Forced into the priesthood by his father, Father Jean Gagnon could not resist the temptation of the novices from the local convent, who came to confess their desires in his confessional.
The confessional smelled of old wood and stale incense, a scent I had come to associate with the slow, suffocating death of my own desires. Father Jean Gagnon, they called me now. Twenty-five years old, ordained barely six months, and already I knew the weight of a collar I had never wanted around my neck.
My fingers worried the rough fabric of my cassock as I sat in the darkness, listening to the shuffle of feet beyond the carved screen. Another penitent. Another soul to absolve while my own festered in silence.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
The voice was young. Female. The high, clear tone of a novice from the convent attached to our parish—I had learned to recognize them now, the slight tremor in their words, the way they paused before certain admissions as if testing the air for judgment.
“How long has it been since your last confession?” The words came automatically, worn smooth by repetition.
“One week, Father.”
One week. They came every week, these young women, these brides of Christ who had been shipped north by families too poor or too pious to keep them. Some arrived with genuine vocation burning in their hearts. Others arrived because they had been given no choice.
I understood that second group far too well.
“What weighs upon your heart, my child?”
A pause. The wood of the kneeler creaked as she shifted her weight. Through the screen I could see only the outline of her veil, the pale suggestion of a face.
“I have had... impure thoughts, Father.”
My stomach clenched. Here it was again—the litany of desires that these young women poured into my ears while I sat in the suffocating dark, my own body betraying me with every word they spoke.
“Impure thoughts are the devil’s distraction,” I said, the rote response hollow even to my own ears. “But to resist them is to grow in virtue. Tell me of these thoughts, that I might help you find strength against them.”
Another pause. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped to barely a whisper.
“They are about you, Father.”
The air left my lungs.
I gripped the armrest of my chair, my knuckles going white in the darkness. This was not the first time—God help me, it was not even the fifth—but each confession of this nature struck me like a physical blow.
“You must understand,” I said, my voice rougher than I intended, “that the vows I have taken, the vows you have taken—they are sacred. These thoughts are a temptation sent to test your devotion.”
“Yes, Father.” But there was something in her tone that suggested she was not entirely convinced.
“You must pray. You must turn your mind to holy things when these thoughts arise. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Father.”
I gave her penance—rote prayers, a litany of Hail Marys—and listened to the rustle of her habit as she rose and departed. Only when the door clicked shut did I allow myself to exhale, my body slumping against the hard wooden back of the chair.
Beneath my cassock, my cock throbbed with insistent, shameful life.
I did not leave the confessional immediately. I could not. Not with the evidence of my own weakness pressing against the heavy black fabric, demanding acknowledgment I refused to give. Instead, I sat in the darkness, my eyes squeezed shut, and thought of the home I had left behind.
Thirteen children. I was the youngest, the final burden my mother had borne before age and exhaustion had stilled her womb. Three of my sisters had already taken the veil by the time I was old enough to understand what that meant for me. My brothers had scattered—to the factories of Montreal, to the lumber camps of the north, to marriages that produced grandchildren my father could boast about to his neighbors.
“It’s good for the family’s reputation to have a priest.”
My father’s voice echoed in my memory as clearly as if he stood beside me. He had said those words while driving me to the Grand Seminary of Montreal, his weathered hands gripping the reins of our old horse, his eyes fixed on the road ahead rather than on the son he was abandoning to a life of celibate service.
I had wanted to be a teacher. Or perhaps a farmer—something that would let me work with my hands under an open sky, something that would let me find a wife and raise children of my own choosing. But the youngest son of a large Catholic family had no such choices. The youngest son belonged to the Church, a living tithe offered up by parents who had already given too many children to too many causes. The Grand Seminary had been six years of Latin and theology, of cold dormitories and colder silences, of learning to suppress every natural urge until I hardly recognized myself in the mirror. I had emerged with a collar around my neck and a hollow ache in my chest, assigned to this remote parish in northern Quebec where the winters lasted eight months and the only women I would ever speak to were nuns. Nuns who, it seemed, had desires of their own.
My erection had subsided enough for me to stand. I adjusted my cassock with practiced movements and stepped out of the confessional into the dim light of the church. The vaulted ceiling soared above me, painted saints and angels watching with impassive eyes. What would they think, I wondered, if they could see the thoughts that plagued their servant?
The parish was small—perhaps three hundred souls scattered across farms that stretched toward the distant treeline. On Sundays the pews filled with weathered farmers and their equally weathered wives, with children who fidgeted through my sermons and infants who wailed during the consecration. During the week, only the nuns came.
The convent attached to the parish housed thirty sisters and a novitiate of fifteen young women. They were the ones who filled my confessional day after day, their whispered sins painting a picture of life behind convent walls that bore little resemblance to the holy retreat my imagination had conjured.
Masturbation. Sex toys fashioned from candles and polished wood. Lesbian encounters between novices and the older nuns who were meant to guide them in virtue. And always, always the confessions of those who had been forced into the habit against their will, who burned with desires they had been told were sinful but could not extinguish.
I had come to know them by their voices. The hesitant one who always began with a long silence. The defiant one who spoke of her sins with something approaching pride. The tearful one who seemed perpetually on the verge of breaking. And now, increasingly, the ones who whispered that their impure thoughts centered on me.
Confession is supposed to be confidential. I knew this—knew it with the certainty of my theological training, with the weight of centuries of Church teaching. But confession is not anonymous. Through the carved screen, voices carry identifying marks. A particular cadence. A distinctive accent. The way certain words are shaped by certain mouths. And I had begun to note, almost against my will, which of the novices admitted to desiring me.
