Chapter 9 - Gabriel
She shows up at my door at ten PM Friday night with a bag over her shoulder and no explanation.
Not frightened. Not crying. Just composed, direct, practical. The bag hangs heavy from her shoulder, car keys dangling from her fingers, and her face says exactly one thing: I need something and I decided you're the person I'm asking.
Just two days ago she was down on her knees in the confessional.
And now she's here, standing in my doorway with her hair down and that bag over her shoulder, and already her scent is invading my space.
Vanilla and something darker, the same scent that clung to my clothes after she swallowed my cock.
My body responds immediately. Christ. She's been here ten seconds and already I'm getting hard.
Nobody comes to the rectory. It's my cell, my controlled space, my exercise in self-denial. Now she's standing in the middle of it, and every wall I've built feels like tissue paper.
I should send her somewhere else. A motel. Alma's spare room. Anywhere that isn't a priest's private quarters at night with no witnesses and my cock already remembering exactly how her throat felt working around me.
"Can I come in?" Her voice is calm, steady, but there's something underneath. That effort of holding composure when the ground is shifting. I recognize it because I've been living it since she walked into my life.
I step aside. Of course I step aside.
She sets the bag by the door, stands in my hallway, and I watch her read my life like a confession written on walls.
The bare plaster, no photographs, no art.
Just the crucifix over the doorway and nothing else.
The wooden floor creaks under her feet. Boards I've walked for years that suddenly sound different with her weight on them.
Through the kitchen door: plain, clean, empty.
Coffee maker that might as well be from the Stone Age, toaster, nothing that suggests food is anything but fuel.
The rectory is always cold. I keep it that way.
But with her here, I notice it. The October chill that makes her wrap her arms around herself.
Through the other doorway, the edge of my bedroom is visible.
The hard mattress that's basically a board with a sheet, the pull-up bar bolted to the frame with worn grooves where my hands grip it every morning at 4 AM.
She traces one with her finger, understanding without asking.
Weights arranged on the floor like instruments of penance.
I see the moment she understands. This isn't minimalism as an aesthetic choice. This is a punishment.
She doesn't comment directly. Just: "Nice place. Very 'Spanish Inquisition chic.' Did the hair shirt come with it, or was that extra?"
The joke has edges, but underneath is something softer. Recognition, maybe.
I make coffee because I don't know what else to do with my hands. Hands that remember her hair twisted in them while she swallowed my cock. Her beans are still in my cabinet from when she brought them last week. I use them. She notices. Neither of us mentions it.
Kitchen table. Two chairs, one wobbles. She tells me the operational minimum while I pour coffee into mugs that haven't held anything but black necessity in years.
She shifts in her chair and I track the movement, remembering those same hips pressed against the confessional door while I lost my mind.
"I was followed back from Miami." Her hands wrap around the mug, steady despite what she's saying. "Same type of cars as the parking lot men from last week. Professional. They know where my cottage is."
She pauses, weighs her words. "Tonight felt different. Closer. More deliberate. Like they're done watching and ready to move."
The men following her don't know what I am. What I was. They see a priest. They'll die seeing a priest if they come for her. My hands flex at my sides. I may not carry a weapon, but these hands remember exactly how to hurt someone who threatens what I care about.
"How many vehicles?" I ask, and my voice has already shifted to a flat register. "Did they approach you? Did they follow you here?"
She gives me the details, precise and clean. The priest recedes entirely. The other man takes over. Two cars, four men minimum, professional spacing, no approach yet but getting bolder. Classic intimidation escalating to action.
"You're staying here," I say. Not a question, not a command. Just the tone of a man who's assessed a threat and already decided how many bodies he's willing to leave.
She looks at me across my stark kitchen table, and the ghost of a smile crosses her face. "There he is," she says quietly.
"Who?"
"The man who put someone on their knees in a parking lot." She takes a sip of coffee. "I was starting to think I'd imagined him."
The reminder of that night, of how easily violence came back to my hands, doesn't shame me. Sitting here with her needing protection while my cock remembers her mouth, I'm only grateful the skill remains.
"Okay," she says. "I'll stay."
I give her the bedroom. She argues, but I win, of course. She'll be in my sheets tonight. Tomorrow they'll smell like her. I'll either burn them or jerk off into them for the next month.
She looks at the room with an expression I can't quite read. The hard mattress. The crucifix on the wall above where I lay my head every night. The complete absence of anything that could be called comfort.
"This is your bed?" Her voice is carefully neutral. "This is what you sleep on every night?"
"It's fine."
"Gabriel, this is a plank with a sheet on it."
"It works," I say, because what else can I say? That softness feels like cheating?
She looks at me for a long beat, filing this alongside the empty kitchen and the bare walls. I don't enjoy being read, but I'm too tired to maintain walls tonight.
We should sleep. Neither of us does. We end up back at the kitchen table with cooling coffee, and the conversation that happens isn't planned. It comes the way conversations do at midnight when two people are exhausted and the pretenses have been stripped away.
"Most priests at least have a picture of their mother," she observes, studying the bare walls. "Maybe a houseplant that's dying. Something that suggests a human lives here."
"Plants die," I say flatly. "Everything I touch does. Safer to keep the counters bare."
The words come out heavier than intended. She sets down her mug, and the small clink echoes in my empty kitchen.
"Is that what you tell yourself? That you're protecting things by not having them?"
