Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Levi
“To help me sleep,” I answer her bluntly as I tuck my phone nervously into my shirt pocket.
She’s caught me dead to fucking rights listening to some of my favorite late-night audio. I have no idea how long she was watching me or what she saw or heard, so unless I want to lose her trust again by lying, I have to give her at least half the truth.
“Porn helps you sleep?” I can hear the skepticism piled on thick in her question.
“I don’t sleep well. Or much. Ever. Sometimes it helps.”
“It didn’t look like you were sleeping.”
“I didn’t know I was being watched.” I respond to her faster and grumpier than I should. It’s not helping my case.
“Well, now you know what it feels like.” Her arms tighten the knot they’re making over her chest at my irritability. If she knew what I was listening to—who I was listening to—she’d probably like it even less.
“Did I wake you up?” I try to change the subject.
“No. I needed water and some painkillers. Don’t try to distract me.” She frowns and then presses on. “What kind of porn are you listening to that helps you sleep?”
“Does it matter?”
“It must be interesting then if you don’t want to tell me.” A wry little smile grows on her lips.
“Just go back to bed, Zephyrine.” I should have remembered she can wander around now. I’m the one who let her. I just wasn't adequately prepared for it personally, treating this space out here like it’s my bedroom instead of a living space.
“If you’re into something kinky, I’m not going to judge you. I mean, like you said, you saw everything I was looking up.” She tries to reassure me.
The last thing I need is to think about her kinks.
“Bed.”
“Let me listen.”
“Bed,” I repeat.
“I know it said Z’s Playlist.”
I scrub my hand over my face and grab my glasses off the table so I can get a better look at her in the dark.
“So?”
“So was it stuff you found from me? Or something else?”
“Something else.”
“Then why does it say Z’s Playlist?”
“Have you considered I know someone else named Z, or that there’s an adult star I like named Z?”
“Is that the case?” she presses, and I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place like usual with her.
She doesn’t let things go, and she’s too much like me when it comes to wanting the cold, hard truth. I can’t lie to her. If I do and she finds out, and let’s be honest, women like her always find out, she’ll never trust me again. We swore no more lies.
“No.”
“So they’re my videos from my phone? You still have them?”
“Do you want them? That can be arranged.” I try to distract her again.
“So, yes, you’re watching videos from my phone, or no?” She’s relentless now.
“No, they’re not videos from your phone.”
“Do you want to keep playing twenty questions, or do you want to tell me?” Impatience seeps through her tone.
“They’re you. Fuck! They’re you, okay?” I finally cede ground and steel myself for whatever reaction she’s about to have.
“Me?” She goes stark still.
“They’re recordings of you. Ones I made when you were at the convent, and I was surveilling you.”
“They sounded like porn.”
“Some of them are, sort of.”
“Why are you listening to recordings of me that sound like porn in the middle of the night?”
“I told you. To help me sleep. I have trouble sleeping, and I got used to it at the convent.” It’s mostly true. Tonight, I just really wanted to hear her. “It’s a habit.” A desperate one, an embarrassing one now that she knows about it.
“I want to hear it.” She sits down next to me and holds out her hand. I stare at her open palm for a long beat, trying to decide whether there’s a way out of this. “I’m serious. Where you left off too. Not some random point you pick.” She pushes her palm closer to me.
I let out a ragged sigh and drop one of the earbuds into her hand.
I keep the other one in my left ear, and I pull out my phone.
I've done a hell of a lot of things in my life.
Dodged a lot of interrogations and charges.
This little nun is about to take me down with the most incriminating evidence I've ever been caught red-handed with.
She pops the earbud in her ear and looks at me expectantly as I unlock my screen and stare at the play button.
When I take too long, she presses it for me.
I close my eyes at the sound of skin on sheets and the soft moan she makes through the remaining earbud.
“Oh,” she cries softly through the speaker. “Mmmm.” I can hear the muted sound of her licking her lips. There's another rustle of fabric, like she’s pulling her pillow closer. A muffled moan comes through, and Zephyrine, the corporeal version in the here and now, hits the pause button on my phone.
I open my eyes and do my best not to look like I’ve been caught with my fucking pants down. I’d at least managed to keep my dignity there.
“You send me to bed, and then you listen to me getting off?”
