carrots in the kitchen after catching a glimpse of his profile in the window’s reflection, your hand shakes so badly you have to hide it in your apron.

When he passes you in the cloister and lifts his hand in a small, courteous nod, your pulse darts like a trapped bird.

You keep telling yourself the same thing — if there were truly something wrong, someone else would see it.

No one does.

The sisters speak of him with admiration.

Reverence.

Warmth.

“He has such a gift for explaining Scripture,” Yuki sighs, covering a smile as she polishes the chalice.

“He listens,” says Utahime. “Really listens. Not like some who come through.”

“The abbess says we should be grateful,” Shoko tells you one evening, stacking plates. “Men like that don’t owe us their time.”

You bite down on the urge to say, Men like that don’t owe us their dreams, either.

Instead, you nod, and let their certainty wash over you like cold water you pretend clears your head.

It doesn’t.

The garden becomes your refuge because there is earth there, and earth makes sense. It stains your fingers in ways you can understand. The air smells of damp soil and green things instead of incense and him.

You are in the garden, kneeling in the dirt with your apron full of herbs, fingers smelling of sage and rosemary and the faint lemon of crushed balm, when a shadow tips over you.

The sun disappears from your shoulders.

For a moment you think a cloud has passed overhead — then you feel the warmth of a body behind you and realize it is him.

“Sister,” he says, his voice smooth as oil over stone. “You’ll stain your habit.”

You blink up, squinting. The light behind his head turns him into a dark outline, haloed.

You can’t see his expression at first, only the suggestion of it. Something small and easy sits on his mouth.

“I’m careful, Father,” you reply, brushing dirt from your knees. You struggle not to sound breathless.

“So I’ve been told.” There’s something in his tone that makes your pulse stutter. “You tend the herbs?”

“Yes.” You tuck a stray hair back under your veil. “For the infirmary and the kitchen.”

“An important task,” he says. His gaze drifts past you to the neat rows. “You know which plants heal and which poison.”

You’d never thought about it like that, and the realization sends a shiver down your spine.

“It’s… knowledge anyone could learn, Father.”

“Not everyone does.” His eyes return to you. The sun has shifted just enough that you can see them clearly now. The color is still rich, still wrong, but you tell yourself it’s just your imagination. “Tell me, could you walk the grounds in the dark by scent alone?”

The question is strange and oddly intimate. You swallow.

“Perhaps. The rosemary is very strong near the west wall. The wild garlic grows by the ditch. The cypress…” You trail off, embarrassed by your own earnestness.

He smiles, slow and precise, like something being unsheathed.

“You pay attention.”

Someone calling it a virtue should not make you feel undressed.

He glances at the sky, the sun is sinking, painting the clouds in darkening streaks.

A murder of crows breaks from the trees behind him, wheeling together, their cries harsh and sudden — a swift black eruption into the sky. Their cawing rips across the quiet.

You look up, startled, and catch the image like a painting — his dark form against the light, birds wheeling overhead, the monastery at his back like something out of a cautionary tale.

You tell yourself it’s a coincidence. Birds do as they please.

Still, the sight punches through your chest like a prophecy you never asked for.

“Even the crows approve,” he says lightly, following your gaze. “An omen, Sister?”

You’re not sure if he’s joking.

“I don’t put stock in such things,” you say, folding your hands tight so he won’t see them tremble. “We have Scripture. We don’t need birds.”

“Some say birds carry souls,” he muses. “But perhaps that’s old superstition.” A beat. “May I help you up?”

He offers his hand.

The proper thing would be to refuse, to say no need, Father, I have legs, thank you. To avoid giving him any excuse to touch you again. But your knees are stiff from kneeling, and your mind is running too many circles at once, and his hand is simply there, palm open, patient.

You put your fingers in his.

His skin is warm, drier than you expect, the grip firm without being crushing. He pulls you up with smooth strength, as if you weigh nothing at all.

For a heartbeat you are close enough to smell him — incense and soap and the faint metallic tang of old coins, of blood that has long since dried.

You steady yourself and look up at him to say thank you.

