There are clouds in my mother’s lungs.

Dr. Nguyen and I are bent over his iPad in the hallway, looking at the X-rays, while my father paces behind us.

“This was yesterday,” Dr. Nguyen says. “And this is today.” He swipes on the tablet, bringing up the most recent image, which shows a sprawling fog of white along my mother’s lower left lung. “My best guess is that there was some aspiration into her lungs when we were suctioning her stomach. It’s not an uncommon complication in these scenarios. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing the response I’d like after three days of antibiotics.”

I run my hand over my mouth. Not seeing the response I’d like is a polite way to frame the state of the woman in the room behind us.

“See, I’m looking at this effusion in the lungs and I’m looking at her respiratory rate and the oximetry readings, and I’m thinking that we need to move upstairs.” Dr. Nguyen looks up at me with apology in his eyes. “She needs the ICU.”

My dad makes a noise from behind me, and the Sean Bell who Gets Shit Done, who’s a priest in the Church of Cancer, makes note of it, shelves the noise away as a reminder to touch base with him later. But for now I make myself talk through every step of this with Dr. Nguyen, every option, every variation. Steroids, different antibiotics, CPAP, BiPAP, draining, not draining, pain management—all of the puzzle pieces are laid out and considered. Dad distantly agrees to what the doctor and I decide on, and then Dr. Nguyen goes off to make it happen. Within an hour, Mom will be moved upstairs. I try to remind myself that people move back downstairs from the ICU all the time; this isn’t a one-way street, this isn’t a cascade of dominoes. The dominoes can be picked up again, straightened and reset. It will be fine.

I still call all the other brothers and let them know.

Back in the room, Mom is awake, blue-lipped and ashen. She looks staggeringly unbeautiful like this, frail and strangely flattened, every line and wrinkle in her face thrown into sharp relief. And yet, I can’t remember my chest ever stitching with so much love and pride for her.

She tries to say something to me, and she can’t find the breath to do it. I touch her arm. “It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “You don’t have to say anything right now.”

“Need…to,” she pants.

“Okay,” I say, taking her hand. “What is it?”

“You…” she manages “…look…like shit.”

I burst out laughing and when I also start crying, she doesn’t say anything. Simply gives my hand a weak squeeze.

“We’re going up to the ICU tonight,” I say after I can speak again. I wipe my face with my sleeve. “They need time to try some more antibiotics, and they’re going to give you an oxygen mask to help you breathe while they do that.”

She doesn’t respond for a minute. Then she says, “Will it hurt?”

“They said the mask might be uncomfortable, but otherwise, no.”

She looks like she wants to say something more, but she can’t catch her breath. It’s only as the nurses come in to start readying her bed and IVs for the transfer that she gets it out.

“Go…home…few hours,” she says. “Not going to die tonight.”

* * *

I go home.

I shower and I do some laundry and I consider shaving for about three seconds before I decide I don’t have the energy. I’ve gone from “sexy stubble” to actually scruffy over the course of the week, but there just hasn’t been time to do anything more than wash my body and brush my teeth in between the hospital and Zenny and trying to keep a handle on work.

So instead I yank on an old henley and some jeans and crack open my laptop to get some shit done in the quiet of my kitchen before I go back to the hospital. Before I go up to my mom’s new room in the ICU.

Except.

Except now that I’m home and things are quiet, it’s really hard to drown out the lingering hospital feelings. I can hear the beeps and the murmurs, I can see Mom’s face, that uncomfortable combination of sick-sunken and steroid-swollen. I can hear Dad crying softly to himself in the lounge, see the steam curling off the free, oil-black coffee as the respiratory therapist talked us through how the BiPAP would work.

And now that I’m alone, now that I don’t have to be strong for anyone or take notes or take charge or anything else—everything crashes into me like a train from nowhere.

Not going to die tonight.

But she is going to die, isn’t she? Maybe not tonight, maybe not even this time at the hospital, but she’s going to die and I failed her. I threw all my money in all the directions I could, I barely let her out of my sight, I spent every waking minute trying to get her well—and I failed.