Some of them were beautiful, from what I could see beneath their veils and shapeless habits. Pale skin. Bright eyes that flickered toward me during Mass with something more than spiritual hunger. Young bodies that moved with unconscious grace through the rituals of their daily prayers.
I was a priest. I had taken vows. But I was also a man of twenty-five years, and the flesh does not forget its nature simply because we drape it in black.
The weeks passed, and I developed a routine that felt almost sustainable. I celebrated Mass each morning for the nuns, said the weekly Masses for the parishioners, performed the occasional wedding or baptism or funeral, and spent long hours in my study reading books that did nothing to quiet my restless mind.
The presbytery was a modest two-story building attached to the church by a covered walkway. It had been built fifty years earlier by the parish’s first priest, a Frenchman who had apparently believed that austerity was the surest path to salvation. The floors were bare wood, the walls unadorned plaster, the furniture heavy and dark and uncomfortable. My bedroom contained a narrow bed, a washstand, and a crucifix that seemed to watch me with particular attention during my weakest moments.
But it was the cleaning that brought the novices into my space.
Each week, a group of them came to scrub the church floors and polish the altar and wash the vestments. Two of them, always two, were sent to the presbytery to clean my living quarters. The Mother Superior had explained the arrangement during my first week at the parish, her sharp eyes missing nothing as she outlined the duties of the nuns under her charge.
“It is a reward or a penance,” she had said when I asked how the novices were chosen. “A reward for those who like cleaning and a penance for those who do not.”
I had nodded, pretending I understood. In truth, I understood nothing about the way women thought—not the Mother Superior with her iron-gray hair and her knowing eyes, not the novices with their whispered confessions and their hidden desires.
But I had begun to pay attention. I had begun to remember names.
Sister Jeanne Perron. I had heard her confession three times, each one franker than the last. She spoke of her body with a kind of wondering shame, as if she could not quite believe the things it wanted. She spoke of touching herself at night, of the way her thoughts drifted toward the young priest who said Mass each morning, of dreams she could not control.
Sister Émilie Nadeau. Her voice was softer, more hesitant, but her confessions were no less damning. She had been sent to the convent by an uncle who had no use for an orphaned niece. She did not want to be a nun—had never wanted it—and her desires burned all the hotter for being so thoroughly suppressed.
I asked for them by name.
It was a Thursday afternoon in late September when I walked to the convent and requested an audience with the Mother Superior. The leaves were beginning to turn on the maples that lined the parish road, splashes of red and gold against the gray sky. Winter was coming, as it always did in this northern country, and I felt a strange urgency building in my chest.
The Mother Superior received me in her office, a sparse room that smelled of beeswax and old paper. She was a tall woman, broad-shouldered, with a face that had been handsome in youth and had hardened into something formidable with age.
“Father Gagnon.” She did not rise from behind her desk. “What brings you to our humble convent?”
“I wished to speak with you about the novices who clean the presbytery.”
Her eyebrows rose slightly. “Has their work been unsatisfactory?”
“Quite the opposite.” I kept my voice steady, my expression mild. “Sisters Jeanne and Émilie in particular have been doing remarkable work. I wished to commend them, and to request that they be assigned to the presbytery on a regular basis.”
The Mother Superior studied me for a long moment. Her eyes were the color of winter slate, and they seemed to see far more than I wished to reveal.
“Sister Jeanne Perron and Sister Émilie Nadeau,” she said slowly. “They are both young. Both quite new to the novitiate.”
“Is that a difficulty?”
“Not at all.” A smile touched the corners of her mouth, there and gone so quickly I might have imagined it. “If their work pleases you, Father, then by all means they shall continue. It is good for novices to feel useful.”
I thanked her and departed, my heart beating faster than the brief conversation warranted. I had done nothing wrong—had said nothing that could be construed as improper—and yet I felt as though I had set something in motion that I could not call back.
The following Wednesday, a knock sounded at the presbytery door.
I opened it to find two young women standing on my doorstep, their hands folded inside their sleeves, their eyes downcast in proper humility. Sister Jeanne was the taller of the two, with a dusting of freckles across her pale cheeks and a strand of copper hair escaping from beneath her white coif. Sister Émilie stood half a step behind her, smaller, darker, her black hair pulled so tightly back that it seemed to stretch the skin at her temples.
“We have come to clean, Father,” Jeanne said. Her voice was the one from the confessional—I recognized it immediately, that slight tremor, that barely suppressed breathlessness.
“Come in.” I stepped aside, gesturing them through the doorway.
They moved past me in a rustle of wool and starch, their habits brushing against my cassock. The scent of them reached me—plain soap and something else, something warmer beneath the clean surface. Émilie’s eyes flickered up to meet mine for just an instant, dark and frightened and hungry, before dropping again.
I closed the door.
For a long moment we stood in the entryway, the silence stretching between us like a held breath. I could hear the ticking of the clock in my study, the distant murmur of wind through the eaves. Somewhere in the church, the other novices would be beginning their own cleaning duties, supervised by the older nun who had accompanied them.
I had perhaps two hours before anyone thought to check on my guests.
“I know what you have confessed,” I said.
The words fell into the silence like stones into still water. Jeanne’s head came up sharply, her green eyes widening. Émilie made a small sound—a gasp, quickly stifled.
“Father, I—” Jeanne began, but I raised a hand to stop her.
“You have told me of your desires. In the confessional. You have spoken of things that would see you cast out of the convent if anyone else knew.” I paused, letting the weight of my knowledge settle over them. “And I have asked for you specifically. Did you wonder why?”
Émilie’s hands were trembling. I could see the fine vibration in her fingers where they clutched the fabric of her habit. “Father, if we have offended you—”
“You have not offended me.” My voice came out rougher than I intended. “You have done quite the opposite. I am a priest, but I am also a man. A man who was forced into this life against his will, just as some of you were forced into yours.”
