Chapter 41 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Come to me / Burn your starry crown / My dark angel”
— “Come to Me” by PJ Harvey and Mark Lanegan
The booth is built for one body and one confession, so with two of us in here, there’s no space that isn’t shared.
Kir’s thighs surround mine. His chest pins me against the back panel.
I can feel the hard line of his belt buckle and the harder line of his erection against my stomach.
Every breath I take pushes me closer to him because there’s nowhere else to go.
He doesn’t kiss me like I expected him to, though.
Instead, he drops.
Kir Lazarev sinks to his knees on the floor of the confessional. His thumbs press into the groove above my hipbones, hard and possessive, and he looks up at me through the dark, those gray eyes catching the thin seam of candlelight leaking through the lattice.
“What are you doing?” I whisper hoarsely.
“Worshipping you.” He pops my jeans button one-handed, unzips me, then drags my pants and underwear down in one rough swoop.
“Kir!”
He presses his mouth to the inside of my thigh, just above the knee, and I feel teeth. “Spread your legs.”
“Kir, we are in a—”
“I told you to spread your fucking legs, Jillian. Do it before I do it for you.”
Gulping I do. Because of the jeans tangled around my calves, I can only part my thighs a few inches, which is almost worse because it means everything that follows will happen in tight, claustrophobic proximity.
His shoulders wedge into the narrow gap I’ve made.
His breath breezes over my center first, hot and uneven, and then his mouth.
I cry out when he licks my folds, then immediately clap my hand over my own mouth.
He pulls back half an inch and grabs my wrist. “Hands down.”
“Someone will hear!”
“I said hands down, Jillian.”
I drop my hand to my side and ball it into a fist. He rewards me by dragging his tongue flat and slow from bottom to top, and my head cracks back against the wooden panel hard enough to hurt.
“Be quiet,” he murmurs against me. “Or, actually, don’t. I really don’t care.”
He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks.
My hips jerk forward and he pins them back with one forearm banded across my pelvis.
The strength in that single arm is staggering.
I can’t move at all. I can only sit here with my back against wood that’s heard decades of whispered sins and take what he’s giving me.
He’s not gentle about it. He eats me with his whole mouth—lips, tongue, teeth—sloppy and ruthless. He knows exactly what I need, but when I try to grind against his face, he pulls back.
“Ask.”
“No.”
“Then I stop.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
He pulls his mouth away entirely and rests his chin on my hip, looking up at me with wet lips and zero mercy. “Try me.”
I last about four seconds before caving. “Please.”
“Please what?”
“Please don’t stop.”
“Good girl.”
He dives back in with a vengeance, and this time, two fingers push inside me.
I bite my fist. My other hand finds the top of his head and grabs a handful of his hair.
The wet sounds his mouth is making are filthy and amplified in this tiny wooden box, and through the lattice screen, I can see the flickering glow of prayer candles and the shadow of the crucifix on the far wall.
Kir’s fingers curl as he eats me out. “You taste like you’ve been thinking about me all night,” he purrs against my pussy.
I yank his hair hard. I want it to hurt. He growls with pleasure and sucks harder, and my knees buckle for real. He catches me with both hands on my ass and holds me up, his face buried between my thighs, and I’m essentially sitting on his hands while his mouth destroys me.
The orgasm tears through me. A strangled sound escapes around my knuckles, high and desperate, but Kir still doesn’t stop. He works me through the entire thing, slower now, softer, drawing it out until I’m twitching and oversensitive.
He presses one last kiss to the inside of my thigh. Then he stands.
In this space, standing means his body is flush against mine from knee to chest. His belt buckle digs into my bare hip. His hands are on the wall behind my head again, and his face is close enough that when he exhales, I breathe it in.
“Turn around,” he orders.
There isn’t much room, but I do it anyway, shuffling in the narrow space and grinding against him in the process, until my chest is pressed against the back panel and my cheek rests against the wood.
Behind me, I hear his belt, then the slide of a zipper, and then his hand is on the back of my neck, firm, holding me in place.
“Hands on the wall,” he instructs. “Flat.”
I press both palms against the panel. The wood is worn smooth by decades of hands doing exactly this—pressing flat, gripping, bracing for whatever comes next. Same posture. Very different context.
He kicks my feet apart as far as the bunched jeans at my knees will allow. Then he pushes into me from behind.
I squeak in shock.
“Shh,” he breathes against my ear, but there’s a smile in it.
“Then go slow.”
“Not a fucking chance.”
He pulls back and thrusts in again, harder, and my forehead knocks against the wood. He fists a hand in my hair and pulls my head back, keeping my spine arched, while the other hand grips my hip to hold me in place.
