I met Dawn on my first day working at the church. "Reinforcements are here, praise the Lord!" she said, bouncing from her chair in the front office and welcoming me with a tight hug. Not shy. She never would be.
Dawn was the office administrator at Spread the Seed, a mid-sized nondenominational Christian church in my hometown. I'd just returned home to live with my workaholic dad and his new trophy wife, and I needed work. I'd earned a very expensive but at that point fruitless English degree, so all options were on the table. STS didn't pay much, but it was close to home and didn't have demanding hours. I figured I'd spend a few months there while I tried to get my Great American Novel off the ground or land a big-city magazine job.
My new stepmom, Caitlin, had circled the listing in the paper and left it for me on kitchen table one morning shortly after I got back. We didn't discuss it, but then we didn't have much common ground---she'd been married to my dad for only about year, and I was in college for most of that. Proofing sermon texts and sending emails wasn't exactly a "writing job," as she scribbled above the circled ad, but I treated it like a well-meaning gesture. I called the church that morning, had an interview that afternoon, and was hired that evening. I was up-front with the minister about not having much of a religious background and being pretty much agnostic. "That's fine, son," he reassured me. "You might find you grow to like being in a faith environment. And not being a member of this congregation keeps you from becoming...entangled."
I wasn't sure at that point what
entangled
meant, and I was afraid to ask. I wasn't sure if there was a religious protocol about talking about that kind of thing. That first morning, all I knew about how churches operated was Dawn, who proved to be upbeat, kind, and fun to work with.
And, I couldn't help but notice right away, very sexy. Dawn was curvy with full hips and deep cleavage on a small frame--5'2", tops. And she wore dresses that showed it off, usually low-cut but classy enough for an office. Her bright silver crucifix had a way of drawing my eyes to her tits. And with her height, I couldn't help but look down. She had bright green eyes and a sweet smile that was easy to take in as well. Her churchiness, far from making her seem distant, only made her hotter to me.
And her voice. Her first-day-on-the-job guidance was peppered with Southernisms that she expressed in a sweet-tea lilt. "Well don't that just beat all!" she said, when I was able to fix a paper jam. "Aren't you just delightful," she'd say when I thanked her, for anything---bringing me coffee, picking up a ringing phone.
It was just the two of us in the office, but for most of that first week I didn't get a chance to find out much about her personally. I was still learning the ropes about everything the church office needed. Edits to the newsletter, website, and Sunday sermon slide decks. Stewardship promotional letters, printouts of pledges for congregants, ads in the newspaper, office stuff. And though we were the only front-office staffers, the place could get busy during the week. Deliveries, people looking for NA and AA meetings, and various "church mice"---congregants coming by to clean the kitchen, fix the wiring of the speaker system, and other odd jobs. Sometimes homeless persons would come by and Dawn would draw from a stack of fast-food vouchers or suggest a shelter or other service. ("Now you take care of yourself, you hear? God loves you.") She was uniformly kind to every person she encountered, which was nice to see---she lived her faith. But it also had the downside of making me feel like nothing special to her. Everybody got that flirty, sweet-tea tone of hers. By the end of that first week, I better understood why envy was a sin.
So I hardly had time to think of her as anybody but a supervisor I hoped to impress, some way or another. But by the end of the day on Friday, finishing my first week on the job, Dawn came into the office with a couple of beers and handed me one. "Congrats, hon, you survived!" she said.
I took the bottle, bemused. "A little odd to be keeping beers around in a church, isn't it? Where there are AA meetings?"
Dawn laughed sweetly---I came to love that laugh, and even that early on I wanted to chase it. "I keep it strictly locked down with the sacristy wine. And it's not like we're drinking in the meeting room. In fact, I know a place that's much more comfortable. Follow me."
I carried my beer and followed. Did I watch her ass sway in that yellow-and-purple sundress? I certainly did. Did I have thoughts about what it might be like to pull up that skirt, tug down whatever panties she had on (I imagined something skimpy and silky, a sexy secret she kept to herself) and fuck her silly? Yes. I'd spent a week watching her ass jiggle as she handled office errands. Did being in a church suppress those thoughts? If anything, they were more intense. But I still knew my place---she was my boss, and I didn't know her relationship situation. She was at least 10 years older than me, grown up in a way that made me figure I was out of her league, emotionally, religiously, whatever.
Dawn tugged open a door and suddenly we were in the sanctuary. Notre Dame it wasn't, but it felt churchy enough. The STS sanctuary was as big as a junior-high basketball court. Room for maybe 500 parishioners, long padded pews, big projection screens. Behind the altar, a large wooden cross, gently lit from behind.
Dawn took a seat at one of the pews near the back and I sat next to her. "I usually come here at the end of the week with a beer to just decompress and think," she said. "It's nice to have some company."
"'Drinking buddy in the pews' wasn't on the list of assigned tasks for the week, but it works for me," I said. Dawn laughed that laugh of hers.
She pried a lot of information out of me---my college studies, my aspirations, my returning home, my parents' divorce, my new stepmom. Dad traveled a lot for work, so being "home" meant spending a lot of time around a woman I didn't know very well. No girlfriend---I'd broken up with the one I had shortly before graduation, when she landed a job as a publicity assistant at a publisher in New York and I couldn't even pretend to have a prospect that would allow me to follow her.
"Oh, that's a heartbreaker, dear," Dawn said, patting my knee softly.
"We weren't super close. More like college friends. How about you?" I thought about appending one those terms of endearment she like to use---
hon, dear, sweetie
. It wouldn't have been appropriate for me to do that as her employee, and it would've been awkward as a non-Southerner. But I wanted to.
Her back straightened, her face took on a teasing, flirty look. She seemed to be testing me about how inquisitive I was willing to be. "What about me, hon?"
"Boyfriend? Husband? What brought you to this church? What do you want to do with the rest of your life?"
"I don't get asked very often. Big questions." She pulled on her beer.
I looked up, waved the bottle around me. "We're in the place for it."
She smiled and patted my knee again. Then she unspooled some personal details. She was married for five years---at STS---but things "fell apart" and she divorced her husband two years ago. Came out well in the divorce, no kids, but didn't like dating. For a time she'd worked as an admin at a big tech firm, but wanted something simpler, so she took a job in the church. "You meet all sorts of people trying to do good things, every day," she said. "Not every place can say that. Besides, you learn all sorts of interesting gossip."
"Oh? Like what?"
She paused, as if sizing me up. "You'll find out in due time, I'm sure."
After a little more small talk, we rose to go. At the front door, Dawn gave me a sweet, tight hug. "I'm glad you're here," she said, her eyes a little more sparkly from the beer. She took my bottle from my hand and downed the last half-inch in the bottle. "I think you're going to like it here."
My cock hardened in the sanctuary as I thought the same thing, and tried to keep it from pressing against her thigh. Dawn was sweet to everybody, I knew, but her kind words at that moment were meant just for me. A note you'd keep in your pocket and never share with anybody because it was a secret so good you wanted to have it on you at all times.
*
You're not here to read a story about religion, so rest easy: Working in a church didn't deliver me into the loving arms of Jesus. But I did spend the weekend after my first week at STS thinking about sin.
I'd jacked off a few times thinking about Dawn: I stroked my uncut cock thinking about her cleavage and the way her crucifix drew me to it. I imagined her round ass and how it would feel while she rode me in the sanctuary. I imagined her whispering in her sweet-tea voice about how much she needed my cock, sucking me off in the pews, hiking up her dress and letting me fill her pussy, telling me how much better I was at fucking then her ex-husband.
