"Lifestyle" by AJ Maiorana

You've never known what it felt like to fuck someone like you hate them. She tries her hardest to convince this stranger dressed as a nun that she is not sure she’ll be leaving with you. Like fucking hell. You wonder if Jesus would have fucked Peter with the same bitterness. It might be ironic, the comparison. Denial comes in threes. You haven’t cum once. But Jesus offered unconditional forgiveness, so who the hell are you to hold a grudge?

The taste of chocolate and mushrooms lingers on the back of your tongue like the eucharist; sweet, earthy, and hard to swallow. The music from every room shakes the tin walls like an overzealous choir. The nun asks to put her friend's cock in your partner’s mouth. She feels your fingers tighten in her hair at the suggestion. She says to the nun, only if they both do you as well. The idea dies in the air. The heat rushes out of you all at once and you are a boy in a confessional, on your knees for something you don’t believe in.

She walks you around the benches and cages of a bondage room labeled a confessional. She tells you about the times she loaded up on cocaine so she could eagerly take beatings from strangers. She asks how you want to fuck her, trying to coax life back into you. Someone fills the room with incense. You stop the tour and put her on her knees, there in the middle of the room. Repentance through action and humiliation. Forgiveness comes as you do.

AJ Maiorana is the non-fiction editor for JAKE the Magazine and a recovering catholic. He had work published in Gutslut Press, Bulb Culture Collective, Bullshit Lit, and Mr. Bull Bull. He is a one-time Pushcart Prize nominee.