Chapter 1: Retreat into Temptation
The basement air was always cold, but now it felt like a living thing, slithering over Millie’s skin where her sweater was pushed up. Simon’s mouth was a brand on her neck, hot and wet, and her whole body was one giant, aching pulse. The industrial fridge hummed against her back.
“We—we should stop,” she gasped. Her fingers weren’t listening. They were twisted in the chain of his crucifix, the metal biting into her palm.
He pulled back, just an inch. His eyes were dark, the kind of dark that made her stomach swoop. “Do you want to?”
That was the problem. She didn’t. She really, really didn’t. Stopping felt like tearing a piece of herself off. They’d already crossed the line, anyway. A week ago, in the storage room behind the donated Christmas decorations. It had been fast and clumsy and so quiet afterward they could only stare at the ceiling, listening to the echo of their own breathing in the dark.
The anxiety since then was a physical weight, a rock in her gut that made it hard to eat the bland casseroles her mom made. She’d looked at herself in the mirror, searching for a mark, a difference. She was technically not a virgin. The words felt foreign and filthy and thrilling. Simon was different too. He moved like he owned the space around her now, his touches sure where they used to be shaky.
“Sister Agnes will be back,” Millie whispered, but she was arching into him, her hips tilting on their own.
“Wafers are in the rectory. That’s a five-minute walk.” His voice was rough. He’d been rationalizing everything since it happened. Last night, over text, he’d typed out: If we’re already forgiven for the first time, and we’re going to ask forgiveness anyway, is the second time really a new sin or just part of the same confession?
It made a twisted kind of sense to her. The dam was broken. The card, as he called it, was gone. Why was she still standing in the flood pretending to be dry?
His hand slid from her waist, over the curve of her hip, and down the back of her thigh, hiking up her long skirt. The fabric was wool, scratchy. His fingers brushed the bare skin at the top of her tights, and she jerked.
“See?” he murmured, his lips against her jaw. “You don’t want to stop.”
“It felt really good,” she blurted out, the confession muffled in his shoulder. “That’s the worst part. It felt so good, and now all I can think about is… doing it again. What’s the point of even abstaining now?”
He stilled. “Yeah.”
That single word held everything. The same desperate hunger, the same gut-churn of guilt. They’d met in this youth group, two of the most fervent. They’d volunteered to be accountability partners to quit porn, to stop touching themselves. It had lasted about three days. Then the texts started. I slipped up. It was a bad scene. Me too. A really long video. They began comparing notes. Describing. It became a game, a secret language. His logical mind would break down the mechanics; her more emotional one would describe the feeling, the shameful, glorious rush. The bond felt holier, somehow, than just being two good kids who never sinned. They were soldiers in the trenches together.
Now they were here. His body was pressed against hers, and all the sermons, all the talks about purity rings and saving yourself, melted into a stupid, distant buzz. This was real. The connection, the kinkiness of it all, hiding and wanting and feeling. It was better than any video.
“It doesn’t feel like just… a sin,” Simon said, thinking aloud, his forehead against the fridge next to her head. “It feels like a thing. A thing we do. And we love God, right?”
“Yes.”
“And we’re going to ask for forgiveness.”
“Yes.”
“So what if…” He pulled back to look at her. His curls were messy where her hands had been. “What if we… made it a prayer?”
Millie blinked. The fluorescent light flickered, casting his face in a momentary shadow. “What?”
“What if we prayed. While we did it. We meditate on scripture, or we just… talk to God. Together. While we’re… connected.”
The idea was so absurd, so blasphemous and perfect, that a hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat. It would make it mean something. It would twist the sin into something else, something almost sacred. It was the ultimate rationalization, and it was so Simon.
“We wouldn’t be just giving in,” he pressed, his eyes blazing with the logic of it. “We’d be incorporating Him. We’d be acknowledging His presence in our… union.”
Union. The word was better than fuck. It sounded like a hymn.
