Chapter Text

Chapter 11. The liturgy of desire – Part 2

Overwhelmed. Yes, that would have been a good word to describe what she felt the moment Khatri, swept away by something very close to a surge of passion, sent everything to hell, knocked dinner to the floor as if they were swimming in abundance in that town, and lifted her onto the table.

There was a moment, barely an instant, when their eyes met in the middle of a silence interrupted only by their ragged breathing.

Clea saw a version of Khatri she was not at all used to. There was something dark in his gaze, a kind of hunger and need entirely unbecoming of a priest. His short curls had lost all sense of order, a fact for which she was solely to blame. His full lips were damp and reddened, another small personal victory. And had she dared lower her gaze, she would have confirmed that the man’s face was not the only devastatingly attractive thing about his body.

Khatri’s eyes, on the other hand, worshipped Clea as if every one of his longings stood before him. As if, in that woman, he had found the entire meaning of his existence. Her loose hair allowed her soft curls to frame her face with a delicacy that did not correspond, at all, to what they were doing. Her green eyes, always so intense, looked back at him with expectation. She had the sort of beauty that would make anyone who crossed paths with her in the street turn to look at her twice.

She felt the man’s fingers sink into her thighs at the same time that she noticed the way he moistened his lower lip with the tip of his tongue. Once again, she had the sense that the man was debating between at least two transcendental options.

Whatever Khatri’s doubts were, he seemed to resolve them alone in that internal dialogue, because he finally brought one of his hands to Clea’s cheek, covering it with the breadth of his palm, leaned over her, and kissed her with all the hunger she had previously seen in his gaze.

Clea, moved by instinct, clung to Khatri’s shoulders with the desperation of someone who needed to feel him close, closer, as close as he would allow. And it was in that instant that she realized Khatri was still wearing his shirt. Open, yes, but still on. She curled her fingers into the fabric and, barely pulling away from his mouth, gave one very simple order.

“Take this off…”

Khatri, who would have preferred to pull out his own nails one by one rather than stop kissing her, obeyed without protest when Clea tugged at the edges of the shirt to slide it first from his shoulders, then down his arms, before throwing it aside, far away from them. And she, who adored making herself hard to get, pulled away from his lips, feeling him lean forward again to follow her and kiss her once more, unsuccessfully. Clea had pressed a finger to his chest, applying the slightest pressure to make him straighten.

In that way, the Italian was able to admire his torso in its entirety. That was the body of a man who had spent the last two years and seven months surviving and helping shape the town they inhabited. Surely he, in an act of humility she would have hated to hear, would not appreciate himself for what he was: an incredibly attractive man.

The candles had created such an exquisite play of light and shadow that they defined his collarbones, the kind she suddenly wanted to bite, though she did not because there were still parts of his anatomy left for her to admire. They also outlined his pectorals, which, until that night, she had only been able to guess at beneath his clothes. She admired those strong arms and the devastatingly sexy way the veins stood out along them. Her gaze lowered to his abdomen and, almost automatically, her pupils dilated at the sight of that glorious V formed by his pelvis, disappearing beneath the waistband of his trousers. And, lastly, she contemplated the fine line of dark hair that began below his navel and vanished beneath the fabric, along with other things she was also curious to admire that night.

Khatri would have sworn he heard Clea make a sound very much like a purr.

“Father…” the woman whispered as she lifted her gaze to Khatri’s eyes, with some effort.

Oh, she would have loved to immortalize the embarrassed expression she saw on him in that moment.

“Don’t fuck with me by calling me ‘Father’ like that… as if saying it alone doesn’t turn you on.”

Oh. Oh, well.

She blinked several times, trying to process what had just come out of the mouth of the most cautious man she had ever known in her entire life. She did not know why, but the situation made her laugh in a considerably playful way.

“I was going to tell you, Father, that I have dreamed of seeing you like this many… many times,” she whispered while, guided by her usual shamelessness, she let her fingers slowly trace the edge of his trousers. She moved up his abdomen without the slightest hurry, pressing her palm against his body to feel the heat of his skin as she rose until she placed her hand directly over his heart. “I imagined myself making hundreds of clever remarks to make you nervous, but seeing you like this… Per amor di Dio, you are… you look…”

Khatri lowered his gaze to the hand she had resting over his heart before lifting his own to cover it. His fingers enveloped hers with tenderness before he brought her hand to his lips and kissed her palm with a slowness that made Clea bite her lip.

“I have dreamed of you too,” he whispered as he slid his lips to the inside of her wrist, where the tip of his tongue drew a couple of small circles. “Even when I didn’t want to dream of you, you appeared in my dreams. Not even inside my own head are you capable of doing as you’re told…” He heard Clea laugh for a few seconds before that laughter turned into a gasp when Khatri tightened his free hand on her thigh. “I have desire you so much, Clea…”

Every trace of teasing on the Italian’s part vanished at the way Khatri, damn Rudra Khatri, priest and prude, was seducing her in a manner she could define with no word that was not horrendously obscene.

He seemed to have surrendered completely to a desire from which he could no longer escape, and not only could he not escape it, he did not want to. She watched him slide his lips, with torturous slowness, along the inner side of her forearm while those dark eyes settled on her chest, specifically on the breast the dress had left exposed some time ago. Khatri’s gaze was so intense that, for one tiny moment, Clea felt her cheeks take on a blush she did not know how to hide.

In a matter of seconds, Khatri’s lips abandoned her arm so he could lean a little further and leave a chaste kiss on Clea’s shoulder. He descended along her collarbone until he brushed the upper curve of her breast with the same delicacy with which he might have caressed porcelain. It did not take him long to attend to her nipple with a series of wet kisses, a little suction, and the warmth of his breath, making Clea, at some point, bring her hand to Khatri’s hair to tangle her fingers in it. Her other hand searched for support on the table behind her, clutching the tablecloth between her fingers.

