Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

For a brief moment in the late afternoon on rare sunny days, the church is painted blood red. A shard of sunlight kaleidoscopes through the crimson of Jesus’ robe as he kneels in the Garden of Gethsemane and it bathes the sanctuary in flames.

Father Theodore Lasso, better known to his parishioners as Father Ted—or simply Ted if they’re not so traditional they think they’re committing a sin by dropping the honorific—always tries to find himself here when it happens. It’s beautiful, almost like a man-made natural wonder, but there’s another reason, too.

The first click of a stiletto bounces off the vaulted ceiling, and the sound is music to his ears. A grin stretches wide across his face, but he doesn’t turn his head. Instead, he closes his eyes and tracks her movement by sound alone, and he can so clearly see her snowy curls and the blood red soles of her Louboutins as they strike the floor.

He doesn’t know her, but she’s giving him something to believe in.

She’s an angel.

Even though he’s never believed in them before, there’s no other explanation, really.

It's what came to mind the first time he ever saw her. After he had already processed up the aisle to the pulpit, the doors swung open and there she was, shrouded by golden morning light.

They locked eyes across the expanse of the sanctuary just as Ted said the Lord be with you, the last word dying on his lips, forgetting for a moment that anyone else existed.

Without a doubt, she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. So beautiful that it terrifies him a little. He’s never felt that way before.

So, yeah, angel feels appropriate—just short a pair of wings.

She had mouthed by rote, and also with you, an apologetic frown twisting her glossy pink lips. The expression was almost youthful, like she’d walked into class late and was worried about getting smacked with detention. Ted gave her his most reassuring smile, to tell her without words: it’s okay, you haven’t done anything wrong.

And then he proceeded to trip over every other word he spoke and trip over the hem of his vestments at least three times. He kept finding her face in the humble crowd, and she was laughing—with amusement, not cruelty (though he wasn’t sure how he could tell the difference when she was a perfect stranger), like she knew she was the reason he suddenly couldn’t string two words together and was walking like a newborn colt.

She darted out so quickly, he worried she wouldn’t come back. But she did. Every Sunday, she walked in just as the service began and left just as it ended. Every Sunday, she wore an outfit that stole a little more of his breath. Every Sunday, his eyes swept over the congregation but always lingered on her. Sometimes she looked away, sometimes she held his gaze so intently he looked away. But sometimes she smiled at him and that smile lit him up like a candle in a dark room.

It takes him a few Sundays to finally realize that he, Father Ted Lasso, is definitely flirting with a parishioner.

A long time ago, he drove past an elementary school in his hometown. Painted on the yellowish brick in giant, electric blue letters were the words, “Be curious, not judgmental - Walt Whitman.” It stuck in his mind like a catchy song, inspired him to read every single word Walt Whitman ever wrote only to discover that in all of Mr. Whitman’s fine wisdom, those words in that arrangement did not exist among them. Nevertheless, he adopted it as the simple guiding principle he could live his life by. The world would be a better place if others would, too.

So he hasn’t made any judgments about why she might have just started showing up one day but good God is he curious.

There’s just so much to be curious about. Like why she runs off so quickly and where she runs off to. What she’s thinking when she smiles at him. What she does for fun and who she does it with. What songs she sings in the shower when she’s home alone.

He’s curious to know what her voice sounds like.

He’s very curious to learn her dang name.

But most of all, he’s curious about why the hell he can’t stop thinking about her.

Everything reminds him of her. It doesn’t matter where he is—handing out free lunch in the park, going on his weekly home visits, reviewing the parish’s dire finances—she is always sprawled out in a corner of his mind. A corner that’s stretching into more of a room. A room that harbors ambitions of becoming an entire house.

The guilt creeps up on him slowly until it becomes impossible to ignore.

Laying in bed one night, tipping more whiskey past his lips than he knows is good for him, he thinks about her. Sleep evades him most of the time anyway, but he’s got no hope of finding it anytime soon when the memory of the cream mock neck sweater she’d worn that morning has him desperately clinging to the last dregs of consciousness. Not only that, he’d stolen a too-long glimpse at her black pencil skirt and when she left in a bit of a hurry, he spotted the crimson bottoms of her heels. Those shoes are fancy, he thinks. He googles them. Louboutins. That’s right. The price of a single pair makes his eyes bug out a little.

There was not a thing immodest about the outfit but the visual sits heavy on his core. When he looks down at his lap, he regards the bulge beneath his sweatpants like one might when they spot two animals mating in the park—curiosity with a spoonful of disgust.

He ignores it all and drinks himself unconscious.

The leaves on the trees are burning orange and he still has no idea who she is.

Maybe it’s a test of faith.

He considers, on multiple occasions, about asking one of the other parishioners about her. Mae, an elderly woman who manages his favorite pub, knows everybody in Richmond. She’s bound to have seen this woman before. Someone so striking can hardly move through the world unnoticed, and Richmond is hardly a big town. He bites his tongue though. The superstitious whisper within him that he can never quite silence fears drawing undue attention to her will break the spell and she’ll disappear forever. Heck, for all he knows she might not be real at all considering nobody else appeared to pay attention to her the way that he did.

In the AA meetings that he rather ironically leads, he'll occasionally lose track of whoever is speaking's testimony because their blonde hair might remind him of her blonde hair and he'll tune back in to an uncomfortable silence, expectant eyes watching him. The same pattern repeats itself across everything he does, so he determines to stop before he can get into any further trouble.

On a Sunday in October he ignores her. As much as he’s able to, anyway. He lets his eyes gloss over her as they wander across the other familiar faces, and just as he wrenches his eyes away from her face, it falls in disappointment. For the rest of the service, he feels the weight of her gaze on his skin, on his soul, but he refuses to meet her eye.

The following Sunday, everything changes.

She’s never taken communion before. Sometimes she leaves before he even finishes giving it. Again, he refuses to make any assumptions about why this may be.

But when he invites the congregation forward, she stands and joins the procession.

Focusing on what is right in front of him is very difficult when she, despite lingering near the back of the line, hovers over most of them by a country mile, her neck high like a proud sunflower stem. The church is hardly warm, too old to have proper heating, but he’s roasting beneath his layers, much too aware of the runnels of sweat breaking out all across his torso.

It’s both hours and seconds before she steps up to him, her head bowed. If anything, her demureness only winds up the sucker punch that slams into him when she tilts her chin up, and he looks into her luminous green eyes for the first time. He prays—actually prays—it won’t be the last.

One of her dark brows arches high on her forehead. There’s a question in her amused expression, one his brain is too besotted to translate.

Someone behind her clears their throat impatiently, and he’s once again standing in front of the pulpit before a few dozen pairs of eyes, all of which he has looked into before and not a one of them have made him feel like that. No eyes he’s ever looked into have made him feel like that.

But now’s not a great time for his mind to wander down that crooked path.

“Oops,” he says, playing off whatever they might’ve just witnessed with a breathy laugh, “That's my line, ain't it?”

Her brow quirks upward as her lips widen into a near-cheshire grin—no teeth, only a small, hypnotic parting at the join of her lips.

He pinches the host between thumb and forefinger and lifts it to her lips, doing his best to still his hands and failing miserably.

“The Body of Christ,” he says, breaking on the last word. Not his suavest delivery.

“Amen.”

Oh.

The single word sounds like a melody he heard a long time ago but had woefully forgotten.

Her glossy pink lips split at the seam to receive him. It. No, Him.

With a trembling hand, he lays the host on the tip of her wet, red tongue.

He should let go.

She should close her mouth and swallow it down.

But he doesn’t. And she doesn’t.

So he pushes the host deeper into her mouth, pushes until his fingers are two knuckles deep and he begs, he pleads, “This is my body. Take,” and she seals her lips around him and sucks—

Electricity jolts up his vertebrae and wakes him back up. He still holds the host to her tongue and his fingers are blessedly not in her mouth.

But her eyes are curiously dark, the pupils blotting out the green. Her shoulders rise high with the force of her breath, near panting. He can feel the humid heat of it on his hand.

Something very unholy is happening underneath his robes.

Ted pulls his hand away, forming a fist at his side and digging crescent moons into the meat of his palm. Her eyes disappear behind her spidery black lashes as she downcasts her gaze and steps away, though not quickly enough to hide the ruddy hue now painting her cheeks.

Once she sips the Blood of Christ, she immediately exits, stifling the clatter of her heels with what looks like a well-practiced stride. She glances back at him without fully turning her head just before she pushes past the door and vanishes into the late morning.

When he finally gets home after a few agonizing hours, he slams his apartment door shut, fumbling his pants open before he even removes his shoes. Too damn dizzy to make it to his bedroom, he slumps against the wall to hold his frame upright.

Self-hatred tosses fuel onto the flames of shame already diverting way too much blood into his dick, making it so sensitive to the touch he hisses when he closes around it. It throbs in his fist, begging him to succumb just to get some goddamn relief, but he stays his hand.

When he was 16, he drank down an entire bottle of communion wine too quickly. He remembers how warm the wine was in his belly before it slipped into his bloodstream. He’d been giddy from drunkenness, yes, but more from the thrill of doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. She feels like that. If he acts too imprudently, he’ll be full of nothing but her and while he’s not sure that’d be such a bad thing, he had regretted the communion wine. He doesn’t want to regret this.

So he puts his hand to use fixing a tumbler of whiskey and twisting his shower faucet all the way to the ‘C,’ dogged by the pervasive feeling that all he’s doing is delaying the inevitable.

She starts turning up on other days.

He doesn’t even need to turn his head to know it’s her, her footsteps have become a language of their own, one that only he can understand.

In the late afternoons, his legs and back are usually cramped from spending too long at his desk working on the week’s sermon. Ever since she appeared, his ideas are both too inspired and too chaotic and so completely unruly, it’s a Sisyphian test to distill them into anything usable. Honestly, he’s just been winging it most weeks, banking on his delivery being passionate enough to smooth over any holes in his logic. He drops his notebook on his desk in defeat—the pages looking like a cross between a heavily redacted government document and a lovesick teen's diary—and saunters to the sanctuary. He gravitates to the second pew because of its prime view of his favorite stained glass window and also because on the back of the first pew someone scratched a heart around the initials T&R into the wood. The church may be small but it's stuffed with tiny mysteries like this. He constructs elaborate stories about whether it was T or R who scratched the initials and if the heart was added later and how long it might've taken them and if they'd gone unnoticed or gotten in trouble.

He’s running a thumb over the groove of the heart when he hears the click.

He doesn’t turn his head. It’s not long before the footsteps fall silent, indicating she has chosen to sit where she sits every Sunday.

Ted doesn’t like to approach people. Priests tend to trigger what he’s dubbed white collar syndrome, the clerical cousin of white coat syndrome. His own blood pressure spikes into approximately the stratosphere any time a medical professional approaches him, which has barred him from ever donating blood much to his chagrin. Priests approaching people unprovoked can similarly trigger a guilty conscience, so he prefers to wait for people to come to him.

Patience is a virtue, he reminds himself. If she wants to talk to him, he believes that she will in her own time. Even if her own time is proving to be a few timezones behind his.

But patience, like anything, is good in moderation. Temperance, after all, is a virtue, too. And he's feeling awfully temperate about his patience. It snaps one evening after the umpteenth time his restless body compels him to stand and pace, so he paces himself right into the kitchen.

In no time at all, there’s a batch of shortbread cooling on the dining table while he tears through his cupboards to find a stack of small, pink cardboard boxes he previously purchased for the annual autumn carnival, which, if memory serves, should be the perfect size.

He tastes a small square, pleased with the result, though next time he could use a pinch less salt. Assuming there will ever be a next time.

He’s antsier than ever the next morning. The small box might as well be a cement block in his backpack with how heavily it weighs on his mind. What if she doesn’t even show up today? What if she hates them? What if it’s far too much and she runs away and he never sees her again?

Giving these to her might come at the cost of losing her forever and the risk of that outcome is so unconscionable, he completely forgoes any work on his sermon to hover over her empty seat for possibly hours with the box clutched between his sweaty palms.

But maybe, just maybe, it'll break this stalemate in his favor. That outcome is worth the risk.

So he sets the box down, wiping his palms on his black pants as he hightails it out of there before he can second guess his decision.

Ted perches on the edge of his usual seat, bouncing his legs and drumming his fingers arrhythmically against the wood while he waits.

And waits.

And waits.

The sanctuary glows red.

And just as he starts to lose faith that she's coming at all, the doors open and her familiar footsteps track across the floor. When they’re alone like this, she doesn’t make an effort to stifle the sound, which thrills him for some reason he can’t quite put his finger on.

Her footsteps stutter to a halt. She must've spotted the box. After a dragging moment, the old wood of the pew creaks as she sinks her weight into it.

He can only imagine what her face is doing right now and not knowing is pure agony.

The church is so quiet he hears her nails scrape against the box, the flex of the cardboard as she pops the lid open.

In the thick silence that follows, the clerical collar grows tight against his throat so he hooks a finger beneath it and tugs it loose.

Then the air fills with a resonant groan of unmistakable pleasure:

“Fuck me.”

Chapter Text

The familiar symphony of creaking wood and clattering heels snaps Ted’s patience and he sets off after her with lengthened strides, hoping he’ll close the distance without needing to chase her.

When he throws open the doors, he’s thrust into the gloaming of early evening, the sky a bruised mix of blue and purple.

A young man cloaked in royal blue and red bumps into his shoulder and mutters, “Sorry, mate—Er, Father,” before he turns back to his friends. The path that wraps around the church is choked with people, many of them bedecked in similar colors. Ted looks in either direction, but he doesn’t see her anywhere.

He looks at the ground like she might have left a trail of biscuit crumbs and then at the sky like she might have taken to it. He considers choosing a path at random, praying that providence will guide him right to her, but that veers a little too close to stalking. So he taps his fist twice against the doorway and goes back inside to close up shop.

The minute he sets foot in his apartment, he knows it would be a bad idea to stay there with only his thoughts for company, particularly thoughts of her saying fuck me, so he changes and shoots off a text to Beard:

Miss you buddy! Going to the Crown & Anchor for dinner if you’re free

The streets are quiet, but the pub is roaring with life. He wades through the sea of blue and red and squeezes into the last empty stool at the bar. Mae acknowledges his presence only by pouring him a pint and sliding it toward him, her attention fixed on the TV broadcasting the A.F.C. Richmond vs. Crystal Palace game.

Ted hails from a football town, so he’s familiar with the pendulum swing of agony and hope even if he doesn’t understand this version of football so much. Seeking distraction, he joins in their cheers and their jeers (with discernment. He still gets a priestly blush when they shout See-You-Next-Tuesday nor does he care to insult peoples’ mothers).

If he hadn’t turned to a regular named Paul to ask him what the heck ‘offsides’ meant right when he did, he might’ve seen the camera cut to a regal blonde woman, might’ve heard the commentators asking themselves if the risky gambit of promoting Nathan Shelley from kit manager to team manager was about to pay off. But he’s too engrossed in the messy diagram Paul draws for him on a cocktail napkin to notice.

Ted’s a little deeper in his cups than he meant to be when the final whistle blows, bringing the curtain down on a disappointing 2-1 loss. He half-heartedly attempts to lift the spirits of those who linger, but they’re only interested in drowning their sorrows.

Beard still hasn’t texted him back, so he waves Mae down to pay his tab. She brushes him off, insisting he consider the meal and drinks a donation to the church. Ted discreetly tucks a small tip underneath the salt shaker anyway.

Ted feels dejected and more than a little lonely, two feelings that will only worsen once he’s home. He turns instead to the Green, his sneakered toes scuffing the stone with every step.

When he reaches the street at the end of Paved Court, hardwired instinct turns his head to the left, so he doesn’t see the car careening towards him from the right.

The car horn screams just as a hot, crushing pressure snares his wrist and yanks him backwards with a force that makes his shoulder pop painfully. Suddenly, he’s face to face with her, wreathed by her arms like they’re striking the final pose of a passionate dance.

That car must’ve killed him because this can only be heaven.

But Ted surely isn’t bound for such a paradise, so he knows he must still be alive.

Ted feels like her hands are all over him and he can’t stand it, so he tries to step back but he clumsily stumbles over his leaden feet. Despite her effort to catch him, he tumbles bonelessly backwards.

The pavement rushes up to meet his back, punching an oof out of his lungs. A second one comes when she lands on top of him and knocks whatever wind he’s got left in him right out with the rest.

‘Y’okay?” he rattles out despite his lack of breath.

Her gaze locks on his, the molten gold tones latticed within the green blazing. “...Am I okay?”

“Yeah? I pulled you down.”

“Because I was trying to keep you from falling, but you went like a sack of fucking potatoes.”

“You coulda just let go.”

“Yes, obviously I could have—” She cuts herself off with an indignant huff. “I just saved your life, Father.” The title falling from her lips is a sniper shot straight to his heart. And his dick, if he’s being honest. “So how about instead of critiquing my technique, you say, ‘thank you.’” The authority in her voice makes him shiver.

“Thank you,” he echoes.

It’s fitting that the street lamp above them perfectly haloes her head. If a set of snowy white wings unfurled from her back just then he wouldn’t even blink twice.

“Why are you smiling?” she asks, her dazzling green eyes narrowing into two accusatory slits.

“Am I?” he asks, only then becoming acutely aware of his rounded cheeks. He wants to say, because a literal angel is laying on top of me, but he can’t so instead he says, “Guess I’m just happy to be alive.”

Oh. Weird. It actually feels true.

But he can’t dwell on it for long because a drunken voice shouts out, “Oi! Start the show already, won’t you?” and is met with a chorus of bawdy laughter.

“Shit,” she exhales, gritting her teeth as she pushes herself up. She gives the small audience, some of whom are holding up their phones, a withering glare that scatters them like ash in the wind.

She extends her hand out to him. When he reaches back with his left arm, he winces from the pain radiating out from his shoulder in waves, so he switches to his right.

The heat of her bare skin flows up his arm like liquid gold and pools at the base of his spine. Yikes.

“You’re hurt,” she states as she carefully cups his elbow with her other hand and lifts him to his feet.

“M’okay,” he slurs.

“I nearly ripped your arm out of your socket.”

Ted, recalling a warm September day where she peeled off her jacket to reveal a pair of perfectly sculpted arms, says, “I have no doubt you’d defeat Michelle Obama in an arm wrestlin’ competition, but let’s not get—”

“Your shoulder could be dislocated. I’ll take you to A&E.”

Ted doesn’t want to spend the rest of his night at a hospital only for them to tell him his shoulder is perfectly located but he should probably talk to his GP about his high blood pressure and he especially doesn’t want her to waste a second of her time on him.

“Look,” he says stubbornly, demonstrating that he can move his arm by a few painful degrees in every direction. “When my buddy Beard dislocated his shoulder, he couldn’t move his arm at all.”

She scans him rigorously. Her gaze is penetrating enough that he believes she would find him out if he ever dared to lie to her. “May I at least see you home? No offense, but you seem more than a little pissed.”

“Oh, I’m not angry.”

She snorts. The sound is delicious. “Pissed is British for drunk.”

The smile that breaks out over his lips dulls the pain. It doesn’t hurt that she’s still clutching his hand protectively, sharing her apparently endless supply of warmth with him.

The contact prompts him to say, “I’m amenable, if you’ll do me one favor.”

She sighs through her nose, nobly withholding her most devastating eye roll. “By all means, Father, ask the person who just saved your life for a favor.”

“I’d like to know what to call you when I properly thank you for saving my life.”

Even rolling her lips into her mouth can’t completely suppress her smirk.

“Rebecca. Call me Rebecca.”

“Rebecca,” he repeats. Her name tastes like warm honey on his lips.

Ted thinks about the initials carved into the pew. He’s almost certain that Rebecca comes from the Hebrew word meaning to bind.

“Thank you for saving me, Rebecca.”

“You’re welcome,” she says with a careful nod. Regrettably, she releases his hand and immediately the nighttime air seeps back under his skin. “Do you live nearby?”

“Church Court,” she sighs as they turn down his street, “Naturally.”

“Pretty good as far as commutes go,” he says, gesturing to the opposite end of the road which opens up to the church.

He pauses outside the door that leads up to his apartment.

“This is me,” he says reluctantly, tingling nervously. Any onlooker would assume she’s dropping him off after their first date and now he’s waiting to see if he’ll get a goodnight kiss.

“Right,” she sighs, her eyes sparkling like she might be thinking the same. “You’ll put some ice on that shoulder?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And if it gets worse…”

“I’ll scoot my boot right on down to A&E, scout’s honor,” he says, saluting with his good arm.

Ted longs to reach out and tuck her snowy hair behind her ear, to dimple her bottom lip with his thumb and coax her mouth open.

“Hey, I uh—” he starts but sputters, mulling over his next words so as not to overstep, “You gonna be alright gettin’ home?”

“Oh.” She frets at her bottom lip, like she hadn’t really thought about it herself. “Yes. I can call a car.”

An absolutely terrible, horrible, no good idea kicks its way into his head.

“Do you want to wait upstairs? I’ve got more of those biscuits if you—”

“You have more?” she interrupts, a hungry, golden gleam to her eye.

Ted can’t suppress his fond laughter. “Yeah. I made a whole batch.”

Rebecca’s jaw quite literally drops open.

“You made them?”

Ted hums and nods. It would be too self-aggrandizing to describe what he sees written all over her face as awe, but he can’t really conjure another word to describe it.

But she schools her expression, her lips crooking into a wicked smirk. Her bottom lip looks so deliciously plump, he thinks about sinking his teeth into it and sucking until he turns it wine-dark.

“You should say a few Hail Mary’s, Father.”

“Wh— Why?” he says guiltily, fearing he had broadcast his desire without even saying a word.

“Because they’re sinfully good.”

Ted silently thanks God that he hasn’t got two working arms otherwise he’d be cradling them around her so he could dip her and kiss her until she’s dizzy.

He leads her upstairs, sweating a little at the state of his apartment but unable to determine a suave way to request she wait in the hall while he tidies up.

He wishes he’d done it anyway. The place looks even more squalid with Rebecca, slightly rumpled but still entirely pristine, standing in it. There’s no chance she misses the days old pasta water on the stove and the bloated, wormlike noodles still floating in it, or the crusty dishes stacked in the sink, or the open jar of peanut butter, or the empty bottles of whiskey crookedly lined up on the counter, or the shoes and clothes strewn pell-mell across every available surface.

He’s so certain she’ll lose her appetite for the biscuits upon seeing the unsanitary conditions of the place they were made and she’ll exit pursued by bear. But she shrugs off her coat and kicks off her shoes like she’s visited a thousand times before. Then she steps behind him and slowly slides his coat off each arm, hanging it beside her own on the rack. He’s still stupidly blinking in shock when she saunters off to the kitchen like she owns the place.

Ted follows like a lost puppy.

Rebecca opens the freezer and digs out a bag of peas he didn’t even know was there. She wraps the bag in a soiled kitchen towel and offers it to him, her brow raised in a silent challenge.

He manages a meagre, “Thanks,” as he slings it over his shoulder. “Can I get you something to drink? Water? Tea? Something stronger?”

“Oh, I’ll never say no to a cuppa, but I can make it. You sit,” she says in a tone that brooks no argument, gesturing to the small, rickety dining table. “Shall I make you one as well?”

“If you’d enjoy torturing me, then by all means.”

“I might yet,” she says sotto voce. His groin tightens a little. Instead, she brings him a glass of water which he opts not to complain about even if he’s itching for alcohol.

Soon enough, she’s joining him at the table, a steaming mug in one hand and a small plate of biscuits in the other, which she must’ve sniffed out on the cluttered counter like a bloodhound. She lifts the biscuit to her nose and inhales deeply, her eyes already rolling back into her head before she’s even taken her first bite.

It only occurs to him then that having her so terribly close to his bedroom is an unimaginably stupid risk.

“I’m sorry I bolted before I thanked you for these. Also for cursing in church,” she says, that second apology without much sincerity.

“No need to apologize. I’m just happy you like ‘em. And that building has survived literal bombs, so I hardly think an f-bomb is enough to even make her shiver. I should be thankin’ you for livening the place up.”

Rebecca practically preens at this semi-compliment, her earnest smile exposing a line of crooked teeth she’d previously kept well hidden. Every detail he notices about her makes everything so much worse.

A taut, tense wire stretches between them. She breaks it by pointing to the bag and asking, “Better?”

Ted almost knee-jerks a yes—a hard-boiled instinct he’s developed over the years because he’s found that very few people ever want to be confronted with the mundanity of the clergy. Priests eased the suffering of others, they didn’t experience it themselves. But something about Rebecca compels him to be truthful, which is its own kind of danger.

“I can’t really feel anything with the layers.”

“Oh,” she says, frowning. “Perhaps you should remove a few.”

Ted swallows tightly.

“Good idea,” he says, “I’ll just go—”

“Father,” she says, laying a hand on his forearm, “It’ll take ages for you to do it on your own. May I?”

It’s a test of his resolve, for sure. But boy, it sure feels like the worse sin would be to deny her anything she wants.

“Sure. I appreciate you.”

The pain and discomfort of doing this on his own actually would’ve been preferable to the pure torture that follows.

Rebecca perches on the edge of her chair, holding eye contact as her fingers curl beneath the hem of his navy sweater. “Lift your right arm.” He does. “Good,” she purrs. The simple praise makes his body sing. He dutifully obeys her soft-spoken, straightforward commands until the sweater comes free. One less layer yet he’s hotter now than he was at the start. He always did like being told what to do.

She works her way down the buttons of his Oxford with steady fingers, respectfully averting her gaze from his bobbing Adam’s apple and the crimson splashed on his cheeks and neck. He wouldn’t be surprised if she could hear his heart slamming against his ribs or his nerves buzzing like a neon sign.

It’s been nearly two decades since he’s even approached anything resembling intimacy with another person. In all that time, there’s not been one single day where he’s forgotten how fucking badly he craves it.

He wants to tell her to keep peeling back his layers until she exposes his beating heart.

But his heart is a terrible burden, and it would be cruel to ask her to help carry it.

Rebecca’s halfway down his shirt when she pierces his pensive silence by saying quite nonchalantly, “Did you become a priest because someone called you ‘daddy’ in bed and you liked it a bit too much?”

It takes a few seconds for her words to catch up with both of them.

“Oh my God,” she gasps, pulling her hands back. “Fucking Christ— Shit. Sorry.”

“Trust me, if I had liked it that much I never would’ve taken the cloth,” he says, grinning.

The implication floods her cheeks with pink, but she laughs heartily, her head briefly falling down between her shaking shoulders. The laughter tapers off, and she’s left clinging to his gaze for a long, thick moment. Her flush deepens, and she redirects her attention back to his shirt.

She’s beautiful. God help him.

“You can ask,” he says affably.

“Ask what?” She pushes the button-down off his shoulders and starts rolling the left sleeve of his undershirt up, which he doesn’t even think to question.

Ted gives her a knowing look.

“Fine,” she sighs irascibly, rolling her eyes, “Why the fuck would you voluntarily give up sex?”

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“Probably not as hard as an erection when you’re celibate.” She freezes, her eyes widening with horror he can’t help but smile at. “Oh my God. What am I even saying?”

White collar syndrome strikes again, he thinks with amusement. “I find your candor very refreshing.” And hot. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s easier than—”

His thoughts go blank when her hands prod gently at his shoulder, their uncommon warmth seeping beneath his skin. No part of him wants her to stop touching him.

Yup. Celibacy is definitely easy.

“Just checking to see if it’s dislocated,” she offers, apparently misreading the reason for his silence. When her hands fall away, his skin is itchy but the pain feels duller. “Carry on,” she says, returning the peas before leaning back in her chair and taking up her tea and biscuits once more.

“Sex is messy. Complicates things. And for me, it only ever ends one way.”

“In an orgasm,” she says sagely.

He chuckles. “Any man worth his salt knows that his own orgasm ain’t the end-all-be-all of sex.”

Rebecca clears her throat and crosses one leg tightly over the other, the hem of her skirt edging up her thigh just so.

“And you actually are? Celibate, I mean?” she says, attempting to hide her face with her mug so she asks the question more to her tea than to him.

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

The stiff silence that follows isn’t the only thing between them that's stiff.

“Can I ask you a question?” Ted asks, hoping a change of course will settle some of his very inconvenient discomfort.

“No, I am not celibate.” She arches a brow at him.

“Noted,” he says, pulling his ankle over his knee in hopes that the bunching of fabric at his groin might hide how interested his cock is in this information. “Why did it take me walking into oncoming traffic for us to finally officially meet?”

Rebecca turns to stare into the middle distance, rubbing the skin beneath her eye with the side of her index finger. “Well, I’d hate to have caused a scene by interrogating you about sex in public.”

“Your discretion is certainly appreciated.”

She takes her time chewing a bit of biscuit, even more time washing it down with tea.

“I wish I had a more exhilarating answer than ‘I was afraid.’”

“Afraid of what?”

She worries the inside of her cheek between her teeth as she deliberates her response, the white crescent of her thumbnail mindlessly skating along the curve of the mug handle.

“People tend to like me better from a distance,” she says in an affectless monotone that lacks any of her usual music.

Her lips bow into a smile completely devoid of mirth; it breaks his heart so completely he feels it like physical pain.

“Well, I’m awfully close to you right now and I still like you.”

“You hardly know me.”

“I’d like to,” he says with heartfelt certainty. Ted’s been lonely for so long he easily recognizes other members of the club.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” she says, her smile a bit warmer this time, but the distance hasn’t quite left her eyes. “You know what? I liked it better when we were talking about sex.”

“Okay, okay,” Ted says, “How about this: What kind of sex does a priest have?”

“Missionary,” Rebecca answers blithely.

Ted makes a buzzer sound. “Nice try, but the answer is…nun.” Ted raises his brows and gives her a wide, Muppet-ish smile.

She snorts a laugh, then says, “As long as you don’t make it a habit.”

“Yes!” he shouts, smacking his hand down on the table and startling Rebecca so badly she splashes tea onto her cream blouse. “Oh, shit,” he says apologetically.

“Honestly, it’s fine,” she says, waving dismissively.

It’s very much not fine that her lacey bra is showing through the now translucent fabric. But of course in his pigsty of an apartment, there’s not a single unused towel in sight, so he dashes into his bedroom and picks up a t-shirt from the pile of what he’s, like, 80% sure are clean clothes.

“Here,” he says, all but thrusting it into her hands. “You can change in the bedroom, if…If…If you want to change. Which you don’t have to. Unless you want to.”

He ignores the slyness of her grin as she says, “Thank you.”

Ted putters around while he waits, haphazardly cleaning in an attempt to not think about the fact that a beautiful woman is in his bedroom or that he knows exactly how her fingers unbutton a shirt or her bare back or other possible locations of freckles like the one on the side of her neck.

“Either this shirt is nearing the end of its mortal life,” she says as she emerges from his bedroom, her finger pushing through a wide tear along the collar of the a few dozen washes away from threadbare red t-shirt, “or you’ve been lying and I actually should be calling you Father Asso.”

She turns and his heart stops for a beat or two before it finds its rhythm again. He hadn’t realized he’d given her a beloved relic from his college days—a custom made t-shirt jersey from his flag football team, the Diamond Dogs. Rebecca gestures with a thumb at the letters that once spelled out his full surname, but now the ‘L’ is gone, the others slowly eroding.

Even still, seeing his name on her body fans a deep, primal flame within him.

“Are you alright, Father?” she says, her brows furrowing.

He’s spared from answering when his phone starts vibrating in his pocket.

“So tell me about your friend,” Rebecca says.

They’re huddled up in the backseat of a Rolls Royce driven by an honest-to-God chauffeur named Peter who wears a little cap and everything. When Rebecca said she could ‘call a car,’ he assumed she meant a Toyota Corolla driven by a 24-year-old trying to pay off his student loans, not this.

Ted grips a fistful of his jeans in each hand, feeling like a baby wearing mittens because he’s worried that he’ll somehow manage to do irreversible damage to the car’s expensive interior.

“Beard’s what you might call a rambler,” Ted says, “Which you think might make him a terrible friend, but he’s the best I’ve ever had.”

“How did you meet?”

Ted smiles fondly at the memory. “He came into the church where I did my deaconship to escape the cold. Didn’t have a place to spend the night so…I bent the rules. Told him to sleep in the back office but to make himself scarce in the morning because the priest wouldn’t be happy about it. Well, I woke up to a call from the police tellin’ me my car had been stolen, along with a bunch of silver candlesticks from the church. So I told ‘em that I’d let him borrow my car to take all that silver to get polished.”

“You are lying.” Rebecca lightly smacks his thigh. “You’ve stolen that straight from Les Miserables,” she says, pronouncing the title in a spine-tingling good French accent.

“God’s honest truth,” he asserts. “He actually ended up polishing the silver himself. Did such a good job the priest hired him back to do it every few months after that.” Rebecca laughs, low and bell-like. “Life ain’t been easy on him, so I do what I can to help.”

“Then it sounds like you’re not the only one who got a best friend out of it,” she says, her eyes sparkling in the dark. “What’s he doing in London?”

Ted’s smile thins. “Honestly, I don’t know. I put in a lot of good words at the Catholic school back home to get him a coaching job there, and he was doing really well, but when I told him I’d taken this job, he just up and followed me, and he’s been flying by the seat of his pants ever—”

“Trousers.”

“Huh?”

“Trousers are pants, pants are knickers.”

“Thank God I’ve got you to keep me from faux pas-ing my way into trouble. I’m startin’ a list.”

Ted opens the Notes app on his phone and types:

Pissed = Drunk

Pants = Undies

Rebecca comes with him despite his attempts to let her off the hook, which gives him the opportunity to steal several glimpses of the faded t-shirt beneath her wool coat, each one of them making his stomach swoop. Once they enter the police station lobby, he notices she’s ducking her head like she’s worried about being recognized.

Ted quickly surveys the room, sees that there’s not an insignificant number of people around in Richmond red and blue, but nobody seems to be paying them any mind. He doesn’t have a chance to ask who she’s hiding from before they’re summoned to the desk by a haggard looking young officer.

