Chapter 14 - Benedict #3
She comes again. I feel it—the clench, the tremor, the way her whole body locks and then releases in a wave that pulls me with it.
I follow her over. The orgasm tears through me like something with teeth—not pleasure exactly, or not only pleasure.
Something bigger. Something that has the taste of destruction in it, the knowledge that whatever I was before this moment has been burned away and what's left is just this.
Just her. Just the dark church and the narrow bed and the woman beneath me whose body I have learned the way I learn everything—obsessively, invasively, completely.
***
After. The choir loft in the dark. We're lying on the narrow bed, not touching. The space between us is six inches and infinite. The stained glass throws faint color across the ceiling—fragments of saints and martyrs, visible in the ambient glow from the street.
Her breathing has slowed. Mine hasn't. I'm lying on my back, staring at the ceiling, and the hunger isn't satisfied. I knew it wouldn't be. Satisfaction was never the point—the point was knowledge, and now I have it, and the knowledge has made everything worse.
I know her body now. The way she sounds when she comes. The places that make her arch and the places that make her go still. The exact pressure that turns her breathing from steady to ragged. The way she says my name when there's nothing left to hide behind.
And it's not enough. It will never be enough.
She turns her head. Looks at me. In the dim light, her face is unreadable—or readable in a way I'm not prepared for.
The clinical distance is gone, but something has replaced it.
Not warmth. Not surrender. Something watchful.
The clinician coming back online, assessing the wreckage, beginning the slow work of understanding what just happened.
She looks down from the choir loft. At the nave. At the wall.
"What is that?" she asks. Her voice is rough. Used.
"Something I'm working on."
"That's not an answer."
"No."
She's quiet for a long moment. Then: "You live in a church. You have a wall covered in documents and photographs. You have scars that don't come from rock climbing."
I don't say anything. Let her work. This is what she does—she reads, she assembles, she builds a picture from fragments. She's been doing it to me since the wedding. The difference is that now she has more data.
"Who are you?" she asks. Not the question she asked at the crisis center—what are you doing. This is deeper. This is the question underneath all the other questions, the one she's been circling since she saw me across the reception hall.
"I'm the man who just fucked you in a church," I say. "The rest can wait."
She doesn't push. Not tonight. She lies back and stares at the ceiling and the colored light moves across her skin, and she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and the most dangerous and I am in more trouble than I have ever been in my life.
She gets up. Dresses. I watch her—the reverse of undressing, the methodical reconstruction of the woman who walked through my door. Jeans, sweater, coat. Hair gathered and twisted. The armor going back on, piece by piece.
"I should go," she says.
I don't ask her to stay. The words are in my mouth—stay, sleep here, let me learn the sound of your breathing—but I don't say them. Because asking her to stay would be need, and need is a weapon I'm not ready to hand her.
"I'll call you a car."
She nods. We don't touch. The distance between us is back—not the old distance, not the surveillance distance. Something new. The distance of two people who have seen each other completely and are deciding what to do with the seeing.
She goes down the stairs. I hear her footsteps cross the nave. The church door opens and closes.
I lie in the choir loft. The sheets smell like her now—warm skin, shampoo, sex. The scent fills the narrow bed, fills the loft, fills the church. It will be here for days. It will be here every time I close my eyes.
I got what I wanted. I've been saying that after every move—the street, the donation, the tour, the kiss. I got what I wanted. And every time, the getting has made the wanting worse.
This time is no different. This time is worse than all the others combined. Because now I know what it sounds like when Lucy Anderson says my name with my body inside hers, and no amount of surveillance or strategy or patience will ever be enough to replace the sound of it.
She's gone. The church is empty. Christ watches from the apse.
I press my face into the pillow where her head was and I breathe her in and I understand, finally, that this woman is going to destroy me.
Not with clinical precision. Not with the professional distance she's been wielding like a scalpel.
With the thing underneath all of that—the raw, unperforming, undefended thing that I felt in the dark when her body moved against mine and her mouth opened under mine and she said my name like it was the only word she knew.
She's going to destroy me and I'm going to let her.
That's the decision I've made. Standing in the doorway was hers. This one is mine.