He is a silhouette against the dying sun, his features cut in shadow and light. The crows are a wheeling black lace overhead. His smile is small and utterly decent, the sort of expression that would reassure anyone else.

It sends a cold thrill down your spine.

“Dinner soon,” he says. “Don’t be late, the stew will grow resentful.”

You muster a weak laugh.

“Yes, Father.”

He inclines his head and moves away, shadow withdrawing from your skin. You stand there with the herbs cradled in your apron, the smell of basil filling your lungs, and watch his back as he walks toward the main building. The birds peel away in a ragged flock, their cries fading.

You tell yourself he is just a man.

A flawed one, perhaps. But no worse than any other.

You tell yourself you are the one making monsters in the dark.

You keep telling yourself these things even as the nights prove you wrong.

He’s there again.

Or he isn’t.

You don’t know how the night divides.

Sometimes you think you fall asleep and his presence simply condenses out of the air, like breath on cold glass. Sometimes you imagine you hear the subtle confession of wood at the door, the sigh of hinges that move only for him. Sometimes you feel his weight, sure and solid, dipping the mattress before you’ve even fully surfaced from whatever restless half-dream you were in.

Tonight, you become aware of a hand around your throat before you realize you’ve woken.

It’s not a choking grip. It’s not gentle, either. His fingers fit around your neck with terrifying ease, thumb resting on the hollow where your pulse riots. The pressure is firm, a collar of heat and intent, reminding you how delicate that column of bone and flesh really is.

Your eyes fly open.

The cell is dark, but you know him.

Your body knows before your mind catches up — the span of his shoulders braced over you, the heat of him through the thin fabric of your nightdress, the bare suggestion of his face above yours.

The crucifix on the wall is just a pale suggestion beyond his shoulder.

The window is a faint rectangle of darker dark.

“Easy.” he murmurs, close enough that his breath ghosts over your lips. “You’re awake this time.”

Your heart stamps against your ribs like it wants out. Your hands fly up — to push him away, you tell yourself, but they land on his wrists instead, fingers clamping down.

His skin is hot under your palms.

“Father—” The word scrapes your throat even with his hold relaxed. “This is—”

“Sleepy?” he murmurs, cutting you, voice low and close to your left ear, exactly where you imagined it would be. “You always are when I come to you.”

Your heart stops, then slams.

This is it — the moment you have begged for and dreaded.

Proof.

Confusion.

The edge of waking and dreaming, blurred.

“Am I—” Your tongue feels too big for your mouth. “Am I… asleep?”

He laughs, soft and wicked.

“Do you want to be?”

You don’t know the answer.

His weight settles more fully along you, chest to chest. You feel the lines of him even through your nightdress — the ridge of his ribs, the solid muscle under the cloth, the warmth like a brand. One of his legs slides between yours, the firm press of his thigh parting your knees.

It sits right there on the back of your tongue, one syllable — stop.

A holy word, a safety, a line.

But you think of all the nights you tried to pray it away and failed.

You think of the taste of the host on your tongue under his thumb, of his hand hauling you up from the garden, of crows spinning black over his head.

You think of the way you already feel ruined without having anything solid to blame.

You don’t say stop.

Your silence is its own answer.

His thumb presses slightly, not enough to hurt, just enough to make your next breath deliberate.

“There,” he croons, quiet and pleased. “See? You can choose.”

His weight shifts, settling more fully over you. One of his thighs slides further between your legs, the fabric of his trousers rough against the thin cotton of your nightdress, against the soft, secret place you refuse to name even in your own thoughts.

He’s solid, warm, implacable.

“Breathe,” he says, as if he’s the one giving you penance. “In. Out. Feel where our bodies meet. Feel what your pious little conscience does when your flesh gets a say.”

You hate him.

You hate that he’s right.

“Move,” he says, the word a coaxing, not a command. “Come now. Let go for me.”

You are already moving before you realize it, a small, betraying roll of your hips against the pressure of his thigh. Your body recognizes friction like a long-lost language.

Heat flares low, treacherous.

Shame crashes over it, then recedes, leaving the want bright, raw in its wake.