“Busy night, officer?” Ted says jovially.

“Richmond lost,” he says without looking up from his computer. Rebecca hides her face even more. It’s strange, but even worse than that, it’s adorable.

The officer goes on to explain that Beard hasn’t been charged with anything, he merely got picked up with a handful of others after a brawl broke out at a pub, which Beard was trying to stop, not participate in.

“However, he’s still being detained because they found an issue with his visa when he was being processed.”

“What’s the issue?” Rebecca pipes up before Ted can speak.

The officer finally seems to notice her, and his eyes widen in recognition.

“Oh…Um…I’m afraid I don’t know the specifics.”

“Then I’m sure you’ll find us someone who does, hm?” she says imperiously, now taking up her full height. Ted works hard to keep his jaw from falling open.

“Yes, ma’am,” the man says, shooting up from his chair and speeding away.

In short order, they’re taken back to see the Assistant Chief Constable who’s seated across from Beard, his arms characteristically crossed over his chest, his expression glum and a little bit angry.

“Hey, buddy,” Ted says, clapping him lightly on the shoulder, “You okay?”

Beard does little more than jerk his head. Ted knows his friend probably hasn’t spoken a single word since he’s been here given his well-earned distrust of cops.

The chief says, “I’m afraid we must keep Mr. Beard in detention until we’ve made a report to immigration services as it appears his visa expired several weeks—”

“The absolute fucking incompetency,” Rebecca seethes. Surprised by her outburst, both Ted and Beard nearly snap their necks to look at her.

The Chief sputters, “I beg your—”

“Not you,” she says with a wave of her hand. “My legal department.” The long-suffering sigh she releases is so persuasive even Ted believes her, though he has no idea what the hell she’s talking about. “Lisa took her maternity leave early because she’s at heightened risk for preeclampsia and her vagina’s bleeding like it’s the red fucking sea—” The Chief clears his throat and shuffles some papers on his desk. “—So the entire department’s in complete shambles as you can imagine, which means that Beard’s, our newest Assistant Coach,” she gestures to Beard who looks completely flummoxed, “visa paperwork is probably one in a tower of paperwork that Lisa’s useless assistant, Richard,” she sneers, “hasn’t even seen. My sincerest apology, Coach Beard, for this absolute calamity. Richard’s head will be rolling on Monday morning. Figuratively speaking, of course.” Then she turns to the Assistant Chief and says, “And I apologize for wasting your time with a juvenile clerical error. We’ll be going now.”

“I…” the Assistant Chief stutters weakly.

But Rebecca is already standing, sliding her purse over the crook of her elbow. “Come on, then,” she says, ushering Ted and Beard out of the room.

“Wait, I…”

Rebecca whirls on her heel and spears the Assistant Chief with a gaze so severe, Ted expects to watch him turn to stone.

“Yes?” she says icily, her brow arched impossibly high on her forehead, her eyes full of cold fury.

“I…I am looking forward to seeing how A.F.C. Richmond evolves under Coach Beard’s leadership.”

Ted can’t see himself, but he assumes his poker face is failing miserably given how Rebecca’s eye flicks to his before she says, a bit sheepishly, “As am I. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Mrs. Mannion.”

Rebecca stumbles almost imperceptibly as she turns on her heel to leave.

Ted feels like he’s been punched in the stomach.

Chapter Text

“Come to Nelson Road around—”

Mrs. Mannion.

“—discuss your compensation—”

Mrs. Mannion.

“—with a flat on Paved Court—”

Mrs. Mannion.

“Lasso mentioned you were a coach—”

Rebecca—Mannion, apparently—sits in the front seat of the Rolls, half-turned to monologue at Beard, all but pretending Ted no longer exists, except she can’t quite commit. When he unzips his puffer to his clavicle then to his belly to thwart death by heat stroke or attempts to unbunch his khakis so they’ll stop chafing his already aching cock or, or, or, her leonine eyes strike him like a match. Then she drags them like a corpse back to Beard, sweeping her tongue across already wet lips.

He hopes he’s hiding his betrayal better than she’s hiding her guilt.

It’s not until he hears the blunted latch click of a door opening that he notices the car has dovetailed with the curb at Church Court.

Ted watches Rebecca smooth her palms down over the bell curve of her hips before she extends her right hand to Beard, but he’s glued to her left, flicking back a tendril of hair, settling at her side, flexing her fingers like they ache to hold something.

That hand saved him, tended to him, healed him, and lied to him. And the worst part is, he can’t claim he doesn’t know why this bothers him with any credibility.

The hand he watches folds beneath the other and she presses both beneath her breasts. “Goodnight, Father Lasso,” she says, nodding deferentially as she might to a stranger. To a priest.

“Goodnight, Rebecca,” Ted returns, equally as impartial. “Thanks for…” Ted scrapes around for the gratitude he should be overflowing with, but he comes up empty, so he settles on a pathetic, “For everything.”

Her face starts to sink, but she catches its descent, brutally schooling her mouth into a mild smile. A bracing inhale coaxes her mouth open in preparation for words to spill out, but instead her teeth clamp around her lower lip. In one final act of torture, she slides a hand along the generous swell of her ass to pin her long coat in place as she folds herself into the backseat, vanishing behind the reflective window.

Ted and Beard stand hip to hip and silently watch the car coast out of sight.

“I didn’t think I was high, but I’m really not sure anymore,” Beard says, performing a bug-eyed inspection of his outstretched fingers.

“Nah,” Ted confirms, “You’re not.”

“You drunk?” Beard asks, rightfully identifying that if Ted were, that might make him just as unreliable a narrator.

“Not anymore.”

Ted’s radiator prattles itself to exhaustion and still only manages to keep him just north of uncomfortably cold. It hadn’t been cold at all when Rebecca was here.

Tugging on a crewneck sweater, he tests his shoulder and discovers the pain is little more than a ghostly twinge now. Ted retrieves a quilt, a spare pillow, and some pajama pants for Beard who has poured an ungenerous two fingers of whiskey into two glasses.

“So are we gonna talk about it?” Beard asks, swilling the whiskey around as he, doomed to a lifelong game of ‘the floor is lava,’ kicks his heels up onto the coffee table.

Ted collapses like a ragdoll into the armchair, a pinch more fluff oozing out of its wounded seams. He picks up his glass and bravely resists emptying its contents straight into the back of his throat. “I’m not sure our friendship can withstand another debate about the best Muppet movie—”

“Not the ‘it’ I was referring to,” Beard interrupts, “And it’s the Great Muppet Caper.”

“Don’t you start with me—”

“Why was Rebecca Mannion wearing—”

Rebecca Mannion might as well be a kick in the nuts. Beard’s words turn to cotton in his ears.

“Huh?”

“Your Diamond Dogs t-shirt? The one you refuse to wear because it is both fragile and irreplaceable and you are famously a klutz?”

He hadn’t even—

Aside from Beard, he clings to precious little from his past. He surrendered most of his material possessions when he took his vows and most of his emotional ones when he crossed the Atlantic. Or, at least, he likes to think so. But that ratty shirt had been with him all these long years and now Rebecca wears that deteriorating piece of his history like it’s a part of her.

Beard, more patient than a glacier, regards him silently.

“We didn’t have sex,” Ted says evenly, like the very suggestion doesn’t make him want to launch himself into the sun.

“I didn’t say—”

Ted pulls the muscles of his cheeks inward, quirking his lips and lowering his brows to remind Beard he’s not an idiot.

“Fine,” Beard concedes with a hapless shrug, “Wouldn’t have judged you if you did.”

Ted grinds the bottom of his glass into the armrest. “I’d be roadkill right now if it weren’t for her.” Beard steeples his fingers beneath his nose. “Which is relevant to the story. That’s how…Hang on. You said Rebecca Mannion like you knew who she was. Before tonight, I mean.”

“You didn’t?”

Difficult question to answer, so he grunts a simple, “Uh. No.”

“Your aversion to gossip is by far your worst quality,” Beard sighs. “She’s been the talk of the town for months now because—”

“Don’t tell me,” Ted interrupts, “Rather hear it from the horse’s mouth.” Even if he’s desperately curious. “But of all the people who could’ve saved my life, guess we’re both pretty lucky it was her, huh? Congrats on your new job, by the way.”

They reflect on the surreal night until they hit the bottom of their respective glasses and Beard’s yawns stretch so wide his jaw pops.

Ted bids Beard goodnight, lingering in the doorway for a beat to silently pledge the same empty vow to clean up the apartment tomorrow. By the time he crawls into bed, Beard’s chainsaw snores crash against the closed door in waves, almost strong enough to rattle the wood. It might bother him if he were remotely tired, if he weren’t stretched out flat in the dark thinking about Rebecca wearing his t-shirt and the fabric stretched around her breasts and her woody, sharp musk seeping into the fiber. God forbid she washes it before she gives it back.

He jolts upright. She’d gone home to her husband wearing a shirt she hadn’t left in. He hopes she remembered in the car, asked Peter to roll up the partition so she could hastily swap it out for her blouse.

But she might not think about it until later. After it was too late.

He can picture it too clearly. She got home—which to his American imagination is definitely a castle—and her heels clattered or the door creaked or maybe, worse, she summoned him intentionally. Mr. Mannion, whoever he is, came to help divest her of her coat, and it was only then she remembered four-fifths of Ted’s name was filigreed between her shoulder blades.

Ted reminds himself they hadn’t had sex. Their evening together had been completely innocent. Rebecca might have no issue telling Mr. Mannion every detail. But his mind plucks at a different thread, one where Rebecca kept the shirt on deliberately because she likes riling the vulpine and possessive Mr. Mannion up for sport. When he saw Ted’s name, he asked, what’s this? Rebecca's smirk widened like a cut throat. Maybe she shook with arousal as he traced a finger along the cracked letters. Maybe she was wet when she replied, his claim. Mr. Mannion probably growled, reaching for Rebecca’s hips, only his hands look like Ted’s hands. But Ted’s hands couldn’t be on her hips because—

Oh.

Because his hand is busy strangling his own cock.

And he should stop doing that, really, but he’s boxing Rebecca in, her cheek and breasts kissing the wall, and spanning his hands across the small of her back, digging his thumbs into the divot at the base of her spine. She mewls like a starved animal, like she’s ached for his touch for a thousand years, like just this might be enough to make her come.

Or maybe that high-pitched, strangled sound isn’t Rebecca at all, no, it’s working its way unstoppably up his throat, so he flips nearly onto his stomach and sinks it into the pillow. He’s nailed his wrist to the mattress, so he can only fuck ruthlessly into his fist, and he needs. Needs to stop

But he can’t stop rucking her skirt up over her hips or pushing her panties down to her ankles. He can’t stop whining into the pillow or palming at his heavy balls because how can he stop when she’s bare for him, for him. He falls to his knees and raises his mouth in supplication to her sweet, shivering cunt—

A broken sob chokes him, tears him clean from hypnagogia into stark awareness of his jerking hips, the sticky sheen on his hand, the reek of sweat and come choking his nostrils. With every pathetic thrust, Rebecca drifts further away, his orgasm drifts further away, both as unreachable as heaven. Another sob, a silent plea. He squeezes his eyes shut and the next thing he knows, it’s morning and Beard is knocking on the door.

Ted had done his best to wash the everything off that morning, scrubbing his skin until it stung.

Beard had a hankering for cronuts. Ted had no fundamental grasp on what a cronut was but Beard’s enthusiasm caught him like dry tinder. He so desperately wanted to think about anything else so he was only too happy to indulge in the errand.

But the distraction is short-lived. Ted’s mid-chew when they stroll past a kiosk stacked with newspapers. Normally, he wouldn’t pay any mind, but splattered across the front page of one called The Sun is the headline:

Saint Rebecca: Our Lady of Richmond lost another match but made a life-saving catch

And beneath it are two ganged up photos: Ted caged in Rebecca’s arms and Rebecca atop Ted, her legs bracketing one thigh, his arm tight around her waist. The photo is far more lascivious than his memory. He ignores how it makes his cock stir.

“Don’t—” Ted says weakly as Beard reaches for the paper, his cronut dangling dangerously between his teeth while he digs around for spare coins in his pockets. “Come on, man,” Ted groans like a teenager as Beard’s eyes rake across the text.

“You come on, man,” Beard mocks, “You are on the cover of a British tabloid.” He lifts the paper and shakes it towards Ted’s face. “The very thing that killed Princess Diana! If they’ve identified you, you might never know peace again. Need to assess the threat level.”

“You are paranoid in the weirdest possible way,” Ted says, half to himself. From what he can tell, his own face isn’t really recognizable in the photos anyway.

“Thank you,” Beard mumbles, his eyes feverishly scanning the article. “Shit,” he exhales, “We got a positive ID.” He reads out, “‘A witness to the act of heroism alleges the mystery man is Father Theodore Lasso.’ Maybe you should go incognito for a while, shave off your mustache. Actually…No. Never do that.”

After that, Beard starts whipping his head around like a paranoid cockatiel, shooting menacing looks at anyone who gets too close.

“You’re making a mountain out of a molehill, Beard-o. Who even reads those rags, anyway?”

A lot of people read those rags as it turns out.

The biggest crowd he’d ever seen at the church had been his first mass, which he chalked up to curiosity about the American priest taking over, but it’d quickly whittled down to its typical size. A size, he realizes now, he’d gotten pretty comfortable with. He can hear them buzzing like a beehive all the way from his office.

There’s no reason he can conjure why anyone would be interested in him. Granted, he hadn’t read the article, but as far as he could tell, nothing about it was scandalous. The only scandal is the one playing out in his own sick mind.

Ted chokes back a swig of whiskey from his emergency flask before he goes to start the service.

He looks out over the veritable sea of faces, and not one of them is the one he wants to see.

Ted helps Beard move into his new place, just a couple minutes walk from Ted’s own. The flat is much nicer than Ted’s, appointed with enormous windows and new furniture rather than shabby hand-me-downs.

In all the years of their friendship, the only consistent part of Beard’s life was his friendship with Ted. Landing a job and/or housing with a record like his was no simple task. Adding deportation to his ignoble CV surely wouldn’t have made it any easier.

Rebecca hadn’t only saved Ted that night, she’d saved Beard, too, and Ted had been stewing so hotly in a jealousy he had absolutely no right to feel, he failed to even remotely express the depth of his gratitude. He should trade his cassock for a damn clown costume.

He itches to make it right with her, but he has no idea how. Beard reports he’s hardly laid eyes on her since his first day. Ted would never ask Beard to spy, and Beard wouldn’t do it even if he did. It would be equally as wrong to just show up at her place of work. And he doesn’t have her phone number. So, any way he slices it, he’s basically S.O.L. Big time.

Still, he religiously leaves biscuits on her pew and prays that she shows up.

But that doesn’t work, so he starts praying for divine intervention.

As her absence stretches painfully on, walking into traffic or teetering on the edge of a tall bridge in the hopes she’ll swoop out of nowhere to save him again starts to sound a little too tempting.

He starts losing sleep. Losing more sleep, rather. Worries that she had actually gotten into trouble with her husband. When he gets snarled in that particular line of thinking, it takes tremendous levels of self-control to stop him from doing something completely drastic.

There are bruised half-moons under his eyes on the night she storms back into his life.

The door to his office explodes open and Ted, already leaning dangerously far back in his chair, upends himself completely.

A shout of “Jesus fucking Christ,” is quickly followed by footsteps across the floor and then familiar warm hands are pulling him up to his feet. Rebecca dusts her fingers along the crown of his head. “Did you hit your head?”

“I…” He swallows tightly, overwhelmed by her and the worry alight in her eyes. “No, no. Fit as a fiddle, Chicken Little.”

This turn of phrase does little to assuage her worry. “You’re certain?”

“Yup,” he asserts, “In fact, I’d been sitting down for way too long, so thanks for the heart rate boost.”

“You’re welcome. And sorry.”

Her still ringless hand drops from his head to her stomach. Shame prickles up his neck and cheeks, the cloying spectre of his fantasy making him dizzy. She’s wearing a skirt—tight like nothing else, deep, rich navy—he could just push her back onto the desk and—

Ted steps away abruptly, and she catches him just before he trips on the overturned chair, but she releases him swiftly.

“It’s all good. It’s like they say—third time’s officially a bit.” To his delight, she laughs lightly at this. “So…” He bites his tongue to stop himself blurting out, are you actually married? “Just in the neighborhood?”

“No. Are you busy tonight?”

His already quickened heartbeat goes from a jaunty trot to a gallop.

“Uh…No?”

“Then come with me. And bring that.”

Ted follows the line of her elegant finger to the Bible on his desk.

“Let me just make sure I’ve got it straight,” Ted says, walking rigidly alongside her. “One of your players got tripped by a ghost—”

“—Claims he was tripped.”

“Because he went into a room that’s been cursed since the first World War—”

“—Rumored to be cursed.”

“And now they’re all panicking because they’ve disturbed a small battalion of restless spirits?”

“They certainly think so.”

“So you want me to perform a religious ritual to break the curse and help those ghosts cross peacefully to the other side?”

“Right on the money, Father,” she sighs.

“...You do realize there’s no actual ritual like that, right?”

Rebecca quirks her brow. “I have faith you’ll come up with something…believable.”

“Good news: Believable is my middle name.” He chooses to ignore that she is, in essence, asking him to lie. “So why are you doing all this?”

She fiddles with the ornate gold ring on her right hand. “The squad is very…political. Fractured.” Even Ted caught wind of a literal brawl that broke out during yesterday’s match. “The coaches agree we need to unite them by giving them a common cause. Well, nothing brings people together like mass hysteria, so I thought this was as good an opportunity as any.”

“Sounds like you really care about them,” Ted observes.

“I’m trying to,” she says reluctantly.

“You wanna unpack that?”

Rebecca hums, her lips curling upward. “Later. We’re here.”

The Crown & Anchor has transformed into something of a theatre. On one side of the pub, a group of young men sip pints and chat with one another in low, anxious voices. The other side watches them with open-mouthed awe, like an audience witnessing a very profound or perhaps a very salacious play.

The door shutters behind them and one by one, they fall silent, eyes on Rebecca standing like a sculpture beside him. Beard tips the brim of his maroon cap towards Ted just as Rebecca nods at an older man wearing wire-framed glasses on the opposite side of the crowd. The man steps forward with Mae and clears his throat before launching into a story about Nelson Road’s history to which Ted listens very carefully.

After they fall into an ominous silence, Rebecca starts towards the man wearing the glasses, Ted taking the cue to trot at her heels. The men’s heads follow her like a flower follows the sun.

“Gentlemen,” she begins, “I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine, Father Lasso. He has very generously agreed to assist us with this…grave matter.”

Ted laughs. Nobody else does.

Every eye in the room flicks to him, scanning him thoroughly. He’s dressed down, his clerical black shirt tucked into a pair of dark washed jeans, but regardless, the authority inherent to his station has them shifting in their seats and sitting up a little straighter.

“Evening, y’all,” he says warmly, sweeping his eyes over each one of them like he’s delivering a homily, “You can call me Ted if you prefer. Uh…As M—” He can’t quite get Mrs. Mannion past his lips. “I may not have a Proton pack, but don’t let that fool you—I ain’t afraid of no ghost.” Beard and the bespectacled man hiccup a laugh, Rebecca rolls her lips into her mouth, but otherwise, crickets. “Alright, y’all are too young for that one, I get it. Thought Ghostbusters was pretty ubiquit—” Rebecca clears her throat. “Right. Um. How many of us here today have ever wished we could go back and change the past?” Nearly everyone in the room raises their hands, except for angry eyebrows Roy Kent and Rebecca. “And despite getting warned by many films that meddling with time is almost always a bad idea, it still really bothers us that we can’t. So it’s a heck of a lot easier to just…forget it. But the thing about the past is, it don’t always like to be forgotten. Might come ‘round and bite you in the butt—”

“The ghost did not bite Dani’s butt,” says a man with a French accent.

“If a ghost bites my arse, I’m gonna lose it, bruv,” says another wearing chic black glasses.

“No ghosts are gonna be biting anyone’s behinds, fellas,” Ted says, palms raised to soothe the growing murmur. “Because we’re gonna work together as a team to fix it.”

“How do we break the curse, Father Lasso?” a player he recognizes as Obisanya asks. The plea echoes around the group.

Ted, buying himself time to think of a way to break the curse, jokes, “Well, if you wish to have the curse reversed, you’ll need a certain potion first.”

Rebecca snorts, but the rest of the boys just babble in confusion.

“I’m striking out today, huh?” he says sotto voce to Rebecca, his heart jumping when she smiles blithely and nods pityingly. But Into the Woods gives him an idea. “Alright, alright. I’m gonna need y’all to brush up on your Sondheim and your 1980s cult classics, but before that, what we need to do is make a good ol’ fashioned sacrifice—”

“I vote Colin!”

“Oi!”

“Not a human sacrifice,” Ted shouts emphatically over their quarrelling. He’s seen Into the Woods, after all, so he ploughs ahead with, “An item. Something personal, something you truly value. Pick one and bring it back to the club tonight, at…midnight.”

This demand is met with a chorus of groans and complaints that are silenced by a shout from Kent, “We’re all going to fucking do it!”

“Uh. Thank you, sir,” he says, earning a curt nod from the gruff team captain. “Those spirits will be able to rest easy knowing their sacrifice hasn’t been forgotten, alright? See y’all at midnight.”

After the players have filtered out, despite the doors getting blocked by half the town, Rebecca introduces him to Leslie Higgins and Nate Shelley, both of whom regard Rebecca apprehensively. And Rebecca, he notes, is uncharacteristically chilly.

Almost as soon as they’re gone, the austere lines of her face melt away, and her usual warmth returns.

“Hungry?” Ted asks.

Rebecca’s eyes flick toward the door like she’s considering concocting an excuse to go, but then she nods her head.

Mae sets them up in a snug corner booth putting him in dangerous risk of bumping his thigh against Rebecca’s.

Mae’s hand is hardly off the basket of fish and chips before Rebecca dives in. Though she’s clearly enjoying herself, it’s no groaned fuck me, which, he’ll admit, pleases him greatly.

“Would you consider yourself a skeptic?” he asks, dashing malt vinegar over top of his fried fish.

“Are you asking me if I believe in God?” she says.

“Not necessarily,” Ted says, shrugging, “You just don’t seem to buy into all this spirit business.”

“I do not believe the training room is cursed, no. Nor have I ever seen a ghost at Nelson Road, despite what local legend claims. What about you, Father? Do you believe in ghosts?”

“I do. But more importantly I think they need to believe in themselves.”

Rebecca’s groan is low and melodious and full of mashed up potato.

“Richmond is cursed. By mediocrity. And a refusal to take accountability for it. Or anything for that matter.” Rebecca reaches across the table to dip one of her fries into Ted’s ketchup. “Take Dani. It’s easier to blame a ghost for a benign injury than accept that he just got overzealous and tripped like an idiot. A sweet idiot, but still.”

“Not sure that’s a Richmond curse so much as a human one.”

“Maybe so, but I promise you, what Richmond lacks in trophies, it more than makes up for in cocky reprobates,” she says snidely.

“Apologies if this sounds harsh, but if you’ve got so much contempt for the whole kit and caboodle, why do you do what you do? And if you don’t mind dropping in what exactly it is you do while you’re at it, I’d appreciate it.”

“I’m the majority owner and acting Chief Executive Officer for the club.” Ted still isn’t exactly sure what that means, but it sounds very impressive. “And I do it because…” Ted follows her eyes to a nearby couple laughing over their pints. The woman wears a royal blue jersey with the name KENT on the back. “Because I have to. Because I have to believe people can be better.”

He raises his pint and says, “I’ll drink to that.”

“So why do you do what you do?”

Ted’s throat constricts like he’s been caught in a lie. Rebecca observes the bob of his Adam’s apple, her eyes bright. “You like asking questions, but you don’t like answering them, do you?”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so for once in his life, he doesn’t say anything. Just stares at her like she’s walked in on him naked, like every secret he’s ever had is written plainly on his skin in a language only she can read.

Rebecca stares back, her eyes widening like she’s once again said something she hadn’t really meant to. But she’s quicker than he is to school her expression.

“I also don’t like answering questions. But unlike you, I don’t usually like asking them, either.”

“Usually?” Ted says, his curiosity too easily perked. That cheshire grin of hers returns, satisfied that she’s caught him out. “Dang. If you ever need a career change, you’d make a good lawyer.”

“And you’d be an excellent therapist,” she notes.

A sinkhole opens up in his gut. He hides his hands underneath the table before she can see them knot into fists.

“Are you alright?” she asks with a furrowed frown, nearly lifting out of her seat to come to his aid.

“Yeah,” he lies, and he knows Rebecca knows he’s lying, but he doesn’t take it back, and she doesn’t press. “I do what I do because I love helping people. Anyone that I can, any way that I can.”

“And did you always know you wanted to do that by becoming a priest?”

Ted can still hear the muffled sound of his mother crying behind her closed bedroom door when she thought he was asleep.

“Nah,” he says with a wan smile, “Past me would think it’s pretty lame I did this instead of get bit by a radioactive spider.”

“Well, I for one am glad you don’t hide that face of yours behind a mask. I rather like it.”

A blush explodes across his cheeks. Inexplicably, he replies, “Makes it a heck of a lot harder to hang upside down in an alleyway on a rainy night and make out with a pretty girl though.”

“Hm. I happen to know a pretty girl with a history of keeping you out of harm’s way. Shame you aren’t allowed to snog her, though.”

The pink on his cheeks scorches an angry red, and the lines around Rebecca’s mouth deepen, clearly amused. Rebecca shifts and her leg slides down his kneecap from the knob of her ankle to the crook of her knee, like she’s dragging a bow across taut strings. And Ted’s nothing more than an instrument who’s been waiting to be played by her his entire life.

“Sorry,” she says. But she doesn’t sound sorry at all.

Ted takes hold of the single thread of self-preservation he’s got left and steers them hard toward lighter topics. But with her, even small talk feels profoundly important. Ted is greedy for every scrap she feeds him, like he might be able to stitch together the whole of her if she gives him enough. He can’t ever remember wanting to know a person like this.

Ted baskets his chin on the heels of both palms, his cheeks aching from smiling, and all she’s doing is explaining how Premier League player loans work.

Rebecca glances down at her watch. “We’d better get going.”

Ted sulks and she gracefully pretends not to notice.

“So what are you gonna put in the curse fire?”

“Shit,” she grumbles, “Do you really think I need to participate?”

“Make 'em better by having ‘em follow the lead of the best, hm?”

Rebecca smacks his arm. “You’re an arse. Affectionately.”

“Thank you. Affectionately.”

Rebecca’s smile slips, her knuckles whitening around the fabric of her skirt. “Peter? Could you swing by the house?”

The house.

“Of course, Mrs. Mannion.”

Mrs. Mannion.

A wrought iron gate swings open automatically as the car approaches, and they roll down a long drive towards a house that is definitely not a castle, though it’s about as modest as one. Everything in England always felt so old compared to home, so Rebecca’s house jars him with its modernity—all sharp angles, black steel, and glass. Ted suspects he would feel as uneasy as Rebecca looks right now in a house with see-through walls.

He doesn’t expect to be invited in, but he’s still disappointed when she instructs him to wait for her in the car. Her hand trembles, so faint he might be imagining it, but he wants to thread his fingers through hers all the same.

Ted averts his eyes from the glass house, makes friendly conversation with Peter but he can’t help but follow the lights switching on and off inside, can’t help but notice a dim light in one of the upstairs rooms. Before too long, Rebecca returns clutching a small bundle to her breast.

“What’d you pick?” he asks thickly, unable to identify the shapeless lump in the dark.

“Feels like it would be bad luck to tell you now.”

“Bad luck, huh? Knew you weren’t a skeptic,” Ted says, hoping she can feel how warm his smile is.

They stumble out of the car just before midnight. Ted hastens in the wake of Rebecca’s long, powerful strides, and he’s so mesmerized by the sway of her hips he nearly misses the words, ‘Rupert Mannion Training Centre’ over the door.

Rebecca freezes just outside the treatment room, and turns to him, smoothing her palm over his shoulder. “Whatever you’re going to do in there, just…Really sell it, alright?”

He chokes out a perfectly strangled, “You got it, boss.”

Peach pink dapples her cheeks and neck, and he’s stopped from doing something really stupid when she cups his jaw and smooths the pad of her thumb over the corner of his mustache, her eyes sliding to his lips as she does. Perfectly chaste, indescribably dangerous.

She bends her elegant neck towards his ear, her breath a butterfly whisper along the hinge of his jaw. Warm, warm, she’s so warm. “I believe in you, Father,” she says, velvet in his ear.

Ted trembles so violently the pages of the Bible audibly snap together in his hand.

He follows Rebecca into the cramped room in a daze, confused when she urges him ahead of her, and it’s only the players’ expectant puppy dog-eyed staring that reminds him he’s supposed to be doing something.

Ted bumps his fist twice against his chest, hoping that when he opens his mouth, something inspired will come flying out.

I believe in you, Father.

“I’ve always been a believer…And I don’t just mean in this,” he says, lifting the Bible. “Ghosts. Aliens…Guardian angels.” Rebecca sheepishly drops her gaze to the floor. “To quote another sacred text: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” A murmur of recognition amongst the men has Ted subtly pumping his fist in triumph. “Can I tell y’all a secret? A lot of people think that because I wear this collar, I have all the answers. But I don’t. Not by a long shot. Truth is, I wear this thing because what I’ve got are a lot of questions. Questions are scary, and most of ‘em will never be answered, which is scarier. But that’s where belief comes in. So whether you correctly believe that The Muppets Take Manhattan is a far superior film to The Great Muppet Caper—” Beard groans indignantly. “Or that our sacrifices tonight mean something, or whatever it is that you choose, know that it has power. I believe. Do you?”

Ted tosses his Bible into the garbage can, striking up a chorus of shocked gasps.

“I’m just kidding,” Ted says, waving his hand jovially and digging the book out, “That’d get me in some mighty big trouble.” Rebecca snickers into her hand. ”Who wants to go first?”

The men look around at one another nervously, silently willing anyone else to go first.

Rebecca steps forward, tugging the bundle out from beneath her armpit—a faded blue A.F.C. Richmond jersey, a different design from the ones he’s seen on TV.

“This was…a gift. I won’t say how long ago I received it exactly, but to give you a hint: Sam was in primary school, and Roy wasn’t yet a pensioner. It made me feel like I was…a part of the team. But I wasn’t then. Not really.” Rebecca’s mournful smile droops. “This is a relic of a different Richmond. A different me. And I’m quite ready to say goodbye. So…” Rebecca brandishes the shirt. Ted’s breath stutters when he sees ‘MANNION’ across the back just before she deposits it into the bin without hesitation or apparent sentimentality.

One by one, everyone in the room follows suit. Though a few of the sacrifices feel a little dubious, he reminds himself that value is subjective, and for the most part, the boys rose to the challenge with aplomb. Right at the end, another young man bursts into the room—Jamie Tartt, the star player and, apparently, diva of A.F.C. Richmond—and gives an impressively vulnerable speech before dropping in a pair of cleats.

With that, they carry the heavy bin out to the field (“Pitch,” Rebecca says gently).

“Showtime,” Ted says under his breath to Rebecca, audaciously winking at her. He raises his hands into the air, still clutching the Bible. With his eyes half closed, he bellows in his most exaggerated Evangelical pastor voice, “Ohhh, spirits!” Rebecca’s lips roll violently into her mouth, her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter. “Please accept this…humble offering as a token of our…remembrance of you, our valiant heroes. We ask that you lift this curse, so these fine folks can reclaim their treatment room and…win more games.”

“Matches,” Rebecca whispers hoarsely.

“Matches!” Ted corrects. There’s a long moment of silence. “Beard—the matches.”

Beard scrambles around in his pockets for a matchbox and tosses them to Ted. The fire blooms, crackling loudly and stinking to high heaven.

“Alright. The only way to know if the curse has been lifted or not is to ask for a sign so…Join me this time, boys.”

All of them together chant, “Oh, spirits!”

“Speak to us!” Ted says.

And, just as Rebecca planned, Dani Rojas comes bolting out onto the pitch.

The team do their best to rope Ted and Rebecca into standing out in the freezing cold to drink with them, but Rebecca politely declines and Ted really has no desire to stay without her.

Once inside, she turns to him and says, “Would you like a tour?”

She walks him slowly through the building—the locker room, coaches’ office, the weight training area.

“And this hall represents the club’s long, albeit…modest, history. The first match was played in 1897. You know all about the war,” she says, gesturing vaguely at a network of very old framed photos.

One picture shows a long line of tents. He hums as he inspects it. “If I were to suggest you set up camp then throw a tar-like substance onto a British soccer field—”

“You’d pitch I pitch a tent so I can pitch pitch onto the pitch,” she replies without missing a beat.

Ted really could kiss her.

“You want to kiss me, don’t you?”

His thoughts stutter like a record scratch, but his heart kicks up like a drum.

“What?” Ted asks, flooding with heat.

“I think you heard me,” she says, closing the distance between them, so close he can feel her hot breath on his neck. Ted already knows he’s clay beneath her touch; giving in would be easy, his flesh is so, so terribly weak. And his spirit? That ain’t faring much better. “So why don’t you?”

“I can’t,” he exhales, the refusal burning in his throat like sin.

“Because you’re a priest?” She drags the pad of her finger across his collar. “Or…because I’m married?”

Ted’s back hits something solid, shocking his breath out of his lungs. Rebecca crowds him against the blood red frame around the alcove, the roles from his fantasy reversed. He has to tilt his head up to look at her, and that alone pushes the tiniest whimper out of his chest.

“Tell me,” she says, her lips mere inches from his.

She drags her knuckle down his jaw, smirking as she coaxes his mouth open—for her tongue, for his words, he doesn’t know. He can’t know.

Because I’ll fall in love with you and I’ll ruin your life.

“Beca—”

Bang.

They both snap their heads to the left.

A framed photo lies face down on the floor like it had leapt off its hook, the frame haloed by shattered, glittering glass.

