Page 55 of Sinners Atone
Then a wall of black bricks it out.
This shadow is larger than the last. It makes me feel even more vulnerable and on edge, and it takes everything in me not to close my eyes and wait for it to disappear.
With a lump in my throat, I turn around. My gaze snags on the blood splatter on the glass panels, then beyond it to a man dragging a body toward a waiting car.
Then finally up to him.
With a sinking feeling, I realize I’ve jumped from the frying pan and into the flames of hell. Gabriel Visconti is terrifying at the best of times, but under the naked light bulb, he’s a nightmare personified. It brings out the red of his scar and the black of his fury. Casts the planes of his face in a demonic glow.
Every nerve ending prickles under his glare as it slides down my body. Down my arm, and to my hand, where it narrows into a sharp point.
“Something to confess?”
What?
With not a single thought in my brain to latch onto, I dumbly follow his eye line to the Sinners Anonymous card in my hand, then grow cold.
Legend has it, these cards started mysteriously popping up years ago, long before I moved to the coast. Tacked above public telephones, at the bottom of tip jars, wedged into the frame of bathroom mirrors in nightclubs. They’re matte black and thick, with nothing else but a number printed along the bottom in gold. If you call it, it takes you to an automated voicemail message, encouraging you to confess your wrongdoings.
It’s probably some sort of new-wave religious cult or whimsy art school project. Even if it wasn’t, I’ve never been tempted to call.
The only time I’ve ever been tempted to confess wasthatnight, and to him. Only because I was certain he’d die.
The silence grows hot and begins to itch. I suppose I’d hoped he was too delirious, too close to death, to even register, let alone care, what I was asking of him.
“Ha. Of course not.” I crumple the card in my pocket and clear my throat. “I’ve never done anything worth confessing,” I mutter, staring at the broad expanse of his chest. My eyes dart across to his arms bulging beneath his short-sleeve T-shirt. No jacket in winter? How is this man not cold?
Silence hangs heavy, then hardens into tension. When it takes up too much of the space between us, I reluctantly slide my gaze up over his tattooed neck, thick beard, and search his expression.
As expected, it’s stone-cold and still. Annoyance pulsates behind his eyes and throbs at the side of his jaw. Christ, his stare is so intense, I imagine this is how it feels to stare down the barrel of a gun. It’s like he’s waiting for something, and suddenly, I remember my manners.
“Thank you,” I say sheepishly. “For, you know, stopping that creep from?—”
He cuts me off. “Do you always follow men you don’t know into dark spaces?”
Feeling as small as child being scolded, I shake my head.
Though his eyes flash dark, his tone is eerily calm. “What would you have done?”
“What?”
“What would you have done,” he repeats slowly, irritation tugging at his words, “if I wasn’t here?”
Oh. I shift under the weight of his heavy breaths and scan the empty road beyond the blood-smeared glass. “Well, I don’t know, actually. I guess someone would have walked by eventually.”
His nostrils flare at my answer. He looks up to the roof and swallows thickly, composing himself. “And if they didn’t?” he grits out.
“Um. I’d have screamed for help?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“What are youtalkingabout?”
Regret arrives quickly, and it sounds like a single heavy footstep and the thud of a closing door.
I hadn’t appreciated the space between us, and now it’s gone, snatched away by my stupidity and replaced with the heat of his body brushing mine.
What little air is left in the booth wilts and dies, creating a vacuum, and suddenly, I’m hyperaware of every sound and sensation within this eight-by-four box. How his hard torso contracts, then expands, grazing my stomach between the opening of my coat. How it blooms a strange heat beneath my skirt. How his heavy exhales steam the glass and cling to my clammy skin. The bob of his inked throat. Every bulge and vein snaking along his bare arm. I can hear thedrip, drip, dripof something warm and wet falling from his busted hand pressed against the wall by my head, and onto my shoulder.