He notices, of course. His hand at your throat tightens, not enough to cut off air, just enough to anchor you there, to his body, to the present.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, and his voice sounds like it does in the confessional when he coaxes details from you. “Don’t be shy. If you’re going to damn yourself, little dove, at least enjoy the fall.”

His other hand slides up your side, slow, dragging fabric with it, mapping the line of your ribs, the soft curve of your waist. Every inch he explores feels like it has never been touched before.

Your skin burns in the wake of his palm.

“There you are. You feel it, don’t you? Every night, whether you admit it or not.”

“You know this is wrong,” you manage, the words breaking around a swallow, around your own breathing. “You know—”

“Of course,” he says, almost amused. “That’s half the flavor.”

His thumb strokes lazily along your pulse.

“Tell me no and I stop. Tell me you want this and I give you everything you dreamt and more. Otherwise…” He shifts his thigh, presses it more firmly up between your legs and you swallow a moan. “Otherwise I decide for you.”

You are not used to deciding.

Your whole life has been obedience — to family, to Rule, to God, to bells.

The idea that your yes or no matters more here than any vow terrifies you.

It also thrills you in a way that feels like blasphemy all its own.

Your hips rock again, helpless, seeking more of that pressure. A small, broken sound escapes you, half whimper, half curse. His mouth curves against your cheek in a smile you can feel.

“My good girl,” he breathes. “There’s your answer.”

He eases his grip on your throat, fingers tracing the line of your jaw instead, thumb brushing the corner of your mouth. You suck in a proper breath, only to lose it again as he rolls his hips in slow counterpoint to yours, making you aware of every point where you meet.

The kiss is nothing like you imagined.

You thought, if you allowed yourself to think about it at all, that it would be harsh, bruising, claiming.

It is not.

It’s slow. Intent.

His mouth fits over yours with devastating familiarity, like he’s had all the time in the world to study you, to learn exactly how to angle, how much pressure to use, when to coax and when to command.

Warmth coils low in your belly, unwinding all your hard-won restraint. Your nightdress has tangled up around your thighs, baring skin to the cool air and the heat of him.

You can’t remember pushing it up.

Maybe you didn’t. Maybe he did.

Maybe the dream did it for you.

He tastes of the wine he doesn’t drink in front of you, and of something darker — like copper and smoke and night. His tongue teases at the seam of your lips, patient, waiting.

You open for him because you are already open everywhere else and this feels inevitable.

Your fingers curl around his wrists, then up his arms, feeling the muscle under the cloth, the coiled strength there.

You are aware of every place you touch and every place you don’t.

When he finally pulls back, you chase him without meaning to, lips parted, breath shaking.

“See?” he murmurs, mouth a breath from yours. “Nothing you haven’t already done in your mind a hundred times.”

You want to deny it. You can’t.

He kisses along your jawline, open-mouthed, tasting, breathing you in, as if he has all the time in the world.

Each slow drag of his lips is another step down a staircase you know ends somewhere you’re not supposed to go.

“Terrible, isn’t it,” he whispers, “how your body answers faster than your conscience?”

You hate him.

You move harder.

Your breath comes in little shocks. Sound curls in your throat and he captures it before it can escape, two fingers slipping between your lips, not deep enough to choke, just enough to occupy. It’s absurdly intimate, the way he moves them slightly, the way you can feel callus and heat even there, pressing down on your tongue.

Not gentle, not cruel — just claiming.

You bite down lightly on the knuckles and feel the roughness of his skin, taste the salt of him and the faint tang of incense.

“Taste,” he says. “Bite if you need to convince yourself it’s real.”

You suck in air around his hand, the taste of him layered over the taste of the host from earlier, and it makes you dizzy. The room shrinks to the rhythm of your hips against his thigh, the weight of him above you, the hard floor of the mattress under your back.

“Hush,” he murmurs. “We can’t have the whole house waking, can we?”

The humiliation of it makes your eyes burn.

Being shushed like a child with his fingers in your mouth while his thigh works between your legs, while your body betrays you with every involuntary grind, every tiny clench.

The shame feeds the heat, the heat feeds the shame.

