My mind buzzes with panic.

Fucking PANIC, man.

And I shut the door right back closed.

“Uh, Sean?” I hear her say from the other side, but I’m too busy pacing in circles right now to answer. And I’m not even thinking, I’m just panicking, turning in circles like a dog walking into a room where the furniture’s been rearranged. All of my normal confidence is gone, all of my normal contingency-thinking, all of my charm and problem solving, it’s just fucking gone.

All that’s left is wanting Zenny and knowing I shouldn’t want her, and oh yeah, this idiot erection I have that is refusing to relent. If anything, my body and my dick are thrilled that Zenny is here in the flesh.

“Sean, I know your mother raised you better than this,” Zenny calls through the door, sounding amused. “Let me inside, please, or I’ll tell her how rude you were.”

Like Elijah, Zenny was somewhat exempt from the Bell-Iverson schism, and I can’t actually be sure that she wouldn’t tell my mom about this, so I spin around and yank open the door before I can think about it any longer.

Zenny gives me a sunny smile and pushes by, leaving that delicate rose scent in her wake. I have to fight myself not to sniff the air like a wolf after she walks past me and props herself against the back of my sofa. I pick up my crumpled suit jacket off the floor and hold it in front of my crotch, a move straight from the Adolescent Boy Playbook.

You’re thirty-six, not thirteen, I have to remind myself. Fucking act like it.

Luckily, Zenny doesn’t seem to notice my odd jacket pose. Instead, she seems taken with my apartment, gazing with large eyes at the clean, minimalist space. I look around myself, seeing it as she would—the stained concrete floors and giant windows, the long, low lines of the furniture—and I feel a spike of pride. It is a pretty nice place, even though it’s really nothing more than a convenient place to sleep and shower before I go back out to conquer the world.

“Nice, huh?” I say all cool and cocky like, and she looks back at me with an arched eyebrow that would have made a 1930s Hollywood starlet jealous.

“You know it’s nice already; you don’t need me to tell you that,” she says. “And I was really thinking it was kind of sad.”

“Sad? The two-million-dollar loft with an amazing view?”

“A two-million-dollar loft that looks like a model home. There’s no pictures or books or mail on the table, nothing personal at all. It makes me feel lonely for you, actually.”

Well, fuck, now I feel kind of lonely for me too.

“Anyway,” she says, straightening up, “I didn’t come by to see your apartment. I came by to talk to you.”

Okay. Okay. I can do this.

I can talk to her—just talk—without kissing her and without accidentally coming in my pants. And this is a good thing anyway: I can explain to her about the shelter replacement and I can warn her the fuck away from Northcutt. This will work, it will totally work, and this conversation will end without me betraying my promise to Elijah.

I gesture her over to a seat and then I offer to get her a drink, an offer she accepts. And it’s while I’m in the kitchen getting her a La Croix—carefully angling my body so she doesn’t see the heavy erection still pressing against my pants—when I causally ask, “So what is it you want to talk about?”

And just as casually, she responds.

“I want you to have sex with me,” she says.

Well, shit.

* * *

A few minutes later, she’s drinking her La Croix and I’m sitting on the chair across from the sofa, watching the hypnotizing clench and shudder of her throat as she drinks.

She finishes drinking, sets the can down, and dabs gently at her bottom lip with her knuckle. A simple act that has my cock throbbing.

“Okay, so,” I say in a choked voice. It’s the first I’ve spoken since she dropped her giant, nun-sex bombshell. “Obviously the answer has to be no.”

She looks at me, the sunlight catching those metallic glints in her eyes, the gold of her nose ring. “But why?” she asks, and God help me, it’s that mixture of soft and direct of hers that I have no defense against. The headiest blend of vulnerability and confidence.

“Zenny. Be serious.”

“I am being serious. Why can’t you have sex with me?”

“You’re Elijah’s little sister,” I say, holding up a finger. “You’re far too young for me. And you’re a nun.” I add a finger to each point, until I’m holding three in the air together, like I’m reciting the weirdest scout pledge of all time.

Zenny stands up and walks over to me, wrapping my three fingers in her own, and it’s so much like how I imagined her fingers wrapping around my shaft earlier that I have to close my eyes for a second. “Can we at least talk about these things?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I mutter, my eyes still closed. “Those aren’t things that can be talked around.”

“I don’t like lying, even by omission, but if it’s crucial, then…Elijah doesn’t have to know.”

