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But by now, I’m starting to wonder if God even cares.

“It is not a sin to love,” says the man in the booth. I start, I’m so shocked to hear it. And then I choke. I know that voice. I know that voice: I’ve had it moaning in my ear. It is not the priest sitting there, listening to me spill my heart out.

It’s fucking Leo Shaw.

“You bastard,” I hiss, beating the partition separating us. Furious, and nervous, I curse silently, squirming in the relative privacy of the booth. Bastard! Fiend! I’m ashamed he’s heard me so vulnerable, awfully nervous Leo Shaw has heard something that lets him see me more truly. I’ve gone and shattered some fantasy, tainted his lust for me.

Another part of me is fearful in a more base way. Fearful God will strike me down. Sinning outside His house is one thing, but letting an impotent lover do as he pleases? Letting him act as a priest, adopting a mantle he has no right to? I knock my head against the back of the confessional. “Bastard,” I whisper again. “That’s not—I don’t. . .” I sigh, rubbing my temples. My cheeks are burning. I want to tell him: This is my place, you blaspheming devil. My religion. My God. If you are faithless, so be it. But don’t taint mine. Instead, all I manage is, “Don’t mock me again.”

There’s a groan as the wooden seat is released, and a moment passes where I don’t hear him. I assume he’s left, stormed out or sulked, I don’t care. But then the door to my booth creaks open.

Leo looks at me forlornly

“I mean it,” he says. “It is not a sin to love.”

“Leo,” I say, “what are you doing?”

He doesn’t answer. He just walks in and closes the little confessional door behind him, and something about that, something about being this close to a man who’s been inside me, who I have had carnally, who I lust after—the weight of the sin feels immense. This is a holy space.

I shouldn’t be feeling what I’m feeling. Heat flooding my groin. A twitch. This isn’t—what I wanted. I wanted—still want—absolution. I sigh and readjust myself. “Why did you follow me?”

He looks at me and flinches. “I don’t know. I thought. . .”

“You thought?”

A defeated sigh, and then his confession true: “I wanted to. That’s all. I wanted—”

He cuts himself off, perhaps realising he has propositioned me and then stalked me as I ran to God. And I think he is about to proposition me again. And I think the act of defiling myself on holy ground will be yet another sin God cannot forgive.

But I don’t think I can stop myself.

Leo is looking at me, heat in his eyes, hungry. I shift and turn my head to stare at the wall.

“You’ve heard all my sins,” I whisper.

“They’re hardly sins,” he says.

I snort. “Really?”

He moves. I can see him; the shadow of him, pressing forward in the cramped booth. I can all but feel the heat from him, and I go dizzy with a terrible kind of arousal, where I’m scared of what I’m feeling. Of the intensity.

Leo knows exactly what he’s doing. When I gain the courage to turn to him, his eyes rake over me like my flesh is an altar to be desecrated. I am meant to keep myself a temple to God, and I keep letting other men in. This will be no exception, because Leo bends over me, arms pushing against both narrow walls until I’m trapped beneath him, until I have to arch my neck to look up.

A smile quivers at his lip. Barely more than a whisper he says, “Do you want to know what true sin feels like?”

God.

God fucking save me.

The way he says it, the way he looks at me, shoots straight to my groin. I feel my cock fatten, and my confession burns in my brain: lust is my greatest sin. I’m too weak to stop it.

I am too weak to want to stop it.

Leo stands straight and steps back. “Get on your knees,” he says.

And I am a good boy, so I do what I’m told.

I go down ready to worship. I forget that my entire torso is covered in bloody bandages; the promise of pleasure is briefly enough to expel any latent pain. Leo’s eyes glaze over with lust and want. He reaches into his pants, face creasing up with happy surprise. I don’t think he expected me to do this. Hell, I shouldn’t—I know I shouldn’t. But I think it is obvious by now.