Her heart was hammering. The rock of anxiety in her gut softened, transformed into a low, eager throb. “We could say the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Or just talk to Him. Honestly. About how we feel.” His hand smoothed her skirt back down, a strangely gentle gesture. “We wouldn’t say ‘I love you.’ That’s for marriage. This is just… this. A physical prayer. Between the three of us.”
The three of us. God, in this grimy kitchen, with the smell of old incense and the hum of the fridge.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs, distant and slow. Sister Agnes, with her bad knee.
They sprang apart. Millie yanked her sweater down, her face flaming. Simon turned and busied himself with a box of paper napkins, his breathing uneven.
The door swung open. Sister Agnes stood there, a large box of communion wafers in her arms. Her gaze swept over them, lingering on Millie’s flushed cheeks. “Everything all right down here?”
“Yes, Sister,” Simon said, his voice impressively steady. “Just discussing the reading for next week. The Song of Songs. It’s… very evocative.”
Millie almost choked.
Sister Agnes nodded, a faint smile on her lips. “Beautiful. The love of God for his church. Remember, the body is a temple.” She set the box on the counter with a thud. “Don’t stay down here too long. It’s damp.”
She left, her sensible shoes squeaking on the linoleum.
The silence she left behind was charged, electric. Millie looked at Simon. He looked at her. The anxiety was still there, a sharp, metallic taste in her mouth. They were marked. They were changed.
But he was right. They could fix it. They could make it mean something else.
He reached out, not for her body, but for her hand. He laced his fingers with hers. His palm was sweaty. So was hers.
“Tonight,” he whispered, his thumb stroking her knuckle. “After group. My parents are at adoration until ten.”
She nodded, a quick, frantic jerk of her chin. The prayer formed in her mind already, a frantic, jumbled plea. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name… She couldn’t remember the rest. Just the feeling, the desperate, hungry feeling, waiting for the clock to tick down to their strange, new liturgy.
Just the feeling, the desperate, hungry feeling, waiting for the clock to tick down to their strange, new liturgy.
The remaining hour of youth group was a form of torture. A prayer session felt like a sick joke. Millie sat on the folding chair, knees clamped together, and tried to focus on Sister Agnes’s lesson about the parable of the prodigal son. All she could think about was the video she’d watched that afternoon, the one she’d searched for after the first time with Simon, needing to see something that mirrored her own fall.
Bree. The redhead from Backroom Casting Couch. Curvy, with a sweet, fake-nervous smile that dissolved into these breathy, pleading moans. Oh god. Oh god, right there. She said it like a prayer. Millie had watched it twice, headphones in, her own hand shoved under her waistband, fascinated by how Bree’s body moved, how she seemed to both resist and crave it. It wasn’t just the sex. It was the transaction. The permission. The way Bree’s oh gods sounded both like surrender and a demand for more. Maybe that’s what prayer during sex could be. Not stiff, recited words, but that raw, gasping thank you for the feeling, a plea for it to never stop. Thank you for this pleasure. Help me feel it more. Help him make me cum. The blasphemy of the thought made her shift in her seat, a fresh, hot wave of excitement pooling low in her stomach, so intense it almost felt like pain.
Across the circle, Simon’s jaw was tight. He was tracking Sister Agnes with a fierce, fake concentration. But his mind was in his basement, on the plaid couch that smelled like his dad’s cigars. He wasn’t thinking about dating Millie. The word girlfriend felt childish, a label for people who held hands after Mass and got permission to go to prom. What they were doing was something else. It was adult. It was real.
A holy relationship, a pure courtship leading to marriage—that was one path. It was a path that officially had no sex. That was the rule. So what they had, this fumbling in the dark, couldn’t possibly be part of a holy relationship. It had to be separate. A compartment. The sex lived in a different room in his head, a room where the only furniture was Millie’s body. Her incredible tits, heavy and soft in his hands. The startling smoothness of the skin on her inner thighs, like nothing he’d ever felt. The slick, shocking heat of her cunt, which he still couldn’t believe he’d been inside. The shame was a low-grade nausea, always there. But he could outrun it if he focused on those details, on the mechanics and the sensations. The sex was more important than any relationship could be because it was a fact, a physical truth. The relationship was just an idea.