She could not say with certainty when it happened, but at some point, while Khatri discovered that Clea’s breasts were his new obsession, the strap of the dress that still allowed the girl to keep a certain dignity over her body slid down her arm until the garment became a heap of fabric around her hips. Khatri’s mouth closed around the nipple of her other breast with a slowness that drew a soft, honeyed sound from Clea, one that made her bite the inside of her cheek in an attempt to silence it. She failed.

Khatri, perhaps emboldened by the way she was reacting to his attentions and more focused on her pleasure than on the urgency beneath his trousers, brought one hand to one of Clea’s thighs. His fingers tightened against her skin and slowly climbed beneath the skirt of her dress.

Her body tensed slightly when she felt him brush her groin.

“Can I…?” Khatri’s hoarse voice pulled her from her trance.

Clea opened her eyes halfway to look at him, lips parted and gaze filled with the lust he had worked so hard to ignite in her. She nodded very slowly while parting her legs a little more.

“Please…”

The first caresses came over her underwear, slow, as if Khatri, who had gone years, many years, without sharing that kind of intimacy with another person, were learning the rhythm of certain things all over again. His fingertips noticed the dampness in the fabric when they moved a little lower. That discovery had two very specific effects on him: the first was feeling his ego swell in a very un-Christian way; the second had more to do with a certain part of his body becoming particularly hard.

Once again, guided by a courage whose origin he did not understand, he slid the garment aside so his fingers could trace a slow, circular rhythm over her clit. He felt Clea gasp against the curve of his neck, her breathing far more irregular than anything he had heard from her until that moment.

“Madonna santa…”

He let out an exhale against Clea’s hair, something almost like a laugh, while leaning in to leave small kisses from her temple to her cheek.

“Every time I hear you say something in Italian,” he murmured, his lips brushing her skin as he spoke, “I wonder whether I should be worried.”

Clea made a sound that mixed a laugh with a gasp, moving her hips against his hand so he would continue.

“Italian slips out when I’m angry or turned on… And so far, you haven’t done anything to make me angry with you…”

He probably should have been scandalized. He had several reasons to flagellate himself that night after breaking more than a few vows.

However, his mouth found hers again, kissing her with such depth and passion that Clea wrapped her legs around his waist. Her thighs tightened around Khatri’s hips, and he slid his hand up to one of them to hold it firmly, just in time to feel Clea press herself against him in a way that was impossible to ignore. His erection, trapped inside his trousers, pressed against her wetness, this time without catching him quite so unprepared. Or perhaps he had accepted that some things were inevitable… like the undeniable fact that he had never felt so alive.

The man’s hips moved against her to create friction, a movement almost minimal, but one that drew a gasp from both of them, swallowed by the other’s mouth.

Clea pulled away from the kiss with a thin thread of saliva still joining their lips, and with a tremor in her legs she did not know how to hide.

“Khatri…”

He rested his forehead against hers, so close to each other that every exhale made their breaths mingle.

“Yeah…?”

For a millisecond, not even she knew exactly what she wanted to ask him: to keep touching her, to let her feel his fingers inside her, to kiss her again, to take off his trousers, to gasp her name again, or to fuck her right there. Any of those options would do.

She bit her lip with such eagerness that Khatri admired the sight with a certain boldness.

“Take me to bed.”

Khatri, in a brief moment of clarity, seemed aware that the request meant crossing one final barrier; it was taking the last step toward fully breaking with everything he had worked so many years to uphold.

Choosing the path of righteousness or choosing the person who had made him feel alive again.

When he spoke, his voice sounded lower than Clea had ever remembered hearing it.

“Are you sure…?”

She could not describe the kind of tenderness Khatri’s constant search for her consent inspired in her. She knew he was not asking because he truly wanted to stop, nor because he had too many doubts. He was asking because, even with his body burning against hers, he still wanted to make sure she was there, with him, of her own free will. That each step belonged to her too.

Clea held his face with both hands, cradling it tenderly before their eyes met.

“Yes, I’m sure I want to make love with you, Khatri.”

Something in that sentence finished connecting certain parts of his mind. That priest would have been willing to live with the desire he felt for her for the rest of his days if it had been necessary, because he knew that desire, that very specific kind of desire, could never be extinguished. The only solution would have been to move away from her, but… How could God be so unjust as to give him Clea, to make him feel whole at her side, only to take her away from him because He could not grant him permission to love her?

He was tired, so very tired, of pretending he did not burn for her. That he didn’t love her with every part of his being.

“Then come here…”

While she caressed the nape of his neck with her nails, sending a pleasurable shiver up his spine from bottom to top, Khatri took the dress bunched around Clea’s hips, pulled it over her head, and threw it far away from them. Then his hands slid beneath her thighs and drew her to the edge of the table with a firmness that pulled a stifled cry from her.

As he lifted her from the table, Clea pressed her body against his. Her breasts flattened against Khatri’s chest, she looped her arms around his neck, and her hands clung to his back. She could feel, in far too much detail, the way his muscles tensed as he carried her. She had the ridiculous impression that, if they remained that close to each other long enough, they would melt into one another.

He walked with her in his arms until he crossed the threshold of the door that led to a room Clea had never had the pleasure of exploring: Khatri’s bedroom.

She had imagined it once or twice, in an absolutely normal and not at all obsessive way, of course, as any reasonable woman who had fallen in love with a priest in a cursed town would do. It was a room as simple as she had imagined it: perfectly tidy, clean, with a closed book on the bedside table, a narrow bed so neatly made that she felt the faintest pity at the thought that she would soon ruin it because of him.

Khatri laid her on the mattress with a care that completely contrasted with the urgency with which he had lifted her from the table. First he placed one knee on the bed, then leaned forward to settle her onto the sheets without fully letting go until Clea fell softly onto her back. Her curls spilled over the pillow where Khatri slept every night, and her bare skin shivered at the contact with the cold fabric of his sheets.

He remained above her, supported on one arm while tracing her thigh with his fingertips, and for a few seconds, neither of them deigned to speak.

