EROTIC STORIES :

The Splinter
Part 2
© remittance girl, 2008


The bright winter sun filtering through the dusty window is what woke her. Looking at it, Moira realised it must be far past nine already. She moved a little and groaned, remembering what she'd done to herself.

Sitting up made her wince. The blood had dried on her back, and the robe had stuck, in places, to the wounds. She pulled the coverlet off the bed and wrapped it around her. The least painful way to deal with her problem was to stand in the shower and get everything really wet. She'd been in this predicament before.

As she'd showered, waiting for the water to soften the scabs, a vague and very disturbing memory bubbled to the surface. Moira knew better than to cover her skin with anything if she'd drawn blood. She recalled a voice. Like God's voice, but not. A touch on her cheek.

Even under the heat of the shower, she got goose pimples. It gave her the courage to pull the robe free of her skin with one good tug. When she was washed and had salved her back, and put her clothes on, she tiptoed downstairs. The last person she wanted to run into was Brother Simon.

"Good morning, Moira."

Her heart plummeted. "Brother Simon. Morning."

"Get yourself some coffee, or tea, and then come to my study please. We need to talk."

In the kitchen, she hoped that she would could buy herself some time by making coffee, but the electric pot was full and simmering away. She poured herself a cup and wasted some time looking for a sugar bowl in unlikely places.

"It's in the cupboard with the cups."

She looked up to see Jacob, shirtless and scratching his crotch through the same pair of jeans he was wearing yesterday. "Don't you change your clothes, ever?"

"I take them off to wash them."

Moira gave him a disgusted look as she heaped numerous spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. "And when's that?"

"Why? You offering?"

She was about to tell him to take a hike, when she got an idea. How much talking to Brother Simon could she do if she was busy? She took a sip of her coffee and felt the sugar coat her teeth. "Okay."

"Really?" Jacob slid past her just a little too close to get to the coffee pot. "You serious."

"Yup. Give them to me. I'll wash them, if you'll tell me where the machine is."

"Alright! It's in the basement." He began unbuttoning his fly.

"Not here, you pervert! Get your clothes together - all of them, and I'll do them. Well, maybe not your underwear."

"Hey, no problem there. I don't wear any."

"Moira?" called Simon from the hallway.

"Shit."

She gave Jacob another disgusted glare and carried her cup out of the kitchen.

Bother Simon was standing at his door looking a little annoyed. "Is now convenient?"

"Actually I told Jacob I'd wash his clothes for him." Moira gave Simon her sunniest smile.

"In... Now," Simon ordered, holding the door to his study open.

Moira hunched her shoulders and went in. She sat in the same old armchair, watching him. Instead of taking his usual place on the sofa, he perched on the edge of his desk, behind her, so she had to crane her neck to see him. It made the welts on her back throb. "I could just get the laundry started and come back," she offered, hoping for a reprieve.

"Jacob can do his own laundry. We need to have a talk about last night."

Moira considered playing dumb, but she was pretty sure it wouldn't fly. Silence was a better tactic.

"You have to promise me that you won't self-flagellate in this house. Do you understand?"

She sat mute, gripping her coffee mug. He came around and stood in front of her, looking down. The thin, thatching scars on his cheeks stood out white against his skin, the other's seemed like deep folds.

"Do you understand, Moira? I have to have your word on this."

She looked up at him. "I can't give you my word on that."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't keep that promise."

He grimaced and crouched down in front of her. "You can't use and be in this house."

"Mortification of the Flesh isn't heroin. It's not illegal, it's not immoral, it's an act of devotion to God." Moira looked directly into his eyes, challenging him.

"Not when you do it."

She thought for a moment. "It makes me feel sick now. I don't like it anymore. So I know - I just know - it's a sincere act of contrition."

Simon licked his scarred lips. "I saw you."

"That was wrong. Everyone has a right to private worship. Everyone."