The knowledge of it rolls through me, those prairie storms I’m always thinking of, vast and charged and ready to tear through trees and chew through houses.

You failed

You failed

You failed

She’s going to die

She’s going to die she’s going to die she’sgoingtodie—

With a vicious gesture, I slam my laptop closed and grab my keys, trying to escape the clouds roiling black and electric in my mind.

* * *

“Sean!” Zenny squeaks as I wrap my arms around her from behind. “You scared me!”

“I’m sorry,” I say, nuzzling her neck. “I couldn’t wait until you were done with your shift. I needed you.”

She’s in the shelter kitchen, finishing up with the dishes. Now that the meal is over and the supply pantry of fresh clothes and toiletries has closed, the shelter is emptied out. Zenny’s told me before that it’s common during the warm nights of summer; people will come in to shower and to eat, but prefer to be on their own afterwards.

“Maybe some of them feel awkward about the charity,” she’d said when she was explaining it to me. “And some of them are suspicious of us, think that we’ll try to preach to them.”

And in a way, I can understand. Sometimes freedom is worth the discomfort.

My hands find the hem of Zenny’s jumper and gently ruck it up to her thighs, and I give a masculine noise of distress when I discover that what I thought were leggings are socks that end just above her knees—some kind of schoolgirl fantasy and nun fantasy fused together into one.

“Fuck, baby,” I say, my fingertips playing with the edge of her socks. The skin above is soft and smooth and warm. It tickles her where I touch. “Are you trying to kill me?”

She giggles, breathless and happy and also trying to protest. “Sean! We can’t do this here!”

“There’s no guests at the shelter tonight,” I say, nipping at her ear. “And Sister Mary Theresa just left. It’s just us and the front door is locked.”

“Oh,” she says, her tone of protest giving way to something more…intrigued. “We’re alone?”

“We’re alone. And I want to play a little game.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s called Sean Finally Gets to Fuck Zenny in her Nun Outfit.”

She lets out a surprised laugh, which quickly turns into an intake of breath as I spin her around and crowd her against the counter, my cock pressing rough and needy into the soft stretch of her belly. I shape my hands to her pert little tits, moving my thumbs over her nipples, which are hard and budded even through the layers of shirt and jumper between us.

“Remember our first kiss?” I ask, brushing my nose against hers. “Right here?”

“Yes,” she breathes.

“Let’s pretend we’re there again.”

“Yes,” she agrees.

And so I kiss her. I kiss her like I did that day, a hard, searing slant of lips and tongues. A bite on her lower lip, my hands around her waist, lifting my little nun doll up on the counter and stepping between her legs. And this time when I growl, “I want to see your cunt,” there’s nothing holding me back, nothing left to make me shy away.

This time, I help her shove her skirt up to her waist, and I get to see those sweet cotton panties for real. She spreads her legs and I step back, my cock throbbing in time to my heartbeat.

There’s those light blue knee socks, there’s those firm, curved thighs. There’s the innocent cotton of her panties and not-so-innocent rumple of her skirt around her waist. There’s that plain white headband holding her curls away from her face, throwing the high curves of her cheeks and the graceful sweep of her jaw into lovely relief. And there’s the cross around her neck and the rosary at her waist, and they dredge up every suppressed feeling in me—fear and anger and shame and still more fear—and yet there’s also a comfort at seeing them that I can’t name. Like familiarity, but more profound.

I don’t pretend the cross away as I drink in her body. It’s here, just as we are here, and it’s a flickering, inconstant revelation to think that God could be here too, in the same way. That sex isn’t apart from God, it’s not separate, that somehow the God that’s prayed to and sung to and served by charity and love can also be a god that’s inside of sex and exists just as much inside fucking as He does inside a prayer or a nap or a meal or anything else a human might do in a human body.

And, like a dancing candle flame, the revelation gutters and hides itself once again.

“More,” I say hoarsely. “Show me more.”

Zenny gives me a look that’s the swirling crossroads between mischief and virtue, and then she spreads her legs wider and pulls the crotch of her panties to one side.

