[ Here's the juicy little secret, the thing they don't tell you in Catechism, in your entire blessed lifetime: you are all. fucking. damned. That's the entire premise of grace and salvation, isn't it? You had to be a wretched piece of shit, or else the magic just isn't there. Graves knows that to his bones, of course -- being a priest lets you be two things: a holier-than-thou motherfucker (sometimes not literally, it all depends on how much you like the Madonna, and no, not the singer) or someone who's acutely aware of what's coming for you and it isn't seventy two virgins and a big house in the clouds. No, your destination's way down south.
Graves is very carefully neither, but he has his duties and his obligations (even if he sometimes doubts there's anyone out there at all), and he fulfills his duties with a severity and tenacity that will shame even the most hardened Puritans. But he's not without weakness, especially not when the biggest one comes in the form of a lanky, tall, and hunched young man with fine cheekbones and a generous mouth, with a general disposition that suggests that his mother keeps him firmly under her thumb, and cruelly so.
Credence Barebone. Graves is inexplicably kinder to him, for reasons that he's evidently realizing -- reasons aren't all platonically altruistic, reasons that have everything to do with the shy flutter of those eyelashes, the occasional pursing of those lips, the shy, awkwardly ardent nature of Credence's overtures. There is no doubt about it, the boy is both beautiful and tortured, which is all the more personally perplexing when Graves has historically never been inclined to favor any of those things.
Things get steadily worse when Graves wakes at night, mired in obscenely sensuous dreams, self-control shot to pieces by the threads of desire, need, because God made man and God made him so fucking flawed that he prays when he wraps his hand around his cock and he prays when he thinks of Credence's mouth around his dick, of him sinking deep into that tight, tight hole and he prays when he comes in a whisper of his name, buried in sin.
He's damned. Of course he is.
He asks for forgiveness the first six, seven, eight times it happens. Nine onwards, there's no 'first' anymore, and he stops asking. He lets it sit with him, this filthy little thing, this hobgoblin of the soul that reminds him how he wants more than anything to fuck Credence Barebone into the mattress, and on occasion he's half-certain Credence knows, that perhaps lust has a smell to it that he's already picked up, especially today. Graves doesn't miss the anxiety during this particular lesson, and when he excuses himself the priest gives him a grace period of four, five minutes.
He enters the empty bathroom on the sixth, surprised to see him there instead of locked away in a stall. ]
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Graves is very carefully neither, but he has his duties and his obligations (even if he sometimes doubts there's anyone out there at all), and he fulfills his duties with a severity and tenacity that will shame even the most hardened Puritans. But he's not without weakness, especially not when the biggest one comes in the form of a lanky, tall, and hunched young man with fine cheekbones and a generous mouth, with a general disposition that suggests that his mother keeps him firmly under her thumb, and cruelly so.
Credence Barebone. Graves is inexplicably kinder to him, for reasons that he's evidently realizing -- reasons aren't all platonically altruistic, reasons that have everything to do with the shy flutter of those eyelashes, the occasional pursing of those lips, the shy, awkwardly ardent nature of Credence's overtures. There is no doubt about it, the boy is both beautiful and tortured, which is all the more personally perplexing when Graves has historically never been inclined to favor any of those things.
Things get steadily worse when Graves wakes at night, mired in obscenely sensuous dreams, self-control shot to pieces by the threads of desire, need, because God made man and God made him so fucking flawed that he prays when he wraps his hand around his cock and he prays when he thinks of Credence's mouth around his dick, of him sinking deep into that tight, tight hole and he prays when he comes in a whisper of his name, buried in sin.
He's damned. Of course he is.
He asks for forgiveness the first six, seven, eight times it happens. Nine onwards, there's no 'first' anymore, and he stops asking. He lets it sit with him, this filthy little thing, this hobgoblin of the soul that reminds him how he wants more than anything to fuck Credence Barebone into the mattress, and on occasion he's half-certain Credence knows, that perhaps lust has a smell to it that he's already picked up, especially today. Graves doesn't miss the anxiety during this particular lesson, and when he excuses himself the priest gives him a grace period of four, five minutes.
He enters the empty bathroom on the sixth, surprised to see him there instead of locked away in a stall. ]
Are you all right?