Felicity’s days blur into a rhythm of whispered prayers and rigid routines at St. Agatha’s, a Roman Catholic boarding school tucked into the ragged, rain-lashed outskirts of the Australian bush. The isolation is suffocating — a cage of crumbling sandstone walls and watchful nuns who patrol the dormitory halls like spectral enforcers of piety. But behind her textbooks and rosary beads, Felicity’s mind thrums with restless energy. She’s consumed by thoughts the sisters would damn as mortal sins: the heat of skin, the weight of bodies, the secrets coiled between spread thighs. The novels hidden beneath her mattress feed this hunger. Dog-eared paperbacks with cracked spines, smuggled in by Jenny during holiday breaks — The Delta of Venus, Tropic of Cancer, their pages stained by flashlight and hurried fingertips. Felicity lingers over passages detailing sweat-slick encounters and the cunning language of desire, replaying them in her mind during Mass, her gaze fixed on the bleeding Christ above the altar. Fiction feels safer than her reality, where every urge is clipped short by guilt. Jenny, though — Jenny is a different kind of story. Their affair began in the stale quiet of the library archives, hands brushing between shelves of theological texts, then palms pressed tight in the shadow of a choir loft when no one else lingered after vespers. It’s fierce yet furtive; Jenny’s laughter dissolves into bitten-off gasps against Felicity’s neck. But even Jenny’s touch leaves her hollow. It’s all stolen moments and trembling silences — their exchanges are urgent, almost clinical, a scratch for an itch that only deepens the ache. Felicity craves something reckless. Real. Not the damp, guilty friction in broom closets, or the way Jenny’s affection flickers cold when the bell rings for morning prayers. She imagines strangers in dim bars, roaming neon-lit streets where no one knows her name, or the suffocating weight of a man’s body — something written plainly, brutally, without shame or salvation. At night, she presses prayer-scarred hands to the window, watching the bush writhe beyond the fence. Somewhere past those gum trees, the world pulses with heat she can’t name but craves like air. The chapel bells chime midnight. Felicity prays, but not to God — to desire itself, coiled hot in her stomach, waiting to crack her wide open.