Chapter 13 - Gabriel
Monday evening, and she’s teaching me to make sofrito. I’m failing.
"Too big," she says, watching me mince garlic as though I’m disarming a bomb. "You're not building furniture. Just chop."
The kitchen smells foreign: onions, peppers, garlic sautéing in olive oil.
She moves around me with easy authority, adjusting the flame, adding ingredients by feel rather than measurement.
Every time she pivots from counter to stove, we nearly collide.
The kitchen is too small for two people, or maybe I'm too aware of her proximity.
Her hip brushes mine when she reaches past me, and my cock stirs at the contact, instant, undeniable, my body responding to hers like it's been programmed.
"Taste," she commands, holding out the wooden spoon.
I taste. The flavor explodes on my tongue: alive and complex.
Heat and depth and pleasure I'd forgotten food could provide.
My face must show the surprise because she laughs, genuine and unguarded, and the sound makes me want to press her against the counter and find out what other sounds she makes.
"That's what food is supposed to do," she says. "Make you feel something."
The spoon she's using is old, dark wood worn smooth. I've noticed it since she moved in, leaning against the wall like a silent witness.
"That spoon has stories," I say.
She stirs the sofrito, considering. The movement makes her breasts shift under her shirt. No bra, I can see her nipples through the thin cotton, and I have to look away before my cock gets harder. "It was my Abuela Rosa's. She taught me to cook with this spoon."
While she stirs, stories spill out like steam. Her voice softens when she mentions Hialeah.
"Abuela's kitchen was tiny. The walls turned yellow from decades of garlic and oregano."
She demonstrates how Rosa would stand behind her, arms wrapped around to guide her small hands.
"Like this," she says, and I feel her breath warm against my neck.
She rolls up her sleeve, revealing the silver-dollar sized patch of puckered skin on her forearm.
"I was nine years old. Grabbed a copper pot." Her finger traces the scar's edge. "Rosa slathered it with aloe from the plant in her window. 'Now you know what the stove can do,' she told me. 'Respect it.'"
She pauses, eyes on the bubbling pot. "She used to say some people run hot," her finger circles the scar absently. "That they need to be careful not to burn everything they touch."
My throat closes. Isabella's face flashes behind my eyes.
"Julian hated my cooking," she continues, voice hardening.
"First it was 'Let's try that new place downtown.
' Then suddenly we had reservations every night.
" Her wooden spoon scrapes the bottom of the pot with unnecessary force.
"My kitchen skills gathered dust while we ate at Michelin stars.
When I mentioned visiting Rosa, his forehead would crease.
'You always come back so… quiet,' he'd say. 'I worry about your mood.'"
"When Rosa got sick, I was eating catered food in Julian's penthouse.
" Her voice goes flat, reporting facts. "I got there hours too late.
She'd been cooking black beans. They were still on the stove.
The apartment smelled like my childhood and I sat on that kitchen floor holding this spoon and finally understood what he'd taken from me. "
She says this simply, no performance, just truth.
The sofrito's burning while I stand here like an idiot, trying not to think about her mouth.
I stir it, and suddenly the act carries weight: participating in what Julian tried to erase.
Every clumsy cut, every hesitant taste, learning pleasure from a woman who was systematically denied it.
"Tell me about the beans," I say.
She does. Rosa's recipe emerging while we cook, the kitchen filling with steam and spice and something that smells like a home neither of us has had in years.
She reaches across me for salt, her breast pressing against my arm, and my cock goes fully hard.
I grip the counter edge, knuckles white, fighting the urge to spin her around and taste the spot where her neck meets her shoulder.
Tuesday morning, we go for a walk through town. A mundane moment that feels like a date because she's beside me in daylight, not at church, not serving food to the hungry. Just walking down Main Street while Homestead draws its conclusions.
We're almost back at my car when I see him. Truck driver, leaning against his vehicle, the type who occupies space like he owns it. His eyes track Sera from ankles to face with the slowness men like him think is flattery.
"Waste of a body like that on a priest," he says, loud enough to carry. The crude comment hangs in the air like a challenge. "Could be doing something better with your afternoon, sweetheart. I could show you."
The reaction is instant, volcanic, physical.
My body prepares for violence before my mind engages: adrenaline flooding, hands curling into fists, every muscle tensing.
The sequence plays out in vivid detail. Three steps forward, grab his throat, slam his skull against the truck bed until teeth scatter like dice, until his crude mouth can't form words, until he understands that Sera is mine and his comment just signed his death certificate.