Clea, who did not want to break the magic of the moment, lifted a hand to brush his face with the back of her knuckles. She followed the line of his beard to his chin, and that was the exact instant Khatri turned his face just enough to kiss her fingers. A slow, intimate gesture that made her hold her breath. When their eyes met, something burned between them, a longing so primitive yet so tender that they understood in that instant what the other needed.

Khatri leaned toward her body, which meant he had to settle between her legs before his body, warm and strong, covered Clea’s. They kissed slowly, with the devotion of someone who wanted to linger in that instant: both of them in a bed, alone, without guilt, without burdens. They were only two souls who had dared to give themselves that moment of peace and love they so deeply deserved.

The fingers of both her hands tangled in Khatri’s hair, feeling him breathe against her mouth because neither of them was willing to pull away completely. The man’s hips moved against hers with a deliberateness that made Clea’s breath catch. It was not a clumsy or accidental movement, as if he had finally accepted that his body wanted something his mind had spent far too long denying him. She felt the pressure of his erection against the dampness of her underwear and, at the shiver that ran through her body, arched her back against him.

“Khatri…” His name came out as a sigh that disappeared into his mouth.

Clea’s hands left the softness of his hair to slip between their bodies with a very specific purpose. That night, she seemed to be in a constant dispute with Khatri’s clothes, because she conceived of his trousers as an absurd barrier between both their needs. The sound of his belt buckle made him press his forehead to hers, eyes closed, his breathing trembling.

“Can I?” Clea’s voice sounded especially sweet, because she was aware that this step was substantially important to him.

And then something truly extraordinary happened in Clea’s eyes.

Nothing resembling a word came from Khatri’s mouth. Nor did he merely nod and let her be the one to mark the next step, something she would have found logical considering he had gone years, literally, without sharing his body with someone else. But that man, who seemed determined to give her some kind of heart attack, did something very different.

He slowly straightened until his knees were planted on the bed, his body positioned between Clea’s legs. That fact, for some reason her brain did not know how to manage with the slightest decorum, left her completely speechless. She had an absolutely privileged view of him, of his bare face, exposed before her, his curls messier than ever and a bright fire in his gaze. There was not much trace left of the insecure man she had seen when she sat astride him in the chair. Nor did he resemble the priest she had so often seen praying with enviable discipline.

Khatri’s hand descended to his belt at the same time Clea’s heart struck against her ribs. In the sepulchral silence of the night, the sound of the buckle coming undone echoed with indecent intensity. The sight itself seemed so obscenely intimate that Clea, had she not had him between her legs, would have pressed her thighs together on instinct. She watched, with exceptional attention, as he removed the belt first, then unbuttoned his trousers before lowering the zipper with a slowness that was, surely, intentional.

He was not simply taking off a garment. He was allowing her to watch him take it off.

And Clea, who took considerable pride in being able to make an indecent comment even at the most inappropriate moment, discovered, with a mixture of stupefaction and humiliation, that she had gone mute.

“You’re very quiet…” he murmured, more as a kind of check that everything was all right.

She blinked several times, as if she had just come out of some kind of trance, realizing far too late that she had been staring at his hands with her mouth half-open. She lifted her gaze to him, more flushed than she was aware of.

“It’s just… I don’t know if…” Oh, how she hated that her brain, always fast and clever, had decided to betray her at the worst possible moment. “I think I’m experiencing something like… divine illumination.”

The corner of Khatri’s lips curved faintly in a small, almost restrained smile, but Clea saw it perfectly, of course she saw it. She also sensed how something in him relaxed upon discovering he could affect her that way.

“It certainly looks like it.”

“You’re getting cocky, aren’t you?”

“A little.”

He managed to draw a brief laugh from Clea, more air than sound. But the laugh died the moment Khatri moved away to get off the bed.

The room, which was already small in itself, seemed to shrink considerably at the sight of him standing beside the bed, his trousers open and sitting low on his hips. She watched him hook his fingers into the edge of the fabric to push it down. Clea, poor Clea, followed the descent of Khatri’s trousers down his thighs with those glittering little eyes and watched as he bent over to free himself from the garment, leaving it aside with much less care than she was used to seeing from him.

His underwear remained as one last useless, minimal resistance. The blush climbed up the Italian’s neck even before he removed it. It was not so much embarrassment… or perhaps it was. She had imagined Khatri that way, of course. It would have been very hypocritical to pretend she had not. But imagination had the kindness not to look back at her the way he did.

If Khatri had had to explain what he was feeling in that moment, he would have compared it to jumping out of a plane. If one thought about it too much, one did not do it, or did it in a clumsy, humiliating, not at all memorable way. So he lowered his gaze to a specific point somewhere between the floor and the bed and pulled down his underwear, which soon dropped to the floor. He pushed it aside with his foot and, for an instant, neither of them moved.

Clea’s eyes traveled over the man’s anatomy with a slowness that had nothing to do with wanting to torture him, but with a real inability to process what she had before her. The broad chest, the brown skin, the firm abdomen contracting with every breath, the hips, the dark hair descending toward his sex…

Khatri was hard. Completely and utterly hard. For her.

With no fabric to soften the image, the sight of his erection sent such an intense rush of heat through her that, this time, she did press her thighs together.

She parted her lips at the need to take in a breath and, when she lifted her gaze to Khatri’s face, she noticed that his head was lowered. She discovered in him an inevitable vulnerability, worthy of someone who had spent far too long without showing himself like that to anyone. Khatri’s body, so present and so full of desire, seemed to acquire an uncomfortable awareness of itself. As if some part of him, even in that moment, even after having taken the initiative, did not know what to do with the way Clea was looking at him.

She slowly sat up on the bed, supporting herself on one hand before placing both knees on the mattress just as he had done before.

“Khatri, amore mio…”

Khatri slowly raised his eyes to her, as if he needed to make sure he had not imagined it. As if, of everything that had happened that night, which was neither little nor irrelevant, those two words had been the truly extraordinary thing.

Amore mio.

Clea felt emotion tighten her throat in a rather inconvenient way, considering she was practically naked in the bed of the man who made her sigh every damn morning, every damn night, and every damn second she thought of him. She held out her hand toward him and offered a small but sweet smile.

