The Drazen World: LUST (Kindle Worlds Novella) (4 page)

He waits a single, infuriatingly long moment. It might only be a second, but caught in this juxtaposition between heaven and hell where I am, balanced on the brink, it feels like an eternity. Then without warning, his hand clamps back around my cock. “Come,” he orders, and I had no idea I could do that, come on command, but oh God, I do.

I double over with the force of my orgasm, my cum spilling onto the ground in front of us, all over his hand, almost my jeans, but he catches it deftly, with a practiced move, his palm spreading to collect every drop that didn’t already hit the dirt of the garden.

I keep going, longer than I ever have before, emptying myself into his palm, my cock spasming hard with every fresh wave of cum. Finally, with a huge gasp for air, I finish, and he slides his hand over me, coating my dick in my own cum, wiping it across my crotch too, so I’ll feel it all day long, even when I pull my jeans and boxers back up.

Then he lifts his hand to my face, a faint sheen of my juices still coating his fingers and palm.

“Clean it off,” he says.

I lick every inch of his palm again, tasting myself and him mingled together, a new flavor every bit as intoxicating as him on his own, because it’s both of us combined. I lick and suck until his fingers and palm are cleaned of every drop of me, and I would have kept running my tongue over his calloused fingers—calloused from what, I wonder, what does this priest face in his life to make his hands so world-weary? —except he stills me with a soft grip on my shoulders, and pulls his hand away.

I turn around now, wanting to reach for him, feel him against me once more. But he’s already standing, dusting dirt from his knees.

I stuff myself back into my jeans, shoving to my feet as I pull the zipper. “Paul,” I start, wanting to grab his shoulders, draw him against me. Wanting to feel those full lips against mine.

But he’s already turning away from me, a heavy shoulder blocking my path. “That was a one-time thing,” he says, those green eyes fixated on the house, refusing to meet mine.

“Paul,” I repeat, a little louder. A little angry, now. How can he do that, go from completely in control of me, ruling over me, giving me more pleasure than I knew was possible, straight into this closed-off robotic expression?

“I can’t do this,” he says, his voice hard as iron. Before I can wrap my head around this, before I can come up with anything even approaching an adequate reply—
what the fuck do you mean, you just did it
, maybe, or perhaps,
why the fuck not
—he’s already walking back up the path out of the garden, toward the house, the crowd of people.

The wake, which until this moment I had forgotten entirely about.

Figures. Just when I realize what could fix me, what could remove me from my own pain long enough to make the world seem semi-okay again, it’s taken away.

Fact of the matter is, I’ve never felt as right as when Paul had his hands on me, his voice in my ear.

And from the looks of it, I’ll never feel that right again.

I turn to follow Paul into the house, when my foot nudges something in the soft loam of the garden dirt. I glance down at it, lean over to reach for the object.

A simple gold chain, attached to a watch I don’t recognize. It’s a little dirty from where it fell, but otherwise undamaged thanks to the soft dirt here, freshly churned around a little patch of flowers Gabby and Monica had been working on.

I brush the dirt from the back of the watch and turn it over in my palm.

To Paul
, reads a small, curling inscription across the back.
All my love, Marcus.

Chapter Five

Three days have passed. Three days since the wake, since we put my sister into the ground.

I’ve lost count of how many hours it’s been now, since her death. It doesn’t seem worth counting them anymore. Why bother? There’s only forever left to live through.

I’m not eating. Barely sleeping. I lie awake at night and think about the only thing that distracts me from the ache in my chest every time.

Him.

I picture his firm body naked before me. I picture myself running my hands over him, worshipful, as he grips my hair in his fist, directing my head where he wants it to go, toward his gorgeous, thick cock, curved up toward me like it’s begging me to suck it dry.

I picture that cock poised behind me, parting my ass cheeks, teasing at my entrance.

I picture him fucking me the way I’ve only ever dreamed of being fucked. Until I’m helpless to resist. Until I’m so bruised I can’t walk the next day.

I failed to find Father Paul Kendrick at the wake to return the watch he dropped in the garden. If I’m honest, I didn’t try all that hard. At night, when it’s gotten too late and my eyes have gone dry from staring wide-eyed at my ceiling, I flick on my bedside light and study the inscription again. Run my fingers over the smooth metal that he touched, that he carried in his pocket with him for who knows how long.