You are a loop of your own making.

Ouroboros.

His free hand slides up, under the hem of your nightdress, palm hot against your hip, your side, the curve above. He explores, squeezes, tests the give of you like bread dough, like he’s seeing how much you can take.

When he reaches your chest, you stiffen, a little jolt that he doesn’t miss. His hand pauses for half a heartbeat, giving you the barest chance to object.

You don’t.

He continues, cupping, thumb brushing over a peak already tight and sensitive, dragging a ragged sound from your throats that his fingers instantly muffle. He hums approval low in his chest, the vibration bleeding into you.

“There,” he says, almost soothing. “There you are. All that devotion, all that discipline. I knew it would taste good when it broke.”

You want to be outraged, to fling an accusation in his face, to tell him you are not a thing he gets to break for sport. Instead you arch into his touch like a plant seeking light, like something that has been starving and suddenly smells bread.

The world narrows to very simple things — the slide of fabric, the rasp of your breathing around his fingers, the restless press of your hips against his thigh.

His mouth travels along your jaw, down the side of your neck, planting slow, open-mouthed kisses that feel like theft.

He lingers where your pulse flutters, teeth scraping lightly, tongue soothing after.

You can feel something building inside you, a tight, spiraling coil of feeling that you have only ever brushed up against alone in the most shameful of moments. It comes faster now, with him, with the friction and the heat and his voice in your ear, low and pleased.

“That’s it,” he whispers. “Let go. You’re already halfway over the edge, little dove. Recall the psalm.”

His words cut through the haze like a bell.

Psalm 63. The one he gave you as penance, the one you’ve been muttering into your pillow at night, the lines about thirst and flesh and dry land that feel less like doctrine and more like confession.

Your eyes roll back, not in piety, but because everything in you is suddenly too intense. The coil snaps. Your body seizes and shudders, pleasure washing over you in hot, unstoppable waves.

It’s too much, you try to clamp down, to still yourself, but you can’t.

You ride it helplessly, grinding against him, swallowing your own cries around his fingers as he keeps you there, his hand on your chest, his mouth at your throat.

He murmurs something against your skin, words you can’t make out, tone unmistakably satisfied.

You feel praised and ruined at once.

When your muscles finally stop shaking, you lie there panting, his thigh still wedged between yours, his fingers still in your mouth, his hand heavy and warm on your chest. Your mind is white noise.

“There,” he breathes, almost reverent. “There you go. Look at you. Perfect.”

He withdraws his fingers from your mouth slowly, dragging along your tongue, your lower lip, leaving them tingling. Your chin feels empty without them.

“You see?” he goes on, thumb tracing the damp smear at the corner of your mouth. “You gave it freely. No devil to blame. Just you and your choice.”

You want to sink into the mattress and disappear.

You don’t get the chance.

Because he’s moving again, shifting his weight, catching behind your knees with both hands, pushing them up, folding you in on yourself until your thighs bracket your ribs and your knees are somewhere near your ears.

The position leaves you helpless, exposed in a way that makes your stomach drop. Your knees rise, your thighs part, your body opens.

You do not resist. You cling to his forearms, breathing hard, eyes searching his face for something — mercy, hesitation, anything.

He looks… reverent.

That’s the terrible thing.

He looks at you like this is worship.

You feel the shift of his clothing, the whisper of fabric as he frees himself from the constraints of propriety. You don’t look down. You won’t. You can barely see anything in the dark anyway, but you know if you let your gaze stray you’ll never be able to lie to yourself again.

Strong hands press the backs of your legs, holding you there, bent, offered.

You can feel the fabric of your nightdress bunching, sliding higher, the night air cool on skin that has never known another’s gaze.

You are acutely, sickeningly aware of the hard line of his cock against you, pressed where you are most vulnerable.

The implication is clear even without words.

He could take anything he wants like this.

You have no leverage, no room.

All you have is your voice.

“Say the psalm.” he murmurs, as if he’s asking you to pass the salt.

You swallow, throat dry, mind scrabbling at the text like a climber on loose rock.

“O God,” you begin, voice barely more than a whisper.