I groan at the sight. She’s all soft and small there, with the tiniest glimpse of where my cock will go and with an obvious glisten along the tight line of her folds.

“Your cunt is wet,” I say.

She nods, giving her kitty a little stroke with her other hand. She shivers at her own touch.

“Was it wet last time we did this?”

She nods again, squirming on the counter.

“Did you have to go home and use your teddy bear? Did you have to rub your poor little clit until you felt better?”

“Yes,” she confesses, her head dropping down. I realize she’s looking at herself, taking in the picture the hiked-up dress and cotton panties make, and I take in the picture she makes as she looks at herself—the gold stud glinting from her snub nose, the aroused part of her lips, the long sweep of eyelashes against her cheek.

“Tell me,” I say, stepping closer, running my hands up her thighs. “Tell me what you did.”

“I—I—” She shivers again. “I needed it so much. After you left, I went straight back to my dorm. My roommate was out and I just…” She’s squirming with the memory.

“Did you pretend it was me?” I ask, letting my thumbs play against the wet silk of her cunt. “Did you pretend you were riding me?”

“Ah,” she gasps because one thumb has started circling her clit while my other thumb has plugged her opening. “Yes. I pretended it was you. I pretended that you never stopped; that you took one look at my pussy and knew you had to fuck me right then and there.”

I nip at her jaw and then reach in my pocket for my wallet, digging out a condom.

“This time, I will,” I say. “This time we don’t stop.”

I tear at the condom wrapper with my teeth, tear at my jeans, and soon I’m rolling the sheath over my erection and feeling the Pavlovian pulse of excitement as I do. I’ll be inside her soon, I’ll be fucking that tempting pussy, I’ll have a nun speared on my cock and writhing in pleasure.

“It never gets old watching you do that,” she whispers. Her eyes are on my cock, which is hard and dusky-red and shining with latex. “It’s so sexy.”

I step between her legs again and both of us look down. All fucking is carnal, of course, but there’s something extraordinarily carnal about this sight: both of us still dressed, her knee socks and her innocent panties held to the side for me, her postulant’s uniform shoved up around her waist. My cock, hard and rude and male, demanding to be taken between her legs.

But Zenny’s innocence will always be tangled up in her boldness, in her fearless ability to want, and she takes the aching part of me in her hand and rubs me against her pussy. I let her use me however she likes—the blunt, round crown against her firm budded clit, long sweeps through her folds, the occasional shy brush against her taut asshole—and then when I’m shaking with the effort to hold still and let her play with me, she finally wedges me at the source of all her wet and whimpers for me to push in.

I do.

It’s shocking how tight she is. Every fucking time. I mean, all women are—I’ve never met a pussy that didn’t feel good on my cock—but Zenny’s is some magnitude of heaven I’ve never felt before. She holds me like a glove, tighter than a glove, and when I get so deep that the tip of me is in her belly, she flutters and grips me tighter. And when I slide out, her body tries to hold me in, greedy and hungry for my organ.

I cup her ass in my hands and start fucking her cunt in earnest, and her hands leave her panties and go everywhere—to tangle in my hair and to rub against my beard and to fist up my shirt so she can see my stomach muscles working to fuck her.

“Sean,” she says. She says it possessively, like it’s her name to say, and it is, it is, I want my name to belong to her for the rest of my life.

“Yes, darling?”

“Harder.”

I go harder, making sure to drag my cock out at just the right angle, making sure to rub against her clit as I sink all the way in. I relish the feel of her ass in my hands, the blue glimpse of her schoolgirl socks out of the corner of my eye. The awakened, happily agitated look on her face as she stares down at where I move between her legs. The cross necklace sliding and jumping along her chest as I thrust.

“Does this little nun need to be fucked?” I murmur to her. “She’s gone too long without it and now she has to have it?”

“Yes,” she squeezes out, eyelashes fluttering as she looks up at me with eyes the color of treasure and earth. “Oh, yes, Sean—oh, oh—”

“I’ll fuck you anytime you want, little nun,” I say into her ear, my arms cradling her back and head as I drive into her down below, picking up the power and pace and letting her feel my strength. “Anytime you want.”

