Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
W hen he walked out of the room, Rev felt like he was walking away from home.
His Mistress was home. Especially right now. She was the only thing that made sense to him.
But that was no good. He had to get his head right, to know how to be there for her, not to lean on her too much when she’d had such grievous hurt done to her.
The day he’d helped out at the shelter, there’d been a volunteer counselor handling a session with one of the guests. Rev had found her daughter sitting somberly on a chair outside the closed door of the little room. She’d been too worried to go play with the other kids, and was holding a container of glitter in both hands. He’d pulled up a chair next to her.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Fairy dust. When you sprinkle it on people, it gives them magic. Sometimes the ability to fly. Want to see?”
“I was hoping you’d offer.”
He’d obligingly bent forward so she could sprinkle a pinch on his head. He’d widened his eyes, stood up and stretched out his arms to do a zooming plane maneuver up and down the short hallway. “Why, look at that. It do work. Isn’t that something?”
She smiled and cradled the container against her. “You were praying with Lucas and his mom in the playroom,” she said. “Is there magic in that, too?”
“Yeah.” Rev took a seat beside her again. “It a lot like fairy dust. It touches those who need it, gives them the ability to lift themselves up.”
He glanced toward the door as it opened. The mother’s eyes were red, but she looked like the session had helped. Her daughter rose to hug her, and they walked away, hand in hand.
The counselor leaning in the doorway had coffee-colored hair, one blond lock twisted like a ribbon against it. She also had the look of the TRA women to her. That Domme look. Her green gaze slid to his glitter-anointed hair, and a smile curved her mouth.
“Maureen,” she said, offering a hand. “Known as Dr. Mo around here. You’re Rev, Vera’s man.”
He rose and shook. “I like the sound of that.”
“Good. I think she does as well.”
“You help the kids too?”
“Yes, sometimes. My approach with them is more like yours. I sit with them, play with them. Listen and use what they give me to nudge them toward healing and healthy emotional responses. Some sessions I don’t make much progress, or I feel like we’ve taken a step backwards.”
She glanced at the mother and daughter, now on a couch in the living room, the little girl in her mother’s lap. “Time in a safe mental and physical space contributes most to their healing. Too many questions, too much prodding and poking at the wrong time, can feel like more of the same thing they left behind.”
Yeah. So Rev knew he’d messed up, saying anything to Veracity at all about his family and what had happened. Her telling him not to call her Mistress tore out his heart. He’d tried not to show it, but how she turned her face away from him told him he had. She couldn’t handle his feelings right now, and she was the most generous person he knew.
It was one thing to see the terrible thing done to her. Another to see how it had dug deep into her, upsetting all she knew about herself, what she believed about the world.
It put a weight and hurt on his heart he didn’t know what to do with. He got on a bus, but he didn’t get off at his home. He kept riding, staring through the window sightlessly. He couldn’t pray, which he knew wasn’t the right thing, but it didn’t change it. He had things in his mind that rejected everything. What he wanted most, to be with her right now, wasn’t right either. She needed him with her, even if she’d pushed him away, but she needed the man who wanted to serve her with his whole heart, not a man toting around a tortured, angry wreck of a soul.
He saw boys playing basketball. It was a bad neighborhood, but the court was part of a church’s grounds. The stone structure had been here for over a century, but funds had been found for some long-needed renovations. Nothing fancy, just what was needed to keep it up, and the front stoop was clean, the landscaping tended. Jesus didn’t care about stone and a roof. He cared that the door was open and welcoming.
When Teena Joy had first started their church in a big tent on the property where the building now stood, she’d told him that.
He exited the bus and went to the church steps. The outer doors were unlocked, because one of them rested an inch or two in front of the other. It was unusual for a church to be unlocked this early in the morning, well before time for the pastor or church secretary to arrive.
He looked at the door, then at a bench in front of the chain link fence around the basketball court. He could sit over there. Think.
One of the songs he’d practiced with Sy and Trey had been “Some Things I’ll Never Know” by Teddy Swims. The far-too-true and sad words were in his head now.
His feet took him up the steps and inside. It was a non-denominational church like his own, with a mix of Christian practices represented. Like a table of candles on one side of the transept, and a wooden cross centered before the chancel. A painted wooden lamb rested beneath it in a manger of straw. Statues of the Virgin Mary, St. Francis and Buddha were placed behind the cross in the chancel.