His hands tighten, forearms bracketing you. His body is a wall above you, heat and intent.

“You are my God,” you manage, shame flooding your cheeks. “I seek you… earnestly. My soul thirsts for you.”

He laughs, low and delighted.

“Seek me, then. Seek harder.”

There’s a moment of cruelly sweet hovering — his body poised over the place you’ve never let anyone touch, not like this, not with this intention.

You can feel the heat of him, the promise of pressure.

He moves. Not much. Just enough.

Pain, sharp and unforgiving, lances through you. Not enough to truly hurt, but enough to shock your lungs into forgetting their task. Your hands fly up, clasping at the sheets, at his shoulders, at anything.

A low sound escapes you, half a broken word.

He inhales sharply through his teeth, as if your reaction is its own reward.

He doesn’t stop. He murmurs something soothing you barely catch, a praise or a prayer twisted on his tongue, and continues to invade the space in you that has only ever belonged to God and the quiet.

“My flesh longs for You,” you force out, the line now a grotesque echo of your own situation, “in a dry and weary land…”

He sets a pace.

Slow at first, deliberate, as if making sure you feel every shift, every angle, very drag of his length, the veins adorning it. Your voice warps around it. You stumble over the next verses, parts of them dissolving into sounds that aren’t language at all.

Your body is overwhelmed, nerves lit like candles, sensations stacking and crashing.

Your body yields even as your mind tries to pull away.

The sting dulls into a fullness you have no words for. The rhythm he sets is relentless, grinding, dragging you along whether you’re ready or not, you can feel yourself squeezing him, you can feel him so deep it has to bulge your lower belly to fit properly when he bottoms out, hips pressing against the globes of your ass.

He changes angle, and suddenly the world narrows further.

Every thrust grinds against a place you didn’t know existed, igniting nerves you hadn’t catalogued.

Your body clenches around him, traitorously eager, and you hear yourself whine and mewl.

“…as I have seen You in the sanctuary,” you gasp, though the word sanctuary has lost all meaning. Your fingers clutch at his sleeves, nails digging into fabric, into the muscle beneath.

You don’t know if you are pulling him closer or trying to hold yourself together.

He doesn’t let you hide.

“Keep going,” he breathes, tone threaded with something tight, something barely held in check. “Don’t stop the prayer now.”

“Because Your love— is better than life,” you choke out, the words hitching on breath, on movement. “My lips… will praise You.”

He laughs quietly, the sound dark and delighted.

“They already did.”

You want to tell him to shut up, to stop twisting everything holy into something raw and carnal, but you can’t form the words.

Your mind is a blur of scripture and sensation, of guilt and desperate, grinding need.

“Thus I bless You while I live,” you continue, voice climbing, fraying. “I lift up my hands in Your name—”

Your hands are not lifted — they are anchored on him.

Your nails bite crescents into his skin.

You think you might bruise.

You think you might die.

He leans down, pressing his forehead briefly to yours, breath hot, almost gentle.

“Look at me.”

You do.

You drag your eyes up to his, feeling like you’re being dragged along behind your own gaze.

For a moment you see it again — that inhuman slit, that vertical pupil in the red, a flash of something that has no place inside a human face.

Your heart stutters.

Then, just as before, it’s gone — round irises, normal, as normal as anything about him can be.

“Remember this,” he says softly. “Next time you kneel at the rail. Remember who you opened for.”

You don’t know if he means God or himself.

He drives into you with purpose, using your own psalm as a metronome for each thrust.

You break again, somewhere between verse six and seven, the psalm shredded on your tongue. Your body climbs and shatters and falls, over and over, until you lose track of how many times the night swallows your small, strangled cries.

He praises you through it, voice a low, running commentary against your skin, against your ear, against the pounding silence in your head.

Good.

There.

That’s it.

Give it to me.

Give it all.

Your voice starts to fray. The psalm devolves, holy words dissolving into broken syllables and bitten-off cries.

He doesn’t care.

Or perhaps that was the point from the start — to make prayer and pleasure indistinguishable, so that every time you try to speak to God you remember the way your own voice sounded under him.

