Page 72 of Priestly Sins

I reach around and work her nub but leave it about the time she begins to push back trying to ride my cock.

Her huff makes me laugh and that brings a moan deep inside her.

I thrust and pull and when she begins to reach between her legs, I wet my thumb in my mouth and press it into her perfect ass.

She falls to her chest against the bed, no longer fighting but taking, soaking up pleasure, not wrestling to get it.

When I reach around and begin working her clit, she moans and chokes out, “Too much. It’s too much. Everywhere.”

She explodes, pulling me in deeper. I keep at her clit. I keep at her ass. I keep up my thrusts but twist as I pull out and when she explodes again, I give in and come too, letting her pussy take me over the edge.

Ecstasy.

I lean over her back, exhausted, sweating, sated.

“Happy New Year, Sirona.”

“Happy New Year, Sean.”

Thirty-Six

January is a blur of orgasms, winter storms, puppy training, and various king-cake inspired recipes.

I learn to make Irish stews while Sirona works on baking bread in a whole new climate.

I finally buy a treadmill and put it in the garage. I hate treadmills, vastly prefer open-road running, but Irish stews, king cakes, and homemade bread mean I need it. Sirona doesn’t know how to make a dozen cupcakes; she only knows how to make five dozen. The treadmill at this point is a necessity.

We also spend January doing things that people do in relationships when they start dating. We’ve done everything backward: meet, move across the globe, make a family, fall in love. It’s peculiar, but you have to know someone’s birthday and food allergies and stuff.

It also gives me a chance to be known. Aside from Bobby, there aren’t a handful of people who do. To be perfectly frank, I need to know me too.

Killing Calabrese took a load off me that was like removing an anvil hanging above my head. The dark cloud of his existence hung over me for so long, its removal is a blinding sunshine in my life. But it shines a light into an almost empty existence.

Eating and fucking all day would, eventually, bore me. I guess anyway. I’m not there yet.

At night, in bed, after we take care of baser needs, Sirona tells me about snippets of her life, stories of her growing up in New Orleans, stories of explosive doughs on her mother’s ceiling during early fails at baking, being self-taught, and wanting desperately to go to France to study.

She tells me tales of Clara from her birth until last spring when I got to know her.

She cries, sometimes missing home. Two and half months in is just long enough to have that vacation feeling wear off and the permanence of being on the run settle in.

I tell her about my father and I share about my baker and potter mother. I tell her stories of New Orleans in the summers when I was a kid.

I tell her about my father’s ill-gotten fortune and the security we have. She’s never not needed to work. And with Calabrese stealing from her, she’s always worked harder than necessary to bring home less than she earned.

She sometimes wonders aloud about whether he can find us, whether she’s safe, whether Clara will be orphaned.

I don’t tell her she doesn’t need to fear Enzo Calabrese anymore. I’ve never told her he’s dead. I couldn’t stand her looking at me and knowing I’m a killer and that it’s me she should be fearing.

I don’t tell her about the priest, or child abusers and the like I’ve offed in my quest to make the world a little safer for my small, but loved, family of sorts.

I don’t tell her anything I ever heard in the confessionals or stories I shouldn’t know from my time in New Orleans. And I never ask about her times in the confessional, the tears, the despair. It feels like a betrayal to her that I would know and she would not have meant to tell me.

* * *

On a random Thursday,I leave Killian’s house after delivering yet another batch of cupcakes to him. The snow isn’t just falling, it’s almost a whiteout. It is gorgeous and peaceful and blankets everything in white. It also muffles all sounds except for my shoes crunching over icy sprigs of grass and brush.

I look up and stare. Gray surrounds me, white puffs cascade down from gray skies. The silence and peace are almost deafening. And, in this moment, I say a quiet prayer of thanks for this new life. The calm, the bliss of happiness, for Sirona and Clara, and what is yet to come.