But now, after three days of letting that tiny little keepsake soothe me, I know I need to do the right thing. Return it.

So, first thing after I finish calling the manager of the hotel where we’ve got a gig next weekend, what will be our first without Gabby—another painful jolt, another pang in my heart—I hop into my car and drive to the church. Funny, how I spent years avoiding this place, and now it seems that I’m here all the damn time.

I guess it’s true what my distant relatives say, about tragedy driving the wayward Catholics back to mass. But this probably wasn’t how the conservative Catholics who raised me pictured this going, when they told me that as a rebellious teenager. Certainly they didn’t imagine the sexy, dominant gay priest who would beckon me back into the church, anyway.

But when I climb the steps into the church and pace the empty halls, my heart sinks in disappointment. He's not here.

It takes me a while to find the little office off to the side, through the attached school where they teach Sunday school every weekend. Voices drift through the semi-deserted halls, so I follow them to a room with a half open door. The voices hush when the floor creaks beneath me, and I hear the high-pitched, muffled laughter of a woman, followed by the soft sound of a slap against a fabric-encased body part.

Sounds like I'm not the only one who's been inspired to mess around this close to church.

A moment later, a brunette with flyaway curls sticks her head into the hallway. Her eyes lock onto mine, and her cheeks flush as she pats at her more-mussed-than-it-probably-was-a-few-minutes-ago hair. "Can I help you?" she asks breathlessly.

"I'm looking for Pa—Father Kendrick?" I correct myself mid-speech. After all, how many parishioners would be on a first name basis with the new priest? I don't want to draw any more attention to myself than necessary.

Strictly speaking, if I really didn't want to draw any attention, I'd just leave the watch with this woman and skip out of here. Go back to swiping through the bottomless pit of vapid hotties I found on that dating app where I met Adam. Surely not all of them are as useless as he turned out to be.

But I can't shake my memories of Paul. Can't forget the feeling of his hand wrapped around my cock, quite literally driving me to my knees, or the sound of his harsh voice in my ear, taking me over in a way I never even knew I craved.

"He works at A Safe Place on Tuesdays," the woman says, jerking a thumb toward a little flyer tacked to the bulletin board.

It takes me a moment to piece together that it's even Tuesday today. God, I'm a fucking mess. But I follow her gesture to the little flyer, remove it from its thumbtack and read the description across the top.

A Safe Place
for children of all ages, is a charity run by . . . blah blah. I read between the lines.

It's a halfway house.

I open my mouth to ask the woman what he does there, if he's preaching, if it's a private event or what. But she's already slipped back inside her side office, the door shutting firmly behind her this time. The soft laughter is even louder now, like she's assessed me and decided I'm not a threat, so she can be as loud as she wants with whoever she's got inside there.

With a shrug, I tuck the flyer into my back pocket. There's an address at the top, not a far drive from here.

And I've got a watch to return.

***

It doesn't take me long to locate the place. Even if I hadn't known what they did here, I could guess from the shabby exterior, the rundown feel of the building.

And the couple dozen kids ambling around the yard. Some younger ones playing a raucous game of tag, and a few older ones lying on their backs in the grass, cloud-watching maybe, or just talking. Two of them, a boy and a girl who must be about seventeen, are holding hands as they watch, though the moment they hear me unlatch the front gate, their hands spring apart guiltily.

"Is there a Father Kendrick here?" I ask them, since they seem the most likely to be semi-paying attention to who enters this house today.

The girl just stares at me, but the boy jerks his thumb toward the front door. "Kitchen," he says.

It's odd. I expected to find Paul talking to the kids, maybe about religion, or sharing a Bible verse or . . . I don't know. Anything but this. But when I find my way through the house to the kitchen, helped along by a couple adult staff members just inside the entrance who I explain my quest to, there's Paul, shirtsleeves rolled up to his biceps, elbow-deep in a sink full of suds.

"You're doing dishes?" I ask from the doorway, leaning against the frame for a moment. We're alone in the kitchen, at least for now, though the traffic in the house seems ceaseless and unpredictable.

He glances over his shoulder at me, those eyes of his a shock all over again when they latch onto mine. If he's surprised to see me here, he doesn't let on. After a moment of eye contact, he turns back to the sink. "I do whatever they need me to. Whatever will help. With this many mouths to feed, though, dishes are always a pretty safe bet."