The hand he reached forward caught in her hair as he cupped the back of her head and made her look at him. "Listen to me. I *saw* you. Get it?"

She jerked her shoulder to get his hand off her neck. "And?"

"That was no act of contrition. That was an act of erotic self-flagellation. You were so far gone when I walked into that room you didn't even notice I was there. Naked, bleeding, panting..."

Suddenly he released her and got up, turning his back to her and breathing deeply. "I know exactly what that is because I've been there so many times. You have no idea."

She could see from the set of his shoulders that he was trying to keep his temper. "I don't know. Maybe I do. Your scars - you did that to yourself, didn't you?"

"Yup."

He turned around and crouched back down in front of her chair. "Look at my face, Moira. This is how it ends. Do you think I'm pleasing in the eyes of God?"

Moira looked away, but he grabbed her chin roughly and pulled her face back to his. "Do you think so?" he demanded.

For the first time, she looked at Brother Simon's face - really looked at it. Each of the scars, and the features in between and, for the first time she noticed that, between all the scars, he was handsome. He looked a bit like St. Francis.

Fumbling, Simon began to undo the buttons on his shirt. "Pretty? Do you think it's pretty? Do you think that God would want any creature he made to do this to the body he gave them?"

She gaze slipped from his face to his chest.

"Oh, my God..."

Whorls and lines, puncture marks, words and raised symbols. Instantly and without thinking, she reached out a hand and touched one of the ridged scars with her fingertip. It followed the strange terrain of his skin down and over to just where his heart sat, beating hard beneath the surface.

"It's..."

Moira's head was buzzing, like a million bees were zooming around trying to find a way out. She put her coffee mug on the floor and, with her other hand, traced another set of skin engravings on the opposite side of his chest. Nothing could have made her look away. The patterns danced and wove together as if they were alive. And they were.

"...beautiful."

Her body compelled her forward, like being pulled on a string attached to something deep in her tummy. She edged off the chair and onto her knees in front of it, pressing her mouth against the swirling, dancing, speaking skin.

The deepest, longest electrical shock: that's what it felt like against her lips. Her body shuddered at the contact. As if all the pain he'd suffered to make these scars poured down her throat.

Simon made a noise. She felt him try and pull away, but she wrapped her arms around his neck and clung on tight. His hands were on her arms, trying to pull them away.

"Don't...Moira. Stop. Please!"

She couldn't stop. Closing her eyes, she smeared her cheek across the embossed flesh. Behind her lids, each bump, each ridge was a gloriously illuminated line on a map - a divine map. A map of God's Kingdom, like the one she'd been trying to make on her own skin.

"Get off!"

The force of the push sent her backwards, slamming her spine against the seat of the chair. She glared at him. How could he be so cruel as to keep this from her? Then she saw the fear and hurt in his face.

Pulling herself upright, she stumbled and ran out of his study.

* * *

"What's up with her, Si?" Jacob bumped into Simon in the hallway. "She's way upset, man."

"Seems so."

"And what's up your ass, badman? Did you guys have a fight? Because, if she's leaving, it's your fault. She was gonna do my laundry."

Simon couldn't help rolling his eyes. "Well, damnit, that's why she's here, Jacob! To do your laundry."

He put his arm around Jacob's shoulder and laughed. "You're a sexist pig, you know that?"

They walked upstairs together and carried the ladder into the front bedroom. It was the room with the most water damage, and someone had papered the walls. They needed to be stripped and sanded. And he'd have to find some money to get the roof fixed.

As the two of them tore the old paper away, another gaudier layer was revealed beneath the first. Scraping away at the wall felt good and Jacob kept up his usual running commentary on everything under the sun. It took Simon's mind off what had happened in his office. He didn't want to think about it, or what he was going to do with Moira.

No, he thought as he worked the scraper hard over the mouldy wall covering. That's not right. Moira was Moira. The bigger question was, what was he going to do with himself?