And it’s as she’s coming with a bowstring-tight cry that I hear what I just said, and what I just said slices a gash of hope right across my open heart. Maybe we don’t have to end with her vows, maybe she’ll interpret the vow of chastity as loosely as the radical sisters around her interpret obedience. Maybe I can be her lover still, a ciscisbeo to a bride of Christ.

She salts the hope-gash within seconds of it opening; as she comes down from her climax, clinging helplessly to my shirt, she murmurs, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

It’s said in a gauzy, fuzzy way, the kind of careless words that slip out in the unguarded softness after orgasm, and I can tell by the way she continues to cling and sigh as I chase my own release that she doesn’t know how that simple comment has gutted me, how it’s punctured something vital and now I’m bleeding everywhere between us.

She’s going to miss me.

She’s going to leave me.

And I’m going to die when she does.

“Come inside me,” she says into my chest. “Come lots.”

“Can’t,” I grunt. “Can’t.”

I pull out, my wet erection resting on her belly and then it happens. I come lots, making a few short, staccato strokes along her stomach as pleasure hooks hard in the pit of my belly, and then I fill the condom with a ragged breath, pulsing heat while my cock throbs right above where her womb is inside. The thought makes me come even harder, like a primal caveman eager to spend inside a woman and plant his child there.

But there will be no child, and there is no claiming.

God claimed her first.

I keep her close until the last jerks have settled, and when I pull away, Zenny coos appreciatively at how much I’ve given her, which sends a jolt to my flagging dick.

“Can I throw this away in here?” I ask, nodding my head to the condom.

Zenny laughs. “It won’t be the first time there’s been a condom in the shelter trash.”

I tie up and clean off, but when I’m turning back to Zenny as I’m tucking myself away and zipping up, I find her completely naked and leaning against the counter with not a single stitch of clothing left on her body except those damned knee socks.

“More,” she says simply. “I want more.”

I prowl to her, a growl rising in my throat. “More of me?”

“Yes,” she says, her tongue running along the top edge of her teeth.

“More of these things you’ll miss?”

If she hears the bitterness in my voice, she doesn’t let on.

“Yes.”

I trap her naked form between my arms, bracing my hands at the edge of the counter around her hips. “And what will you miss, Zenny? When you become a nun, when you marry God?”

“Your cock,” she says bluntly. As unhappy as I am with the turn her thoughts have taken, I’m proud of her for using the filthy words I like. I’m proud of her boldness.

“It’s yours. Anytime you want it. What else?”

“Mmmm, your mouth,” she says, and I take my cue to chase kisses all down her neck and between her breasts and along the firm skin of her belly. I sling her leg over my shoulder and open up her sweet cunt to my mouth, and then I show her all the tricks and twists and hungry sucks that will make her miss my mouth all the more.

Her hand tangles hard in my hair and yanks, I can hear the rasp of her knee sock against the waffle-weave of my henley and it drives me crazy, I swear to fucking God.

“I’ll miss your fingers,” she moans, as my hands get to work.

“The scruff on your jaw,” she says, as I leave her rough scruff-kisses on the inside of her thighs.

“The way you look at me when you’re eating my cunt, like you want to eat my heart.” And sure enough, I’m looking up at her from between her legs, making sure she sees how wet my mouth is every time I pull away for a breath.

“What else?” I rasp against her flesh. “What else?”

She hesitates and then plunges ahead. “Feeling you come inside me. For real.”

That makes me pause. Think. Stand up.

“Keep going,” I order.

“Wondering if you made me pregnant.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Being pregnant.”

Oh my God, this woman. This woman and my poor, aching cock, hard all over again for her. Because of her.

I splay my hand across her tummy, low and insistent and selfish. “My baby here?” I ask, in a dangerous purr. “You’d miss feeling my baby grow inside you?”

“Yes,” she confesses. “Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you miss it?”

