Eva
His hands traveled up my stockinged thigh-highs. “Did you wear these for me? To tease me?” he asked, lifting my dress higher, exposing my legs to the cool December air. “Because if you did, if you wore these on purpose to tempt a man who is not allowed to fuck, then you will need to be punished.” Jamie raised my dress another inch. I could feel his hot breath against my skin. He looked up at me. “Answer me, Eva.”
“Yes,” I said. I hadn’t planned on getting naked with Jamie in the middle of a tree farm when I was getting dressed this morning, but it wasn’t an accident that I was wearing my favorite black silk panties and thigh-highs.
“I thought so.” He ripped off my panties and stared at my well-trimmed mound. He licked his lips as he took me in, and I felt myself getting even wetter. “You will come only when I say, only when I allow. And if you make a sound, alert anyone that I’m eating your delicious pussy, then I will stop. That is your punishment, Eva.” He flung one of my legs over his shoulder, parted my slick, quivering folds with his fingers and circled my entrance with his hot tongue. I grabbed him by the hair, trying to force him to come inside. I needed his mouth there. Spearing me, sinking deep inside my heat. Instead he teased me mercilessly by sucking and nipping my clit. My back scraped along the tree as it bowed from the orgasm that loomed, the one that was just out of reach.
“Yes . . . yes . . . oh God . . .” I tugged on his hair even harder and shamelessly rode his face. Every muscle was locked in place when he stopped abruptly and sat back on his heels and smiled. “I promise I’ll be good. I won’t scream. But I need you, Jamie. Please!” His smile evaporated, his eyes darkened, and then he swayed forward and pummeled my pussy with his tongue while pushing two fingers in.
“So fucking wet.” An arrogant but satisfied groan vibrated across my throbbing clit. “And so tight.” He didn’t take his time as he licked and fingerfucked me. As he thrust in and out. He wasn’t savoring my taste. No, he buried his face in my pussy like he couldn’t get enough. Like he would do anything to make me fall apart. I looked down just as he peered up at me and the sight of his tongue stroking my clit was my undoing. I couldn’t take it. But he hadn’t told me to come yet. And I would obey him. I wanted to. And then I heard him say, “Come for me, Eva. Now.” My vision went black as my body transcended and then I was there falling around him, fisting his hair as I rode out each mind-numbing wave. I tried not to scream but it was impossible. All I could hope for was that we were far enough away and out of earshot. My body shook as the last ripple shot through me and then he lowered my leg, grabbed my panties off the ground and tucked them into his coat pocket. When he finally stood I went for his belt because there was no way we were finished. I wanted to touch him, to make him fall apart at the seams.
“No, we can’t do that, Eva,” he said, grabbing my wrist.
“Haven’t we already crossed the line?” I asked.
“I’m your stepbrother and a priest. I can’t let it continue.”
“But what if I want it to happen? Would you stop me if I unzipped your pants and pulled out your cock and fed you into my mouth?” His hand tightened around my wrist and I heard his sharp intake of breath. “Or would you rather sink into my pussy bare with nothing between us? I’m on the pill. And I have never let anyone inside me without a condom but I would let you. Because I would want to feel all of you as you claim me.”
He threw my wrist down and took a step back. “Christ, Eva, do you know how hard this is? To taste you, to watch you come, to hear that you want me to sink into you with nothing between us? I thought staying away from you would get you out of my system, that I could just get past this. But whenever I’m near you my resolve weakens and I lose myself. And I can’t let that happen anymore,” he thundered, his voice close to a shout.
I felt the tears coming and I would be damned if I was going to let him see them flow. I buttoned up my pea coat and with the remaining scraps of dignity I had left, I trudged out of the woods, but not before hearing Jamie yell that he was sorry. I wanted to turn around and tell him to go fuck himself. That he was weak. But instead I pulled out my phone and called for Uber to pick my pathetic ass up.
