Page 138 of Priest and his Anarchist

I am sick of denying myself the blatant truth because every time I close my eyes at night, it was him I saw. It was our time together I kept. It was his touch I felt, his kisses that burned, and the way his weight felt on top of mine when he rode my body over the edge was almost too unbearable to remember.

He keeps his eyes peeled out to the front of him. If I wasn’t being so greedy and delusional, I’d follow his sight to see what he is looking at, but I don’t want to miss a second. I don’t want to blink because I know that is all it takes for him to be gone again, as if he never existed.

And I’ll be left once more, in this shell of a room that feels like home, even though I know it isn’t.

He wasn’t mine to begin with, and he never will be.

My fingers itch to touch him, so I reach up to his cheek. Heat spreads through my palm at a speed that has my head spin.

But he isn’t real.

He turns toward me a little. “Do you trust me?” I’m too entranced by his mouth that I lose my train of thought.

“Yes.”

He smiles, but it’s not the usual one he gives me. There’s no underlying meaning. He twirls some of my hair around his finger. “You wouldn’t if you knew my secrets.”

“I already know your secrets, Priest.” The words come as quickly as they arrive in my head, but that’s how it’s always been, because with him, I’ve never had to think or second-guess what I say.

“What about the one where I loved her first.” He pauses, and I swallow the acid his words leave behind.

His grip in my hair tightens.

“Priest…” I tap at his arm.

His jaw bounces, the pupils in his eyes ballooning pitch-black.

“Priest…” I warn again when the pain in my scalp is almost too much. “What are you doing?” The whispers leave me through shaky lips. “Please.”

His breathing hardens as if each breath he takes is a battle none of us can see. His nostrils flare and his jaw tightens again before he’s leaning down, his body over mine and the tip of his nose touching mine.

“What have you done to me, Madness?”

All the heat he makes me feel spreads south. “Noth—nothing.”

His laughter feels crooked against my mouth. “Wrong.”

He kisses me, flicking his tongue between my lips. My thoughts stop. Everything stops as my hands find their way into the bed of his hair. I tug back on it gently, curling my elbow around the back of his neck to pull him in closer.

In a flash, he’s stripped, that glorious weight I’d prayed for forcing me further into my mattress. He fills me to the brink with a simple thrust, his mouth back on mine as he drives himself into me as my body tightens around him, willing him to never leave.

“Don’t leave me,” I whisper against his mouth.

Hovering above me, he circles his hips against me, and my orgasm explodes into lava, my eyes bleeding through the heat. “Never.”

Last night wasn’t fair. Familiar frames pass. The ones I already know, and the black sunflower that peers back at me. What does it mean? He has many of them in his garden.

“It means you. Luna, the opposite to the sun, silly!” River dances toward me, but instead of stepping to the side, she goes through me like a ghost, evaporating into thin air.

If I closed my eyes hard enough, would he come back to me? I can almost hear his voice in the back of my head as if last night was real. But it wasn’t. Yet again, it was a figment of my imagination, bound by the love I’ve had for him. The love I’ve had since I was a little girl.

Chapter Thirty-Three

priest

The weight of it sits in the palm of my hand, a persistent tale hidden on the other side. One my father disregarded and one I knew I couldn’t.

Wrapped in a porch that withered over time, the blatant neglect was obvious by the cracked paint webbing across the surface. It was once a farmhouse, alive with laughter and hidden beneath an oak tree. I’d seen the photos.

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