Jeanne’s lips parted. A question formed in her eyes, something between hope and terror.
“I have desires of my own,” I continued. “Desires I have confessed to no one. Desires that keep me awake at night while I listen to the wind and wonder if I will spend the rest of my life alone in this cold country.”
The ticking of the clock seemed very loud now. Outside, a crow called harshly from the bare branches of a maple tree.
“If you wish to act on those desires,” I said, “now is the time. I will not force you. I will not coerce you. If you prefer, you may simply begin your cleaning duties and forget we ever had this conversation. No one will know. No one will ever hear of it from my lips.”
I spread my hands, a gesture of openness, of vulnerability.
“But if you wish it—if you truly wish it—then I am willing to show you what it means to be desired by a man who wants you.”
The silence stretched. Jeanne looked at Émilie. Émilie looked at Jeanne. Something passed between them—a communication I could not interpret, a silent conference conducted in the language of shared secrets and shared fears.
Then Jeanne turned back to me. Her cheeks were flushed, a deep rose color that spread down her throat and disappeared beneath the high collar of her habit. Her eyes, when they met mine, were bright with something that looked very much like relief.
“How do we do this?” she asked.
I exhaled slowly. “Take off your clothes.”
They helped each other.
It was not what I had expected—not the hurried, fumbling removal I had imagined during my sleepless nights. Instead, they turned to one another with the practiced ease of women who had dressed and undressed together many times before. Jeanne’s fingers found the buttons at the back of Émilie’s habit, working them loose with steady precision. Émilie reached up to unpin Jeanne’s veil, her small hands gentle as she lifted the white fabric away.
The habits fell first. Heavy black wool puddling at their feet, revealing plain cotton shifts beneath. Then the shifts, lifted over their heads in a whisper of fabric. Then the undergarments—simple white cotton, functional rather than decorative, but somehow more erotic for their very plainness.
They stood before me naked, and I forgot how to breathe.
Jeanne Perron was beautiful in the way that paintings of Eve were beautiful—rounded and ripe and suffused with the warm glow of mortal flesh. Her hair, freed from its pins, fell past her shoulders in a cascade of copper and gold, catching the pale autumn light that filtered through my windows. Her breasts were round and firm, sitting high on her chest with the proud lift of youth. They were full enough to fill my hands, the nipples a soft pink that darkened as I watched, tightening in the cool air of the presbytery. Her waist curved inward above hips that flared gently, and between her thighs a small patch of fiery pubic hair gleamed like a brand against the cream of her skin.
Her bottom was rounded and full, the cheeks meeting her thighs in a smooth curve that invited the palm. When she shifted her weight from one foot to the other—nervous, perhaps, or simply aware of my gaze—the flesh of her buttocks moved with a subtle, hypnotic sway.
Émilie Nadeau was her opposite in every particular. Where Jeanne was rounded and womanly, Émilie was small and almost boyishly slim, her body barely curved enough to distinguish her from a child. She stood five feet tall if she stood an inch, her bones delicate beneath skin that seemed almost translucent in the pale light. Her breasts were small and conical, barely more than handfuls, with nipples that stood out prominently—swollen and dark and already hard, as if her body had anticipated this moment long before her mind had consented.
Her pubic hair was a neat triangle of black, as dark as the hair on her head and just as silky. Her bottom was small and firm, the cheeks tight with the muscle of a young woman who spent her days on her knees scrubbing floors. There was something vulnerable about her nakedness, something that made me want to shield her even as I planned to take her.
I approached them slowly, the floorboards creaking beneath my weight. They did not move. Did not flinch. Did not cover themselves, though I saw Émilie’s hands twitch at her sides as if the impulse to hide was difficult to suppress.
I touched Jeanne first.
My hand settled on her hip, the skin warm and smooth beneath my palm. She shivered at the contact, a tremor that ran through her entire body like wind across water. I let my hand slide upward, tracing the curve of her waist, the ridge of her ribs, until I cupped the weight of her breast.
It was softer than I had imagined. Heavier. The flesh yielded to my touch, molding itself to the shape of my hand as if it had been waiting for this contact. I brushed my thumb across her nipple and felt it tighten further, puckering into a hard peak.
“Ah—” The sound escaped her lips before she could stop it, a soft exhalation of breath that was almost a moan.
I turned to Émilie.
She flinched when I touched her—not in fear, but in anticipation. Her skin was cooler than Jeanne’s, or perhaps that was simply the contrast of her darker coloring against the pale autumn light. Her breast fit entirely in my palm, the conical shape pressing into my hand with a firmness that surprised me. Her nipple was larger in proportion than Jeanne’s, the dark areola puckered and tight.
“Have you ever been touched like this before?” I asked.
Émilie shook her head mutely. Her eyes were huge in her small face, dark pools of apprehension and want.
“And you, Jeanne?”
“No, Father.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Not by a man.”
I let my hand drop from Émilie’s breast and trail lower, across the flat plane of her stomach, through the neat triangle of dark hair, until my fingers found the warm cleft between her thighs. She gasped as I touched her there—a sharp intake of breath that made her small breasts rise and fall.
She was wet already. The folds of her sex were slick beneath my fingers, parting easily as I traced the shape of her. I found her opening and let one finger press gently inward, feeling the tight heat of her clench around the intrusion.
“Mmmph—” Émilie bit her lip, her hips jerking involuntarily.
I withdrew my hand and moved it to Jeanne. She was wetter still—her thighs were already slick with the evidence of her arousal, and when I slipped a finger inside her she moaned openly, a low sound that vibrated in the quiet room.
