Project Passion

Project Passion

Dusty Miller

Copyright 2013 Dusty Miller

This Smashwords Edition was published
by Dusty Miller

Image Copyright 2013 Dusty
Miller

ISBN 978-9918999-3-7

http://hotboox.blogspot.ca/

The following is a work of fiction. Any
resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or
events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters
and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The
author’s moral right has been asserted.

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Project Passion

Dusty Miller

Five minutes to pull into a truck
stop, take a small bag into the restroom, and then it was out of
the habit and into ordinary, even drab street clothes. Phase One
complete. She was free. It was her life and she had dreams. She
also had some rights. What a long strange trip it had been just to
get this far.

Normally she would be teaching third
grade at St. Francis Xavier Girl’s Academy for about six and a half
hours a day, but the rest of her time was taken up by the daily
prayer rituals, feasts and holiday observances, or household
duties, which were little better than maid work in their communal
existence. She went to Mass every day. Four hours in the car were
hardly a respite.

She’d had too much time to
think.

Sister Heather was frankly terrified
as she stumbled about putting up camp. Her hair, healthy and thick,
was her best asset for what lay ahead. Otherwise she was pretty
unremarkable as far as sexy women went. That was one problem. Tall,
fairly fit, used to being on her own a lot of the time, and having
been through a few tough spots in the vale of tears that was this
life, she was having a hard time with the thoughts and fears of
what might happen. Or worse almost, what might not happen. It was
hard to convince herself that she could live with a failure. It was
equally hard to believe that she could succeed. This was her first
serious attempt.

There was a lot that could go
wrong.

It all began innocently enough. Not
that the desire for raunchy sex with a man was innocent—it was far
from it, but Heather had fantasized about what sex might be like
since she was very young. It was a priest she was in love with at
the time who did that for her. It led to discovery. The thoughts
she had entertained towards him! It was mental pornography. She had
tried to imagine herself, beautiful, sensuous, raven-haired and so
cool and sure. Thoughts of his dark olive skin, curling
mustache…and with Father Alan or even some other man, perhaps
hairier and more strongly built, making love to her...rather. The
first orgasm scared her. The revelation was that she liked it. The
sort of misgivings that it also aroused were predictable and she
wondered how to ever get beyond that.

Why didn’t she have any
guts?

For years it simmered on the back
burner of her sexual consciousness, bubbling along at the level of
private fantasy. One which she indulged in her solitude from time
to time, although God knew it was wrong. But not to do it was so
very much worse.

Sex did wonderful things for her body
and her soul and that was undeniable.

Who knew, maybe it was understandable
at some level. She was a lonely kid back then, and a horny
teenager. It was the experimentation, and the discovery that it
brought a pretty big bang for the buck, as the saying went. But she
was in Orders. It was forbidden. Jesus Murphy, it was
sin.

This brought an awkward smile in the
midst of driving in the tent-pegs.

It was the forbidden fruit, the
nameless and atavistic desire to be held, understandable in someone
who had been geeky and awkward since she was seventeen. Torn from
her family and isolated from the world. It was more than simple
curiousity. It was the yearning to be desired. She wanted someone
to want her, as much as anything. She wanted, needed, someone to
want her body. It was a craving. She wondered what it was like to
make a man drool, running rough hands all over her.

Perhaps it was not unnatural, when she
recalled. As a seventeen year-old she honestly believed that she
would be alone forever…and it was natural for thoughts to stray,
and to wonder if she was indeed a fallen woman, even without
actually doing anything. She’d fallen in love with others. Men who
were attractive but somehow those fantasies never worked out in
tangible fashion. The notion that she was ugly and no one wanted
her was one of the factors that led to her into entering the
convent in the first place. It was honest confusion. Perhaps it was
the fear of the unknown, the fear of life itself. It felt cowardly,
looking back now.

Heather was just old-fashioned. She
knew all the words—she’d read a few books.

The words came easily, words learned
the first day of school, standing in the yard waiting for the bell
to ring.

All the usual words. Every
kindergarten kid knew them.

No, Heather was scared witless. And
yet she had found the courage at last, to acknowledge the secret
yearnings for what they were. She had found the courage to act.
There were fantasy men she still loved, still missed, still
wondered about after all these years, and all of that was a side
issue.

It was still difficult, of course, no
matter what people said these days. She still thought of it in the
old terms, in terms of revilement and hatefulness. Deep inside, she
knew. She knew.

Maybe it all came down to who you were
born to be—and maybe Heather was fooling herself when she
masturbated, dreaming of a certain someone whom she could never
quite visualize except in the most obvious—and perverse—terms that
she possibly could. It’s like they barely had faces. What a sad
thought. One day her thoughts turned to black men. For some reason
that really did it for her. It was Satan tempting her.

