The Jewels of Tessa Kent Read Online Free

they were still too young and too undeveloped to look right in sexy underwear. But if you squinted your eyes and lifted your nipples in cupped hands, and stuck out your ass, you could get a pretty good idea of how you’d look in a couple of years.
    As for
Penthouse
and
Variations
, they pored over one issue at a time, discovering that some of the subject matter was heart-pounding and passionately fascinating. Teresa couldn’t keep from thinking about all the forbidden, unutterably exciting things a man and a woman could do together—except when she was brooding on the certainty that she was going to go to Hell after she died.
    It was amazing, Teresa thought grimly, that she was able to lie with such calm to the priest at confession, producing a normal series of venial sins as she tried not to breathe the stale air in the red velvet, padded phone booth of the confessional that the old church still used in spite of Vatican II. But she knew the truth. She was unquestionably guilty of at least four of what her catechism class had been taught were the seven deadly or mortal sins. She was guilty of lust, the sin of impurity, and of gluttony, the sin of drinking too much. When she and Mimi dressed up and admired themselves she was guilty of the sin of pride … their sessions certainly didn’t conform to the “normal pride in a neat appearance” the nuns talked of.
    Every single week of her life, as she left any of these three mortal sins unconfessed, by name and number of times it had happened, she was committing yet
another
mortal sin by not confessing, so her sins were not forgiven but lay on her heavily and painfully, almost too much to endure. Yet, to rid herself of them would have been worse. If she’d ever been tempted to make a full confession, she’d be kneeling in front of a pew doing penance for hours—for days!—before she could receive absolution and the sacrament of penance. Since her mother waited to drive her home from church, praying quietly in a pew not far from the confessional, any such penance would cause an inquisition.
    Hell waited for her, Teresa never doubted that. Her weekly catechism class had started when she was five and a half. From that time on she spent all of every Saturday morning being indoctrinated into the rules, laws, and prayers of the church, by a different nun everyyear. When she’d made her First Holy Communion at eight, she’d been certain that she’d go to Heaven. Just thinking of how pure and light-filled she’d felt walking down the church aisle in her beautifully embroidered long white dress, a little bride accompanied by a little groom, could still bring tears to her eyes.
    Yes, the forest of fear of Hell she lived in now was a place she’d been prepared for from the beginning of her memory. Hell, the certainty of Hell for a sinner who hadn’t confessed and wasn’t absolved, had been seared into her for seven years. It wasn’t knowledge she could question any more than she could question the fact that she was a girl or an American.
    Hell, actually going to Hell, had only started to be a reality to Teresa after she met Mimi. Before that she had been able to confess to the mortal sins of envy or sloth and anger, as well as all the minor venial sins, and feel cleansed when she left the confessional.
    Now she couldn’t give up her lies of omission in the confessional any more than she could possibly tell a priest that she’d spent hours looking at pictures of naked men and women and reading vivid details about people having sex in every way anyone could imagine.
    As the year passed, Teresa’s confirmation loomed. “Oh, what am I going to do?” she moaned to Mimi. “I have to make a full confession, a good confession, before I’m confirmed, and even if I managed to admit—you know—my mother would know I’d done something very bad.”
    “What if … what if you went to a strange church, by yourself, without your mother, and got it over with before your