“You are both ready,” I said. “But before we begin, I have something to arrange. You will begin your cleaning duties now. Naked. I will return in a few minutes.”
They stared at me. The request was absurd—improper beyond measure—and yet neither of them protested. Something in their expressions suggested they had already surrendered control to me, had already placed themselves in my hands with a trust that made my chest ache.
“Go,” I said gently. “Begin your work. I will not be long.”
They moved toward the kitchen, their bare feet silent on the wooden floor. I watched them go—Jeanne’s rounded bottom swaying, Émilie’s small, firm cheeks tight with tension—and then I turned and walked out the door toward the church.
The cold air hit my face like a slap, sobering me. My erection, which had been pressing insistently against my cassock, began to subside as I crossed the covered walkway and entered the church proper. Inside, the other novices were scattered through the pews with rags and buckets, their habits rustling as they worked.
The sister in charge—Sister Marie-Claire, a stout woman in her fifties with a face like a hatchet—looked up at my entrance.
“Father Gagnon. Is something wrong?”
“I made a mess at the presbytery,” I said, the lie coming easily. “Nothing serious, but it will take Sisters Jeanne and Émilie longer than usual to complete their work. I wanted to inform you so there would be no concern.”
Sister Marie-Claire nodded briskly. “Send them back when they are finished. The Lord’s work does not wait.”
No, I thought. But perhaps the devil’s does.
I returned to the presbytery with my heart beating faster than the brief walk warranted. The door swung shut behind me, closing out the cold air and the gray sky and the world that would condemn what I was about to do.
Jeanne was in the kitchen.
I found her bent over the counter, her body stretched out as she scrubbed at some invisible stain. Her position gave me an unobstructed view of her from behind—the pale curves of her buttocks parting slightly to reveal the darker cleft between, the pink folds of her sex visible where her thighs spread for balance. Her pubic hair gleamed in the light from the window, a small patch of fire that seemed to beckon me closer.
She did not hear me approach. The sound of her scrubbing—wet cloth against wood—masked my footsteps. I was able to stand behind her for a long moment, drinking in the sight of her, before I moved.
I knelt.
The floor was hard beneath my knees, the wood cold through the fabric of my cassock. I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to the warm cleft of her sex.
“Ngh—Father!”
Her body jerked in surprise, but I had already gripped her hips with both hands, holding her in place. My tongue traced the length of her slit, from the tight bud of her clitoris to the small, puckered opening of her anus. She tasted of salt and copper and something indefinably sweet—the taste of a young woman’s arousal, clean and sharp and utterly intoxicating.
“Don’t move,” I murmured against her flesh. “Continue your work.”
She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a moan, her hands gripping the edge of the counter. I returned my mouth to her sex and began to lick in earnest.
The folds of her labia parted under my tongue, revealing the deeper pink of her interior. I traced the edges of her opening, probing gently, feeling the muscles of her thighs trembling against my cheeks. Above me, I could hear her breathing—quick, shallow gasps that caught in her throat with each stroke of my tongue.
I found her clitoris and focused my attention there. The small bud was swollen now, emerging from its hood like a pearl from an oyster. I circled it with the tip of my tongue, flicking gently, and was rewarded with a guttural sound from deep in her chest.
“Ahhhhn—”
Her hips began to move, pressing back against my face. I tightened my grip on her flesh, fingers digging into the soft curves of her buttocks. Her juices flowed freely now, coating my chin and cheeks, dripping down to spot the wooden floor beneath us.
The sounds of my tongue against her wet flesh were obscene in the quiet kitchen—slick, rhythmic sounds that seemed to echo off the plaster walls. I could feel her building toward climax, could feel the tension in her muscles coiling tighter and tighter like a spring.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, Father, I’m—”
I stood.
My cassock was bunched around my waist before I had even made the conscious decision to move. My cock sprang free, hard and aching, the tip already glistening with the fluid that had leaked from me while I tasted her. I positioned myself behind her, one hand on her hip, the other guiding my flesh toward her opening.
“Mmmph—” The sound Jeanne made as I pressed against her was muffled, as if she had bitten her own lip to contain it.
I pushed forward. Slowly. She was tight—virginally, impossibly tight—and despite her wetness, my entry met resistance. Inch by inch I worked myself into her, feeling her inner walls stretch to accommodate me. She cried out when I was halfway in, a sharp sound that was half pain and half pleasure.
“Are you all right?” I asked, my voice strained with the effort of holding still.
“Yes. Yes, don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
I pushed deeper. Her body yielded by degrees, the tight sheath of her sex gripping me with an intensity that made my vision swim. When I was fully seated inside her, my hips pressed flush against the curves of her bottom, I paused to let her adjust.
The sensation was overwhelming. Heat. Pressure. A rippling constriction that seemed to pull me deeper even when I held still. I could feel her heartbeat through the walls of her vagina—or perhaps that was my own pulse, thundering in my ears.
I began to move.
Slow at first. Long, deliberate strokes that withdrew until only the head of my cock remained inside her, then pushed deep again. The wet sounds of our joining filled the kitchen—a rhythmic, liquid counterpoint to the quickening pace of our breathing.
Jeanne’s breasts swayed with each thrust. They hung beneath her now, round and full, moving with a pendulum motion that matched the rhythm of my hips. I reached around her body and cupped one in my palm, feeling the weight of it, the warmth. My fingers found her nipple and pinched.
“G-Ghhah—!”
Her entire body convulsed. The grip of her vagina tightened around my cock, a series of involuntary contractions that signaled her orgasm. I continued to thrust through it, continued to pinch her nipple between my fingers, feeling the way her sex milked me with each pulse.