Near the candle table was a well-tended olive tree, hung with mementoes. A bracelet, a pet collar, a small family photo. A shrine for loved ones. Photos were stuck in potted flowers, grouped around the tree’s sizeable wooden planter. He guessed it had been built by a devoted parishioner. Words were carved along the planter’s wide top lip. Psalm 96: All the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord.
Going to the cross, he put his hands on the base, his forehead on the polished wood above it. But that didn’t give him rest. He wanted to beat his head against it, use the impact to give him answers he didn’t know.
He backed away, and sank down in a pew in the middle of the church. As he leaned against the wooden side, he put his head into his hands.
A movement had him lifting it. A woman wearing jeans and a T-shirt had come in from the chancel door. She had close-cropped hair and caramel-colored skin.
She was also blind. She wore dark glasses and used a white cane decorated with colorful stickers to navigate the space before her. The casual way she swept it left to right told him she used it only to be sure nothing unexpected was in her path.
The reason for her familiarity with the surroundings became obvious as she turned his way, making the swirly white letters on her T-shirt easier to read.
I’m the pastor. Really.
(Yes, God does have a sense of humor.)
She wore a military dog tag in a silver frame. The short chain it was on was threaded with jasper beads and a cross, the cross lying against the dog tag.
Her head cocked in his direction. “Hello. Are you all right?”
A kind question. If he was fine, just here to pray, she would leave him be. If he needed something…
He was used to being the one who offered what she was offering. Veracity was the first who’d offered Rev, as a man, things he’d finally allowed himself to need. Or maybe she had pushed through the doors he’d kept closed on that.
He didn’t know what to say. He needed to say something, because she couldn’t see if he was nodding or shaking his head. But a paralyzing mix of grief, rage and helplessness gripped him, and an overwhelming desire to act how he shouldn’t. If he so much as twitched, he feared he’d become an agent of destruction, a tornado he couldn’t control.
The woman moved toward him. Though barely past five feet and small-boned, there was a toughness to her that made him think the dog tag could be hers.
She slid into the pew behind him, leaned forward and put her hand on the pew, sliding it toward him until the side of it touched his shoulder. “I’m here,” she said quietly.
She said nothing further. Just sat with him, with no expectation, no pressure on him to say or do anything. It helped him let some of that pressure out and keep ahold of himself. It also meant the words that came from him had no prompting other than being what covered all of it.
“I failed her. My Mistress.”
A peculiar stillness gripped the woman. He’d likely confused her with the odd word choice. But he couldn’t think of how to change that, so he just kept going. “My family…they think I chose her over them. She thinks I chose them over her. I tried to follow my love for all of them, and that sword, both sides, is cutting me to pieces. I don’t know how to put myself back together to help either one of them. And there’s such anger in my heart for my family, I don’t want to help them. I only want to help her.”
He trembled with the terrible truth of it, said aloud in God’s house. She gripped his shoulder, just a light, brief contact, but it was a powerful connection, like two live wires. The woman understood the path. Like Veracity did, even when hurting and confused.
The wound in him was bleeding, and he would let it keep flowing. He told the pastor everything that had happened tonight. She didn’t interrupt once, and her hand tightened during the worst parts. Relaxed when he said how Veracity was okay, and with her chosen family—it hurt to not include himself in it—and that he’d made sure his family had done the right thing.
The kids from the basketball court abruptly burst in, laughing, busting each other’s chops over the pickup game. Rev started, and rubbed his face, wiping away the tears he hadn’t realized were there. The pastor squeezed his shoulder, a reassurance, and twisted around.
“John Walter, if I hear that basketball bounce on this floor, I’ll rearrange your internal organs by putting a combat boot up your backside.”
“I know better, Reverend Dana,” he promised. “Do you have any of them sausage biscuit roll things in the kitchen?”
“I made up a breakfast batch. Leave me a couple of them, you pack of wolves. There’s bottled orange juice, too. Look in the fridge. And be quiet and respectful in this space.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Rev saw her dip her head his way. The kids minded her, quieting down and sliding past him with sidelong looks, the one in the lead murmuring, “Sorry, sir.”
They disappeared through the door she’d used in the chancel, likely the best way to the church kitchen. They resumed their banter once more, though at a lower volume, their shoes thumping along with them.
When Rev turned on his hip toward her, Reverend Dana had a fond smile on her face. “They’re good boys,” she said. “Go on, if you have more on your heart.”