Jamie
My dad caught me wrestling that nine-foot Frasier fir off the roof of my car and cursing a few times when the twine got tangled.
“Eva called a few minutes ago. Said she wasn’t feeling good all of a sudden but would definitely take a rain check on the chili,” my dad said, walking toward me.
“The beer is in the front seat. I can get the tree if you want to grab that.” I wasn’t in the mood for pleasant chitchat, even from my dad. I was angry at myself. Once again I had given into temptation. Would I have felt better about myself if I thought that it hadn’t been worth it? No, Eva was worth every punishment, every second of damnation. And I wasn’t going to have to wait to be punished or for the end of days to arrive. Every second without her, every time I pictured her falling apart beneath my touch, every time I remembered that she had chosen me to confide in, I would be punished all over again for what I had done. And I had no idea how to stop it. I had taken Edward’s advice. Every day I had prayed for guidance, for God to show me what to do, how to make this right. But He never answered me. And the silence on His end was starting to piss me the fuck off.
“You alright, son?”
Obviously I needed to do a better job at hiding my feelings. “Yeah. Just received some news that a parishioner of mine is sick. I’ll need to add her to my prayer list,” I said, lying through my teeth. It was pretty low of me to conjure up an illness that didn’t exist, but lying was the least of my worries.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. You should pass your parishioner’s name on to Marcia. She’ll add her to our parish prayer list as well. Wouldn’t hurt to have two parishes praying at the same time,” my dad said with genuine warmth.
The mention of Marcia took me right back to the tree farm, to the story Eva had told me. Eva had been assaulted by her teacher as a teenager and when she had reached out for help, for someone to believe her, her mother and her priest had turned their backs on her. My mother would never have done that. She would have stood up for me, and did in fact on more than one occasion when the odds didn’t seem to be in my favor. Even when I had been in the wrong she had always been there for me. Because that was what mothers did. They loved their kids unconditionally. They didn’t tell their children that they were dirty whores. They didn’t make them feel ashamed of themselves. They didn’t beat them down every chance they got. Mothers were selfless. Mothers were a gift from God. That was what I had always believed. But after today, after hearing what Marcia had done, my view of her was skewed. I would have to keep reminding myself that if Eva was willing to make an effort to see if the relationship with her mother could be salvaged, then it wasn’t my place to judge. I would have to put my own feelings about what Marcia had done to her daughter all those years ago aside.
“No, that wouldn’t hurt at all,” I said, forcing a smile.
Once inside, Dad and I lowered that behemoth of a tree into its stand and started draping it with strands and strands of lights. Marcia was thrilled that I had brought the tree over and thanked me at least a dozen times. Nate showed up a few minutes before the game started wearing his ratty old Eagles t-shirt. Liz hated that shirt and had threatened to throw that thing out when he wasn’t looking, but it looked like the shirt would live to see another day.
“So where’s that hot wife of yours?” I asked, handing Nate a beer and a bowl of chips.
“Dude, keep making comments like that and I swear I’ll beat your ass,” Nate said, smiling as he took his first sip. The ongoing joke would never get old. I would tell him that his wife was hot, or make some reference that I was checking her out and he would tell me that he was going to beat the piss out of me. I never said those things around Liz though, not that she would have minded. She was cool. And so perfect for Nate.
I remembered when he had first met her at the hospital. Nate had just finished a physical therapy session but wasn’t pleased with his progress. He had thought he should have been stronger at that point and he was getting frustrated. When the therapist had left, he had tried to get up from his wheelchair by himself and attempt to transfer to one of the beds he practiced on. But he hadn’t been ready to make that move independently and had stumbled to the ground. Liz had just finished rounds as an intern and found him lying there, cursing like a madman and fit to kill. But Liz had shown him no pity. In fact, she had called him a stubborn ass right to his face, right before she helped him back into the chair. He had asked her out the very next week after therapy and they had been together ever since.
I would never have that. I would never have a wife nag me about getting rid of my favorite shirt. I would never know the kind of love Nate and Liz shared.
