The Summit
The Faith & Media Summit filled a sterile glass-and-steel box in downtown Nashville. The air smelled of new carpet and weak corporate coffee.
Riley Read was guest of honor.
She stood surrounded and alone—beige-suited pastors, faith-lifestyle bloggers, the soft machinery of anointed networking—all angling for a slice of her time. She smiled until her jaw ached. Her hands, the ones that still wanted to crush, stayed clasped politely in front of her like a prayer she did not mean.
Somewhere behind the badge table, two women in modest blazers traded a half-joke she almost didn’t catch.
“—loaned eternities, like the old house churches used to say—”
“Midwives of what, though?”
Laughter. A coffee cup. The phrase slid past without explanation, a coin dropped in carpet.
Then the room’s pressure changed.
He was not on the schedule. He arrived as weather: a drop in barometric ease, a low bass note under the skin that lifted the fine hair on Riley Read’s arms before her eyes found a face.
DRIZL.
The name from the green-room dare. The spill. The man who moved the dirty half of the circuit without wearing a badge for it. Here he was in daylight faith media, smiling a slow smile meant for no one and everyone at once.
Riley Read’s trapped other self snapped to attention like a dog hearing a whistle no saint should admit exists.
He did not look at her first.
He looked at the room—and the room rearranged around the looking.
With him walked she.
Riley Klemmons.
Ghost in a high-necked black dress more scandalous than any of her on-screen nudity. The lie of modesty. Scandalous guest invited to “bridge the gap,” and she looked terrified enough to make the bridge look like a plank over open air.
Read froze.
Her.
The sinner from the laptop.
Here.
The Brush
Jerry was already at her elbow, hissing low. “It’s a setup, Riley. That’s DRIZL. Snake. And that’s—Klemmons. Whatever you do, do not engage. We walk to the green room, we call legal, we—”
“Jerry.”
His voice cut the air without raising volume. DRIZL’s. Close enough now that Riley Read felt the word in her teeth.
“Riley. Riley. Come. The press is waiting.”
Not a request. A summons.
He did not touch her. He only tilted two fingers toward the photo bay, and a volunteer with a lanyard flinched as if struck, then herded three pastors out of the frame like furniture. Jerry stepped back without deciding to. Schedule, bodies, narrative—rewritten in one quiet gesture.
The war in Riley Read’s head went silent.
The part of her that had slammed a laptop in a black bus obeyed.
He engineered it: saint and sinner, side by side, the perfect propaganda still.
Camera flashes whitened the world.
“Riley, over here!”
“Riley K., smile!”
“Together, girls!”
Klemmons shook. The porn mask would not hold under fluorescent holiness; it cracked at the mouth. Read moved in beside her on legs that felt borrowed.
Noise thinned.
Flashes became weather far away.
There was only sensation.
Riley Read smelled her.
Not sex. Not sin as the pamphlets named sin.
Lemon.
And ozone.
Clean, sharp, sterile—the scent of fake purity clinging to a body famous for filth.
Riley Klemmons smelled her.
Not grace. Not God.
Frankincense.
And under it, dark heavy animal musk—the hidden sin of the public saint, worn like oil no one had permission to name.
Their arms brushed.
One point. Bare skin on bare skin.
Read recoiled with a hiss as if burned. Klemmons flinched and gasped as if iced from the inside. Recognition ripped through both of them without language—two halves of a hypocrisy finally touching and finding the fit too exact to survive denial.
Across the bay, DRIZL watched the jolt land.
He smiled like a man confirming a measurement.
Jerry saw the smile. Jerry saw Read’s throat work. Something uglier than fear moved in him—want, quick and shameful, the brand-man’s hunger to stand closer to whatever had just rewritten his client. He swallowed it. It did not leave.
The Microphone
The panel was a controlled disaster.
Riley Read failed in the pretty way first: scripted answers about faith and grace turned hollow in her mouth the moment she tasted lemon-ozone still ghosting her sleeve. Three feet of stage separated her from Klemmons and felt like a wire pulled tight through both their spines.
A moderator lobbed a softball about prayer.
Read gave the pageant line on autopilot. “You have to trust His plan. Even in the silence.”
Then that other voice.
Not the porn voice. Small. Broken. Desperate. Off-script.
“But what do you do,” Klemmons said, “when you pray—and He—”
A fractured sound, almost a sob, almost nothing.
“—and He doesn’t answer?”
The room held still. Hundreds of faith leaders went quiet the way people do when a real wound opens in a place built for performance.
Riley Read looked at her.
Really looked—past the body the internet had inventoried, past the manufactured climaxes, into the drowning thing underneath.
A saint’s soul, aching for a purity Read faked every day on stages just like this.
Read’s jaw unlocked. The polite smile cracked at one corner and did not repair itself. Something colder and truer moved into her face—not storm-cloud poetry, just the drop of temperature when a lie stops being useful. Her pupils widened. Her hands, in her lap, finally stopped pretending they were gentle.
She leaned into the microphone.
The voice that came out was not a song. Low. Throat-close. Certain.
“Then,” she said, and let the silence hurt for one full beat, “you find a God who will.”
Their eyes met and held.
Declaration of war.
Promise of salvation.
The unspoken Word moving from one mouth to the other like contagion.
In the third row, a woman shifted and crossed her legs. Two seats down, another followed, quieter, as if the first movement had given the body permission. Along the aisle a third. Not a chorus. A spread. Want rewriting posture under fluorescent light while the men on the panel still thought they were discussing prayer technique.
Jerry stood in the wings with a dead earpiece and a live problem, watching his saint indoctrinate a room without raising her hand.
Across from him, DRIZL did not clap.
He only watched Riley Read as if she had finally begun the work he had scheduled her for months ago—whether she knew the calendar or not.
The infiltration was not finished.
It had only found a microphone.