My own climax built with sudden, overwhelming force. There was no holding back—no disciplined control that could delay the inevitable. I drove into her one final time, burying myself to the hilt, and felt the first jet of my seed release deep inside her body.
“Nnnnghh—”
The sound I made was not a word. It was pure animal noise, dragged from somewhere beneath my ribcage. My cock pulsed again and again, each spasm sending another wave of hot semen into her depths.
We stayed like that for a long moment, both of us breathing hard, both of us trembling with the aftermath. Then I withdrew, gently, and watched the evidence of what we had done begin to trickle down her inner thigh.
“Continue your work,” I said. My voice was hoarse. “I will find Émilie.”
Jeanne straightened slowly, her face flushed, her eyes glazed. She did not speak—perhaps could not speak—but the look she gave me was not one of regret.
I left her in the kitchen and went in search of the other.
Émilie was in my bedroom.
The door stood half open, and through the gap I could see her small form moving between the bed and the washstand. She had stripped the sheets and was bundling them into a pile on the floor, her movements methodical despite her nakedness.
I pushed the door open fully. She looked up at the sound, her dark eyes meeting mine with an expression that hovered between fear and desperate hope.
“Did you hear?” I asked.
She nodded. A flush rose in her cheeks, spreading down her throat and across the upper slopes of her small breasts.
“Did it frighten you?”
She shook her head. “It made me want…”
Her voice trailed off, but there was no need for her to finish the sentence. I crossed the room in three strides and pushed her backward onto the bare mattress.
She landed with a soft gasp, her legs spreading instinctively. I knelt between them, lowering my face to her sex as I had with Jeanne. But where Jeanne had been generous in her proportions, Émilie was delicate. Her labia were small and neat, the inner lips tucked modestly within the outer, the whole of her sex no larger than my palm.
The only hair on her body was that neat triangle above her mons—the rest of her was smooth, the skin soft and pink and glistening with her arousal. I could smell her now, the faint musky scent of a woman’s desire.
I began to lick.
She responded immediately—more immediately than Jeanne had. Her hips bucked upward against my face, and her hands flew to my head, fingers tangling in my hair. The sounds she made were high and breathy, almost whimpers, as if she could not quite believe what was happening to her.
“Ah—ah—Hyaa—!”
I licked deeper, parting her folds with my tongue, seeking out the tight bud of her clitoris. It was smal—smaller than Jeanne’s—but impossibly sensitive. The moment I touched it, Émilie’s entire body arched off the bed.
I reached up with both hands and found her nipples.
They were large for the size of her breasts, prominent and dark against the pale skin of her chest. I pinched them between my thumbs and forefingers, rolling the hardened nubs as I continued to work her clit with my tongue.
The combination was too much for her. Her climax hit with the force of a storm—her thighs clampeding around my head, her back arching, her mouth opening in a soundless scream. And then, as I continued to lick her through the spasms, she did something I had not expected.
She came again.
A gush of fluid flooded from her, soaking my chin and chest and the mattress beneath her. The release was copious and hot, and it seemed to go on and on as her body convulsed with a second orgasm that eclipsed the first.
Her legs released their grip on my head. I rose to my knees between her thighs, my cock already hard again—had never truly softened, in truth, not with the sounds and scents of two women’s pleasure filling my senses.
I entered her smoothly, her wetness making the penetration effortless despite her tightness. But she was tight—tighter even than Jeanne, her small body clamping around me like a fist.
“Oommmphhh!”
Émilie’s legs wrapped around my waist, her heels pressing into the small of my back. Her breasts barely moved with my thrusts—they were too small for the kind of bouncing I had watched in Jeanne—but her nipples remained hard and dark and impossibly erotic.
I lowered my head and took one between my lips.
The sound she made was not human. It was a keening wail that seemed to vibrate through her entire frame, and almost immediately I felt her orgasm again—the third in as many minutes, her vagina contracting around my cock with desperate, rhythmic clenches.
I fucked her through it. Trusted harder, faster, feeling the tight heat of her grip milking me toward my own release. When I came, it was with a great, shuddering pulse that seemed to drain every ounce of tension from my body. My seed filled her, joined the evidence of her own pleasure that already soaked the mattress beneath us.
Afterward, we lay still for a moment. The room smelled of sex—that particular combination of sweat and fluid and the faint musky scents of our bodies that no amount of cleaning would ever quite erase.
I rose first. “The cleaning must be finished,” I said. “We have perhaps an hour before the other novices complete their work.”
Émilie nodded, her eyes still dazed but her movements obedient as she slid off the bed and reached for her discarded pile of sheets.
Two hours after they had arrived, the cleaning was finished. The presbytery gleamed—floors scrubbed, surfaces dusted, sheets changed—and the two young women stood before my desk in my study, still naked, their habits folded neatly on a chair by the door.
“Kneel,” I said.
They did. Side by side on the worn wooden floor, their faces upturned toward me with expressions of trust that made something twist in my chest.
I had not donned my trousers after leaving Émilie. My cassock hung open, my cock still exposed, soft now but still glistening with the combined evidence of our activities. I stepped toward Jeanne first.
“Open your mouth.”
Her lips parted obediently. I guided my soft flesh between them, feeling the warmth of her tongue, the gentle suction of her mouth. She sucked as I had instructed—gently, as if savoring a sweet—and I felt myself begin to harden again despite the two climaxes I had already spent.
When I was partially erect, I withdrew from her and turned to Émilie. She opened her mouth without being told, her dark eyes fixed on my face. Her tongue was smaller than Jeanne’s, her suction more tentative, but the effect was the same. My cock swelled against the roof of her mouth, hardening to full erection with a speed that surprised me.
I withdrew.
“Sit on the desk,” I told them. “Side by side.”
