chapter 32
Gus, The Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple
My heart lifted when Decca walked through the front door. The two days she’d been gone had felt like weeks.
She’d been called out for another emergency. Good for the world. They needed her brand of dogged expertise. But I was bereft without her husky laugh and the flip of her tarot cards echoing through the house.
She’d been running herself ragged since the summer. And now that winter was approaching (the slower season for the dead) she still couldn’t seem to catch a break. It seemed like she was on a new site nearly every day.
Her keys slipped into the dish. When she turned around, her eyes searched for mine. Her body crumpled onto the bench beside the door.
The back of her head hit the wall as she stared up at the ceiling, quiet for a long stretch of time.
“Cobwebs,” she said. “I keep forgetting to take the broom to that corner.”
I tracked her eyes up to the ceiling. “Not now.”
“No.” Her eyes closed, and she shook her head. “Not now.”
“That bad, huh?”
She nodded. Her eyes still closed. The scenes were replaying in her head. Part of her was still out there. I could only imagine the horrifying tableaux morts seared into her retinas after the week she’d had.
Her mouth was set in a grim line. Her hands gripped the edge of the wooden bench.
Her body shook. So slightly, I did a double take. Her shoulders convulsed and rounded as she pulled her arms across her chest and hugged her body.
I’d never seen her cry before. Not like this. I’d never seen her show any emotion toward the dead, other than a long-suffering acceptance and a compulsion to serve. To solve the case. To bury any grief with humor.
“Dec?” I said her name quietly. I didn’t know if I should go to her or give her time to discharge whatever horrors she’d seen.
“I’m so cold.” Her voice broke. Tears spilled from her eyes.
I crossed the room in three strides to get to her. Pulling her up and into my arms, I held her firmly, pressing her face into my chest. Stroking her hair.
Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. Protect your child. Heal her pain. Use me for your will.
And hers.
Her arms were folded between us, still protecting herself, even from me. Still crying into her hands instead of my dampening my shirt.
Her tears were relentless as we stood in that embrace. I barely noticed when she’d gripped the button placket of my shirt, at first holding on for dear life, then rolling the buttons under the tips of her fingers and stroking the cotton seams while her sobs grew less rhythmic.
I wanted to tell her it was okay. I was here. She was here. We’d talk through it. She was safe in our soft place.
But I couldn’t get the words out.
Nothing sounded right in my head. I dropped my chin to her head as she sniffed and turned her face to me, pulling me down by the neck to her lips, wet and salty with cooled tears.
I could take anything but her pain. If I could somehow cut those images out of her mind, I’d do it. I’d invade with surgical precision and banish every horror.
I’d fill her up with something better. Something easy.
Love.Instead of death.
She reached up to my neck and tugged around my collar, reminding me I still wore my clerical clothes.
I love you,I wanted to say.
“Dec—”
“Just kiss me. Keep kissing me.” She didn’t let me say anything else. I didn’t know how much I wanted to say. It wasn’t the moment for any big reveals.
Her teeth sank into my lower lip a little too rough. I froze from the brief shock of pain.
My cock hardened.
Oh, fuck.I liked it when she did that.
I pulled her back, gripping the back of her head between my hands and digging my thumbs into her temples. I only wanted to still her for a moment. To look into her frenzied eyes, pupils big, overtaking her sage green irises. Her mouth hung open, wetness gleaming on her lips. God, how good would it feel to have my cock inside there?
Pain twisted inside me. The conflict of two wolves. I wanted to tear her apart. I wanted to lick her wounds.
Her tear-stained face was so open, pleading with me to give her this. Let our bodies take away her pain. So she could leave the dead to bury their dead, as Christ told his apostles in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. It was something I’d never fully understood until now.
“Gus,” she whimpered. “Please.”
That tiny, gasping vulnerability drove all rational thought out of my head. I was an animal that had been caged for too long. Now that I was free, I could go. Run. As far as I could for as long as I could. Turn my head into the wind and catch the scent of prey on my tongue, steer toward it, and chase and chase until my legs gave out.
Or I caught it.
My jaws ripping into soft flesh. Copper-scented warmth pouring down my chin onto my chest. The taste of the wild after years of denial and denial and denial.
My fingers tightened, twisting into her loose ponytail. Pulling so hard, her feet started to lift off the ground. Her lips crashed into mine as her talons dug into my shoulder. A long, shuddering moan came from one of us. I couldn’t be sure who and didn’t care.
She gripped my shirt again, trying to unbutton it with trembling hands before giving up and ripping it out from my waistband.
But there wasn’t time.
She needed me. I needed to be inside her.
Her breezy skirt wasn’t enough to keep me out. My hand slid down to her neck, not squeezing, just holding. Just firm enough to make her suck in a ragged breath and watch her eyes flit closed. With my other hand, I reached up between her legs and yanked her underwear and tights down to her thighs, immediately sliding my fingers through her pussy.