“This is what you get,” he says, “for kneeling in a pew with your hands folded like a saint, when we both know you’re anything but.”
“I’m a better person than you.”
He slams forward and I choke on whatever I was going to say next. “You’re a brat,” he corrects, tightening his fist in my hair. “A gorgeous, insufferable, stubborn little brat who can’t go five minutes without mouthing off. And I love every fucking second of it.”
Love—that’s a word we will not be exploring tonight. I shove back against him, hard, taking him deeper, and he splutters in surprise as I bear down around him. I grin savagely. If I’m going to lose my mind in a confessional, he’s coming with me.
“Is that the best you’ve got?” I breathe.
It’s bait, pure and simple. He takes it. His hand leaves my hair and wraps around my throat from behind. The other hand snakes around my front, finds my clit, and starts working it in a flickering blur while he keeps pounding me with his thick cock. It’s all too much.
“Say my name,” he orders.
“Fuck you,” I pant.
“Say it.”
“I’m not going to—”
He pinches my clit lightly and pulls out halfway. “You said it to the camera,” he reminds me. “Just the other night, remember? You moaned it to an empty room. You can say it now.”
I did scream it to an empty room and a blinking red light. It felt safe because he wasn’t there. But he’s here now, his chest against my back and his hand on my pulse and his cock inside me in a church, and saying his name means admitting this is real. This isn’t a mask or a screen or a camera.
This is a man.
This is him.
He thrusts once, deep and devastating. “Say it, Jillian.”
I’m shaking all over. He tightens his grip on my throat by a fraction and resumes his rhythm, slow at first and then building, and the pressure in my core ratchets up and up and I know I’m close and he knows I’m close and he won’t let me get there until I give him what he wants.
I whisper something.
“Louder.”
“… Kir.”
“Again.”
“Kir—”
“Again.”
“Kir!”
“Again.”
“KIR!”
And then the orgasm rips through me so hard my arms give out.
I collapse forward against the panel and he follows, pressing me flat, his hips driving into me through the aftershocks while his fingers keep working and his other hand gentles on my throat.
He says something against my hair, but I can’t hear it over the roaring in my ears.
I feel his rhythm falter, then break, and he buries himself deep one final time and his whole body locks up behind me.
I feel the heat of him inside me with no lattice, condom, or mask between us.
When we’ve both finished cumming, we stay there for a long time. Pressed together against the back panel of the confessional, breathing the same heated air. His forehead rests against the back of my skull.
Eventually, he pulls out. I feel him tuck himself back in and zip up. Then his hands find my hips and he tugs my underwear and jeans back up, buttoning them for me tenderly.
I turn around in the narrow space. Face to face. Chest to chest. His forehead drops against mine. I can feel his heartbeat through his sweater. It’s fast. Faster than mine, maybe.
“You said my name,” he says quietly.
“I did.”
“How did it feel?”
I think about lying. The habit is so ingrained that the deflection forms automatically: It was just a name, don’t flatter yourself, it slipped out. But the lie won’t come. Not here, not in this cramped wooden box that will tolerate no lie.
“It felt real,” I tell him.
His hands find mine in the dark and he holds them, fingers laced together between our chests. I pull back enough to look at him.
“We should go,” I mumble. “Before the early mass crowd shows up and we have to explain ourselves.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “What would we say?”
“That we were praying.”
“That’s one word for it.”
I almost laugh. Turning, he pushes the door open and steps out first, checking the aisle.
The cathedral is empty now. The old woman is gone, the priest nowhere in sight.
Kir reaches back and takes my hand, pulls me out.
My legs are rubber. I grip the edge of the confessional doorframe until they remember how to work.
We walk down the aisle side by side, not touching now, two people in a church at dawn who could be anyone. At the front doors, he stops. I stop beside him.
First light is breaking over the city as Kir turns to face me. His hair is a wreck but his eyes are level and clear. “Next Wednesday,” he says. “Eight o’clock.”
I blink. “Huh?”
He laughs. “I’m taking you out. A real date. Not your kitchen floor, not an alley, not a—” He glances back at the confessional. “Not that.”
“You’re asking me on a date?” I say, still confused.
Kir nods. “Corner of W 28th and 10th Ave. I’ll be there at eight.”
“And if I don’t show up?”
He doesn’t even begin to consider the question. “You will.”
I want to argue, but he’s probably right. “What should I wear?”
“Something that makes you feel dangerous.” He steps closer, tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “I want every man we cross paths with to wonder what they did wrong in a past life to not have a woman like you on their arm.”
Then he pushes through the heavy doors and disappears into the morning.