Like a heathen clung to the homily,
Let the reason come in the common tongue of your loving me

She is divinity.

It is sacrilege to think it. She is a woman of clay and earth, she is nothing so lofty as the clouds that house the angels and he knows, he knows that the thought is sin to compare, both in her eyes and those of the gods that might hear the words filling every breath of air in the space of his consciousness. He knows, he knows, and he sins.

Erik sins because it is all he has ever done and he doesn't know how to stop, not when he is pressing and pulling fingers in the warm white marble of her hips, striated pink with the grip of eager fingernails. He sins as he laps at her, drinks from the closest thing to sacramental wine that will ever touch his lips with each pass of his tongue, feels the grip of grace itself in the twist and tangle of her fingers in his hair. He sins as he lifts a trembling thigh to settle it with the weight of contrition over his shoulder, sins as he looks up to see the chips of colour dancing from the eyes that shine like rose windows through barely-cracked eyelids.

He sins, relishes his communion and the wordless psalms sung in a breathless purl for his devotion. She doesn't know how she begs for worship, how every little detail chiseled into her façade cries out for his supplication. He is on his knees with hands above his head, pressed together but for the waist that keeps them separated, and nothing is more appropriate because he must make pleas of forgiveness.

He sins and he sins and he sins again and he has stopped telling himself that it will end, this sacrilegious series of comparisons and weights, because how can he feel anything but the divine in that earth-shattering tremor that wracks the foundations of her, how can hear anything but the voice of heaven's choirs in the way she cries out her rapture? She is godless and sacred and earthly and celestial and everything the universe could be, and she is coming undone at his voiceless prayers.

He is baptized for the thousandth time in the salt-laced sweat of the skin that he is blessed to feel on his wretched sinner's face. He is cleansed by her body going limp against the wall and her hand loosening in his hair. He is absolved by the whisper of his name, tired and sated. Amen.

He sins, and he will sin again.

A/N: Title and quote taken from a Hozier song of the same title.