Zenny’s monastery is an old stone house, sprawled lion-lazy over the block and surrounded by trees. I’m surprised at how intimidating it looks to me right now—big and venerable and almost castle-like—and even the trees seem to guard the women inside, fretting at me with leaves like hands flapping in warning.

I ignore them. If God Himself couldn’t stop me right now, then I’m certainly not going to let the trees do it.

I’m only here to say goodbye to her, I tell the trees. Calm down.

I glance down at my watch and then at the invitation I’ve got clutched in my hand. Elijah had wordlessly handed it to me during my mom’s funeral, and I don’t know what he wanted me to do with it—or if he simply wanted me to know that Zenny was still going to be a nun, despite le detour de Sean Bell. But I’d known what I needed to do the moment I saw it.

The monastery door is open, and I step inside the wide foyer, following the muffled, hymning sonance down the hall to the small chapel, slowing my steps the closer I get. And the slower I walk, the faster my heart hammers.

I tell my stupid heart to stop. That we’re only here to say goodbye. If Zenny can be brave enough to reveal how she feels in the face of this, then I can be too. I can set her free. And I’ll never recover, sure, because she’s it for me, she’s all a sinner like me gets—my one and only chance flashing like a firefly in the dark, too high up to catch. I’ll spend the rest of my life hurting with wanting her, missing her with swift and fierce aches. I’ll spend the rest of my life jealous of God, no matter what fledgling truces He and I have struck.

But I don’t want that for her; I don’t want her to waste any of her precious heart on an old sinner like me. I want her to live free and happy and full.

Without me.

It’s been two days since Mom’s funeral, and it’s weird to be approaching the chapel now, since it’s my second time in a religious space in almost as many days. Or maybe it’s weird how not-weird it feels.

Maybe I’m reformed.

The chapel doors are closed, and I have an uncomfortable foreboding that I might be too late, a foreboding that turns into a metallic panic I can taste in my mouth.

You can say goodbye just as easily after her vows as before, I remind myself, but it’s about more than that. I wanted her to feel free as she walked down the aisle to meet God, I wanted her to walk to God without any other claim on her heart. She deserved that at least, that final unmooring, that final atonement. She deserved that from me. And I’m too late to give it to her.

But then I hear a small hiccup coming from somewhere in the hallway, followed by a nose being blown. Curious, I follow the sound to its source: a small room off the side of the hallway and around the corner from the chapel’s entrance.

Inside, wearing the wedding gown she should have been wearing for me, is Zenny.

Crying.

Pacing.

Fucking gorgeous.

I had a thousand things I was going to say in this moment, a thousand smooth apologies and pretty speeches, but they all fly out the window the moment I see her crying. I can’t see it without wanting to make it better; I can’t bear the thought of anything making her sad, ever. It’s like physical pain.

“Zenny-bug,” I whisper and she starts, turning around to face me.

“Sean?” she asks…and then promptly bursts into a fresh round of tears.

I don’t care that we’re in the monastery, I don’t care what’s happened before this moment, there’s only her and her tears and doing whatever I can to stop them. I stride forward and sweep her up into my arms, like she’s my bride in truth, and then I carry her to the bench on the side of the room, sitting down with her cradled in my arms.

She buries her face in my chest, her slender body hitching with sob after sob, and there’s the silk and tulle of her bridal skirt everywhere around us, clouds of it. And I hold her close, crooning low and wordless at her ear as I rock her, as I stroke her hair away from her face and band her snugly against my torso and chest, holding her as I’ve wanted to hold her for the last week. Tight and close, with my face in her hair and her hands clutching at my chest.

“What is it, Zenny-bug?” I murmur. “What makes you so sad?”

She shakes her head against my chest, crying even harder, her hands now holding on to my T-shirt hard enough that the fabric is bunched in her palms, as if she is worried I’ll try to let her go.

Silly Zenny. As if I’d ever let her go.

I’ll hold her as long as she lets me. I’ll hold her for the rest of my life.

