Audacity (Seraph)

Part 2 – Offertorium (Offering)

This time, I’m waiting for her at reception when she steps out of the lift on the third floor. I greet her with what I hope is a warm smile and a firm handshake, and I send up a fleeting prayer, the tiniest plume of celestial smoke, that my delight that the moment has finally arrived isn’t written too clearly on my face.

When we walk through to my office, Gladys’ former desk in the antechamber is clear except for a monitor and keyboard and an oversized vase bearing the most decadent array of flowers, their greenery tumbling wantonly down the sides and their heady, musky scent filling the air. My personal assistant, the achingly competent George, has aced his mandate to ensure Athena’s floral arrangement packs a punch.

‘Welcome to Rath Mor,’ I say with a feeble gesture at the flowers.

‘Thank you. They’re beautiful.’

‘Come on through, why don’t you, and have a seat while you tell me how your Christmas has been.’

She perches on the cream sofa, knees and ankles pressed daintily together, and I take the compact armchair opposite her, allowing me a good look at my new prize. Because if someone who looks like that, who is as intelligent as that, and whose job description now includes letting me use her whenever I want isn’t the most dazzling prize, I don’t know who or what is.

Her dress is a silk shirt-waister, ivory coloured with a delicate print of semi-furled ferns. Despite the fabric-covered buttons that run the gamut from her breastbone to a few inches above her hem, it’s beyond reproach. The fabric, which moved like water as I led her through to my office, now falls modestly from her knees almost to her ankles. There are pearls at her throat and in her ears, and her auburn hair is glossily, perfectly coiffed. The overall look is perfectly demure—at least it would be on anyone who didn’t look like Athena, because this woman could be dressed for Antartica and she’d still scream sex to anyone who looked at her.

Rather, she’d scream you want me but you can’t have me, because I am legions and galaxies out of your league.

Unless your pockets are deep enough.

I love it, though. I love that everything about her is exclusive and elevated and extortionate. I rejoice in the certain knowledge that the Athena who sits before me, poised and intoxicating, is a different creature from the one I’ve had the good fortune to unravel, twice now. That when you stroke her and lick her and fuck her and whisper filthy words to her, she’s every bit as wanton in that moment as she is buttoned up in this.

A man would do terrible things for a glimpse of that woman beneath the ice queen facade. Those glimpses are the most delicious forms of foreshadowing. Of foreplay, even. So when she leans forward after a few minutes of small talk, my entire adrenal system marshals itself.

She begins innocuously. ‘I’ve done some reading on the priesthood over Christmas.’

I narrow my eyes. ‘Is that so?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’ She crosses her legs, the silk flowing around them as she does. ‘I thought it would be helpful to understand where you’re coming from. But I had a question.’

‘Go for it.’

A little smile. ‘I bet you know where this is going.’

I shake my head, amused. ‘I wouldn’t presume to know what you’re thinking, Athena.’ I’d never be able to keep up.

‘When you administered Holy Communion,’ she asks, her voice low and melodic, ‘would the members of your congregation kneel for you?’

My pulse kicks up a notch, though I have no idea why. ‘Not in my parish. That only happens in churches where there’s an altar rail. They just formed a standing queue.’

‘Oh.’ She deflates a little. ‘And would they take it in their mouths? I mean, would you put the Host directly on their tongues?’

‘Only for some of the older or more traditional parishioners, usually. The practice of taking it in the hand has been permitted by the Holy See for fifty years or more, now. Why do you ask?’

‘I was trying to visualise how it would have been when you did it. I was trying to imagine you giving me Holy Communion, and how it would have worked.’

I smile. It seems a sweet, if random, line of questioning. ‘If you’d lined up to receive a blessing, I would have asked you to simply cross your hands over your chest and I would have made the sign of the cross on the top of your head. I couldn’t have administered the Holy Eucharist to you as a non-Catholic.’

She nods. ‘I see. So, let me get this straight. Do you mind humouring me for a second? Will you stand?’

