Pure & Sinful (Pure Souls) (8 page)

His eyes strained in the dim light of the spa room as the scent of bleach and the mist of moist air hit him, making his empty stomach lurch temporarily, then subside into peaceful bliss. The jets must kick on automatically before the club opens, he concluded, given the foggy, steam-filled quality of the room. Whatever the case, the combination of the white noise that was the churning of the water and the smell of sanitized H-two-oh combined to lull Marc immediately into a nearly hypnotic state. Leaving his robe hanging on the hook by the men’s locker room door, he tiptoed carefully up the two steps to the lid of the tub and eased himself into the water. 

“Blessed be the hot tub vendors, for their products rock.”

In miraculous fashion, his muscles uncurled and unknotted, growing pliable under the aquatic massage. Better than shiatsu and yoga combined, his limbs rejuvenated in moments, all hints of pain slaking away. The workout — and the last few nights of restless sleep — had left him sore, but now, at this moment in the tub, he couldn’t recall feeling this at ease, this relaxed, this… at peace, for months.

But as he stretched out his legs and felt his toes make contact with another’s, his sense of nirvana popped like a helium balloon on a florescent lamp.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

Two grey eyes barely above the fluctuating water line, burned — the ocular cocktail a mixture of rage, embarrassment, and intrigue from across the way. “What the
hell
are you doing in here?”

“Me?” Marc belted back, half-rising out of the water before he recalled that he was, in fact,
au naturel.
Keeping his lower half beneath the churning jets instead, he pointed accusingly at the witch. “What the hell are
you
doing here? T
he club hasn’t opened yet!”

“Dee let me in, before you decided to go the full Monty!” Riona shrieked, hitting the surface of the water like a toddler having a tantrum. “Oh, God, can you just … leave already?”

“I’d love to, but I’m just a wee bit nude at the moment.”

Her eyes sharpened as the smallest fraction of her shoulders broke the surface. “Me, too.”

Each waited out the other like some old western high noon showdown. Finally, after several brooding moments, Riona rolled her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest, cupping her breasts in an unsuccessful attempt to remain discreet. Marc’s masculine hard wiring kicked in and drew his eyes right down to hands he noticed were
way
too small for their appointed task.

“Look, Marc, this is silly. We’re both adults, right? Let’s just… one of us close our eyes while the other gets out and leaves.”

Sounded like a good enough idea. He gave a curt nod, sat back, closed his eyes, and waited.

“Well?”

One eye cracked open. Riona squinted so hard, he thought she might be trying to force her eyeballs out the back of her head. “Well what?”

“Well… go already. I’ll keep my eyes shut.”

The flare of indignation rekindled as both their eyes flew open.

“I’m a priest, Keystone. I can’t just go about traipsing naked in front of the laity.”

Riona clicked her tongue. “One: never call me the lay-anything again, and two: um, no. You may be a priest, but you’re still a guy, and — unless you’re about to tell me you’re gay — I don’t trust that whole, ‘the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not sneak a peek’ thing.”

Marc scoffed. “As if. How about this? Let’s just both get out at the same time and run as fast as possible towards the locker rooms. If we’re looking straight ahead, we can’t be looking at each other. Not… that I would ever look.”

Riona’s eyes surveyed the room, measuring the direction and the distance.

“I won’t… look either.” Was there a hint of doubt in her voice too? “Yeah, okay, sounds good. On the count of three, then?”

“Count of three, yeah. Okay. One… Two… Three!”

A localized tsunami washed over the floor as both leapt from the tub and booked it like felons. Marc was first to reach his target, but invoked a holy hell for the ages as he found the door jammed. He guessed Riona was having the same problem, based on the frantic jingling of the metal handle on her side of the room, punctuated by under-her-breath cussing.

He heard Riona’s fist make contact with the hard laminate of the door. “What the devil?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s locked.”

“But who would have locked the door? Dee?”

“Dee wouldn’t do that. Maybe it was you. Maybe a panic thing you did when you found out I was in the room?”

“Reactionary magic? Like, something I wasn’t even conscious of?”

“You walked through the wall of the meat locker without knowing you could do it,” Marc countered over his shoulder, his peripheral vision catching the vague outline of her very precise frame.

