Guilty Conscience

By Rose Nichols

Confession

“I need your help, Reverend Mother.”

Mother Margaret looked at the petite form, barely entering adulthood, sitting across from her desk in her office. Grace’s hands, folded primly in her lap, quivered ever so slightly. Margaret remembered when the girl had arrived a few months ago, all nerves and silent, wide-eyed obedience, a trembling lapwing drawn into the cold stone safety of the convent. Another mouth to feed, another soul to repair, but there was something about this one; a latent heat roiling beneath her pale skin, a flush so quick to rise that it bordered on a defect. Even now, Grace’s cheeks glowed strawberry under the dormitory pallor of her habit. She had a pretty mouth, lush and downturned, as if the Lord Himself had sculpted it for the express purpose of supplication. A loose strand of red hair tangled with the wire frame of her glasses.

Mother Margaret steepled her fingers and waited while desperation thickened the air between them. Grace’s gaze never quite met her own; it wandered, catching on the golden crucifix nailed to the bookshelves, on the dust motes spangling the shaft of light from the window, on the calloused cuff of her own sleeve, picking at a loose thread as if she could unravel her predicament with enough patience.

When Grace finally spoke again, her voice was so small it could have been mistaken for the frantic whisper of the wind outside. “It’s gotten worse, Mother. I did as you said. I recited the Penitential Psalms. I tried fasting, cold showers, everything…” her breath caught, the confession trembling on the edge of shame, “but it keeps happening. The dreams. And the… the need.”

Margaret let her silence linger a moment, then pushed a porcelain cup toward Grace. The girl’s fingers shook as she accepted it, tea sloshing against the rim. Margaret’s own hands were precise, movements deliberate and spare. She watched as the steam fogged Grace’s glasses, briefly obscuring those deep green eyes before they blinked themselves clear.

“I see,” Margaret said, her voice low and deliberate as a chisel finding weakness in stone. “You say the dreams persist. What, precisely, do they contain?”

Grace’s breath fogged the rim of her teacup. She set it down, hands cupping themselves around each other, as if shielding something shameful from sight. “I… they’re not like ordinary dreams, Mother. They’re feverish. I wake up—” Her voice, usually pale and cloudy, caught a current of color. “I wake up damp. It seeps through to the sheets. And sometimes I’m not sure if I was still asleep or if I— if I—” She broke off, words dissolving in the cup of her palms.

“Continue.” Margaret’s tone was hard like granite.

“Describe the content of these dreams. Speak plainly. I expect candor, Sister Grace.”

The girl’s jaw worked, teeth worrying a patch of raw skin inside her cheek. Then, softly, “It’s always… bodies, Mother. Sometimes I know them, sometimes I don’t. Sisters, from the dormitory. Their habits are gone. I see their skin, the shapes of them. I feel—” Her voice shrank, retreating, “I feel their hands on me. Sometimes I watch, sometimes I’m inside the skin of another. There’s always a heat… between my legs. And when I wake, it’s still there. My thighs are sticky, the sheets—” She scrubbed at her eyes as they welled up with tears. “It’s disgusting. I’m so ashamed.” The words, once released, seemed to loosen her, and her hands unclenched.

Mother Margaret watched her with a measured patience, as if gazing at a vessel she had long suspected to be cracked and now saw the fissure widening. She let the girl’s trembling hang in the air like a bell, then struck it softly with her own question.

“These dreams, Sister Grace. Do they arise from imagination alone? Or is there, perhaps, a foundation for them in your waking mind?” She lifted her chin, eyes sharpening. “Have you felt attraction to any of your Sisters here? Visions are often seeded by desire, and desire, though a test, is not in itself a sin unless acted upon.”

Grace’s gaze flinched from the crucifix to the window. Her voice came in fragments, each chipped from a larger, hidden stone. “I… I care for my Sisters. I wish them health, peace, happiness. Sometimes I admire them. Their faith. Their discipline. But this—” She clutched the air, as if trying to catch the right words. “It’s a sickness. I know it is. I confessed it months ago, I try to fight it every day. Father Paul said to talk to you for guidance.”

Margaret’s lips twitched, the barest shiver into a smile, but her eyes were all glacial rebuke. “The flesh is a stubborn adversary, Sister. Its cravings must be tamed, not reasoned with. Even Saint Teresa, when tormented by visions of the body, sought mortification to cleanse herself. You are not the first to struggle.”