“Of course I would. Of course I do.” I keep my hand large and demanding at her belly while I kiss her until she can barely breathe. “I think about it all the time. Every waking moment and then it’s in my dreams too. You carrying my baby. You nursing my baby.”

At the word nursing, I pluck gently at one of her nipples, and it’s as if I’ve struck a gong somewhere inside her. The tiny movement seems to reverberate through her body, sending goose bumps hurry-scurry all over her flesh.

“Fuck,” she mumbles, and I have to smile because she sounds like me. I bend down and lick at the furl I’ve just touched, opening my mouth and running my tongue along her areola, across the tip of her nipple in gentle flickers.

Then I stand up. “What else?”

“Marrying you,” she whispers, and then she looks away like she can’t bear her own words.

My heartbeat is threatening to vault right out of my chest. Could she actually love me back? Babies and marrying—those are love actions, love words, surely she means that she misses the chance to do them with me and not just in general—

I’m going to tell her. Right now, when our hearts are full and honest and raw with appetite. I’m going to tell her.

But she beats me to speaking. “I want you to fuck me,” she says, voice growing shy. “…back there.”

I’m so tangled up in practicing my declaration of love that I very nearly miss this. “Pardon me?”

“I mean…anally,” she says, and the kitchen light is too dim for me to see the reddish hue at the apples of her cheeks, but I know it’s there. “I want to try it at least once before…”

Before she leaves me.

God. How can that idea still hurt so much? How can it hurt more and more and more, like a train rolling over you, like being stretched on a rack, like being crucified?

Tell her now. Tell her so she knows.

I open my mouth again, but she is already taking my hand in hers, guiding it over the firmly plump curve of her ass. “Please,” she murmurs. “I don’t want anything left undone. Not a single thing.”

My heart hammers at my chest and my objections hammer at my skull and my cock—well, my cock is just as hard as a hammer, pushing against the teeth of my zipper like a cellmate trying to break free.

“I—”

“Sean,” she begs, spinning in my arms and leaning forward on the counter. The act turns her body into a buffet of tight curves and narrow lines, showing the clear dip of her waist and the edible swell of her hips. It also displays that firm, sweet ass. And the shadowed well between her legs.

Reasons why I should tell Zenny I love her right now:

1. I love her.

2. She needs to know.

3. She likes the honest guy thing.

4. An old nun told me to.

Reasons why I should wait to tell her:

1. She’s bent over a sink.

And really, I think, as I smooth interested hands over her waist and ass, I’m going to love her even more after we do anal, so what’s the rush? It can wait.

It can wait.

Except.

Sigh. Huff. Grumble.

“Zenny, we can’t do this here,” I explain softly. My hands are still everywhere on her, fondling and caressing and loving, despite my words, because fuck it, I can’t help it. Not when she’s like this, bent over and peering back at me with a daring kind of half-smile.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a fucking kitchen,” I say, giving her sides a quick tickle as I say it.

She giggles at my touch, but then pouts at me. “I don’t want to wait,” she says. “I want to be able to look back and say I was spontaneous, say that for once I didn’t care about what anyone else thought, I didn’t do something to be the best at it. That I did it just because I wanted to. Just for me. I could barely make myself choose this in the beginning but now…” she gives me a shy smile. “Being with you has made it easier. It feels easy to demand the things I want. Good, even.”

Ugh, I hate all this casual talk of looking back, this implication of her future life apart from me…and yet at the same time, pride burnishes a warm glow inside my chest. Pride for her. If I couldn’t have my wish of worshipping her for the rest of my days, then this would be my second wish—that she’d grow into her own needs. That she’d find a balance between pouring her love into the world and loving herself.

But, be that as it may… “That makes me glad, sweetheart. I promise it does. But I don’t want to hurt you, and anal is, well, delicate, at the best of times.”

“Can’t we at least try?” she asks, wriggling her cute bottom at me, and it’s absurd that I, Sean Fucking Bell, am trying to talk a woman out of anal, but that’s what Zenny’s done to me. She’s unbuttoned me and shaken me out all over the ground and now I’m just a mess of jumbled pieces, nothing resembling the arrogant know-it-all I was just a few weeks ago.

