Audacity: Chapter 20

‘Legs apart,’ I tell her as I come to stand behind her. ‘Lean forward for me.’

If I thought she was dangerous on her knees for me yesterday in the middle of my office, in here she’s downright lethal. I take in the sight of her: burnished waves and creamy skin and the violin-shaped silhouette of her body that’s surely as hardwired into our beauty-seeking parts as the Fibonacci sequence. Her bottom is pale and pert and so inviting as to feel like home for my angry, pulsing dick.

She obliges as if she’s a good girl and not the intoxicating little sacrileger that she is, and I sink slowly to my knees. The kneeler on this thing is generously proportioned, but it’s a tall order to get two adults stacked one behind each other on it, and when I kneel, my wool-clad legs straddling her bare ones, it has the effect of pressing her front up against the wood and every perfect inch of her back up against me.

I take a moment to drink her in. Usually when I’m in here, my mind is on the beautifully inscribed words in front of me and on the grace I seek, but today my senses are spilling over with the blessings of this beautiful woman. Instinctively, she tips her head to the left so I can lay my cheek against hers as I peer over her shoulder to the prayer book. I inhale luxuriously, her heady floral scent enveloping me. I already equate it with the most decadent kind of sex.

My fingertips trail up the sides of her body with the lightest of touches, moving up over the goosebumps on her thighs, her hips, and lingering at the dip of her waist before I bring my arms up. An ill-advised glance over her shoulder shows me her breasts smushed together and two hard, pink little nipples on full display.

I set my elbows on the cap rail so my arms are framing hers, and then I join my hands in prayer around hers. Her steepled fingertips are freezing. I cage her in more firmly with the sensitive skin of my bare inner forearms against her outer forearms. She shivers in the cradle of my body, leaning back as much as she can against my chest.

She feels tiny and fragile like this, and her shiver serves as a timely reminder that she isn’t just the fierce warrior queen whose role she plays so convincingly but a young woman who must have her own demons, her own insecurities, no matter how skilfully they’re buried. Her taking this step, waiting in here for me like this, touches me in a way I can’t quite articulate.

The realisation has me speaking more gently than I may otherwise have done when I begin to intone the opening to all the Hours.

‘Deus, in adiutorium meum intende.

Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina.’

O God, come to my assistance.

O Lord, make haste to help me.

How fucking ironic that I should be praying these words while my body is wrapped around that of a young, shivering, perfectly naked woman for whose very presence, nakedness, I am paying through the nose. I recall our jokey conversation about St Augustine yesterday at lunch.

Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.

I’m self-aware enough to know it’s highly improbable that I’ll want any divine intervention against the very venal sins Athena and I are hurtling towards in my private and previously sacrosanct space.

I pray the Hymn of Terce aloud, pausing before I launch into the Psalms to whisper into Athena’s ear. With my head turned a little, my lips brush the delicate shell of her ear.

‘Did you know that Terce is essentially a prayer to the Holy Spirit to ask for moderation and control of one’s earthly passions?’

I can’t see her smile, but I can certainly hear the pleased note in her voice. ‘I did not. How fitting.’

‘Fitting? Horribly ironic, more like.’

‘Maybe your God has sent me to tempt you. Did you ever think of that?’

‘If he has, then I’m screwed.’ I allow my lips to linger in the hollow below her cheekbone for a moment before turning to face the book. I don’t need it as a prompt, and if I did, its ornate calligraphy would fall well short of easy legibility.

At Terce, I tend to say a selection of lines from The Book of Psalms that I know by heart, lines that bring me comfort and strength. Only, as I recite them today, I feel every word as an admonition, as excruciating as if I were flogging myself as I recite them:

‘Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things.

Turn away the reproach that I dread.

Let my heart be blameless.’

When I set this time aside in an otherwise full calendar, when I turned the handle of this door, my intentions were pure. This was to be my moment, in a life sliding alarmingly towards total secularism, to check in with God. To ask for His grace. To connect with Him, really. And now, with my senses as full of this naked temptress as my arms are, my prayers sound disingenuous to my own ears.

I want it all. I want to commune with God and His son and His Holy Spirit, and I want to bury myself deep inside Athena’s body, a body that feels extraordinarily sinful and yet has been created in God’s likeness.

It’s a body so beautiful that I could happily never come up for air.

I want spiritual rapture and bodily rapture, it seems.

What would happen if I tried for both? God won’t rain His wrath, His vengeance, down upon me. This ancient manuscript won’t combust into flames. He gave man Free Will for a reason.