Ted goes to pick it up and sees Rupert Mannion for the first time. A picture is truly worth a thousand words; in the photo, Rupert sits in the middle of a gaggle of laughing young women, one girl perched on his lap, a bottle of champagne in his hand, a smug expression on his face.

Ted looks to Rebecca only to find she’s staring in horror at the photo.

“Fuck,” Rebecca breathes, the fear on her face seeping into Ted's soul. “Fuck.”

And then she's off, taking her warmth with her, rushing away from Ted as quickly as her heels will carry her.

Chapter Text

“Rebecca!” he calls after her, but she doesn’t stop or look back or even slow down. “Man, you can really move in those things,” he mumbles under his increasingly ragged breath as he gives chase.

The fluorescents give way to the cinereous city sky above the amber glow of the parking lot where Rebecca cuts a swath through the luxury vehicles dotted around the parking lot, the team’s revelry rumbling like distant thunder.

“Rebecca, wait,” he huffs feebly, massaging a stitch in his side. “You…you wanna throw me a bone here?”

She stops, inclining her head back towards the building they just emerged from. Ted follows her line of sight to the words ‘Rupert Mannion Training Centre’ looming above them. When he fixes his attention back on her, the lines of her face are drawn so tight there’s no longer any life, any music left in her face.

“Forgive me, Father, for my…behavior. It was terribly inappropriate. I don’t really know what came over me.” He hardly recognizes her voice; every word seems like it’s been cut from marble.

“You don’t need to be forgiven. You didn’t do anything wrong. I could’ve told you to stop,” Ted admits, confused by her shifting cadence. “What happened back there?”

“We must’ve bumped the wall—”

“No way. I don’t believe that and clearly neither do you.” Rebecca looks at him reproachfully, but Ted thunders onward, “Was that an act of God? Is your husband dead and now he’s haunting—”

“You don’t know?” she asks, spinning slowly on the ball of her foot, a ballerina figurine trapped in a music box.

“You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

“About my husband.”

“Well, I know his name is Rupert Mannion because it’s over the door and I know it ain’t fair but I got some feelings about his character based on the photo that met its demise in the hallway back there. Why? What is there to know?”

“He’s not dead,” she says flatly. “He had a stroke during the final home fixture last season, so I’ve taken charge of Richmond while he’s convalescing.”

Ted, to his shame, feels disappointed.

“Oh,” he says woodenly, stuffing his hands into his pockets and kicking at some pebbles beneath his feet, “I’m real sorry to hear that. I’ll…I’ll keep him in my prayers.”

“Do you still think I haven’t done anything wrong?” she says coldly. “My husband narrowly survived death and instead of kneeling by his bedside to care for him while he recuperates, I’m seducing a priest, trampling right over the vows both of us have taken. What does that make me, Father Lasso?”

Ted knows what she wants him to say better than he knows what he wants to say. Sure, it doesn’t look good on paper, but there’s too many gaping holes and missing variables for it to add up. Lost in the calculation, he hesitates too long, and she accepts his silence as punishment.

That mirthless smile returns. She turns away from him like a closing door. He has this feeling that if he lets her go now, she’ll be lost to him forever.

“It makes you human, Rebecca.”

Maybe it’s too late. Maybe it’s not enough. But he says it anyway.

Rebecca glances over her shoulder, and even in the dim, he can see the sheen over her eye.

“Will you be alright getting home with Beard?” she rasps softly, trying and failing to coax out the gravel in her voice.

There’s a cathedral-sized something building its way up from the pit of his stomach, kindling for just the right fire.

“Yes, but…When can I see you again?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I appreciate your help this evening, and I’ve—”

This has to mean something. It has to because if it doesn’t mean anything then nothing does.

“This can’t be it,” he half-sobs, “Don’t you feel it? This…connection between us? Ever since I first laid eyes on you, I’ve…I think we were supposed to find each other. I know it’s bananas, but, Rebecca, I think you’re my—”

“I’m not,” she interrupts, driving a jagged knife through hope itself. Rebecca brings a warm palm to his face in apology, brushing his cheek like the gentle beat of a wing. Her eyes flutter shut for a heartbeat. For two. “I so badly wish I were, but I’m not.”

“How can you be so sure?” he pleads like a child frightened of the dark.

“Because you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, Ted Lasso, and you deserve far better than me.”

Her hand falls away, falls somewhere he can’t reach.

“Rebecca—”

“Goodbye, Father. Be well.”

Maybe he doesn’t really know her at all because the last thing he ever expected was for her to remind him so much of himself.

After a week of wallowing and wobbling through his days, drinking through his nights, Ted holds a six-pack of beer in one hand and pounds on Beard’s door with the other. As it swings open, he shoulders his way past Beard and grumbles, “I want you to tell me everything you know about Rupert Mannion.”

Beard, of course, seems to know quite a lot.

A self-made business mogul, ownership of A.F.C. Richmond was just one of Rupert Mannion’s many assets but clearly one he obtained out of some combination of sentiment and vanity. Under his ownership, little about Richmond’s performance changed. Rupert was more liable to make political hires than he was to actually attempt to improve their fortunes on the pitch.

Rupert had married a woman named Helen in 1976, but at some point in 2005 their union was quietly dissolved and Rupert emerged not long after with Rebecca Welton (Welton has Ted’s heart doing hopscotch in his throat) on his arm. One of A.F.C. Richmond’s founders was a Welton, so for Richmond supporters, the Mannion-Welton union was nothing less than a royal match and the dubious origins of their relationship were of little importance.

After they married, Rebecca transformed the club’s long-neglected charitable arm into something not only functional, but exceptional. Rebecca was bestowed the epithets ‘Saint Rebecca’ and ‘Our Lady of Richmond’ by the press and the public. She lived up to them when, as Rebecca had told him, Rupert collapsed during a match last spring. What Rebecca failed to mention was that she performed CPR on him for the three full minutes it took for emergency personnel to arrive—an act of heroism that was broadcast live on national television before the director had the good sense to cut to an unplanned commercial. Rumor has it that Rupert only survived because of Rebecca.

Rupert, from what Beard has heard, was thought of as debonair, the kind of man who could charm the pants off just about anyone. He hasn’t been seen much since the stroke, but he did emerge during Richmond’s opening match and was hailed as something of a triumphant hero. But there are less than savory things Beard’s surmised. The kind of behavior that Rupert permitted at Nelson Road, tacitly or otherwise. That ever since taking over, Rebecca has been working hard to uproot the rot at the core of the place. Sometimes, Beard admits, it seems like she’d prefer to torch it than fix it, but that might just be him making assumptions.

“Does she…Does she seem okay?” Ted asks reluctantly.

“I wish I knew her well enough to be able to tell you,” Beard says somberly.

He knows that trying to puzzle out Rebecca is probably a waste of time since she made it pretty dang clear she had no interest in seeing him again, but he does it anyway. He does it because it at least crowds out the nothing waiting on the other end of something.

It’s edging closer to Christmas when he starts to feel the filth of his apartment underneath his fingernails. His skin prickles with shame to think that Rebecca had seen this. Prickles with something else to think she had seen it and stayed anyway.

You deserve far better than me.

Doesn’t make a lick of sense, is the thing.

He starts with the trash. With the plastic wrappers that haven’t quite made it to the bin. With the rotting vegetables in his fridge. With the junk mail and the crumpled paper and the balled up tissues that’d fallen underneath his bed when he had a cold a couple months ago.

People tend to like me better from a distance.

And yet there’s not much at all he likes about her distance.

He’s too frayed, too damn tired for order, for hierarchy. He charts a desultory course around the apartment—emptying a drawer completely, scrubbing the flecks of mold from a forgotten cup of coffee, abandoning sweeping beneath the window to go strip his bedsheets, picking up a t-shirt he just keeps tossing back on the floor—

Does Rebecca wear his shirt when she gets into bed beside Rupert? Does she even share a bed with him? He supposes it’s none of his damn business, but it chews at the ragged edge of his thoughts all the same.

—and moves it into the hamper. The same with his underpants. His cadre of black shirts he usually picks based on which one is the least wrinkled. But there’s still a constellation of socks on the floor when he migrates to his bookshelf and starts to alphabetize them, but then he’s just stripping every book off the shelf, walking away to find a dust rag, lasering in on the dirty baseboards by the front door.

Outside his window, the amplified strum of a guitar fills the evening quiet. A busker starts to sing Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree.

Reminds him of his father draping silver tinsel over his mother’s shoulders and pulling her into a half-waltz. She swatted at his shoulder even while she melted into his arms. Dad winked at Ted over her shoulder, and it filled him with nothing but dread because he knew his father was only happy like that right when he was dancing on the edge of despair.

He works at the dark spot until his fingers cramp, but he can still see its stubborn shadow on the wood.

Trampling right over the vows both of us have taken.

Does Rebecca love her husband? When she saw the shattered photo, her expression was wracked with fear, not love. Not tenderness. Not affection.

Love and fear go hand in hand, he knows. He knows it because that’s how he feels about God.

If a vow is broken by action, not thought, why does he feel shot through with sin? Born with a stain on his soul that can never be scrubbed clean, the same rope that hanged his father around his own neck. Or the same loaded gun pointed at his own head. Whatever. He wants a drink.

A voice rises from the grave of his memory. I need to tell you something.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” he murmurs beneath his breath. His knees ache from kneeling on the floor. There’s a crucifix nailed to the back of his door and he stares up at it for a long, lean moment and he wonders if God’s forgiveness is cool and grey and empty or if it’s warm and balmy and whole like Rebecca’s touch. “Quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Oh, I’m not—”

“I’m not, either,” she says.

The figure beside him slides into focus, and he’s sure as a man deep in his cups can be that he’s dreaming.

“It’s you,” he slurs.

“I know, I know. Of all the pubs in all the towns, etcetera.”

“Is this a dream?”

“I don’t think so. At least not in the traditional sense.”

“Dunno,” he mumbles, “Sounds like something someone in a dream might say, Sister—”

“Doctor,” she says curtly but not unkindly, the barest hint of pride on her lips. “Doctor Sharon Fieldstone. I suppose I should be calling you Father, now?”

“Guess we traded places,” Ted says with amusement, finally registering her lack of habit plain as day. She’s more mature than he remembers, more in stature than appearance. Heck, as far as appearances go, she’s hardly aged a day.

“Maybe,” she says, “Though maybe not much has changed at all. You’re about as drunk as you were the last time.”

A wood-paneled honky tonk bar in the dead end of nowhere, Kansas—last place he’d ever expect to find a nun. A sign from God just when he’d nearly given up.

“Nah,” Ted argues weakly, “Was definitely drunker last time. How the heck have ya been, Doc? Or should I call you Doctor. Or Sharon.”

“Doc is nice,” she says neutrally, so he can’t really tell if she actually likes it or if she’s just appeasing him. “And I’ve been many things, but today, I’m well. How are you, Father? Or shall I call you Ted?”

“Ted is nice,” he says, “And Ted is very happy to see an old friend.”

“Hm,” she hums, scanning his slumped frame. “Let me get you that drink,” she says, waving Mae over and requesting two tall glasses of water.

“You’re funny,” Ted says as Sharon scoots the water towards his hand. She stares at him imperiously, prompting him to take a sip. Then more of a gulp. “So…If it ain’t too bold of me to ask, what happened?”

“You did,” Sharon replies, a response hooks his brows in surprise. “Though I only realized it long after the fact. I knew my calling was to help people, but I started to wonder if I’d answered the call in the wrong way. It was our conversation that inspired me to meet with a professor at King’s College, and I rather embarrassingly fell in love with her. I’d never been in love before.”

“What was that like?” Ted asks, wide-eyed and rapt.

“Horrible,” Sharon says, “We just celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary.” There’s a mischievous twinkle in her eyes that pulls Ted’s lips right up into a smile, a bit of his sadness leaking out at the corners.

“Okay, lemme guess.” Ted scratches his chin. “Endocrinologist.” Sharon shakes her head. “Russian Lit ‘cause you’re gaga for Gogol.”

“Clinical psychology,” she says.

“Huh,” Ted says, curling inward without meaning to, his knuckles whitening around his glass, willing the water to ferment into wine. “And you and I meeting is what set you down that path?”

“In a roundabout way, yes.”

“Ain’t that something,” Ted drawls incredulously, “Should I be flattered that I’m so fucked up in the head I turned you into an atheist?”

“I didn’t say—”

“Is that why you’re here? Saw my name in the paper and decided to come find me now that you’ve got the proper credentials to crack my skull open and analyze all the shit that spills out?”

“No, of course—”

“I told you things I ain’t never told anyone else.” He’s vaguely aware that he’s shouting now, garnering the attention of the entire pub. “I thought you listened ‘cause you were kind, not ‘cause I was some kinda damn lab rat.”

Sharon remains silent, her expression infuriatingly neutral.

He wrestles out his wallet and, too bent out of shape for math, slaps all the cash he has down on the bar. “Happy anniversary. May my personal tragedy fuel many more years of happiness for you both.”

He’s two steps out the door when he considers going back in to apologize. He’s far more sober now than he’d been when Sharon arrived, so there’s little to shield him from the weight of shame. Which is good, really. He deserves to feel it. Nothing he’d said was fair or rational or kind. But if he apologized, Sharon might forgive him, so he turns from the warm, inviting glow of the pub and sets off for the cold, empty, dark of the church.

The church is a bit cold. Definitely dark. But, he quickly discovers, it’s not empty.

Two steps into the sanctuary, he freezes in his tracks.

Rebecca sits in the second row, her hands draped over the pew in front of her. When she turns, she hastily unknits her fingers.

“Oh,” Ted says, “Sorry.” It’s only after the apology that he remembers he’s not actually the intruder in this scenario. “Uh…How’d you get in here?”

“If you sort of wiggle the handle on the side door enough the lock slips. It’s always been like that.”

“It’s…” He trails off, narrowing his eyes at her. Rebecca shrugs sheepishly. “Right.” Ted shifts from foot to foot, unsure what to do with himself now. “Well, I’ll…Uh…Leave you to it, then.”

Ted makes for the doors but she commands, “No. Stay.” Adds a soft, “Please.” Not that she has to since he already stopped. Rebecca stands and hovers near the aisle.

“Thought you didn’t wanna see me anymore.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s…” Rebecca pinches the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger.

“What?” Ted snaps, his patience pathetically thin. Rebecca’s brows furrow in surprise, or anger, maybe. “I know you’re going through something, Rebecca, and I’m sorry for that, but I can’t help you if you—”

“Help?” she scoffs, “I don’t remember asking for your help, Father.”

“You’re right. You didn’t. But I think you’re too stubborn to ask anyway.”

“Oh, stop it. You don’t know me.”

“Because you won’t let me!”

Me, me, me echoes through the sanctuary, and then everything falls terribly silent.

“Please,” he breathes, “I want to know you.”

“You think you want to know me. Everyone does, at first. I’m a curiosity—a thing at a shop that catches your eye, so you take me home and you like me when I’m small enough to be handled, but the second I’m not, you’ll wish you’d left me behind, and you’ll either abandon me or, worse, you’ll refuse to let me go. And you’ll end up hating me for it.”

“Bullshit,” Ted barks, “You wanna know what I think? I think maybe people like you better from a distance because you never let ‘em get any closer.”

“Fuck you.”

“Well, you’d certainly like to, wouldn’t you?!”

A furious burn creeps up his neck. Did he really just say that?

Rebecca stares at him—stricken, angry, but she also looks a little like she wants to…laugh? A noise bursts out of her—a forced sound like she’s been tickled and she’s not sure she’s enjoying it. She splays her hand across her diaphragm, her long, manicured fingers dimpling the fabric of her dress.

It’s a nice dress, he notices. Made of a fabric that looks like liquid crimson metal with a sweetheart neckline, cropped at her mid-thigh. The kind of dress someone would wear to a fancy party. The kind of dress that makes his throat bob helplessly.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I shouldn’t have—”

“No. It’s fine. I mean, what gave it away?” she asks rather rhetorically, fanning out her hands and bending her knees like she’s about to curtsy.

His pulse flutters at her flexing thigh muscles. He grips the pew next to him with a sweaty palm to keep from keeling over.

“Why are you here, Rebecca?” he asks. Rebecca smoothes her palms down her long coat, not meeting his eye. When the silence drags on for what feels like twenty years, Ted says, “Wait here.”

Rebecca finally looks at him, furrowing her brows as he dashes past. She hasn’t moved an inch when he returns, now wearing his cassock and holding two glasses of whiskey, one of which he offers to Rebecca.

She glances at the glass, then at him, her eyes audaciously raking up the long black garment to his face.

“What’s this?” she asks, dubious.

“Now I ain’t saying there is, but if there’s anything weighing on your heart, and you think you might wanna do something about that…” Ted gestures at the confessional over her shoulder.

“And the whiskey? Is that a new Catholic PR stunt? Trade your sins for free booze?”

“A one-time-only, Father Lasso Special. Don’t tell the Pope, he’ll just steal the idea and take all the credit.” Ted says, earning him a threadbare smile. “I’ll uh…Just be in there. For a little while. If you want to join. No pressure.”

Ted presses the whiskey into her hand, then leaves her there, a little too satisfied with her gobsmacked, mildly irritated expression. He sits on the small bench, slumping against the wood and slinging the entire tumbler of whiskey down his throat.

Seconds of silence pass. Minutes. Then that familiar sharp click, the scraping of curtain rings, a muted creak. More silence.

Ted whispers furtively, “You’re supposed to say ‘Bless me, Father, for I have—”

“Fuck off,” Rebecca replies haughtily. He can only see her outline, but he’s almost certain she’s smirking. “And don’t even think about asking me how long it’s been since my last confession.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Ted says, his eyes sliding shut as a blithe smile draws across his lips.

The time is measured in little noises. A muffled knock on the wood. The clink of a fingernail on glass followed by a quiet swallow. The rustle of fabric and swish of skin sliding along skin. A poorly suppressed sigh. Then,

“I think I’m addicted to masturbation.” Ted bites down hard on his lip. “These past couple of months I’ve been going at it more than when I first discovered it and made an absolute disaster of my parents’ sofa. That’s a sin, isn’t it?”

“To some,” Ted near-squeaks, his head suddenly so bloodless he wonders if he’s ever been coherent in his life.

“I’ve also been unfaithful, I suppose, because when I do it, I don’t think about my husband at all. A bit funny, really, because when my husband was fucking other women, I suspect he was only ever thinking about me.”

Her words hit him like a heart attack—understanding violently slotting into place. Of course. Of course.

“I’ve also lied. Often and well. But my most recent offense was just this evening. Right now, I’m meant to be at a Christmas party with someone who could be a friend if I’d let her be, but I told her I was ill and I couldn’t go. I came here instead.”

“Why?” he can’t help but ask.

“A young woman came to my house today looking for Rupert. She’s seven months pregnant with his child. Fifteen years he and I have been together and in all that time, not even one scare,” she says distantly, maybe wistfully. “I wanted children very badly, but when I started to understand who Rupert really was I thought it was good that we never reproduced because when we die, there will be no trace of us left on this earth. But now…”

Ted’s lips split open. He very nearly says, I understand. God, you have no idea how much I understand. But before the words can emerge, Rebecca continues, a sob caught in her throat,

“I’m not good, Father. I’ve never been good because If I were, I never would’ve fallen in love with him. If I were good, it would’ve been you I was sent for, not him.”

“Rebecca,” Ted says softly, sensing that she’s spinning out into a bleak, grey nothing he knows all too well. “I’m not—”

“I just want him to die, but I’m so fucking scared of being alone,” she sobs.

Ted feels Rebecca’s heart crack in his own chest.

He pushes aside the curtain—though he doesn’t even remember getting up—to find her bent brokenly over herself, white-knuckled fists tangled in curls like she’s trying to rip out her own hair. Ted sinks onto his knees before her.

Gently, he coaxes her hands into his own, his lips grazing her knuckles as he holds them close to his heart. “You’re not alone. I’m here.”

She finally shows her face to him, and his breath catches at how her eyes still manage to sparkle in the darkness. The cramped space is an inferno; he feels a drop of cool sweat trickle down his spine.

“Come here,” she beckons.

From his knees, he straightens his spine so they’re eye-to-eye, setting loose a hummingbird flutter in his heart.

“Come here,” she says again, soft and husky.

Ted plants his palms on the bench, boxing her in, his face mere inches from hers.

“Come—”

Ted seals his lips over hers, and she hums against his lips. He thought, however foolishly, this might be a chaste kiss—lovely but brief. But Rebecca works his mouth open like his jaw is made of rubber, slips her tongue between his teeth like it belongs there.

Rebecca’s nails dig into his scalp, urging him closer. He breaks their kiss, pulling an effete little whimper from her throat, her fingers grasping needily for him, but she softens like butter when he presses open-mouthed kisses down her jaw and neck. She’s perfect, and he wants more. He wants her undone, slick with sweat and come. He wants her loud, filling the hollow shell of the church with a canticle of moans and gasps and cries more holy than any hymn.

So he kicks aside his nerves as best he can and puts his hands on her clothed hips, fingers edging along the jut of her iliac crests, the crease of her thighs, dragging down her skirt. An eternity passes and then, and then, he’s finally touching her bare skin.

“Oh, God,” she moans.

A booming clap of thunder shakes the foundations of the church.

They both freeze. In that span of silence, all he can hear is the rush of his own blood, their syncopated panting. He can feel her skittering pulse where his thumb digs into her leg just above her knee.

He remembers where he is. The wood that made this confessional was harvested from a tree that’s been extinct for over a century. The first foundations of this church were laid before William the Conqueror arrived on the isle. It was erected because since the beginning of time, humans have heard thunder and been afraid.

And Ted has always been afraid. Afraid of living and afraid of dying. But right now, maybe for the first time in his entire life, he’s not afraid of anything.

There’s a symphony of popping thread as Ted parts her legs, the slit over her thigh ripping open wider. He mumbles a sorry and she mumbles back an I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. He rucks the dress up as far as he can. Because her legs are ten miles long, there’s just so much skin he wants to caress and map and revere. Ted strains against his jeans, and the agony is divine.

He pushes her coat off her shoulders, and she helps him by shrugging it off all the way. He stops, breathless at the wide ocean of her chest stretching from exposed shoulder to exposed shoulder.

“What?” she asks, looking down at herself like he’s trying to trick her into thinking she’s got mustard on her shirt.

“You’re so beautiful,” he exhales.

In response, Rebecca hooks her legs around his hips and pulls him closer, his face nearly prat-falling into her breasts. His fingers scrape at the neckline of her dress, and she groans, “Jesus Christ. Take it off, just take it off.” In a lunatic tangle of movement, he gropes around for the zipper and wastes no time yanking the pull down, down, down, and soon he’s pulling the entire dress over her head and tossing it carelessly into the dark behind him.

With a couple fumbling twists of his fingers, her bra falls away and he’s staring, slack-jawed, at the heaving swell of her perfect breasts.

Rebecca clears her throat impatiently.

“Sorry,” he breathes, “Just…admiring.”

“I’m not a fucking museum exhibition, Father,” she says, exasperated, “You’re allowed to touch.” So he takes them into his hands, giggles boyishly as their weight spills out of his palms. He mouths his way up from the delicate, salty skin underneath, then laves his tongue over her perfectly dusky nipple. “Oh, fuck,” she groans, starting to approach his desired volume. “I might…Christ, I think I’m going to come.”

Ted blushes, but he doesn’t stop. He brushes his thumb over the other, her hips writhing rootlessly against his stomach. Through his layers he can’t feel if she’s wet, but he imagines a streak of her come on his clerical black, and that alone urges him on.

“Do you want to? Like this?” he asks, letting his humid breath spill over her nipple, then follows it with a stream of cold air.

“If you promise that won’t be it, then yes.”

“Oh, I have no plans for that to be it. Promise.”

He licks, sucks, plucks at her nipple until she’s gasping for air. There’s a freckle on the inner curve of her left breast that makes his gums ache to look at. He bites her there, sinking his teeth in hard enough that her skin starts to give. The pleasure is so heady, his hips mindlessly rock against her and Rebecca slaps the wall, her ring cracking so hard against the wood he wonders if she chipped it. “Oh my God,” she moans throatily, another accompanying rumble of thunder answering her call.

Ted doesn’t relent, wants her pleasure to climb, so without giving her more than a breath of rest, he drags his knuckle up the center line of her black lace underwear, whining when he feels how soaked the fabric is. Rebecca swallows down the sound with her lips, kissing him furiously and spreading her legs even wider. He hooks his thumbs around the waistband, but instead of tugging them off, he tugs them up so the lace slips between her lips.

“Fuck you,” she hisses through gritted teeth. Ted pins her thrashing hips to the bench, which earns him an irascible, rebellious look. But it fades into pleasure as he lowers himself down, quirking his brows wickedly as he slowly drapes her left leg over his right shoulder.

“One thing you should know about me: I do not have the patience of a s-saint,” she huffs, her muscle twitching violently as he kisses and nips his way up her leg.

“Lucky for you, I ain’t particularly saintly,” Ted murmurs into her skin just before he closes his lips over her clit and sucks hard, knowing her underwear will blunt the sensation. Even still, Rebecca cries out at the contact. The sharp heel of her stiletto digs into his back and makes him moan into her cunt.

Ted pulls back, tonguing determinedly at the fabric like he can excavate her taste from it, her hips fighting hard against his hands all the while.

“Take them off,” she pleads. Ted, nearly as desperate, starts to pull them down, but she traps his hand. “Just rip them. I can’t—”

Ted obliges, wrenching at a weak point where the elastic meets the lace, and the mess of fabric comes away in his fist.

He kneels at her altar, her thighs spread open like a book far more holy than the bible, and he plans to revere her like she’s the eighth sacrament. To hell with the other seven—she’s the only one worth worshipping.

Now that she’s bare for him, he can see that her lips aren’t quite touching, exposing a stripe of coruscating slick gilding the delicate folds of skin. He skims his fingers through her neat curls and trails up and down her outer lips. “Okay?” he asks, curving his nail along the skin just above her clit.

Rebecca’s lip twitches in a half-smile, and she says, “Yes. Please.”

Ted spreads her lips open with the pads of his thumbs, teases her clit with a snake-flick of his tongue. The shock of it makes Rebecca gasp, her hips jerking away from his reach. He claws into them and pulls her hard against his mouth, burying himself in her like a man who dreams of drowning, makes a noise like he is. When he looks up, her head is tipped back in rapture, murmuring a litany of blasphemous curses. Ted pulls languidly at her clit, and she clenches her jaw shut to trap whatever sound is trying to escape.

He reluctantly unlatches and says, “Rebecca. Let me hear you.”

As though he’s trying to prove that he means it, he pushes two fingers inside of her, and she shouts when he crooks his fingers, her cunt clenching around them greedily.

“Good,” he groans, “So good.”

Maybe it was a bad idea to encourage her, because when he goes back to massaging her clit with his tongue, she’s no longer holding back. The sound of her pleasure erupts out of the confessional and rumbles with the thunder. Ted palms at his aching cock but fails to find even an inch of relief.

Rebecca twists her fingers into his hair and uses her grip to grind against his face, nearly slipping off the narrow bench with the effort. “I’m so fucking close,” she sobs. Ted braces himself, savoring the ache in his jaw and knees, and flattens his tongue, hoping that his eyes say take what you need from me. The thigh of her planted foot tenses as she rocks her hips again and again, the sharp cut gems of her eyes never leaving his. “Ted,” she coos, tenderly cupping his cheek. Ted moans brokenly, tears brimming in his eyes. She’s chanting his name when she bursts on his tongue, orgasm bowing her back. Ted feels her spilling down his chin, dripping onto his cassock, and he smiles, drinking from her like it’s his only hope at salvation. Maybe it is.

Ted kisses her belly, the space between her breasts, the skin beneath her ear.

“You okay?” he asks quietly, nuzzling into her neck, scratching a gentle path from hip to shoulder blade, the affection he feels for her bleeding out of him.

“Yes. Could be better,” she pants.

“What can I do?” he says, doing his best to cover her naked body with his.

“You can fuck me, Father Lasso,” she whispers, “I’d really like it if you fucked me.” Her hand slides down to cup him between his legs. “I think you’d really like it, too.”

“Uh…Yes. I would. My apartment is—”

“Here. This whole…Thing,” she slides her hands down his chest, “is rather alluring.”

“But…won’t you be uncomfortable? My bed is nothing to write home about, but it’s more suitable for making love than some old, creaky wood, I’d think.”

“You,” she says, pulling him toward her by his collar, “are unbearably sweet.” She kisses him deeply, sucking his bottom lip between her teeth. Then she pushes him back and unbuttons his cassock. “But I don’t think I can wait that long.”

Honestly, he doesn’t think he can either. Ted takes over undoing the complicated maze of buttons and Rebecca wastes no time getting his pants open. Her palm stretches down the hard line of his cock, her thumb tracing a shadowy, throbbing vein. The ache is unimaginable; he’d completely forgotten what it felt like to have a hand other than his own touching him like this. “Jesus Christ,” he moans, taking hold of her wrist. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I was celibate. This is like puberty all—”

“That’s okay,” she says gently, “You’ve taken such good care of me, love. Now it’s your turn. Do you want my hand?” She teases a knuckle up his shaft, which distracts him from commenting on the fact she called him love. “My mouth?” She nips at his jaw. “Or…” Rebecca turns away, flattening her forearms to the wall and canting her hips out, looking back at him over her shoulder with a devilish smirk.

Ted closes the already small distance, pressing himself into her back. He plants desperate kisses on her neck, squeezes her breasts, her hips, her heart-shaped ass, which Rebecca nudges back against him, a needy reminder of what he’s supposed to be doing. Ted takes himself in trembling hand and drags it through her slit, coating himself in her come. With a hand clawed around her hip, his cock catches at her entrance. The thunder outside roars distantly and doubt rumbles through him.

But it’s too late; he’s already in love.

Ted pushes into her slowly, his vision narrowing to pinpricks; a good thing, really, because all he can do is feel and all he feels is Rebecca. “Oh, God,” he whimpers, his forehead cradled by the crook of her neck. “You feel so fucking good, Rebecca. So fucking—Oh. Oh. Oh. Please,” he whines, her cunt clenching around him, “Have some mercy on me, sweetheart. I just need—”

“Sorry,” she gasps, “Sorry. I’ve just…I’ve imagined this—us—so many times, and it’s so…God, I’ve never felt full like this.”

Ted wraps his arms around her, putting aside for the moment that his dick is buried in her to the hilt, and holds her tight, so she knows that he knows exactly what she means.

Rebecca lifts his palm to her mouth and kisses his heartline, then plants it on her breast and grinds her bare ass against him. Ted snaps his hips up hard and drags his cock out slowly. “Fuck,” she gasps. He tries to keep a steady pace, but she’s so tight and warm and she keeps wiggling her hips and making the most gorgeous, ruined noises, so when he notices that the walls of the confessional are shaking, it takes him too long to realize it’s because he’s apparently trying to fuck her into next year.

“Don’t stop,” she snaps when he slows in an attempt to regain control, “Harder, Father, please.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, picking up his punishing rhythm once more, every thrust, every wet slap of his skin against hers punches a throaty moan out of him. And beneath him, Rebecca just chants don’t stop, Father, don’t stop, oh, God, yes, harder, fuck, yes. He’s exhaling more air than he’s taking in. It’s so hot in the confessional it might be an actual fire hazard, and he feels so feverish with desire he worries he might pass out. And maybe he’s hallucinating, too, because when Rebecca’s back rolls in pleasure, her shoulder blades ripple strangely in the dim, like something is scraping against her skin from beneath. But when he blinks, it’s gone, and he waves it off as a trick of the light. Or lack thereof. Ted covers the hand she’s splayed against the dark wood with his own to keep himself from buckling, his face buried in her hair as he pants hotly onto her neck. When he brings two fingers between her legs and circles her swollen clit, she keens as her body shudders violently from the outside in. “Rebecca,” he lulls as she rides out her orgasm on his cock. “Rebecca Welton,” he wails.

Welton–un–n.

He comes so hard inside her he feels it in his teeth.

Ted shrugs off his cassock and lays it across the bench, guiding Rebecca—a shaky, sweaty, gorgeous ruin—onto it.

He watches his own spend spill out from between her legs onto the black fabric, feeling a little out of body about the whole thing.

“You know my name?” she says, looking up at him with febrile, glassy eyes.

Ted nods.

“Good,” she says, dragging a hand through the tangled nest of her hair. “You know, I feel quite bad for Jesus Christ.”

“Why’s that?” Ted says.

“Because he only gets to have a second coming. I got to have three.”

He's completely and utterly fucked.

Chapter Text

This isn’t where she’s meant to be.

Here in a confessional, sagging like a naked ragdoll, sex drunk from fucking a priest. In a church.

What blasphemy! How obscene! So jejune!

Honestly, she could really put Jesus Christ to shame and go for a fourth if she didn’t think that would kill the priest.

The priest, who ambled into the dark with the grace of a baby deer to retrieve her dress and shook it out before handing it back to her, now stands in the open door frame of the confessional, hands gripping the wood like he’s in the hull of a rocking ship. Despite being covered from neck to toe, he’s the perfect picture of debauchery—hair ruined by her fingers, cheeks ruddy from exertion and heat, mustache deliciously askew and damp. She wants to clean him up and make a mess of him all over again.

Rebecca gives him a crooked, toothy smile. And it’s not the priest looking back at her, it’s Ted and a contented, close-mouthed grin she’s never seen. Somehow he’s looking at her exactly the way she feels about him, like his beautiful fucking face is a mirror of her own heart.

And her heart beats for him with an impossibly human rhythm.

Her pants are a ruined, wet tangle of lace and she doesn’t see the point of her bra (no worse feeling than putting a bra back on after taking it off) so she stretches the dress right over her naked body, finds he ripped the slit so high it’s downright indecent.

Even better, the neckline is too low to cover the mottled bouquet his teeth left on her breast. She traces the shape with her index finger, remembering the gorgeous pleasure-pain shocking her into orgasm.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Ted drawls, observing her finger’s path.