Finally, finally, Sister Agnes said the closing prayer. They all shuffled out, calling goodnights into the cold air. Millie and Simon didn’t look at each other. He got into his parents’ old sedan. She got into her hatchback. They drove in separate directions, a pointless decoy for anyone who might be watching, before converging on his silent, empty house ten minutes later.
The basement was dark, lit only by the eerie glow of the aquarium in the corner. The hum of the filter filled the silence.
They stood three feet apart, their coats still on.
“So,” he said. His voice was strange.
“We should… pray first?” Millie’s suggestion came out in a whisper. She was trembling. “To, you know. Set the intention.”
Simon nodded, a sharp jerk of his head. This was logical. It made it sanctioned. He dropped to his knees on the shag carpet. After a second’s hesitation, she knelt facing him. They bowed their heads.
“Dear Lord,” Simon began, then stopped. The words dried up. All he could see against his closed eyelids was the shadow of her cleavage in the church kitchen.
Millie jumped in, her voice rushed. “Thank you for bringing us together. Thank you for… for the ways our bodies can feel. Please be with us now. Help us to… to feel good. To feel close. To… um… to achieve climax. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
“Amen,” Simon echoed, the word thick.
Then they were moving, a frantic tangle of zippers and wool. His hands were on her sweater, yanking it over her head. Her fingers fought with his belt. There was no tenderness, just a raw and hungry urgency. The prayer hadn’t purified anything. It had just been the match thrown on the gasoline.
Her bra came off, and his breath hitched. Unbelievable. Even in the weird blue light from the fish tank, they were perfect. He filled his hands with them, lowering his head to take a nipple into his mouth, and she cried out, her back arching. This was the thing. This was the real thing. Not holding hands. Not chaperoned dates. This sweating, grunting, animal reality.
As he pushed her back onto the couch, hiked her skirt up, and fumbled with her tights, Millie’s mind was a fractured mess. I’m not a virgin. This is my second time. I am a person who does this now. The guilt tried to rise, a greasy wave. She pushed it down by focusing on the feeling of his weight, the scratch of his jeans against her thighs, by letting Bree’s moans play in her memory. Oh god. Oh god.
When he entered her, it was less awkward than the first time. It was sharper, more focused. The pleasure was a bright, insistent thread starting to weave through her. She wrapped her legs around his hips, urging him deeper.
“Feel good?” he grunted into her neck, his rhythm already starting to stutter.
“Yes. Oh, yes. Thank you, God,” she gasped, and it wasn’t performative. It burst out of her. The thank you was for the feeling, for the permission, for the insane kink of saying His name while Simon’s body pistoned into hers. It was the ultimate sin and the ultimate thrill, all tied together. She was praying. She was coming. She was so, so damned.
Simon heard her thank you, God and felt a final, crashing wave of shame. He buried his face in her hair to hide from it, chasing his own finish, focusing only on the clutch of her body around his, the slap of skin, the unbelievable reality of what he was doing. The sex was the only thing that mattered. Everything else was just noise.
Everything else was just noise. The guilt was a thin, distant sheet of glass, and they were crashing right through it, splintering it into a thousand irrelevant pieces with the sheer, grinding force of their bodies.
Her thoughts dissolved into pure sensation. Each thrust was a discovery. The blunt head of him caught on a fold, a spongy pocket of nerve endings she never knew existed, and a broken gasp tore from her throat. She could feel the slick, hot smear of his pre-cum painting her insides, a slippery promise of what was to come. He felt enormous, a fullness that seemed to spear up past her womb, nudging a deep, aching spot behind her belly button. It was a good hurt. A necessary one.
Simon was lost in the wet, clutching heat of her. The way her cunt sweat, coating his shaft with each pull, was a miracle. It was proof. It was better than any prayer he’d ever mumbled. He loved it. He needed to live inside that feeling forever. He squeezed her breasts, his thumbs rough on her nipples, and in the dark theatre of his mind, they weren’t on his parents’ basement couch. They were up in the choir loft, pressed against the cold railing, the scent of wax and dust thick in the air. The fantasy was a lightning bolt to his groin.