“Hey, can you boys grab the bins of ornaments from the garage?” my dad called from the kitchen. The pot of chili he was stirring was almost ready to be served but I didn’t have an appetite. Thinking about Nate and Liz, about the experiences they would have together, reminded me just how lonely I was and how much I missed Eva.
“Sure, Dad,” Nate yelled as he set his beer bottle down on the coffee table. “Let’s go, shithead,” Nate said to me. I didn’t have a comeback. I didn’t have anything left. I was empty. As if in a fog, I made my way into the garage and searched for the ornaments. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong or are you going to make me beg, princess?” Nate asked.
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I couldn’t pretend that I was fine, that my world as I knew it wasn’t crumbling to pieces. I couldn’t deny my feelings for another second. I looked up to see that the door leading from the garage and into the house was closed and then I took a deep breath. “I think I’m falling in love with Eva.”
Nate’s jaw dropped and then he leaned back in his chair. “Are you serious?” he asked, his playful tone long gone. “I mean, when did this happen?”
I told him what I could without betraying her trust and my duties as her confessor. I had to gloss over some details but he didn’t press to know more, which I was grateful for. But in the end, he knew that I had kissed her and that we had gone further than that as recently as an hour ago.
“I know I hurt her. If you would have seen the way she looked at me when I told her that we couldn’t be more, that this has to end . . . it fucking killed me.”
“Why does it have to end?” Nate asked. His question wasn’t laced with sarcasm, but what the fuck kind of question was that?
“I don’t know. Maybe because she’s my stepsister and oh yeah . . . I’m a priest.”
“Yeah, and why is that? Why are you a priest?” he asked, giving it right back to me.
“I’ve answered that question already. Remember?”
“No, I remember asking you why you wanted to become a priest. And your answer was ‘because it’s something I need to do.’ That was all you gave me, your brother, the guy who you used to party with, drink beers with and pick up girls with.”
“That was a long time ago.” I didn’t like where this conversation was headed. It needed to end before . . .
“Yeah, eight years ago, in fact. Right around the time I ended up in this chair.”
“I don’t want to talk about this. I told you about Eva because I thought I could trust you . . . because I needed my brother. Instead you want to take a trip down memory lane.” I turned away and scanned the garage. I spotted a red bin in the corner marked Christmas and made a beeline toward it.
“You can trust me. You can trust that I would never breathe a word about you and Eva. But you can also trust that I will tell you the truth, even when it fucking sucks. I think you became a priest out of guilt. I think you felt so guilty over what happened to me that you joined the priesthood as some sort of penance, your payment to God or some shit like that. I don’t think you ever received a call from a higher power that this was the path for you and if I’m right, if what I said hits home with you, then what is wrong is you continuing to be a priest, not being with a woman who you have genuine feelings for.”
“Enough!” I yelled.
The little bastard smiled and shook his head. “Yeah, I hit a nerve alright. Finally. And before you go into a full-fledged tantrum, chew on this one. The only person to blame for why I’m in this chair is me. I was the drunk dumbass who walked home from that party in the shittiest part of Philadelphia at three in the morning. You need to get over it. Because if you haven’t noticed, I have. I have a career I love and a smart-mouthed wife who tolerates my shit and loves me anyway. Move on, Jamie.”
I couldn’t get out of that garage fast enough. Or eat that bowl of chili my dad had waiting for me when I returned with the goddamn ornaments. The chili tasted like sandpaper in my mouth but I swallowed it as quickly as I could and washed it down with a beer. I felt bad that I didn’t make more of a fuss over my dad’s cooking but I couldn’t think straight. I avoided my brother the rest of the night and pretended to watch a game I didn’t give two shits about. At the end of the half, I told my dad and Marcia that I had to go because I had received a text from the hospital and I was being asked to do a last rites call. I left without saying goodbye to Nate. I was in no mood to hear any more of his theories.