"Are you always this . . ." I start, then sigh when I can't quite find the word I'm looking for.

He raises his eyebrows expectantly.

“Unpredictable?” I finally blurt.

"I wouldn't call volunteer work unpredictable for a man of the cloth," he replies evenly.

I shrug one shoulder, an unconscious imitation of his usual move. "Maybe not any other man of the cloth." I take a step closer, and he slowly draws his hands from the sink, wiping them one at a time on the tea towel beside him. I can't stop watching those mesmerizing hands. The hands that coaxed a stronger orgasm from me than I even realized possible. "But a man like you?"

He steps away from the counter, closer to me. The air between us electrifies. We're still a foot apart, and yet already I can feel his body against mine, the ghost of all the places on my body that he's already touched.

My eyes won't tear themselves away from his curved lips. They bow in a little, secretive smile, and I swear my knees shake at the sight.

"You don’t know what kind of man I am.” His breath ghosts across my lips as he speaks, an aftertaste of mint. He takes another step closer, and my pulse leaps in my veins. "Why are you here, Darren?”

It's the first time he's said my name, and fuck, it does terrible things to me. Terrible, pleasurable things. I imagine him gasping that name as I take his cock in my throat, or wrap my fist around him the way he took me.

“I found something of yours. Wanted to give it back.” Yet I make no move to reach for my pocket, or take out the watch. Some instinctive part of me knows that the moment I do, this meeting will be over. And I want this to last as long as possible.

“I already told you I can’t do this.” He frowns, and turns away from me. “You aren’t very good at listening to instructions.”

“Never have been, no.” I lean against the counter. “Well. Aside from when you have your hands on me, for some reason. Then it was pretty easy to obey.”

His shoulders tighten, his back still turned. “You can’t be here, Darren.”

“Why not?” I ask, suddenly reckless, not caring about the line I’m treading. “What’s so bad about this? It felt pretty damn good to me. And you seemed to enjoy it.” I watch him carefully, judge by the tilt of his head and the ripple that runs through his muscles that he’s remembering the garden every bit as powerfully as I am.

He wants me too. Whatever he claims, I can see it written all over his body.

I reach out to grasp his arm, spin him around, and when I do, his green eyes fly straight to mine, burning up with hunger. But his mouth remains a hard, angry line.

“Stop doing this,” he says, his voice low and throaty.

“Doing what?” I ask, even though a part of me understands what he means. My tongue darts out to wet my lips, and his eyes track its progress hungrily.

“Tempting me.”

“Turnabout is fair play, Father. I can’t stop thinking about you. And I know you want to take me again.”

Those eyes flick back to mine, seemingly surprised, as I raise my hand to trace my fingers up his stomach. It’s the first time I’ve been the one to touch him. The fabric of his black off-duty shirt is primly starched, but through it, I can still feel the raised ridges of his muscles, every bit as well-defined as I knew they would be. I trace those muscles up, toward his pecs, taking my time. Never taking my eyes from his. "Tell me how to please you, Father," I whisper.

His lips part, his eyelids half-closed now with pure, burning want. I risk a glance away, down to his crotch, and my smile widens as I see his need growing there.

He wants me. Every inch as badly as I want him.

But then there's a soft crash from another room, the patter of running feet, and he jerks away from me, back to the sink, shoulders hunched high around his ears. His fists are clenched at his sides. “Get out of here.”

"Paul . . ."

"I said
go
. Don’t try following me again." Those shoulders clench, his muscles corded through his shirt.

"Fine," I snap. I rip the watch from my pocket and set it on the counter beside him, with a little more force than strictly necessary. "I only came to bring you this anyway. You left it in my sister's backyard." I inject a bit more venom into that statement than necessary, too. Suddenly, a dark, injured part of me wants to remind him exactly how we got to this point. Whose fault this really is. "You know. When you had me on my knees with your hand on my—"

"Stop."

The pain and anger in his voice stops me dead. I glance from his bent head, to the watch on the counter. He’s almost shaking, staring at it now.
All my love
, said the inscription, and I can't help but wonder who that means. Who Marcus was.

Why Paul won't let me past his guard, when he clearly has no qualms about smashing through my own resistance to take what he wants.

I turn around and storm out of the safe house without a backwards glance.