"We?"
Seminary never covered this: how to explain why a beautiful woman is emerging from your rectory on Sunday morning. The parking lot connects everything. No back exit unless sheclimbs through the bathroom window, which I consider for three desperate seconds before accepting that would be worse.
"You leave early," I say, scanning the lot through my kitchen window. No suspicious vehicles. "Before anyone arrives. Drive somewhere, come back in twenty minutes, park like any parishioner."
She looks at me with something between amusement and pity.
“Are you more scared of Markovic’s men or your own parishioners?” she asks.
I refuse to dignify that with an answer.
“Well?” she insists.
I glance up. “I can’t punch my parishioners into submission, so…”
She checks the GPS watch—panic button untouched, tracker steady. Good. She leaves at eight-fifteen, wearing a thin jacket and still damp from my shower, and I try not to think about water running down her body, my soap between her breasts, her hands spreading lather over skin I've barely touched.
The parking lot is empty. Perfect.
Except for Alma.
Alma's sedan pulls in just as Sera pulls out. Through my window, I watch Alma's head swivel with the deliberate rotation of a woman acquiring ammunition. I am comprehensively fucked, and not in the way my cock has been begging for.
By eight-forty Sera's back, taking the third pew as I enter in vestments. She's wearing a simple dress that makes her collarbone look like territory I need to mark with my teeth. Her hair has dried loose. I can imagine the scent of my soap on her, and my cock responds by pressing insistently against my pants under the flowing vestments.
The Gospel reading goes fine. The prayers, manageable. Then comes the homily.
I step to the lectern, open my notes, look up.
She's watching me with her intense focus, filing me away like evidence. Learning my professional face the way she's learned what I look like when I come.
"God's mercy is not transactional. We don't earn it through—"
She shifts, crosses her legs. The dress rides up just enough to show the curve of her thigh, and my brain whites out. That's the thigh I gripped at the gala. That's the thigh that trembled when I had my fingers inside her, when she was so wet she dripped down my hand.
"Through our works," I manage. "But through grace freely given—"
She pushes hair behind her ear, exposing her neck. I'm paralyzed by memory: her confession about Julian—’he'd say kneel and I'd kneel, and my pussy would clench before he even touched me.’ My cock throbs so hard I have to grip the lectern to stay upright.
Three sentences about mercy tumble out, probably backwards. Mrs.Alvarez dabs her eyes like I've said something profound. Alma watches from the back, clearly not buying any of this.
I make the mistake of looking at Sera again. She's just existing, breathing, being a person in a church. But my mind supplies the image anyway: her in the confessional, my cock disappearing into her mouth, the way her throat worked to take all of me, how she moaned while swallowing my cum like she loved the taste.
"And so we see," I say to the back wall, "that mercy requires us to… to open ourselves to grace. Let us pray."
The Our Father has never been more necessary. I deliver the rest of mass to fixed points on walls—anywhere but the third pew where she sits wearing my soap like she's marked by me.
After mass, after the handshake line, Alma corners me.
"That woman. From the diner."
"She needed help with—"
"At eight-fifteen in the morning? With damp hair?"
"It's not what you're thinking."
Her look says she's thinking plenty and all of it's accurate. "Father Gabriel, I've known you three years. You’re a good man. You take care of your flock. But you run like demons chase you, and now suddenly there's a woman in your shower?"