Grace swallowed audibly.

Fixing her eyes on Grace with that clear, predatory gaze, Margaret asked, “When you wake, Sister, do you find your hand between your legs? Do you allow it to linger?” Her words were anatomical, almost medical, but the intimacy of the question made Grace’s cheeks flush even more intensely. She shook her head; too quickly, too desperately.

“I try not to, Mother,” she stammered. “But sometimes I do, for a second, before I realize. Then I stop.”

“You touch yourself, then. Out of reflex, or compulsion. And this is what burdens you?”

Grace nodded, hands knotted so tightly her knuckles blanched. She hated herself for the involuntary memory of her own slick fingers, the cold shame of pleasure stolen in the dark.

The Mother Superior studied her as one might a caged bird, hunting for the nature of its agitation. “There is no sin in waking to temptation,” she said, her voice unexpectedly gentle. “No shame in failing to master the body at first strike. It is the persistence and the indulgence, the act of will over simple urge, that marks the soul for damnation.” She reached, very casually, and flicked a strand of Grace’s red hair from her cheek, the gesture motherly and coldly delicate at once. “You have not transgressed, Sister Grace. Not in the way you fear.”

Grace blinked, uncertain whether to believe the words or brace for some further rebuke. “But the thoughts, Reverend Mother. They consume me. Sometimes I wake and I’m already— already—” she could not finish before breaking down in tears.

Mother Margaret let the girl’s sobs echo in the room. She seemed to consider her next words with a grave tenderness, as though pruning a sick bloom with utmost care. “Sister Grace. There is a teaching that may help you. So long as the body is not brought to… fulfillment, the wrestling of flesh against spirit is but virtuous discipline,” Her voice was soft but firm. “Do you understand what I am saying? It is not a sin to touch yourself; it is only a sin to bring yourself to climax.”

Grace’s pulse trickled back into her body, newly sluggish, as if her veins had thickened with honey. She had prepared herself for weeks for this moment of reckoning, had constructed elaborate fantasies of public denouncement or private exhortation; she’d even once, in a moment of abject terror, imagined her own expulsion, suitcase in hand, a scarlet letter stitched through the lining of her habit. But this unexpected absolution brought a wave of relief over her. She hadn’t sinned. She was still worthy of God’s love.

“No climax,” she repeated, trying to compose herself. “Only the… struggle.” She tried to picture such a half-measure, the act without the ending, and found herself unable to grasp its logic. It was like being granted permission to feast, as long as you didn’t swallow.

Mother Margaret watched the shape of comprehension settle into Grace’s posture, a softening at the neck and shoulders, the faint release of air from slumped lungs. She had seen it in many initiates; how quickly the body responded to the possibility of pardon, the way hope and guilt mingled into a new and more complex agony. It was a chemistry Margaret understood intimately, for she herself had been sculpted by it, her own novitiate haunted by instructors less merciful and much less clever. She regarded Grace now with an almost proprietary satisfaction.

“Our Lord,” Margaret intoned, voice smooth as river stone, “places obstacles in our path not to break us, Sister, but to grind away our imperfections. Each resistance, each craving denied, is another step up the mountain of virtue.” Her gaze was unyielding. “If you were to gratify yourself fully, you would fall. But if you permit your struggle to remain unfinished, if you discipline your body and mind, sharpen them on the stone of restraint, you draw closer to Him. Every denied urge is an offering, a little crucifixion.”

Grace nodded with understanding, her eyes were wider than ever now, not in terror but in the peculiar gratitude of the newly reprieved.

The Reverend Mother relaxed, her silhouette easing back against the chair. “You need not fear. You are under my guidance now. Discipline is not a solitary endeavor. Many sisters have struggled with these torments, and the devil is most cunning when we are alone. Should your temptations persist, or if you sense yourself staggering at the brink, you are to come directly to me. Do you understand?” She leaned forward, the crucifix on her breast swinging slightly, catching the yellow afternoon sun and flashing it across Grace’s face. “I am here to shepherd you, Sister Grace. In all things. No matter how shameful.”

Grace’s breath came in tiny, hiccuping sobs. “Yes Reverend Mother. Thank you for your patience.”

“Good. You are dismissed.”

Grace rose slowly, head bowed, and left the room, pausing only to make a sign of the cross before the crucifix. She shut the office door behind her with a loud click.

