Page 20 of Ignition Rites

Once wasn’t enough. I need her again.

The admission should disgust me more than it does. Instead, still kneeling before an altar I built for confession, I undo my pants and free my cock.

I wrap the lace around the hardness that never fully left after I walked away from her and stop there, hand closed around myself, as though restraint might become possible simply because I have finally named what I’m doing.

It doesn’t.

I move my hand.

I surrender.

I surrender to the memory of her tightening around me when I drove deeper, to the way she took as much as she demanded, to the sound of her asking for exactly what she wanted. I surrender to the humiliating certainty that wanting her is easier than resisting her has ever been.

My hand moves faster against the lace while I chase a sensation memory can’t reproduce: Lorelei coming around me, body tightening, voice breaking against the room.

Even that isn’t what undoes me. It’s remembering her asking.

She asked without shame, without pretending she wanted less than she did.

The memory of it tears the last of my control loose. I come hard into the lace clenched around my cock, the sound I make swallowed by stone walls that have heard every other confession I refused to speak aloud.

When it passes, I rest my forehead against the edge of the altar and breathe.

What have I done?

Eventually I fold Lorelei’s panties into my back pocket, put myself away, and fasten my pants.

I stay there, the altar in front of me waiting for my confession.

But I won’t confess, because the thing I can’t give even this room is the one answer I’m no longer certain belongs entirely to me.

I didn’t go to that box tonight because the design required it.

I went because I couldn’t stay away.

At least, that’s the answer I want.

Then I remember the token in her palm. Alistair’s crest. Permission she hadn’t known she possessed until I looked at it.

Either my father knew I would go to that room, or he counted on wanting her being enough to put me there.

I don’t know which possibility is worse.

What I know is that I went anyway.

Her mask is where I put it when I left the box, folded into my jacket pocket after I picked it up from beside the workbench. I take it out now and set the black lace on the altar like an offering. Her panties stay in my back pocket.

You feel it too, I told her.

As if saying it first made what happened inevitable instead of chosen.

Alistair would call tonight useful: a vessel responding to claim, another piece settling exactly where he expected it to. Once, I could have repeated that explanation until it became indistinguishable from belief.

I can’t tonight.

I stay on my knees with one palm against the altar and catalogue every reason I should stay away from her — doctrine, strategy, family, the fact that my father appears to have anticipated enough of tonight to put his crest in her hand. Another man might count rosary beads. I count reasons.

None of them changes what I want.