A painful shudder wracked my body as my fingers parted her labia and found her blazing heat. A gasping sob escaped her lips as my fingers teased her clit, rubbing delicately.
“Gus, I need you now.” She yanked me closer by my belt and feverishly threaded the leather through buckle as I kissed her mouth, tilting her chin up so I could scrape my teeth over her jaw, lick the tender spot on her neck that melted her into a shivering pool of goo.
Decca threw her head back and rocked into my hand. But I withdrew. If she needed me now, she needed my cock. I’d only needed to ensure she was wet and ready for it. I needed her pulsing pussy writhing on me just as much. Needed to spear her and make her take it all.
I pulled down her tights and underwear, ripping them off one leg.
I gripped her thighs, pulling her legs around me, needing not so much to get off, but just to feel her closer.
The kitchen island was the closest surface. Already I was lost to thought. Only feelings and need surged through me, wrapping around me, around her, binding us together in a fever.
“Spread your legs,” I said, gripping her neck like my hand was a collar and I owned her. I pushed her onto her back. “Let me see how wet your pretty pussy is for me.”
Her head fell to the side, as if she was in a trace, but her knees widened. I lifted the front of her skirt to see that patch of dark hair over her lips. Her wetness gleaming in the lamplight. Blood surged into my cock. I was harder than I’d ever been in what was possibly the shortest time. It was angry and red, and I needed to drive it into her.
Her tear-reddened eyes were on me. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been watching, but it was serious. A look of serenity and resignation. I paused, my thumb grazing her jaw, brushing across her lips. Her tears started again, but they meant something different now.
Or maybe they meant the same thing, and she needed me to fuck her tears away.
“Don’t you dare be gentle.”
“Oh, sweetheart. I won’t be.”
I gritted my teeth and squeezed her neck before sheathing my cock fully with one thrust.
Decca sucked in a breath.
“Oh, fuck, Crow. Look at you.”
I watched as I pulled out, practically crying at the sight of it. Pleasure shot through my body so completely, it didn’t start or end with the nerve endings in my cock, but my eyes, my fingertips, my heart, my shoulders. Electricity coursed through my body, down to my toes.
The sight of her tight little cunt inviting me in, opening to me, displayed for me like a work of art.
She was mine.
The thought stuck me on the second thrust. Her back arched off the table, and the angle deepened. We moaned in harmony.
Mine.
“You’re beautiful,” I said to her. To some part of her. I didn’t know, because barely any part of me had any cognition. The rest of me was floating on this electric wave of perfect pleasure.
“Gus,” she breathed. “Harder.”
Something broke inside me. I didn’t know I had anything else left, but suddenly I couldn’t stop. When I rammed into her on the next stroke, she screamed.
“Harder.”
Her nails dug into the wooden block.
My hand slid down to her shoulder. To brace myself.
When I slid out almost completely, she gasped at the end of the stroke as the head of my dick stroked the sensitive top wall of her vagina. When I thrust in, I came in contact with her clit from the outside. I was already on the verge of coming, and when I came, I’d be freefalling off a cliff.
“You take my cock so beautifully, baby.”
Loud gasping moans escaped her in rhythm.
“You feel so good. So wet and… fuck, I need you to come.”
I circled her clit with my thumb.
“Harder. Now. Press hard.” She pushed my hand down on her clit, and almost as soon as I’d made that rough contact, her face contorted as she screamed my name.
She sucked air into her lungs and intoned a long, sustained moan. Guttural and without pretense. Animalistic and primal. I stopped thrusting. Her pulsing vaginal walls and her bliss were enough to make me come along with her. Both of us existing for these long precious moments of pure explosive pleasure.
For those long moments afterward, I was blind. She’d recovered first, staring up at me dreamily with a sleepy smile on her face.
I swallowed. My saliva was thick in my throat from panting. My lungs burned as my heart rate slowed, catching my breath like I’d been drowning. I sank onto her chest, my cheek buried in her sweater.
Her fingers raked through my hair that was falling over my face. I rose and fell on a deep breath inside her chest.
“Your collar.”
“Mmm,” I couldn’t speak yet. Only moan.
“You…you just did that to me with you collar on. I thought—”
I raised my face and rested my chin on her sternum. She was still laid out on the butcher block, and I was still inside her with no desire to leave.
“A collar’s just a collar.”
Reluctantly, I slid out of her, feeling the gush of our fluids pool between her legs and ass.
“I thought maybe it was blessed.”
I shook my head and smiled.
“There’s nothing taboo about it?”
“Priest or not, I don’t see anything taboo about a married man fucking his wife.”