He'd had his lapses on the celibacy front. Few men who took Holy Orders hadn't struggled with that particular thorn. But it hadn't been a problem for a very long time because he'd found something that seemed like such a perfect substitute. Of course, he hadn't realized what was happening at first. Like Moira, he convinced himself that penance, of a physical kind, would bring him to a state of grace, and greater his acts of mortification, the more visible the wounds, the further he had strayed from reality.

Until someone sane stepped in and stopped him. Now, of course, the problem was that he didn't do that anymore.

"Are you even listening to what I'm saying, man?"

"What?" Simon looked over at Jacob. "What were you saying?"

"You're digging a hole into the outside wall, dude." The boy pointed to the wall in front of Simon. There was a tool-sized trench, three inches thick, in the plaster.

* * *

The very last thing she wanted to do was have to go into that room with Simon and ask Jacob about his clothes. Moira opted for trampling on privacy; she went into his room and picked up every piece of clothing that was lying around on the floor, under the bed, in the closet. Half of the items were stiff with paint, and true to his word, she found absolutely no underwear.

Wrestling everything into a garbage bag, she dragged it down the stairs and went looking for the basement. The first door she opened turned out to be the front sitting room. Except there was no furniture in it, and she had found the source of the cat smell. One of the side windows was broken, and the neighbourhood stray had obviously found his way in.

The next door she opened was a closet. It had a unique smell of it's own. Not like the sitting room, it was more of a rotting vegetable odour. Two more empty rooms later, she gave up on the hallway, searched the kitchen and found it. She should have known: all horror films have their basement doors in the kitchen. She opened it and peered down into the murk. Creepy.

Unlike in horror films, the light switch at the top of the stairs did work, and Moira decided that it wasn't all that creepy after all. She descended, dragging the bag of laundry behind her. It wasn't just Jacob's stuff that needed washing; her own robe and bedspread were in need of attention too.

The basement smelled of damp, but otherwise, it was in better shape than a lot of the house. There was a very old washer, and a very new dryer in the corner, by the stairs. She sorted the wash out on the floor and put in a load, added the soap and started the machine.

It wasn't the nicest place to hang out, but Moira was not in a hurry to run into Simon, so she sat down on the bottom set and watched the machine wiggle for a while. The wall opposite the washer and dryer was odd. Not really a wall, just a lattice of support beams, but if she looked at it just so, two of the old wood beams made the outline of a cross. The cross-bar was at chest height and she giggled as she walked over to it and stretched out her arms. A perfect fit. Could a person be sainted if they were martyred in a basement doing laundry?

She stood there for a while, her fingertips brushing against the rough texture of the thick wooden beam. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine it was the texture on Brother Simon's chest, but it didn't work. Even in the brief amount of time she'd had, her fingers had memorized the tracery of lines and dots that she had touched.

"What the fuck?"

Moira jumped at the voice. Jacob's face peered from between the supports on the stairs.

"You're a very weird chick, you know that?" He stomped down the stairs and smirked at her. "But, if you're into that sort of thing, I guess I could be cool with that."

"What do you want?" She could hear the ring of defensiveness in her voice. It was better than sounding embarrassed.

"Filler? You know, for the walls?" Jacob walked into the back of the basement, his voice echoing off the walls, even as the darkness swallowed him. "Si's not on his game. He gouged a huge hole in the wall. I think you got him upset."

He re-emerged with a crusty pail and a box of something. "What was the fight about? Who was gonna be on top?" he teased.

"You're really, really disgusting, and a pervert! You know that?"

"Oh, hey! I forgot to give you these jeans. Do you want them now?" Jacob laughed and feigned unbuttoning them again. Then, suddenly he stopped. He was looking down at the pile of whites on the floor. He bent down and picked up her bathrobe. It was still damp from the shower, but it had dried some and the bloodstains had turned a rusty brown. "Shit. Are you hurt?" Jacob turned the garment around in his hand.

"Give that back, you asshole," she said, making a grab for it.