I open my eyes.

“I’m not asking for a proposal, Sean, or even a boyfriend. I need help.”

“Yeah, but sex help?”

She sits on the coffee table in front of me, her flip-flopped feet crowding against my dress shoes and her jumper-clad knees rubbing against the expensive wool of my suit trousers. “Will you let me at least explain it? Please?”

I’m so distracted by the feeling of her knees brushing against mine that I can barely speak. I manage a nod.

“Okay,” she says, taking a breath and then blowing it out in a nervous huff and sending a lone curl up in the air for a moment. “So here’s the thing. I’m going to become a novice soon, in about four weeks. And even though it’s not the final step, it’s still a very big step. Maybe the biggest. I’ll put on a wedding dress and change my name. At the end of the semester, I’ll move out of my dorm room and into the monastery full time; I’ll start wearing the habit. It’ll be the end of my life as Zenny and the beginning of my life as a bride of Christ.

“All of the other sisters—and the novice mistress and the prioress—they’ve told me to expect periods of intense temptation and doubt before I go through the novice process, they said it was natural and healthy even, but it hasn’t happened. If anything, I feel surer than ever that this is what I’m meant to do with my life.”

“I—okay. That seems like the exact opposite reason to have sex with some old stranger.”

“You’re not a stranger,” she says, smiling—and fuck, that smile. Huge and sweet and so very, very kissable. “But I can see why it doesn’t make sense yet. The thing is that I feel like I should be doubting, I should be tempted to leave, and I’m worried about the fact that I’m not. It makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.”

I can feel my brows pull together. “I mean, I personally think that anyone who believes without doubt is lying to themselves, but surely that’s the goal, right? To believe without doubt?”

Her smile grows bigger, as if I’ve said something that proves her point. “See? That’s exactly what I’m looking for!”

“Wait—what?”

“The whole ‘you’re lying to yourself’ thing! The whole ‘God isn’t real and you’re wasting your life’ thing! I feel like if being around anyone can make me doubt my vocation, it’s you.”

I…I don’t know if I like that.

I don’t know why, because if you’d asked me an hour ago whether I’d like to keep innocent people from wasting their lives on a fake deity (and a corresponding religious bureaucracy that doesn’t give a shit about them), the answer would be yes. Hell yes, even. But now that I’m in front of the hypothetical innocent person, hearing her say I’m good for making her doubt the things she holds valuable…I don’t know, it doesn’t feel so nice.

She continues, unaware of my inner struggle. “I think that a belief tested by doubt is the strongest possible belief, and my novice mistress agrees. She also thinks that I haven’t had—ah—” there’s heat in Zenny’s face as she looks down at where our feet touch “—enough, um, experience to actually face what I’ll be giving up to join the sisters. She thinks I need to taste more of the world before I leave it behind.”

I’m still processing being Make Me Doubt Guy, and so it takes me a moment to sift through what she’s saying. “Your novice mistress is telling you to have sex?”

Zenny looks up at me, and she’s trying to be cool and worldly as she talks, but the shy flick of her eyes away from my own betrays her. This topic clearly makes her bashful, which is rather charming considering how determinedly and boldly she broached it in the first place. “She is kind of an unconventional woman, and a very unconventional nun. But being a virgin isn’t a requirement for joining a monastery—celibacy is only a requirement for staying there after you’ve taken your vows.”

“Will they still let you take your vows if you’ve had recent, uh, ‘tastes of the world’?”

Zenny laughs a little. “Like I said, I have an unconventional novice mistress and my prioress is very, well, modern. She says she’d rather have women who choose this life in knowledge than who choose in ignorance.”

I have to concede that’s a fairly wise perspective on religious life—if anything about religious life can be called wise and not, you know, corrupt or pointless.

“Okay, so you feel like you haven’t, I don’t know, thoroughly interrogated this choice or whatever because you haven’t had doubts, and your mentors have encouraged you to go fuck someone to force those doubts into being.”

“Well,” Zenny says, flexing her hands on her knees and looking down, “it’s more like they think I’m so certain because I haven’t actually confronted what I’m leaving behind. And that’s not just sex. It’s money and close relationships and freedom and frivolous kinds of things. I don’t just want fucking, Sean,” she explains, her eyes finding mine again. “I want someone to show me everything I’m going to miss. I want someone to challenge me and test me. And if I’ve tasted everything the world has to offer and I still want to consecrate my life to Christ, then I’ll know it’s what I’m truly meant to do. It will be a mature choice and not a choice made out of naïveté.”

