SASHA DIDN’T SAY NO, and part of her wanted to celebrate her good luck at Patrick playing into her fantasy. “Sure. I’d love to keep you company.”
Patrick started turning over chairs and putting them on top of the empty tables. Without words, Sasha joined him. They worked in silence until they were done, and Patrick returned behind the bar and started making her a whiskey sour.
Burning, sweet, and tart. Just like she felt around Patrick Dooley.
“Your family is a trip.”
Sasha didn’t stifle her laugh. It was a relief to not suppress her emotions after spending hours with her mother. It was so automatic that she didn’t even realize she was doing it half the time. “That’s an understatement.”
“How’d you—”
“Not end up being a total bitch?”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“But that’s what you meant.” She leaned toward him and the danger of being too close to him.
Patrick shrugged, respectful enough not to deny it.
“I guess it’s because I try to do the right thing even though I want to do the wrong thing. I pretend to be the good girl they want me to be.” He put down her drink in front of her and she took a sip, meeting his gaze. “Even though I want to be my own person and live by my own rules.”
“Is that what this . . .” he said, motioning between them, “. . . is?”
The fact that he’d noticed there was something between them was a cataclysm. His words made her want to throw everything she’d just said to the wayside and jump over the bar to kiss him. She wanted to forget all about trying to be good and just allow herself to be fully bad.
But she stopped herself. If only to dig in to what he’d said before humiliating herself. “What do you mean?”
Patrick rolled his eyes, and she got a picture of what he must have been like as a wayward adolescent. It was another un-priestlike thing that she needed to file away for when they both came to their senses. They would both come to their senses, right?
“I might be a priest, but I haven’t forgotten what this is like.” He made the same motion.
Still, Sasha shook her head. “You’re going to have to elucidate. I’m still not clear.”
“Chemistry. Heat. The whole thing.”
Each word hit her right in the abdomen, turning it liquid and hot. “Are you trying to seduce me?”
“No.” The word was like a bucket of cold water, leaving her whole system confused. “I can’t seduce you.”
“If you could?”
Patrick raised his brow and poured himself two fingers of scotch. He leaned down against the bar so that his right forearm was close to her left forearm. “If I could, I would have ages ago.”
It was as though the bucket of cold water had never happened. “How?”
He canted his head toward her and said, “I don’t think it would be all that difficult.”
“So you think I’m easy?” God, she loved teasing him. When had she ever had this much fun around a man? Definitely not with Nathan. Maybe not since college, when the stakes were a monthlong fling rather than a lifelong commitment.
“No, I don’t think you’re easy. I think this would be easy.”
This. She loved how he said it and wanted him to lay out what this was.
“How are things going with Chet?”
Sasha was confused for a moment, and then she realized that he meant Nathan. “Nathan and I have seen each other a few more times. I like him,” she said, more to convince herself than Patrick. “He’s a good guy.”
“You talk about him like he’s a long stint downstate,” Patrick scoffed. “Or lima beans.”
That made Sasha’s spine stiffen. He didn’t have the right to flirt with her. They couldn’t touch. They could certainly never kiss or fuck or make babies. Why did he think he could judge her trying to ease herself into a lovely relationship with someone who could give her all of those things?
She leaned her head so that she met his gaze. So close that he could kiss her with the most minor tilt of his head. “What’s it to you?”
“I hate it that you don’t have this,” was all he said before he kissed her cheek. It was the most intense kiss she’d ever had, and it wasn’t even on her mouth. The feel of his soft lips against her skin was incredibly sensual. She was already warm all over from being near him, but this was far too much.
And when it was over, in what could have been a month or a minute, she turned her head so that she could meet his gaze. It was molten and intense. She was drawn to it like a flame.
“What was that?”
“I’m sorry.” He might be, but she wasn’t. “I didn’t mean—I couldn’t help—”
“I couldn’t help it either.”
“So you and that other guy don’t have this.”
Sasha shook her head and Patrick closed his eyes as though the disturbance in the airflow caused by her movements was a caress. “No.”
“What do you want from me, Sasha?”
How could she answer that when the answer was absolutely everything? She wanted him to lay her out on top of the bar and strip off all of her clothes. She wanted him to lick and suck and bite at her skin until it was bruised and aching for any other reason than needing him to touch her. She wanted him to completely lose control and empty himself inside her body.
But she couldn’t have those things because there was guilt marring his perfect features from just a kiss on the cheek. It seemed that he didn’t expect her to give him an answer either because he said, “I thought about you the other night in the shower.”
“Did you touch yourself?” She might not be able to tell him all of her thoughts on what they should do with this, but that certainly wasn’t going to stop her from a follow-up now.
He nodded. “I hadn’t done that in—a long time.”
That admission filled her with a level of pleasure she hadn’t previously known. It filled her with electricity and sensual power, and she wanted more of it. “How did it feel?”
“Amazing.” More sparks across her skin. “And terrible.” Even more.
“I haven’t let myself do the same.” She didn’t know why she admitted that. It had the potential to give him the wrong idea—that she didn’t want him at least three times as much as he wanted her. “I don’t think I could stop.”
She bit her bottom lip, and his gaze dropped there. The moment stretched and morphed and the stuffy air in the bar turned even thicker. The faint smell of his fresh sweat wafted off his skin. They breathed each other in for what felt like a millennium. She could see his brain working behind his green eyes. They almost glowed at her. She was sure that they were having the same thoughts. They both wanted to take this further than thoughts and furtive masturbation sessions, but they couldn’t. And how much she wanted him felt like physical pain. He reached out one finger and smoothed the crinkle in her brow. His touch was electric.
“I should leave.” Sasha had let this go way too far.
He shook his head and didn’t lose her gaze. “Stay.”
“I want to.” She couldn’t breathe, but she wanted to drown in him.