I don't answer. The crucifix watches us from the doorway, Christ in perpetual agony, the only decoration I allow myself. Fitting, really. A reminder that suffering is holy. That pain has purpose. That some things can't be atoned for, only endured.
My jaw clenches. I can feel her watching me, waiting. The silence stretches until it becomes its own confession.
She doesn't demand. She just looks at me across the table. Open, patient. Not requiring my secrets but offering space for them. A door, not a trap. Walk through if you want. Stay where you are. Either way, I'm here.
My hands grip the table edge. The words are there, pressing against my teeth, silence fighting to stay silent. But she's sitting in my kitchen because killers are hunting her, and somehow that makes us even. We're both carrying death. Maybe that's why the words finally come.
"I was…."
I stop. Start again. Stop. My jaw works like I'm chewing glass.
"I was twenty," I finally manage, the words coming out flat, careful. "I was in Miami, born into it. Gabriel Delgado, not the priest, the prince. The son of Jorge Delgado, everything that comes with that name."
I have to stop again. Stand. Pace to the window, check the street outside. Paranoid habit, but it gives me distance from her eyes.
"I was good at it," I continue, back still turned. "The charm, the rooms, the people. Moving through that world like I owned it, because in a way, I did. I loved it. The danger, the power, the electric hum of being someone who mattered. Loved it the way an addict loves the substance."
I turn back. She hasn't moved, just nods like she knows exactly what that kind of love costs.
"There was a woman."
The name sits on my tongue like a stone. My hands clench into fists. So long of not saying it aloud, and now it wants out, and my body is physically fighting it. But Sera is patient, steady, holding space for whatever I'm about to confess.
"Elena."
There. Said. The sky doesn't fall, but something in my chest cracks.
"We were together. She died. It was an accident."
I say "accident" and the word tastes like ash. I don't say how. Don't tell her about the room in the club or the breath play or how Elena's face looked when I realized she wasn't pretending anymore. I will never tell anyone that.
"I left Miami that night. Entered the seminary three days later. The collar was supposed to be a lock. A cage. A way to make sure I never hurt anyone again."
“But it was an accident. You didn’t hurt her.”
“I did. It was my fault.”
“You… murdered her?” Seraphina’s voice is flat, a simple question, like she’s asking whether I bought milk today.
“No,” I manage to say. “It was an accident but it was still my fault.” My voice sounds like someone else's. "So I took myself out of the equation, made sure I could never hurt another woman like that."
She makes a small humming sound.
I meet her eyes across the kitchen. "It worked."
I don't say ‘until you’. I don't need to. She's sitting in my kitchen at one in the morning, and I can still taste her on my tongue. The ‘until’ is self-evident.
She's quiet for a long time. I brace for the questions. How did she die, what kind of accident, what really happened? The questions that lead to the part where a woman trusted me with her breath and I held it too long.
She doesn't ask.
"You were twenty," she says finally.
I nod.
"And you've been punishing yourself ever since." Not a question.
I gesture at the kitchen. The bare walls. The empty counters. "Not punishing. Keeping other women safe. And atoning."
"There's a difference?"
I don't answer because I don't have one. All this penance and I still can't tell where the atonement ends and the self-destruction begins.
The conversation shifts. Not away from the pain but deeper into it. Elena opened the door. Now I walk through it into the room I've been avoiding even longer.
"Marisol." My sister's name feels foreign in my mouth. "She was eighteen when I left. Eighteen, and I just… left."
I have to stop. Pace again. The weight of this guilt is different, newer, raw where the Elena guilt has calcified.
I stare at the table, avoiding Sera's eyes. "When Elena died, Marisol was alone."
"Your sister," Sera says quietly.
"Our mother had died six months before. Father was getting sick." My hands flex, remembering violence. "All she had left was me, and I just… left."
"You thought you were protecting her."
"Did I?" I laugh, bitter. "Or was that the story I told myself? 'I left to protect her.' Makes the collar feel like heroism instead of cowardice."
Sera leans forward. "What does Marisol think?"
My voice cracks. "That I abandoned her. I thought I was saving her from my darkness, but—"
"You left her alone in her own," Sera finishes.
I look up, meet her steady gaze. "She fell into partying and drugs, ended up in the tabloid headlines every other week. And somehow I still thought I was protecting her by staying away. That she needed space."
"What did she need?"
"Her brother. Not a priest." I swallow hard. "She needed someone to stand beside her at our mother's grave, not… absence dressed up as virtue."
Sera is quiet, just holding the weight of what I've said.
"She called you," she says finally. "Still calls. That door isn't closed."
I huff out a laugh. “My sister is a fucking angel.”
She sets down her mug, looks at me directly. "You can't unleave. But you can stay now. She doesn't need your sermons. She needs you to show up messy and imperfect and present."
Something loosens in my chest. Not absolution. Permission. Permission to stop punishing Marisol with my absence.
It's past two when we finally stop talking. The coffee pot is empty. The kitchen feels less stark somehow, like her presence has changed its molecular structure.
She takes the bedroom. I take the couch that's six inches too short. She closes the door and I lie there staring at the ceiling, achingly aware of her in my bed. In my sheets. Her hair on my pillow where tomorrow I'll press my face and breathe her in like a fucking deviant.
I should be in agony. Should be doing the cold shower, the rosary, the pull-ups until my arms shake. Instead, I just lie here, cock half-hard from proximity alone, something in my chest finally unclenched.
I said Elena's name out loud. First time since it happened. The guilt didn't lift, it never lifts, but it shifted. Like setting down one end of something heavy.