Rev did, but he spoke it slowly, thinking it through. Letting the rest out had helped him dig deeper. “There are moments that say, take this in your own hands, take up the sword. I think God does use us that way, when you have to protect innocents. I would have fought them to protect her. I would have taken life to do it. The life of my own cousin, raised like a brother with me.”
It was another terrible thing to say aloud, but it was the truth. “I'm glad it didn’t come to that."
“Me, too,” Reverend Dana said. “The lives you take never really leave you, even the ones where you had no choice, not if you want to protect what matters. You relive it, though, thinking, if there’d been more time, more space to make the decision, it could have turned out differently. But with humans, it doesn’t always work that way.”
“No ma’am. Some things, people I know, I can help put back together, but I can't fix them permanent. They keep figuring out ways to get broke again.” Craig passed through his mind, that poor boy’s flat dead eyes. The families of his victims would say his soul had fled his body, but the soul didn’t have that choice. It was cowered down in him somewhere, miserable and afraid.
Teena Joy didn’t let him watch the news much, but he recalled a story of a man who’d killed his wife and kids. Teena Joy had said he had a powerful sickness in him. Rev asked if she thought it was best for them to put him to death. She said God made those decisions, though sometimes He did it through a court and a judge or jury. She’d said, “That man might like donuts, Karman. He might go into a donut shop every day and pick out one, sit at the counter, drink his coffee and enjoy it.”
He’d asked her what that had to do with him killing his family.
“Everything and nothing. You just think about that whenever you’re dealing with someone, with things they’ve done. Be just, and don’t allow harm, but don’t decide you’re their judge, either. You offer love and forgiveness, and let God take care of the rest. You be human, and let God be God. Your soul will be lighter because of it. Lighter in weight, and more lit up, with less darkness to hide things from you.”
It was far easier to follow that path when the person harmed wasn’t someone you couldn’t breathe without. He gazed at his hands. He’d held Veracity, willed her soul to stay in her body, even as he could feel it being cut free. It had terrified him. Made him determined to change its mind. Change God’s mind. Had that been wrong?
No. Because God would have taken her, if it was meant to be. Rev had no power to stop Him. But it still felt like his effort had torn the fabric of the universe a little. “I afraid there’s nothing I can do to fix this,” he said.
“It’s been my experience,” Dana said carefully, “when we think we’ve failed our Master or Mistress, what we’ve really failed to do is trust them enough. There are only two things they expect. For us to trust and serve them. Just like with God. They’re not God, but the principle is the same, because they’re both based in love and devotion.”
He stared at her, then his heart eased a little more. God had sent him to someone who understood, who could stand on the ground where he was floundering. “Yes ma’am. Guess that’s true enough.”
She cocked her head. “There’s another poison in your gut.”
“If…they’d succeeded. If they’d…killed her.” When his voice broke, her surprisingly strong hand gripped his shoulder again. “They were going to make me think she’d just left. If they’d convinced me of that, I would have looked to my family for comfort, never realizing they was the ones who took her from me. Why people like this? How they make that okay in their minds? How they let hate and fear and lies take them over that way?”
“We are flawed creatures,” Dana said softly. “But it didn’t happen, and maybe that’s because this time good triumphed over that kind of evil and darkness. We take our victories where we get them.”
Her voice became firmer. “Though she needs some time, when she’s ready, your Mistress will need you to trust her enough to show her just how badly this affected you. You have to show your hurts, because to fully heal from them, you have to do it together. Open your souls to one another.”
She tapped his hand, resting on the back of the pew. “You start opening that door when you’re falling in love, but when things like this happen, you have to open it wide and take each other into the back rooms, into the basement and attic. We talk about how love can handle anything, but it’s another matter to have the courage to trust it, and each other, that much. The depths of love are infinite, and it will go anywhere you need it to go.”
She paused. “Just like the love you have for your family. They’ve done something terrible, but you love them because that doesn’t go away. And since you say your Mistress has been down a difficult road with her family herself, she can help you with that.
“We need to stand on our own two feet, but we also need to know when we need help. When we need healing and care, too.”
She drew his attention to her blind eyes and a cochlear implant behind her ear. “I nearly died from an IED when I was in the Army, but worse than that, I wished I had. It took my Master to bring me back to myself. Both of them. The earthly one and the Heavenly one.”
