The Green Room
Her worship was a war.
Outside the polished steel door of the green room, twenty thousand souls screamed her name.
“Riley! Riley! Riley!”
The roar was formless, tidal, vibrating up through concrete into the bones of her feet. Inside, Riley Read’s world held only one sound that mattered.
Squeak.
Squeak.
Squeak.
Her knuckles were bone-white around a paper towel. She scrubbed at a single non-existent smudge on the mirror. The sharp chemical bite of the cleaner was the only thing in the room that felt honest.
Jerry poked his head in—publicist, handler, the nervous architecture of her brand. “Riley? Five minutes to the meet-and-greet. They’re ecstatic. Said you prayed the house down.”
She watched her own reflection. Angelic. Sweat-free. Eyes the color of a calm summer sky that had never once told the truth about what lived under her ribs.
“There’s a smudge,” she whispered. The voice was low, gravel, nothing like the instrument that filled stadiums.
“Where? Riley, it’s clean.”
She pressed harder. The tension was not in her shoulders. It lived deeper—in her hands. A vibrating need to grip, to crush, to make something outside her finally match the pressure inside.
The paper towel thinned under her fingers with a soft, failing tear.
Squeak.
“I’ll be right out,” she lied.
Jerry lingered half a second too long. His gaze snagged on her hands, on the ruined towel, on the discipline of a woman scouring nothing. Something like fascination moved behind his professional worry—quick, ugly, not yet named. Then he vanished. The door clicked shut.
Alone.
She stopped scrubbing. Her palm ached. She knew this feeling. It was not piety. It was not God.
It was the other thing. The wrong thing. The enemy she had been reading her Bible against since she was fifteen—verse as weapon, purity as performance, the Word as a wall she kept rebuilding because something on the other side of it kept breathing her name.
The Lemon
Four hundred miles away, the only thing Riley Klemmons could feel was the itch.
“And—cut!” The director, a bored man named Sal, did not bother to sound impressed. “Perfect, Riley. Just perfect. That’s a wrap, people.”
The Klieg lights snapped off. The fake luxury penthouse fell into cold blue twilight. Hot metal stink drained out of the air and left dust and cheap lubricant behind.
Riley Klemmons did not move.
She lay on itchy synthetic silk, body gleaming with sweat that was half real and half sprayed. The male talent—a man whose name she had already released—zipped his pants without looking at her.
“Great work, Klemmons,” he mumbled.
She tasted ash. Metallic ghost of faked passion. Her throat ached from moans she had manufactured on pitch, on mark, on time.
Lemon. That was the joke on set. The lemon. The ultimate sinner. The porn goddess famous for angelic eyes at the exact second she faked a camera-ready climax.
Under the performance, something quieter screamed.
Not for God.
For silence.
She stared at the gaffer packing cable and thought, with bleak private humor, that at least the lights were honest when they burned out. She was still lit for no one. Still arranged. Still empty in the place the lens called holy filth.
Sal clapped once. “Wardrobe wants the robe back in ten. Don’t ghost, Klemmons.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, and heard how dead the line landed.
The Laptop
The tour bus was a tomb. Silent. Cold. Black.
Riley Read needed it that way.
She had fought the urge all day. All week. Longer, if she counted honestly—and she did not like counting honestly.
Don’t look.
Don’t look.
Don’t look.
Opposition research, she called it. Knowing the enemy. Folders nested inside folders. Screenshots of industry threads. A private browser profile named nothing she would ever let Jerry see. Late nights after meet-and-greets when the adrenaline crashed and the hands still wanted to crush.
Liar.
The habit had a history. Three months ago someone in a green room—not Jerry, a lighting guy half-drunk on craft services coffee—had laughed about the circuit. About who booked the clean half of faith media and who moved talent through the dirty half without ever putting his face on a badge. A name like a spill: DRIZL. Said once. Not explained. Beside it, offered like a dare, the other Riley.
The sinner with the saint’s eyes.
Riley Read had not asked for the spelling. She had not needed to. The name had already been living under her tongue like a bruise.
Now her fingers—the same fingers that ached to crush—trembled over the trackpad. Jaw locked so hard her molars complained. She opened the folder. Hovered over the bookmark she had sworn, twice this week alone, to delete.
The cursor blinked.
She almost closed the laptop. Thumb on the edge of the lid. Counted to four. Failed at five.
She typed the name anyway. The lie. The other Riley.
Riley Klemmons.
Her finger rested on the trackpad without clicking. The bus hummed a single low note under the silence. Somewhere far forward, the driver shifted gears. She could still stop. She could still be the woman who only researched for ministry talking points.
She clicked.
The sound was small and absolute.
The screen flickered.
We do not see the screen.
We see Riley Read.
Color climbs her chest first—deep, hot crimson—then her throat, then the roots of her hair as if shame had a direction and preferred to be seen. Breath stops. Catches. A tiny suffocating gasp she would never allow a microphone.
Her stomach clenches around stacked refusals: disgust, betrayal, hatred, the whole public vocabulary of a saint confronting sin.
Then the truth arrives lower.
Not in her heart.
Deep. Buried.
A single sharp pulse in her clit—so precise it feels almost medical, so real it steals the air out of her lungs. Wet heat follows like a verdict. Her thighs press together hard enough to tremble. The ruined paper towel, still somehow in her other hand from a pocket she does not remember using, tears fully with a soft final sound.
She knows this feeling.
It is not lust, not exactly.
It is not sin as she has been taught to catalog sin.
It is envy—pure, unadulterated, agonizing.
She wants that.
She wants to be that.
The freedom in the hollow eyes. The honesty of a body used without the costume of prayer. The way the other Riley does not have to pretend the war is holy.
Riley Read slams the laptop shut and plunges the bus back into darkness.
She sits panting in the black, shaking, angelic face streaked with real hot angry tears.
The saint’s revelation is complete.
She does not hate the sinner.
She aches to be her.