“Come with me.”

Khatri, aware that those words were not an order but represented the possibility of a choice, approached slowly, as if his body, or perhaps his treacherous mind, were still asking whether this was right. But then he took her hand, and the simple touch reminded him why he was there. Clea had become a home, a safe place where he could take shelter and shelter her in return. She was the woman who had made him understand the full definition of the word love, had made him understand its complexity and… He wanted to be with her, in every way his body and mind would allow.

When he was close enough, Clea gently squeezed his hand and brought it to her lips to kiss his knuckles, one by one, with such deliberate tenderness that she noticed him hold his breath for a few seconds. After leaving one final kiss, she pressed his palm against her cheek so he could feel her warmth.

“I don’t know how to look at you in a way that won’t frighten you,” Clea whispered, looking at him with affection despite having spent the whole night burning for him with indecent intensity. “Because there is nothing about you that makes me want to look away.”

Clea leaned toward him and kissed his abdomen. A slow kiss, right where his skin tightened with every breath. Then she left another a little higher, over his ribs. And another, this time at the center of his chest, where his heart was beating so hard she felt it against her lips. She raised her face to look at him, still close to his chest.

“You seem to me the most desirable man I have ever seen in my life,” she whispered, “and if you knew everything I see and think of you, you would not feel even the slightest trace of shame.”

She lifted herself on her knees just enough to steal a chaste kiss from his lips, a kiss that pulled Khatri out of his daze. Clea, returning to her position, moved to one side of the bed, offering plenty of space and inviting him with a few pats on the mattress.

“Now I want you to get into bed with me.”

Khatri watched her in silence for a few seconds before the corners of his lips rose in a smile that was hard to contain.

The bed creaked again under Khatri’s weight as he sat in front of Clea. She smiled back at him, crawling toward him until she was at his side. Only one last garment remained, her thong, which she removed with fairly dignified ease and tossed to one side of the bed. Khatri followed the garment’s path, feeling the blush climb up his neck. In the middle of that brief moment of distraction, Clea closed the entire distance between them by sitting on top of him, facing him, astride him, with each knee on either side of the man’s waist. The contact left them both breathless.

Clea’s weight settled over his bare thighs, her breasts met his chest again, and for an instant, Khatri’s entire body seemed to tense beneath her.

Clea felt it too. She felt the hardness of his cock against her stomach, hot, alive, and impossible to ignore. She felt the brush of his bare skin beneath her thighs, against her ass, and in the way Khatri’s hands, after a second of stillness, rose to rest on her waist.

“The bed is ridiculously narrow,” she whispered against Khatri’s mouth, with the tiniest, nervous, trembling laugh.

He, who had rested his forehead against hers and closed his eyes as if still trying to organize everything happening inside himself, let out an exhale halfway between a laugh and a sigh.

“Right now, it seems like an advantage.”

She looked at him with such blatant astonishment that Khatri, more by intuition than anything else, opened his eyes.

“Well, well, Father,” Clea whispered, unable not to smile.

“Clea...”

“No, no.” She caressed the edge of his jaw with her thumb, lingering over the roughness of his beard as if it had become one of her favorite things that night. “I think it’s a magnificent evolution. Very stimulating, in fact. I’d even say it’s spiritually enriching.”

There it was, Clea’s usual shamelessness, the one that had driven him mad since the very day he met her. There was something so alluring in that way she had of existing that Khatri lowered his gaze to her mouth. Blessed lips. How could anyone blame him for wanting to kiss her every second of his life? That thought drew such an unclerical smile across his face that Clea felt something very indecent low in her belly.

“I don’t think any of this is very spiritual.”

“Shut up.” She placed one of her fingers over his lips, pressing them in a playful gesture. “I’m about to found a religion.”

Khatri’s hoarse laugh vibrated against her finger, the same one she slowly withdrew and that he took advantage of by biting the pad of it in a surprisingly playful gesture. Clea bit her lower lip before wrapping both arms around his neck with two clear objectives: to press herself closer to him and kiss him again. The kiss began soft, almost smiling, but it lost any trace of innocence as Khatri’s hands descended to her ass, where his fingers spread over her with firmness.

She could not remember the last time someone had touched her with that kind of desire.

Clea abandoned her lover’s lips to tilt her face and take refuge in the curve of his neck. She delighted him with her open mouth, letting her tongue brush just enough to feel him gasp. Then she descended along his throat, toward the pulse beating hard beneath his skin. It inflated her ego to notice how Khatri shuddered beneath her mouth. She liked it so much that she bit the area softly, barely a brief pressure that drew something like a growl from him.

She smiled against his skin, proud.

“Mhm… So you like that.”

Why give him time to answer when she could bite him again with even less decorum? Khatri, in response, squeezed Clea’s ass and pulled her so close to him that, even though it had not been his initial intention, he made the friction between their sexes inevitable.

The air thickened and the temperature of the room became unbearable. He pulled his mouth away from her neck with the smallest gasp.

“Clea…” Her name came out low, almost like a warning that arrived too late.

“I know,” she whispered, though she was not entirely sure what she was admitting.

That she wanted him, perhaps. That the friction had set her alight. That she needed more. That she was about to lose her mind over the naked man she was sitting on.

Clea closed her eyes for a few seconds, breathing against his mouth before making a decision. Her right hand moved down Khatri’s chest to explore his warm skin, outlining the most sensual shapes of his body with her fingers until her fingertips brushed his stomach. She felt him tense beneath her fingers even before she touched him. When she finally wrapped her hand around his cock, Khatri let out a broken breath.

She began to stroke him from base to tip with the slowness of someone who did not want to rush and, much less, make him uncomfortable. That was precisely why she did not take those green eyes off him; she needed to attend to every one of his reactions in case he was not comfortable enough with this.

She watched him close his eyes, observed the tension that formed in his neck and the movement of his throat as he swallowed. She touched him with an almost experimental delicacy, not because she did not know what she was doing, but because she wanted to discover what he liked. What pressure made him hold his breath, what rhythm would make him moan…

“Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

Khatri opened his eyes halfway and looked at her with a darkness that made her shiver.

