I’m amused at her eagerness, but I’m an unmoving wall of aftercare, which earns me a charming little tantrum.

“I’ll fuck you every time you ask me,” I promise. “But I need to make sure you’re doing okay first.”

“I’m okay,” she pouts. “Now come over here and do it again.”

I’m over at the bathroom door; I’ve just finished with the condom, and also with a ten-second staring session in the mirror where I stared at the face of a man who’s in love.

I’ve never been in love before.

It’s gutting and disorienting and dizzying—and joyful. Like a roller coaster careening wildly around corners, like a car punching into top gear as the highway streaks away underneath you. Like standing in a prairie summer storm—the blowing rain soaking your skin, lightning sawing across the sky, the wind a part of a song that you knew a long time ago but have since forgotten.

It’s too soon, but I love her.

She’s Elijah’s little sister and much too young for me, and she only wants me for sex, but I love her.

And she’s going to leave me for her God, but I love her.

I go back to the bed, and I undress her, I undress myself. I make us shower, flicking water at her from the spray while she stands just outside pulling on her shower cap and wrinkling her cute little nose at me. I spend a long time washing and soaping and massaging her, petting her and spoiling her and telling her how much I want her, how grateful I am, how perfect she is.

I don’t say that I love her. Not because I doubt it, not because it’s new, but because I honestly think it might spook her given her reaction to my there are no other women I care about like this comment the other day. I don’t want to scare her away, not when I’ve just gotten her, and also—is it even fair for me to tell her this? She didn’t explicitly say and we can’t fall in love when we were negotiating our arrangement, but I’d felt it in the air nonetheless, hanging like a heavy fog.

I don’t think she wants that from me.

And it might even be cruel to burden her with it in the looming face of her vows.

So I stay silent about that part, and after we’re toweled off, I spend another long time rubbing her with lotion and she rubs me with her lotion so that I smell like roses and I don’t even care. I want to smell like her always, I want to carry roses with me wherever I go. And I use the lotion as an excuse to check the bite marks on her breasts, to gently test her clit for soreness. I’m hard, and I’d love nothing more than to burrow inside her soft heat once again, but I refuse to hurt her. I couldn’t stand it if I hurt her.

But gradually she convinces me that she’s not sore, not hurting, and we go again, completely naked this time. She wants to try being on top, and she pierces herself on my offered-up cock in a slow, anguished slide. She’s shaking as she sinks home, and I murmur reassuring words to her, run gentling hands over her flanks and hips. I tell her how hot she is like this, perched above me like a goddess, how sweet her tits look, how hard it makes me to see her pussy stretched around my base, as if I barely fit. I do barely fit, and the thought is inflamingly coarse, sinfully vulgar.

So of course I share that with her too.

She rides herself to a whimpering, shaking orgasm—one I endure marginally more stoically than the last time—and when she’s finished, I make to pull off the condom.

“No,” she insists, dismounting me as if I were her steed, her stallion.

(God, that thought shouldn’t be as erotic as it is, but fuck me, I can’t help it.)

She puts her hand on my wrist. “Come in the condom again,” she says, her eyes gleaming in the dark. “I like to watch it.”

“Your wish is my command,” I whisper, and as she kneels next to me, my little anthropologist once more, I wrap my hand around my Zenny-wet cock and jerk off.

Strictly speaking, jerking off through a condom is not something I’d normally enjoy, but it doesn’t matter now. With Zenny next to me, her perfect tits hanging forward as she leans in for a better view, and her lovely, fascinated face in profile with her button nose and long eyelashes, it doesn’t take much. I only need to pull on myself a handful of times before my erection swells inside the condom and starts pumping out my release.

It’s raw somehow, raw and almost unclean feeling—which is surprising given that it’s perhaps the cleanest sex act one can perform—but it’s something about how it traps my cock inside its own leavings, something about how much it puts my grunting, rough release on display.

It’s enough to make a man hard again.

Which is how we end up having sex a third time, this time tangled together on our sides, one of her legs over my hip and my arms tight around her. It’s slow and languorous and when she comes, it’s nearly silent: a caught breath and then the telltale contractions on my dick.

I jack off a final time—yes, into a condom once again, I really can’t refuse Zenny anything—and we clean up and crawl into bed like two tired children coming home from a theme park. Exhausted physically, exuberant mentally, sleep a fuzzy, earned embrace waiting for us the moment we close our eyes.

“Thank you,” Zenny murmurs, tucking herself into me. “It was everything I wanted. More than I could have wanted.”

“No, thank you, darling.”

And I almost don’t ask, because the night has ended so perfectly, so sweetly, but I have to. “Zenny, what happened with Northcutt today?”