“Don’t be,” she breathes, suddenly feeling like she’s never wanted anything more than to wear Ted’s love like a symbol of devotion.

This revelation makes somewhere deep inside her belly tremble, just a flutter that’s forgotten when Ted circles behind her so he can zip up her dress. Better yet, he sweeps her hair to the side and kisses the crook of her neck. Rebecca closes her eyes and melts into his frame, solid and soothing.

“Do you want to stay at my place tonight?”

“Yes,” she sighs in relief though she hadn’t realized she was nervous he wouldn’t ask.

“You got a hair tie?”

Rebecca squints one eye open and twists her neck to look at him with suspicion. “Why?”

“Sex hair, sweetheart. Big time. I’m talking Dolly Parton.”

“Which decade?”

“Mmmm. Nineties,” Ted says, twisting a few strands around his fingers.

“Oh, no.”

She digs out a silk scrunchie from her clutch and Ted plucks it from her fingers, holding it between his teeth while he cards his fingers languidly through her tangled hair. The gentle tug on her scalp feels fucking divine and she’s so touch-starved, apparently, she moans a little. Ted chuckles, a velvety sound that supples her spine. He knots a low ponytail and kisses her neck again.

No, she’s not meant to be here. She chose to be.

Rebecca never thought she would feel lost.

But if drinking a rare vintage of Saint-Émilion Grand Cru straight from the bottle while imagining herself smothering her sleeping husband with a pillow didn’t constitute lost, well, she wasn’t sure what did.

The fantasy was so lurid and she was so drunk, she stumbled into his bedroom on Sunday morning worried it hadn’t been a fantasy at all, but he was alive and she was, frankly, disappointed. A powerful wave of revulsion sent her sprinting to the toilet where she purged quite a lot of expensive wine but not a single drop of guilt.

It was all a telltale sign she’d been in the house too long—the chic soullessness of the place always made her tetchy and paranoid. A walk in the early autumn sunshine would do wonders. Perhaps even make her less murdery. She hoped. Or did she? She wasn’t sure.

Seeking a semi secluded spot to smoke a cigarette, the soothing sound of an organ beckoned her towards the church, but it was the American accent she heard through the doors that drew her inside.

It was odd to be there again. This was the church her parents brought her to midnight mass and Easter service when she was young, primarily out of an allegiance to its former priest, an old uni friend of Paul’s, rather than deeply held faith. The only altar Paul prayed at was that of A.F.C. Richmond, and Deborah believed whatever suited her best at any given moment. Suffice to say, Rebecca didn’t have a religious bone in her body. What she did have were memories of breaking in through the shoddy side door with Sassy and getting drunk on communion wine.

Rebecca didn’t know what she expected to find inside, but it certainly wasn’t Father Lasso.

They locked eyes from across the sanctuary and he looked at her like she was the only person in existence. And just like that, she didn’t feel quite so lost.

Rebecca was above religion. Considered it all nonsense, a scam, a relic of a bygone…Why was the priest so ridiculously, unfairly fit? There was a snowflake’s chance in hell that she would ever convert, or…Honestly, who in the history of the earth had ever really looked good with a fucking mustache and why was it this specific priest? And, it went without saying, the Catholic church was quite problema…Really, a priest? she thought when his foot caught on the hem of his little dress. He looked up at her and blushed and she felt it between her thighs, right where she wanted to see those blushing cheeks. Oh, God, I want to fuck the priest.

It was stupidly gratifying to see the effect she was having on him, and she wondered if he had even the foggiest of the possibly even more potent effect he was having on her.

But the very idea of actually speaking to him scared the absolute fuck out of her for some reason she wasn’t yet willing to interrogate, so she bolted out the door and went straight to a hotel suite so she could get off thinking about the priest in peace. Her husband wouldn’t miss her.

That might’ve been the end of it, only she couldn’t stop thinking about the fucking priest or fucking the priest. It was ludicrous, a naughty schoolgirl crush, but going to mass and flirting with the priest from afar and masturbating like a loon about it kept her sane when everything else was spinning out of control.

After yet another meeting with her solicitor where she was told (again) that Rupert’s solicitor had denied her petition for divorce (again). Going to court was her only remaining option (other than Rupert dying, but she kept that to herself), but she hesitated. It would be a long and bloody affair. Saint Rebecca would be pilloried in the proverbial town square for attempting to divorce her poor ailing husband. Whatever leverage or sympathy she might garner from his infidelity would be gone when it came out she’d known for nearly an entire year and waited until he was vulnerable to plunder him for all he was worth. As if she could’ve predicted any of this would happen.

So she was really looking forward to her date with the priest (sitting in the second-to-last row of pews and making eyes at him from afar), but for whatever reason, he refused to meet her eye, the wanker, and it turned her into a holy fucking terror, so when she returned the next week, she decided to up the ante.

She was already piping hot around the collar—aroused by both her own righteous fury and the anticipation of committing a sin and the hard pew pressing against her every time she crossed her legs—when he called the congregation forward. Every step closer to the priest made her clit throb angrily and her cunt clench also angrily, not to mention her knickers were catching just so. By the time she reached him, she was ready to go up like a silk stocking to flame.

Standing close enough to him to make out the green woven into his amber irises, every individual hair of his ridiculous mustache, to breathe in the soapy scent of him made her want to turn around and run out of the church screaming. It didn’t help at all that he appeared similarly struck and so adorably flustered that he couldn’t remember the ritual he’d performed probably thousands of times before.

God, she wanted to eat him alive.

Maybe he was turning her Catholic after all.

When he said, “The Body of Christ,” it sounded like, I want to fuck you.

So when she said, “Amen,” she was really saying, please, Father, fill me with your holy spirit.

All it took was Father Lasso touching the Body of Christ to her tongue for her to orgasm.

It came upon her so suddenly it was like he exorcised it out of her right there in front of the entire congregation. Blessedly, her knees did not buckle, she did not moan, and thank God or herself or who-fucking-ever for her dark trousers because suddenly it was the land of milk and fucking honey down there.

And fucking Christ, it was still crashing through her, thigh muscles clenched painfully, when Father Lasso blinked back to focus, matching her pant for pant, and she no longer felt very in control of herself, so she bolted.

Back at her hotel, now a standing Sunday reservation, she imagined sinking to her knees there in the pulpit and sucking his cock like a holy relic, not at all caring that she was moaning loudly enough the entire floor could probably hear. Maybe the one below, too.

At the hotel she didn’t have any toys (she hadn’t been able to get herself off with her hand in years), but the fantasies she spun out of the memory served just as well. She worked herself until her clit couldn’t take it anymore, but she was anything but sated.

Because it felt like she was waking up to something new, and she was hungry for more.

The December air hangs heavy with petrichor and ozone from the storm, but it’s pleasantly cool against her skin. There’s no telling what time it is, but the streets are eerily silent. Feeling a bit agoraphobic, she loops her arm around Ted’s elbow and fills the silence telling him why she knew about the side door because she could tell he wanted to ask. Her curious boy.

“Do not get it fixed,” she warns, “I’d be drawn and quartered in Richmond Green if anyone knew I snitched to the bloody priest.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Ted says, hand to his heart.

She believes him. Because she is. Safe with him.

“Anyway, I’m not a regular priest. I’m a cool priest.”

Rebecca rolls her lips into her mouth, unwilling to give him the satisfaction, but she does snap her knuckles playfully against his chest. He rubs at the spot where she made contact, smiling like he’s plenty pleased with himself.

Walking through the threshold of his flat feels like slipping into a warm bath, the chaos of it oddly soothing. It’s subtly different than before—more messy than filthy, but just as cozy. Rebecca hangs up her coat and kicks her shoes off beside the door with ease.

“I’m going to pop to the loo,” she tells him, already on her way.

“Sorry for whatever mess—”

“Don’t be,” Rebecca interrupts, dismissing his concern with a wave of her hand.

He should give himself more credit, honestly. It’s only a little untidy. She knows all too well how difficult even the simplest things can be when everything feels heavy. Unable to help herself, she tosses an empty toothpaste tube and discarded seal into the bin, hangs a crumpled towel on the rack, wipes a few stray stubble hairs into the sink with a bit of toilet roll and washes them down the drain before splashing cold water onto her still flushed face.

Rebecca pauses just outside the doorway. Ted has laid out a faded pair of navy joggers and an equally faded red shirt with the peeling logo of an indeterminable Kansas sports team…maybe. Ted never looks shabby, but she’d be surprised if any of his clothes are from this century.

Like a woman possessed, Rebecca buries her face into the shirt and inhales its laundry detergent scent deeply.

Some days, usually on a Friday, she would come home and find a neatly wrapped box on her bed. Snuggled beneath the ribbon, a small card made of monogrammed linen paper that even smelled like his cologne. In swooping, narrow letters:

5 Hertford Street

8 o’clock

Never anything more than the place and the time. Inside the box, behind layers of fine tissue paper, she would uncover what she believed for so long was proof of his love. A new dress made of a dark, sumptuous fabric that hugged the parts of her he liked best better than his arms ever did. Beneath the dress, a new pair of matching Manolo Blahniks with heels as thin as they were tall. The heels made her taller than him, which he liked. The heels made her feet ache so badly she could hardly stand without his help, which he loved.

When they were out, he would always wait for her to suggest they leave. If she had behaved, he would take her back to their house and undress her like a doll. But if she hadn’t, he would kiss her coolly on the cheek and send her back alone.

This felt different. This felt like care, given without expectation. Every fiber of Ted’s worn-out t-shirt and joggers comfort her like a home she’s never had. Tears scald her eyes for the second time that night, which were the first tears she had shed in years.

Rebecca finds Ted in the quaint living room smoothing a blanket over the sofa. She leans against the entryway frame and observes him wryly. “I hope you’re not expecting me to sleep on that cartoonishly tiny sofa.”

“‘Course not,” he says, “It’s for me.”

She raises an eyebrow, waiting for it to dawn on him how ridiculous he’s being. It doesn’t.

“We just had sex,” she says after a long enough silence.

Ted scratches the back of his head, red rising on his cheeks. “Right. But I didn’t wanna assume—”

“If I wanted to sleep alone, I would’ve just gone back to my house,” she says. Ted sighs, making a performance of haughtily stripping the pillow and blanket off the sofa. Rebecca crosses the room and assists him in matching up each corner of the blanket just right. “Thank you for the clothes.”

“You’re wearing the heck out of ‘em, so pleasure’s all mine, really,” Ted says, taking her in a bit rakishly like he’s imagining pushing the joggers right over her hips. Now it’s her turn to blush. How a man who regularly uses the word ‘heck’ had fucked her so filthily, she’ll never know. Ted clears his throat, drawing her attention back to him. “There’s water boiling if you want some tea.”

Rebecca smirks at his passive phrasing, like the water had just decided to boil itself. She passes through to the kitchen and discovers he’s already set out a chipped mug, a couple of tea bags, a carton of milk, and a pot of sugar, and she supposes those must’ve all just walked themselves to the table, too.

“Thank you,” she says, verklempt.

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

It’s everything.

She would tell him so, but the word gets caught in her throat and she feels a little nauseous. It’s only then she recognizes that she’s nervous. Scratch that. She’s terrified.

On Monday she woke in the hotel with hunger still pulsing inside of her and she wanted to see him again.

She didn’t know if he would be there, but he was sitting in a pew like he’d been waiting for her. Except he didn’t turn. Didn’t acknowledge her in any way. She watched the back of his head for what felt like hours, wondering if he was deep in prayer or hadn’t heard her come in or thought she was someone else.

When she came back again and again, it became a game. In her admittedly stubborn estimation, it was his turn to approach her, and Rebecca, competitive to the utmost fault, refused to concede even if the rules only existed inside of her head.

So she was quite satisfied when she arrived to find a small pink cardboard box awaiting her. And when she bit into them, well, their utterly divine taste—so delicious it actually turned her on—was somehow still the least remarkable part of eating them.

The stupidly good biscuits—seriously, they had just the perfect amount of salt—pried her closely guarded heart open just that much further, and given her history, it made her nauseous. So she ran. Again.

Only to find him again only hours later, drunkenly stumbling into oncoming traffic.

It happened following a particularly frustrating Richmond loss. Lately, she felt like their babysitter instead of their boss, charged with twenty odd man-babies completely against her will. When Richmond’s management fell into her lap, her first instinct was to sink them to the depths and sell the team at a loss. She promoted the kit man mostly as a joke, but he proved to be a master tactician with an extreme deficit of confidence stemming from constant belittlement. It plucked at a heartstring she’d long thought dead and—ew—she wanted to fix him, and then—ew, ew—she wanted to fix all of them. Worst of all, she started to care about them and about them winning, and made the mistake of gloating to her husband that they would. So if she went to the house and saw his smug face, it was a coin toss on whether she would behead him on the spot. His second stroke may have robbed him of his ability to communicate, but Rebecca had never needed his words to understand him with crystal clarity.

So she had decided to get a drink at the Crown & Anchor, something she hadn’t done in years, hoping vainly she might run into Father Lasso.

She certainly didn’t mean to find him like that. She didn’t mean to dislocate his shoulder, but she did mean to heal it just a little, though she wasn’t supposed to (she didn’t know why she wasn’t supposed to or even how she knew she wasn’t).

What she really hadn’t meant to do was fall in love with him, a fuck up on a cosmic scale.

It’s such a human thing, this love she feels for him.

It makes her want to do impossible things like know him atom by atom so her skin, her teeth, her cunt, her heart, and the marrow of her bones will recognize him as easily as her eyes and ears.

It makes her say things she would never normally say. Embarrassing things like asking him if he became a priest because he had a daddy kink when they’d only really just met. Awfully vulnerable things like in the confessional or right now, lying in bed facing one another in the darkness.

“I hate sleeping alone. I always have.”

Nothing prompted her to say this; it’s an offering given of her own free will.

“Yeah?” Ted asks softly. She nods. “I don’t like it much either. Dunno if I always have but I remember the first time I was afraid. I grew up in tornado alley. In Kansas,” he says.

“Continue. Just know I’m imagining you with pigtails, a checkered dress, and a little dog, too,” Rebecca croaks the final phrase like a witch.

Ted laughs, a rich, loose sound rumbling from his belly that makes her grin from ear to ear. “Actually, I told all the kids at school that movie was about my mom. Her name’s Dorothy.”

“You’re having me on,” Rebecca snorts.

“Hand on my heart,” Ted says, aptly slapping his hand to his chest. “It’s not really about my mom,” he adds, quite seriously.

“Mhm,” she says, giving him an exaggerated wink.

“No, it really is—”

Rebecca snorts as she taps the tip of his nose. Ted slaps his palm to his own forehead and drags it down his face, but he’s smiling.

“So, tornado alley?” she prompts.

“Right, right. When I was five, a tornado came through the neighborhood in the middle of the night. I slept through the sirens and woke up in my dad’s arms. He was carrying me down to the basement…”

“Ted?” she asks, watching his expression go vacant, the hand next to his head curling into a fist. She reaches out and takes it. He blinks life back into his eyes.

“Sorry,” he says, his fingers unwinding. She keeps hold of his hand. “The tornado took out the McCleary’s house. Only four doors down. Rest of that summer, I was so scared we would be next, that I’d be asleep and…Took a whole Lego bribing economy and a couple of months to coax me back into my own bed. So…Guess that kinda turned what might’ve been a pretty bad summer into a good one.”

“You’re lucky,” Rebecca sighs, “My parents’ tactics certainly didn’t involve any Lego. I was also five when I started getting vivid nightmares. My father woke up when I was climbing over him, and he plucked me right up and carried me back to my room. Even sang me a lullaby.”

Ted pushes himself up on an elbow and rests his chin in his palm. “You remember what he sang?”

Rebecca clears her throat and speak-sings, “Each evening, from December to December, before you drift to sleep on your cot, think back on all the tales that you remember of Camelot…”

Ted’s jaw goes slack. “Now…Hold the phone. You’ve had the voice of an angel this whole time and I’m just now hearing it?”

“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” she snorts, swatting at his arm, “I can hold a tune.”

Ted narrows his eyes at her. “I can hold a tune. You can sing.” A ferocious blush burns her cheeks and she does her best to hide. “Alright, alright. We’ll circle back to this. The lullaby. Did it help?”

“It did. That time. The next time I had a nightmare, I went to their room and the bedroom door was locked,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes.

But Ted stares back at her, horrified. “Jesus, Rebecca. They locked you out?”

“Well, I certainly got the message.” She waves her hand dismissively, laughing bitterly. But Ted doesn’t join in. “What?”

“Just…Breaks my heart to think of little Rebecca scared and all alone,” he says somberly, “Heck, I get it. Parents gotta get shut eye and all, but…Did they ever talk to you about it?”

Paul and Deborah Welton weren’t big on talking.

“I…I don’t know…I’m sure they did and I just can’t remember.” Rebecca worries at the inside of her cheek. “I think I’ve given you the wrong impression. They aren’t bad people. They…”

They thought she was fucking mad. Not without reason, of course.

“They what?” Ted nudges, squeezing her hand.

“I was more than they bargained for, is all,” Rebecca says with finality. Before he can press her, she yawns widely. “Can I tell you something?”

“Anything,” Ted says.

“I really appreciate you donating these clothes to me, but I sleep hot. Very hot,” she says, already feeling fresh sweat soaking the hair at the nape of her neck.

“So you sleep—”

“Naked. Like a fucking male fantasy, I know.”

Ted’s face heats up. “Well, this male’s fantasy is for you to feel comfortable. You want me to crack the window, too?”

Rebecca nods, then wriggles out of his clothes, mourning their loss as she drops them to the floor. Ted’s other shirt is folded safely beneath her pillow. She doesn’t sleep in it, too worried about sweating through it and speeding up its demise, but like a child’s blanket or stuffed animal, its presence is a balm to her famously poor sleep. Maybe the real Ted will be even better.

Rebecca closes her eyes and syncs up her breathing with Ted’s.

“Rebecca?”

“Hm?”

“You said you started getting vivid nightmares. You get ‘em still?”

“Sometimes,” she murmurs.

Ted finds her hand beneath the sheets and they thread their fingers together so tightly not even air could pass through.

“I would never lock you out.”

Rebecca pulls him into her, cradling his soft and precious body against her chest as tears threaten to spill once more. She doesn’t deserve this. She doesn’t deserve him. Maybe if she could split open her chest and tuck him behind her ribcage to keep him safe and warm and always close she might start to be worthy of him. Ted molds himself to her form, tucked so tight against her she feels his cheek rounding against her sternum, the press of his belly on her pelvis, the knob of his ankle digging into the meat of her calf.

Rebecca sifts her fingers through his hair, listening to the susurrus sound of his breathing as it slows and deepens. Her throat gums up when he drools on her just a little. She thinks perhaps she’ll follow him into dreamless sleep, but each time she starts to dip, she gets pulled back up by the scruff.

There’s a shadow on the wall that’s either the sprawling, shivering branches of a tree or a skeletal hand reaching towards her. A cold tendril of air from the open window licks at her vertebrae sending a shiver cascading down her spine. The cold has never bothered her before, but this chill settles deep inside of her and she can’t quite get warm. She gentles the duvet up her torso and cocoons herself around Ted beneath it. That’s better.

She doesn’t think she sleeps at all, but then she wakes up to morning light and the smell of biscuits.

She didn’t know she was in love with him until her husband’s picture jumped off the wall. Rather regrettable timing, in her opinion.

It shook her more than she would ever admit. Perhaps she was particularly susceptible to messages from beyond because they spent the evening discussing ghosts and spirits and mysteries of the universe, but she read the shattered glass like a haruspex—her path was set and she was straying from it, dangerously so.

It was unfair. It was all so fucking unfair. This had been the best night of her entire life until that fucking picture fell and reminded her of everything she was and everything she could never be.

It makes you human, Rebecca.

She so badly wanted to believe him.

As a child she read a battered copy of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There and could finally put words to what she’d been feeling. The world was a fairytale and she was Alice trapped on the wrong side of the looking-glass. But unlike Alice, she could press against the glass as hard as she pleased and she never fell through. She didn’t even have kittens to keep her company.

She hadn’t even understood the depth of her loneliness until she met her husband, her purpose. Once she knew what it was to be whole, she never wanted to be just a part again.

Please don’t ever leave me, she used to whisper against his jaw, I won’t survive it.

So when she uncovered what was lurking beneath the bravado and the charm, she believed she was meant to save him by loving him with everything she was. She always had so much love and nowhere to put it, but now she understood why. It was always meant for him.

But she wasn’t good enough. The harder she tried and the more she gave, the easier it was for him to sink his claws into her and tear her away bit by bit, a pain she ignored until it was screaming, screaming, screaming at her to put a pillow over his horrible fucking face—a face she still loved despite everything—and just end it all.

It makes you human, Rebecca.

Ted was kindling a flame within her that she thought had been snuffed out. But the portrait reminded her that her soul was fit for Rupert, not Ted. Ted was sweet and kind and thoughtful and caring, and beyond delicate. Rebecca saw how broken he was, and she suspected he only saw the cracks, not the golden light that shone through them. If she were different, she would show him just how beautiful he was. But she was what she was, and she would only damage him further if she tried.

Choosing to walk away from him was the most human thing she had ever done, and she hated herself for it.

And she could have—should have—chosen to stay away from him, but then the girl Bex came to her door. Bex’s belly was much rounder than when Rebecca had last seen her. She remembered it quite clearly, pushing open the bedroom door to find Rupert smirking at her over Bex’s bare shoulder like this was a show he put on especially for her. After Bex finally accepted that Rebecca’s hushed invitation to come inside wasn’t an attempt at murder, she told her that she hated asking but Rupert hadn’t sent her money in three months and she was a broke student and he had been so insistent that she keep the baby and the expenses were piling up and—

Rebecca wrote her a cheque from her personal savings, not just for the past few months, but enough to get her—to get them both—comfortably through the coming year, and then some. She told Bex not to worry, that Rebecca would figure this out, but to keep herself and her child far, far away from Rupert fucking Mannion.

Saint Rebecca really could save anyone except herself.

Within seconds of closing the front door, she had sent Keeley a thin lie of an excuse and ordered an Uber. She nearly went to Ted’s flat, but her feet carried her towards the church instead.

She didn’t need company, she needed answers.

She walked as close to the pulpit as she dared, sliding into the second row. It wasn’t until she dropped her head and clasped her hands together that she realized she didn’t even know how to fucking pray. Sighing in exasperation, her gaze fell to something scratched into the wood just as the doors swung open behind her.

Ted sits on the kitchen counter in his shirt and boxers, hair sticking up, dark stubble pebbling along his jaw, and, worst of all, a pair of black-framed reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He’s sipping a mug of coffee, she surmises by the scent and his hatred of tea, while reading a tome of a book. He’s so perfectly at ease and golden in the morning light streaming in through the kitchen window, her chest hurts to look at him.

He spots her over the rim and makes a choked sound into the mug before pulling it away from his lips.

“Hi,” Rebecca says softly.

“Um,” he says, swallowing thickly.

Rebecca frowns. He seems nervous—blushing, a bit twitchy, and he can’t seem to bring himself to even look at her. The silence drags and her stomach twists, sure that the morning light has cast the sins of last night into harsh relief. Christ, she’d been such a selfish bitch, taking without thought of the consequences.

“I’m sorry,” Ted says, still not looking at her, knuckles white around the mug handle. Of course he didn’t want her to stay, but he was so kind he’d never tell her to go.

“No, no,” she says, rubbing at her tingling nose with the back of her hand, “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

“What?” Ted says, overturning the book in his lap. “Why?” he asks meekly, like he’s scared to hear the answer.

“You were very kind to let me stay here, but if you want to pretend last night never happened, then—”

“Is that what you want?” Ted asks, his brows furrowing, heartbreak in every line of his face.

“No,” she says, now completely lost, “Sorry…Why were you apologizing if you weren’t about to give me the boot?”

“Give you the…” Ted looks like this thought never would have once occurred to him. “No…It’s ‘cause…” He flushes again, scratches the back of his head and looks away. “‘Cause I looked up to find a gorgeous, buck-ass-naked woman in my kitchen and I forgot all my manners.”

Rebecca looks down at herself. “Oh,” she says, a laugh breaking through the tension. She tentatively steps towards him, his blush and his smile growing. “Which manners are those?” she asks, wedging herself between his thighs.

“Y’know…” he says, swallowing tightly, “‘Good morning,’ and ‘do you want some coffee?’ and…polite stuff you ask a sleepover buddy...” His thighs twitch as she walks her fingers up his leg.

Her eyes drop to the book in his lap. “Interesting choice.”

“Huh?” He follows her gaze. “Oh. It’s…I’m brushing up on my gospel for Midnight Mass.”

“Mm. Sounds important,” she says, lifting the book from his lap to reveal his very tented pants—also quite worn, she notes—damp spreading out from the center. “I’ll help you,” she says, smirking as she places it into his hands.

Ted peers at her over his glasses, eyes narrowing as they sweep up her bare torso. “Help, huh?”

“If you stop, I stop,” she says, fitting the crescent between her thumb and forefinger into the crease of his thighs and kneading softly.

“Stop wh—”

The question catches in his throat with the brush of her fingers against the thick, rigid line of his dick.

“You sure like making a sinner outta me.”

It’s a sign of just how much she likes him that she doesn’t snap at him for daring to tell her what she liked.

“That might be true,” she says, plucking impatiently at the elastic waistband of his pants, “But what I like even more is making you feel good.” When Ted doesn’t move, she raises an imperious brow that turns his cheeks bright red. He lifts himself off the counter one ass cheek at a time so she can slide them down his legs.

There’s something about him naked from the waist down, thighs spread apart for her on the fucking kitchen counter—which, she notes, is tidier than it was last night, though perhaps less so now—and completely at her mercy that makes her delirious.

Rebecca scratches her nails up the outside of his thighs and digs them into his ass as she kneads the flesh, little hiccuping giggles fluttering freely from his throat along the way, and fuck, she could almost cry at the sweetness.

She leans forward to mouth up his jaw, his stubble rasping deliciously against her lips. “Teach me, Father,” she whispers, teeth scraping his earlobe.

Ted brings her hand to his mouth and sinks a kiss into the grooves between each knuckle, then unfolds her fingers like a precious bloom. Holding her by the wrist, he drags his tongue slowly up her palm, her middle finger catching on his bottom lip. Rebecca sucks in a harsh breath and holds it as he arranges both of their hands around his cock and squeezes, tighter than she would’ve dared to on her own.

Not exactly what she meant when she said teach me, but she’s not complaining.

Rebecca eases her hand up his petal-silk skin just enough to catch some of his slick with her thumb, and he whimpers through gritted teeth.

“Read.”

Ted cradles the Bible’s worn-down leather spine precariously in one hand. The print is impossibly small—she sees (or rather, doesn’t) why he wears the stupidly sexy glasses—but she can just make out underlines, boxed in passages, and cluttered scribbles in the margins. She wonders what they say and if he’d ever let her read them.

“And the angel said unto them-m-mmm—” The last consonant unspools into a moan so rumbly she can just about feel it vibrating in her fucking vagina. Rebecca slows to a near stop. “F-fear not…” The angel’s tidings come out in a papery flurry of syllables. By the time he gets to the end of the sentence, he sounds like he’s run a marathon.

“You’re doing so well,” she coos, tracing her thumb along a shuddering vein, “Keep going.” She teases his head with a featherlight touch, and his frame melts into the painted column at his back, his hand falling uselessly to the side.

“I think you’re gonna kill me,” he pants, and she lets go of him completely, his hips jerking in a pathetic attempt to chase her hand.

“Which Bible verse is that?”

Ted’s limp arm suddenly comes to life, snaking out to tweak her nipple. She squawks, “Fucker,” and bats him away with an indelicate snort, raising her index finger at him in warning as he makes to do it again.

He’s laughing as he starts reading once again. “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is…Christ on a cracker.”

She’ll have to circle back to Christ on a cracker at a later date because she’s too occupied biting down on his neck and gauging what pressure she needs to apply to his balls to get the most devastating whimper out of him. When she skims a finger along the stretch of skin behind them, far enough to graze his hole, he can’t stop whimpering long enough to speak. It almost feels criminal to bite him harder, urging him onward to choke out words about signs and swaddling clothes and a manger—she doesn’t really fucking care.

All she cares about are his needy, helpless noises and the flutter of his doe-like lashes against his cheek and the knowledge that his cheeks flush the same pink-red as his cock and that sunlight turns his irises a luminous amber color that really should come with a warning.

“You’ve already got it memorized, haven’t you?” she asks, observing that his eyes are closed more often than not as he speaks the words.

“Sure do,” he admits sheepishly.

Rebecca knocks the bible from his hand, not caring where it lands, and removes his glasses, placing those delicately aside. That’s a metaphor she’ll have to unpack later. Hand to the back of his neck, she pulls him down into a crushing kiss, sucking his bottom lip between her teeth.

Once she’s got his breath in her lungs, she redoubles her efforts, her arm muscles starting to burn. Ted’s forehead drops to the crook of her neck, his breath fanning hotly across her clavicle as his moans fill the entire flat.

“You’re so good,” she says, nosing at the shell of his ear, “So good for me, my gorgeous boy.”

For a moment she fears she’s gone too far, staking a claim where she has no right to, but Ted squeezes her hips and keens into the crook of her neck, mustache rasping her skin as he babbles an incoherent litany of praise and pleas. It’s more texture than words, sugary and buttery just like his biscuits, and just like his biscuits, she wants to devour him.

“You’ve kept this cock all to yourself for so long, love,” she purrs, “Like you were waiting for me.”

Maybe it’s cruel of her to say it, given everything, but there’s a thread of truth in it, too. She can’t help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, she’s been waiting for him for a very, very long time. Ted must agree if his guttural groan is anything to go by.

“You feel so good in my hand,” she murmurs, smothering his neck with open-mouthed kisses, “Felt so good inside my cunt last night, too.”

“Jesus, Rebecca, fu-uck,” he stammers, “I want…Wanna make you feel good again.”

There’s a shimmering warmth deep in her core, so much sympathetic arousal leaking out from between her legs and no knickers to catch it, she feels it dripping onto her thighs. It’s tempting to accept his offer, but too much of her brain is oozing out of her ears to determine how to get him inside of her fast enough, so she just holds him here.

“Don’t worry,” she says, gathering her arousal on two fingers and showing him how they glisten, “you’re already making me feel good.”

“God, Rebecca…Please,” he whines, parting his lips for her.

She sinks her fingers into his mouth and he sucks them in all the way to the third knuckle, holding her wrist as he reverently licks and sucks with a passion that borders on zealotry, like leaving even a drop behind would be a mortal sin. He gags, a bit of drool leaking out of the corner of his mouth, and oh my God, what the fuck, why is everything he does the hottest thing he’s ever done?

“Holy fuck,” she groans just as his come spills over her fist.

Ted droops like a wilting flower, head bumping into her like a needy kitten.

“G’morning,” he slurs after a beat, giving her a perfectly drugged smile. She laughs, patting his rounded cheek with her non-sticky hand. Ted flexes his heels, his thigh muscles rippling deliciously beneath his skin, before sliding off the counter. “Lemme help clean you up a little. As thanks.”

“Oh, if one of us needs cleaning up, it’s—”

Ted crowds her back against the counter, the edge of it cool against her bare ass. He drags two fingers through his own spend, knees her legs gently apart. “This is my body,” he says, voice quavering, “It’s yours if you want it.”

Rebecca just stares at him, mouth agape. Either Ted is lying about his celibacy or he’s some kind of sex god who has been depriving the world of his gifts for far too long. The latter seems far more likely.

“Sorry,” he says, brows furrowing, “Too much?”

Rebecca snares his retreating wrist and guides his hand to her swollen lips.

“Not at all.”

Ted smiles as he pushes his fingers into her one at a time, cradling her face so she can’t look away as he slowly fucks his come into her.

The orgasm isn’t far off, but he still builds her up like a cathedral, with steady, patient precision. It’s been centuries since he started, and she can no longer parse the individual sensations, just feels like one tightly coiled spring.

There’s a future unfurling in the apple of his golden eye, a nacreous kaleidoscope of possibilities where before there had only ever been one.

It makes you human, Rebecca.

All she has to do is pluck the fruit from the tree and take a bite.

“I’m afraid I can’t get enough of you.”

It’s going to be the fucking death of her.

Chapter Text

Ted.

Something hot closes around his numb fingers. No, scalding. His body tries to jerk away. Can’t. Muscles are all locked up. He convulses painfully.

You’re safe. It’s okay.

That voice. He wants to trust it. Body won’t cooperate. Too busy dying.

I’m dying.

“You’re not dying. You’re having a panic attack.”

The air is so thin. He’s suffocating. His heart is running itself ragged in his chest. It’s gonna give out soon. Maybe he’s already dead and that voice—

“Breathe.”

Well, when she says it like that, it’s easy. Most natural thing in the world.

A warmth blooms like a field of sunflowers in the center of his sternum. His refracting vision collides with itself, and he squints at the sudden influx of light from the streetlamps. When his vision finally adjusts, he finds the most welcome sight he could ever imagine.

“Rebecca?” he chokes out, tears pressing at the backs of his eyes.

“Yes, baby. I’m here.”

“Wh…Where’s here?”

“Good question. Tell me what you see.”

Ted dutifully obeys. “I see…a brick wall, a no entry sign, there’s a Christmas tree in that window across the street, a locked up bike, a garbage can, Rebecca…Oops. Sorry for listing you right after garbage can.”

Rebecca’s laugh softens the line of worry between her brows. “There’s my Ted,” she says, cupping his face between her hands. “Can you stand?”

Soon enough he’s upright on unsteady feet, stiff from the cold and dizzy from the panic attack. In one swift motion, Rebecca shrugs off her coat and shrouds it over his shoulders, and it’s only then he realizes he’s not even wearing one himself. Ted protests, insisting she take it back, but she’s having none of it.

“I’ll kill you if you die of hypothermia,” she says with an authority that brooks no further argument, “Off we pop.”