"No, come now, really. Are you okay?"

For a moment, Moira didn't say anything. Then she put on her cute face and smiled at him. "Of course I'm okay. I've got my period, that's all."

His expression was priceless. He dropped the robe and stepped over the pile of laundry. "Oh, sorry," he mumbled, as he climbed up the basement steps, two at a time.

Moira giggled. A year ago, she'd have been far too embarrassed to even mention the word "period" in front of a boy. Now she was using it as camouflage. Still, she'd told a lie, and that was a sin.

She followed Jacob up the basement steps. Her mother had made her promise that she'd call her every day, and Moira kept her promises.

* * *

"Well, that explains it," said Jacob, working water into the powdered filler.

Simon was on the ladder, scraping off the more difficult scraps of wallpaper, up by the ceiling. "Explains what?"

"Moira. She's probably not actually a bitch. She's just on the rag right now."

At first Simon cringed at the crudity, but then he stopped scraping. "She told you that?" It sounded very out of character for Moira.

"Yeah. I think she was a little embarrassed about it."

"She just offered the information?" The whole interchange was sounding odd to him.

"Nah, her nightie or whatever in the pile of laundry was all bloody. I thought she was hurt or something. Geeze, so shoot me, dude! I don't get the whole nightwear stuff, man. Why bother?"

It occurred to Simon that for all Jacob's worldly experience, he didn't really know much about women. Still, mused Simon, why'd she lie? Why didn't she just tell him to mind his own business? That she'd lied was significant: it meant she felt guilty about it. And if she felt shame about it, then perhaps he could use her conscience to persuade her to stop.

Climbing down off the ladder, he brushed the fragments of paint and paper off his head and shoulders. "Mr. Bronson is delivering a TV this afternoon. He's donated it. It's second-hand - pretty old, I think, but it will probably get most of the channels."

Jacob looked up at him like an ecstatic five-year old. "A TV? Fuckin' alright! It's sure better than spending every evening in my room beatin' my meat."

Simon gave him a pained look. "Way, way, way too much information, Jacob."

He heard Jacob laughing behind him as he made his way down the stairs. Although he tried very hard to never make religious values an issue in his halfway house, the residents were predictable in their overwhelming need to say things they thought would shock him - Jacob in particular. Simon took it all in good humour, knowing that if the boy was trying to shock him, then he cared about what Simon thought. That bond had seen them through some rough times.

As he rounded the door of his study, he stopped. Moira was just hanging up the phone.

"You're welcome to use the phone anytime. I can give you some privacy if you want."

She wouldn't look at him, and her face had gone bright red. "It's fine. I just owed my Mom a call." She made her way towards the door, without once glancing up at him.

As she passed him, he caught her arm gently. "Hey. Moira."

"Yeah?"

"When things go strange, and get weird, and you live in a house with other people, it doesn't work if you don't confront the problems. They just get worse."

She didn't move or pull away, but wouldn't raise her eyes either.

"Let's talk about what happened. Clear the air. It'll be good for both of us."

"I don't want to sit down and talk about it."

Simon nodded. "Fine. We can stand right here and do it. Okay?"

"Okay." It was a mousy little noise. Simon marvelled; there were so many facets to Moira.

"I'm sorry for pushing you away. I know it probably felt terrible and hurt your feelings, too."

"Yup. It did."

Simon stared at the dingy window beyond his desk for a moment, trying to make sure he was careful with his words. "I like you Moira. I think you're a really brave young woman. And you're attractive - very attractive. But I have taken a vow of celibacy and I have to protect myself from situations that would tempt me to break that vow."

"I understand that."

Her response surprised him; it was extremely mature. That made it far easier to continue. "I don't put any of the blame on you, you understand. It's my vow and my responsibility, but I regret pushing you, and I'm sorry for any pain it caused you."

He looked over at her. His height made him tower above her and he cringed inwardly thinking of the force he'd used. Her face was hidden from him, but her dark head nodded.