Because of her proximity, he’d noted the name stamped on her dog tag. Winston, Peter R. He nodded toward it.
“He the earthly one.”
“Yes.” She clasped it, her lips curving with a hint of mischief. “Sometimes he tries to convince me he’s the Heavenly one as well. Doms can get carried away with the whole know-it-all, protective thing.”
Her humor opened his heart to more light. “I didn’t expect to find a pastor called to the same thing I am.”
“No? Faith is all about the beauty and challenges of submission.” She offered her hand to him, palm up. “If you want, we can pray together. For you, your family, and especially for your Mistress. We can give thanks, because she’s alive, and you have the chance to show her how much you love her and want to be with her.”
“And hope she feel the same way.”
“If it’s God’s will. Or the Lord and Lady’s.” Dana winked. “I have a friend who worships your Mistress’s chosen path.”
She touched the dog tag again. “Rev, I don’t pretend to know God’s plan for you, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t include your Mistress wanting you back at her side. Just be patient and allow time for her to heal. To think and pray.”
He took her hand. “And most importantly, have faith.”
“Amen. And blessed be.”
Vera stared out her kitchen window at the birds wrangling for the best position on the tray of her feeder. The whimsical metal piece, designed to look like an antebellum house, was swinging from the jockeying birds. It was twilight, the setting sun glinting dully on the metal.
It had been nearly three weeks. Jasmine and Joss’s wedding, their handfasting, was coming up. She thought of Jasmine’s phone call, that day in the car with Rev. Her delight when she heard the girl was ready to set a date, that two people who were good for one another were choosing to walk forward together in this life.
Last night, she’d sat in her living room and recalled the henna exercise with Rev, every moment. Marking his flesh, enjoying his body, the way he responded to her. The feel of his eyes upon her, when she let him open them.
She hadn’t mailed the card to her family. She’d considered burning it in the cauldron she kept on her home altar. Instead, it rested on that same altar, until she was in the right frame of mind to know what to do.
Her head would be fucked up for a while. No one had ever committed violence against her the way Witford and Tisha had. She’d had several sessions with Maureen to talk it out, and it had helped. So had a wine and chocolate dinner with Ros and the other women. At work, Bastion made sure her tea was always hot, that she had the best of the baked goods, and fielded her calls as if he was a knight protecting the walls of her castle. When she told him she was fine, he pretended he wasn’t doing any of that. And kept doing it.
She wanted Rev. Needed him here with her. He’d known that, too, that night in the hospital. She was being stubborn because she could, because her whole world felt upended. Because she was coming into her house through her front door after nightfall, because she didn’t feel safe doing it the way she normally did. Because she was doing stupid things, like blaming him for being family to the people showing up in her too-frequent nightmares.
She was hiding from him. That knowledge made her angriest of all.
It wasn’t the best mindset for officiating a joyous occasion like a wedding, but she could pull it off, bring the right energy to it, if she meditated on it, if she…
Goddamn it, she couldn’t. Her faith in love was shaken, which affected everything else. She should call and ask someone else to do the ceremony.
But Jasmine had asked her to do it.
The radio was playing. Don Henley’s “End of the Innocence” which seemed too close to home. She wasn’t innocent, but anytime one’s world, one’s paradigm, was shattered, proving how at the mercy of Fate each of them was…it wasn’t an easy thing to accept, because then every bubble one created for oneself felt like an illusion that would disappear, like dreams did shortly after waking in the morning. Nightmares didn’t suffer from that problem.
She went to her living room, turned on the fire because she felt cold, and sat down. She cried again, so frustrated and angry, and hurt…and afraid. She wasn’t this weak, weepy woman. She wasn’t.
Surging up, she marched through the kitchen and yanked open her back door, just to prove she could do it after dark. She’d scream her defiance at that darkness, dare it to come up on her porch. She’d kick its ass.
The shout caught in her throat. As she looked at her pots of flowers arranged on the porch stairs, so many bright and beautiful blooms, a different, better idea presented itself. Her backyard fountain gurgled, water splashing around the bronze girl dancing, a smaller version of what she’d bought for the office. When she walked slowly down the steps and looked up through her live oak branches, she could see stars.
Do the things you would tell someone else to do, and believe they will work, the same way you believe it for them. Maureen had suggested that. And realize it will take more than once for it to do so. It’s like mental PT. It’s going to be really difficult at first, but it will get better, the more you do it.
