Last week from the pulpit she mentioned she'd just had a birthday. Everyone clapped, as we always do for birthdays. Except then she thanked all the women who had joined her and helped her through it, helped her through turning old. I looked at her, standing there before us, not much older than me, and I thought of the unfinished story I'd been working on, on and off, for the last year or so, the story she inspired but that had not yet offered up to me its secret ending.

The words are sexual but I do not hear them. I hear the lilt of her voice. I see the subtle movement of her pale hands against the dark wood of the pulpit. I hear the promise of abandon. I see the toss of her blond head. I hear her excitement. I feel my cock rising. I anticipate the sacred, I wait for the heat of her body, for my fingers on the buttons of her lavender blouse, for nipples visibly hard freed to my mouth, for her hips lowered over me, for the cold shock of the alter against my naked back.

She isn't old. She's what, ten years older than me tops? I'm not old. I've been known to feel old. It's a horrible feeling, an asexual feeling. The thought of her feeling old and asexual disturbed me to the core.

She is looking at me as she preaches, urging me to cast aside my evil sexual inhibitions, to cast aside my clothes, to cast her onto the nearest couch. Her sermon is ending. My anticipation is rising. I want to place myself in the offering plate, offer myself to her as a subject for her book, to do with me what she will, to experience the expression of God's justice-love through my body and soul.

I've been watching her preach since she was a free-love seventies radical, watched her mature into a free-love eighties radical, and a free-love nineties radical, and I need her now to be a free-love 2004 radical.

I want her bad. I want her immediately, without hesitation or doubt.

I needed to talk to her, to argue and plead, but she had an appointment after the service, left in a hurry without talking to anyone, left me frustrated and angry for a week at the passage of time and human frailty. This week she did not run off. This week she stayed and thanked people for coming as they left the sanctuary. I puttered around, cleaning up, biding my time, waited for the line to clear out, sidled over, real casual like. "I wanted to argue with you last week," I said to her very quietly, leaning in just a little to establish a sense of secrecy, "but you ran away before I could talk to you."

But the service is only half over, and the sanctuary is still filled with the rest of the congregation, and even though I would eagerly take her in front of the assembled, the dearly beloved, the potentially jealous, this is still a Presbyterian church with a very strict order of worship. Even fucking the preacher silly on the alter, in the pew, in the middle of the floor must be done decently and in good order.

"What did you want to argue about?" she whispered back, drawn into my little conspiracy, turning her head to the side, her ear toward me so I could answer in kind.

I find it increasing difficult to sit still during the rest of the service. I fidget, my hard cock pressed against the pressed pants of my suit.

"You're not old," I whispered softly but clearly, my tempted mouth just inches from her offered ear, "you're hot."