"I'm sorry too, Brother Simon. I'm sorry for putting you in that position. I shouldn't have touched you like that. I know it was wrong. It was a sin."

Something about the way she spoke made his heart sink. He was listening to her build a litany of transgressions for the next time she took the flail to her back. Instantly, he was painfully aware of how his hand encircled her upper arm. He fought the instinct to let it go.

"There's nothing wrong with wanting to touch and be touched. It's not a sin. Every human needs to be touched. It reminds us of our mortality, and our fragility and how precious life is."

"There's no need to find excuses for me. It was lust," she said flatly.

"I guess maybe it was. But, so what? As sins go, lust is a pretty minor one in my books."

She turned to him and looked up into his face. "You don't get to decide which sin counts and which one doesn't. Only God can do that."

Her expression made his heart race and his stomach churn. It was fevered, intense and pitiless. If anyone ever wondered what the 16th Century Spanish priests of the Inquisition looked like, this was probably it. Born of cruelty, and narrowness, and pushing down drives until it all curdled into corruption. Simon loved his faith, but sometimes he could feel nothing but hatred for the Church.

He couldn't help himself. He clasped her head in both his hands and brought his face inches from hers. "How the hell did you get so nasty? Who made you so judgemental and intolerant?"

He let her struggle uselessly to pull her head out of his grasp. The kick that she landed on his shin hardly registered. He just kept looking in her eyes, trying to find the source of all that anger.

She stopped struggling and then she spoke. "I confess to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to all the Saints and to you, brothers and to you Father, that I have sinned exceedingly, in thought, word and deed: through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault." She recited the Mea Culpa with the kind of zeal only a Pope could appreciate.

He let her go. "I'm not a priest, Moira. I can't hear your confession or grant you absolution."

Her face twisted into a small smile. She lifted her arms and wrapped them around his neck, pulling herself up on her toes. "Then what are you good for?" she whispered, pressing her body against his. Her tongue flicked out and touched his bottom lip, the ruined one.

Then she kissed him. It was a violent, brutal kiss. Anyone other than Simon would have been shocked at how intentional and feral it was. But he understood. Christ, he understood. He felt her teeth cut his lip and he responded, wrapping his arms around her and pressing her to him. He was truly lost.

And it didn't seem to matter, as he pulled her to the floor, biting at her face and her neck, or as he tore at the front of her blouse and tugged it off her shoulders. She didn't bother to fiddle with the buttons of his shirt, he heard the little patters as they scattered on the linoleum. A high, soft keening came from her throat as she pressed her bare skin against his chest.

His fingertips flitted over the raised flesh of her back. He felt his cock swell painfully, trapped beneath her weight. Her mouth was at his chest, her legs straddling his hips, her neat navy skirt rucked up around her own. She rocked as she suckled at the lined scars. It was hard to remind himself that this was no experienced adult he was dealing with. He stroked her back gently.

"I'm sorry," she moaned once, before pressing her full lips back against his skin.

"Don't be. I'm not."

Simon didn't move. He lay there and felt her mouth devour him, felt her wetness seep through her own clothes and his. He lay there and prayed as each roll of her hips brought him closer and closer to coming.

He wasn't sorry.

That was his prayer: the one he repeated over and over again as her hard, small nipples raked across his chest, as she began to buck and shudder on top of him and as he took her hips in his hands and arched his own until his whole body trembled with pleasure. A warm gush spread across his lower stomach as he ejaculated. It felt like baptism.

Slowly, Moira pulled herself up. "So..." she said, her eyes still unfocused. "That was sex."

Simon swallowed and caught his breath. "Well, it was a very close cousin."

She put her head back down on his chest, as if she were listening for a heartbeat. "Do you think God will forgive us?" Her voice sounded frightened.

"I think he'd forgive you in a heartbeat." Again, he trailed his fingers along the raw wreckage of her back. The question was, would she forgive herself?

Continue to Part 3