“I can’t tell what I’m supposed to do anymore,” she says tearfully into my chest. “I can’t tell what I want and what God wants and whether the two are the same thing.”

I don’t speak—I definitely have not built myself up to be the authority on what Zenny should do when it comes to taking her vows. So I just hold her and cradle her and kiss her head. I stroke her arm and make a deep, tuneless hum in my chest.

Slowly, so slowly that I don’t even take note of it at first, her sobs turn into muffled tears and the muffled tears turn into tired sniffs, until she’s slumped against me, enervated and quiet.

By degrees, I become aware of her body nestled against mine. The slender curve of her waist under my hand. The tickle of her curls against my throat. The firm curves of her ass cradled in my lap, the hook of her knees over my thigh.

Heat—unwelcome but unstoppable all the same—floods me, inflames me. I shift, trying to keep her innocent of my hardening cock.

“How long do you have?” I ask, wondering if I should make myself scarce before someone finds their newest novice in a man’s arms, in her Jesus wedding dress no less.

I feel her head turn to glance at the clock. “Thirty minutes. They’re praying about accepting me into the order, and then the rite will begin.”

I finger the beading on her wedding gown. It’s a few years out of fashion, and I have the feeling it was bought secondhand. Donated maybe. She still looks stunning, though, a vision right out of my reckless, unguarded dreams. The dress has straps draped across her shoulders, like Belle’s gown in Beauty and the Beast, a close-fitting silhouette of silk from her small, sweet breasts down to the tempered flare of her hips, and from there it spills into a kind of frothy madness that is very enchanting. I run my hand through the froth, closing my eyes and imagining—just for minute—that she really is my bride, that this is our wedding, that she’s in my arms because she wants to be there and not because I was an available chest to cry into.

I imagine that I can kiss her.

I imagine that I can love her.

Her hands have loosened in my T-shirt, and a finger now scrolls idly over my chest, up around the collar of my shirt to the bare skin of my neck.

“You shaved,” she murmurs.

“For the funeral,” I explain. That morning I could practically hear my mom clucking about what a ruffian I looked like, so I finally took a razor to the beard. I’d barely recognized the man in the mirror when I was done—the week of hospital life had carved fresh hollows under my cheekbones and smudged grief under my eyes. (My hair hadn’t suffered though. I was spared that at least.)

Zenny clears her throat and tilts her head up at me. “Why are you here, Sean?” she whispers. “Why today?”

“I came to make things right,” I say honestly. “I messed up. And I didn’t want you dragging that down the aisle with you.”

Her long eyelashes are still threaded with tears and they sparkle as she blinks. “You messed up,” she repeats carefully. “So you came here. Today. Right before I took my vows.”

“I don’t want a single part of what you do today to be tainted with anger or bitterness.” I tuck a curl behind her ear, watch as it ignores my fingers and springs back. “This is what you wanted. This is what you’ve worked so hard for. You deserve to have it be exactly what you dreamed.”

“And it didn’t occur to you that showing up would make it all about you, again? That it would stir up bad feelings for me? That it might make things worse?”

“Oh.” Fuck. I hadn’t.

Shit.

My head drops down as I loosen my arms around Zenny to let her go. All I’d wanted was to make things better—take a page from all the pirates and peers in the Wakefield books and make a grand gesture, but a grand gesture to support her, not to win her back. To show her that she and her life as she planned it meant miles and miles more than whatever my pulpy idiot heart still longed for.

And once again, I’d fucked it up.

Zenny moves, and I sure it’s to get off my lap, to get away from me, but hot relief and confusion flood through my veins when I realize she’s not climbing off of me, she’s rearranging herself. She’s straddling my lap so she can look me easily in the face, and as her knees nestle on either side of my hips, her dress surges up around us in white, silk waves.

“Sean,” she says quietly, cupping my face. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“But—”

She presses her fingertips to my lips. “I know what I said. It’s true. And I’m still glad you’re here.”

A month ago, I wouldn’t have understood this, how something could have an and. How something could be flawed but still good, how something could be imperfect but still worth loving.

I’m beginning to understand now.