“That was a case of life and death. The magic followed the motivation; I can’t walk through walls now if I try to do it on purpose. Why would I lock the doors so you couldn’t leave as a reaction to fear?”

A foreign squirm in his insides made Marc wonder if he might have developed a spontaneous parasitic infection. “Because subconsciously, you know I’d protect you from anything. Maybe you wanted to be stuck in here…” His head turned a bit more, and though Riona’s perfectly-curved assets were well on display, it was her eyes that locked on him now as she, too, tilted her head to meet his gaze. “… with me.”

Was she blushing? Or were her checks still crimson from her time in the hot tub? “Marc?”

Like the last line of a bad joke, the handle of a third door, the one that led into a hall from the lobby of the gym, began to jingle. As the door cracked, two unfamiliar feminine voices poured into the soundscape.

Marc looked to Riona and Riona looked to Marc, before both looked in desperation to the open supply closet at the back of the room. All thoughts of propriety and modesty were pushed aside as they both dove into the darkness of their last refuge. The two blue-haired grannies must not have seen them, as they proceeded into the tub like nothing was afoot.

“Fuck!” Riona’s voice was an airy shout-whisper. “Fuckity-fuck-fuck.”

“You could say that three times,” Marc agreed as he instinctively, mysteriously found himself pushing her in the dim light of the closet behind his body protectively.

“I thought I just did.”

The gym’s building plan hadn’t been drawn up with the closet as a place for anything but a few mops. Riona rolled up on her tiptoes and craned her neck over Marc’s shoulder. Through the crack in the door appeared the senior citizens in the tub, like two white raisins in a pot of boiling water.

“I can go. I don’t have anything they haven’t seen before.” Riona pressed forward, her soft body pushing with disproportionate force against his back.

Marc, however, splayed out his arms, impeding her efforts. “And just what the hell do you expect me to do?”

Riona strained for a better angle. “Unless you keep something else beneath your vestiges not found on other men, I doubt you have anything they haven’t seen before either.”

“Seriously!”

Riona groaned. “Fine. Look, there’s this one charm Ramiel taught last week, but it’s a little tricky…”

The priest saw a glimmer of his faith flash before his eyes. “What does it do?”

“Makes me invisible,” she answered. Marc looked back over his shoulder, careful not to look too far down. She nodded. “Yes, invisible. I’m not supposed to tell anyone, he said. I guess I’m not supposed to know how to do it.”

“Masking the human body from existence is against the rules of conduct the Council established for Pure Souls,” Marc whispered. “He wasn’t kidding; you’re not supposed to know how to do that.”

“But I do.”

“Yeah, damned good for us, too. Can you cast it over me too?”

He felt her dampened hair against his neck as her chin set upon his shoulder. Despite the chill standing dripping wet in a closet should have gave him, he suddenly felt flushed and dizzy.

“Yeah, it’s a bit hard, but I think I can do it. I can get us out into the main hall, and we can get into the locker rooms from the front. Only thing is, you have to hold onto me the whole time.”

His tongue was going to choke him. “Why?”

“The magic is easier to spread when I have physical contact.”

Oh, God, kill me now.
“Okay.”

He felt her shift beside him. His eyes whipped in the opposite direction. “And let me get in front. I can barely see over your shoulder.”

Reluctantly, he shifted a bit to the right, letting Riona past.

“Put your hands on my…”

But before she could finish the sentence, Riona shuddered against the warmth of Marc’s chest pressed into her back and his hands softly gripping her waist, pulling her flush against him.

“Like this, Keystone?”

Oh, God, kill me now
.
Desire wasn’t a sin, but the thoughts rolling through Riona’s mind with Marc’s hands on her hips weren’t putting her on an express train to Heaven. His mouth lingered right next to her ear, making the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Holy hell, he was buff. Marc always dressed in modest clothes, and though she could tell he might have cut a fine figure in something more fashionable, she couldn’t have imagined just how hard his chest was or how strong his grip could be.

In a little more breathy tone than she’d like to admit, her eyes closed, focusing on the sensation of his fingertips pressing gently into her, pulling her. She swallowed a gallon of air. “Closer.”

When his whole body pressed fully against hers, the momentary lust abated. He might be hard as steel in the chest, but there was nothing equally stiff below the waistline that she could sense. If she couldn’t even arouse a celibate man, what was the point of those D-cups she sported?