I don't move.
The collar holds me. Not faith, fabric. The white band that everyone in this town recognizes, that means something to the community I've served faithfully. If I break his jaw, if I paint his truck with his blood, I lose more than the priesthood. I lose the only identity I've had since Elena.
I swallow the violence like broken glass. My hands stay at my sides, face neutral, and the effort, the full-body discipline of not destroying this man, makes my neck tense with frustrated aggression.
My hand finds the small of Sera's back. A light touch, guiding her past the truck, past the driver still smirking at his own crude comment, down the street.
The gesture happens without thought, pure instinct, and I don't remove it.
Her warmth bleeds through the fabric into my palm.
What it means, this unconscious public claim, this mine without words, hits me only after we're walking.
My hand on her body in daylight, and she doesn't pull away.
She leans into it, and my cock twitches at the submission in that small movement.
The man shouts another comment. My blood roars too loud to hear it, but I imagine finding him later, after dark, teaching him what happens when you make crude comments about Seraphina.
Back at the rectory, the kitchen smells like reheated sofrito. Everything is normal except my hands are still shaking and my jaw aches from clenching and my cock is still half-hard from the possession of touching her in public.
She sits at the table with coffee, studying me.
"You wanted to hit him."
I deflect. "He was out of line."
"You were about three seconds from putting him on the ground." Not asking, telling me what she observed. "Your whole posture changed. You went somewhere that isn't Father Gabriel, and coming back took everything you had."
I sit. She's too good at reading lies, and lying to her has become impossible.
"Yes," I say. "I wanted to hit him."
"More than hit."
"Yes." I wanted to destroy him. Wanted to make him bleed for looking at you, for his crude comment, for existing in the same space as you. "Much more."
"But you didn't."
"No."
She's quiet. "That was harder for you than the parking lot."
She's right. The parking lot was tactical, justified. This was personal: wanting to destroy a man for disrespecting her, not protecting her from a threat. The difference between a soldier and something else entirely. Something that gets hard at the thought of violence in her name.
"How did you learn that?" I ask. "Reading people like that."
She tells me. Julian's world, dinner parties where she was an ornament.
Learning to track micro-expressions because missing signals meant bad nights.
Not violence, Julian wasn't violent, but rooms whose temperature changed with his mood, and the only way to navigate was reading the weather before it arrived.
"Survival skill," she says. "I learned to read men the way sailors read weather."
"What do you read on me?"
She looks at me, long and transparent, and I wonder if she can see how badly I want to bend her over this table and fuck her until she screams my name. If she can read the violence and hunger and possession all tangled together under the collar.
"A man who's very good at pretending to be someone he's not." Pause. "But who's getting worse at it every day."
The observation lands. She's right. The collar is slipping, failing, the mask thinning. Every meal she cooks, every night with just yards between us, the distance between Father Gabriel and Gabriel Delgado narrows.
"Is that a problem?" I ask.
She considers genuinely, not performing thoughtfulness, and I imagine sliding my hand up her thigh while she thinks, finding her wet, making her lose that careful consideration.
"It depends on who's underneath."
"You've seen who's underneath."
"I've seen pieces. The parking lot. The gala. The…" She doesn't say the altar. Doesn't say how I dropped to my knees and ate her pussy like a man starving. "I've seen the man who breaks things and the man who kneels. I haven't seen the one in the middle."
The one in the middle. I’m not sure he exists.
After dinner, I scrub the last plate while she dries, our elbows occasionally brushing.
The dishwater has cooled. She hands me a towel without looking up, knowing exactly when I'll need it.
Later, she curls into the corner of the couch, book propped against her knees, one sock-covered foot tucked beneath her.
The lamp casts a halo around her hair. I spread budget sheets across the table, pencil tapping against columns of numbers that swim before my eyes.
Each time I glance up, the space between us seems to shrink.
The radiator clicks. When she shifts position, I catch a hint of vanilla from her skin, something darker underneath, mingling with the lingering church incense in the curtains.
She turns a page. The soft whisper of paper shouldn't sound erotic, but everything she does has become foreplay: existing in my space, breathing my air, shifting on that couch in ways that make her breasts move under her shirt.
My cock stirs, the constant state since she moved in, this perpetual awareness of her body and how badly I want to touch it, taste it, claim it completely.
"Gabriel." She doesn't look up from her book. "I can feel you staring."
I don’t reply. Just sit here in silence and wish she could feel more of me than that.