“I was crying because I missed you,” she says. “I was crying because I love you.”

My heart is flinging itself madly around my chest now, pounding at its prison and choking me. “Zenny.”

That’s all I can get out. It’s all I have.

“You were right,” she says, looking away from me. “I’d begun to want this for all the wrong reasons. I was going to do this for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t about God any longer—it was about proving something to the people who doubted me. Everyone who thought my becoming a nun was ridiculous or wasteful, everyone who thought I wasn’t strong enough to give up money and sex.”

“Oh,” I say again. My tone says it all—that one noise is filled with a foolish hope the kind I’ve never dared to feel.

“Oh, Sean,” she says, and something like pity enters her voice.

My heart freezes.

“I still think I have to do this,” she whispers. “Just…for the right reasons now.”

“Oh.” That word again, like it’s the only word I know anymore.

“But you were the one who showed me that,” Zenny says gently—and dare I dream—sadly? Longingly? “I’ll always be thankful to you, not only for teaching me love, but for pointing me in the right direction. You’re right: I would have always regretted walking down that aisle and taking an oath with all the wrong intentions.”

I suppose this isn’t any worse than I’d initially feared and planned on, but somehow it feels like it. I try to regain control of my heart and fail; it’s vanished once again inside that hole in my chest. “I’m glad. I want you to have the life you want; I want all your choices to be yours. Always.”

“And you?” she asks, a little furrow appearing between her eyebrows. “What is the life you want? Are you going to be…”

She can’t finish, and I don’t need her to. She wants reassurance that I’m going to be okay without her, and I can’t unequivocally give it. I’m not going to be okay. But I guess that’s what I’ve learned over the past month: my being okay is not the most important thing in the world.

“God and I are on speaking terms now,” I offer, hoping to distract her from her question. “And for that, I have you to thank. You said belief was giving my heart and trusting that understanding would come later. And I realized at some point I’ve already given my heart without understanding—to you, Zenny. It wasn’t so hard to do it a second time with God.”

Her eyes flash anew with tears and she pulls me close. “Sean,” she breathes against my neck, and her breasts are flat against my chest and her thighs are tight around my hips and her ass is—

“Sweetheart,” I say, in a strained voice. “I need you to let go.”

“No,” she says, squirming even closer, trapping my rigid length between her mound and my own stomach. “That was beautiful.”

I endure this with as much forbearance as I can muster, although my voice is gravelled and harsh when I say, “Zenny, you have to stop moving around on my lap.”

This does make her pull away, just enough to straighten up and look at me, but the act of straightening brings her cunt squarely against my erection and her eyes flare with understanding. She swallows at the same time, warmth coming to her face.

“Oh,” she says. She’s been infected with that word too.

“Yes, oh,” I tease, trying to make light of it, make light of a very sad and aching cock. A sad and aching heart. “It would be better if you moved, darling.”

She doesn’t move. Instead she sits on my lap, regarding me, her breathing moving fast and hard and pushing her perfect tits against her Jesus wedding dress.

My thighs are actually shaking with restraint now, my stomach is clenched with it. It is taking every shred of decency inside me not to reach under her skirt and pull myself free, not to find her slit and pierce her with my fingers and then with my cock. Not to piston into her with her wedding dress billowing around us all while I trap her to my chest and dig my teeth into her neck. I can actually feel my lust like a physical thing, a fire or a pool of molten metal creeping up my legs to my belly.

“Baby,” I rasp. My hands are shaking as I put them to her waist to gently ease her off. “It’s—you’re—” I can’t make words.

“I’m what?” she whispers.

“I’ll always want to hold you, but I’m thinking about more than just holding you right now, which I know you don’t want.”

She looks at me with an expression torn between curiosity and responsibility. Air quavers in and out of her lungs as she asks, “What if I do want it?”

My head falls back against the wall. “Zenny,” I beg in a hoarse voice.

“Maybe…we could…just one last time?”

I have no response to this. None. Because if she’s asking if I want to fuck her one last time before she gives her life to God, then of course the answer is yes. Yes, and I’ll plunge inside of her this very second.