“I don’t have toys to warm you up—”

“Use your fingers, then. Are you Sean Bell or what?”

“—or lube come to that—”

“It’s a kitchen! I’m sure there’s oil in here somewhere.”

“Baby, I can’t use a condom and oil. It will break the latex.”

There’s a pause, and I watch Zenny’s teeth dig into her lower lip. I think for a moment—with a rueful sort of relief—that she’s finally conceded, that she’s finally accepted that it’s bananas to have kitchen-sink anal, and then she says, “Then don’t wear a condom.”

This would be a good time for me to remember how to pray.

“Zenny…” I breathe. My hands are still on her body, rubbing circles and lines along her silk-soft skin. I know I should say more, I should resist, but being bare inside her…even if it’s just once…

“You’re clean, and so am I. And it’s not risking pregnancy,” she says, and then—sensing my weakness— “Teach me how it can feel good, Sean. Please.”

Fuck. I can’t refuse the teacher game and she knows it. I curl over her body, defeated, my willpower melted away like a snowflake on a tongue.

“Okay,” I mumble into the delicate bird-wing of her shoulder blade. “But you have to let me do it the way it needs to be done.”

“As long as you hurry up,” she says, wiggling against me. Fuck.

It takes me less than a minute to source a mostly full bottle of vegetable oil—I’m very motivated—and then I’m covering Zenny’s body once again with my own. “Are you sure about this?” I say, kissing her ear. “Very, very sure?”

“Very, very,” she says impatiently. “Why is it when I want to speed up, you want to slow down—and then when I want to slow down, you want to speed up?”

I’m straightening now and unscrewing the bottle cap. “When has that last ever happened?” I ask, amused. “You’ve never wanted to slow down a minute in your life.”

“Not with sex. But with…other things. Feelings.” She stops, as if hesitant to say more.

The furrowed-out space in my chest aches with her implied meaning, aches more at the thought of telling her I love her. Would it be wrong to? If she has just said she wants to slow down with the feelings?

This is not ass-talk, I decide. Ass first. Orgasms for Zenny first. Then we talk.

“I’m just rubbing oil on you now,” I explain to the little nun in front of me, shoving my feelings to the side and focusing on her. Her pleasure. “I’m not going to press inside just yet.”

“Okay,” she says, and then hums a little as my finger brushes against the sensitive pleats, spreading oil warm and plenty over her.

“Now inside. Just like the plug, baby, you’ll push against me.” And then I gently, as gently as it can be done, work my finger inside the tight aperture. Inside, she is a furnace. A fucking furnace. A snug ring of muscle and a smooth sheath of heat behind it. My blood goes on fire, all at once, burning me up from the inside.

“Okay, this part you’ll help me with,” I say, taking one of her hands and guiding it to where my finger is burrowed inside her. “You’re going to replace my finger with yours…and then add a second one as soon as you’re comfortable. Yes?”

“Yes,” she says eagerly, already pushing at my hand to replace it. I let her, drizzling some more oil for her, and then while she fingers her own ass, I quickly toe off my shoes and tear off my jeans and shirt. She adds a third finger without me telling her to, and I abruptly lose the ability to breathe.

“Jesus,” I mutter, liberally glazing my palm with oil and wasting no time fucking my oiled-up hand as I watch her. “Jesus Christ.”

I step closer, the view impossibly intimate, impossibly carnal, and then I run my hands all over her ass and flanks. “Are you ready, sweetheart?”

“Ready,” she sighs out, withdrawing her fingers with a noise that would make God Himself sympathize with all my decisions. I move myself behind her as she braces herself on the edge of the sink, and I feel her shiver when the broad head of my dick nudges against her rim. It’s much, much bigger than anything she’s taken before, and I run a soothing hand up and down her back.

“Relax and push out against me. Think of how full you’re going to feel. What a dirty girl you’re going to be with my cock in your ass, hmm?”