The walk back is quiet. Ted keeps stealing glimpses of Rebecca, certain he’ll catch her true feelings on her face when she doesn’t think he’s looking. He wants to apologize for being nothing but dead weight. Quite literally considering he can hardly lift his feet off the ground. But his tongue is taffy, and he selfishly puts more of his weight on her. Rebecca just stares determinedly ahead, arm hooked securely around his waist.

Around the corner from the church, he hears the low hum of the organ beneath the buzzing crowd arriving for Midnight Mass. “This way,” he says, doubling back and finding a route that puts them out almost directly across from the side door.

They stealth through the church’s back halls, narrowly avoiding a few renegade altar servers darting to and fro. As soon as Ted shuts the office door behind them, they both double over in a fit of breathless giggles, adrenaline buzzing through them.

“Shhh,” Ted hushes, pressing his index finger to his lips when he hears footsteps. But Rebecca’s attempt to clamp down on her laugh just forces a snort out of her nose, setting her off all over again.

And gosh, she’s very cute but way too noisy all things considered, so he pulls her into a crushing kiss, hoping she understands that he’s smothering her for a good cause. Rebecca melds into him, feels like curling up on a hearth. It doesn’t seem right for her to be this warm when she’s been out in the cold without a coat on. But he reminds himself that she’s a grown-up. Surely if it were cause for alarm, she’d know that by now, right? Her laughter mellows into a rumbly chuckle against his lips, scattering his worry right along with his chill, so he gently flattens her to the door and kisses her languidly until the footsteps fade.

“You’re real pretty, you know,” he says, skating his palm down the silky, dark emerald dress, “Ain’t your pretty self supposed to be at some ritzy party?”

When she informed him of her Christmas Eve plans, he’d felt pathetically mawkish, like a kid who wasn’t allowed to get any candy at the supermarket. Not that he’d ever begrudge her a social life—and he wouldn’t have been able to spend time with her anyway what with his hours upon hours of priest duties—but some other self might have been her date to that party, hanging off her arm and eating out of the palm of her hand for all to see.

“I left early so I could come to Midnight Mass,” she says, shrugging with one shoulder like this should be obvious to him.

It’s not obvious to him.

“Why?”

“Perhaps I was feeling a bit nostalgic,” she says, explaining that her parents brought her here when she was young, “Perhaps I was in the mood to sing Christmas carols. But, mostly it’s because the Priest at this church is devastatingly attractive, and…I’ve missed him.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” he says quietly, leaning forward to kiss her again.

“If you keep kissing me like that, many peoples’ Christmas Eve will be ruined because I’ll have absconded with their priest.”

Can’t really see that as a bad thing, which is probably a bad thing in and of itself. Maybe he’s tempted because he’s exhausted and not in any mood to lead another mass.

But Rebecca pats his cheek and gently shoves him away. “Let’s get you dressed, love.” She walks over to his discarded heap of vestments. “It’s a good thing they don’t let women join the clergy. Reckon I’d die of heatstroke if I had to wear all these layers,” she comments, picking the stole up off the back of the chair to inspect it.

“Yeah? That and being a woman are the only things stopping you from joining the clergy, huh?” he teases, retrieving his cassock from the floor.

She hums thoughtfully. “They might not appreciate my opinions on religious institutions…Or my rampant sexual urges.” Ted chuckles as he buttons up the cassock, finding his hands are still stiff and shaky. “What’s next?”

“The, uh, white one. Other white one.”

“What’s this?”

“An alb,” Ted says, “Means white.”

“Apt,” Rebecca intones, unimpressed, shaking out the long white garment and bringing it to him.

“How did you find me?” he asks, the question muffled by fabric as Rebecca tugs the alb over his head.

“I snuck in here first,” she says, fussing with his collar, “Saw this all over the floor, so I went looking for you, and I suppose I got lucky. Next?”

Ted doesn’t really buy that it was pure luck, but he lets it go.

“The cincture.”

“Pardon?” she asks, sweeping over the remaining items.

“The…uh…rope,” he clarifies, pointing at the white rope coiled like a snake on the floor.

Rebecca bends at a very unfair angle to pick it up. She pulls the white cord taut between her hands, her face all wicked lines. As she saunters towards him, his skin prickles in anticipation. Rebecca loops the cincture around the back of his neck and pulls him up to her lips. Trapped between Rebecca and the rope, a helpless mew crawls from his chest. Rebecca hums her praise into his mouth and his dick twitches. Then she releases him all at once. He whimpers pathetically at her absence.

“You probably shouldn’t trust me with this,” she sighs as she slowly drags the rope from his neck. The wool’s friction makes him shudder involuntarily.

“On the contrary, I trust you with it very much.”

Rebecca snags her bottom lip between her teeth, seeming to consider this information, then drops the coiled rope into his hands.

“Tell me what it means.”

“Temperantia et castitatis,” he intones, pushing down the sting of shame while he ties the cincture around his waist. His hands shake enough that he fumbles the knot.

Rebecca closes distance, gently replacing his hands with her own. “Temperance?” she guesses, “And…cas—”

“Castitatis,” Ted repeats. Rebecca shakes her head. “Chastity.”

“Ah,” Rebecca says, her blush deepening. It sours his stomach to see her look ashamed, but he can’t shape any helpful, dissuasive words, so he accepts her help with the stole and the chasuble in strained silence.

“Thank you,” he says weakly, taking her hand before she can walk away.

Rebecca closes both hands around his and pushes her thumbs into the center of his palm, working her way outward to his knuckles. Then she guides the heel of his palm to her jaw, kissing and lightly sucking the pad of his thumb.

“Did something happen?”

Tension frames her eyes. Ted loves every line on her face, but he doesn’t like when they’re arranged in worry, even more so because he’s the source.

“It’s not a big deal, Rebecca. I’m fine now.”

Rebecca, unconvinced, takes his face between her hands so he can’t look away. “I found you barely coherent on the ground outside in winter without a coat on. Maybe that isn’t a big deal to you, but it is to me.”

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out.

“Whatever for, love?” she coos with a gentleness that makes his soft palate swell with emotion.

“For…for making you—”

“Ted,” she says, “You haven’t made me do anything. I chose to look for you. And I’d do it again, alright?”

He nods and sucks in a shuddering, steadying breath. Rebecca’s reassurances and the warm net of safety he feels in her presence uncorks something within him and the words flow out like water.

“There was this kid at the nine o’clock Mass. A boy. Five, maybe? His mom kept shushing him, trying to get him to settle, but he was a real chatterbox. Mom looked like she was two seconds away from hauling his butt out of there. Funny how it’s the exact same look my mom used to give me. But his dad—I assume, anyway, seeing as they looked damn near identical—his dad whispered something into his ear that made him laugh, pulled the kid into his lap, and…It was like he cast a spell or something, ‘cause the kid knocked out just like that. Fast asleep. Dad had to carry him out when it was over, and I felt like…Like I couldn’t breathe. Had to…”

Rebecca embraces him, her palm flat and reassuring against the back of his neck, holding him so close. “I’m sorry,” she whispers into his hair, her voice toffee-thick, “I’m so sorry.”

Ted’s breath stutters. He could just confess it all to her right now, let the rot spill out, but he’s been enough of a burden tonight. Any more would be too much. There’s no sound but the organ’s treble and the distant thrum of the congregation beneath it, but they find a music of their own, swaying in each other’s arms like a boat rocking on gentle waves, weightless and easy.

And it’s easy, too, for their lips to meet again, and it’s easier still for the kiss to deepen. Ted crowds her against the door. Rebecca guides his mouth to her neck. There was this sound she made when he scraped his fingers through her hair that night in the church. Wants to hear it again, so he toys with the strands at the nape of her neck and pulls languorously, and, yup, there’s the sound. Heaven. He drags his tongue over her stretched skin and her pulse thrashes against his tongue. The taste of her perfume, dusky and sharp, slides down his throat smoother than whiskey, buzzes through him with a speed that puts alcohol to shame. It’s addicting. Dangerously so. He knows this. He descends her body anyway, trailing wet stains on the fine silk as he kisses her, pulls the fabric between his teeth to bite her soft belly.

He sinks to his knees and falls into paradise, her hips notching perfectly into his palms like his hands were sculpted to hold them.

“Father—”

“Please,” he begs, clawing into her skin and tugging her closer to where he wants her, “I can smell how much you want it.” He noses at the crease of her thigh, brushes his lips over her pelvis. “I need you inside of me, Rebecca, please.”

Rebecca’s hand falls softly into his hair then trails along his jaw to tip his chin up. The emerald dress turns her eyes into jade lanterns. The way she’s looking at him—brows soft, lips curved up and parted open, muscles slack—makes him feel…

Ted ducks his head, aiming for her clit, his salivary glands swelling at the very thought of tasting her cunt on his breath when he recites the Lord’s Prayer.

She twists her fingers into his hair again to hold him back.

“We shouldn’t,” she says, her lips curled in a wicked bow.

“No, we probably shouldn’t,” Ted agrees, palms sliding up beneath her skirt, scaling the backs of her legs to squeeze her ass. Rebecca’s eyes flutter with want, the balls of her feet shifting to find solid ground again.

Ted dips forward again, but Rebecca tightens her grip on his hair, and whines, thin and reedy. Her leg twitches against his hand in response. Ted works his hand between her thighs to drag his thumb up the wet length of her underwear.

“Jesus fuck,” she groans, much, much too loudly, and he hears a delightful thud as her head knocks back against the door.

Her hand starts to slip from his hair, so he catches it and forms it back into a fist.

“Pull harder,” he whimpers.

She obliges. The shock of pain goes blurry like raindrops on a fogged up window. The cortisol drains out of him and he floats softly into the pocket of heaven that exists wherever Rebecca is.

“I might get you in trouble,” Rebecca warns, husky and playful.

“Maybe I don’t care,” Ted murmurs into her thigh, shivering because it feels like the truth.

Rebecca gives him a curious, unreadable look as he drapes her leg over his shoulder, but it slackens into pleasure with every inch he rucks her skirt up. Ted hooks his thumb around her underwear and pulls it to the side. He gets his tongue flat and taut on her clit, is about to push into her deeper when—

Bang. Bang.

The brutal knock on the door is followed by, “Father Lasso?”

“Yeah?” he grits out, swallowing back his frustration.

“We’re ready to begin the procession.”

“Just a sec, Gregory Peck.”

They remain frozen in place until the footsteps fade. With a mournful sigh, Rebecca lifts her leg from his shoulder and helps him stand. Ted squeezes her hips, not at all ready to let her go.

“Spend the night with me,” she whispers into the shell of his ear, “I want to unwrap you like a Christmas gift. I want you to make me come until I beg you to stop.”

Ted sinks his guttural affirmation in her neck. His cock fights against all five of his layers to twitch against her.

“Go, baby. I’ll sneak ‘round to the front after it’s started.”

“Meet you after?”

Rebecca nods, but before he can exit, she says, “Shit. Come here. You’ve got my lipstick all over.”

Ted’s so bone-tired he can hardly pick his feet up off the floor, but he still enters the apartment as quietly as he can just in case Rebecca is still asleep.

He slips off his shoes, hangs up his coat—Rebecca’s things are still there—deposits the paper bag he’s carrying onto the counter, then walks gingerly to the bedroom.

Rebecca’s not sleeping. She lies flat on her belly, her blonde hair darkened by dampness, chin propped on one palm, feet drawing nonsense circles in the air as she slowly flips the pages of a book. There’s a sliver of sunlight draped across her bare back that makes her skin glitter like gold. Ted leans on the doorframe and sips at the sight of her—a celestial body that swallowed a human heart, naked in his bed.

She looks back at him over her shoulder. Ted’s heart beats double time when he recognizes his own reading glasses hugging the tip of her nose. She doesn’t startle at his sudden presence, doesn’t chide him for sneaking in or accuse him of leering, she just treats him to a toothy grin that wakes up every line on her bare face.

“Merry Christmas, angel,” Ted says, beaming.

Rebecca pats the mattress beside her. Ted discards his outermost layers and crawls onto the bed.

“Merry Christmas, baby.”

“Whatcha reading?” he asks, slotting his chin into the crook of her shoulder to peer down at her selection. “Seriously?” he inquires, a surprised laugh catching in his throat.

“Mhm,” she says, nudging her temple against his forehead, “Why are you so surprised?”

“Oh, I dunno. Maybe ‘cause you didn’t seem all that interested in it when I was reading it to you,” he reminds her playfully, grazing the ridge of her neck with his mustache. The familiar musk of her perfume has been replaced with the clean, honeyed redolence of his own soap. His insides go a little squiggly.

“That’s because I was far more interested in you, Father,” she sighs, craning her neck further, an invitation for the brush of his lips, the sting of his teeth. Ted trails his nails down the valley of her back, the swell of her ass, the plane of her thigh, and back again, her skin as soft and warm as melting butter. Rebecca groans, her head dropping to her chest. “Honestly, how am I meant to pay attention when you’re around if you insist on behaving like this while looking so gorgeous?”

“Sorry,” Ted says, pulling his hand back.

“Don’t stop,” she snarls like a kitten, “I forgot how fucking good that feels.” She pillows her cheek on arms folded over the open Bible. “Can’t remember the last time somebody scratched my back.”

Ted positions himself alongside her. “So, how far have you gotten?”

“Not very. Kept dozing off. Bit dry, isn’t it?”

“Parts of it, sure.”

“Do you have a favorite p-a-a-mmmm…” Her question unspools into a moan when his nails find the curve of her waist.

“Why dontcha read the whole thing and guess?”

She narrows her eyes at him, appraising. “Appealing to my competitive nature I see. Clever boy.”

“You can skip Leviticus though. And Numbers. Definitely ain’t in either of those.”

“Noted,” she murmurs, her eyes fluttering shut once more.

“Hey.”

“Hm?”

“Sorry we didn’t exchange Christmas gifts last night.” The fatigue of leading three nearly two hour masses and his panic attack collapsed on him the second he made eyes with his bed. The most action either of them got was Rebecca unsexily removing his pants while he was half asleep. “Pinched a coupla donuts Mae brought in this morning to help make up for it.”

Rebecca cracks one eye, ears perking up at the word donut. “‘S’alright, love. We were exhausted,” she says, cupping his jaw and sweeping her thumb across his cheek.

“How ‘bout I keep you in this bed all day to make up for it?”

“Don’t tempt me. I should’ve left already,” she sighs.

“Right. Richmond’s first annual Secret Santa,” he pouts.

Rebecca clucks her tongue. “Don’t you pout at me as if this wasn’t your bloody idea, Father.”

“My vast knowledge of team building exercises finally came ‘round to bite me in the butt. Hubris, thy name is Ted,” he exhales, sinking back onto the pillow.

“Oh, trauma,” she laughs, rolling her eyes, “It’s only a few hours. Got any plans this afternoon?”

“Nothing besides my annual It’s a Wonderful Life drinking game.”

Rebecca arches her brows, green eyes gleaming like a predator at the suggestion of a game she might be able to win. “What’s the game?”

“I see how much whiskey I can drink while I watch It’s a Wonderful Life,” he says, smiling like it’s a joke even though it isn’t.

Rebecca tuts disapprovingly. “Send your regrets to George Bailey. This year, you’ve got plans with me.”

“Is it sacreligious for you to wear a Santa Claus hat?” Rebecca inquires, poking at the cotton ball end of the cap, “You know…Paganism, or something?”

“I think we’ve long since conceded defeat to paganism on this particular front,” Ted laughs, adjusting the hat. Rebecca’s hands retreat behind her back the same way they have all afternoon. And if they’re not behind her back, she’s using them to fiddle with the lapel of her green jacket or her scarf or her own pagan elf hat or, or, or. Ted was more than happy to carry the gifts because he’s also spent all afternoon battling the insistent, practically biological impulse to take her hand.

“Rebecca—” he starts, but when she turns to look at him, her smile easy, he feels like it’s too much to say that Christmas has made him feel nothing but lonely for most of his life, and today is the first time in a long time he hasn’t felt like that at all, so he says instead, “I had a lotta fun today. Thanks for letting me tag along.”

He’d expected her to turn back up with her sights set on a much sexier Christmas, but he was hardly disappointed when she revealed their afternoon plans. It was a gift in and of itself to see her do something that clearly made her feel good for an entirely different reason.

“Of course, Father. It was really my pleasure.” She pauses, cocking her head to the side as she considers something, then continues, “My intentions aren’t entirely innocent, though.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been thinking…” Rebecca’s eyes dart around the mostly empty South London street they’re walking down to get back to her car. “About ways we might be able to spend more time together. In the daylight. Like this. If that’s…If that’s something you’d even be amenable to, of course.”

“I’m amenable,” he says, though he should be saying the opposite, probably, seeing as he’s slipping and sliding ever closer to the edge of something terrifying.

“I did some digging and discovered your parish owns a plot of land not far from here. Apparently your predecessor and the parish council planned to build a school, but the funding fell through.”

“Right. Sounds familiar, yeah.”

“The surrounding community lacks the resources to support a youth football club. The A.F.C. Richmond Foundation sponsors a great number of youth clubs, and I was thinking, perhaps, the parish land could be—”

“I’m gonna stop you right there, Ms. Welton,” Ted says formally. Her eyes flash, perturbed. “I think it’d be best to discuss this very intriguing proposition o’ yours in a more formal business setting, don’t you?”

Rebecca rolls her eyes. “Certainly, Father Lasso. Why don’t you come to my office after the new year? Or perhaps I could take you out to dinner? Courtesy of A.F.C. Richmond, of course.”

Ted shrugs. “Maybe both. Might need a few meetings. I’ve been known to drive a hard bargain.”

“Oh?” Rebecca queries, her lids growing heavy as she hungrily wets her lips.“I’d certainly like to see you try.”

By the time they return to his apartment, there’s not one square inch of his legs not aching from so many hours of standing and walking. He feels leaden and his stomach is a little sour from the lack of sleep. Rebecca studies him as she diligently undresses him in the entryway, pushing his coat off his shoulders and helping him balance as he kicks off his trainers. Then she marches him into the bedroom.

“Rebecca,” he starts to protest, though he isn’t sure what.

“Hush,” she commands, bypassing the bedroom and pulling him into the bathroom, a tight squeeze for one person, let alone two.

Rebecca twists the shower knob before turning to him. She undresses him with aching deliberation, treating the buttons on his shirt and jeans like a jeweler would a precious gem. He considers telling her she doesn’t have to be so gentle considering he pulled most of his wardrobe out of 2-for-1 bargain bins, but he likes that she is. Not just with his clothes, either.

By the time he’s naked, the small room is hazy with steam and heat.

“Merry Christmas to me,” she murmurs, arousal building beneath his exhaustion as her eyes trace a languid line up his body. “And what a gorgeous gift you are, Theodore.” Ted’s cheeks burn crimson. Rebecca takes his jaw in gentle hand. “That’s what it means, yes? Theodore? Divine gift?”

“You look that up?” Ted asks, amused.

“Maybe,” she says coyly.

“Rebecca means ‘to bind.’”

“And did you look that up?”

“Nope. Just knew it,” Ted presses the words into her palm. “It’s Hebrew. Literally a knotted cord.”

“Like a lasso?”

Ted’s breath stutters in his chest. Rebecca’s eyes burn fiercely.

“Rebecca—”

“I’m famished,” she interjects with forced casualness, stepping away from him, “Take your time. I’ll see what I can rustle up in the kitchen for us, hm?”

She exits before he has the chance to answer.

The water drowns out the sound of her puttering around the kitchen, leaving him only with his thoughts. He feels like Rebecca has slowly been handing him pieces to a puzzle that he can’t quite put together, especially now with exhaustion turning his brain to treacle.

Back in the Nelson Road parking lot, she had cut him off before he could utter the word soulmates. She told him with such heartbreaking certainty that it wasn’t possible. If I were good, it would’ve been you I was sent for, she had confessed to him in the church. Sent for, in retrospect, was a curious choice of words, wasn’t it? Sure, there might very well be a rational explanation for it all. Rebecca had neither affirmed or denied her skepticism and he knew now she had no religious beliefs, but it’s entirely possible she wouldn’t believe in a concept like cosmically ordained soulmates. That night in the church confessional she’d been, well, rather reasonably emotional to say the least. Might’ve just been a slip of the tongue.

Sometimes coincidences do just happen, he knows. But how many coincidences have to pile up before they add up to something…else?

He finds Rebecca, dressed down in a shirt and sweatpants she pilfered from his dresser, standing over a pot of boiling water and humming softly to herself.

“Color me impressed,” he says, scanning what she’s managed to assemble from presumably slim pickings.

“I’d withhold praise until we’ve eaten. I might yet manage to burn this pasta. Especially if you’re going to do that,” she admonishes, wiggling the arms he’s got circling her middle.

“Okay by me. I can think of something else I’d very much like to eat.”

Ted mouths at her neck and snaps her sweatpants’ elastic waistband with his finger.

“Teeeed,” she groans, half-bumping, half-grinding her ass into his pelvis, “If I get any hungrier, I’m going to eat you.”

“A cause I’d be happy to sacrifice myself for. Might even get me to sainthood.”

Rebecca cranes her head to meet his lips and they lose themselves in a hot, wet kiss until a hissing sound rips her attention back to the stove, and she shrieks adorably at the boiling over pot, frantically reaching for every knob but the correct one until she finds it.

“You,” she accuses, “are a troublemaker. Get out of my kitchen.”

Ted yelps when she smacks his ass with the spaghetti claw and laughs his way out of the kitchen, so full of a feeling he’s too afraid to name.

Rebecca hooks her leg over his beneath the small dining table, and he rests his hand comfortably on her thigh.

She spins her fork expertly through the noodles and lifts them to his mouth. Ted smiles, blowing away the rising steam before taking a bite. Rebecca regards him with an arched brow as he slowly chews and swallows.

“Well?” she asks expectantly.

“Perfect,” he affirms. Just like you, he thinks.

Rebecca narrows her eyes and dubiously takes her own bite, nose crinkling as she swallows it down.

“You have an interesting definition of perfect,” she says, blushing lightly when she catches his lingering, probably doofy, but hopefully very fond gaze.

The overcooked pasta with bland tomato sauce and shared plate of stale crackers, sliced up cheese, a smattering of baby carrots, green olives, and a leftover donut from the morning is the best Christmas dinner he’s ever had in his life.

“So is there a story with It’s a Wonderful Life?”

Ted’s fingers give an involuntary twitch around her thigh, his palms clamming up. Rebecca covers his hand and squeezes it gently.

“Not a happy one,” Ted admits, nearly taken aback by his own honesty.

Rebecca neither pushes him to continue nor relents by offering him a way out. Just watches him with a passive expression, waiting for him to choose.

It’s a story he’s only ever told one other person while under the steep influence of alcohol. A nun who happened to walk into a bar in the middle of nowhere Kansas on the night that might’ve otherwise ended with him falling asleep on the train tracks and never waking back up.

Telling Sharon had helped him back then, set him on a path he never otherwise would’ve found. A path that, by the grace of God, led him right to Rebecca.

So he lets the words spill out.

“My dad loved this movie. We watched it every Christmas after Mass until I was sixteen. The year he shot himself.”

Rebecca doesn’t outwardly react to this information, but her eyes gleam as her thumb starts tracing a soothing pattern on the back of his hand.

“Christmas without him was…different. Especially that first one. I asked my mom if she wanted to watch the movie with me, but she refused. Locked herself upstairs. So I continued the tradition with my dad’s whiskey for company.”

“Your mother—”

“She was in pain,” Ted interrupts, hearing the simmering anger beneath her words, “So she tried to not be in pain by avoiding anything that reminded her of my dad. Like the movie. Like Christmas…Like me.”

“Ted—”

“I’ve accepted that she loves me as best she can. Don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for entering the priesthood, though,” he chuckles darkly.

“Why not?”

Ted heaves a sigh. “The priest in my hometown refused to give my dad a Catholic funeral or let him be buried in the church cemetery. Wasn’t canon law anymore, but he thought it might cause a scandal, I guess. Lotsa people turned their backs on us when we most needed them, so mom turned her back on all of it. Can’t say I blame her. I was right there with her.”

“That’s…fucking cruel,” Rebecca seethes.

“I agree. Wish it hadn’t gone down that way, but the priest apologized to me before he died a few years back, and I forgave him.”

“You’re better than the whole rotten lot of them,” Rebecca proclaims, nearly yanking him clean off the chair as she sweeps him into a bone-crushing hug. “Let’s reclaim the tradition, hm?” she sniffles, “Only this time you get me and some hot cocoa instead of whiskey.”

Ted feels like his heart might just burst. She’s almost too good to be true.

“It’s getting late, sweetheart, and you’ve been with me nearly all day. Nobody’s missing you?”

Rebecca huffs a sardonic laugh. “I RSVP’d maybe to Elton’s—”

“Whaddya mean Elton?”

“—and if you’re referring to my husband or my parents, then no. Christmas has never been sacred in any of my previous households.”

“Previous?”

She pauses.

“It’s high time I move out of that horrible house. I should’ve done it a long time ago, but I wasn’t…I wasn’t brave enough. I am now, and I suppose I have you to thank for that.”

“Me? Heck no. That’s all you, baby. And I’m proud of you.”

“Not all me, but thank you,” she says sincerely, “And thank you for not locking me out.”

Ted finds a website where he can rent the film while Rebecca makes hot cocoa. She sets two mugs down on the coffee table beside his battered old laptop and crawls into his arms on the cozy loveseat. As the film plays on, they touch each other indolently and without purpose, palm to belly, toe against ribs, thigh over hip. To Ted, it’s more intimate than sex.

She’s cradled in his arms, sinking sleepily into his frame when George says, you want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down, so he murmurs the words into her hair. Rebecca tilts her chin up to kiss him, and he feels a telltale swelling in his soft palate. By the film’s end, the tears are sliding freely down his cheeks. Down Rebecca’s, too, he realizes when she kisses him in the dark—the salt complements the rich chocolate lingering on her tongue.

Ted pulls her weight onto him and she holds him together when he starts worrying he might burst apart at the seams. Usually at this point, he’d either be too drunk to feel much of anything or not drunk enough, and in either of those scenarios, he tends to start hoping he won’t be alive for the next Christmas. He’d almost forgotten what it was to feel so much—sadness and heartache and profound happiness and safety and…

Just tell her, he thinks, but I love you feels like too much and not enough all at once, so he does his best to press everything he feels for her into her skin.

They kiss on the sofa like teenagers until he’s swollen and aching beneath her. Ted bands his arms around her hips and says, “Hold onto your butt.”

“Wh— Why? Oh!” she shrieks and giggles as he pushes off the sofa and carries her into the bedroom.

Maybe it’s because her inhibitions are next to non-existent after two orgasms. Maybe it’s because Ted looks so fucking gorgeous stretched out naked on the bed, his cock weeping even though she hasn’t touched him yet. Maybe it’s because he’s desperate to get his tongue on her—she knows this because he pulled his fingers out of her spasming cunt and started licking them, whimpering and praising her taste. Maybe it’s because he’s sharing that taste with her by slowly fucking his perfect fingers into her mouth and it’s making her fucking feral. Maybe it’s just divine fucking inspiration.

Whatever it is, she pulls off his fingers with a pop and feels compelled to say, “I want you to teach me how to pray, Father.”

This clearly takes Ted by surprise. She nearly laughs at his precious, baffled expression.

“Sorry?”

To illuminate her point, she opens his nightstand drawer and roots around for the thing she’d discovered earlier that day while, frankly, snooping.

“You’re being serious?” Ted asks, his eyes dropping to the string of dark cherry colored beads. Rebecca nods. “Right…now?” She nods again.

His throat bobs helplessly for a few seconds, so she kneels and presses her palms together in prayer. Ted’s gaze dips to her pushed up breasts, lingers on the rosary beads grazing her taut nipple.

“Lord, help me,” he mutters as he mirrors her position, his cock deliciously straining towards her, “Or strike me down.”

Rebecca drops the rosary into his open hand with a smirk.

“Okay, repeat after me.” Ted touches the crucifix to her forehead. “In nomine Patris.” Rebecca dutifully echoes his words as he slowly descends to her sternum, the crucifix catching on her bottom lip as it passes, “et Filii,” to her left shoulder, then follows the curve of her clavicle to her right, “et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

Ted pants hotly onto her sweat-slick skin, his dark and interminable eyes locked on her. And everything she’s feeling is too much. Too much to stay caged inside of her. It swells in her throat and claws at her shoulder blades, desperate to get out.

So when she breathes, “Amen,” she’s really saying I love you.

Because she can’t actually say it. Because wouldn’t telling him be as good as forcing him to choose between her and God? And she doesn't want him to have to choose because she’s fucking terrified that he won’t choose her. It’s much better, she reasons, to indulge in this fragile, sacred peace they’ve found in one another. Even if it’s not going to last. Even if it can’t. So she surrenders to what her body demands, lets her desire drive her far away from her thoughts.

“Can I say something blasphemous?” she asks, clearing the charged air between them.

“Why start holding back now?” he asks, grinning.

“You speaking Latin is really fucking hot,” she rasps, “If you did that during mass I’d die.”

“Actually, I do a traditional Latin mass on Wednesdays at seven,” Ted says casually.

“...If you hear moaning during Wednesday’s seven o’clock mass, it’s just the holy spirit moving through me. Pay me no mind.”

“As if I could pay you no mind,” Ted replies, wetting his lips. “Hold out your hand for me.”

Ted presses the crucifix into Rebecca’s open palm then cages her hand with his own.

“On the crucifix, you recite the Apostles’ Creed.”

Ted’s lips graze her ear when he whispers the words like they’re an offering of delicate snowflakes. When her eyes slip shut, she imagines they’re in a room full of people, but this is a secret for them alone. The intimacy of that fantasy could make her howl for how badly she wants it to be real. She cradles her forehead in the crook of his neck—a perfect fit. His voice cocoons her in a dark, sumptuous velvet and he begins drawing lazy circles over her clit, just shy of where she needs him for her to come. Satiety thickens her tongue, so she ends up sputtering out, “P-pontius Pilates.”

“Pilates, huh?” he chuckles and his amusement only thickens the pressure between her legs.

“F-fuck off,” she exhales, already trembling, “But never, ever shut up.”

Suddenly Ted’s mouth is everywhere, his tongue tangling with her thick, useless one, nearly choking her. He sucks her bottom lip between his teeth then bites. Hard. She gasps from the shock of pain, then moans loudly into his mouth as it dissolves into unbearable pleasure. When Ted pulls back, he’s smiling. His teeth flash in the dark and she watches him slide his tongue from canine to canine. Christ.

“I’m not going to learn if you keep distracting me,” she says, giving him a measured, heady glare.

“Don’t like it when the shoe is on the other foot, huh?”

“That was different,” she argues.

“Oh? How so?”

“Because I said so.”

“Okay, boss. You wanna learn? I’ll show you how it’s really done. Hands right where they’re supposed to be,” he says, laying them together in prayer to demonstrate. “But I should warn ya, these hands really don’t wanna stay put…”

Ted slides off the bed. His hands close on her hips and with one muscular pull, she’s right at the edge of the mattress, Ted kneeling between her legs.

“So make them.”

Rebecca swallows thickly, her eyes flicking between his hands and the rosary, and her hips give a reflexive twitch.

“You’re sure?”

Ted nods. “I’m at your mercy, Rebecca.”

“You’re safe with me, baby,” Rebecca promises, breathless.

“I know.”

Rebecca carefully wraps the rosary around his wrists, Ted’s breath growing heavy as she loops it up from his forearms to the tips of his fingers, the crucifix dangling loosely between his wrists.

After he reassures her multiple times that it isn’t too tight, that he knows what to do or say if he wants out, he says calmly, “Just breathe, sweetheart. I’m okay. We’re okay.”

Rebecca obeys, some of the tension leaving her shoulders on the exhale.

She takes him in—Ted gazing up at her from his knees, body soft and reverent, cheeks a gorgeous peach. So at peace, so vulnerable and open to her. He dips his head to kiss her thigh, dusting her skin like sugar. All of this should make her feel powerful, but that’s not really it at all. Power is a cold and hard and distant thing, but what's inside of her now is warm, tender, intimate.

What she feels is more like holiness, maybe.

And it courses through her the same way that love does.

Maybe that’s what it feels like to believe in God, and if it is, she doesn’t stand a fucking chance.

“—Hail Mary’s.”

“What?”

“Alright, you don’t even got my hands on you…Y’okay, honey?”

“Yes. Carry on,” she says, eager for distraction.

Luckily, she’s a quick study when Ted isn’t distracting her with his skilled fingers, and he hums in approval when she’s able to speak it right along with him.

“That’s it. Only nine more to go. Keep it up, baby, we got this,” Ted encourages.

“Goodness,” Rebecca remarks, “You could’ve made a fine athletic coach, Father Lasso.”

He chuckles. “Ain’t that what a priest is? A coach for the Lord?”

Rebecca groans, her eyes rolling so far back in her head it actually hurts her brain.

“Hail, Mary, full of grace,” she begins before Ted has a chance to cause further brain damage. He joins her for, “the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst wom—oh, fuck. Holy shit,” she moans, hopelessly unprepared for the hot shock of his tongue.

“Holy Mary,” Ted corrects. “On the tenth amen, I want you to come on my tongue.”

Rebecca opens her thighs wider and cants her hips forward. “Yes, Father. The blessed fruit of my womb is all yours,” she offers lightly, smirking, but it plucks at a string within her, an aching desire that goes far deeper than arousal. Her eyes carve down to Ted’s bound hands twitching against the curve of her belly folding over her pelvis, and she doesn’t wish it were flatter like she once might’ve, no, she wishes—

Stop.

Luckily, Ted’s mouth proves a good distraction.

She comes for the first time on the seventh Mother of God, back arching high off the mattress—she doesn’t remember lying back—and a laugh builds in her chest, but she chokes on it because—oh fucking hell—Ted keeps working her, the hot, wet grit of his tongue relentless and outrageously perfect. A spasm sits her bolt upright, so quickly the edges of her vision go fuzzy.

“I ca-an’t,” she sobs.

But she cries out in sorrow when he pulls his tongue away, her hips needily chasing his mouth.

Ted presses his pinkies to her sternum.