She yawns, and I relax the tiniest bit because I don’t think she’d yawn if something terrible had happened. “He met with me and the Reverend Mother, tried to convince us to issue a follow-up statement to the news outlets that Valdman and Associates has been nothing but helpful, it was all a misunderstanding, yada yada. We said no.”

Relief rolls over me at the same time as delight. “You told him no? Just like that?”

“Well, the Reverend Mother did. And he started to be shitty and then she asked him to leave her office and he did. She’s very intimidating when she wants to be.”

I picture the scene, with stupid Northcutt fleeing the office with his tail between his legs, some old lady in a giant winged nun’s hat scolding him as he goes. It’s a very nice scene to imagine.

“So you’re okay? She’s okay? I was so fucking worried when I heard.”

“We’re okay,” Zenny says sleepily. “Believe it or not, we can take care of ourselves without Sean Bell coming in to save the day.” She pats my chest as if I’m a tamed bear who thinks he’s ferocious, but is only a harmless old lump instead.

“I know, I know…I just want you to be safe, is all. I—” wrong word, Sean! “—care about you.”

“Mmm. I care about you too. And I like that you care about me.”

She says it simply, dozily, and it’s the last thing she says before she falls into sex-exhausted sleep.

But me? I stay awake for a long time, my brain still spinning and reeling with this new thing, this new love. This new love that I can’t ever, ever keep.

***

The next week passes in a blur of sex and work. We find a rhythm that feels impossibly right—sex in the morning, then work for me and classes and rotations for her. In the evening she has her shelter shifts and I start going with, because I can’t stand to be apart from her (of course, I don’t just get to hover around her and steal kisses when no one’s looking; she puts me to work in the kitchen). And then we come home and fuck late into the night. Her curiosity knows no bounds, it makes her brave, and she tries the jeweled plug for the first time and loves it. We fuck in every position she wants to try, every position I can think of, we sneak a fuck in my office and one in the corner of an expensive restaurant. We snuggle and watch movies and I burn with this secret love for her and it chars me up inside, it sears me and cracks me. I can’t get enough of it.

I try to make her doubt in earnest.

It never works.

And it’s a stinging thing to note that even as I try my hardest, even as I throw every reason I ever hated God or despised the Church at her, I can’t crack her faith the way her love cracks me. I can’t carve away her connection with God the same way she’s carved a gap into my heart that she refuses to fill.

I can’t bear to tell her I love her. It feels manipulative somehow…and also I’m frightened. I don’t think I’ll survive it if I tell her and she dismisses it. Dismisses me. I can even imagine it, in my worst moments, the way her mouth will soften in pity and her eyes will shine from compassion.

Sean, I’m flattered, she’ll say, and she’ll do something mortifying, like pat my shoulder. But you know I don’t feel the same way. You know I never will.

God, the fucking irony of a sinner loving a nun. It’s agony. I’m dying. And as I’m both alight and aflame with loving her, these splashes of thought keep coming out of nowhere, like raindrops on a sunny day.

Raindrop number one: I’m jealous of Zenny’s relationship with God—not only jealous like a lover watching his beloved with someone else but jealous that she has it. Jealous that she’s mature enough to be angry about all the pain in the world and to accuse God of not doing enough, and then in the same breath, work to change that pain in His name.

Raindrop number two: Zenny reminds me of the things I loved about God. A sense of curiosity, a bravery, a turbulent emotion bundled close with the deepest peace. Things I felt about God once upon a time, and felt about myself.

Raindrop number three: if loving Zenny is even close to the way she loves God, I understand why she’s choosing this life.

I realized being furious with Him was not the same thing as wanting Him out of my life. That’s what my mom said the day I found her with the rosary. What if that were true for me too? Is hating God the same thing as not believing in Him? Can you hate a thing you don’t believe in?

And when I say I hate God, what do I mean? Do I mean that I’m angry about Lizzy, angry that humans who were supposed to serve goodness were actually monsters, and that it’s all His fault? Do I mean I never want to think about Him again? Or do I mean that I want to rage at Him, to howl and pace and scream, and have Him listen? Have Him witness and hear and see my pain?

And one night, in the dark as Zenny sleeps, I send up a thought like a balloon.

I still hate you, I think up to the ceiling. You let us all down and I’ll never forgive you.

Nothing happens. The ceiling remains a ceiling, my room remains quiet save for the soft snores of the little nun at my side. There’s no burning bushes or shimmering prophets poking their heads out of the walls.

Except when I tell Zenny about it the next morning, she gives me a knowing smile and eyes full of compassion.

“Sean,” she says. “That was a prayer. You prayed.”

It’s like looking up and seeing a green sky, this thought.

It haunts me for days.