My brow furrows as I get to my feet. I have no idea where she’s going with this. Her tone sounds innocent, intellectually curious, but something tells me she has an agenda here.

She, too, rises, standing in front of me. ‘So I would have done this?’ She crosses her hands diagonally over her chest in an X.

‘Yes. Now bow your head.’

She does, and I use my thumb to make the sign of the cross over the silkiness of her hair. When she tilts her face upwards, I see how close we are.

‘So if there was no altar rail,’ she muses, gazing up at me through her eyelashes, ‘then it couldn’t have gone like this, if I’d ever decided to come into your church and trick you into thinking I was a baptised Catholic.’

Before I can understand what’s happening, she’s sinking gracefully to her knees before me, the silk of her skirt billowing around her like a parachute. I stare down at her with some twisted mix of fear and fascination as she raises her hands in front of her, joining them in prayer.

‘And if most people take it in their hands,’ she continues, ‘then you would never have been in this position, where a young woman was kneeling before you, with her mouth open and her tongue held out to receive the Body of Christ, but all you could think about, as you made your pilgrimage along the altar rail, was how easy it would be to slide your cock in there instead and really put her to the test.’

I’m thickening instantly, at her awful, disrespectful and downright sacrilegious words, even before she closes her eyes and opens her mouth and sticks out her little pink tongue just enough that yes, it fits how people have traditionally received the Host, and yes, I can see how right she is, how staggeringly easy it would be to unzip myself, to give myself a couple of pumps before brushing past her plush, waiting lips and onto that expectant, welcoming little ledge her tongue is providing.

As I stand there, staring down at her and reeling at the skill with which she’s just unrolled a canvas and shown me a world of possibility painted on its front, she opens her eyes and fixes their hazel orbs on me.

‘No, I don’t suppose you did. Even if the thought ever crossed your mind, I know you would never have acted on it. You’d never have put your own needs first, would you?’

‘No,’ I mutter, because she seems to be waiting for an answer. ‘Of course not—the idea of it is unfathomable.’

She nods and parts her hands, placing them on the tops of my thighs so they bracket the straining fabric of my suit trousers. ‘Of course it is. But you’re not a priest now, Gabriel. You’re a layman, and you’re allowed to do whatever the fuck you want. And I suspect you still need to be reminded of that every now and again.’

She pauses, and I slide my hands beneath all that hair so I can cradle her jaw. Her skin is so soft under my thumbs as I stroke it, her lips so supple as she speaks.

‘So how about I pretend I’m one of your penitents, and I’ve come to receive Holy Communion, but you know I’m not Catholic. You know I shouldn’t be trying to disrespect this sacrament when I’m just some terrible sinner, a random little slut, and you decide to teach me a lesson. Because the only thing I’m worthy of swallowing down is your cum.’

I inhale harshly, my dick throbbing behind my zipper. ‘Jesus Christ, Athena.’

‘If I’ve driven you to blasphemy already,’ she muses, fingers hovering over my flies, ‘then I must be doing something right. How about it? Want to play?’

My thumbs drag over her jaw as I gaze down at her.

Who is this she-devil who, with a few expertly crafted sentences, has taken all that I know to be true and noble and sacred and turned it into something that is quite literally intoxicating, but whose poison I am apparently powerless to resist?

How can she take what was, for me, the single biggest privilege of the priesthood—the God-given ability to turn bread into flesh and wine into blood, Christ’s blood—and set it alight, torching it so it burns in my veins like the basest kind of addiction and smokes out every last drop of good sense, of propriety?

And how the actual fuck will I withstand her unholy charms if, at eight-thirty on a Monday morning, she already has me incapable of doing anything but accepting this infernal little proposition with indecent verve?

Forget Jack Nicholson and his well-meaning soundbites.

This woman makes me want to be a far, far worse man.

When I speak, I barely recognise my own voice.

‘Do it.’