So she sat on the bench by the fountain and centered herself. She called upon the meditations that she’d summoned plenty of times these past weeks. The usual peace and balance they brought her had stayed out of her reach, but each time, they’d been getting closer. Just as Maureen had predicted.
She let go of the desperate need to be back to her normal self and breathed. She didn’t push the frustration and uneasiness out the door. She just opened it, let them see the way out as she turned her attention to other, better things. She imagined herself baking something, taking out the ingredients, getting her hands dusted with flour. Preheating the oven, feeling the heat against her legs as she worked at the counter next to it, mixing fragrant dough by hand.
She coaxed her subconscious to turn away from the fear and frustration as if it were a separate being from herself, a hurt child that needed to know it was okay.
The pathway to her favorite quiet place in her head was there. It had gone from opaque in the first week to murky in the second, a path through a haunted forest. Tonight moonlight was shining on it. As she moved along it, slowly, she inhaled the scents around her on the outside, felt the presence of the elements, the wider turnings of the universe.
The path became even clearer.
Several more deep breaths, and then she was ready for the idea that her flowers and peaceful yard had given her. She rose and shed her clothes. On this bench, the oaks screened her, and no one could see her in the darkness.
Terron, bless his kind heart, had a spotlight on the corner of his house, with enough wattage to throw light into her backyard as well as his own. Normally and considerately, he only used it in brief spurts, like when his brother was visiting and his greyhound needed a last trip out before bedtime.
The police presence at her house meant her neighbors knew the basics of what had happened to her. A few days after she was home, Terron had come to her front door and told her anything she needed, he would do, and had offered to keep the spotlight on at nights for her. Or to install a spotlight of her own for her, if she wanted that.
She’d been twitchy and not herself that day, but it had helped, the reminder of the good in others. She’d taken him up on it for the first week and a half, but last week had told him she wanted him to start turning it off again.
She was glad she’d done so, because here she was. She needed to feel the night, the moon, the strength of the Goddess through her. She tipped her head back, her hair brushing her shoulder blades, her hands reaching up.
As she let all that into herself, she knew when she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t afraid, since she’d invited that energy into her before. She’d reached out on that link that awful night, and he’d felt her. He’d come, the Powers That Be helping him know how to get to her in time.
He’d come now, because it was time. She was ready.
She lowered her chin. Rev knelt a few paces away from her, his head down. Waiting on his Mistress’s desires.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“I been coming by for a brief spell every night.” His voice moved over every inch of her skin, a warm blanket being pulled up over her body on a cold night. It settled into her heart. When his head lifted, his gingerbread-colored eyes, the thick lashes and strong inner light, held her like his arms did. “Just to watch the house a while. Make sure you’re okay.”
When she reached out, he rose and took her hand. As they touched, her body swayed, and his arm went around her, holding her up as she put her face against his chest.
It didn’t matter that she was naked, and he wasn’t. He was giving her this, making her feel powerful. Showing her that power was still there. It hadn’t been taken away by what had happened.
“Jasmine and Joss’s wedding is soon,” she said. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
“Then you will,” he said simply. “What can I do to help you, Mistress?”
She touched his face. “I’m sorry, Rev. For your family. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you that sooner.”
“That wasn’t your job, Mistress,” he told her brusquely. An answer not from her sub, but from the man who wouldn’t back away from the responsibility of being a man. “They turned themselves in. Lawrence told you that, right?”
“He did. You took care of it, just as you said you would.”
If she stayed immersed in that night, her life really would end at that moment, nothing else but that defining her.
The strength of his hands was welcome. She felt safe and protected with him. He’d given her that from the first, a surprising need she hadn't expected to have as strongly as she did. She told him that, and his eyes darkened with pain, but she wouldn’t allow his guilt to mock her words.
“I still feel safe and protected, Rev. You came for me. You helped save me. Even if it hadn’t turned out that way, it’s not a physical safety I’m talking about, but an emotional one. It was how you felt about your family that made me feel abandoned. Not the other. I was wrong about that. I understand why you did what you did.” She paused. “I need you, Rev. Come inside.”
“Yes…ma’am.”
He’d remembered what she said at the hospital. She put her hand on his chest, then her head on top of it. She could hear the beat of his heart through it. “You’re mine, Rev,” she said softly. “And as long as you want that, you’ll call me Mistress. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mistress.” The relief in his voice was a powerful wave surging through her.
