Page 151 of Divine Temptations

The knowledge lanced through me, sweet and terrifying. I’d never been more aware of another man’s need in my life.

“Are you okay?” he whispered.

I opened my mouth and found nothing but a sound I didn’t recognize leaking out of me—a broken little gasp that turned into a groan. It crawled out of my chest without permission, honest and helpless, and the second it left me, I felt him respond. His grip flexed. His breath caught. The hardness of him nudged against me, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the way it ricocheted through my body.

“Jimmy, I want you.”

He said it haltingly, careful and fierce all at once. “I want you so bad it feels like I’m coming apart. But if you’re scared—if you don’t want to—say it. I’ll stop. I need you to want me too. This doesn’t go one inch further unless you want it.”

The floor seemed to tilt. A man like him, all hard edges and masculine, handing me the reins—I didn’t know what to do with the power of it. The ache in me swelled, thick and tidal. I clutched his shirt tighter, breathing open-mouthed against his throat. My heart hammered.

Not forcing. Not taking. Only offering himself.

My mind split clean down the center.

On one side was heat, near unbearable pressure, and a promise I could taste.

On the other side—memory. It rose up mean and bright, a projector bulb burning through the dark.

Saul’s laughter in our garage the summer I turned sixteen, dust motes floating like glitter in hot light. We’d taken apart the lawnmower because we were dumb and bored and everything felt possible. He’d had oil on his jaw, and I’d wiped it off with my thumb, and we’d paused like the air had gone syrup-thick. He’d said, “If you don’t want to—” and I’d cut him off with my mouth because I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to feel.

We were clumsy. It was nothing like the slick sin Daddy warned about from the pulpit. It felt like a firefly landing on your knuckle—shocking and wonderful, light with nowhere to go but inside your skin. Our teeth bumped. We figured it out, and the world didn’t end.

Until the side door slammed open. Daddy’s silhouette cut the light, and then his voice was everywhere, a flood that drowned me.

“Abomination!”

He came at us so fast I didn’t have time to beg. Saul scrambled back, knocking the wrench set onto the concrete with a scatter of clanging metal. Daddy’s hand caught my arm, and I remember the shock more than the pain at first, the disbelief that this was happening, that my father’s hand could feel like a stranger’s.

Saul ran.

The sound of his sneakers slapping the driveway was the loudest thing I’d ever heard until the belt was louder. Leather and rage, over and over, a rhythm I still sometimes felt under my skin when I tried to sleep. Daddy panting, quoting scripture between blows like a man trying to baptize me with pain.

“Better to enter heaven maimed—better to cut it out—better than hellfire!” The words tangled, becoming one long sentence that meant only this: You are wrong. You are broken. God hates what you are.

Afterward, there was the quiet. The slick mess of tears, the sting that didn’t stop, the coppery taste of blood in my mouth where I’d bitten to keep from screaming. Daddy kneeling beside me, gentling his voice, telling me he loved me, that he had to do it, that love corrected error, that he’d saved me from damnation. He prayed over me while my body shook.

“You’ll thank me one day,” Daddy whispered, and I nodded because there was no other answer allowed.

The flash of memory snapped away, and I was back in Lucien’s kitchen, wrapped in arms that held but didn’t hurt, hearts colliding instead of fists. My skin burned with the echo of old pain and the fresh blaze of desire. I pressed closer, greedy for comfort, greedy for him, and hated myself for wanting this even as it made me feel alive.

“Tell me what you want,” Lucien said breathlessly. “You get to choose, Jimmy.”

I didn’t have words big enough to hold what I wanted. Like I wanted everything, and I was terrified of all of it. I wanted to stop time in this room and lay my cheek where his heart thudded and believe that this was holy. Then I wanted to unlearn every sermon that ever taught me how to hate the parts of me that lit up at the sight of a beautiful man. More than anything, I wanted Lucien’s mouth on me.

“Do you want this?” he asked again, his voice breaking around the question. I felt it shiver through him, then through me. He wasn’t unaffected; he was holding on by the same frayed thread I was.

I pulled back enough to see his face. Up close, he was devastating—eyes gone dark, lashes low, mouth soft and hungry all at once. A pulse beat in his throat. Lucien looked… scared. Not of me. Of himself, maybe. It made something fierce and protective flare in me—that a man like this could look at me like I was something worth trembling for.

I turned my head and kissed him.

The kiss wasn’t careful. It wasn’t clean. It was messy and real and tasted like the life I’d been starving myself out of. Lucien opened for me, and then I was wrecked by the wet heat of his mouth and the slow drag of his tongue. I gasped, then the angle shifted, and I felt him everywhere—chest to chest, hip to hip, the hard line of his erection stamping its shape against me. Theworld tilted, colors too bright behind my closed eyes, and I didn’t care if the floor fell away as long as his mouth stayed on mine.

Lucien’s thumb stroked my cheekbone, and the tenderness almost undid me more than the heat. He was asking and answering a question with his mouth- I want you, do you want me? My body shouted yes in every way it knew how—breathless, shaking, and pressed up tight to him like we could knit ourselves together through fabric and will alone.

I didn’t think about hell, or about Daddy. I thought about the taste of Lucien and the way his breath hitched when I slid my palm up the hard plane of his chest to the steady thud of his heart.

Lucien broke the kiss first, barely, our mouths still brushing, breath mingling. His eyes searched mine as if he were hunting for doubt and finding too much desire instead.