Every time you commune, you remember his taste.

Every time you think of a psalm, you remember — vividly — how deep he is drilling inside you while all you can say are holy words.

Somewhere in the blur of it, you realize you are giving him everything.

Every heartbeat. Every breath. Every scrap of your carefully constructed purity.

Every word of Scripture you ever thought would save you.

Your dignity. Your discipline. Your delusions of piety.

Your fragile certainty that you could keep at least one part of yourself untouched.

He takes it all and keeps going.

The edges of your vision go gray. The room tilts. You cling to the sound of his breath, harsh and so close to your ear, to the press of his hands on the backs of your legs holding you in place, to the crucifix on the wall you can’t see but know is there — mute witness to your undoing.

When it finally breaks again — whatever fragile dam you had left — it feels like falling straight through your own body. There’s no thinking left, only sensation, bright and overwhelming.

Your mouth opens in a wordless plea that might be Jesus, might be his name, might be nothing at all.

He groans something filthy and approving into your skin, a sound that vibrates through your bones.

Then everything goes soft.

The weight above you lifts a little, enough to let you breathe properly, not so much that you feel alone. He eases your legs down slowly, as if you are something precious that might break, smoothing instead of gripping.

Fingers trace idle shapes on your thigh, your hip, your side, as if he’s admiring his own work. His hands smooth the fabric of your nightdress back into place, covering what he unveiled. The gesture is almost tender, which makes you want to scream.

When it finally stops, when the tide recedes and leaves you wrung-out and shaking, you realize you have tears on your face.

You don’t remember when you started crying. You just know that your cheeks are wet and your throat hurts and your limbs feel like they’ve been unstrung.

You lie there, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling.

The crucifix hangs slightly askew, as if even Christ turned his head away.

He touches your cheek, thumb catching a tear.

“Beautiful.” he murmurs. “You see? You were made for this. For me.”

You realize you’ve been holding your breath again.

“I’ve—” Your voice cracks, a small thing. “I’ve damned myself.”

He considers, tilting his head.

“You’re very dramatic, little dove.”

Anger flares, weak and way too late now.

“You—”

“I offered,” he interrupts, not unkindly. “You accepted. Sin loves a collaborator.”

His thumb traces the line of your jaw, the hollow under your ear.

“But if it comforts you, I’ll carry the larger share. I know what I’m doing.”

“That doesn’t absolve me.” you whisper.

“No,” he agrees. “But it makes you less boring.”

You should slap him.

Your hand lifts, then falls uselessly to your side. You are too tired even for outrage.

“Rest now,” he says quietly. “You’ll make a mess of morning prayers if you collapse in the stall.”

You want to ask him if he’s staying.

If he’s leaving.

If any of this will look different when the sun comes up.

You want to demand proof — bruises, marks, anything — to reassure yourself that you didn’t imagine the whole thing.

He leans down one last time, presses his mouth to your forehead in a parody of priestly blessing.

“O God, You are my God,” he murmurs against your skin, the first line of the psalm now a mockery, a benediction, or both. “Earnestly, you seek Me.”

Your eyes flutter shut.

The last thing you feel is his lips, light and blasphemously tender, at the corner of your mouth.

When you open them again, the room is empty.

The crucifix hangs straight.

The window is a dark, indifferent rectangle.

Your nightdress is twisted around your thighs. Your body aches in ways that feel very specific and undeniable. Your throat is raw. Your legs are heavy and sore. The sheets smell of sweat and something else you refuse to name.

Maybe it was a dream.

Perhaps you did everything to yourself, guided by your own unholiness, and dragged his image into it to avoid admitting that your own hands could do such things.

Perhaps he really was here, and the stone and the dark and the God who should have stopped him all looked the other way.

You swing your legs over the side of the bed and sit there in the dimness, hands dangling between your knees, breathing in and out. The psalm echoes in your head, the words now stitched with new, unwanted meanings.

My soul thirsts for You. My flesh longs for You.

You laugh once, a broken little sound that isn’t joy at all.

You touch your throat. No bruises. Your jaw. No soreness. Between your legs, the ache is real enough, a tender, pulsing reminder.