“This you begging?” he asks, amused.

Rebecca shakes her head.

“Good,” he murmurs. Ted pushes on her chest, and she flops back onto the bed, propped on her elbows to watch him eat her out like he’s starving and her pussy is a feast she’s laid out just for him. Just this side of overstimulated, she has to dig crescents into her thighs to hold herself open for his long, merciless pulls. He’s too fucking far away from her, so she knots her fingers into his hair and pulls because, fuck, the coruscating pressure in her swollen cunt is too intense and she’s going to shake apart like a rusted old machine without him. He buries gorgeous, filthy moans into her cunt and, “Oh, God, Father, I'm going to come,” she sobs breathlessly when she feels the tips of his fingers and the smooth rosary beads nudging then dipping inside her leaking entrance, and it’s too much.

Fuck the Hail Mary’s, it’s Ted she’s chanting over and over again, loud like holy thunder. Either she’s going to scream or pee or maybe this is the hour of her fucking death or all three, and she doesn't care which, she just needs to—

Her final cry breaks his name into two syllables, coming harder on his tongue than she ever has in her whole sorry, sordid life, or lives, and then there’s nothing. A long, black interval where all tension melts from her body and she floats like a petal on still water.

“Ho-ly fucking hell, Rebecca.”

His voice, which she can describe as nothing other than awestruck, is strangely muffled in her ringing ears, and she wonders if you can blow your own eardrums by orgasming too hard.

“Are you okay, honey?” Ted asks thickly, the words pressed between gentle licks and kisses around her thighs.

When she blinks back to, his eyes are wide and warm and ridiculously caring beneath eyebrows pulled down at the center. And, Jesus Christ, his face is absolutely drenched, like she spat a mouthful of water all over him.

“Fucking Christ,” she laughs in disbelief, “Did I do that?”

“Uh,” he swallows, the apples of his cheeks burning even pinker, “Yeah. Your body is something of a miracle, honey.”

“And so is yours, baby,” she says before helping him to his feet and arranging him on the bed, flat on his back, bound hands resting helplessly above his head. “That mouth of yours, especially. How on earth did you learn that fucking trick?”

“What can I say? You inspire greatness,” he says, shit-eating—or perhaps pussy-eating would be more appropriate—grin wide on his face.

She takes her time with him—licking his face clean, kissing a path all the way to the knobs of his ankles and back up again, digging a trail with her teeth. Rebecca doesn’t know if she has any orgasms left in her, but she desperately wants to show her appreciation.

“You’ve taken such good care of me, baby,” she murmurs near the base of his penis, inhaling his primal scent, “My turn.”

“You always take care of me.” Her eyes snap up, hearing the emotion strangling him. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry,” he cries softly, tears rolling down his temples, “You deserve so much—”

“My love,” she croons, her heart crumbling as she straddles his hips and presses her weight down onto him, banding her arms around him tightly and raining soft kisses over his mustache, his cheeks, his neck, his lips, “I like taking care of you. I want to.”

“But I’m—”

“No,” she silences him, not wanting to even guess how he planned on finishing that sentence, “Listen to me.” She clasps his jaw with both hands, nails denting his skin, and kisses his tears away, catching a fresh few on her lips. “My husband never let me take care of him. I couldn’t even hand him a tissue when he had a cold without getting punished for it later. After his first stroke, I…I tried, but he was so fucking cruel to me. Crueler than…He thinks it makes him weak, and he doesn’t like feeling weak. He hates anyone else thinking that he is. Especially me.”

Ted hiccups another sad little sob, bringing his bound wrists behind her neck in something like a hug. “I’m so sorry, Rebecca.”

“Thank you,” she breathes softly, overcome with how healing it is to hear someone say I’m sorry. “This is…”

A chill runs down her spine, and she huddles even closer to him.

This is how I love you.

“You’ve helped me find a part of myself I wasn’t sure was there anymore.”

“Okay,” Ted murmurs, “I’m pleased as punch to hear that.”

“Good,” she says, smiling as she kisses him, “Are you…” She raises a suggestive brow.

“Show me how it’s done, darlin’.”

Darling.

She rather likes how it sounds with the dropped consonant.

Soon enough, she’s coaxing herself down gently onto his half-hard cock, both of them groaning with divine satisfaction as it swells, stretching her tight cunt. Leg muscles just north of useless from four successive orgasms, she’s riding him too languidly for either of them to come, but neither of them are in much of a hurry. Rebecca bends so he can take her nipple in his eager mouth, clenches her muscles around him, arousal pooling again as he shudders and moans beneath her, his dick twitching needily inside her.

Oh. Maybe she has another orgasm in her after all.

Ted whines in displeasure when she sits up, but he changes his tune after she runs her thumb up and down the inches of his cock she can’t quite take, licking his lips as she lifts and sinks down again so he can watch himself split her open, his hands struggling against their binding with each pass. Soon she’s rocking with more intention, spurred onward by his needy, whimpering pleas and the sopping wet symphony of their fucking. The longer she goes, the more desperate she is for them to come together.

She tells him as much, and he gasps out a little uh-huh, and plants his feet on the too thin, squeaky mattress. Rebecca braces herself on his knees and he tries to meet her rhythm, though without the use of his hands, he can only thrust up a few times before he loses his balance.

“I need…” she pants through gritted teeth, “I need—”

Ted grunts and with one sharp pull, he wrenches his wrists apart, snapping the wire and sending rosary beads flying across the room in all directions.

That’s a metaphor for something, she thinks once again the split second before he grabs her hips and snaps up into her so brutally he knocks the breath from her lungs, the beads still bouncing and rolling around on the wooden floor beneath them.

“Yes,” she cries out in ecstasy at the sharp, sweet sting of his palm connecting with her ass. “Again, Father.”

Ted pauses and looks up at her.

“Call me Ted. Like before. Please.”

“Ted, then,” she repeats, “Again.”

He smiles and she dares to entertain the possibility that maybe, just maybe, he might choose her.

When Ted wakes up, the first thing he notices is that Rebecca is still beneath the covers, nestled in his arms, and that it feels more like a warm summer’s day than a blazing inferno.

The second thing he notices is a nausea as familiar to him as his own shadow, probably because it’s dogged his heels for as long as he can remember. The sinking, unmistakable weight of guilt.

Chapter Text

He’s drunker than he should be but about half as drunk as he wants to be.

Beard presses another sweaty bottle of beer into his hand, and he mumbles a thanks though he would’ve preferred something stronger. There’s a twinkle in Beard’s eye as he nods curtly like he knows that if he weren’t supplying Ted with lager, he’d be reaching for whiskey. Fuck, of course he knows that.

The beer helps, but he’s still dogged by the feeling he shouldn’t be at a New Year’s Eve party surrounded on all sides by young people with model good looks, speakers blaring with music everyone seems to know except for him. Each time he runs into one of the players, they call him Father (though he tells them not to) or bow to him (though he tells them not to) or berate him with their curiosity (Priests are allowed to go to parties? Priests are allowed to drink? Priests don’t always have to wear their dog collar?). Every passing comment drives a nail of guilt through him.

Ted informs Beard he’s going to step out for some air, and Beard instantly slips into the crowd with his somewhat off putting date, Jane. They’d recently met at a chess club, and Ted’s glad that Beard seems to be settling in London, even if he’s dubious about his choice of company. He weaves his way through the crowd like it’s a laser maze, worried someone might stumble and spill a drink on his new cashmere sweater. It was a belated Christmas gift from Rebecca; she saw it in a shop window and bought it because it reminded her of the pools of green in his eyes. Knowing a glimpse of fabric in a distant window brought him to mind made him want to burn his sweater, resign his post, and flee the country. Then she pulled out several more copies of the same sweater in different sizes, unsure if he preferred them more baggy or fitted, and he tipped forward and kissed her mostly so she wouldn’t see the tears threatening to spill from his eyes. It drowned every other thought from his head, at least for a little while.

Once Ted slides the back door shut, the music becomes little more than a thrumming bass, and he instantly feels calmer. He had been edging closer to panic than he even realized.

“T—Father Lasso?” says a voice as familiar to him now as his own thoughts.

Rebecca sits on a swinging garden bench, holding a cigarette in one hand while her other arm is wrapped tightly around the shoulders of a younger woman he doesn’t recognize. Rebecca, of course, is breathtaking in a gold dress that sparkles like champagne. The other woman is dressed like a small human disco ball, though she doesn’t much look like she’s up for a party.

From the sooty puffiness of her eyes to the steep hunch of her shoulders, it’s pretty obvious that she’s been crying. He half expects her not to take notice of him, but she rasps, “You’re the priest?” This jolts him, his eyes nervously flicking to Rebecca, but she’s just watching on with amusement. “But you’re fit!” she blurts out, then claps her hand over her mouth.

Ted can’t help but smile. He slips his hands into his pockets and looks down at his shoes, pink flooding into his round cheeks.

“You’ve got to be careful around him, Keeley,” Rebecca says lightly, “Father Lasso has an effect on people.”

“A blessing and a curse,” Ted says, drying his clammy palms on his dark jeans before stepping towards the pair with his hand extended. “Keeley, I take it?”

Keeley’s bangles jangle around her limp wrist as she shakes his hand. “Nice to finally meet Rebecca’s hot,” Keeley digs a crooked elbow into Rebecca’s ribs, “priest friend. Sorry that it’s right after I dumped my boyfriend.”

“Oh. I’m real sorry to hear that, Keeley.”

“S’fine. He’s a fucking self-centered, immature prick, and Rebecca told me I deserved better, and I do, but he ate me out like I was his last meal and what if…what if I never f-find that again,” Keeley sobs, pressing her face into the crook of Rebecca’s neck.

Rebecca clucks and coos, mouths sorry to Ted as she strokes Keeley’s slicked back hair. Ted waves his hand, silently asks ‘should I go?’ to which Rebecca fervently shakes her head.

People tend to like me better from a distance, she’d told him, but Keeley seems awfully glad to have her nice and close just then.

Yeah, it’s good to know that if she didn’t have him, she’d be okay. Better off, probably.

He drags a chair over from the patio table and slowly slips his beer, relaxing by inches as he listens to Keeley’s litany of complaints about her ex.

“What do you think, Father?” Keeley asks and he realizes that both Keeley and Rebecca are watching him expectantly.

If this were a counseling session, he’d reach for scripture, always ready at his fingertips, but that would neither be helpful or well received here. Anyway, given his own history, he’s hardly qualified to offer relationship advice.

“Oh, what I think ain’t important,” he laughs, waving his hand.

But Rebecca sears him a withering look that—not now—makes his dick twitch. “Yes, it is,” she says, her tone brooking no argument. Keeley watches them like a tennis match. “Keeley solicited your opinion, so I think it’s important to her.”

“Well, in that case…I think Rebecca’s right.”

“Good answer,” Rebecca murmurs around the cigarette pinned between her glossy lips.

“I believe people can change for the better, but I think you should be with someone you love for who they are right now, not who you hope they’ll be. You deserve that, and so does he.”

Bitterness lines his words like rust, and he thinks Rebecca hears the scraping, but their attention is stolen by an approaching black hole.

“Roy,” Keeley greets, a soft smile brimming on bitten lips.

“Keeley,” Roy grunts back, offers a silent acknowledgement to both Ted and Rebecca, but he’s clearly not interested in either of them. “You want to take a walk?”

Keeley turns to whisper something unintelligible into Rebecca’s ear, her hand shielding her lips. Rebecca snickers, then urges, “Go.”

With Keeley gone, the party feels more distant than ever. The music and the clamor fall away and it’s just the two of them here, suspended in time.

“Guess she’s real broken up about…You’re shivering,” he notes, frowning. It’s not even that cold by his standards. In fact, it’s a little uncomfortably balmy beneath the cashmere.

“Oh, I’m f—”

But Ted is already peeling off the green sweater and moving to sit beside her on the bench, thrusting the bundle of warm fabric into her arms.

“You feeling okay?” he asks, resisting the temptation to lay the back of his hand across her forehead, but she’s usually borderline feverish on any given Tuesday, so he’s not sure it would get him anything other than an admonishment. “D’you wanna go inside, or should I—”

“Ted,” she interrupts, squeezing his hand. Her fingers are cool to the touch. “I’m alright, love. Really.”

“Okay, okay,” he concedes, though he doesn’t believe her, “Will you put that on?” She shoots him a petulant look, so he continues, “I’d sure feel better if you did.”

Rebecca sighs, but she pulls the sweater on. Ted shoves his hands into his pockets so he doesn’t pull her into his arms and pour his body’s heat into her. There are clusters of partygoers scattered around the garden, but nobody seems to be paying them any mind. Daringly, he inches closer, the fabric of his pants grazing her thigh.

“What did Keeley whisper before she left?” he asks, “Not that you hafta tell me or anything.”

“After her fight with Jamie, she made me swear that I would kiss her at midnight, but it seems I’m getting stood up.”

“You ringing in the New Year without a kiss? Now that’s just criminal.”

“It is, isn’t it?” A plume of smoke curls from her lips. “Though I shouldn’t have any trouble finding someone else. Plenty of eager candidates around.” The gold in her eyes sparkles as she hungrily scans the others looming nearby, carefully avoiding looking at Ted. Her attention lingers on the broad shoulders of another man for several excruciating seconds. When the man meets her gaze and raises his cup towards her, something inside Ted snaps.

“Look at me,” Ted growls.

Rebecca’s head snaps to him, surprise etched into every line of her face.

Ted forces himself to remain still even though every atom in his body is screaming at him to take her into his arms and kiss her until she forgets that anyone else exists. To sink his teeth into the side of her neck and leave his mark so that every person at this goddamn party knows who she belongs to.

They stare at each other in taut silence, his weakening will the only shackle keeping him from doing something very, very stupid.

“Ted—” Rebecca starts, but he shoots to his feet and flees before she can say another word.

Head down, blood rushing in his ears, he can’t even muster an apology when he clips someone’s shoulder—the other man spotting his opening and taking his chance to give her everything Ted can’t, maybe—and soon the party’s thumping bass is far behind him.

He turns into the first alley he finds and vomits on the pavement, purging all of the cheap beer from his system but not a drop of the disgust he feels for himself. Good, he thinks.

Ted doesn’t know where his feet are carrying him until he arrives at the church’s front doors. He keeps a bottle of mouthwash in his desk drawer right next to his flask of whiskey, so he goes there first. Seeing the flask, his fingers give an involuntary twitch. He unscrews the top to take a swig. Empty. Though he’s got no memory of finishing it himself. Puzzled, he instead goes for the mouthwash, swishing it around his mouth as he walks to the bathroom to spit it down the drain.

The sanctuary doesn’t feel like one. Vacant of warmth or comfort or safety, all the good things he feels when Rebecca holds him in her arms. Dozens of excoriating eyes peer down at him from paintings and etched glass, judging the heavy drag of his feet up to the top velvet-lined step before the altar where he collapses onto his knees.

“Please,” he begs, “Just tell me what to do. Please.”

He waits for an answer. For a sign. For something. Anything.

And he waits.

And he waits.

The sharp click of a stiletto rends the oppressive silence, and the sound is music to his ears. He’s speared in place, unsure whether he should run to meet her or shout at her to leave. But before he can do either, her footsteps fall silent.

Maybe she’s similarly torn. Maybe she’s suddenly wondering why she had followed him in the first place when all he’s proven is that he’s volatile and unreliable and overbearing. Maybe she’s realized that it’s him, not her, who is better from a distance. She wants Father Lasso. But Ted? Who would ever want—

A hand snakes over his shoulder, caging his jaw with unforgiving fingers. Her gold ring burns cold against his skin.

“Look at me,” she compels. And he does. Of course he does. How could he ever choose not to?

Even in the darkness, everything about her is bright; her storm-tossed eyes and febrile cheeks, her hair white as freshly fallen snow, the gold on her dress catching every scant fractal of light.

She kisses him like she’s hungry for him, and he feels so desperately unworthy of being kissed like that. He should stop her. Put his hands on her shoulders and push her away. But when he touches her, he just pulls her closer, kisses her back like he’s starving, and he thinks he probably is.

Rebecca rumbles a low, satisfied laugh into his mouth before she breaks the kiss. Ted turns to find her kneeling on the step below. He sits flat on his ass and pulls her hips between his legs, more comfortable now that he’s the one tilting his chin up to look at her.

“Rebecca, I’m so sorry. I…I ain’t trying to control you. I would never want to. You can do whatever you want. Be with whoever—”

“Here,” she says, tugging down the collar of the green sweater, exposing her bare collarbone, just above her heart.

An offering.

Ted holds her with reverence, but he bites down with a violence that makes her cry out. The sound scares him, but it unspools into a whine of perspicuous pleasure that makes his cock strain against his fly. Rebecca's body shudders against him, pulse fluttering, muscles twitching, fingers snarling into his hair over and over again like she’s trying to pull him away and push him closer all at once. Ted sucks until salt and the sharp taste of perfume give way to iron—from his gums or from her skin, he doesn’t know. Ted soothes the bruise with a few broad strokes of his tongue then sits back to admire his work, peeking out over the collar like a bloody sunrise on a green sea.

Rebecca pulls down the other side of the collar, and Ted obliges the silent request to give her another to match. Then she discards the sweater altogether and pushes her breasts towards his face. Following her silent guidance, he pushes her dress down to her hips. He sucks a mark onto the top of each breast, imparts a third next to the freckle in between. The meat of each forearm near the crooks of her elbows, her sculpted biceps, leaking at the feeling of her tendons straining under his teeth. The tender skin underneath her breasts, down her ribs to her soft belly, smiling as she giggles and squirms.

Ted follows the trail back up her torso like it’s a map pointing him directly to her heart. When he reaches it, he sinks his teeth in there, too, feeling her pulse in his teeth.

Rebecca cranes her neck to the side, but he hesitates, reluctant to mark her anywhere she can’t easily cover up. But her brow arches imperiously, lips quirking in challenge. Ted relents, unable to deny her anything, so he carefully decorates her throat, too.

Ted splays his palm across the side of her neck and brushes his thumb over the blooming bruises, a soft smile dancing on his lips.

“Do you understand?” she asks in a whisper so husky not even God could overhear.

“I’m starting to think I don’t understand a damn thing, my darlin’,” Ted admits, surprised to find that it doesn’t worry him so much. It’s not so bad to be adrift at sea if you’re with someone who can navigate by the stars.

Rebecca smirks, apparently pleased with this answer. Without further ado, she crashes into him, ripping off his clothes like they insulted her. Surrendering to her is the easiest thing he’s ever done.

“Will you do something for me?” she asks, then whispers her request into his ear.

Ted stands naked as Adam in the exact place he performs the Eucharist each and every Sunday. He should be ashamed, he should be on his knees reciting Hail Mary’s until his throat bleeds, and even that shouldn’t feel like penance enough. He’s punished himself for much less in the past.

But he feels good, is the thing.

Ted cups Rebecca’s jaw like a chalice he’s poured all of his love into and pulls her into an achingly soft kiss that makes him tremble like flower petals in gentle rain. No wine or bread or vestment or relic is holier than Rebecca’s lips, he thinks, coaxing her mouth open with the pad of his thumb.

“Kneel.”

His hand doesn’t leave Rebecca’s face as she drops to her knees on the step beneath him, and without prelude, takes his cock so deep into her mouth she gags on it. A guttural, virginal groan rips free from his throat, the church’s high ceilings catching the hymn of pleasure and returning it back tenfold. The dance of her tongue over his nerve endings is a goddamn miracle. He tells her so—or tries to, anyway, between breathy whimpers, and he feels her moaning around his dick at the praise.

Ted makes a mistake—too dizzy, too stupid with pleasure to think better of properly looking at Rebecca’s flushed and hollow cheeks, her pretty hand working his base as she sucks him into rapture. His knees buckle, but Rebecca catches him before he can fall and lays him out on the plush carpet.

“Always saving me,” he mumbles drunkenly, his hand carding clumsily through her curls.

Rebecca just hums, redoubling her attempted murder. Seconds pass, maybe hours, maybe time no longer exists, but he can’t hold back much longer.

“Rebecca,” he gasps out, pushing himself up on a wobbly arm, “Rebecca, baby—”

Two slick fingers slide into his mouth and he keens wildly around her knuckles. She palms at his balls—he’s going to come—her long middle finger slips between his ass cheeks—oh, God, he’s going to come down her throat—presses down on that tender spot and everything goes blissfully black. Pleasure explodes from him like New Year’s fireworks, and with a broken sob, he shudders violently on her tongue. Vision still swimming, all he can do is listen to the erotic song of her drinking down every last drop like it’s champagne.

Rebecca cradles him gently in her arms, smothering him with soothing kisses and devastating him with murmured affection.

Eventually his breath evens out, the haze clears, and—

Oh.

He’s already half-hard again.

Both of their eyes go wide like they’ve been bewitched.

“Guess celibacy pays off after all,” he ventures. He had noticed that he’d been recovering rather quickly, but he had never tested the limits, feeling uncomfortable at the thought of demanding more sex just to satisfy his curiosity.

“Or the power of Christ is compelling you to fuck me with your miracle cock.”

Well, apparently Rebecca lacks those particular reservations. She pulls him to his feet. Ted scoops her up and carries her to the edge of the altar.

“Bit dramatic, don’t you think, love?” she muses blithely, smoothing her hands along the red fabric draped over the hard marble.

“Oh, like you are gonna pass up the opportunity to be fucked by a priest on an altar?” he accuses, tugging her soaked underwear and her golden dress down her long legs.

“And just what are you implying?”

“That you’ve got a thing for priests.”

Rebecca rolls her eyes.

“I’ve got a ‘thing’ for you.”

“Yeah, but the priest thing turns you on,” he teases, dripping with smarmy affection, “You’d been touching yourself for weeks before we ever spoke. Don’t think I forgot.”

“Fine,” she concedes, “Your priest thing had me so pent up that I orgasmed when you gave me communion. Right over there, in front of the entire congregation.” She gestures over his shoulder. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” She smirks wickedly, clearly delighted that she’s managed to stun him into silence. “If you’ve got nothing else to say, Theodore, use that pretty mouth to worship me.”

So he does. He’s an astronomer and her freckles, scars, and mottling bruises are a field of stars. He charts them slowly, savoring every gorgeous inch of her while she gets increasingly impatient, huffing and whimpering and finally giving into desperation and begging him to make her come.

Ted kneels in supplication before the altar and kisses Rebecca’s cunt with more reverence and passion than he’s ever shown the consecrated marble beneath her. He gets his hands on the backs of her thighs and holds her open so she can only take what he gives her. Lucky for her, he can’t deny her anything.

His flat tongue and pursed lips and crooked fingers are a prayer answered not with silence or a disembodied presence he’s probably imagining, but by bucking hips and curled toes and choked gasps. Tears slip from his eyes when she falls apart on his tongue, making the most gorgeous sounds he’s ever heard.

She’s still spasming when he sinks into her, both moaning from the perfect stretch and obscene squelch of her tight, wet cunt. The sight of Rebecca beneath him steals his breath and he runs his hands up her sides, back down the curves of her breasts and the slope of her belly in admiration, the evidence of his love everywhere he looks.

“God, honey. You’re so beautiful.”

“Do you understand now?” she asks, catching his hand and pulling it to her face, laying a kiss on his heartline. “I know we can’t be more than this, but I don’t care. It’s more than enough. You are more than enough.”

In the Book of Genesis, God gave Adam the entire world but it still wasn’t enough, so God created Eve. Not from the dust of the ground, but from Adam’s rib. Love itself was born from sacrifice.

He's so fucking scared, there's no chance she doesn't feel him trembling. And maybe that's his sacrifice, letting go of the fear. He'll never know if he doesn't try.

“Bone of my bone,” he murmurs.

“Flesh of my flesh,” she replies. Ted smiles, marveling at her, and she gives him a half-shrug.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Ted pushes into her with a slow roll of his hips, smearing open-mouth kisses down her neck, lashing her nipples with his tongue. Rebecca’s back arches off the altar in pleasure and he drags his palm down the divine slope of her stomach, his thumb landing on her clit.

“Fuck me like I belong to you,” she rasps, every syllable drenched in lust and authority.

He lays his palm on the side of her throat and brushes the ridges of her larynx with his thumb. No real pressure, but the suggestion alone makes his cock twitch, arouses the feral thing inside of him that filled him with so much revulsion earlier tonight. This time he doesn’t run, he claws his fingers into Rebecca’s hips with bruising force and snaps into her hard, their skin clapping together like thunder. Rebecca cries out, a sharp, wounded sound sends him spiraling out of control.

Ted fucks her like he wants to make sure she’s going to feel it tomorrow. Lips swollen from kissing him, skin rubbed raw by his mustache, bruises pulsing, hips sore from being fucked by him, cunt stretched by his cock, clit aching for him, her every thought bent towards him.

“You’re mine, Rebecca. You belong to me.”

“Yes,” she cries out, “I’m yours, Ted.”

They pass the affirmation back and forth until they’re both too fucked out to speak, so he lets his body do the talking. Ted gets his knee up onto the altar, pulling her hips downward to meet each brutal thrust. He fucks her with long, deliberate strokes, like if he gets deep enough, he might get to be a part of her forever.

Ted spreads his palms over her hips as he pounds into her, framing the swell of her belly.

Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. A part of her forever.

His rhythm falters and his mind starts to slip backwards in time.

Stop. Not now. Not right now.

Ted shakes the thoughts away by losing himself in the divine sensation of Rebecca’s walls rippling and clenching around him, the warm gush of her come, her wordless ecstasy.

His second orgasm is hurtling towards him like a freight train. He starts to pull out, suddenly worried about filling her with his come while simultaneously even more turned on at the thought, but Rebecca wraps her legs around him and traps him there, pulling his weight down onto her.

“My Theodore. Mine, all mine,” she breathes, and that’s all it takes. It hurts to come a second time, but it feels serenely good, too. Rebecca kisses him through it, swallowing down his whimpers of pleasure-pain.

They breathe each other in as they lay there for an eternity, cradled in each other’s boneless arms like they have no intention of ever letting go. He doesn’t know if it’s past midnight yet. Hadn’t heard any fireworks, but maybe that was because they’d been too occupied making fireworks of their own.

“Let’s get cleaned up back at my place. Don’t got any champagne, but there’s biscuits and that spiced tea you’ve been loving lately,” Ted says, giving up on his Oxford as he fucks up the button holes for the third time.

“Or,” Rebecca says coyly, tugging her fingers through her hair, “I could show you my new place. It’s not far from here.”

She explains that within the past three days, she found the place, signed the lease (her solicitor had advised her not to purchase anything she wouldn’t be willing to risk losing in a hypothetical divorce), and got a bed frame and mattress delivered so she can at least sleep there while she works out the logistics of moving.

“So…You told him you’re leaving?”

Rebecca stares down at her hands, twisting her gold ring anxiously around her finger.

“It’s difficult to tell him anything,” she sighs. “Rupert had a second stroke after the home opener last September. I tried to stop him from going, but of course he didn’t listen. He told me he knew what I’d been up to since stepping in for him. Accused me of trying to steal the club out from under him and fucking half the squad while I did it just to humiliate him. It was ludicrous, so I laughed at him, and…he hit me. Split my lip with his ring.” Rebecca absently plucks at her bottom lip, smiling bitterly like she’s trying and failing to find the story amusing in retrospect. “You have to understand, he wasn’t like that before. Cruel, yes, but never physically violent. But after the first stroke, he started behaving like an insolent child, breaking anything he could get his hands on when he was in a foul mood. My things, usually. But he had never hit me. I suspect he was always capable of it, but maybe he just couldn’t restrain himself anymore. Or didn’t want to.”

“Rebecca. I’m…Jesus, I’m so sorry,” Ted says uselessly, caught between rage and crushing heartbreak. All these months she’d been sharing a house with a dangerous man. The thought makes his blood boil and his stomach churn. To think he’d ever been jealous of Rupert Mannion. That he’d treated her that way, and she’s still showing him far more empathy than Ted thinks he deserves.

“I could have left sooner, but I just kept making excuses for him. I was an expert at it by that point, after all.” Rebecca goes to the faraway place he’d watched her drift off to that first night they spent together. Ted squeezes her hand, coaxing her back to him gently. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to prattle—”

“Don’t ever apologize for talking to me about this. You can tell me as much as you want, baby, okay? Nothing’s off the table.” he drawls plaintively, kissing her knuckles tenderly.

“Okay,” she exhales, smiling wanly, “I was so terrified that he would just become more volatile after the second stroke. But…he has what’s called global aphasia. He can’t speak or write, so I don’t have to put up with his constant interrogation and paranoid conspiracies, but it’s strange…The doctors say his cognition was likely impacted, but I know him. I’m so sure he understands far more than he lets on. I don’t know what he’s capable of anymore, and that’s…that’s…”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Ted coos, taking her into his arms, “You’re safe now. I’m gonna keep you safe.” All he can do is hold her while she weeps. He weeps, too. Weeps because she’s been shouldering this burden all on her own for so long and she never should’ve had to. When she settles, he says quietly, “I wanna be there with you when you tell him you’re leaving.”

“No. Absolutely not,” she says with an authority that brooks no argument, “I don’t want you anywhere near him. Full stop. No discussion.”

“Okay, okay,” he concedes, “That Roy Kent fella seems pretty frightening. Bet he’ll have your back.”

“He would. Roy’s…He’s a good man. But that might be problematic because Rupert is convinced I’m fucking him.”

She barks a laugh, and Ted joins in.

“Then bring Beard as backup. He’s good in a scrap.”

“I don’t doubt it,” she sighs. “I promise, Ted. I’m sure they’ll enjoy playing bodyguard for me.”

“Thank you,” Ted sighs, relieved.

“Right. Let’s go christen my brand new bathtub, hm?”

“Before we go, can I show you something?”

Ted leads her to the second row of pews, the old wood creaking beneath their combined weight as they sit.

“Check this out,” Ted says enthusiastically, eager to cheer her up. He points at T&R scratched into the wood. It’s difficult to see in the dark, but not impossible. “T and R. Dunno how long it’s been written there, but it kinda feels like destiny, don’t it? Like the universe wants us to be together.”

Ted turns to Rebecca and his smile slips right off his face. She’s frowning, staring at the etched initials with displeasure bordering on fury.

“Why does this matter to you so much?” she asks icily.

“Why does…Sorry?” he sputters, feeling like he’s a step behind her.

“Destiny. Soulmates,” she sneers. Emotion thickens his throat as she continues, her anger rising, “Tell me, Ted, what’s so fucking romantic about not having any say over your own life?”

He realizes that he unwittingly trod clumsily over a sore spot, so he chooses his next step more carefully, trying to concede some ground to her in hopes that he can figure out where this anger is coming from. “Well, I guess when you put it—”

“Is that why you really became a priest? Sentenced yourself to misery just so you never have to make a fucking decision for yourself ever again? After all, a puppet on strings can’t be held accountable—”

“Woah, ouch,” Ted interrupts, “Starting to feel personal there, darlin’.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snarls, pushing herself abruptly out of the pew.

Ted sucks in a steep breath through his nose, attempting to smother the fear that he’s said something terribly wrong without meaning to and the frustration that she’s just yelling at him instead of explaining. They still have a lot to learn about each other, he knows, but that’s okay. They have time.

“Okay, Rebecca. I won’t. I’m sorry.”

“And don’t look at me like that,” she snaps, “I’m not mad. I’m—”

“No, it’s…Rebecca, your nose is bleeding,” Ted says as calmly as he can, starting to follow her out of the pew.

Rebecca makes a face like he’s just suggested something preposterous, but she wipes at her nose with the back of her hand anyway, confusion sculpting her brows when it comes away bloody.

“Oh.”

Her knees buckle.

Ted lunges for her as she crumples to the ground like a puppet whose strings were cut all at once.

Chapter Text

Rebecca falls without grace.

If terror hadn’t been flooding the trench of his body like toxic gas, this might’ve surprised him because Rebecca Welton couldn’t fall. On the night she saved him from the car, she hadn’t fallen, Ted had pulled her down with him. The proud lift of her chin, shoulders that wouldn’t dream of slouching, it seems she’s always closer to flying than to falling.

But gravity claims her now with a greedy vengeance. Ted’s reflexes are rusty with panic, helpless to stop the cruel meeting of hard concrete and knee then hip then arm then—

Ted dives, wedging his fingertips beneath her skull just in time to stop it from cracking on the ground. Blood fills his mouth. He must’ve bitten his tongue on the way down, but he doesn’t feel the pain. He can’t feel anything. Not even Rebecca’s pulse when he gets his fingers on her neck. Panic rises in his chest with the might of a biblical flood.

“Rebecca?” he croaks uselessly. She doesn’t answer.

He tries her carotid again.

“C’mon, breathe,” he says aloud to both of them.

And…There. He feels her pulse fluttering. Ted doesn’t know much but her heart shouldn’t be beating this fast.

The blood smeared across her cheek is a violent shock of crimson against her pallid skin. God, when had she gotten so pale?

How long has it been since she collapsed? Seconds? It feels like hours. He should call an ambulance, but he doesn’t know where either of their phones are, and he can’t leave her in case she…

“Oh, God, please, wake up,” Ted begs. Water splashes onto her face, and he doesn’t even register it as his own tears. Rebecca would know what to do. She had performed CPR on her husband for three minutes. Ted, inept and wholly unprepared, has only ever seen someone do CPR on TV.

So Father Lasso does the only thing he can: he prays.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me. Thou art with me, so stay with me, honey. Please, Lord, I’ll do anything if you let her stay.”

And for the first time since he doesn’t know when, his prayer is answered. Rebecca wheezes, an awful death rattle that makes his heart stutter, but a second later she snaps violently back to consciousness.

“Rebecca?” he cries out, clasping her face. But there’s still something very wrong. Cold fear slips down his spine.

Rebecca’s eyes are flung wide open in horse-wild horror, white ringing her irises on all sides as she stares not at him, but through him. The hair rises on the back of his neck.

Her hand shackles around his wrist with bone-crushing strength, and she whispers, “Don’t go.”