“Please,” Millie choked out, the word mangled. Her eyes were screwed shut, but she saw the stained-glass window behind the altar. “Simon… have the courage. Please. Come inside me. Do it.”
Her plea, wrapped in the language of virtue, unraveled him. It was the most obscene thing he’d ever heard.
“God,” he rasped, his hips stuttering. “Help me. Let me touch her. Let me keep her.” His hands kneaded her flesh desperately, as if he could fuse them together through force alone. This wasn’t about love or futures. This was about ownership of a feeling. Her sweat, her smell, the incredible, tight slide of her—it was the only sacrament he could comprehend.
“GOD, HELP HIM!” Millie yelled, the words ripped from a place of pure, animal need. “HELP HIM FUCK ME!”
The blasphemy was the final trigger. There was no romance here, no fluffy notion of becoming one. They were two separate, desperate animals chasing a chemical prize. He was a piston. She was a sheath. They were tools for generating pleasure, for achieving that critical mass of friction and fluid.
She prayed again, a silent, screaming mantra in her head: moremoremoremoreMORE.
His rhythm fractured, became frantic, punishing. The sound was vulgar. Wet slaps. Grunts. The creak of worn couch springs. Her nails scored his back. She was so close. The pressure was a coil winding tighter and tighter in her gut, a gleaming wire of pure need.
“I’m gonna—” he warned, his voice strangled.
“Yes. YES. Let go. Pray. Pray!” she begged.
He didn’t pray. He howled. It was a raw, ragged sound as the orgasm detonated in his spine, flooding out of him in hot, pulsing jets that she felt like a internal brand. The feeling of him spasming, emptying deep inside her, was the final key. It unlocked her own climax, a wave that didn’t crest but erupted, volcanic and shattering. It wasn’t a single burst but a cascading series of them, her body clamping around him, milking him, a frantic, involuntary reflex chasing every last drop of the feeling. It was a white-noise roar in her ears, a total obliteration of thought.
For a long minute, there was nothing. Just the rasp of their breath and the distant hum of the aquarium filter. The smell of sex and cheap carpet filled the air.
Then, the world rushed back in, cold and sharp.
Simon collapsed onto her, then immediately rolled off, as if her skin had burned him. He stared at the ceiling, his chest heaving. The sweat was cooling. The reality was condensing.
Millie lay still, his wetness already leaking out of her, onto the couch. The physical delight was receding, a spectacular tide pulling back to reveal the familiar, littered shore of her shame. It had been the best orgasm she’d ever had. It had also felt like dying.
Neither of them spoke. The prayer had been answered. They felt utterly empty.
They felt utterly empty.
The hum of the filter was the only sound for a long time. Millie stared at the water-stained ceiling tiles, counting the brown marks. Fourteen. Simon lay beside her, a sweaty, cooling length of skin and bone, staring at the dark television screen.
“Well,” he said. The word cracked in the middle.
“Yeah,” she whispered back.
The confusion was a thick jelly in the space between them. It was mutual, total. The glorious, screaming high was gone, scraped out of them, and what was left felt hollowed and stupid. Her body ached in new places. She could feel him drying on her inner thighs, a sticky, intimate glue.
“Do you feel… kind of crappy?” Simon asked. He didn’t look at her.
“Yes.” The admission was a relief. “Do you?”
“Really crappy.”
Another silence. The weird energy wasn’t anger or regret. It was the bafflement of two people who had just tunneled toward each other with single-minded fury, only to find themselves in separate holes afterward.
“Then why did we have to do it so badly?” Millie’s voice was small. “Five minutes ago, I would have killed someone to get here. Now I just feel… nothing. My sex drive is just gone. Poof. That’s confusing.”
“It’s biology,” Simon said, his logical brain groping for a handhold. “Dopamine drop. It’s a chemical letdown. It doesn’t mean the thing itself was bad.”