Her eyes are hypnotic, the copper rims darkening into pools so deep that I can barely separate where they blend into the onyx of her pupil. “If you really want this,” I say, feeling almost dizzy looking at her, “you should find a boy your own age. Or shit, at least a boy who believes in the same things you do.”

She shakes her head, and it finally breaks the spell. I stand up abruptly, going over to the window, because I can’t handle looking at her, being so close to her. Not when she’s asking for what she’s asking for, which is something I’d fork over my own soul to give her.

Unfortunately, that would almost certainly be the price. Not my soul per se, since I don’t believe in that shit, but you know. Whatever’s left of honor and morality inside me.

“It has to be you,” she pleads to my back. “I’ve been trying to take the Reverend Mother’s advice for the last six months. Wearing street clothes instead of my uniform to school, trying to flirt with the guys in class, even saying yes to a couple of dates, but no one interested me. No one challenged me. In fact, most of the guys I interacted with only reaffirmed that I wasn’t missing anything good. I never even got as far as kissing them, and that night at Elijah’s gala—it was me saying goodbye to the whole plan. I’d have that one last time to get dressed up and drink and pretend, and then I’d give up this idea of searching for doubt. I mean, if I’d been searching for it and still didn’t find it, then didn’t that mean something too? That God didn’t want me to doubt?”

I don’t believe in a god, so I obviously don’t believe in any predestination, “this is God’s path for me” crap, but by dint of the situation and my vested interest in trying to maintain a semblance of control, I find myself squawking in agreement. “Surely that’s the right answer. Surely you should give up this idea.”

“But see, then I saw you,” Zenny says, and her voice goes so soft and low that I turn to look at her. Her face glows up at me with a kind of self-deprecating helplessness, like she knows how silly it all sounds and yet she can’t stop herself from just coming out with it plainly. “I saw you, and you were the first boy I ever wanted, Sean. When I was a little girl, I thought we’d get married, when I was old enough to have a real crush, I had a crush on you. When I was in high school, it was you that my body first wanted. And seeing you at the gala was like…like the answer to my prayers.”

I’m greedy for this idea of her having a crush on me, of her wanting me with all this shy conviction over the years. The thought of it sends something spinning in my chest like a pinwheel, and I have to force myself to track the conversation. “You prayed for doubt?” I ask, hoping she can’t see how boyishly flattered I am.

“I prayed for a chance. A chance to prove I was stronger than doubt—but how could I prove it if I never had the doubt in the first place? And then there you are, the first man I ever wanted, the ultimate temptation. Powerful and experienced and so hot I could barely even talk to you without stammering.”

It should be shocking that this makes me embarrassed, this compliment, when I’ve had women call me a god or a hero or any number of insane things in order to get into my pants or my wallet. But it’s not shocking because—as I’m quickly learning—everything about Zenny seems to come with a different set of rules, a different set of experiences. It’s like I’m starting all over again with her, and I have no idea what to say.

Luckily, my silence doesn’t seem to bother her and she keeps talking. “And it wasn’t just that I wanted you, although I did. I mean, I do. But I know how you feel about the Church, I know exactly how worldly and materialistic you are, and what could be more perfect? Who could be more perfect?”

She beams up at me, like a star pupil who’s just delivered a perfect answer, and I stare down at her, like a teacher trying very, very hard to suppress a boner he has for his student.

“Zenny, the answer is still no.”

Her beaming smile fades into a sigh. “I thought you might still protest. It’s about Elijah, isn’t it?”

“And you’re young. A thousand years too young. I know it’s hard to see at your age, but men like me are—”

Zenny holds up a hand to stop me. “Don’t give me some patronizing line about the ‘depraved nature of men’ or some bullshit. It’s a gender theory that’s about fifty years out of date, for one, and nothing more than a convenient excuse for you to avoid taking responsibility for yourself, aside from the way it neatly precludes the possibility that a woman might also be depraved. And aside from the obviously problematic binary construct.”

I blink. Star pupil indeed.

“I wouldn’t ask for this if I didn’t want it, and I can assure you that I’m just as capable of sexual energy as a man. I can also say that aside from being a legal adult, I’m under no illusions about the way you desire me. You made that very clear the night of the gala.”

