Chapter 4: The Grille
The silence that follows is not empty. It is the worst kind, the kind with weight, the kind that presses down on the wood between them until RJ can hear her own pulse in her ears and the tick of the old radiator pipe somewhere behind the velvet curtain. She keeps her hands folded in her lap on the kneeler's edge. She keeps her eyes down. The little red lamp above the grille glows steady, and beyond it, in the other half of this wooden box, Sister Margaret has stopped breathing the way a person breathes when they are listening to a boy list his sins. This is a different rhythm. Slower. Deeper. Wet at the edges.
RJ has said it all. Every one of them. Mia on the passenger seat with the television box against Michael's shoulder, Mia on the truck stop tiles with her thighs shaking against the sink, Mia spread under her in the dorm bed and the kitchen and the upstairs room with the torn dress on the floor. She has not softened it. She has not dressed it up. She named it plainly, every act, every hole, every mouth, the way you would name a wound to a surgeon. And through all of it, Sister Margaret said nothing. Not a Hail Mary. Not a word of rebuke. Only that breath, turning over in the dark.
Then RJ's hand moves before she has decided to move it. Her right hand slides off her knee, crosses the narrow gap, and the pad of her thumb ring knocks once against the carved panel beside the grille, and her fingers find the opening, three of them, sliding through where the lattice gaps wide enough for a voice and a whisper and not much else. On the other side of the wood there is a wrist. Small, cool, the skin gone paper-dry with age at the inside, veins like pencil lines under it. RJ's fingers close around it. She does not pull. She does not need to.
For a moment nothing happens. The wrist is rigid in her grip, a bird's bone, the whole forearm tensed like a rod. RJ feels the pulse jump under her fingertips, fast and light and completely at odds with the calm flat voice that has been coming through this grille for a quarter of an hour. She rubs her thumb along that pulse, just once, slow.
Then she hears the small mouth open on the other side of the wood.
"Put your hand back in your lap," Sister Margaret says. Her voice is exactly as calm as before. "And listen to me very carefully."
RJ does not move her hand.
"Listen," the nun says again. The vowels have gone soft at the ends. She is not scolding. She is telling a fact. "There is the door at the end of this corridor. It locks from the inside. You are going to wait until I have walked to my side of the rectory and gone through the vestry, and then you are going to come to my booth. Not this one. The one they keep for the priest. You know it. You know exactly where it is." A pause. Her wrist turns inside RJ's fingers, a slow quarter-turn, not to pull away. To settle. "Do you understand me?"
"Yes," RJ says.
"Then let go of me."
RJ lets go. Her fingers come back through the grille one at a time, and she looks at them in the red dark as if they belonged to somebody else. On the other side of the wood there is the soft drag of fabric, the creak of knees, the click of beads, and then footsteps on the tile, steady, unhurried, growing fainter. The curtain of the confessional stirs when the far door opens and the draft moves through, and the smell of beeswax is suddenly cut with cold air off the nave. The door closes. The footsteps go. A second door, heavier, at the other end of the church. Gone.
RJ sits alone with her heart going like a hammer against her ribs.
She counts to twenty. Then she stands, and the kneeler creaks, and she pushes the curtain aside. The church is dim, a few candles guttering at the side altar, the red lamp the only steady light. She walks the long polished floor past the pews, past the font, past the little side shrine of a saint she was forced to memorize in Sunday school, and the sound of her own boots on the stone is enormous. She has never in her life been inside a church this late. She has never been inside any building, anywhere, with this much heat sitting low in her belly and her hand still remembering the dry wrist.
The priest's booth is the one near the door.
She opens it. It is smaller than the other. The velvet curtain is thicker, the darkness complete, and it smells of dust and old incense and the faint sweet rot of flowers left too long in a vase somewhere. She pulls the curtain shut behind her. She sits on the hard little bench and sets her hands on her knees and waits, and she can hear now, through the thin panel, the sound of someone on the other side of it, breathing.
The grille between the two halves of this box is wider and it has no lattice, only four carved slats, and through the gaps RJ can see nothing but the suggestion of movement, a hem of grey wool and the shine of a small brass cross. Then a match strikes. A candle flares in the other half, and the light comes through the slats and paints stripes of gold across her thighs and her knuckles, and in the sudden glow she can see the shapes of Sister Margaret's hands folded in her lap, and above them, just visible through the widest slit, the small mouth, the pale chin, the loose skin of the throat.
"Take your shirt off," Sister Margaret says.
RJ's hands go to the buttons of the oversized cotton shirt without any instruction from her head at all. She undoes them one by one, and the fabric slides off her shoulders, and the church air is cold on her arms and her chest, and she folds the shirt and puts it on the bench beside her knee. Under it she has a plain grey sports bra. Her nipples have gone hard in the cold and they are pressing forward against it, and she knows the nun can see them through the slats, because the candle on that side is doing its work from exactly the right angle.