Her eyes grew darker again. It was so easy to see her arousal. Too easy. Whenever her pupils widened, my cock grew hard. It didn’t matter that I’d just come mere seconds ago. I needed her again.
I stood and reached for her hands, pulling her up. Her shoulders slumped as she chuckled at her bonelessness. A ragdoll. I lifted her onto the floor and laced my fingers through hers, dragging her behind me through the kitchen and up the stairs. Slowly. Neither of us had our sea legs back yet.
In our room, I nodded toward the bed.
“Take your clothes off and lie down.”
I was achingly hard, but I didn’t want another rough fuck. I wanted to worship her pussy.
She looked embarrassed that she wanted to follow my orders, but the way her hands immediately reached for the hem of her sweater, there was no doubt that she wanted to be told.
She stripped.
It was efficient and dutiful, the way she removed her clothes. Her sweater and bra first. Then her skirt. She lay back against the bed, propped on her elbows.
“Your turn.”
I hadn’t planned on undressing. Hadn’t planned on coming up here at all, but Decca made things like time and schedules seem futile.
I slipped the plastic tab out of the collar and unbuttoned my shirt. I needed my body pressed against hers. Needed her heat to melt into me. Needed her soft skin brushing mine.
I placed a knee between her legs and lowered my body to hers, kissing her lips, down to her jaw, her long neck, and the spot under her ear that made her gasp. I flattened my tongue against her skin, tasting the sweetness of her skin and inhaling her noxious perfume—which was starting to become a turn on—and the wool of her coat and the old lady soap she always used. The same one that perfumed the linen closet. Probably the same soap Granny had stocked in that cupboard ever since Decca was seven.
I traced her body from one muscle to the next, down her chest, kneading the small curve of the underside of her breast, sucking the other nipple into my mouth, scraping with my teeth. Her breasts were so responsive. “Could you come like this?” I asked. “Just from this?”
She shook her head. Her hips shifted, seeking pressure. My cock, my hand, my thigh, anything to writhe against.
I offered nothing.
I slid further down, circling her waist as I kissed my way lower and lower, to the crease of her leg where my cum was spilling out of her with the latest rush of arousal her body was creating. The result of our sex.
God, it was a beautiful sight. Her outer labia covered everything inside with a shock of short dark hair at the top of her slit, now glossy in the moonlight. “Just looking at you like that, Crow. It makes my…” I swallowed my emotion. It was too much to know what to call it. “It makes my cock so fucking hard.” I grabbed her hand and wrapped it around me. “Feel it. This is what you do to me. Not just splayed out for me naked on our bed, but always. You could talk about coffin liquor and I’d be hard. Just being around you makes me crazy with lust. I didn’t know it was possible to want someone as much as I want you.”
“You just had me not even five minutes ago.”
“Five minutes too long.”
“What are you waiting for, then?” She laughed.
I moved back down her body and tentatively reached out with my tongue.
She gasped and gripped my hair in her fists, pulling her legs wider, up to her belly to open herself to me. She pressed my face lower. Milky fluid poured out of her, just a small amount, running down to her ass.
I’d never tasted myself before. It wasn’t something I’d ever considered. I’d never fucked without a condom, even after my vasectomy, but even if I had ever filled another woman’s pussy, something told me I wouldn’t have needed to lick her clean like I did with Decca.
It tasted salty and acidic, but I wasn’t doing it for the flavor. I was doing it… I didn’t know why I was doing it, but it was so filthy my legs tingled. My cock raged, and I couldn’t help but buck my hips against the bed, seeking relief from the poor, maligned quilt. Fuck, I needed to come. My cock ached as I licked and licked and stroked my tongue into her vagina, as she fisted the quilt and pushed her pussy harder against my face.
“Gus, I’m going to come.”
“Yes, Crow. That’s the idea. Come for me. I need it.”
“I need something. Inside. I need you inside.”
I gave her a finger. It wasn’t what she wanted, but after all efforts at cleaning her, I didn’t want to defile her again.
I licked lower as I stroked her from within, using my thumb to swirl over her clit from the top.
My tongue against her ass made her lose control. My own hips moved harder, deeper, making the friction of the quilt on my cock almost painful. She needed to come, and I needed… I just needed. Fuck, I thought my days of coming alone and ruining sheets were over.
Decca’s face was so peaceful in her drowsy state. The line between her eyebrows faded, and a smile played on her lips as she floated in and out of sleep. She’d had a difficult week. Several new, challenging cases had come up. The forensic artist she worked with had put a face on the skull of a man, and he’d been identified. And finding new ways to make her come was the closest thing to heaven, but we were suffering from the lack of sleep.
I sat on the edge of the bed, memorizing her face in its relaxed state. When she woke, her mask of tension would slip back into place. Her teeth would clamp together. Her eyes would take on that sad, somber light that conveyed all the horrors she’d seen.
