Page 11 of The Preacher's Pet

“There are other ways to hurt a person.” His voice is dark as if full of anger at the entire world.

I open my mouth and close it again.

He takes a step closer, practically pushing me up against my chair. “Just stay away from him. I mean it.”

He doesn’t give me a chance to respond and stalks back to his table. He picks up his untouched plate of food and carries it over to the trash can where he dumps the whole lot—plate included—and storms out of the cafeteria.

I watch him go, my mouth open, wondering what the heck that had all been about.

6

ROMAN

I have lost my appetite.The girl has taken it away from me, and I can’t eat now. Jaw clenched and head pounding, I throw my plate of food, plate included, into the trash can.

I need to leave right now. Her weird colored eyes are following my every movement, and it’s making my skin prickle.

There’s something so otherworldly about her, and it creeps me out. She also has other effects on me, and I find them, in particular, hard to stomach. My aching cock is disgusting to me right now.

I don’t do well with being turned on. Sex isn’t the easiest thing for me to navigate. For the longest time, I’ve felt little desire. I used to, of course, but it never ended well for me. Any kind of sexual activity brought about feelings of shame, nightmares, and, at times, flashbacks. It became easier to avoid it altogether.

My energies are focused elsewhere these days, but now, this slip of a girl has awakened something in me, and I don’t like it.

I storm to my room. I take the back way, along the lengthy, dark corridor lined with portraits of college elders. There are rumors of ghosts in these hallways, and I, for one, believe them. You can sense the dark energy in some parts of this place. I don’tdislike it. The darkness doesn’t bother me; in fact, I welcome it. It soothes my soul.

In many ways, the stories and legends of this college help to take my mind off my own past. Anything I can do to forget those awful days in my family home helps. Reading ghost stories as a child was one of the ways I escaped the horror of my reality. You might think a child living through what I had would have wanted everything fictional to be rainbows and puppies. It wasn’t the case. I liked to read about other people living in darkness. It made me feel less alone.

Ghosts always fascinated me. The idea of humans having a spirit that could go on, even when our physical bodies had long decayed, had appealed to me even as a young child. It’s what got me into the idea of talking to my ancestors, and from there into the research of my family background, and the history of where I came from.

Learning our family had Viking blood flowing through our veins had given me a strength and pride that had been absent in my life as a boy and a young man. Instead of being a victim, I began to realize I could become something much more potent if I channeled the energy of my past.

Once I had learned how powerful the ancestors could be, I started to appeal to them in my daily life. In my bedroom at home, I made an ancestors’ table. It contained photographs and portraits of family members long gone. I would place small offerings upon this table, things like candles, dried flowers, and sometimes small animal bones I would find in the woods. I would talk to my people, sitting there, in front of the table with my eyes closed, my mind spanning back hundreds of years. I would beg them to help me, and eventually, I believe they did. The person who created so much torment in my life, my despised uncle, suffered a dreadful accident. Although it, sadly, didn’t kill him, it made him weaker. As I grew into a young man,he became a shell of himself, mentally and emotionally. It meant he was no longer a direct threat to me, or to any other young boys.

Not that this enabled me to easily move past what he did to me for all those years. My anger at him has never truly abated. However, it is eclipsed by the anger I feel toward my immediate family. I tried to talk to my mom about the situation once, and she had become panicked and almost fearful. Instead of listening to me, her child, and helping me, she had tried to tell me to keep quiet. To this day, I can’t understand how she did such a thing.

One day, far into the future, I would like a child of my own. If I’m ever lucky enough to become a father, protecting my offspring will be the most important thing in my life.

I finally reach my room and unlock the door. Walking inside, I head to the window and look out over the grounds to the trees beyond. I wonder if I should go for a walk, since being among nature always soothes me. Today, though, there is something stopping me from getting out there with the trees. There’s a rage within me, burning with a fire that scares me. It’s so visceral it threatens to overwhelm me.

How that girl can cause me to feel this way is a mystery. Rationally, I recognize my emotions are way out of whack on this.

There’s also something else going on with the way she affects me, and I hate to even think about what it means.

When I’d approached Ophelia, it had purely been to threaten her and make her stay away, and I’d expected, truthfully, to feel shitty about it. Instead, I’d experienced a heady power rush when I warned her off.

I’d felt immense satisfaction at the way her big, beautiful eyes had stared up at me, so full of fear. Her eyes are amazing, and I wonder what the story is behind their two different shades. Hadshe been born that way, or are they two different colors because of an incident? They hold a whole universe of emotions and stories in their liquid depths, and having them trained on me while I told her to stay the fuck away had been something else.

My dick is hard. It was when I was telling her to fucking leave us alone and still is now. Is it the confrontation that’s turned me on… or is it simply her? I hate that she has this effect on me.

I pace the floor of my bedroom, my hands knotted in my hair, willing my erection to go down. But the more I try to put the girl out of my mind, the more I seem to focus on her, and the more my body wants her.

It’s like an itch I can’t scratch, or a thirst I can’t sate.

I clench my teeth and ball my fists, and I want to lift my face to the sky and roar my frustration. I can’t even remember the last time another person made me feel this way. What is it about her?

The way she’d dropped her chin and told me she was sorry, without even really knowing what she’d done, had awoken something inside me. In that moment, I’d pictured her on her knees, her hands tied behind her back, her chin lowered in that same way.

So beautiful and submissive.

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