Father Jim Mallahan (extremeunction) wrote in zenithrp, @ 2016-01-21 20:12:00 |
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Entry tags: | #day 018, jim, juno |
Who: Juno and Jim
When: Sunrise
Where: The street
Grit and asphalt were pressing into Jim's cheek when he woke up. Assuming he was awake—that much wasn't quite clear, because someone was lying beside him, and he often had very vivid dreams about that. Just before waking, he'd think he was awake and feel some highly specific sensation: the creak of the bedsprings as someone lay down next to him, the warmth of a woman's thigh brushing against his, an arm slung around his waist. Things that he'd never even experienced while awake, and certainly things he tried not to dwell on. The dreams used to mess with him a lot, because he reasoned that they had to be a result of impure thoughts while he was awake, and for awhile in his pre-novitiate years he'd go around to four different confessors at different parishes in the city, each time convinced that he hadn't explained the situation well enough and argued out his reasons for doubt. All four confessors were dismissive: you can't sin while you're asleep, let's move on. Only when he fully pulled out the stops on the obsession and found a fifth confessor had he lucked into a priest who could read between the lines: you have a problem, but it's not what you're dreaming about.
So these days he usually took the dreams as a pleasant but licit random occurrence, something he was allowed to enjoy when it happened. When he woke up more fully, he found that he was in a more problematic near-occasion-of-sin than he'd thought. The girl next to him was the one who'd sat next to him at dinner the other night, Juno, and she was—well, Jack had been right, all the women in the house were extraordinarily pretty. Jim tried to move over to give her some space and only succeeded in jerking both of them by the leg, his right and her left. They were bound together, as if in a three-legged race, with some contraption of metal and leather straps.
"Jesus Mary and Joseph," he muttered as he pulled himself up on one elbow. He debated waking Juno up with a hand on her arm, and then decided that it was more imperative that he focus on not touching her more than he had to. She was probably already waking up thanks to the accidental jerk to her leg, anyway. That gave him maybe five or ten seconds to think this semi-hardon away.