Guilt rams through me like a railroad spike. “Zenny, I—”

“Don’t apologize. I liked it, I liked your honesty. I asked for it, and I mean the things I ask for, Sean. Like right now.”

She’s too articulate for me to argue with, and especially when it’s an argument I only halfheartedly want to win. By which, I mean that my heart feels like I should say no, while the rest of my body is throbbing with the urge to give her everything she’s asking for and then some.

Not halfheartedly, then. Half-cockedly.

“Elijah, though,” I mumble, trying to grasp on to some reason that she can’t talk her way around. “He asked me to keep you safe.”

“And what better way to take care of me than to help me when I ask for it?”

“I, uh—” Good God, where is the guy who dominates boardrooms? Who runs over lawyers and heirs and investors with sheer charm and willpower? Why can’t I formulate a response? Why can’t I vocalize any fucking words?

Zenny stands up now too, taking a step toward me. “Please, Sean. I’m only asking for a month, and I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to give. I’m asking you because you’re the only person who can help me, and the only person I trust to help me, and I need that. I need to trust the person I do this with, it can’t be with a man like…” she waves a hand as she tries to think of an example. “Like Charles Northcutt.”

Red.

Furious, jealous, protective red. Everywhere, in my eyes and choking my throat and tightening my fists. “Stay away from him,” I manage. “He’s a bad man.”

I’m so twisted up in my sudden fit of jealous fury that I don’t see her reach for me; I only feel it as she puts a gentle hand on my arm. “I can tell he’s a bad man,” she says matter-of-factly, “and I have no interest in him anyway. I’m saying that men like him are exactly why I want a man like you to help me with this. You’re all the things being a nun is not…but I also feel safe with you. That’s a very rare combination.”

I look down at her hand, slender and dark and tipped with chipped gold nails. There’s the unmistakable streak of pink highlighter across the back of one pinky finger, and if I’m not wrong, a faint remnant of a list made across the back of her hand in Sharpie.

It’s the hand of a college student, the hand of a woman fresh out of youth, nothing like the chubby dimpled hand of a baby girl I once held in a friend’s kitchen. It’s the hand of a woman who’s still learning herself, who’s sometimes forgetful and sometimes daydreamy and sometimes bored. It’s the hand of a woman who needs to be kissed and caressed and loved down so thoroughly that she will never forget how to appreciate her own body and the feelings it can give her until the day she dies.

And the shitty thing is that I still know all the reasons I shouldn’t say yes; they are banging and parading around me like a marching band. But I still want to say yes.

Fuck, do I want it.

I close my eyes and that’s when she moves in for the kill. A soft, tentative kiss against my lips, sweet and teasing and then gone.

My eyes pop open. “Shit,” I say hoarsely.

“Please, Sean,” she whispers, and she’s so close to me. So very close, and if I wanted, I could pull her into my arms, I could bury my face in her neck and bite like a vampire, I could make her feel every hard, dangerous inch of why this is such a terrible idea.

And I think about how I still don’t know her, not really, not like I should. I don’t know anything about her except the barest biographical facts gleaned from Elijah’s random mentions of her…and of course, that she’s an almost-nun looking to find out what she’ll miss after she goes into those cloisters of hers.

“I need a day to think about it,” I say, taking a stumbling step back, away, my body immediately kicking up a fuss at the distance between us. “I’m not going to pretend I’m a good man, but this is something even I have to think about.”

She nods, and she doesn’t seem surprised or upset, and I realize she expected this. She expected me to need to think about it, and I’m a little relieved by that. Even if I am Make Me Doubt Guy, at least she wasn’t lying about feeling safe with me, about trusting me. She clearly thinks that I have a moral compass of some sort, and I’m weirdly proud of that, in a way I don’t want to examine too closely. In a way that whispers to me how much I already care what Zenobia Iverson thinks of Sean Bell.

“I understand,” she says. “Can I expect you to call?”

Even if it’s a stupid idea to see her in person again, I can’t bear to discuss something so personal and important to her over the phone. “Dinner here. Tomorrow at seven. We’ll talk again.”

“Dinner,” she says, a tiny smile pulling at her mouth. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

And she walks over to the door and I walk with her, telling myself that tomorrow I’ll find a way to let her down gently, that I’ll find a way to say no to this insane scheme of hers. There’s no way she’s going to come to dinner tomorrow and I’ll say yes.

I tell myself that and then I watch her ass under her modest jumper all the way back to the elevator.