‘Keep your hands like that,’ I murmur, sliding mine down over her wrists, her forearms. I move further south, splaying my fingertips over the whisper-soft skin of her stomach and enjoying far too much the way the muscles below it contract under my touch. With my other hand I stroke that silken nook running along the underside of her breast, and it seems to me that she braces for more.

I pinch her nipple. She whimpers, and it’s a rallying cry that has me rolling it, kneading her breast.

‘So we’re “elevating” my morning prayers, are we?’ I ask softly, and she hums her answer. ‘Let’s see.’ I let the hand on her stomach drag south, over the tidy strip of hair that covers her pelvic bone until my fingers find her wetness. ‘Dear me, you have been looking forward to this, haven’t you? Such a greedy girl that you couldn’t let me have my fifteen minutes with God first, hmm?’

‘I wanted to see you praying,’ she gasps out as my fingers work their way past her clit to her entrance.

‘That, sweetheart, is bullshit. You could have done that fully clothed from the perfectly good sofa over there. No, I think you wanted to feel me praying, isn’t that right?’

I’m so hard now it’s ridiculous, and her yes is strangled as she grinds that delectable little arse against my cock and attempts to impale herself on my fingers.

I continue to recite my psalms as I oblige, jack-knifing a couple of fingers deep inside her body while my other hand tends to her breasts, pulling and plucking at her impossibly stiff little nipples.

‘Instruct me in your statutes, Lord, that I may follow them.’

She’s arching in my arms, trying to spread her legs and getting precisely nowhere because they’re caged in by mine.

‘Fuck me, Athena, you’re making it very difficult for me to concentrate,’ I growl before nipping at her jaw. It’s true. My soul has officially gone offline, and the only thing my chimp brain can focus on is how tight, how slippery, her cunt feels around my fingers.

I absolutely have to replace them with my cock. I pull my fingers out and get unsteadily to my feet before hauling her up and turning her to face me. She gazes up at me, eyes glazed and cheeks flushed, and it once again hits me how extraordinarily perfect she is. If I ever had any doubts that this little minx wanted more from me than just a hefty salary, those doubts are ether now, and it causes me to wonder just how much further I can push her.

How much further she wants me to push her.

‘If you want my cock, you’d better get a condom on me, quick,’ I tell her, my fingers flexing around her upper arms.

‘I want your cock,’ she snaps back, and then she’s biting her lip and wrestling my belt and zipper open with none of her characteristic finesse. When she has my erection exposed and free, she rips a foil packet. We both watch as she rolls the condom on, and it takes every remaining trace of discipline I have not to push her down to take it in her mouth.

‘Stand up on the kneeler,’ I command. ‘Bend over—brace your hands on either side of the display case. I need this fast and hard.’

Her face collapses a little at that last part, like it’s the best thing she’s ever heard. ‘God, yes, me too.’

I take a step back, my trousers and boxers around my ankles, so I can enjoy the visual feast that is Athena stepping up onto the kneeler, bare feet apart, before folding herself elegantly forward so her stomach rests on the smooth ledge of the cap rail and her palms hit the table just beyond it.

‘That’s it.’ I place a palm on each perfect white cheek, spreading them so I can enjoy the sight of her well-prepped cunt, pink and glistening and inviting, and the darker, more forbidden hole above it.

If anything is forbidden when it comes to this woman.

I grab my cock for the first time since I entered this most excellent trap and allow myself to trace a line with the tip down through her folds.

The breath she lets out is shuddery. ‘Oh, God.’

‘Praying now, are we?’

I notch myself at her entrance and take her hips, and Christ is the feeling of wedging myself inside her is an earthly paradise so sublime it could have me forsaking any more illustrious versions of heaven. I grunt out the next lines of today’s psalm, the act of sullying these holy words only making my physical pleasure keener. Sharper.

‘Before I was afflicted, I went astray,

but now I keep your word.’

The irony. Fuck, I’ve bottomed out in her. I pause for a second to wallow in the sheer delight of it, Athena’s groan telling me we are both very much on the same page. I pull out and really let her have it, keeping one hand gripping her hip while I use the other to burrow under her arm and find one perfect breast.

I’m a man lost to everything but his basest needs and to this beautiful, writhing woman’s ability to speak to them. The white-hot ecstasy coursing through my veins feels like the most lethally addictive opioid, a drug so strong I know it will pull me under and fill my lungs with its glorious toxins.

We come together like this, with me rutting into her with every animalistic urge I have and grunting out the basest, most transgressive take on psalms penned by King David himself and meant for the glory of God as she swallows my prayers with her cries.

I’m quite certain I’ve desecrated the Office of Terce on this January morning, but fuck if it doesn’t feel like the kind of exaltation most sinners will never know.