“Very all right…”

She moved her hand with more intention, increasing the rhythm to watch as he closed his eyes again. She noticed the way his abdomen contracted and his breathing became more untenable as she stroked him. But Khatri, who could be many things but was certainly not inconsiderate, leaned over her to seek one of her breasts with his mouth. She stopped touching him for an instant, because the wet heat of his lips enveloping one of her nipples drew a shameful moan from her and clouded her mind.

Khatri’s hand descended between their bodies as she leaned in. The simple brush of his fingers against Clea’s stomach made her feel a tingling that ran all the way down her back. When he finally reached her sex, he touched her with a slowness that would have made her legs tremble had she been standing. The pressure on her clit, with those circular movements that soon found their rhythm, made her gasp against his neck.

Clea closed her eyes and rested her cheek on Khatri’s shoulder.

“Cazzo, non fermarti…”

Khatri, who evidently did not understand what she had said but was able to intuit something quite accurate, let out a brief laugh that clung to his mouth before kissing her again. Which was a problem, because Clea could not stop gasping, and he had trouble not doing the same. Ecstatic at the way Clea’s body responded to him, he tested her entrance with his fingers, wet and hot.

“Mettili dentro di me…”

Clea moved her hips toward Khatri’s fingers, almost begging for the pleasure she so deeply craved. And he, blinded by the need to please her, sank his ring and middle fingers inside her. The wetness that greeted him drew a growl of pleasure from him while, with his free hand, he held her by the waist. The bed creaked beneath them when Clea moved her hips again.

Khatri’s cock brushed her thigh, hot and hard against her hand. Clea lowered her gaze between their bodies to contemplate the obscenity of the moment, biting her lip out of pure desire. When she looked back into his eyes, she widened a feline smile before leaning toward his ear to whisper:

“You have no idea how many times I’ve thought about this… About touching you like this.” She moved her hand more slowly and with more intention. “About what you would sound like if you stopped holding back… About what it would be like to have you beneath me, fucking you until I stole the breath from your lungs…”

Khatri’s reaction was immediate, almost as if something in his mind had collapsed, in the best possible way. That woman had always had an outstanding talent for tempting him, for planting ideas or images in his head that a priest should not think about. He had fought desire through thick and thin, but in that precise moment, with her in his arms, gasping in his ear, her breasts crushed against his chest and her hips seeking pleasure from his hand… Well, it made Khatri urgently need to give her what she craved so much.

His fingers curled inside Clea and the reaction was immediate. Her moans became higher and sweeter when his fingers, moving inside her, touched a certain point that seemed to be undoing her literally and metaphorically. She moaned in a far less elegant way than her pride would have preferred, and he, in response, held her with his other hand against the small of her back, drawing her to his body until they were so close that Khatri’s erection brushed against Clea’s wetness with each small movement of her hips.

Clea, who stopped being able to coordinate her movements while Khatri touched her in a way that was about to make her eyes roll back, stopped stroking him. She hid her face in the curve of his neck, breathing against his skin, or trying to.

“Please… don’t stop…”

And he did not stop, of course he did not. Khatri let himself be guided by the way her moans grew more desperate, by the way she writhed in his arms when his fingers touched that certain point, by the way the brush of his palm against her clit made her move her hips with desperation.

In a matter of moments, he felt her tighten around his fingers. Clea clung to his arm and his back desperately. Khatri held her against him with the firm arm he had wrapped around the small of her back while she came apart over his hand with such fierce eroticism that he forgot how to breathe. He watched her lose control little by little, first with that tremor that climbed up her thighs, then in the way her back arched and her fingers sank into his skin. He felt the wet heat of her sex tightening around his fingers, the way her hips continued seeking him even when pleasure was already taking her completely.

Clea ended up hiding her face in his neck, biting his skin to keep from screaming, both of them completely ignoring the marks they would leave behind on each other’s bodies the next morning. The sound that came from Khatri’s throat was low and hoarse, because feeling her reach orgasm in his arms, with his name broken beneath her skin and her legs trembling on either side of his body, turned out to be such a devastating experience that he found nothing even remotely similar to compare it to.

“Khatri…” she moaned, still trembling, her voice so undone it almost did not come out at all.

He pressed his mouth to her temple and left a single kiss there, slow and sweet. His fingers gradually reduced their rhythm, accompanying the last shudders of her body with a delicacy Clea thought could only belong to him. The hand that had been holding her by the waist moved up her back, tracing her skin with a slowness meant to bring her back to reality. His fingers climbed to the nape of her neck, tangling in her curls to hold her as if the idea of separating in that instant seemed to him an absolutely unnecessary cruelty.

A weak laugh escaped Clea against his neck, and Khatri, whose breathing was still too altered for him to boast of any serenity, let out something almost like a laugh against her hair.

“Did I do it so badly… that you’re laughing at me…?” he asked in that deep voice that sent a shiver down Clea’s back.

She pulled away just enough to look at him with parted lips, flushed cheeks, and those bright green eyes fixed on him as if she possessed the ability to detect the most virtuous liar in the world.

“I just came on top of you, so… I’m going to ignore that question for your own good.”

The blush that climbed up Khatri’s face was, in essence, beautiful. Absolutely and devastatingly beautiful. Clea would have liked to tease him a little, perhaps to prolong the agony simply for the pleasure of watching him try to manage that mixture of pride, modesty, and desire. However, her hand closed again around the cock brushing her stomach, giving him the slightest caress, which made Khatri narrow his eyes and press his forehead against hers. He sighed against Clea’s mouth and she, her body still sensitive, felt something inside her ignite again with absurd speed.

“You’ve been far too generous with me…” she whispered, brushing his lips as she spoke. “My pride won’t allow me to be the only one who enjoys herself in this bed.”

Khatri let out a brief, undone laugh that disappeared against Clea’s mouth, from which he had not fully pulled away.

“You don’t have to do any of this out of pride,” he murmured, his lips brushing hers.