But I don’t know that it’s a good idea. And I don’t know that I won’t go to hell for it.

“It wouldn’t be smart,” I say, sliding my hands under her skirt and finding her thighs.

“No,” she agrees.

“And it would be crazy, here in this room, so close to the chapel.” I stand up, taking her with me.

“Yes,” she says, her legs wrapping around my waist and her arms sliding around my neck. “Crazy.”

I walk over to the door to the side room and close and lock it. I don’t know what I’m feeling—or I do, but it’s too much of everything to keep hold of at once. I should stop this, it’s going to hurt us both even more, I should be the older one and the wiser one and put her down.

I don’t want to put her down.

I don’t want to stop.

If this is my last taste of her, I’ll take it, weeping all the while.

“Does this little nun need to be fucked?” I growl into her ear as I pin her against the wall. “Is that pretty pussy feeling empty already?”

Her head rolls back as I nip softly at her neck—careful not to leave marks she’d have to explain away later—but hard enough to make her gasp and shudder. Under the skirt of her wedding dress, my hand finds the crotch of her panties and moves it aside, plunging two fingers into her split. She’s wet, so fucking wet, and so fucking soft, and suddenly I have to eat her, I have to have her on my tongue.

I let her legs slide away from my hips and I set her on the floor. Her whimper of dismay when my fingers leave her cunt is replaced by a jagged inhale as I reach for the hem of her skirt. With my other hand, I take her wrist and press her palm to her mouth, giving her a stern look. “Quiet, darling. You don’t want everyone to know that you’re in here getting fucked in your pretty dress, do you?”

She shakes her head, eyes wide, hand clapped tight over her mouth.

Which is a good thing, because the moment I get to my knees in front of her, a low belly moan of anticipation comes from around her hand. A moan I feel all the way to the tip of my cock.

My tongue runs along the rim of my lower lip as I push up the skirt of her dress and ease off her plain white panties. I need to taste. Need to lick. Need to suck.

Then she’s bared to me, that precious part of her. The neat nest of dark curls, the ripe bud of her clit peeping out from under the vulnerable hood. And when I open her up to me with my thumbs, I see the soft petals I love so much unfurling to reveal her slick, tight secrets.

“You weren’t feeling good, were you?” I murmur, rubbing thoughtfully at her clit. “Put your leg over my shoulder, sweetheart. Sean’s going to make you feel all better now.”

A noise comes out from under her palm—a noise that sounds a lot like oh God oh God—but she slides her leg over my shoulder anyway, allowing me access to the heart of her. I press my nose into her curls and breathe in deep, trying to memorize the sour-sweet-earth of her scent. I try to memorize everything—that first blooming taste of her on my tongue, her hips tilting and searching for my mouth, the jerk and quiver of her breathing as I begin eating her in earnest.

Everything is so soft. So soft. Like she might melt right onto my tongue, and I do my very level best to make her melt, I do. I suckle her clit and lick it, I swirl at her entrance and spear her opening with my tongue. I slowly introduce fingers and thumbs. I growl in appreciation as her hands lace through my hair and yank me closer; I moan and reach down to squeeze my cock as she starts fucking herself against my face because I’m going to come, I’m going to come just like this if I don’t suffocate my cock for a second.

Okay, maybe more like a minute.

And all the while, she’s fucking my face like it’s the last time she’ll ever have a face to fuck her pussy against—which it is.

“Sean,” she breathes around her finger. “Oh, fuck. Sean.”

She comes beautifully. Magnificently. A writhing, wet, gasping, happy little nun.

I wait for her to come down, nursing her through the peaks and valleys until her body goes completely soft and pliant under my lips, and then I stand up, wiping at my mouth with my arm. Her eyes blaze as they follow my movement, locking in on the sight of my wet lips. I curve them in a smirk.

“Did you like that?” I ask, leaning in close and circling the tip of my nose around hers. “Did you like having that poor pussy taken care of?”

