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Let it.

XLVIII

Just Like A Prayer

The altar is still warm from the lie they built into it.

It wants a spectacle. It always has.

The boards under my spine are scorched and uneven, char flaking into my shirt, and the stink of old smoke rides the air like a bruise you can’t stop pressing. The hooks above us sway with the wind—soft metal on metal—making that thin sound I used to call holy because it was easier than admitting I was afraid of it.

Selah is close enough that fear doesn’t fit between us.

Her hand bunches her dress in her fist like she’s pulling herself out of softness by force. Like she refuses to let the world turn her into a symbol, even when it tries. Her mouth is at my throat. Her breath is warm. Her teeth graze just enough to remind my body that I’m alive.

“Right now,” she says, and the words hit like a command carved into bone, “you don’t belong to the Gospel.”

I should correct her.

I should say I never belonged to them. I should say they stole me. I should say they broke me down into parts and called the ruin devotion.

But the truth is simpler and uglier.

Belonging isn’t something you choose when you’re in chains.

It’s something you survive.

My attention keeps drifting to the perimeter. Habit. Threat assessment. A reflex I can’t bleed out no matter how many times I go under cold water and come back up pretending I can make myself clean. The Hollowborn hold the line between trailers, between fence posts and shadows, disciplined the way trained violence is disciplined—still, attentive, waiting.

They’re watching her.

They’re watching what she does with me.

Selah’s hand guides mine down, and my fingers lock on instinct—firm, anchoring, not because I’m taking, but because she told me to stay and my body believes her the way it never believed scripture.

My ring scrapes against her skin as my grip shifts, and the small sound turns my stomach. I hate that it still fits. I hate that I still wear it. A promise, they called it, when all it ever became was another chain dressed up as something holy.

Her mouth finds mine again, and she kisses me like she’s punishing the Gospel for daring to exist. Like she’s taking back every stolen inch of my body by force. She doesn’t make me perform wanting before she believes it. She doesn’t soften the edges for me.

She demands presence.

Something in me—something that’s been trained to obey pain and call it prayer—tries to fold inward the way it always does when intensity spikes.

The old instincts rise first, brutal and familiar, telling me to hide, to brace, to survive the wanting before it can become another kind of hurt. But her hand is on me, her breath is in my mouth, and her voice is in my bones.

Stay.

So I do.

I move my hands up her hips, steadying her, pulling her closer. My fingers find heat through fabric. Skin under it. The proof of her. Selah's mouth is demanding and hot. The tip of her tongue traces the lines in the roof of my mouth, making me tremble.

She makes a sound that isn’t permission and isn’t fear.

It’s need.

It cuts through me.

There’s movement at the edge—something shifting in the same measured rhythm as everything else out there, like the dark is listening for instruction.