“It isn’t only pride.”

Clea leaned in to kiss his Adam’s apple, dragging her lips up to that beautifully defined jaw where she left a gentle little bite. Khatri turned his face to seek her mouth with such little patience that their tongues brushed with anticipation. She responded immediately, wrapping both arms around his neck, pressing herself against him again until her breasts flattened against his chest and her sex, still sensitive, brushed Khatri’s erection once more. They both gasped into each other’s mouths.

They looked at each other in that kind of brief silence that precedes important decisions.

Clea lifted her body, planting her knees on the bed while one hand rested on his shoulder and the other slipped between their bodies to guide Khatri’s cock to her entrance. She descended so slowly that she felt the small resistance of her body as it opened to him. While he held her by the waist, he closed his eyes for an instant, his jaw so tense that Clea knew he was holding himself back in a way that was almost painful.

How could one define the sensation of joining with the love of one’s life for the first time?

She found no word in her head worthy of such a sensation. Not even in Italian, which had certain dramatic resources for impossible loves. Her body, on the other hand, seemed to understand before she did. It was not only pleasure. Clea felt that the entire world had been reduced to the heat of Khatri beneath her body, to his open hands on her skin, to both their frantic heartbeats, and to that unbearable certainty that, if she looked at him for too long, if she allowed herself to understand the magnitude of what was happening… perhaps she would no longer be able to keep silent about the fact that she was in love with him.

For Khatri, however, what he was feeling did not take the form of a question. It was more like a revelation. Having her so close, so alive, looking at him as if there were nothing shameful in the way they needed each other, stirred in him such intense emotion that it overwhelmed him. He did not feel that he was losing any part of himself by surrendering to her. On the contrary, he had the absurd and brilliant sense that Clea was returning to him a part of himself he had buried along with many other things.

He loved her with a certainty so obvious that it hurt in his chest and, in that moment, he understood that making love to Clea did not necessarily mean he was moving away from God. It was the first time in a long while that his body and soul stopped contradicting each other.

“Clea…”

At the sound of her name, she held his face between both hands as if taking hold of the most precious treasure she had ever had at her disposal. Her thumbs caressed his cheeks, feeling the rough brush of his beard before she leaned in to kiss him with an almost obscene slowness and devotion. The sensation of that man’s altered breathing against her mouth made her arch her back for the sole and indecent purpose of pressing herself against him. She moaned even as she felt the invasion of his tongue, sinking her fingers into the nape of his neck while drawing him toward her. The movement of her hips became more urgent, so much so that the bed creaked beneath them and neither seemed inclined to care.

At some point, Khatri gained enough confidence to guide her with his hands, acquiring a confidence of which he was not aware. Maintaining that rhythm and kissing at the same time became an absurd task, so Clea ended up resting her forehead against his, without closing her eyes completely so she could see how Khatri’s face reacted each time she sank down onto him. The sound of their skin meeting mingled with their gasps and moans in the most erotic orchestra.

Khatri’s hands moved from Clea’s hips to her glutes, taking hold of her there and doing something that caught her so off guard it made her release a sound so close to a cry that she blushed all the way to her ears. Because Khatri moved his hips at the same time she did.

It was so fucking pleasurable that Clea could not move because she needed to feel all of him, inside her.

“Cazzo, Khatri…” she gasped against his ear. “Don’t stop.”

And Khatri did not stop, of course he did not, not when he had the woman who drove him mad moaning against his mouth, sometimes in his ear, when he felt her nails digging into his skin, when he felt the brush of her body every time they thrust against each other.

He would not have known how to stop even if he had wanted to. What they were living through no longer belonged to the same kind of desire he had tried to contain for weeks, a desire that could have been classified as theoretical, something that belonged only to him and his mind. He had no intention of stopping when Clea was on top of him, thighs open on either side of his body, rebellious curls crossing her face, lips swollen from his kisses, and that wild look in her eyes.

Every time Clea descended onto him, Khatri met her with a movement of his hips that made the sensation much deeper, more intense, and more difficult to endure if one wished to maintain even the slightest control. The worst thing of all, or the best, depending on how one looked at it, was that he did not seem to be doing it from mere instinct, but from absolute attention to her. He listened to her and repeated whatever had made her moan his name. He softened the rhythm when he noticed she needed to catch her breath. And he drew her toward him when Clea recovered enough air to kiss her as if no distance between them could ever seem acceptable to him.

The intimacy of that position was almost unbearable. Clea could not flee from the intensity of his gaze, could not hide her face in the pillow or conceal it when something made her want to roll her eyes back. In the same way, Khatri could not hide anything either, because she perceived how his stomach contracted when pleasure pierced him from side to side, noticed how Khatri’s gaze became lost in the sway of her breasts with each movement, and the way he parted his mouth from pleasure.

She did not know whether she noticed it first in Khatri’s hungry gaze or in the way he gripped her hips to force her to remain still. Clea lifted her eyes to him with a confusion she could not hide.

“What are you doing…?” she whispered, even though her voice came out far too aroused to sound alarmed.

She felt one of the man’s hands hold her beneath the thigh, firmly. Khatri breathed against her mouth while his eyes searched hers, as if, even in the middle of that surge, he wanted to make sure Clea was still there, with him, every second.

“I want to see you beneath me.”

Clea opened her mouth to answer something, anything, probably some obscenity of remarkable quality given the material she had just been handed. Unfortunately, she did not have time.

Khatri placed his other hand on her waist and, with a firm and surprisingly controlled movement, tipped her back until Clea felt the comfort of the mattress and the softness of the sheets against her back. Her curls spilled again over the pillow and he settled above her, their bodies still joined in such an intimate way that Clea felt her mind cloud over.

Surely the image of Khatri above her destroyed Clea’s nervous system. She contemplated him with his forehead pearled with sweat, his curls a little damp, his gaze alight, his arms tense as both hands pressed into the pillow on either side of her head… If Khatri had moved in that moment, Clea was convinced she would have come in a completely ridiculous and humiliating way. Luckily, he too seemed to need a few seconds before moving.