“Hey,” Ted croons, his voice far calmer than he feels, “I ain’t going anywhere. Just come on back to me, sweetheart.” He strums her cheek gently with his thumb. “You’re alright, Rebecca. You’re safe. I’m right here with you.”

Her grip on his arm goes slack and she finally focuses on him.

“Ted?” she asks in a brittle rasp.

“I’m here,” Ted replies, attempting a reassuring smile, worried that his heart is beating so loudly she’ll be able to hear it.

“No, you’re Ted,” she slurs, half-snorting, half-coughing.

“Uh-oh. Something must be really wrong. You sound just like me.”

Rebecca laughs, the sound paper thin. Ted doesn’t join in.

“I’m okay,” Rebecca says with an effete wave of her hand, “Honestly, I think you look worse than I feel.”

Ted feels her muscles tense like she’s about to prove it by trying to get up. He all but pins her to the floor, and her smile wavers, a hint of frustration creasing her forehead.

“I think I should call an ambulance.”

The creases deepen. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Rebecca scoffs. “This is just a cautionary tale about how you shouldn’t fuck like the future of the human race depends on it after drinking on an empty stomach.”

“I…” Ted’s argument falters. If he pushes her, she’ll probably just resist. And she knows her own body better than he does. “If I go get you water and somethin’ to eat, promise you won’t move?”

“Yes,” Rebecca mumbles. Ted doesn’t move. Rebecca gives him a blank look that would ordinarily make him wither. “Promise,” she vows, not looking all that happy about it. He starts to stand, but she tightens her grip on his wrist. “Don’t go far.”

“Never,” he grits out, thick with so much unnameable emotion.

Rebecca holds true to her word, still flat on her back in the aisle when he returns with a bag of communion wafers and a chalice full of water. Ted helps her sit up slowly, his hands hovering around her, anticipating her crumpling again, but she doesn’t. She leans against the end of a pew, sagging like a ragdoll, but he sees color creeping back into her cheeks.

It’s not until he’s opening the bag of wafers that he notices her dried blood beneath his fingernails.

“How’re you feeling?” he asks, eyes glued to the passage of the, in his opinion, far too modest sip of water down her bruised throat.

“Tired,” Rebecca grunts moodily, terminating any further inquiry.

Ted’s head might as well be scrambled eggs, but one thing he can guarantee is that Rebecca doesn’t want him around right now. It’s obvious in her one word answers, in her occupation with choosing between three identical wafers just so she can avoid looking at him. She needs air, and all Ted is doing is smothering her with his worry, treating her like a damsel in distress or a child who can’t take care of herself. Or worse, a troublesome wife he has to surveil.

It’s not like that, he could explain, I was scared you were going to die.

But he doesn’t think telling her that will help, somehow.

So he waits, forcing himself to at least step back a couple of inches and search for anything else to look at. Naturally his gaze catches on the focal point of the room—the crucifix looming behind the altar where they’d…

I’ll do anything if you let her stay.

Bargains are the devil’s work, but maybe he’d struck one all the same.

“Ted?” Rebecca says softly, pulling his attention back to her.

“Yeah, h—Yeah?”

“I want to go now.”

Rebecca suffers his arm around her waist. Permits him to guide them back to his flat at a generous snail’s pace. And when fireworks explode above their heads and a very spooked Ted throws his arms around her even though she’s perfectly unfazed, she chuckles sweetly.

“Happy New Year,” Rebecca says, pulling him into a kiss that should make his knees buckle, but he can’t relax his muscles. If he closes his eyes, he’s sure that something bad will happen, so he keeps them open. Rebecca, feeling his reticence, cuts the kiss short. She gives him a curious look as she pulls away, but she doesn’t say anything. Just takes his hand and keeps walking.

Until she comes to an abrupt stop, causing him to bump into her.

“I’ve got it from here,” Rebecca says, smirking. He blinks, realizing they’re standing in the threshold to the bathroom of his apartment.

“Oh,” Ted says dazedly, “Right. Sure.”

Ted changes into pajamas and picks out a few things for Rebecca, too. He adds a crewneck sweater to the pile just in case she’s cold. Then he stands in the middle of the floor, not quite sure what to do with himself. If he sits on the edge of the bed, she might feel uncomfortable at the thought that he was waiting for her. But if he goes to the kitchen to make tea, he’d be too far away if something happened. Fortunately his indecision is cut short by the toilet flushing. She doesn’t emerge. The squeak of the shower faucet and the patter of water against tile sets his heart racing. If she faints again, he won’t be able to get to her in time to keep her head from cracking open.

He’s on his feet before he knows it, tapping on the door. “Mind if I join you?” he asks, desperation creeping into every syllable.

The question is met with a dragging silence. Hesitation, probably. Ted, assuming he’s overstepped and put unnecessary pressure on her, opens his mouth to say, forget I asked. I’ll just lurk outside the door like a creep instead.

But Rebecca, barely audible above the running water, says, “Be my guest.”

His heart jumps into his throat when he finds Rebecca sitting against the wall of the shower, eyes closed, knees drawn up to her chin.

“Are you—”

“I’m fine,” she interrupts without opening her eyes, “Just tired.”

His eyes don’t stray from her as he strips off the pajamas he’d only just put on, adding them to the pile next to Rebecca’s rumpled golden dress. Ted squeezes in beside her, doing his best not to crowd her in the tight space. The heat has the map of his teeth blooming across her skin. For some reason, the sight of it makes him feel a little aroused and a little ill all at once.

There’s every possibility she’ll rescind her invitation if he gets too clingy, but he finds himself wrapping his arms around her anyway, cradling her head against his chest. For the first time in what feels like an eternity, his muscles start to unknit, his heartbeat slows, and the panic trickles down the drain with the water. If only he could get closer and closer until they were so inextricable from one another there’d be no telling where he ended and she began.

“What is it, baby?” Rebecca asks, her fingers tracing a slow pattern on his kneecap. The gentleness of her touch makes him ache, that sour feeling curdling in his stomach.

“I’m sorry,” he grits out, “For…for before.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Rebecca sighs. If only she knew that he had. He’d done so many things wrong. “I flew off the handle. You didn’t…You did nothing to deserve that. I’m sorry.”

I did deserve it, he wants to say, I deserve worse.

“I won’t bring it up again,” he vows, tucking his face into the crook of her neck, “The ’s’ word is officially on the ’s’ list.”

“Let’s talk about it when I’m not about to drop dead—”

Every muscle in his body tenses up again.

Rebecca’s limp body. Rebecca’s unseeing eyes. Rebecca’s blood.

“Shit, sorry,” she exhales, “Sorry, love. I’m so fucking tired I’m not thinking straight. But I’m okay. Honestly.” She places his palm over her heart as though to reassure him that it’s still beating. It settles him only just; the steady thump feels as insubstantial as a guttering candle.

It makes you human, he’d told her once, but apparently he’d forgotten that she actually is.

“Trust me,” she whispers.

Ted trusts her, but he worries. He worries even more when he’s not with her.

When Ted worries, he drinks.

“Not hungry?” Beard asks him, his too keen eyes moving from the nibbled-on basket of fish and chips in front of Ted to his outstretched arm waving Mae down for a third pint. Beard’s spent enough time around him to know it’s unusual for him to drink more than two in public. Guilt writhes in his stomach, but he doesn’t lower his hand.

“Had a late lunch,” Ted says, even though he hadn’t.

Beard doesn’t challenge Ted, though he appears to consider it. Instead, he pinches one of Ted’s fries, takes a bite, and chews with slow intention like a cow trying to solve a riddle, staring past Ted’s shoulder, half-watching the Arsenal vs. Liverpool match on the television. He’d become quite the football virtuoso ever since Rebecca had saved his bacon by giving him a job he was in no way qualified to have. His friend’s curiosity, obsessive tendencies, and strategy-oriented mind were their own kind of holy trinity when pointed in one direction, for better or for worse.

After about a million years, he swallows. “Lotta people at the club think the Boss is converting to Catholicism.”

The beer sliding down Ted’s tongue gets caught in his throat. He manages to work a sputtered “Pardon?” in between coughs.

“C’mon, Padre. It’s not hard to see why.” Beard, seeing Ted’s befuddled expression, continues, “Oooookay. Maybe it is. Walk with me. First, the tabloids. Then she turns up with that same priest to rid the club of vengeful ghosts. Logical, right? Nobody bats an eye. But then she’s spotted sneaking in late to midnight mass on Christmas Eve—”

The fine hairs along the back of his neck stand. He presses his palm, damp and cool from the condensating pint glass, there and swallows down the feeling as best he can. “Spotted?”

“One of the players, Dani Rojas, saw her there.” This quells his unease by a degree or two, but no more than that. “You’re at the New Year’s party—”

“‘Cause you invited me,” Ted reminds him.

“Yet you were talking to the Boss out back most of the time. Then you vanished, and so did she.”

There’s nothing accusatory in Beard’s tone, but Ted his cheeks burn like he’s been caught red handed. When he was with Rebecca, he tended to forget that the rest of the world existed. Now he feels it encroaching like an oncoming train. Rebecca’s suspicions about her husband creep up into the back of his throat. What if he caught wind of how much time Rebecca was spending with Ted?

I know we can’t be more than this.

But even this might be putting her in danger.

“Plus this new potential business partnership between the parish and Richmond? Ergo, conversion,” Beard concludes. “But I know that’s not what’s going on.”

Ted thinks he might be sick. He doesn’t want to lie to his best friend, but he doesn’t want to admit the truth, either. He’s not sure he can bear the shame.

“I may not know the Boss that well, but I do know you,” Beard continues quietly. Air isn’t quite reaching Ted’s lungs. He tries to gulp down a breath because having a panic attack in the middle of this pub is the last thing he wants right now. “Not once in the time I’ve known you have you ever tried to convert me. It’s not your style.”

“Would’ve been a waste of effort, anyway. You made your opinions about religious institutions pretty clear to me when you robbed one.”

Beard barks a laugh, but it fades into contemplative silence.

“You don’t have to tell me what’s going on, but you’ve been different since you met her.”

“Good different or bad different?” Ted asks.

With a shake of his head and a huffed laugh, his palm falls onto Ted’s shoulder and squeezes it amicably. “Y’know, I’ve sat through dozens of your sermons over the years, but somehow that’s the most Catholic thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

Ted considers this, then huffs a laugh when he realizes it’s probably true. “Shoot.” He sets his pint down before he can take another sip and pushes it away from him, opting instead for a fry.

Beard smiles, satisfaction evident in the creases around his eyes.

“Hey, Beard-o,” Ted says, “Has uh…Has Rebecca talked to you?”

“Yes.”

“Not in general. Just…about a favor.”

“Oh.” Beard lets his confusion at this suggestion slip through his placid mask for half a beat. “Nope. What kinda favor would she be asking of me?”

That troubles him more than he’s willing to let Beard know.

“Forget I said anything.”

He reaches for the pint again, ignoring Beard's frown.

Rebecca shows up at his apartment unexpectedly, having cancelled her evening plans on account of aching feet and social fatigue. They order takeout. Rebecca finishes her soup, but she does little more than pick at her main. Ted does his best not to overthink it.

They don’t talk about what happened. Ted doesn’t want to be the one to bring it up.

While they eat, he listens to her whinge about work, which is hardly a chore because she’s stinkin’ cute while she does it. Nose all scrunchy, lips all pouty, he loves her so much he wants to cry.

Apparently, she’s trying to rally support for a potential renovation and expansion of the club, her sights set on growing the neglected Academy and launching a women’s team, two efforts Rupert had long stalled. Keeley, whom she had recently hired as the club’s PR director, pitched the idea of taking potential investors on in-depth tours of the facilities, but Higgins had packed her entire day full of them to “get them out of the way,” so she’d spent most of the past ten hours on her feet in heels.

Ted presses his thumbs into the arch of her tender foot while she vents, punctuating many of her sentences with blissful groans. This glimpse into her life gives him an illicit thrill. Rebecca’s inviting him, yet he still feels like a voyeur. Which makes no sense. Or maybe it does. He’s so turned around these days it’s possible heaven is beneath his feet and hell above his head.

The guilt drags the words Rebecca spoke in the sanctuary back into his mind.

I know we can’t be more than this.

And they can’t be, can they?

Rebecca proclaims herself tired of talking. She gathers up the refuse from dinner, shoves her leftovers in his fridge, and tosses the rest in the garbage. Then, she drops her phone in one of his kitchen drawers before proposing they further unwind in bed so she doesn’t fall asleep on the sofa. He’s a bit surprised when he figures out she doesn’t mean sex. At least, not at first.

At first, she lays opposite him and he holds her calf with one hand and his book with the other. She shuffles through half a dozen more positions until she ends up draping herself over him, paging through the Bible splayed open next to his head.

“You didn’t tell me there was pornography in the Bible.”

“Huh?” he replies vacantly, cracking an eye open.

Ted gave up on his own reading a while ago, his book discarded somewhere on the bed. The pressure of Rebecca’s body pressing him down into the mattress lulls him so completely he’s no longer particularly literate. Nor is he itching for a drink or babbling because he can’t stand how loud the silence is. Tracing his fingers slowly up and down Rebecca’s spine and feeling her rib cage expand into his body and her humid breath wash over his ear over and over again gives him the kind of peace he’s always sought in prayer.

But when he opens his eyes, she’s peering at him over the black frames of his reading glasses, lines wreathing her mouth like laurels, her pink bottom lip snagged between her teeth. That certainly disturbs his peace.

She flips back a couple of pages. “‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.’”

“Honey, d’you know what porn is?” he laughs.

“Do you?” she challenges, lifting a brow.

“Depends who’s asking,” he whispers, coyly batting his lashes at her.

“What about this, then, Justice Stewart,” Rebecca continues. Ted snorts at the reference. “‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies,’” Rebecca lilts playfully, teasing the lapel of the pajama top she’d purchased on her way over here with thumb and forefinger.

Ted hums. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says, half-joking and half-hard.

“Oh? My tits remind you of baby deer, do they?”

“Hmm…Not sure. Show ‘em to me and we’ll find out.”

Rebecca rolls her eyes but even still swings her leg over his hips and settles in his lap.

“If someone had asked past me what I’d be doing in my forties, ‘Biblical striptease’ would not have been on the list.”

“We have that in common,” Ted murmurs, practically quivering in anticipation as Rebecca watches him watch her elegant fingers slowly push each button through each slit in the soft cream fabric.

At long last, the shirt splits apart. Ted pushes it off her shoulders. Bruises still linger in a ghostly pattern across her skin. Shouldn’t they have faded by now? Limp. Unseeing. Blood. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Rebecca, perhaps noticing that he’s drifting, slips her fingers through his hair and pulls gently, coaxing him back into his body.

“Alright, Bambi, let’s take a lookie-loo,” he says. She shoves his face sideways, huffing a laugh. Ted gives her breasts a pensive look, his cock twitching as he takes in her puffy pink nipples and the silvery runnels of stretch marks. “Yeah. Not sure fawns are what spring to mind.”

“What does?”

“I ain’t a poet, but I reckon even the best would fail to do ‘em justice.” He tugs her down and closes his lips over her nipple, grinning at the debauched noise she makes as he sucks it into a tight peak and lashes it with his tongue.

“This is much better than a fucking poem, anyway.”

He rumbles a guttural sound of his own as she instinctively grinds against his dick. She came just like this in the confessional, and hell if it doesn’t feel like heaven to him, too. But she seems too distracted by something to find a real rhythm.

Ted slackens his grip on her hips and comes off her nipple with a pop. “Baby?”

“They’re selling it all wrong,” she says, stuttering to a stop.

Ted, not following, asks, “What?”

Rebecca sits up straighter, puffed up like she’s about to defend her dissertation. “The church is so fucking puritanical about sex yet there’s erotic poetry in the scripture.” Ted did not presently have the wherewithal for a theological conversation about sexual shame.

Rebecca picks up the Bible. “‘Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.’ And eat his pleasant fruits?” she repeats incredulously.

“Yeah, well…The Catholic Church would encourage a more…holistic, uh, spiritual reading,” Ted chuckles.

“And what reading does Father Theodore Lasso encourage, hm?”

“It’s obviously about fuckin’,” Ted replies with a half-shrug.

Rebecca laughs and that sound alone could sustain him for a lifetime. Maybe longer.

“They should be selling the Bible like it’s a romance novel. With hunky Jesus on the cover and everything.”

“Yeah? Would that work on you?”

“Mmm. No. But a gorgeous mustachioed priest absolutely would.”

This time, it’s Ted plucking the Bible out of Rebecca’s hands and tossing it haphazardly aside. It slips off the edge of the bed and lands on the ground with a thump.

But there’s nothing careless about the way he holds Rebecca. His hands slip up the length of her body, over vertebrae and the cradle of her ribs, feeling the tectonic shift of her muscles beneath her skin. He nuzzles into the space between her breasts, letting their weight fill his palms. His lips slide up the column of her throat to the hinge of her jaw. Though she’s not radiating heat the way she used to, there’s a healthy flush to her cheeks. Still, she’d eaten so little…

“I feel alright, love,” Rebecca responds to the question that hadn’t even fully taken shape in his mind.

“How d’you do that?” Ted asks, looking at her with wonder.

“What?” Rebecca lifts his t-shirt over his head and puts her hands on his chest.

“Read my mind.”

She traps his nipple between two fingers and pinches it. A smirk cuts across her lips when he whines, a thin and desperately needy sound.

“I can’t read your mind, Ted,” she says, coaxing him down flat on his back, “But sometimes I can read your face because I pay attention to you. The same way you do to me.”

He feels an invisible hook behind his navel. Beads of sweat gather at his hairline, his heart quickening though he hasn’t moved.

“Stay with me,” she instructs firmly.

Rebecca dips her head and scrapes her teeth against his nipple. Every muscle in his body goes taut enough to snap, but he sinks into a pool of bliss when she follows it with the wet flat of her tongue.

“Good boy, Theodore,” she praises, “It’d be a shame if you missed this.”

Rebecca shifts, and the question on his lips is answered after she strips fully naked and settles her weight on his thigh.

This is her palm landing squarely on his shin, squeezing it the way he’d like her to squeeze his neck if he knew how to ask. This is her tits bouncing and her soft belly stretching and creasing with every sinful roll of her hips. This is the grey fabric darkening above his leaking cock and beneath her leaking cunt. This is her strangled whimper as she loses herself in pleasure and takes him right along with her.

But he can’t quite—

“Rebecca,” he groans, “Rebecca…Wait.”

She stutters and slows, flicking a sweat-soaked lock of hair back from her face.

“Can you…”

“What?”

Ted feels his cheeks go bright red, his tongue gummy with shame. He swallows carefully so he doesn’t choke on his desire.

“I want you to follow your bliss, baby, but my leg ain’t gonna appreciate your pussy as much as my mouth will.”

He’s not sure he’s ever said the word ‘pussy’ out loud in his life. Rebecca throws her head back and cackles in delight, which spares him from feeling like a complete idiot.

“Your garden, your fruit, beloved,” she croons, crawling across the bed to plant a knee on either side of his head, “All you ever have to do is ask.”

The view just about knocks him dead. Dewy pink ribbons of skin spill out from the split seam of her cunt. A cloudy pearl of moisture drips onto his chin, warm like summer rain.

Rebecca braces herself on the headboard. Ted holds the flesh of her ass as he licks a long, broad stripe from her entrance to her clit. Her hand sinks into his hair, nails scratching his scalp, and she grinds down hard on his mouth, skin softer than silk on his tongue.

There’s an awful ache in his cock, but he doesn’t dare take his hands off Rebecca to relieve it. His hands are exactly where they’re meant to be, which happens to be exactly where he wants them to be. Jaw hurts, but she’s too close to the edge for him to even consider closing his mouth. The scent of her is so thick in his nostrils he’s dizzy with it. Ted, overcome, slaps her ass and she cries out in rapture, the old bed frame creaking in her hands as she curls over him like a shield.

They lock eyes—Ted’s wide and pleading, Rebecca’s blown-out and febrile—and she shudders violently, nearly toppling over, as she comes into his mouth. He’s both here and somewhere else entirely; Kansas in the summertime with sticky-sweet juice from a ripe peach spilling down his chin. He smiles, lapping greedily at her clit until she all but hops off of him like she’s been electrocuted.

“Oh my God, Ted. Jesus fuck,” she gasps breathlessly, already wrestling his sweats and briefs off.

Rebecca sinks down onto his cock without prelude.

“Oh, fuck,” he groans, contracting his muscles so he doesn’t spill into her immediately. “Slow, honey, please.”

“Sorry,” she exhales, heeding his words. “I think I understand why this is in the Bible.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmm. I came so hard I saw God.”

Ted’s laugh rumbles from deep in his chest. She settles into a slow rocking rhythm, shimmering with sweat and amusement.

“C’mere, you heathen,” he pants, opening his arms for her to fall bonelessly into. Ted carefully flips them over and fucks into her with lazy, shallow strokes, and then not so lazily when he hits a spot she clearly likes by the sound of it. Rebecca smears sloppy kisses across his neck and jaw, her fucked-out grin so crooked and angelic it steals his breath.

He catches her hand as it slides up his neck and arranges her fingers around his throat.

Rebecca’s brows furrow, uncertain.

“Please.”

She gingerly squeezes the sides of his neck. He expects it to feel like a punishment, but instead he feels safe. Protected. Cherished, even. He expects it to feel like he’s dying, but if anything, he’s more aware of his lungs expanding and his heart beating and the pulse of Rebecca’s cunt around his dick.

“You like that, baby?”

“Yes,” he gasps, “A little harder.”

Rebecca squeezes harder, and Ted loses what little is left of his control.

Rebecca might have seen God, but when Ted comes, all he sees is Rebecca.

Ted wakes up in the oily dark, his bones heavy with dread.

Murky sounds puncture the silence. Ragged half-breaths. Strained whimpers.

His stomach drops.

Rebecca.

She’s lying beside him, her eyes a wide sea of terror.

“Rebecca?”

Her gaze shifts to him, but her head doesn’t follow. Tears slide down her temples, and he watches the tendons in her neck strain like she’s trying to move or speak but no sound comes out.

Ted’s chest constricts, his own breath failing to reach as deep into his lungs as he needs it to, so when he exhales, “Breathe,” it’s as much a reminder to himself as it is to her. “Try to breathe, baby.” Ted pushes himself up onto his elbow, cups Rebecca’s jaw with his hand. She’s clammy with sweat. “You’re okay, sweetheart. Do it with me now.”

With his exhale, Rebecca’s neck jerks painfully. She heaves a sob and throws her arms around him like he’s just saved her from drowning.

“Hey,” he lulls, stroking her damp hair and circling his palm over the knobs of her spine. “Are you okay? Do we need to—”

“I’m okay.” But she whimpers softly when he uncleaves himself from her, so he takes her back into his arms.

“Panic attack?” he asks, trying to make sense of it.

“Sleep paralysis,” she whispers thickly.

A shiver ripples out from his spine remembering someone from his hometown church saying it was proof hell existed.

“What do you need? Water? Or—”

“Don’t go,” she says, scrabbling at his back and tucking her face into the crook of his neck. Ted pulls the duvet up higher, wrapping himself around her as best he can to get her warm again.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

They fall asleep tangled up in each other. Or at least Ted does. When he wakes up again, he finds Rebecca at the stove in borrowed sweats, scrambling eggs in a pan.

“Hey, honey. Want me to finish this up so you can get back in bed for a bit?”

“I don’t mind,” Rebecca says. There are heavy dark shadows beneath her eyes. “It’s nearly ready anyway. There’s toast and coffee, as well.”

“Thanks.” Ted kisses her hair, and she smiles wanly.

They eat their breakfast in silence. Rebecca sits with her knees drawn up to her chest, but she eats everything on her plate, even going for more toast.

“You wanna talk about it?” he asks timidly.

Rebecca shrugs, peeling the crust off the bread with two fingers and nibbling it separately from the rest, which he finds terribly endearing. “I used to be able to break myself out of it, but it’s been so long since it’s happened, I suppose I got…stuck.” She slides her hand across the table to take his. “So it’s good you were there. Thank you.”

“Sure,” Ted says, not really feeling worthy of gratitude.

Rebecca sighs and takes a hearty sip of coffee. “I would’ve warned you, but…Well, I really thought you…I thought it was behind me.”

“This is what happened when you were a kid? The nightmares?”

She hums. “That’s when it started. Came and went over the years. I gave up sleeping all together for a few weeks in my twenties to avoid it until I ended up in hospital for exhaustion. Rather dramatic,” she snorts sardonically.

“I dunno. I reckon I’d do the same. Sounds scary.”

“It is. I don’t…see anything, but I hear things. Last night, it was like someone was whispering right into my ear.” Rebecca shakes her head, dabbing the corner of her eye with a knuckle. “It’s horrible.”

Ted slides off his chair and kneels beside her, sliding his arms around her waist. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs into her belly. “Is there anything…I mean, should you see a doctor?”

Rebecca huffs, her hand falling into his hair and ruffling it gently. “They’ll just prescribe a sedative and tell me to manage my stress levels until I can get into a sleep clinic, which will take God knows how long.”

“Alright,” Ted says, “Let’s focus on what we can control, huh. What’s the number one thing causing you stress right now?”

Rebecca chuckles. “Being held prisoner in my own marriage if I had to hazard a guess.”

He knows she hasn’t officially moved out yet. Ted’s not sure what she’s waiting for. Every day she spends in that house just worries him more.

“Right, right. Not much I can do about that, but I can do this.” Ted pushes himself up from the floor and circles around to the back of her chair.

Rebecca eyes him suspiciously. “What are you doi—Oh, oh, fuck, that feels good.”

Ted’s thumbs press deep into the meat of her shoulder blades. Her head tilts forward bonelessly and she groans, a deeply satisfied noise that makes his cock stir. Each thumb rolls over two almost identically placed lumps that pop on every pass, but he doesn’t think much of it.

“You are one knotty lady. Get it. Knot-ty. Like a tie or—”

“Oh, good lord,” she snorts.

“You’re pretty naughty, too. Naughty like—”

Ted dodges her incoming swat with a giggle. He moves his hands over her shoulders, down her biceps, and up into her scalp.

“At this rate, neither one of us is going to make it to work,” she mumbles, half-slumped in her chair.

“Dunno, boss. You’re so knotty, maybe you should play hookey and let me do something about that,” he whispers into the shell of her ear, lightly pulling her hair.

Rebecca turns her head and catches his lips. “I’m also quite naughty, so maybe you should tie me to the bed and do something about that.”

Ted goes so red he worries he might burst into flames. Tries to swallow but chokes and coughs into the crook of his elbow. Rebecca lets out a sultry laugh, sticking the tip of her tongue out at him.

“You being serious?” he asks, genuinely uncertain.

“Deadly,” Rebecca says, bumping her eyebrows. But then she sighs, “But another time, I’m afraid. I’ve got a fucking tour with these businessmen coming all the way from bloody Estonia, so I’d feel marginally bad about the tizzy I’d send Higgins into by asking him to reschedule.”

Ted recalls how icily she’d regarded Higgins that day at the pub. “This Higgins fella. You got beef with him?”

Rebecca is silent for long enough that Ted begins to worry he’s once again mindlessly blundered into territory he’d be better off steering clear of. He perches on the edge of his chair, ready to tell her she doesn’t have to answer the question.

“Do you believe that you can truly forgive someone, Ted?”

Ted knows what he should say.

He recites the words forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us nearly every single day of his pathetic life.

Matthew 6:15. Luke 3:37. Did Christ not forgive the very hands that condemned him to death? Is forgiveness not at the heart of the thing he has dedicated his life to?

“I believe that you can, yeah.”

It isn’t a lie. It isn’t a lie. Of course he believes it’s possible. He’s forgiven his father for ending his own life, for ending Ted’s, in a way. He’s forgiven his mother for abandoning him in her grief. He’s forgiven the ignorance of his hometown. He’s forgiven the Catholic Church for letting them be comfortable in their ignorance. He’s forgiven Michelle for…Well, he reminds himself, Michelle didn’t need to be forgiven because she didn’t do anything wrong.

There’s just one person he’s never been able to forgive.

Rebecca’s eyes are bright and knowing, but she doesn’t press and he’s grateful for it.

“Maybe you can help me figure out how to do it, then, Father.”

“Sure, baby. It’d be my pleasure.”

Rebecca gives him a soft smile. She leans forward to press a kiss to his lips, and she smooths his mustache with her thumb as she pulls away. “Today won’t be all bad. I do have a very exciting meeting this afternoon.”

“Oh, shit. That’s today, isn’t it?” he says, nervous excitement fluttering in his chest.

“Indeed. And I’ve got to make sure I look my best for such an important potential business partner, so I’m going to steal your shower. Want to join?”

“Tempting as that is, we are definitely not getting out of here if I do. Take your time. I’m gonna clean up.”

Rebecca brings her lips to the inside of his palm before she exits to the bathroom.

Crossing into the kitchen, he catches sight of the crucifix nailed to his front door. He feels a prickle of shame creep along the back of his neck. Reflexively, he does the sign of the cross and murmurs, “Hail Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the Fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

Rebecca must've cleaned up before she made breakfast because his kitchen isn't nearly as messy as he remembers. He’s unstacking the dishwasher when he hears a strange buzzing from one of his drawers. Furrowing his brow, he slides it open to find Rebecca’s phone, screen lit up from incoming messages from Keeley. It’s not that he reads them on purpose, but his eyes can’t help but catch on the words while he carries it to the charger in his bedroom.

Have you gotten the test results yet???

If I’m losing sleep about this I can’t imagine how you must be feeling

I’m bringing you a doughnut. Hope you like chocolate with sprinkles. Love you babe

Chapter Text

Ted is once again standing outside the closed bathroom door debating whether or not he should knock.

There's an unpleasant buzz in the tips of his fingers. He shakes his hands to no avail.

Ted wants to confess his transgression. He hadn't meant to look, it was just that—

Does it matter why?

He cannot unsee the text. Test ricochets through his mind. His anxiety pulls on all the threads at once. None of them lead anywhere good.

A muffled cry from the bathroom sets his heart pounding in his chest. He throws the door open.

"Rebe— Oh, shit."

Rebecca stares at him with blown-out pupils, her chest blotchy red, and—he swallows thickly—her hand shoved between her legs.

"Close the door."

"Yeah, yeah, sorry," he mumbles, starting to exit.

"No, stay where you are." She lets out an exasperated little huff when he freezes in place. "But close the door. You're letting the heat out."

"Oh."

He shuts the door and moves his hands to his pockets.

Rebecca lifts her brow imperiously. "Why are you looking at my face? The show's down here." His gaze carves down her naked, dewy body as she shimmies her hips seductively, gesturing to her breasts and figure like she's Vanna White.

"Hang on. Let me respond appropriately." He clears his throat dramatically, then lifts his hands to the height of his eyes and spreads his fingers wide, giving her a cartoon worthy, "Ah-woo-ga."

Rebecca's deep belly laugh is ridiculously gratifying to him. It's a sound he wants to hear every day for the rest of his life.

"Take off your clothes. I'm feeling naughty. As in the sex one."

The test feels like no more than a distant dream when she puts her lips to his beneath the stream of scalding hot water. Rebecca steals all his worry away with slow strokes of her tongue, touching all the places that turn him soft—the back of his neck, his nipples, the soft of his belly, the slit of his cock.

"Turn around for me, baby."

Rebecca turns slowly, a mischievous slant to her lips. "Well? Come and get it," she purrs, canting her hips. Ted spanks her—more playful than hard—and she sinks her nails into his thigh and grinds against him—more hard than playful.

"You're awfully spunky." For someone so stressed they're having sleep paralysis.

"Second wind," Rebecca replies huskily, "Carpe diem, hm?"

The test he has no business knowing about flickers through his mind. She'll tell him. She'll tell him if it's important. He trusts that she will.

"Let us rejoice and be glad."

His lips descend her spine as he speaks, the tang of shampoo and soap residue sharp on his tongue.

His knees kiss the tile. With one hand firm on her lower back, he coaxes her hips towards his face.

"Oh?" Rebecca exhales, intrigued.

He kneads his fingers into the lush flesh of her ass and spreads her open to gingerly tongue at her hole.

“Oh."

Rebecca's whole body tenses then shudders like something's being exorcised from her. Worried he crossed a line, he stops.

“Okay?”

“Yes. Christ, Ted, you can do anything to me except stop,” she whines.

Guess that answers that.

“You got it, Boss.”

Ted's delicate kitten licks drag soft, needy sounds up from the pit of her chest. She's got her forearm between her face and the wall, but she doesn't seem to know what to do with her other hand. It's stupidly charming. Her manicured fingers flail for purchase on the smooth tile but find none, so Ted catches her wrist and lashes it to the small of her back.

She twists her neck to look down at him, a tendril of slick hair snaked across her jaw. Ted holds her umbral gaze as he buries his nose and mouth in her ass.

"Oh my God," Rebecca moans out, half pleasure, half disbelief, "Oh my fucking God."

Ted fucks his tongue into her entrance, then drags the flat of it up to circle her hole. Faith is practiced through repetition. But so is pleasure. Again and again his tongue follows that path with ritualistic devotion, finding the speed and pressure that makes her shake hardest, sob loudest.

When he finally pauses to stretch out his aching jaw, a raspy laugh rattles out of Rebecca's heaving chest.

"You're a dirty boy, aren't you Father Lasso?"

Somewhere beneath the pleasure, he knows he should feel guilt's ghostly fingers stretching around him.

How many hours has he spent just like this, already bruised knees bent once more by guilt, begging God to make him clean?

Maybe it's time to try something else.

So beneath these baptismal waters, he lifts his unworthy gaze up to his salvation.

"Yes, I am," Father Lasso confesses. And God, it feels good to say it.

Rebecca, seeming to hear the gravity of his statement, goes still, then shuts off the shower and leads him dripping to the bed. Water soaks into the sheets as she takes a kneeling position on the bed, beckoning to him, guiding his head to her lush thighs, her cool hands tenderly cradling his face.

Ted's cock throbs in anticipation, sticky desire pooling on his belly.

"Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it," Rebecca commands from above him.