Turning her frustration into power, Riona closed her eyes and tried to replicate the sense of bounciness she felt when she experimented with invisibility under Ramiel’s direction. The tingle in the pit of her stomach told her she was pulling it off, and slowly, she opened the closet door, hoping the crashers were too engaged in their chicken chat to notice.

“We’ll go to the men’s first,” she whispered to Marc.

“Great. Go then.”

They shuffled to the door leading to the main hall without too much fanfare, but were only halfway up the passageway when Riona began to feel Marc’s grasp tighten almost painfully on her as he leaned his brow into her hair.

“Marc, you okay?” she whispered in mouse squeak.

He exhaled in a reluctant way, like a boy about to admit that he’d punched his sister. “I’m trying, but…” Suddenly, Riona felt his admission before she’d heard him say the words, the hardening evidence pressing into her back. “…before anything, I am a man.”

“It’s okay, it’s just biology.” Though, to her surprise, part of her hoped otherwise, if for nothing else, to prove that her confidence in her own sex appeal wasn’t just hot air. “Just a few more steps. We’re almost there.”

As they rounded the corner near the front of the building, Riona found and pushed open the men’s locker room door. She navigated the two of them into an unoccupied area just inside the entry before releasing the magic concealing his body. Still concealed in her own void, she waited for him to let go, for his fingers to relax and his now very prominent arousal to pull away. He didn’t budge. She wondered if it was her imagination that his fingers dug in harder, as if trying to get a better claim on the real estate they now occupied.

“You probably aren’t as familiar with this situation as me, Marc, but the move that usually follows this one requires us to get even closer. Like, negative inches between us.”

Judging by the hardness she felt, like, seven or eight inches.

Still, he lingered, and on her neck she could feel his choppy breaths heat her flesh. His lips made contact — barely — though she knew if she ever brought it up, he’d deny it. Her inner traitor to righteousness told her to lean back, to
let
him have access, to encourage him, but her Pure Soul suspected there’d be hell to pay. Literally.

Finally his hands fell, his voice stumbling as much as his feet as he backed away from her. “Sorry… I… I didn’t…  I would never, have never… I mean, I…”

She put her hand out to silence him as she turned, not recalling that she was still in the blind spot of her magic. “Human first, priest immediately second. No need to apologize for being human. And I’ll try not to hold the priest part against you too much.”

A graceful smile beamed across his face, and though she was invisible still, Riona felt like he was looking straight into her eyes.

“Thank you.”

She wasn’t sure for what. For rescuing him from being seen by the ladies in the hot tub? For not leaving him behind? For understanding that his current trip to the United States of Erection was just the result of their naked, wet bodies sliding together? For not expecting him to act in any way on what he felt?

“No problem.”

But it was a problem. A problem, because for a moment when his lips brushed against her, she felt intention and promise. As a Pure Soul, it was her duty to defend humanity against the temptations wrought by evil intentions. As a woman, she didn’t care if she or Marc or both of them would be damned, she wanted him.

The question was, why?

Jerry was seriously about to gag. He hadn’t seen cheese like this since his tour of the Velveeta factory back in ‘98.

“That’s it?” he scoffed, watching the little scene between Riona and Marc come to a cock-blocking conclusion in the Big Bad’s magical mirror, the original candid camera of the ancient world.

“
That
was a lot. They were both tempted,” Lucifer explained as the scene dissipated and swirled back into the mists. “If they hadn’t been, we never would have been able to see them in my mirror. I can only view the sinful acts. At least one of them, if not both, was having soul-damning thoughts, which made them visible to us. And a reminder, demon o’ mine, temptation is the first step to sin. If we get Riona Dade to sin, she earns herself a very distinguished place in Hell.”

Jerry scratched his chin as he plopped down in Satan’s big, red, bean bag chair. “Riona doesn’t believe sex between consenting adults is a sin. What sin was she contemplating? Last time I read the rule book, humans can only commit sin by willfully and purposefully disobeying the Moral Right Truth as they accept it.”

Lucifer’s teeth ground in frustration. “Fucking MRT. Oh, to be in the times of absolute truths again! This damned, new age, hippy shit, and the flexible morality has cost me more recruits than prohibition.”

Jerry couldn’t be sure, but he thought the temperature in the room went up a degree every time the Sultan of Sin used profanity.