"All of it," Sister Margaret says.
RJ reaches back and unhooks the bra and drags it down her arms. Her tits are full and firm and heavy, sun-dark at the tops from a summer of shirtless work in the yard, the nipples dark brown and standing up hard. She sits there in the dark with her chest bare to a slot of light, and she watches the small mouth on the other side of the grille.
"Now stand up," the nun says. "And come to the side door."
RJ stands. Her boots are loud on the wood. She finds the little door in the panel between the two compartments, the one the priest uses to step between them, no wider than a shoulder. It is unlatched. She swings it open slowly, and the candlelight spills across her bare chest, and there on the other side is Sister Margaret on her bench, sitting perfectly straight in her grey cardigan, the small cross lying flat against her sternum, her grey eyes lifted to RJ's face without a flicker of anything RJ has a name for. The cardigan is buttoned all the way to the throat. Her hands are folded. She looks like she is about to lead a rosary.
"Sit down," she says. "Here. Beside me."
RJ folds herself down onto the narrow bench. There is no room for both of them, and their hips and thighs press flush, and the nun's body is small and warm and surprisingly solid under the wool. The smell of her is soap and candle smoke and a faint trace of starch.
"Your hand," Sister Margaret says.
RJ gives it to her. The nun takes it in both of hers and turns it over, palm up, and looks at it the way a reader looks at a page. Then she leans down over it, unhurried, and opens the small mouth, and presses it flat against RJ's open palm. It is not a kiss. It is more like a seal. The lips are dry and cool and she holds them there for a long moment, breathing warm against the cup of RJ's hand, and RJ can feel her own pulse there, against the nun's lower lip, hammering.
Then Sister Margaret lifts her head, and her grey eyes come up along RJ's bare shoulder, her collarbone, her throat, and settle on her face. Her breath is coming a little quicker now. The calm has cracked somewhere behind her teeth, and RJ can hear it, the same wet edge she heard a few minutes ago through the wood.
"You said," Sister Margaret says, very quietly, "that you have done this to every woman in your life. Your mother. Her bed. The kitchen. The girl from the rowing team. The pair in your room." Her fingers tighten around RJ's hand. "Then you will do it to me. Here. And you will tell no one, ever, so long as you live, because if you do, I will not merely fall. I will burn, and take the whole parish with me, and I do not intend to burn alone."
RJ says nothing. She looks at the small mouth, and the small mouth looks back, and then the nun's hand comes up and she unbuttons her cardigan, one small brass button at a time, and underneath it is not a habit but a plain white slip of a blouse, and beneath that a simple cotton bra, and her collarbones are delicate and blue as old china. She slips the cardigan off her shoulders and lays it folded over her knees like a napkin. Then she takes RJ's right hand in hers and lays it flat against her chest, over the bra, over the small soft breast inside it, and RJ feels the nipple go hard under the cotton at the first touch of her palm.
"Show me," Sister Margaret says, and her small mouth is open now, and her breath comes in a hush, "what an eighteen-year-old does to a woman she wants."
RJ does not answer her. She takes hold of the nun's jaw in one hand, thumb on the point of her chin, and turns her face up into the candlelight, and holds it there, and looks at her for a long moment before she does anything at all. Sister Margaret's grey eyes are wide, the pupils blown, and her small mouth has gone slack; she has been giving orders her whole adult life in this building, and the look on her face now says plainly that nobody has ever put a hand on her like that. RJ files it away. She is going to use it.
She lets go of the jaw and reaches down and puts her hand flat on the cotton bra again, cups the small breast, and squeezes it slowly, feeling it give under the heel of her palm. The nun's breath hitches. RJ hooks a finger into the cup and pulls it down until the breast comes out over the top of it, small and pale, the nipple a soft dusty pink and drawn tight. She leans in and takes it in her mouth.
The nun makes a noise at the back of her throat, a small, broken, startled sound, and her hand comes up to RJ's head, and RJ catches it. She catches the wrist, pins it down against the bench, and keeps sucking, hard, the way she learned on her mother, dragging the whole flat of the nipple over her tongue and then closing her lips around it and pulling, and the nun's other hand comes up and RJ pins that one too. Now she has both her wrists, and she holds them down on the bench while she works the breast, and Margaret's back arches off the panel behind her and her breath comes out of her in a thin continuous whine.
The little brass cross swings against her sternum with every jerk of her chest.
RJ pulls off the nipple and looks up at her. "Leave that on," she says, and it comes out low, and it does not sound like a question. The nun stares at her, breathing through her mouth. "Do you hear me. That stays on. Everything else comes off."
She lets go of the wrists and stands up off the bench and strips the slip of blouse off over the nun's head herself, and then reaches behind her and unhooks the bra and takes it too. Margaret sits there bare from the waist up, small-breasted, her ribs showing, the cross hanging between them, and she is looking up at RJ with her hands folded in her lap now like a girl waiting to be given permission.