They rose and moved to obey. The heavy oak desk creaked under their combined weight as they settled themselves on the edge, their legs dangling, their bare bottoms pressing against the polished wood.
I went to Émilie first.
I spread her thighs and stepped between them. She was still wet—had never stopped being wet, it seemed, her small body perpetually ready in a way that made my head spin. I aligned myself and pushed inside her with one smooth motion.
“Nnnnhh—”
I fucked her vigorously. No slow build this time—just the hard, fast rhythm of a man who had tasted passion and found himself still hungry. My thumb found her clitoris and began to circle it in time with my thrusts, and within moments she was gasping, her small hands gripping the edge of the desk, her dark eyes wide and unfocused.
“Jeanne,” I said, my voice strained. “Suck her nipple.”
Jeanne leaned across the desk. Her mouth closed over Émilie’s prominent nipple, and I watched the smaller woman’s face contort with something beyond pleasure.
“Kyaa—! Ah—Ahhn—”
The orgasm hit her like a wave. I felt it build in the muscles of her thighs, in the tightening of her stomach, in the sudden, convulsive grip of her vagina around my cock. And then—
I pulled out.
Fluid sprayed from her, clear and hot, splashing against my cassock and the front of the desk. She had squirted again, this second release even more copious than the first. The sight of it—the feel of it—nearly undid me.
I stepped sideways to Jeanne.
Her legs were already spread, her magnificent breasts rising and falling with her quickened breath. I entered her with the same hard rhythm I had used on Émilie, my hips snapping against the plush curves of her bottom.
Her breasts bounced with every thrust. They were mesmerizing—the way they lifted and fell, the way the soft flesh rippled with each impact. I grabbed one with my free hand, squeezing the firm mound, watching my fingers sink into the pale skin.
I lowered my mouth to the other.
The taste of her nipple was faintly salty, the texture pebbled against my tongue. I sucked hard, and Jeanne’s response was immediate and violent.
“MMMNNGGHHH!!”
Her climax was louder than Émilie’s—a full-throated cry that bounced off the walls of my study. Her internal muscles clamped around me with enough force to border on pain, and still I fucked her, drawing out her pleasure until she sagged against the desk, her body limp and trembling.
I withdrew. Stepped back. Looked at the two of them—their flushed faces, their heaving chests, the mingled fluids that glistened on their thighs and on my desk and on the floor beneath us.
“Kneel,” I said again. “Both of you.”
They slid off the desk to their knees. I stood before them, my cock slick with their combined juices, the shaft throbbing visibly with each beat of my heart.
I took myself in hand and began to stroke.
Fast. Hard. The wet sounds of my fist against my own flesh filled the study, obscene and urgent. I looked down at their upturned faces—Jeanne’s green eyes bright, Émilie’s dark eyes wide—and felt my climax building at the base of my spine.
“Open your mouths,” I gasped.
They did.
The first jet caught Jeanne across the cheek, streaking white against her freckled skin. The second landed on Émilie’s chin, dripping down to her small breasts. I aimed the rest between their open mouths, watching my seed paint their tongues and lips and the flushed skin of their faces.
When it was over, I staggered back against my desk, my chest heaving. They knelt before me like penitents awaiting absolution, marked by what we had done.
“Clean yourselves,” I said when I could speak again. “Get dressed. And remember—this is our secret. If you wish to do this again, you must keep it secret.”
They nodded. Jeanne’s tongue darted out to lick my seed from her lips, and the sight of it nearly made me hard again.
They dressed in silence, helping each other with buttons and pins as they had helped each other undress two hours before. I watched them return to the shape of nuns—the shapeless black habits swallowing their bodies, the white coifs hiding their hair, the heavy veils falling over their faces.
“Father,” Jeanne said at the door. Her voice was steady now, the tremor gone. “Will we see you again?”
“Next week,” I said. “I have already arranged it with the Mother Superior.”
A smile flickered across her face—there and gone, like the sun breaking through clouds. Then she turned, and Émilie followed her, and the door closed behind them.
I stood alone in my study, surrounded by the scent of sex and the evidence of my own damnation.
And I felt, for the first time since my ordination, that I had finally chosen something for myself.
---
The weeks that followed fell into a pattern. Every Wednesday, Jeanne and Émilie arrived to clean the presbytery. Every Wednesday, I found new excuses for their lateness, new reasons to send word to the church that they would be delayed. The other novices continued their work under Sister Marie-Claire’s watchful eye, and no one seemed to notice that two of their number spent considerably longer at their tasks than the rest.
We explored each other in those hours. I learned the topography of their bodies—the places that made Jeanne gasp and the places that made Émilie fall silent with overwhelmed pleasure. I learned that Jeanne liked to be taken from behind, bent over furniture with my hands on her breasts. I learned that Émilie, despite her shyness, craved the intimacy of face-to-face positions, her dark eyes locked on mine as I moved inside her.
I learned the sounds they made. Jeanne’s moans were full and throaty, rising in volume as she approached climax. Émilie’s were high and breathy, punctuated by those sharp, almost startled gasps that seemed torn from her against her will.
And I learned, to my own surprise, that I felt something for them beyond simple lust. They were not merely objects of my desire—they were fellow prisoners, young people who had been denied choice just as I had been denied it. What we did together was sin by the lights of the Church, but it was also freedom.
It could not last.
Three months after that first Wednesday, I received a summons to the Mother Superior’s office. The winter snow lay thick on the ground, muffling the world in white silence, and the walk to the convent felt longer than usual.
The Mother Superior was waiting for me behind her desk, her expression unreadable. She did not rise when I entered. She did not offer me tea.
“Father Gagnon,” she said. “Thank you for coming so promptly.”
