Chapter 16 The Last Sacrament

CLAUDIA

The Madrid rain doesn't wash things clean. It just feels heavy.

I walk aimlessly along the shining sidewalks of the Barrio de las Letras, the water soaking through my trench coat as the night chill settles deep into my bones. The warmth from the wine I shared with Lucía is completely gone, replaced by a sharp, almost cruel clarity.

I don't have a home anymore. Javi is gone.

His words in our empty living room keep looping in my head like a relentless echo: "I can't stay and watch you fall apart for someone who will never, ever stand up for you in public.

" He was right. I ruined my safe, comfortable life for a fantasy built on old stone, cassocks, and locked doors.

For an absurd pact of pure minds that tonight, under the weight of this storm, feels like the ultimate cowardice.

“It's a lot easier to breathe outside the rules,” the waitress told me. Valeria. Her clear eyes, her unapologetic freedom... I want that. I want to stop being afraid. I want to stop hiding.

Before I even realize where I'm going, my feet carry me away from the empty apartment I shared with Javi and straight to the entrance of Mercedes’s building, tucked away on a stately side street near El Retiro.

I walk up the marble stairs in silence, dragging my wet shoes. Standing in front of her massive wooden door, I tremble. From the cold, from panic, from sheer desperation. I reach out and press the brass doorbell.

One second. Two. Three.

The door swings open slowly.

Mercedes stands in the threshold. She wears an oversized gray wool sweater that makes her look smaller, more human.

Her hair isn't pinned back in its usual tight bun; the dark waves, woven with subtle silver strands, fall freely over her shoulders.

Seeing me standing there drenched, my makeup ruined and my lips blue from the cold, her gray eyes widen in quiet horror.

"Claudia?" she whispers, her voice barely a breath of wind. "My God, what are you doing here? What happened to you?"

"I have nowhere else to go, Mercedes," I tell her. My voice cracks, completely stripped of any academic pride. "Javi is gone. He knows everything. He took his things, and I... I only have you."

I take a step forward, crossing her threshold. My tear-blurred eyes search hers.

"I tried to keep your purity pact. I tried to be strong, to debate in seminars, to stand three feet away from you... but I'm dying inside. I don't care about San Griselmo, I don't care about the department chair, I don't care about hell. I want you. Your body, your soul, all of it."

Mercedes

Lord, save me, for I am drowning.

Seeing Claudia on my doorstep, shivering and broken by the guilt of shattering her life for me, pulverizes my last line of defense. The doctrine, Clara Leguina’s threats, the absolution I lied to my confessor to secure—all of it melts away in the storm. Her pain is my pain. Her ruin is my doing.

"Come inside, please. You're freezing," I say with feverish urgency.

I grab her arm and pull her into the apartment, shutting the door firmly behind us. The darkness of the hallway wraps around us, broken only by the amber glow spilling from the living room.

Claudia wraps her arms around herself, her teeth chattering.

Her dark, wide eyes look at me with a devotion so immense it sends a shiver through me.

I can't bear to see her suffer like this.

I slide my hands over her soaked shoulders, peeling off her wet trench coat and letting it drop straight to the floor, careless of the hardwood.

"You shouldn't have come, Claudia..." I whisper. I try to force the rigid voice of the professor, but my hands shake so badly I can barely unbutton her damp cardigan. "Clara Leguina is watching us. She threatened me in the cloister today. This... this is the end for us if we're caught."

"I don't care about Leguina." Claudia takes another step, erasing the distance between us entirely.

Her freezing hands reach up, gripping the collar of my sweater.

"Look at me, Mercedes. Tell me to my face you don't want me here.

Tell me your purity pact is real and that you aren't burning alive every time you step into that office.

Tell me, and I'll go right back out into the rain. I promise."

I look at her. Her face is inches from mine. I can feel her cold, wine-scented breath, see the desperate tremble of her dark plum lips. It's the same mouth that haunts my mystical delusions, the same mouth that woke me from a twenty-year desert of loneliness.

I try to find a lie in my mind, some theological equation to save me from damnation. But nothing is left. The stone temple of my discipline has completely collapsed.

"I can't..." I moan, and the tears of surrender finally spill over, hot against my cheeks. "I can't lie to you. Not again."

I drop her damp cardigan and, with a wild desperation I didn't know lived inside me, I pull her against my chest. Claudia lets out a choked sob and clings to my neck, burying herself in my shoulder like a shipwreck survivor.

The warmth of her body against mine, despite her wet skin, sends an electric shock straight down my spine.

We are breaking each other, but in the middle of the wreckage, I feel more alive than I have in my entire miserable existence.

Claudia

Her arms around my waist are strong and warm, bringing my breath back all at once. Her scent of cold orange blossom and wool envelops me, a safe harbor in the middle of my chaos.

Mercedes pulls back slightly, just enough to look into my eyes in the shadows. Her long fingers trace my damp jawline, caressing me with a tenderness so deep it makes me close my eyes.

"I'm afraid of hurting you, Claudia," she whispers against my lips. "Of dragging you into my abyss."

"Your abyss is my only home, Mercedes," I answer, opening my eyes to watch her gray gaze finally surrender.

I lean forward, shattering the last millisecond of our absurd purity pact.

Our lips meet.

This isn't the accidental kiss from Salamanca, nor the panicked haste of a locked office.

This is a slow, profound surrender, heavy with a devotion that borders on the sacred.

Mercedes's mouth is warm, alive, tasting sweet and mature, completely intoxicating me.

Her lips move against mine with a ritualistic slowness, as if she is memorizing my texture, consecrating my skin with every movement.

I let out a soft groan, my hands tangling in her loose hair, undoing the last bit of the rigid professor.

Mercedes grips my thighs with unexpected strength and lifts me slightly, prompting me to wrap my legs around her waist. She carries me down the dark hallway without breaking the kiss, until my back hits the wall of her bedroom.

Mercedes’s bedroom is austere, filled with crisp white sheets and the clean scent of lavender. We fall onto the mattress in a blur of hands searching to shed wet clothes, cold wool, and the final suffocating remnants of the rigid world of San Griselmo.

Mercedes

Under the faint light filtering through the window, Claudia’s body is an offering of youth, beauty, and a clean truth that leaves me breathless.

I press my lips along the line of her neck, right where the rain left a cold trail, listening to the sharp, rhythmic gasps that fill the silence of my room like a prayer of thanksgiving.

I unclasp the gold cross from my neck. The chain falls onto the nightstand with a metallic clink that sounds like a final farewell to my old life. I don't need it to protect me anymore. My only refuge is the warmth of the skin holding me, seeking me out with a voracious, tender urgency.

Our bodies join in a perfect, broken symmetry—a dance of relief accumulated through weeks of silence and forbidden glances.

Every touch, every moan Claudia breathes against my ear is an absolution I don't need to ask God for.

I give myself to her with an almost mystical devotion, losing myself in her taste, the softness of her hips, the heat of her stomach tightening beneath my fingers.

There is no guilt in this bed. There is no sin in the shadows of my bedroom.

As Claudia arches beneath my touch, tangling her fingers in my hair and seeking my mouth to muffle a cry of pure pleasure, I weep silently against her shoulder.

I weep from sheer relief, I weep for the eighteen-year-old Mercedes who condemned herself to a lifetime of isolation, and I weep with gratitude.

Because tonight, after a lifetime in the desert, I finally learn that true holiness doesn't live in the denial of the flesh, but in the absolute surrender to the love that saves you from yourself.