I lifted her hand into mine and held it lightly, her long fingers draped gracefully over my wrist. Charting the hills and valleys of her bones, the webbing between her fingers, the long black nails, my heart felt bruised with fullness.
There was a pain that came with loving her. A hot ache in the back of my sinuses as I considered how much joy and peace and wholeness she’d brought into my life.
I had no idea how much I’d been lacking. How had I ever thought I could have a life without her?
I didn’t know how to give back what she’d given me.
Marriage was one of the mysteries of the Church. A mystery of oneness and love. Until her, I’d only understood it intellectually.
It was the concept of epiclesis. This was how it was similar to the other sacraments. During Holy Communion, wine and water and bread became the Holy Eucharist. It wasn’t a chemical or physical change. Nor was it symbolic. It was a spiritual change.
A dynamic so subatomic, humans weren’t capable of fully grasping the complexity.
There were no vows in the marriage ceremony. The bride and bridegroom did not execute their marriage themselves. Instead, the priest asked the Holy Spirit to be sent down on the man and woman and make them into one flesh.
One flesh.
That’s how it felt to be looking at her. Holding her hand that was my hand.
Decca stirred, surprised to find her hand in mine, but obviously liking it. She laced her fingers through mine and held tight. “What time is it?”
“Almost six thirty.”
“I need to make dinner. Is it a fasting day? I hope peanut butter and jelly’s okay. I have so much paperwork to do.”
I kissed her hand. “If it can wait, I’d like to take you somewhere.”
She groaned. “You’re evil, Father Constantinos.”
“You need a break from work. Let me take care of you. This is what we signed up for, right? For better or worse?”
“Those are Catholic vows.” She smiled. “Not part of our sacrament.”
“It’s implied.”
Reaching up toward the headboard, she stretched and writhed in half-hearted complaint. The sheet slipped down under one breast, but for once, she made no attempt to cover herself. With her hair cascading across her shoulders and chest, and her fiery olive eyes gazing at me, taunting, she could have been an oil portrait of some Biblical temptress. Jezebel or Salome. Esther. I imagined her as Saint Varvara or Saint Elizabeth, women victimized and martyred in part for their beauty and intelligence.
Before my dick got any harder, I ripped the sheet all the way down to her toes. “Get up.” I smacked her thigh. “I’m going to church. You’re coming with me.”
She laughed. “What are we doing at church?”
“You wanted to learn Greek.”
“I wanted to surprise you after I knew more, but I’ve been doing the free online classes. To ládi eínai páno sto trapézi,“ she said, stiltingly.
Greek pronunciation wasn’t like any of the Romance languages. It wasn’t even like German. Greek was difficult in an entirely different way. Her mouth wasn’t used to the quick dance of the consonants. They did not come trippingly off the tongue. But the fact that she had taken any time at all to learn the language made my heart burst.
How is it possible to feel this much? Can I die from it?
My cock was hard again. That was nothing new. But now, after this week, it was learning that it got satiated every time it got hard, and it didn’t like being put back in its box again. I cleared my throat and thought of the Greek school class I needed to teach in less than an hour. “That’s actually not unhelpful for a canned schoolbook phrase.”
“Oh yeah? I forgot what it means.”
I threw a pillow at her and tried to make it out of the room.
“Hey, Gus?”
Shit.I stopped in the doorway. So close to escape.
“I think we have a pelvis now.” She bit into her pillowy bottom lip and smiled.
That did it. Two can play at that game. Slowly, I made my way back to her. I started at the foot of the bed, crawling up to her, hovering over her body on all fours, lowering my head to her left iliac crest to plant a kiss over the bone.
“We definitely have a pelvis.”
My face still low, I gripped the back of her knee to bend her leg up and rotated her thigh outward for access. I kissed the joint of her hip, dangerously close to her pussy.
“We have a femur.”
I continued kissing down the femoral shaft to her knee, then trailed open-mouthed kisses even lower. “We have a tibia and a fibula.” My tongue circled the part of her left tibia that stuck out at her ankle and skated down under the arch of her foot, kissing and licking the underside of her big toe.
“I don’t remember all the bones of the ankle, but we have those, too. Tarsals and metatarsals.”
She moaned, but kept her foot still, wanting more. I drew her toe into my mouth, sucking, wrenching a long, low moan from her. I’d have to explore this more when we had time.
I moved to the other side, working my way up this time, kissing and caressing her delicate feet, her bony ankles, kneading her calves before propping my chin on her pubic bone and rubbing the hip bone that jutted out rudely, just to feel the softness of her skin. Between her legs was my favorite place to be.
“If only every set of remains I find could be as complete,” she said, staring into my eyes and raking her nails over my scalp. “I love our bones.”