Heather was more scared now than that
first time, when she went on the internet. She turned on ‘Private
Browsing,’ not that that would ultimately deter the marketers. But
they didn’t care who or what she was, not nearly so much as she
did. She knew no other life…

Always careful to delete her browsing
history, in case someone else would click on it and know who had
been on it. Feeling dirty and dishonest using the house laptop in
her room late at night…it always turned on something deep inside of
her, though. This much was undeniable truth.

Quickly snapping off the
page almost as soon as she had seen it, and then when she sat
thinking about it for a long time afterwards. The truth was that
this was just fantasy, one she had never dared to act upon in even
the slightest way. The obvious conclusion was that she never would.
When she met men
in the wild
as she thought of it, sitting around in bingo, or
attending out of a sense of duty, Saturday bazaars and such, all
about in the greater world once or twice, she’d actually gotten an
oddly passionate feeling while talking to them in vague terms.
Sooner or later, they always told you if they were married or if
they had a girlfriend, or if they had children.

The thought of them as men always hit
her. It always came back to sex.

It was like home schooling. They
always told you. Heather had never mentioned her thoughts to
anyone. That was for sure.

When she was young and insecure, the
knowledge that she was a wanton thing was too much information. She
didn’t want to know. She was so unsure of it either way. It’s not
like she was going to suddenly leave her calling, meet a man, and
have a string of babies anytime soon, but this was just something
she had always wanted to do. Everyone had their Mount
Everest—something that they just had to do once in their lives. At
least make the attempt.

Deep down inside she wondered if there
was revulsion, and just what exactly made a perfectly sensible
woman ldo this to herself.

Surely that must be it. It must be
personal revulsion.

#

After taking time off for a doctor’s
appointment, Heather stopped at a cash machine in a local strip
mall and took out three hundred dollars from an account that was
surprising in its liquidity. She had inherited a little money and
had no idea of what to do with it. A pilgrimage to Rome, or
Jerusalem had been suggested. Taking off her headgear in the car,
and with some objective observation, she thought she could pass for
an average woman, if she just kept her long coat done up. She was
merely plain, but not obviously a nun in Holy Orders.

Heart pounding in raw fear much of the
time, she drove the house’s spare utility sedan eighty miles, and
at darned near eighty miles an hour too, to a regional town on a
dull, late autumn day. It was one where she was pretty sure she
didn’t know anybody. Having studied all the flyers online, she went
straight to Green’s Pharmacy, which was several hundred thousand
square feet in size and known over the tri-state area. The
supplies, as she thought of them, were inserted as an afterthought
in a long list of cheap items which included diapers and a famous
brand of tampons. She bought a case of Similac, some kind of baby
formula. She spoke to no one. She would blush or give the game away
somehow. The checkout girl barely looked up and she was out of
there in twenty minutes. Most of which was spent simply going up
and down the unfamiliar aisles. It’s not like she didn’t know
exactly what she was looking for. She had a list, or surely she
would have forgotten something in her hyper state of mind. She went
to two or three different stores in town, so as not to give herself
away buying panty-hose and condoms, hair remover and stuff like
that, all from the same teller.

To run into a cousin or something
would have been sheer disaster. Most of the items she could donate
at a local drop-box. It was just cover for what she thought of as
The Project.

Suitably emboldened, and after a while
a lot more confident that no one in this particular hick town would
ever see her again, Heather checked a phone book in a booth
standing in front of a Seven-Eleven gas bar and then went looking
for the lingerie store. In the end, she couldn’t stand around all
day looking in the window, and so, stammering and blushing
something fierce, she ended up not buying anything except a narrow
black ribbon with a bow on it for her neck. She wished she could
have been cooler then, but that would be her costume. A proper
dildo would have been priceless, but she just couldn’t do it. She
would be the perfect present for the right guy. Stealing jeans and
other small items from the rummage bin in the church hall front
closet was somehow easier to live with. It was a small package and
easy to hide in their big old building. Down in the basement, it
was tucked into the rafters, carefully leaving the spider webs in
front of the opening intact. She always used a chair from another
room and always put it back right on its giveaway little dust
circles. The long winter nights were used for research and
planning.

#

Heather shook her head. How brave she
was in bringing her packages home. To park the car, and walk in
from outside on knocking knees, loaded with shopping bags. To push
the button and wait for the elevator…it was all kind of a letdown
when no one came along and she had the lobby all to herself. Would
it have been better if Mother Superior was standing there with arms
crossed and right foot tapping?

Oh, have you been
shopping?

She hadn’t even been missed. Everyone
accepted her presence at face value. She’d been gone three of four
hours. No one said a word. When the elevator door opened, again she
was sure someone would be in there, but no.