“Let’s find that ground again. Come inside and watch over me. Keep me safe.”
When they reached the door, he stopped and looked down at her. His hands fell to her waist, flexed. “I need you powerfully, Mistress. All of it, in my head, what could have happened, I’ve about lost my mind over it. Wanted to rage and howl, go find Witford and those others, even my aunt, and do terrible things to them. I knew that was all wrong, but this feeling, to be inside you, take you over, kiss every inch of you, wrap your hair around my hand, all of it…it feels so strong, so different. Something dark to it, but something good, too.”
Her hand curled into his biceps, and she used her nails a little harder. “Why do you think I want you to come inside?”
As she drew him over the threshold and shut the door, he was behind her. She sucked in a breath as he pressed her against her laundry room wall, his body fully on hers. He put her palms flat to the wall, his own over her hands, and they stayed that way, her naked, him clothed, both trembling.
Then he dropped to a knee. He bent all the way down, put his mouth on her ankle, and started working his way up her calf. Slow, tasting her everywhere, his hands following, gripping her legs as he moved up and rained kisses over her thighs, her buttocks and lower back. She curled her fingers against the wall and remembered when she’d ordered him to touch her shoulders and stroke her hair. This was a different form of that, a worshipping and a hunger, tied together. She felt it, in a language universal to every living thing.
He rose and slid his arm around her waist, fingers exploring her navel, her hip bone, her mound. He didn’t go further than that, until she dropped a hand from the wall, clasped his wrist and guided his hand between her legs. At the near violent response of her sex to his touch, she arched against him, hair brushing his face as he buried it there, finding her neck to taste, bite, suckle.
“Yes, Rev,” she said, her voice throaty. “Inside me, now.”
He opened his jeans, guiding himself into her from behind. The angle required him to go slow, but he pressed in deep. Taking his hand back to her cunt, he sealed his hand over it, fingers spread over her clitoris, her stretched labia, his cock buried between them.
She shuddered at the sensations, such overwhelming proof of life . He nipped her throat again, tasting. She brought his other hand up to her breast so he could stroke, explore the taut nipple, the swollen fullness of the curve.
“Oh. Goddess…Stop, Rev. Stay still inside me.”
He stopped stroking, their bodies quivering. It didn’t make it all better, but it was the right step. A reminder of how willing he was to be what she needed, how much he wanted that, too. She closed her eyes at everything such intimate stillness could bring.
She knew his soul enough to know how difficult it had been for him to leave her that terrible day. He’d had to obey a different Master, the one that made him Rev. He needed her forgiveness for that, but he needed to forgive himself.
Feeling all of that restored and reminded her of the power she had as a Mistress, to help him. To have the honor and pleasure of giving him that forgiveness.
She pushed against him, a nonverbal cue, and he reluctantly slid from her. When she turned to face him, she linked her arm around his neck, hooking her leg over his hip. He understood. In the next blink he’d lifted her up against the wall, and was back inside her. This time, the angle was the right one for what her eyes told him he could unleash.
“Give me your strength, Rev.”
A cry broke from her throat as he thrust into her, his hand slamming against the wall as he braced himself there. The power of it vibrated through the house’s frame. His other arm banded around her waist, his hand clamped on her hip as his buttocks flexed under her legs, locked around him.
His body, so strong and solid, his need, was all around her, inside her. She put her face against his jaw, and wrapped her hands over his neck, his vulnerable neck, as he bent his head to her. He brought her to a climax that had a serrated edge, the slicing reminder of the past few days. But their souls were open to one another and joined, able to handle it, soften that edge.
“Yes…” The orgasm rushed in, the dam breaking, and she pushed herself down on him. “Now. Right now.”
He released, and kept working himself in her as her cries rose, a catharsis of sobs and tears. Her fear, her anger, the whole big tangle of emotions that she didn’t yet know how to fully untangle, but she would. She wouldn’t accept defeat, wouldn’t let fear and anger rule her.
When they both slowed and she was still crying, he was pressing against her, also still inside. He stroked her hair and held her so tight, letting her know he was there. He would always be there.
He was murmuring that. Telling her how sorry he was, how he’d be where she needed, when she needed him.
Life didn’t always allow it, but believing in that person’s love, how fervently they wished for that, meant so much. She wanted to believe.