The new position sent pleasure climbing up her back in a slow, deep discharge that forced her to close her eyes and arch against him. Khatri leaned down until he buried his face in the curve of her neck, breathing against her skin while he felt his chest brush against hers with every movement. It was no longer the same rhythm as before, seated face to face, where everything had been more circular and intimate, like a conversation at the same height. Like this, with him above her, Khatri’s body covered her completely. There was more force in his thrusts, more hunger.

“Oddio, fuck me harder, Khatri…”

Clea felt his body respond almost instantly, the rhythm gaining intensity without losing even a shred of precision. Khatri lowered his mouth to her chest, covering her breast with a certain eagerness before rising again toward her mouth. Clea received him with a clumsy, hungry kiss, where their teeth knocked together and their breaths mingled.

The passion between them stopped growing according to any pre-established logic. The bed creaked beneath the increasingly intense and clumsy rhythm of each thrust; the air in the room grew thick, hot, laden with those sounds that mingled the slap of their skin, their breathing, their gasps, and their moans.  

At some point, Khatri braced his forearm on the pillow above Clea’s head so as not to crush her with his weight, even though both of them found the constant friction of their bodies tremendously arousing. His other hand slid between them and Clea’s eyes flew open when she felt his fingers caress that very specific part of her anatomy that made her bend with pleasure. She clung to his back with desperation, tensing her legs as she felt him stroke her clit with a precision that brought moisture to her eyes.

“Khatri… You’re going to make me come…”

And he, who did not seem to find any problem whatsoever in that revelation, pressed his forehead to hers without stopping.

“I want to feel it again…”

Clea shut her eyes tightly, as if that way she could feel all those sensations without becoming dizzy. She noticed Khatri take refuge in her neck again, breathing against her skin, gasping in her ear. He thrust into her with an energy that made it seem as though that man’s only purpose in life had been precisely this moment: to bring her to orgasm.

Although, to tell the truth… She felt him tense, as close to his own climax as she was.

“Khatri, amore mio…”

Clea’s hands clung to him with need. One of her hands crossed his back and sank her nails into him, the other tangled in his hair to make sure she still had him close.

Orgasm reached her again with an intensity that tore the air from her lungs. It was nowhere near the same as the first. This climax was much deeper, much more intense. The pleasurable tingling began in her toes, climbed up her legs, and concentrated in her belly in such a way that Clea arched beneath his body, tightening around him. His name escaped her mouth in the form of a glorious moan she did not try to contain.

Khatri felt it almost at the same time, a shudder running down his entire damn back. His breathing turned into a deep moan against her neck as he spilled inside her, feeling, from one moment to the next, all strength leave his body completely.

They remained in silence for several minutes. Khatri took a considerable amount of time to recover the strength necessary to move. Not because he did not want to, but because the world that still existed beyond Clea seemed to have been reduced to something distant and useless. During that time, he was only capable of remaining with his face hidden in the hollow of her neck, eyes closed, trying to catch his breath. From there, he could feel Clea’s racing heartbeat beneath her chest, could feel her fine, delicate fingers caressing the nape of his neck with a tenderness that finished undoing whatever remnants of strength he had not already lost in her arms.

Clea, for her part, was in no hurry for him to move away either. She liked feeling him that way, vulnerable in a different way, warmer and more intimate. She left several kisses on his temple while moving her fingers up to his damp curls and trying to neaten them a little.

When Khatri finally shifted, he did so with the slowness of someone whose whole body was numb and who still needed time to recover. He almost let himself fall onto one side of the bed, facing her, whom he could finally look at once he was capable of opening his eyes.

“Hi,” she whispered with a small, silly smile before turning onto her side to face him.

The bed turned out to be even narrower with both of them lying side by side. Khatri looked at her for a second before letting out a low, hoarse, exhausted laugh.

“Hi.”

“You were so quiet I was afraid you’d gone somewhere.”

Khatri’s smile became softer, more tender. He leaned toward Clea to leave an affectionate kiss on her forehead, making her smile widen.

“No. I’m still here.”

They remained in silence, looking into each other’s eyes for so long that, for some reason that most likely had to do with exhaustion, nakedness, the heat of their bodies, and the undeniable fact that they had just made love, they both began to laugh. Clea laughed into the pillow and Khatri brought a hand to his mouth as if trying to contain the laugh that escaped him anyway.

“Don’t laugh.” Though he was doing it all the same.

“I can’t help it.”

“And what are you laughing at?”

“Well… I don’t know. The fact that I’m naked in YOUR bed, a bed which, by the way, is in a fucking church in a fucking cursed town. Doesn’t that seem funny enough to you?”

Clea tried to get comfortable in the bed with some difficulty, because it was so narrow that she was practically trapped between the cold stone wall and Khatri’s warm body.

“Your bed is depressing.”

“Well,” Khatri shrugged with feigned disdain, “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“It shows. The hospitality leaves much to be desired,” Clea whispered, still half laughing.

“I’m sorry I failed to foresee this.”

The woman arched an eyebrow, narrowing her eyes as she looked at his face.

“You didn’t foresee it even a little?”

Khatri looked at her with a calm that might have been credible if he were not completely naked beneath rumpled sheets, his skin still warm and the face of a man who had just lost several battles against himself.

“I had been trying not to.”

Clea opened her mouth to answer with some affectionate cruelty, but the phrase died on her tongue. There was nothing flirtatious about the way Khatri had answered her. It was honest, sweet, even. As if he did not regret having imagined a moment like this, but rather all the time he had spent trying to convince himself he could not desire a life in which this was possible.

So Clea, with a solemnity entirely improper for someone who, seconds earlier, had insulted a priest’s bed, tugged the sheet up to cover them both. Or tried to.

The sheet, of course, was also narrow. Apparently, everything in that room had been designed by someone with a profound contempt for human company. Clea pulled one end, Khatri lost half the coverage and let out an amused exhale. He tried to fix it, she ended up with one shoulder uncovered, and finally they both wound up tangled beneath the fabric, pressed together in a way that would have been almost obligatory even if they had not wanted it.