“Yes,” she sighs happily. “Oh, yes. Please—” she pulls at my shirt, trying to chase me for a kiss, and I tease her by not granting it, moving my head whenever she moves so she can’t quite reach my lips. “Sean, please, I need you.”

For that, I let her kiss me, let her lick curiously at her own taste and clean it from my lips. “Say you love me,” I mumble against her mouth. “Say it again.”

“I love you,” she gasps out—gasping because before she can finish, I’m lifting her back up against the wall, my other hand fishing out my cock. Hearing her say it makes me crazed and tame all at once, feral and serene. I could listen to her say it for the rest of my life, I could survive just on the sound of those words alone, I could—

Wait.

Shit.

“I don’t have a condom, baby. I’m sorry.” I start to set Zenny down, and she clings to me.

“Don’t stop,” she pleads. “We’ve already been bare together before, so what does it matter?”

“Being bare inside your cunt carries a different set of problems.”

“I’m on birth control,” she argues.

“I’m not going to risk your future over this,” I tell her firmly. Between the teeth of my zipper, my cock gives a protesting throb. I ignore it. “You’re worth more than that. You’re worth everything.”

“Sean Bell,” she says, and her voice is sharp suddenly, not a little bit stern. I meet her eyes. “If I’m worth everything, then I’m worth listening to. I’m comfortable with the risks.”

“Fuck, Zenny. God knows I want to pin you flat to the wall and fuck you until neither us remember our names.” I’m shaking again, still holding her tight in my arms, and when she moves to hike herself more comfortably, the head of my cock drags through her wet center. I suck in a wounded breath through my teeth, my head falling onto her shoulder.

She bites my earlobe. “I want you,” she says. “I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”

I pull away so I can search her face. Her eyes are warm and urgent, her mouth drawn into a pout of tormented need.

Who the fuck am I kidding? I can’t resist her; I can’t resist giving her anything she wants, ever.

“Honest girl thing?” I ask, needing to be sure.

“Honest girl thing.”

I notch the naked head of me into her cunt and meet her gaze. “Kiss me,” I beg. “Kiss me while you let me inside you.”

She kisses me with the eagerness of a schoolgirl, her mouth open and her tongue seeking, and for a minute we are poised just on the edge of sin, our tongues meeting and mating and my penis only just breaching her. “You make me come apart,” she says against my mouth. “You make me more like myself.”

And that does it for me. I’m gone with loving her, gone with this tumbling, heedless fall with her.

I thrust inside.

There’s nothing between us.

Nothing at all, except for God and broken promises and two grasping, reaching hearts.

My teeth sink into the delicate slope between neck and shoulder, and she moans low and pleased. “I can feel you,” she says in some wonder. “I can feel your skin. Your heat.”

My knees are close to buckling as I work my way into her belly; static and sparks flash across my eyes; I’m airless, airless, taut as a bowstring and perishing right here in front of God, with His nun pinned up against the wall and my pants down around my hips.

Gentle and invasive all at once, the bold tip of my cock kisses against Zenny’s womb, and I nearly stagger with the feeling and with the idea, and all that’s left to me are smashcuts of sensation—

her pussy in a wet, unrelenting squeeze

and

the hidden corrugations and patterns of her body, all soft, all tight, all wet

and

the plump rub of her clit above my cock

and

silk everywhere, her frothy skirt overflowing my arms and rustling and waving and the lush mounds of her breasts heaving under the silk bodice.

“Does it feel good?” I say huskily, looking up into her face as she looks down into mine with a faint red hue to her cheeks and her mouth parted. “Did you need to ride on my cock, baby?”

“Yes,” she pants out, her hips moving with me, angling and squirming. “God. I needed it so much.”

“Why?”

“I needed to be full—fuck yes God—you make me so full.”

“Shit,” I groan, flexing my cock inside her just to feel the stretch and hug of her tight body. “Shit yeah, I do.”

She squirms in my arms again, seeking, seeking, her head falling back and exposing a slender, delicate throat.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” I encourage her, watching with fascination as that delicate throat flutters with her lust-frenzied pulse. “Take what you need. Use my cock to make yourself feel all nice and good again.”