RJ says, "Get on the floor."
Margaret slides off the bench onto her knees on the narrow wooden floor between the bench and the wall, and the space is so tight that RJ has to stand over her with one boot on either side of her knees. RJ opens her belt. She gets the heavy denim down her thighs and kicks it off her ankles, and her shorts after them, and then she is standing there in the dark with her cunt bare and the nun kneeling at her feet looking up at her face, and there is something in the air in that little box now that smells like wax and like both of them.
"Lick it," RJ says. "Slow. You don't get to rush."
Margaret leans in and puts her mouth on her. Her tongue comes out timid and flat, lapping up the whole seam once, and RJ takes the back of her head in her hand and holds her there and grinds down into her face and feels the moan travel up through the dry little mouth. Then Margaret gets her rhythm, and RJ holds her head and rocks her hips along her tongue, and the nun's hands come up and grip the backs of her thighs, and she licks like she is being graded on it, up the length of her cunt and around the clit and back down, over and over, until RJ is leaking down her chin and the whole wooden box smells of it and the candle flickers in the draft of her breath.
RJ lets her have it for a long while. She wants her to know she is good at it before she takes it away.
Then she pulls her up off her knees by one arm and turns her around and pushes her down onto the bench, and pitches her own body over her, and arranges them both until her cunt is over the nun's face and the nun's cunt is under hers, and she lowers her mouth onto it and starts to eat her in return.
Sister Margaret gets there fast. RJ keeps her thighs pinned open with both hands so she cannot close them, and she works her with her lips and the flat of her tongue, and she can feel underneath her the nun's mouth going sloppy and desperate against her own cunt while the nun's hips jerk up and her heels slide off the bench. They hold that against each other, mouth to mouth, in the stuffy dark, both of them working, the wet sounds loud and unashamed in the little wooden room, and whenever RJ slows down the nun whimpers up against her and licks harder to make her start again.
RJ comes first. It builds low and sharp, and she grinds her cunt down hard on the small mouth and lets it take her, and her thighs shake and she swears into the nun's thigh, one low filthy word, and Margaret groans like she has been waiting for it and licks her through the last of it, greedy. Then RJ rises off her, and Mother Margaret lies there panting, her mouth wet, the cross flat on her chest and the little candle still burning in its holder on the far bench.
"On your hands and knees," RJ says. "Over the bench."
She obeys. RJ spits in her hand and puts her fingers in her first, and the nun is so open and so wet that she goes in knuckle-deep without any resistance, and RJ works her with three fingers, hard and fast, and then pulls out and lines herself up and drives into her with her own body, wet cunt to wet cunt, and fucks her against the wooden seat.
She does not go easy. She holds the nun's hips and takes her in long hard strokes, and the bench creaks and the curtain shakes and the little candle throws their shadows up the panel, and after a while Margaret starts to say please. RJ has heard a lot of people say please. She has never heard a nun say it. She slides her hand around to the front of her and finds the mouth and puts two fingers in it, and Margaret sucks them and groans around them and keeps begging, mumbling it against her knuckles, and it only makes RJ harder and faster, and she tells her, do you want it, tell me you want it, and the nun says yes, yes, over and over until her voice breaks on it.
"You like that, sister," RJ says, and does not use her name. "You know what this is. You know what you are."
"Don't stop," Margaret says. "Don't you dare stop."
She does not stop. She takes her all the way at the end, one hand clamped over the small mouth in case it gets loud, and the nun comes under her with her whole body knotted and arching and the whole weight of her bearing back against RJ, and when she is done RJ holds herself inside her another long moment, breathing hard, before she pulls away.
The candle is nearly out. RJ picks up her trousers and pulls them on and gets back into her shirt and does the buttons wrong down the front, and does not care. Margaret is lying curled along the bench with her cardigan draped over her and the cross still on, saying nothing, breathing like a woman who has just walked a very long way.
RJ pulls the curtain aside and steps out into the cold dark of the nave. She does not look back.
She walks home. The streets are empty, the streetlights orange in the wet air, and she crosses the road by the shop with the awning and the park by the chapel and up her own path, and it has been a long night and her legs are heavy and she is starting to feel it now. The living room light is on. Her mother is at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, and she looks up when RJ comes in, and RJ says she's tired, and nothing else, and goes upstairs, and shuts her door, and drops onto her bed face down with her boots still on.
She is tired. Under the tired, though, there is something else, warm and settled in her chest, the knowledge of every woman she has put her hands on in the last few weeks and the look each one of them had at the end of it, her mother and the football captain's girlfriend and Cass and the rower and the two in her room and now the woman in the wood, all of them. She lies in the dark and feels it. Tomorrow morning she gets in the car and leaves again for school.