“You said it was urgent.”
“It is.” She folded her hands on the desk before her. “Sister Jeanne Perron and Sister Émilie Nadeau are to be dismissed from the novitiate.”
The words hit me like physical blows. I gripped the armrests of my chair, forcing my expression to remain neutral. “Dismissed? On what grounds?”
“They are both pregnant.”
The room seemed to tilt around me. The Mother Superior’s voice continued, calm and measured, as if she were discussing the weather or the price of candles.
“You are the only man they have had contact with, Father. The only one, at any rate, who has had the opportunity to be alone with them for extended periods.” Her eyes met mine, and there was no judgment in them—only a tired resignation. “I am not a fool. I have known what was happening since the second week.”
“Then why—” My voice cracked. I swallowed hard. “Why did you allow it to continue?”
“Because I saw how they looked when they returned to the convent. They were happy, Father. For the first time since they arrived here, they were happy.” She paused. “Most of these girls are sent to us because their families have no use for them. They are not called by God—they are disposed of by men. I have spent thirty years watching them wither.”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“You have a choice now,” the Mother Superior continued. “I can contact the bishop and inform him of what you have done. You will be defrocked, excommunicated, and turned out into the world with nothing but the clothes on your back. The girls will be sent to a home for unwed mothers, and their children will be given to the Church to raise.”
She let the words hang in the air.
“Or you can leave. Voluntarily. I will write to the bishop and tell him that you have experienced a crisis of faith, that you have requested laicization, that you wish to be released from your vows. It will be less of a scandal that way—for you, for the parish, for the girls.”
“And what of Jeanne and Émilie?”
“That is the second part of the choice.” For the first time, a glimmer of something like warmth entered her eyes. “If you leave voluntarily, you must take them with you. You must care for them and for the children they carry. You must find a way to provide for them, to build a life that is not dependent on the charity of others.”
I stared at her. “You would have me abandon my vocation for—”
“I would have you take responsibility for what you have done.” Her voice sharpened. “Those girls are carrying your children, Father. They will be turned out whether you choose to leave or not—the novitiate cannot house pregnant unwed women. The only question is whether they face the world alone or with the father of their babies at their side.”
I thought of Jeanne’s freckled face, her green eyes, the way she laughed when I touched a particular spot behind her ear. I thought of Émilie’s small hands, her delicate bones, the way she clung to me after we finished as if I were the only solid thing in a world of shifting sand.
“I will leave,” I said. “I will take them with me.”
The Mother Superior nodded slowly. “And how will you take care of them?”
I thought about it. “There is a farm in northern Ontario. An elderly uncle of mine—a widower, childless—has been writing to me for years, asking for help. He is too old to manage the land alone, and he has no heirs. If we go there and promise to care for him, he will take us in.”
I rose from my chair on legs that felt unsteady. “Why are you helping me? Helping us?”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, “Because someone should have helped me, forty years ago.”
I left the convent and walked through the snow toward the presbytery. The cold air burned in my lungs. The sky was a pale, empty white, stretching toward a horizon I could not see.
And I began to plan.
My uncle’s farm lay three days’ journey to the north and west, across the border into Ontario. I had met him only once, as a child, but I remembered a kind-faced man with callused hands and a quiet voice. He had written to me once after my ordination—a brief letter congratulating me on my vocation, though I had sensed a certain wryness between the lines.
I would write to him. I would explain that I was leaving the priesthood, that I was bringing two women with me, that we would work the land and care for him in his old age. I would not mention the pregnancies—some things were better explained in person.
The presbytery felt different when I stepped inside. The rooms that had been the scene of so much secret pleasure now seemed heavy with consequence. I walked through them slowly, touching the familiar surfaces—the kitchen counter where I had first taken Jeanne, the bedroom where Émilie had flooded my sheets, the study where they had knelt before me with my seed on their faces.
I found them in the church, kneeling in the front pew with the other novices. Their heads were bowed in prayer, their hands folded, their habits making them almost identical to the women around them. But I could tell them apart now—could pick out the proud set of Jeanne’s shoulders, the delicate slope of Émilie’s neck.
I caught the Mother Superior’s eye from the back of the church. She nodded, once, and I understood that she would arrange for them to come to the presbytery that evening.
I returned to my study and began to write.
The letter to my uncle. A letter to the bishop requesting laicization. A letter to my father—this one I crumpled and threw into the fire, watching the flames consume my careful lies and half-truths. There was nothing I could say to him that would make him understand. Perhaps there never would be.
When evening came, the knock on my door was soft but steady. I opened it to find Jeanne and Émilie standing in the falling snow, their faces pale and frightened.
“Come in,” I said. “We have much to discuss.”
I told them everything. The Mother Superior’s ultimatum. The choice I had been given. The farm in Ontario, the uncle, the uncertain future that awaited us all.
When I finished, they were silent for a long moment. Then Jeanne spoke.
“You would give up everything for us? Your vocation? Your place in the Church? Your family’s good opinion?”
“I never wanted to be a priest,” I said. “My father forced me into it, just as your families forced you into the convent. I have spent six years living a life I did not choose.” I reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were cold from the walk, but they tightened around mine. “I am choosing now. I am choosing you. Both of you.”
Émilie made a small sound—not quite a sob, not quite a laugh. “Both of us? How can you choose both of us?”
“I will marry Jeanne,” I said. “That is the only way the world will accept us. But Émilie—you will be part of our household. You will be our sister, our family. We will tell the neighbors that you are Jeanne’s cousin, come to help with the farm. And at night, in the privacy of our own rooms, we will be whatever we wish to be.”
They looked at each other. That silent communication passed between them again, the one I could not interpret but had learned to trust.