“It feels like a sign, though. Doesn’t it?” She finally turned her head on the couch cushion to look at him. “Feeling this crappy after. God probably thinks it’s a terrible idea.”
“Probably,” he conceded. He shifted, and his arm brushed hers. They both flinched. “But… my god, Millie. It felt so fucking good. My penis… I can’t even describe it. The way you squeezed me. It was like this… this perfect, hot, tickling pressure the whole way down my shaft. And when I came, I just… exploded. I saw white. Literally.”
Hearing him say it, crude and specific, sent a tiny, unexpected spark through her numbness. It validated her own feeling. The shame had a counterpart.
“It felt really good for me, too,” she said, the words rushing out. “My pussy… I felt so marked by you. The way you were, like, yapping into me. Rubbing up against my walls. I was so horny. I came so hard. I just wish… I wish I could have come longer. Like, kept that feeling for an hour.”
They were talking about their private parts like dissecting a fascinating, dirty machine. It was shocking. It was honest.
“Maybe,” Simon said slowly, rolling onto his side to face her. “Maybe we just need to get it out of our system. This… curiosity. This hunger. We’ve been so sheltered. Maybe once we’ve experimented enough, gotten enough sexual experience with each other… maybe the itch will be scratched. Maybe we’ll just… stop.”
It was a flimsy idea. They both knew it. But it was a structure, a rickety bridge over the canyon of their guilt. The simple reassurance, however false, made the air feel a little lighter. The crushing weight of “forever sin” shifted to a temporary, manageable “for now phase.”
Enough time had passed. The sharp edge of post-orgasm disgust was softening, blurred by their mutual confession of pleasure. And they were still naked. That fact became suddenly, overwhelmingly present. The blue light from the fish tank played over the slope of her breast, the jut of his hip bone. The conversation about sex, about penises and pussies and exploding and being marked, had done its work. A low, tentative warmth was rekindling in her belly. She saw him glance down at her body, then quickly away, but not before she saw the faint, interested twitch in his softness against his thigh.
He reached out, his touch hesitant now, not frantic. His fingertips traced a slow, absent circle on her bare shoulder. It wasn’t a grab. It was an exploration. An affectionate, curious touch.
“I did want more,” Millie admitted, her skin prickling under his fingers. “Even while it was happening. I was thinking, ‘I want to remember this. I want to see it.’”
“See it?”
“What it looks like. Connected. Like… in the videos.” She swallowed. “The porn I watch. You can see everything. The penetration. The expressions. It’s so… raw.”
Simon’s breathing hitched. His fingers stilled. “We could.”
“What?”
“Take a picture. Next time. If I’m hard enough. If you’re wet enough.” His eyes met hers, gleaming in the low light. “We could take a picture of my penis fucking your vagina. A really explicit one. Where you can see how deep it is. How lost we are.”
The idea was so profoundly kinky it stole her breath. A secret, visual testament. Proof of their sexual bond, far beyond holding hands. “Yes,” she breathed. “For us. To remember.”
The pact was made. The path was set. Experimentation. Documentation. Getting it out of their systems.
Still naked, Simon reached for the laptop on the floor. He pulled it onto the couch between them, the glow washing over their bodies. The search was quick, familiar. He typed in the site. Exploited College Girls.
“Which one?” he asked, his voice already thicker.
“The one with the redhead. In the professor’s office,” Millie said, shifting closer, her breast pressing against his arm. She was fully awake now, the hollow feeling replaced by a thirsty, watching hunger. The actress’s fake nervousness, her staged protests dissolving into real moans… it was a script they understood. It mirrored their own holy-terrible journey.
As the video began to play, its sounds filling the basement, they watched, students of the craft. Millie’s hand drifted to Simon’s thigh. He was already growing hard again, the promise of the picture, of the next time, of the endless next times, fueling a new, more deliberate fire. The screen flickered, the actors moved, and in the blue light, two devout kids quietly, fiercely studied how to be better sinners.