Ted practically unhinges his jaw without hesitation. Next thing he knows, her drenched curls are hovering inches above his face.

The last thing he thinks before Rebecca stretches her mouth around his cock is that he never should've let her read the fucking Bible.

"Do you think they'll be able to tell?"

Ted, half-asleep with Rebecca nestled in his arms, murmurs, "Who-what?"

"The Estonians. Will they be able to tell I started my day sixty-nining a priest?"

He pushes himself up onto an elbow and cups her face with one hand. Even in the dreary light filtering in through the small window, her rosy skin glows.

His cock warms at the memory of Rebecca's thighs pinning him to the mattress while she rubbed her clit inches from his face and sucked his cock with a reverence he didn't deserve. Taking so much without giving anything back had made him feel sinfully greedy, but the further her mouth sank down his cock and the louder the wet sound of her fingers sliding through her swollen folds got, the easier it was to surrender to the pleasure she was hellbent on giving him.

"Yeah. Immediately. Heck, they'll probably know a priest ate your ass, too. You should cancel."

Rebecca barks a laugh. Though he meant it as a joke, his chest tightens when she groans, "God, I wish."

That tight feeling doesn't go away. He clings to her hip when she starts to roll out of bed. Babbles nonsense at her while she gathers her things, fortunately ignoring her phone, and takes it all into the bathroom.

Rebecca arches a brow at him curiously when he sits on the toilet seat, but she doesn't dismiss him. She patiently satisfies his curiosity about all the goodies in her Mary Poppins toiletry bag. The blow dryer roars so loudly he can't speak to her without shouting, so she has him hold it while she drags a rounded brush through her hair.

"Up or down?" she asks, turning her face in either direction as she rakes product through the strands.

"You look pretty no matter what."

Rebecca rolls her eyes, but there's a sincere smile on her lips. She opts for a simple, elegant bun, trusting Ted with the pins. He lets himself believe she'd chosen up just so they could linger here a little longer.

The easy intimacy of the morning hits him like a hunger pang. He's been starving for so long that eating makes him sick, but he does it anyway. He doesn't know how he survived so long without it.

Once they're both dressed—Rebecca in a tailored burgundy suit, Ted a void of color—she rolls back his cuff and spritzes her perfume onto his wrist.

Her familiar rose scent on his own skin overwhelms him.

"I'll top you off when you— Are you alright, love?"

She sees something on his face that makes her frown.

"Mhm. Just…Wish we could stay here, is all."

Because he can't keep her safe anywhere else.

"Me, too."

Ted trails her all the way to the front door, hands and lips sticky for her.

"I've really, really got to go," she insists, still kissing him even though she's twisting the knob and pulling the door open, the crucifix nailed to the back disappearing with every inch.

"Okay," Ted breathes, his palm on the back of her neck, "Go on, then."

"Okay. I'm going."

She doesn't.

"I'm going."

She doesn't.

"I'm really going."

Ted pulls her in for another kiss. She lets out a whimper of surrender and starts to push the door shut when a soft but insistent ahem finally wrenches them apart.

"Shit," Rebecca gasps.

Beard stands in the doorway, a cronut dangling between his teeth.

A regular chocolate donut sits untouched in the bag. He's not hungry. It wasn't all that long ago he'd sat here eating breakfast with Rebecca, but it feels like another lifetime. One that had been taken from him without his consent.

Beard leans against the kitchen counter, taking slow sips of his coffee. It's as though he's only halfway present, staring unblinkingly into the middle distance, looking more than a little haunted.

Ted's foot bounces anxiously, attention fixed on the door Rebecca disappeared through minutes ago. She's probably checked her phone by now. He hates that she's got these damn test results looming over her on top of everything else.

"You're gonna be late for work," Ted says resentfully. It's unfair seeing as Beard was only trying to look out for him as always. Knowing that don't stop him feeling it, though.

Beard hears it too if his frown is anything to go by.

"Don't think my boss will mind."

Ted has nothing to say to that.

"Look, man," Beard starts.

Ted doesn't let him finish. "I know you ain't judging me even though you should."

"Why's that?" Beard crosses to the table and sinks into the chair opposite Ted.

"Because I'm a weak man with no integrity. A false prophet. A wolf in sheep's clothing. An unrepentant sinner. Hell, take the religion out of it, I'm sleeping with a married woman. Haven't I earned some judgement?" There's an unmistakable edge of desperation to his words. "Don't I deserve to be p—"

His jaw snaps shut.

Beard's eyes narrow. He leans forward in his chair.

"What?"

The unspoken word resonates like a church bell in the silence.

Ted looks past Beard's shoulder at the crucifix. He abruptly pushes back from the table.

"Sorry for my tone, Beard-o. I gotta go. Stay as long as you want. And, uh, thanks for the donut."

Ted's phone buzzes fifteen minutes later.

He's disappointed to see it's Beard. The text he sent Rebecca right after he left has gone unanswered. Rationally, he knows this is because she's already with the Estonians. Irrationally, he worries something happened to her.

Though he'd rather ignore Beard and ignore the thoughts threatening to breach the iron wall of his consciousness, if something had happened to Rebecca, then—

Ted swipes open the message.

You're wrong.

I am judging you

For your stubborn belief that everything you believe in applies to everyone except yourself.

And I'm pretty damn curious about why you're still wearing that collar TBH!

Ted turns his own words over in his mind as he crosses the Thames towards Ms. Shipley's house, trying to make sense of their source. They felt false even as he was speaking them. He never fixated on punishment in his sermons. He believed in a merciful and forgiving God. Heck, Ted had interceded on behalf of death row inmates multiple times, but he was desperate for someone to punish him for…What, exactly?

Huh. Beard sure did know him well.

He runs his sleeve along his slightly runny nose and catches a whisper of Rebecca's perfume. It grounds him, knocks him out of his head.

Ted takes a photo of the boats along the river.

Are you having a good Thames with the Estonians?

He smiles the rest of his walk.

Usually he likes visiting Ms. Shipley.

The first time they met she warned him not to get attached because her kidneys were failing and she was going to die any day now. That was six months ago.

Of course he'd failed at the whole not getting attached thing.

But today he feels like a complete fraud. Or worse.

Ted is sweating bullets beneath his layers. The clerical collar feels too snug around his neck.

The heat inside her house is stifling; it smells simultaneously antiseptic and a little rotten. He feels sick to his stomach. It's not entirely altruistic when he offers to take her on a spin around the neighborhood, but she doesn't go for it. Ms. Shipley doesn't really leave her house anymore if she can help it.

Ms. Shipley's cloudy blue eyes are full of far too much trust. He hates feeling like he's bullshitting her. He wants to tell her that she shouldn't look to him for answers on how to make peace with her life. What the hell would he know about that?

His phone buzzes. 

"Pardon me, Ms. Shipley." He tunes out whatever barbed rebuke this interruption provokes.

Relief washes over him when he sees Rebecca's name on the screen. Less so when he reads the message she sent.

I think the Estonians were probably grateful I got sick in a bin instead of on their expensive shoes.

Not the finest moment of my professional career.

Ted is still typing when another message comes through:

I'm so sorry. I'll have to reschedule our meeting. I've gone home for the day.

He replies,

Which home?

After a long pause, Rebecca writes,

Don't worry about me. I'm okay.

These words have the opposite effect. He pushes:

I'd really like to bring some things by if I can.

I'm told I have great bedside manner.

The three bubbles appear and disappear several times before she shares her location. A townhouse not far from the Crown and Anchor.

It takes everything in him to not immediately bolt out the door.

"Sorry 'bout that."

"Girlfriend?" Ms. Shipley asks smoothly.

His stomach swoops, but he hangs onto his composure with a death grip. He can’t imagine what face he might’ve been making that would earn such an offhand comment.

“Oh, c'mon, Ms. Shipley. You know I’m taken.” Ted points a finger upward. The lie twists in his gut.

“The good ones always are."

Ted forces out a brusque chuckle.

“What were we talking about?”

“You were trying to get an old, dying woman to learn a new language.”

“Right, right. Teleios. Y'know, they translate that to 'perfect' in English, but that ain't…Perfect feels like too tall an order, especially when we're taught that the perfection Jesus was talking about only exists in Heaven…"

He drifts off.

That can't be true when Rebecca's green eyes exist here on earth, but it sure explains why looking into them feels like heaven.

"You don't seem yourself today, Father." There's a note of sympathy in her craggy voice.

"I apologize, Ms. Shipley. I didn't get much sleep last night."

Ms. Shipley pats his hand softly.

"No need to apologize. Let's talk about something else, hm? No offense to you, but I'd rather not waste what little time I have remaining in this life discussing boring Biblical nonsense any longer. Oh, don't give me that look, dear. I've been Catholic for 93 years. I've heard it all before."

Ted blinks at her.

"Then…Sorry. Why do you keep asking me to come back? Not that I mind—"

Ms. Shipley giggles rather girlishly. "May I confess something, Father?"

"Uh, sure. Of course."

"My daughter's biological father was a priest."

He snaps his jaw shut with a loud click.

"We had a torrid affair the summer I spent in Rome, Alfonso and I. He wanted to leave the clergy for me, but I told him not to. I didn't know I was pregnant until I got back to England."

Ted sputters, "Does he…Did he ever find out about Sophia?"

"I never found him again." Ms. Shipley shrugs, apparently unbothered. "So, to answer your question, I ask you back because I like your company…"

"And?"

"And you remind me of Alfonso. Best shag I ever had," she sighs wistfully.

Ted goes scarlet. So hot he might pass out.

Ms. Shipley sees his blushing face and giggles girlishly behind her hand.

"Mhm," she hums cryptically.

He smooths his mustache with thumb and index finger.

"So…how'd you end up in Rome?"

This question seems to spark life back into Ms. Shipley's eyes.

As she spins her yarn, he gets lost in his own. If he told Rebecca he wanted to choose her, what would she say?

Ted hasn't thought seriously about killing himself since before the first day he saw Rebecca.

There's nothing that specifically brings on this revelation. Maybe it's just that he's crossing a bridge for the second time today and hasn't once thought about jumping off it, or even hoping, as he has in the past, that a car might careen off the road and slam him into the river below.

It was usually like the latter for him— barring a couple very low moments. Ted reckons that for the one time his father pulled the trigger, there were probably dozens of times he put the gun to his head and chose not to.

Rebecca's words from a few weeks ago come back to him.

Is that why you really became a priest? Sentenced yourself to misery just so you never have to make a fucking decision for yourself ever again?

They had stung because she was right.

Ted never wanted the choice. He just wanted to die. No chance to second guess himself. No suffering. Out like a flipped switch.

Some part of him worried he only cared about Beard's well-being because he couldn't depart this earth without knowing his friend would be okay once he was gone. He wouldn't go the way of his father and leave a mess Beard would spend the rest of his life cleaning up. Ted's death would be the kind a person gets over in time. His mom would be no worse off—she'd been mourning her son for thirty-odd years. The parishioners would say their prayers but they'd forget about him.

He'd just be another person who died a little too soon. Not a real tragedy, just the way it goes sometimes.

But last autumn, he would've gotten exactly what he wanted if an angel hadn't swooped in to save him. And when she did, he said he was happy to be alive, and he'd meant it. He still means it.

Because dying before ever knowing Rebecca Welton would've made his life a tragedy.

And in the months since, he's felt more alive than he ever has. It's awful.

But it's wonderful, too.

Because he's crossing a bridge without wanting to fall off it.

Because there's a sweet elderly couple ahead of him walking arm in arm. One woman unwinds a tartan scarf from her neck and wraps it around the other's shoulders, and it reminds him that love is often loudest when it's quiet.

Because a future is taking shape in what has only ever been a black void of nothing.

A future where it's him draping his scarf around Rebecca's shoulders where anyone can see—scratch that, it'd probably be the other way around.

A future where he's a happier man. A better one. Maybe he's a husband. Maybe he's a…

Ted freezes.

He doesn't need to fall into the river to feel like he's plunged into cold water.

Ted tries to reach for the memory of Rebecca's voice telling him to breathe, but he can't find it. All he finds are memories of swirling red and blue lights, nauseatingly bright, and a fist pounding on the door, so loud it feels like it's cracking his skull wide open.

The memory is so sharp, he feels like he's living it all over again.

Clumsy fingers fight back his sleeve. He brings his wrist to his nose and forces a painful inhale.

There's barely a trace of Rebecca's perfume left, but it's enough. It's enough. It's enough.

He comes back to himself. The sweat trapped beneath his layers has gone ice cold. He shivers as he walks in the direction of Rebecca's house, doubt in every step.

"What's wrong?" Rebecca asks him the second she opens the door.

The pointedness doesn't startle him as much as the blue half-moons beneath her eyes and the trail of burst blood vessels along her jaw.

"I think that's my line."

Ted abandons his groceries on the foyer floor to help her up to bed. Which, to his dismay, is an air mattress on the floor. Once she's settled, he returns to his groceries and seeks out the kitchen in the unfamiliar house.

Though this place suits her far better than Rupert's post-industrial house of horrors, it's pretty barren. Not even half lived in; a safe house more than a home. It makes him sad, but he has no doubt she'll make it her own in time.

He tries not to think about how she might fill the extra bedrooms.

By evening, Rebecca is able to keep her chicken broth down and is out like a light shortly after. Ted lies awake beside her all night, eyelids held hostage by worry. He anticipates she'll be ravenously hungry when she wakes up, so he quietly slides out of bed to prepare some of the plain bagels he bought.

Rebecca can tell something is off, of course. She doesn't know what's pressing on his tongue every time he opens his mouth, only that something is.

He wants to tell her, but he can't. He physically cannot make himself do it. But Rebecca doesn't ask, either. Not because she doesn't care, but because he doesn't think she can.

Because if she's…

He remembers what she'd confessed to him weeks ago.

I wanted children very badly, but when I started to understand who Rupert really was I thought it was good that we never reproduced because when we die, there will be no trace of us left on this earth.

Sometimes he sees himself in her so clearly it scares him.

What better way to castigate him for his failure to put to death that which is earthly in him than to show him his own reflection. It's always sent him running in the past.

But this time, he wouldn't only be running from himself.

Letting Rebecca be alone in this would be an unforgivable sin. He loves her too much to give into that temptation a second time.

When they hug in her foyer before going their separate ways for the day, it's hell to let her go.

Rebecca seems perpetually exhausted. No wonder since her sleep keeps getting interrupted by vivid nightmares. Ted thinks they might be sharing them because he snaps awake the second she does.

She doesn't complain about how cold she is, but she's always beneath a couple layers. Her appetite is downright unpredictable.

Ted worries over her constantly. And Ted's worry is a monstrous thing.

It's excruciating to be away from her for even a second. Her absence leaves him with an unbearable tightness in his chest as though she takes his oxygen supply with her when she goes. He misses her so badly it hurts. Alcohol might soothe the ache, but getting drunk is too great a risk. There's no reprieve until he's with her again.

Maybe it's some biological response to the idea their baby might be growing inside of her, but he doesn't think so. The baby is just that, an idea, but Rebecca is very real and she isn't well. More unwell, he suspects, than she's letting on.

Even when they're together, he isn't keen to let her out of his sight for long.

He knows it's not healthy. He knows it's obsessive. He knows he's being too much. What he doesn't know is how to stop.

Rebecca appears to tolerate it. Sometimes she seems just as needy. Two days ago she rucked up her pencil skirt and rode him on the landing within minutes of his arrival, the bannister groaning and bending ominously in her tight grip.

Having sex seems to be the only consistent way to shut it all out for both of them. Sometimes it feels like the only thing they have any control over at all.

She's going away with the team for the weekend, and he's not taking it well.

Rebecca's wrists are lashed to the bedpost with his cincture while he fucks her from behind.

The sight of her bound wrists, arched spine, flared hips and upturned ass shaped like a perfect heart overwhelms him. Sweat rolls down his back from the effort of maintaining this languid, loving rhythm he's got going. His strokes are achingly slow and precise, like he's pushing something precious deep, deep inside her.

"You're taking it so good, baby," he croons as her cunt tightens around him.

Rebecca bucks her hips back at the praise, trying to meet his thrust, but he goes completely still. She whines pathetically into the pillow, hips wiggling, muscles clenching, tempting him to move again.

Instead he drapes himself over her back, laying hot, open-mouthed kisses everywhere he can reach. His hands wander over her skin, ignoring that it's a little clammy, caressing her breasts and her belly on their way to her clit.

"Let me take care of you, okay?" he pleads.

She melts beneath him.

"Okay," she sighs.

Ted sinks his wet thumb between her ass cheeks, circling her hole while he fucks her hard like she's been begging him to for hours or years. Even though he's not ready for this to be over, he can't keep her tied to this bed forever. Nor would he ever want to. What he can do is make her feel good. Safe. Cared for.

Most of all, he wants to give her even a fraction of what she's given him.

After she comes on his cock a second time, she collapses bonelessly onto her belly. She glares at him when he starts to pull out.

"You're sure?" he asks. "Not too much?"

"Yes. No. I wish I could keep you inside of me forever."

Ted's stomach flutters.

Her cheeks flare pink. "I don't know why I said that."

"Did you mean it?" he asks, hoping very desperately that she did.

"Will it send you screaming out of the flat if I say yes?"

"No, sweetheart. I'm staying right here."

"Then…Yes."

If he wasn't such a damn coward, he would've spilled his heart to her right then.

The weekend comes and he's never been less prepared for mass. The blank page where his sermon notes should be stares mockingly back at him, but he can't even bring himself to care.

Nothing can shift his thoughts from Rebecca.

Ted has to talk himself down from getting on a train to Manchester more than once.

Rebecca won't be alone this weekend. She's sharing a hotel room with Keeley. Beard is nearby. He repeats these facts until the panic dulls.

Maybe he's not drinking anymore, but he feels like he's traded one addiction for another. He recognizes the guilt that follows pleasure. The shame of indulgence. The insatiable desire for more. He wants her so badly that no amount of time with her ever feels like enough.

He's absolutely out of his goddamn mind.

So he decides to at least channel this cuckoo for cocoa puffs energy into something productive.

Rebecca gave him a spare key to the townhouse and told him he was welcome to stay while she was gone.

So Ted goes to the supermarket. He stocks her penurious kitchen with basic cooking supplies. Bakes a tray of biscuits. Then he cooks a big batch of basic chicken and vegetable soup, divides it into individual bags, and shoves them in her freezer.

Her garden is choked with dead foliage, so he spends a few hours in the cold clearing it out. Working with his hands helps settle his mind.

Maybe he could plant some flowers here when it's warm enough. Imagining her sipping tea in a garden bursting with sweet peas nearly makes him cry.

This long winter will end, and Rebecca's life will bloom into something beautiful.

Ted indulges in the possibility that he might be a part of it.

"Tea," he'd say, offering the mug, "and Ted," he'd add, offering his lips. She'd roll her eyes but accept both with a smile.

They would start every morning just like this. A ritual. Faith is practiced through repetition. So is pleasure. So is love.

He's content to leave it like that, but he allows himself, only for a moment, to imagine what else—or who else might grow here.

Ted doesn't sleep.

The next morning, he stands before his congregation and speaks words, and they must make some sense because nobody yanks him from the pulpit with a crook or throws a tomato at him.

When he removes his clerical collar, it's without knowing if he'll ever put it back on again.

He stays in the church until sunset, sitting in his favorite pew, thumb tracing their initials scratched into the wood, and waits for the sanctuary to turn red.

Ted walks to the altar with lumbering steps and falls to his knees before it.

"'Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.'"

The last word is hardly off his lips when his phone vibrates.

Made it back.

Ted runs.

Rebecca seems surprised by his quick arrival. She's still wearing her long, pale pink coat when he crosses the threshold and wraps her into a tight hug, breathing her in like oxygen. Ted hadn't gone anywhere, yet he still feels like he's coming home.

"God, am I glad to see you."

"I missed you, too, love."

Her face looks drawn.

"You feeling okay?" he asks, cradling her face. She flinches. Barely. Enough that he drops his hands.

"I'm hungry."

"Want some soup?"

Rebecca frowns. "Soup?"

"Yeah. Made loads."

"You…I didn't know you could make soup."

"No, yeah, that's fair. But there's this magical thing called the internet. Heard of it?"

Rebecca smiles. It wobbles, then disappears.

But she clears two bowls of soup and half a baguette like a pro.

"Are you pregnant?" he blurts out.

Shit.

Rebecca looks at him. Not with shock or anger, but something indeterminate that he can't quite read.

"I don't know," she answers primly. "I wouldn't trust a home test so early on, so I'm waiting for lab results. The NHS is never in any hurry."

"Oh."

"That's all you've got to say about it?"

"No. Sorry, I…" He rubs a circle on his chest. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know. I told you I wanted children, but…That was a long time ago. I haven't given it much thought, frankly. Not worth having a crisis when it could be much ado about…" Rebecca's gaze flicks to his hand. "Are you okay? I know I should've told you sooner seeing as it'd be your baby, too. In case there was any doubt…"

Her voice sounds very far away.

Ted's ribs feel like they're caving inward. He squeezes his eyes shut but all he sees are red and blue lights swimming behind his lids.

"Ted?"

His eyes open.

"There's something I need to confess," he says.

Chapter Text

"Should I put on one of your black robe-y things, or…" Rebecca trails off, noticing, perhaps, that Ted has gone very still. "Ted?"

"I'm sorry," he exhales. "I'm making this about me when you're the one who…You've probably got so much on your mind already. I don't wanna add to it."

Rebecca frowns. "If you're trying to back out of telling me…whatever it is, just say so. Don't use me and my feelings as an excuse," she says sternly.

The sharpness in her tone displaces his anxiety for a moment. Long enough for him to marvel at the way Rebecca can cut right through all his layers of bullshit without causing any lasting damage.

"I'm scared," he admits in a small voice, but it fails to contain how big the feeling is. "Because after I tell you this, you…You might decide you don't want this with me."

Rebecca isn't swayed.

"I'll be the judge of that."

Lightning flashes outside Rebecca's living room window. The blue dark flinches, then settles menacingly back into place.

Ted's heart beats twice as loud in the silence. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, he counts, tapping a buzzing finger against his thigh. The thunder growls on eight Mississippi. One less than last time. The storm is closing in.

The next burst of lightning draws Rebecca's face towards the window. Lights her up like a marble statue.

An old memory resurfaces. He'd been crossing the Ponte Sant'Angelo on his first and only visit to Rome, staring up in awe at an enormous statue of an angel, its face turned upward like Rebecca's is now, and feeling like it might, at any second, take flight.

The inscription on the statue's plinth read: Vulnerasti cor meum, or, you have wounded my heart.

He hadn't thought much about it at the time. Hadn't wanted to, maybe. But it swells up in him now with a fury. It comes from the Song of Solomon, excerpts of which Rebecca had recited to him not long ago.

The English Bible translated vulnerasti not as wounded, but as ravished or captivated.

You have ravished my heart.

You have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes.

Rebecca's attention snaps back to him as though he'd spoken the words aloud.

Ted wanted to believe that they were meant to find each other. He wanted to believe it because if Rebecca had a choice, surely she wouldn't choose a broken thing like him. She'd choose someone worthy of her, not a guy who's spent so much of his life not even feeling worthy of the air he breathes.

Ted's knees hit the floor. It's the only way he can even begin to feel like he's on her level.

A hand falls softly into his hair. Rebecca's hand. He blinks his eyes open to find her kneeling on the floor. His mirror.

"No, c'mon," Ted says, "You don't belong down here with me."

"Oh, my love," Rebecca croons, smiling, "I was here first."

She cups his jaw, cradling him like he's precious. Like he's worthy of her care, of her gentleness. Selfishly, he lets her. He soaks in the feeling, hoping he'll still remember what it felt like when she understands that he isn't.

A familiar, penetrating warmth he hasn't felt in so long flows into the very depths of him and it pulls the hideous truth of his soul out.

"I killed my son."

Ted expects horror. Judgment. He expects her to drop her hands and back away, turn around and abandon him here on the floor. Damn him to an eternity of begging for forgiveness that will never come.

But Rebecca’s voice is just as gentle as the brush of her thumb across his cheek when she says, “Tell me."

Ted sucks in a shuddering breath.

"It happened, uh, almost nineteen years ago. I was engaged. My fianceé, Michelle…She was six months pregnant. We got in this fight, you see. A real bad one. Can't even remember about what anymore." He scoffs at himself. "I made her so mad, she got in the car and left. I let her even though the weather was bad. I should've…I wish I'd…There was an accident. She survived, but the baby…"

A sob rises in his throat.

"Ted…" There's far too much sympathy in the way she shapes his name. "You couldn't possibly…That isn't your fault."

Ted ignores this. She doesn't understand. He pushes forward, even as his field of vision is flooded by swirling red and blue lights.

"After she left, I drank until I passed out on the sofa. Got woken up by the police nearly busting down my door. Michelle was still under when I got to the hospital, so I…"

His eyes burn. He drives the heel of his palm into his eye socket.

"I, uh, found out he was a boy before she did."

"I'm so, so sorry."

There's a sheen in Rebecca's eyes that makes him feel sick to his stomach.

"No, no, no, you don't…"

Ted's throat closes up, his own body rebelling against him. He's come this far, but he could just accept Rebecca's sympathy knowing that he doesn't deserve it. Once she has all of him, she surely won't want to keep him.

But he can't lie to her. Not since the first time they met. Not when they might…

So he keeps pulling himself open, no matter how badly it hurts.

"Michelle didn't think she could get pregnant, so when it happened by accident, she called it a miracle. Everyone did. But things hadn't been…good between us. For longer than I wanted to admit. I was terrified I was gonna lose her, and I'd finally given her something that made her happy. I wanted to be happy, too, so…I tried. I swear, I tried." The sob he'd been holding back finally punches out of him. "But I didn't want kids. Maybe God doesn't visit the sins of the father upon the child, but I knew I would. That must've been why He took him so soon. To…to save him. From me."

He hears an aborted sound catch in Rebecca's throat, but he can't bear to meet her eye.

"When the doctor told me that he…I felt this weight lift off my chest," he confesses. Ted gathers the soft cashmere of her sweater in his hands, needy and childlike. "My son died and I was relieved. What does that make me?"

Michelle didn't cry when he told her their son was gone. Her blue eyes had frosted over with a cold burning hatred that never thawed.

Almost a year ago, he saw her again. They hadn't spoken since the day she was discharged from the hospital, but there she was, in his Kansas church, on their son's eighteenth birthday. Michelle probably didn't think he knew that, but Ted lit a candle for him every year.

He'd vainly hoped enough time had passed that they might be able to…He wasn't sure. Reconcile? Find some semblance of peace? But time hadn't diminished that hatred. Even though it paled in comparison to what was in his soul, it still burned his skin when she said:

"I have to tell you something. Tim and I are having a baby. I'm so blessed, you know. He really was made to be a father. Some men just are."

No amount of alcohol drowned out her words, so he tried distance. And somehow he'd ended up here, asking Rebecca the question he'd been dragging behind him for nearly two decades. The one he's never voiced for fear of what the answer would surely be.

Rebecca tries to tip his head upward, but he resists.

"Look at me."

He can't do it. Seeing that same hatred reflected in Rebecca's eyes…He'd rather die.

"Please," she pleads softly.

Slowly, fearfully, he raises his eyes. But it's not hatred he finds there. Of course it isn't.

"It makes you human, Ted."

The words hit him like physical pain. Ted recoils like he's been burned, his brain screaming at him to run.

But Rebecca is on him before he can move. Crushing him to her chest. A strong hand curls around the back of his neck, the other, his spine. It feels like she's trying to pull him into her. Inside her. Hug him with her ribcage rather than her arms.

The fight goes out of him. His eyes slip shut and he surrenders to her embrace.

"You are forgiven," she whispers into his skin. Rebecca kisses his forehead. "You are forgiven." This time, his temple.

Again, she presses the words into his skin. Again, she seals them with a kiss. Patiently, reverently. She won't stop until he believes her. Even if it takes an eternity.

But Rebecca has always given him something to believe in. And in her, his faith is unwavering.

"I am forgiven," he sobs.

Something unfurls in his chest and takes flight. He feels the brush of a feather against his tear-stained cheek. Or maybe he just imagines that he does. He can't make sense of anything but the soft patter of rain against the window.

Rebecca, his sanctuary, holds him while he weeps.

For his son. For his father. For himself.

Ted sleeps for a long time. Possibly for days. Maybe even years.

There's an annoying beeping sound coming from somewhere near him. It seems to go on forever. He jolts awake, panicky, terrified that Rebecca is gone. But she isn't. She's twisting in his arms, reaching across him to shut off her alarm. Once the sound dies, she settles back into his frame. A gentle, lulling pressure against his chest.

"Go back to sleep, love. I'm not going anywhere," she murmurs.

Rebecca keeps her promise.

The next time he wakes up, it's with a growling stomach and aching muscles. Throat raw from crying and thirst. The inconvenient, mild agony pulls a low groan out of him.

"Good morning," Rebecca says, amused.

He finds her on the floor beside the air mattress, stretching out her back on a yoga mat.

"There's pizza on the way."

"Pizza?" Ted, disoriented, sounds out the word slowly.

"You slept like a teenager. It's half-past four."

"Jesus," he exhales. "Sorry."

"Don't be," she says, rolling onto her hip, "Gave me an excuse to have a bit of a lie-in. Not sure I've slept that well in…Well, possibly ever. Couldn't stay on the air mattress another second, though, so I've been puttering about."

"You…You've been here all day?"

"I skipped work." Rebecca shrugs with one shoulder, grinning. "Don't tell my boss."

"Shoot. I think I maybe just did."

The needs of his mortal body demand his attention, so he rolls out of bed. Sluggish. Sore. But energized. Especially after a shower and a couple slices of pizza.

It isn't until they're cozied up on the sofa, some comedy game show playing softly on the TV, and Rebecca pointedly asks, "How are you feeling?" that he really remembers last night wasn't a dream.

Ted wonders if he should feel different in some profound, indescribable way. If confessing his deepest secret to Rebecca should've shed the guilt like fat from his body. He thinks for one stupid second about lifting his t-shirt to see if he miraculously developed an eight-pack. But it's nothing so acute. Or obvious.

But there is…something different. It feels the same as when he'd stood in Rebecca's garden. Like possibility.

Ted's lips tug up into a smile.

"Pretty good. There might be something to this confession business after all."

Rebecca gives him a flat look.

"Nah. I guess…I feel like I made the right choice."

This earns him a hum of approval. His belly flutters a little. Turns out he's still hungry for praise.

"You?"

"I'm not pregnant," she says calmly, "I got the results while you were asleep."

Ted's stomach lurches, then settles somewhere he can't locate.

"Forgive me for being crass, but is this a 'sorry' or a 'yay' kinda situation?"

Rebecca smiles sadly. "I think it's both."

Ted pulls her into his lap, curling his arm around her hip. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. Congratulations."

She snorts a laugh. Drops her head into the crook of his neck.

"Talk to me," he says, smoothing his hand up and down her spine.

"Had I been, I finally would've been able to petition for divorce on the grounds of infidelity. My own," she says sardonically.

"What about, uh, the woman you told me about? The pregnant one? Ain't she walking proof that Rupert was unfaithful before you were?"

"Yes, but…I couldn't bear the thought of making her the face of a scandal. She and her baby deserve a shot at a life unmarred by Rupert Mannion. If I can give that to them, I will."

"You deserve it, too, for what it's worth. You're so brave, baby. Doing the right thing even when you stand to lose more than you gain."

Rebecca presses a kiss to the inside of his palm. She keeps hold of his hand, tracing her thumbnail along his heartline.

"I would've lost a lot. Maybe everything. I know I should say money doesn't matter to me, but I am who I am. Destitution doesn't flatter my figure." Ted grins. Gives her hip a squeeze. "But I do care more about the club than his money." Rebecca sighs. "I want to scrape his name off every fucking inch of that place for good and put mine in its place. Welton, that is. My family founded that club, you know."

"I'd heard." Ted smiles, hearing the pride in her voice. "You really want it for real?" She hadn't been so keen on the place last autumn.

"Yes," she affirms. "God help me, but yes."

"Sexy," he murmurs.

Rebecca boops the tip of his nose, then she falls silent, worrying the inside of her cheek.

"When I started to suspect I might be pregnant, I…I suppose I realized I rather like my life right now. My work, my friends, my…you. I know it's far from ideal, but even all the fucked parts feel worth it. Because these past few months, my life has felt like mine. It never has before."

Warmth spreads through him at the thought that he belongs to a life that feels like hers.

"I'm not sure I'm ready to give it up yet. Getting pregnant. Having a baby. It would've knocked me off balance just when I was starting to find my feet. I know that's probably selfish, but—"

"No, Rebecca. It ain't. At least not the kind of selfish you should feel bad about."

"Well, thank you, but I was going to say, on the other hand, getting knocked off balance isn't so bad if you're the one picking me back up."

"Even…Even after what I told you?"

"Even then. I didn't know, of course. Not specifically. But I had this…feeling, I suppose, ever since you told me about your panic attack on Christmas Eve. It made more sense after you told me about your father, but I still suspected a piece was missing."

The little boy who'd fallen asleep in his father's arms. His thoughts had been so muddled as the panic started to pull him under, but he remembers now what he'd pushed away then. Grief for his own father, yes, but grief for his lost son that guilt prevented him from feeling. Like he had no right to it.

That's the difference, he realizes. Now he feels like he does.

"How would you feel about it now? Having children, I mean?"

"I think I'd be okay either way. As long as either way's got you."

Rebecca gives a tentative, almost hopeful smile. She touches her forehead to his.

They're dancing dangerously close to something. Something that would change everything.

"What about you?" Ted asks, nudging them even closer.

"I…" Rebecca makes a glottal sound like she's fighting her words back down. Trying again. "Well. We don't have to worry about it right now, do we?"

They have time, he reminds himself. They deserve this moment of peace.

"No, baby." He drops a kiss on her clavicle. Breathes her in, slow and deep. He feels settled. Still. Nowhere else but here. "Right now, we don't gotta worry about a thing."