Then Jeanne turned back to me. “Yes,” she said. “Émilie?”
“Yes.” Her voice was barely audible, but there was steel beneath the whisper. “Yes, I will come with you.”
We left three weeks later.
The bishop granted my petition for laicization—reluctantly, but the Mother Superior’s letter supporting my request had apparently carried weight. I was defrocked, released from my vows, returned to the status of a layman. The collar came off for the last time, and I felt as though I could breathe again.
My uncle’s reply arrived the day before our departure. It was brief and practical, written in a spidery hand that spoke of age and failing eyesight.
You are welcome here. There is more work than one old man can manage. Bring your women. Bring your children. The farm needs strong hands, and I need company in my final years.
We traveled north by train and then by hired wagon, the snow growing deeper as we pushed into the Ontario wilderness. Jeanne and Émilie sat bundled in blankets beside me, their habits replaced by plain wool dresses that the Mother Superior had somehow procured. The swell of their bellies was just beginning to show beneath the heavy fabric.
The farm, when we reached it, was larger than I had expected. A hundred acres of fields now lying fallow under winter snow, a substantial farmhouse of weathered gray wood, a barn and outbuildings that had seen better decades but still stood solid against the wind.
My uncle was waiting on the porch. He was older than I remembered—his back bent, his face lined, his hair gone completely white—but his eyes were still the kind blue I recalled from childhood.
“So,” he said, looking at the three of us—at me, at Jeanne, at Émilie with her small dark head bowed against the cold. “You are my nephew who has left the priesthood and brought home two brides.”
“One bride,” I said. “Jeanne and I will marry as soon as we can find a priest.”
“And the other one?”
“Émilie is our cousin,” Jeanne said, her voice firm. “Come to help with the house and the children.”
My uncle looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Émilie. Then he looked at me.
“Well,” he said at last. “I suppose every family has its secrets. Come inside. I have stew on the stove and bread in the oven. We can sort out the rest tomorrow.”
We stepped across the threshold into the warmth of the farmhouse kitchen. The fire crackled in the hearth. The stew smelled of beef and onions and herbs. And for the first time in my life, I felt that I was home.
---
The years that followed were hard but honest. We rose before dawn to tend the animals and work the fields. We went to bed exhausted, our muscles aching, our hands callused from labor I had never been trained to do. But there was satisfaction in it—the satisfaction of watching things grow, of building something with our own hands, of lying down each night knowing that we had earned our rest.
I married Jeanne in the spring, in a small ceremony witnessed by my uncle and Émilie and the local farmer who had brought his family to fill the pews. She wore a dress of pale blue wool that she had sewn herself, her copper hair braided with wildflowers, her belly already round with the child who would be born in summer.
Her breasts had grown with the pregnancy, becoming larger and fuller, the veins more prominent beneath the pale skin. She caught me staring at them on our wedding night, as she undressed in the cramped bedroom that was now ours.
“They will only get bigger,” she said, a hint of amusement in her voice. “The baby will need them.”
“They are beautiful,” I said, and meant it.
Émilie gave birth one month after Jeanne. Her labor was longer and harder—her small frame struggled to accommodate the child I had put inside her—but she emerged from it with the same quiet determination that had carried her through everything else. The baby was a girl, dark-haired like her mother, with lungs that seemed far too powerful for such a tiny body.
We named her Marie, after the Mother Superior who had made all of this possible.
Jeanne’s child was a boy, born in the heat of August with a shock of red hair that left no doubt as to his parentage. We named him Thomas, after my uncle, who held his namesake with trembling hands and wept without shame.
Fourteen children. That was what we produced between us over the years that followed—eight with Jeanne, six with Émilie. The farmhouse that had seemed so large when we arrived bulged with the noise and chaos of our expanding family. We added rooms, then added more, until the original structure was almost lost in a warren of additions and extensions.
My uncle lived to see the first five born. He died in his sleep during the winter of our sixth year on the farm, a peaceful expression on his weathered face. We buried him beneath the old oak tree at the edge of the north field, and I said words over his grave that were not quite a prayer but felt more honest than any prayer I had ever offered in church.
The nights, after the children were asleep, were ours.
We had never stopped—the three of us. What had begun in the presbytery in northern Quebec had become something deeper, something more permanent, a bond that marriage certificates and legal fictions could never fully capture. Jeanne and I shared a bedroom, as husband and wife should, but Émilie’s room was connected to ours by a door that was never locked.
Some nights I went to her. Some nights she came to us. Some nights the three of us lay tangled together in the big bed that I had built with my own hands, the moonlight silvering our naked skin, the sounds of our pleasure muffled against pillows so the children would not wake.
Jeanne’s breasts, after so many pregnancies and so many years of nursing, had grown softer and heavier, settling into a gentle slope that I found no less beautiful than the pert roundness of her youth. Her nipples were darker now, larger, and they responded to my touch with the same desperate sensitivity they had always possessed.
Émilie’s body had changed less—she remained small and slim, her breasts still conical despite having fed six children. But there were silver streaks on her belly now, and fine lines at the corners of her eyes, and a confidence in her movements that had replaced the shy hesitancy of her novitiate days.
We grew old together, the three of us. The children grew up and moved away—some to marriages of their own, some to cities, some to farms in other parts of the province. None of them joined the Church. I made certain of that, though I never told them why.
When I looked back on my life—on the frightened young priest I had been, on the desperate gamble that had brought us here—I felt no regret. Only gratitude.
I had been forced into a vocation I did not want. I had broken my vows and sinned by every measure the Church could apply. But I had also found love. Two loves, different in shape but equal in depth, and a family that stretched across two women and fourteen children and a farm in the Ontario wilderness.