“Show me.”
At first she didn’t understand his words. Her brain was too scrambled up in what was happening right at the moment and the things she wanted to happen that maybe, probably, never could. But his words sank in eventually, and somehow her brain got the message to her hand that it should move up to cup her own breast. She gasped when her thumb grazed her nipple through her bra and the flippy sundress she’d put on just for the man in front of her.
He looked down and just watched. He made no effort to touch her, and she didn’t think he would. This was just fair play. He’d thought about her while touching himself, and she hadn’t allowed herself that. So she got him watching her touch herself, and that would punish him for what he’d done.
It was penance.
“More.” It was a grunt, not a word. She didn’t question what his words meant, even in her own mind. She slipped her hand under the hem of her skirt and touched her pussy through her panties. She was wet, and she moaned at the contact.
Patrick reached around her shoulders then, and she stilled. He wasn’t supposed to do this. This wasn’t supposed to make things worse. But he didn’t touch her, just the back of her stool to push it back. “Lean back and spread.”
She did it without thinking. Slipping her fingers inside her panties, she touched herself the way she did when she was alone. She touched herself like she did when she wasn’t pretending to like the way the man whose ego she was responsible for not sinking touched her.
For his part, Patrick was fascinated and transfixed on the way her fingers moved under her skirt. Almost like he was cataloguing and learning for the future the way she wanted to be touched. She was beyond reminding herself that there was no future.
Between the two of them, alone in a mostly dark bar, there was no time. This was happening before he was a priest and after they were both dead in graves, the bodies that they inhabited at the moment being subsumed by the earth itself.
Energy filled her body, and all her muscles went taut. The only sounds were his heavy breaths, him chuffing with his apparent effort not to touch her, and the sounds her body made—moans and her wet fingers rubbing.
“Let me see.”
She growled at him in frustration, and he chuckle-grunted, so she did what he asked. She flipped up her skirt and moved her panties aside to show him. For a moment, he dropped his forehead to the bar and made an anguished sound that filled Sasha with power and brought her back to where she’d been before he’d interrupted her flow.
He lifted his head when she started moving again, and he wasn’t looking at where she was touching herself. Their gazes met and held, and she kept going until she thought her orgasm would break her into pieces.
It had never felt like this before. This was like nothing else she’d ever felt. It was bigger, and it would devastate her when she was done. That was the only thing that held it off for long moments before it hit her like a tidal wave. She couldn’t help but close her eyes. Her body bent and her forehead hit the bar.
When she stopped moving, that was when he touched her. Just his palm on the back of her sweaty neck. She could feel that he was trying to tell her it was okay, but it wasn’t.
It was fairly clear in her mind that it would never be okay again. She would never be able to get the awed look on his face out of her mind. She’d never felt sexier, more powerful, less tethered to the expectations of her family. All her life, she’d been a handmaiden to those expectations. But now, she wasn’t sure that she could do that anymore.
His grip tightened, and so she didn’t move for long moments. The cool mahogany against her skin a reminder that she wasn’t in some celestial cocoon out of space and time, that she’d just jilled off in front of a frocked priest in a bar that wasn’t even locked.
And she didn’t feel guilty at all.
However, she could feel the remorse coming off Patrick in waves. She was sure that he regretted it. How could he not? In his mind, he’d already sinned. In hers, she’d twisted this so that this would somehow even the score.
But the way he’d looked at her—he’d loved this just as much as she had. This would stain his psyche as much as it would hers.
This was a problem.
That was the thought that made her lift her head. This time, he didn’t meet her gaze. He looked down at her wrinkled skirt and sighed.
“Are you okay?” That he asked that, even when it was clear that he was not, made her heart ache for him. And somehow that was worse than the fact that she still wanted him to fuck her. What they’d just done had done nothing to dim her lust. No, she wanted him inside her even more. The way he’d pulled on all the right strings and pushed all the right buttons without even touching her told her that anything else they did would maybe create a tear in the universe.
The idea made her feel more than a little destructive. And the only thing that kept her from pushing things farther, from asking him to touch her more and condemn himself, was the sweat on his upper lip.
The fact that he was trying so hard not to want her, that there was something about this life he had that made him stop, made her stop.
She straightened out her clothes and nodded, finally answering his question. “I’m okay. Are you?”
He nodded but didn’t speak.
“I’m going to go.” She wanted him to stop her.
But he didn’t. “That’s probably—” He didn’t finish his thought. Whatever he was going to say would definitely hurt her and it might hurt him. But she wasn’t going to stick around to ask, because every time they talked, the talking led to them both doing something that they knew they shouldn’t.
The problem was that doing it made her feel less like a bad person—instead she felt free.
But her freedom came at a price—and it was the fact that he thought that some higher power was actually keeping tabs on what people did with their genitals and meting out punishment based on how much fun they were having.
This thing with Patrick was making her realize how deep that patriarchal bullshit had seeped into her veins. Breaking all the rules—fooling around with a priest instead of the man who wanted to date her and was free to do so—was setting her free. It was making her brave.
But it was not doing the same thing for the man in front of her. She was ruining him, and this had to stop.
“Let’s not be alone anymore.” That was the only way this was going to stop. If they weren’t alone, they couldn’t give in to this.
He nodded.
“I’m going to go.”
He nodded again, and she stopped waiting for him to say something. Still, she walked to the door slowly, in fading hope that he would stop her.
She opened the door and looked back at him. There was nothing left to say. Her body was filled with light, and she’d never felt closer to who she imagined herself to be when no one was watching. But he was devastated, and she wasn’t sure that he would go seeking absolution from his God. She wanted to give it to him, hoped he accepted it, and knew that he probably wouldn’t. Still, she said the words.
“Go forth and sin no more, Father.”