Midnight Mass (Camren)

CHAPTER 1

A/N : ☝︎You will need it 🤣

Moonlight poured into the room like a diaphanous waterfall, thick and pooling on the floor. I'd been staring at that moonlight for an hour now, trying to fall asleep, but sleep refused to come. Instead, my brain kept running through arguments against theological theism and rifling through remembered Aquinas quotes.

The danger of being mid-dissertation, I supposed.

I rolled over to be closer to Camila, my wife and my lamb, who was currently fast asleep and facing away from me, her knees drawn up to her chest. I ran a hand over the swell of her hip, the lace of her boy shorts tickling my palm and pulling my mind slowly but steadily away from long-dead Catholic philosophers.

I moved closer to her, pressing my lips to the back of her neck and curling my body around hers. She was warm. Soft. Lavender-scented.

Mine.

Even after three years of marriage, that word still punctured me, pained me with the beautiful awe and wonder of it all. This woman, this polished, driven, smart-as-fuck woman, had chosen me.

And now I was hard.

So very hard.

I wanted to wake her up. I wanted to roll her onto her back and wedge my knee between her thighs. I wanted to hook a finger in the crotch of those panties and pull them aside, and then I wanted to sink into her. I wanted to fuck her until I came, and then I wanted to fuck her again. Hell, I wanted to fuck her all night and all day until we left for her parents' Newport mansion for Thanksgiving in a couple of days.

My upcoming dissertation deadline and her busy work schedule meant that there'd been a lot of nights in the last twelve months that we'd gone without each other, and now I lived with a constant gnawing lust deep in the pit of my stomach—a hunger that never felt completely sated, even immediately after we had sex. Camila teased me about the feast or famine nature of our sex life this year, and I hoped that the teasing didn't mask a deeper unhappiness. Because I knew I was certainly unhappy about it.

And it was my dissertation causing it. So in a way, it was my fault, which made me even more unhappy. But this project was the culmination of the last four years of my study, the pinnacle of this new, post-clergy phase of my life. It was fascinating and meaningful and magical, and those long, silent nights in my library stall were so peaceful and rewarding. I was finally in the dusty, scholarly cave I'd wanted to be in for so long. Just...why did it have to come at the expense of time with Camila?

Tonight had been prototypical of our new life. She'd sent me a text in the afternoon:

Come home early tonight. I am excited to tell you about my day!

So I'd promised Camila I'd be home from the library in time to eat a late dinner. And then dinnertime came and went, and so I promised her I'd be home before ten. And then I found an annotated set of Paul Tillich's essays in the Barth collection and lost track of time, and when I finally checked the clock, it was past two a.m. I'd rushed home, racing past Trinity Church, jogging with my heavy laptop bag the whole way to our townhouse—a narrow brick thing close to the cemetery. When I walked into the bedroom, I saw a sight that was now heartbreakingly familiar to me: Camila in her adorable lace sleeper set, asleep with the light on and her finger in between the pages of the latest Galbraith mystery, as if she'd closed it thinking she would rest her eyes for just a minute.

She'd tried to wait up for me, like she always did. And I'd failed her.

Like I always did.

I'd shrugged off my laptop bag and sank onto the bed, not even trying to quash the self-recriminating bitterness that squeezed my heart and repeated all the things I already knew.