Inside the office, Mother Margaret sat motionless, the lines of her mouth slowly relaxing into something more scheming than maternal. She looked out the window, peering through the frosted glass where the snow had begun to fall, slow and hypnotic, whiting out the garden below. She thought of the girl’s pink cheeks, the visible tremor of her pulse, the way her voice had trembled between terror and hope.

Such a juicy little thing, Margaret thought, not without affection. She closed her eyes and sat, hands folded, a slow, dry amusement spreading through her chest.

How very eager they always were. Especially the bright ones, the hungry ones, who flushed with shame but never stopped coming back for more. Of all the vices that stalked the convent, this was the one she found most delicious: the trembling, unvoiced want, the way it corroded even the most precious soul from within. Grace Murphy was no different than all the others Margaret had broken; just younger, juicier, and so badly in need of a leash.

It had gone even more smoothly than Margaret had predicted. Once again, she’d found that mixing shame and absolution in precisely the right ratio made the strongest tether. Grace was already halfway broken, her soul gnawed by guilt and raw need; all that remained was to shape the wound, to keep it exquisitely fresh and unhealed. The girl’s appetite was obvious, if barely named; she squirmed, she shuddered, she blushed at every implied word, but she did not turn away. No, she would come back, again and again, to supplicate and confess and beg for mercy. And if the cycle never quite led to true relief, so much the better. That was how you made a pet: by training it to crave the hand that alternately punished and petted, to tremble for any speck of favor.

She then hiked up her habit and glanced down into the knee-well beneath her desk. There, in the muffled dark, Sister Catherine knelt naked, the her uniform folded neatly in a stack beside the outstretched feet of the Mother Superior. The air was humid and close, the scent of boiled tea and burnt incense barely able to mask the musk of sweat and cunt rising from between Catherine’s parted thighs. Her eyes were closed in a blissful expression, and her tongue worked ceaselessly, lapping at the folds and seam with slow, reverent strokes. The nun’s face was flushed a deep, fevered pink, and her slick lips were painted with the residue of her labor.

Margaret relaxed her thighs, allowing Sister Catherine’s tongue to nestle into the valley of her pussy, her own hips working forward in a slow, inexorable roll. The sense of power was nearly as exquisite as the physical sensation: she could feel Catherine’s breathing, shallow and frantic, through the gentle tremor of the woman’s nose pressed to her pubic bone. Margaret’s cunt was swollen, engorged with blood and want, and Catherine lapped at it with a diligence borne of both practice and devotion. There was no need to encourage her; Sister Catherine lived for this. Her obedience was as pure as distilled water, a total abdication of self in the hopes of some private absolution.

Margaret stroked the woman’s head, carding her fingers through the short, sweat-damp hair. Catherine whimpered, a desperate little noise, muffled against the yielding flesh of Margaret’s inner thigh. The sound throbbed straight to Margaret’s cunt. She encouraged Catherine with a tightening of her thigh muscles, a subtle flex that pulled the nun’s mouth deeper between her legs.

For a luxurious moment she allowed herself to drift, eyes half-lidded, watching the snow accumulate on the high stone windowsill. The chill outside made the warmth at her center all the more intense, each flicker of tongue a pulse of heat that radiated to her spine. Her mind, always a nest of schemes, was easily able to compartmentalize the pleasure. Sister Catherine’s tongue was a tool, a device, no more meaningful than the paraphernalia of office, except that from time to time it required cleaning, feeding, or re-training. The real delight was in the anticipation: Grace, still so innocent, would be a far more exquisite instrument than this obedient drone. She could see already how the girl would resist, the way red would bloom in her cheeks as she was bent and remade, the trembling gratitude with which she’d accept her place.

The thought was so delicious, it sent the Reverend Mother over the edge. She pressed Catherine’s face tighter, suffocating the whimper with her thighs, feeling the raw, frantic heat of the other woman’s tongue as it searched for it’s target as it bucked up and down. As her spasms crested, The Reverend Mother reached under the desk and seized a double handful of Catherine’s hair, holding her there, nose and lips flush to the wet split, until the last aftershock spasmed from her hips to her ribs and left her collapsed, boneless, against the throne of her chair. She did not cry out, but the huff of her lungs, sharp and hungry, was enough.

God, she loved this job.