They decided that the most comfortable, and peculiarly convenient for both, was for her to rest her head on Khatri’s chest and for him to wrap an arm around her. Only then did silence form between them for a few seconds before she decided to address the elephant in the room.

“How do you feel?”

She lifted her head just enough to check that Khatri was staring at the ceiling above them. He took a deep breath while his fingertips traced soft caresses over Clea’s back.

“I don’t know.”

There was a very brief, very specific moment in which Clea feared that what they had lived had been, simply, a small oasis in their lives. That the next day, everything would return to the way it had always been. It was not so far-fetched a thought, considering everything it had taken them to reach that point. But when Khatri lowered his gaze to her… she saw no regret in his eyes.

“I feel…” As soon as he began to speak, he stopped, because apparently he could not find a damn word in the dictionary that properly fit what he had in his chest. “I feel at peace.”

Clea blinked. It was not the answer she expected. Though it could have been much worse, honestly.

“At peace?”

Khatri nodded slowly and slid his hand from her back to the nape of her neck, carefully tangling his fingers in her curls.

“Before this… I thought that, if it happened, I would be afraid once it was over. That guilt would come, that I would feel… separated from myself. From God and from everything I have tried to be.”

Clea held her breath without realizing it, with a trace of fear in her eyes that, fortunately, Khatri did not see.

“And I don’t feel any of that.”

“And what do you feel…?”

He looked at her with a tenderness that made Clea feel smaller. She felt Khatri’s caress, the way his thumb moved slowly, as if that answer had to touch her before it could be pronounced.

“I feel calm here, with you. And that there is nothing in this bed that makes me feel dirty.”

She did not quite know how to take that sentence. It was not that her expectations had been particularly high; she had not expected a declaration of love worthy of *Bridgerton*, but… there was something in her, a very small corner, that felt a certain disappointment.

She rested her cheek against his chest again, using the excuse that she wanted to get comfortable, to keep him from noticing what was going through her mind.

“Well, thank God… Because if after all this you’d told me you felt dirty, I would have had to kill you, and then how would I have explained that to Boyd tomorrow?”

Khatri let out a low laugh, his breathing still somewhat tired, and the sound vibrated beneath her cheek. Clea closed her eyes at the feeling, trying to convince herself that it was enough. That it was fine. That it was more than enough, really. Khatri had just told her that he felt calm with her, that there was nothing dirty in what they had just shared, and considering the value of that sentence in the mouth of someone who was, after all, still a priest and who had made great renunciations in his life, she had no right to complain. Renunciations he had decided to break for her.

But even so… Even so, there was something tiny, almost childish, that remained curled up inside her. Perhaps because a part of Clea, a much more ridiculous and much needier part than she was willing to admit, had hoped he would say something that did not sound only like relief.

Khatri must have noticed something anyway. Because the hand he had on her back stopped drawing slow circles and went still between her shoulder blades, warm and open, as if he had suddenly perceived the slightest tension in Clea’s body and did not yet know where it came from.

“Clea.”

She kept her cheek resting on his chest.

“Mmm?”

“Look at me.”

“Why? I’m very comfortable here.”

“Please…”

That tone. That damn tone of an attentive, patient man, dangerously willing to see her, even when she was trying to hide with a very respectable strategy: embedding herself against his torso and pretending she had been absorbed by the sheet.

Clea sighed dramatically, because she still had some dignity left, and lifted her face just enough to look at him from where she was. Khatri had his head inclined toward her, his dark eyes still softened by exhaustion, but attentive. Far too attentive.

“What?” she asked, though it came out less convincing than expected. He brushed a curl from her cheek with unbearable delicacy.

“I didn’t want it to sound wrong.”

Clea tried to smile as best she could.

“Oh, no? Well, thank goodness, because as a post-event review it was a bit bland.”

“What I meant…” He moved his hand to Clea’s cheek, caressing it with his thumb. “Is that I feel calm because I am with you. Not despite what happened, but not because I managed to convince myself this isn’t wrong. I am at peace because I am exactly where I want to be… And I want to be here, with you.”

The small, disappointed corner of Clea, that foolish and vulnerable place she had tried to hide against his chest, melted with humiliating ease.

“That was better,” was all she whispered, because if she said anything more honest she might start crying, because she was a damn sentimental fool.

With a soft, sweet smile on her lips, she leaned in to leave a chaste kiss on his mouth. As they parted, he brushed his nose against hers, raising a hand to move a couple of curls away from Clea’s face.

“Your hair is impossible.”

“I wonder whose fault that is.”

“Someone terrible, surely.”

The curl fell back into the same place, disobedient and proud, as if it had a personality of its own. Clea watched him try a second time and a smile escaped her.

“Leave it. It has survived worse things than your good intentions.”

Clea rested her cheek on his chest again, feeling the circles he traced on her back in the form of caresses begin to relax her enough to make her drowsy. Meanwhile, she walked her fingers down the center of his chest, tracing imaginary lines over his skin.

She did not know how much time passed before another question crossed her mind.

“Do you ever think about what you’ll do when we get out of here?”

In the hypothetical case that they could get out, she forgot to add.

Khatri remained silent for a few seconds, considering an answer far more complex than one might think.

“Sometimes.”

Clea lifted her head and rested her chin on his chest, expectant.

“And?”

“And most of the time I try not to think about it too much.”

“You’re a coward.”

He smiled faintly, without the slightest trace of offense.

“Yes, I am.”

The answer drew a sweet laugh from Clea.

“Well… You’re very docile after sex.”

Khatri, still with his eyes closed, let out a hoarse laugh because, deep down, he knew she was right.

“Actually…” he whispered, half-opening his eyes and tilting his face to meet those green eyes he had not been able to get out of his head since the day he met her. “There is something I would like to do when we get out of this place.”

Clea, curious, raised her head to look at him with all the attention in the world.

“What I want to do when we get out of here is spend the rest of my days with you.”