But tenderness can be imagined too, can’t it? The mind is a cruel playwright.

You sit up slowly, wrap your arms around yourself, and try not to cry.

If you go to the infirmary, if you tell the old nurse you fell, that you hurt, she will fuss and cluck and perhaps ask questions you cannot answer. If you go to the abbess and confess everything, she might believe you… or she might decide the strain of cloistered life has become too much for your delicate sensibilities.

If you say nothing, it’s just you and him and the silence.

You say nothing.

You make your bed with shaking hands, smoothing the sheets carefully, as if presentation can erase history. You straighten your veil in the tiny bit of burnished metal nailed to the wall that serves as a mirror. Your eyes look strange in it. Wider. Brighter. A touch wild. You wash your face in the cold water from the pitcher, flinching when your own fingers brush the places he touched, remembering how different it felt when it was his hand, his mouth, his weight.

You go to the chapel when the bell rings.

You kneel. You pray.

You watch him mount the steps to the altar, cassock neat, hair tidy, expression composed. His sermon is about mercy this morning. He speaks of forgiveness as a well that never runs dry. His voice is steady, his gaze sweeping across the congregation without catching on you any longer than anyone else.

He is everything a good priest should be.

You feel insane.

When the time comes to receive again, you hesitate in the pew for a heartbeat too long. Sister Shoko nudges you gently with her elbow, mistaking your reluctance for distraction.

You rise and go with the others, each step feeling like it’s taken on a cliff edge.

He holds the host between finger and thumb.

“Corpus Christi.” he says.

You open your mouth.

You wait to see if his thumb will linger, if his fingers will tilt your chin, if any trace of the night will show here, in this daylight ritual.

He places the wafer on your tongue with the exact, practiced precision you’ve known all your life.

Nothing more.

No touch of thumb, no brush of knuckles, no stolen, secret caress. His hand withdraws as if you burn. His gaze slides past you to the sister behind.

You stagger back to your pew with the host stuck to the roof of your mouth, tasting of paper and flour and the faintest ghost of copper that might only be in your imagination.

Maybe you dreamt it.

Maybe you didn’t.

You chew and swallow and kneel and stand with everyone else, your body a well of unanswered questions. His voice winds through the prayers. His shadow cuts across your folded hands when he passes.

The stone leans a little more toward him.

You think of his thumbs, his mouth, his breath. You think of his pupils narrowing in the field. You think of his hand around your throat and his lips on your forehead.

You think, I gave him everything he wanted. I don’t know where I end and he begins anymore.

And when you close your eyes to pray Psalm 63, the lines come easily, your tongue already used to their shape.

“O God, You are my God…”

You don’t know who you’re saying it to.

By the time you reach the refectory, breakfast is nearly over. Conversations drop to polite mumbles when you slip in. Sister Shoko gives you a worried glance but doesn’t comment when you murmur something about not sleeping well.

He is at the far table with the abbess, head bowed as she speaks. He looks tired in the way holy men are allowed to look — as if he spent the night in prayer, not in your bed.

When he glances up, your gazes meet.

His expression doesn’t change. No secret smile, no mocking glint. Just that same composed, attentive face of a priest discussing parish business.

You search for any sign — guilt, smugness, hunger. You find nothing you can hold in your hand and call evidence.

The taste of the host still lingers on your memory. His fingers still feel phantom-warm against your lip. Your body remembers the night vividly enough that shame surges hot and sharp.

Your mind whispers, it could have been a dream. It could all be in your head.

Your heart whispers back, then why does he move like someone who knows exactly how you sound when you break?

You tear your gaze away, sit down, and fold your hands.

You are a good girl in a quiet, haunted house. You are losing your mind, or you have already given it away.

He lifts his cup to his lips. The crows outside gather on the wall.

You bow your head to hide the tremor in your fingers and begin, automatically, to recite Psalm 63 under your breath.

My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee…

You do not specify who thee is.

You don’t dare.

✟ @sixeyedsaint @crescent-canine @lunarscosmos @twitone @sweetlandspos

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

mima’s room !!