My words have the desired effect, dispelling her apprehension, and then when I reach around to massage her clit, she melts even more, humming her tuneless happy hum once again.

And so I begin.

I forge ahead slowly, tenderly, letting her find her breath when she needs it and giving her a much-needed break after my head pops past her first ring of muscle. I don’t pull out, but neither do I keep cramming in—I wait and let her breathe around the huge invasion, playing with her clit as I do.

Gradually, inevitably, the discomfort becomes something more complicated, the more complicated thing then in turn becomes a new kind of pleasure. I wait until I see this transformation ripple through her body, until her limbs go from a taut wariness to seeking me out. A hand reaches back for me, her feet part and open up her ass even wider, and most tellingly, her hips move back against me; she’s ready for more.

I impale her with care and love. I pierce her with affection and attention. I stretch and invade and stroke into her with every iota of emotion I’ve ever had for this girl—protectiveness and love and amusement and respect—it seeps into everything, and when I finally have her stretching around the base of me, I am barely holding it together. Trembling, sweating, my vision going dim around the edges.

“How are you?” I manage to say through the pleasure-fugue. “How are you doing?”

“I’m—” She’s shivering too, covered in a thin layer of sweat, and I can hear her pounding heartbeat in the threadiness of her voice. “I’m good. Strange. But good.”

“I’m going to move now,” I say in a hoarse voice. “I’m going to fuck you.”

“Yes, please, I—” I’ve started massaging her clit in earnest now and her words fall away into a moan. I slide carefully out, all the way to the tip, and then slide back in.

There are no words for it.

There are no words.

And I’m going to come embarrassingly fast.

“I’ve never been bare with a woman,” I mumble, my eyes glued to where my cock powers in and out of her. My naked cock, and fuck, if I’d known how good a naked cock could feel inside a woman, I don’t know that I would have been such a saint about wearing a condom. It’s slicker, just more, and her ass is the tightest, hottest fucking tunnel, and knowing that when I come it will touch her, it will be inside her—

No, I can’t do that, I promised, I promised—

Fuck, fuck, why did I ever make such a foolish declaration? Because now it’s all I want, all I ever want, and it feels like if I can’t do this, if I can’t have this one thing, I’ll die. I’ll simply die.

“It feels so dirty,” she whispers. “You being back there.”

“You like it, baby? You like me back there?”

“Fuck—yes.”

“Filthy girl,” I growl, banding an arm around her waist and raising her up to near-standing, keeping her upright as I thrust with an arm against her chest and a hand around her throat. My other hand continues to rub her pussy, tease fingers at her sopping wet slit. “You’re wet all over my hand. You get so wet for me, don’t you? So wet to have my cock in your ass?”

My words and my hand have her squirming and tightening and her hands flying backwards to grab at my shoulders. And then, with me buried deep inside her, stretching her virgin asshole, she climaxes with a slow, rolling cry, low and earthy and long. My name comes out, so does God’s, but mostly it’s that long cry, a cry that could be a hymn unto itself. A cry I memorize like a prayer.

She is everything around me, not just the slick massage squeezing my cock, but the nubile press of skin and warmth in front of me, the rose scent in my nose, the sweet taste of her cunt still on my tongue. Her laughter still in the air, the evidence of her passion and devotion all around us. Her clever words and her contradictions and her bravery and her vulnerability and her determination—

The jagged lurch just behind my cock almost warns me too late, and I jerk myself outside of her right as I start ejaculating. Cum goes everywhere, thick ropes of it, and like the animal I am, I’m pressing her cheeks around my spurting cock and fucking the cum-covered cleft until the climax finally wrings itself out and my body relaxes by degrees.

We are sticky and slick with oil and cum, Zenny laughing weakly as she comes to standing and wipes a hand across her sweaty face. I know I look ridiculous completely naked, with a still-wet cock and moonstruck expression on my face, but none of that is enough to stop the stupid words from coming out. I’m just so happy and I feel so good, and she’s smiling and stretching like a cat, and I love her I love her I love her.

“I love you,” I say.

And the world comes to a crashing halt.