"How did you learn that?" I ask. "Reading people like that."
She tells me. Julian's world, dinner parties where she was an ornament. Learning to track micro-expressions because missing signals meant bad nights. Not violence, Julian wasn't violent, but rooms whose temperature changed with his mood, and the only way to navigate was reading the weather before it arrived.
"Survival skill," she says. "I learned to read men the way sailors read weather."
"What do you read on me?"
She looks at me, long and transparent, and I wonder if she can see how badly I want to bend her over this table and fuck her until she screams my name. If she can read the violence and hunger and possession all tangled together under the collar.
"A man who's very good at pretending to be someone he's not." Pause. "But who's getting worse at it every day."
The observation lands. She's right. The collar is slipping, failing, the mask thinning. Every meal she cooks, every night with just yards between us, the distance between Father Gabriel and Gabriel Delgado narrows.
"Is that a problem?" I ask.
She considers genuinely, not performing thoughtfulness, and I imagine sliding my hand up her thigh while she thinks, finding her wet, making her lose that careful consideration.
"It depends on who's underneath."
"You've seen who's underneath."
"I've seen pieces. The parking lot. The gala. The…" She doesn't say the altar. Doesn't say how I dropped to my knees and ate her pussy like a man starving. "I've seen the man who breaks things and the man who kneels. I haven't seen the one in the middle."
The one in the middle. I’m not sure he exists.
After dinner, I scrub the last plate while she dries, our elbows occasionally brushing. The dishwater has cooled. She hands me a towel without looking up, knowing exactly when I'll need it. Later, she curls into the corner of the couch, book propped against her knees, one sock-covered foot tucked beneath her. The lamp casts a halo around her hair. I spread budget sheets across the table, pencil tapping against columns of numbers that swim before my eyes. Each time I glance up, the space between us seems to shrink. The radiator clicks. When she shifts position, I catch a hint of vanilla from her skin, something darker underneath, mingling with the lingering church incense in the curtains.
She turns a page. The soft whisper of paper shouldn't sound erotic, but everything she does has become foreplay: existing in my space, breathing my air, shifting on that couch in waysthat make her breasts move under her shirt. My cock stirs, the constant state since she moved in, this perpetual awareness of her body and how badly I want to touch it, taste it, claim it completely.
"Gabriel." She doesn't look up from her book. "I can feel you staring."
I don’t reply. Just sit here in silence and wish she could feel more of me than that.
14 - Seraphina
Itell him I’m going to Miami to see a gallery.
The lie slides off my tongue like water, smooth and automatic. Gabriel sits across from me at the kitchen table, morning light catching the steam from his coffee. My beans, his terrible toast between us. The mango bowl glows like a small sun between our hands.
"There's an exhibit I've been wanting to see," I add, hating how easily the fiction builds itself. "Contemporary pieces. Might be back late."
He nods, no suspicion in his eyes. "Be careful on the Turnpike. And remember." He taps his own wrist where my watch sits. "Three presses on the crown if anything feels wrong."
I couldn't sleep last night. Three AM found me staring at the ceiling in his new bed. I need distance. Space to think without his scent filling every breath. Without the constant awareness of him mere feet away, probably awake too, probably fighting the same demons. The decision formed before dawn: Miami. I'd go to Miami alone.
Reyes had scheduled our next meeting for two weeks out, but I can't wait that long. Not with the Markovics escalating. Not with this code burning against my chest. Not with Gabriel looking at me like he's burning and I'm both the water and the spark.
Now I'm lying to him about it.
"I should get going," I say, standing before the guilt shows on my face. "Beat the morning traffic."
He stands too, and for a moment I think he's going to kiss me goodbye. The possibility hangs between us, domestic, normal, everything we're not. Instead, he just watches me gather my things, his dark eyes tracking my movements with that intensity that makes my skin heat.
The rectory shrinks in my rearview mirror. Gabriel stands in the doorway, collar bright in the morning sun, watching until I turn the corner.
By the time I hit the Turnpike, I've folded away the woman who makes sofrito in his kitchen. Miami-Sera emerges, sharper, tactical, the mask I hate but need.
Reyes's office tower pierces the Brickell skyline. The receptionist with architectural cheekbones remembers me now. "Ms.Marin, Mr.Reyes is expecting you."