“Rev.” She spoke his name softly. When he wiped away her tears with his thumbs, she did the same to him. A strong man’s tears. Was there anything more certain to help heal a woman’s heart? Those tears said, I love you, you’re not alone with this, I want to fix it .
“Rev,” she repeated his name, because she wanted to do so. She gazed up at him. “Are you hungry? I made soup.”
He didn’t smile, his eyes holding her as tight as his arms. “Have you eaten tonight?” he asked.
She shook her head. He plucked a towel from the stack on her dryer and pressed it between her legs. Then he dropped to one knee to blot the seed he’d left on her thighs before using the same towel on himself and fastidiously tossing it into the wash.
“I’ll make us two bowls,” he said. “Any bread to go with it? Maybe one of those muffins?”
“I’m not sure you’ve earned muffins yet.”
It was a weak attempt at humor. The flicker in his eyes acknowledged it, but he gave her a solemn nod. “Maybe some soup crackers. I’ll go get your clothes from outside.”
He’d noted the cotton robe she kept on a hook by the door, so he helped her into it first, even tying the sash, caressing her hips. She kept the extra robe there, because sometimes she liked to sit on her back porch after she’d changed into her nightgown. The robe helped if there was an evening chill.
She would do that again.
“You can keep your jeans on, but leave your shirt off,” she said.
More relief, that she wanted to be able to look at him, touch him as she wished. But when he touched her face before he went to retrieve her clothes, she could tell he wasn’t expecting her to be the same as always. She appreciated that.
After he returned from the yard and deposited her clothes in the hamper, per her direction, he followed her into the kitchen. Sliding onto a stool, she let him do as he’d said, fix them soup. Serve and wait on her.
“So who’s doing the service at your church this Sunday?” she asked. It brought that uneasiness crashing back through her, but she was feeling like she could win the battle with it right now.
He gazed down at the vegetables swimming in a seasoned tomato-y broth. “Me.”
“Have you ever done that before?”
“No. It’ll be the first time I ever done it by myself. But I helped Witford come up with enough sermons. And it needs to be me. The congregation is confused, and hurting. I hope God will show me what to say, to help.”
In the pause that followed, she expected he was thinking of inviting her, and talking himself out of it so she didn’t feel like he was pressuring her. She wasn’t sure herself, so she asked a question to fill in the awkward silence.
“Are you taking over the position permanently?”
“I don’t know. The church was started by Teena Joy, Tisha, and Tisha’s husband, my Uncle Mel, before he passed away. Witford grew up in it, like I did. We never had to choose a preacher.”
“So you could just take over doing it permanently. No vetting process.”
“Yeah.” He found her soup crackers in the pantry and, at her nod, put a handful into her soup before he did the same for his own. “But I think I’ll ask the congregation to choose. It’s their church, after all. If they want someone else, I’ll fill in until they ready to take over.”
“Would you want the job?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Sunday sermons are only one small part of being the preacher. I couldn’t work at the school anymore, and that’s important to me.”
“What if you hired a co-preacher, and you shared the responsibilities? A partnership, so you have an equal say in the church’s management and direction.”
“Maybe.” He slid onto the stool next to her, and stirred his spoon in the broth.
“Rev, look at me. What’s going on?”
He lifted his head, his expression troubled, at a perilous depth she recognized. She’d seen it in her own mirror, these past few weeks. “It shook me up, my faith in certain things. It isn’t the church’s fault. Isn’t the congregation’s fault. But that poison was there, and I having a hard time understanding how it happened, and if I missed something I should have seen.”
“It's a wound,” she said at length. “Only thing is to let it heal and see what life offers you.”
His gaze slid over her in the robe, and the corner of his mouth quirked. “Is life offering me you, Mistress?”
She nudged him. But she got up and went to her bread box. Bringing forth one of Cyn’s giant muffins, she cut it in half and put his portion next to his soup. When she slid back onto her stool, she made sure she was close enough their hips and shoulders brushed. Even if it meant she might elbow him while eating her soup.
“I don’t have a lot of answers tonight,” she said.
“Is it all right that I’m here with you, being with you?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “This part is good.”
“Then that’s enough, and I’m grateful for it.” He gripped her hand. “I been feeling like I have a knife in my lungs, because even breathing hurts, and when you touched me here,” he put his hand on his chest, “you took it out.”
She put her other hand over his. She couldn’t say anything, because his words made her own heart hurt. But this time, it was the right kind of pain.