I give her half a nod and sit back against the cushions of the couch. I’m ready for whatever lecture I’m going to get about how inappropriate I am. How fucked up this is. How I’ve broken her trust by having these.
“When did you record this?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’d have to look it up on the file. A couple of weeks in. Does it matter?”
“I was just trying to figure out if I’d been thinking about you or not.”
I cough or choke. I don’t know which exactly, but her bluntness catches me wholly off guard, and I have to stop to catch my breath.
“What? Wouldn’t you like it better if I were?” She gives me a look of mock concern that’s highlighted by the moonlight streaming in. I’d never considered the possibility it was anyone else—especially after her confession.
“In my head, you’re always doing it for me, sweetheart. If I thought it was another man, I’d kill him and make sure it was. Hypothetically speaking.”
She stares at me through the dim light for a long moment before she speaks again.
“How does this help you sleep?”
“It lets me get my mind off everything else. Relax a little. I don’t always sleep. Not a deep sleep anyway, but that twilight phase that at least gets me feeling a little rested until I can down some black coffee in the morning.”
“I had insomnia for a while too. It’s awful.”
“It is,” I agree.
She hits play again, and the recording ends, turning over to a new one. There’s another soft intake of breath, and a muffled moan echoes through my eardrum, but this one is different. It’s one I forgot I made. An accident I should have deleted considering it’s about to bite me in the ass.
“Fuck you sound so pretty when you moan,” I groan through the recording.
If I were capable of blushing like her, I would be. I slam the pause button, and she scowls at me, hitting play again. I recoil when I hear my voice come through again.
“I love listening to you touch yourself late at night like this. It's the best part of the job. I can only imagine how wet you get. How desperate you are to be touched. The way it bleeds through in the sound of your breathing and the soft gasps you make.” I sound fucking obsessed with her.
I hit the pause button again.
“I think we can skip this one. It’s just me making voice notes to myself while I was working.”
“Absolutely fucking not.” She presses play.
“That’s it, little nun. Keep going.” I encourage the past version of her as I listen to her touch herself.
The sound of a zipper being drawn down comes through the line.
It’s very clearly mine. “Oh fuck, I need this.” I groan low and heavy into the mic.
There’s a long exhale and the obvious sound of me palming my cock in the background of my heavy breathing.
I slam the pause button one last time and snatch the phone up off the table. I’d completely forgotten that this one has my running commentary.
“Don’t! Please?” Zephyrine’s hand goes to my wrist as I shove the phone into my pocket.
“Why do you want to listen to that?” Maybe she has a thing for humiliating men. I don’t know. I imagine you might develop a taste for it after being married to a man like Corey, but I can do without her experimenting on me.
“Because it’s the hottest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
I make a dismissive sound at the back of my throat, and she squeezes my wrist.
“I’m serious.”
“I think it’s time you go back to bed, Zephyrine.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Send me off.”
“It’s late, and you’re probably still drunk.”
“What if I do it for you now?” She whispers the question, and the temptation winds its way around my spine.
“Do what?” I feign ignorance, buying myself time to try to talk myself out of this. All the while, the baser parts of me cheer her on.
“Touch myself.” She swallows and takes a breath, her fingertips brushing a half circle on the inside of my wrist. “Would you talk to me like that? I want to know what it’s like for a man to talk to me like that. For you to talk to me like that.”
Fucking hell.
“Zephyrine.” I say her name like a warning. I have an iron fucking will, but this is too much even for me.
“It could help you sleep, couldn’t it? It always helps me sleep.” She presses on.
“You’ve still got alcohol in your system on top of all the other reasons we shouldn’t.” It’s my last desperate plea to talk her back from this ledge before I jump with her.
“I won’t touch you. You won’t touch me. It’s dark. It's not that different from listening to the recordings, right?” She offers a convincing argument.
“And in the morning, when you can’t look at me?”
“In the morning, this was all just a dream. I’ll say an extra rosary if you want me to.”
Who could say no to this woman? I don’t think I can. Not under these conditions. Not tonight anyway.
I scrub a hand over my mouth as I contemplate what kind of fate this will earn me. What’s it going to cost me to corrupt a nun like this? A hundred? A thousand times as much? I’m already going to hell.
“Fuck it.”