Her mouth opens once more, a silent cry, and she’s a writhing angel in my arms, falling from heaven and touching ecstasy all at once, and she sobs out a broken I love you as her body flings itself right into the mouth of hell, shuddering with illicit sin in the arms of a sinner, right in the very dress she wore to meet God.

Did I say I was reformed earlier?

I lied.

I’m about to fill up a nun with a week’s worth of pain and anger and loneliness. I’m going to put the tip of my cock right to the firmness of her womb and claim her from the inside out. I’m going to fuck her in this wedding dress that’s not meant for me, and fuck her until we’re sweaty and desperate and spent.

And I do.

I bounce her hard on my cock, I stretch that pussy around my thick, heavy erection until she’s shaking in my arms with her third climax, and then I let it go, all of it.

I let go of the loneliness and the loss.

I let go of the control and the chaos.

And with a juddering moan, I spend into her with several long, hot pulses, an entire week’s worth saved up for her. There’s enough that I feel it leaving me, that I feel it smearing between us, and I imagine the crudest, crudest things: making her drip with me, making her pregnant. It’s awful, but it’s all I can think of as I throb and release deep into her belly. It’s all that crowds my mind—that and the rose-scent of her throat, where my face is buried.

It ended too fast, I realize unhappily. My last intimate moments with Zenny, and they passed faster than I could grab at them, slipping right through my fingers.

Zenny seems to think this too, clinging tight to me, her hands twisting in my shirt and her heels still locked against my back. And we come down together like this, wet and shaky and temporarily whole. I could cry with the unfairness of it.

“It’s time, baby,” I reluctantly murmur, helping her to her feet. It’s heaven to hold her, but she has a different heaven waiting for her and I can’t be the one who ruins it.

I help her clean up with some Kleenex, and I help her rearrange her panties, her dress, her hair, until the only evidence of what just happened is the barely perceptible blush on her cheeks and chest, and the spill of me inside her, invisible to everyone except God.

And then there are no more excuses. It’s time for her to go to her vows, and it’s time for me to leave.

I give her a final kiss, long and lingering, her soft lips yielding under mine and then I straighten up. “I love you,” I tell her. “I’ll always love you.”

“You’re not staying?” she asks, her lips trembling. “You won’t stay?”

“I think I’ve been very patient, all things considering,” I say. “But watch you forswear your love for me and pledge your heart to another? Even if that other person is God? I can’t bear it, Zenny. I can’t do it.”

A tear spills over, followed by another and another. “I haven’t been good to you, have I?”

I look away. “You’ve been very good—”

She shakes her head, forcing a rueful smile through her tears. “No. I haven’t. I don’t know if I can say sorry for all of the times—I don’t believe they were wrong—but I know sometimes I was…deeply inconsistent. Hot and cold.”

“You had reasons to be wary,” I say tiredly. “You wanted something transactional between us, and I broke that.”

“But I broke it too,” she confesses. “I couldn’t tell you because I was terrified of feeding it…this fire inside my chest. But, oh Sean, every time you said one of those things—”

“Things?”

She waves a hand. “You know what I mean. Or whenever your voice would get low and rough, or whenever your eyes would get so big and open, like a sky after rain… Every time, I would feel that fire trying to burn and claw its way free. You do that to me. You tear me open and it was all I could do to hold on to the edges of my soul as you did. I loved you and I was scared, and if I had been honest…well.” She sucks in a deep breath and takes my hand in hers, pressing it to her heart. “Maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much.”

Her heart thumps quietly inside her chest, a tired and mournful bird, and I can’t help it, just one more kiss, one final brush of lips and one final taste of her.

“It was always going to hurt, Zenny-bug,” I whisper against her lips. “Always.”

I soak in a last vision—dark, shining eyes and a tart little nose and a sweep of lush, ticklish curls—and then I surrender her to the hands of God and her sisters. I close the door to the waiting room behind me, effectively slicing our love apart for good, and as I do, my heart breaks

one

last

time.