Page 63 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“You’ll see. And there’s sixty dollars because it’s a fancy date, Zenny-bug.” I’m kidding, obviously, because I could easily spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single night with her—and I considered it, I really did. I thought about whisking her away to St. Bart’s or Paris or the Seychelles, but somehow I knew that wouldn’t impress her.
And I do want to impress her. Or more accurately, I want her to have fun, I want her to be happy, I want her to feel what it’s like not to have the world on her shoulders. I want to see her smile and laugh. I want tonight to belong to her, not to her nursing degree, not to her shelter, not to her family’s subverted expectations. Nothing gets to claim her tonight but laughter and bad pizza.
Zenny misses the humor in my tone though, because she rubs her hands uncomfortably on her jeans. “Should I change?”
I glance pointedly down at my own clothes—jeans and an artfully rumpled button-down. “You’re dressed perfectly.”
“Okay,” she says, and then makes a noise that is somewhere between nervousness and self-deprecation at said nervousness. “Between the new nursing scrubs and the jumper, sometimes I feel like I forget how to dress for the real world. Not that I know where we’re going in the real world,” she adds pointedly.
I don’t take the bait. It’s going to be a fucking surprise. I shift gears as we merge onto the interstate south, and then I ask, “So you’ll wear the habit all the time after your vows, but you don’t have to wear the postulant’s uniform all the time now?”
Zenny leans back against the headrest and props her sneakers up on the dash. It’s such a young thing to do, such a college thing to do, and it makes me smile.
“Every order has their own rules about dress,” she says, not seeing my smile. “With SGS, when and where the postulant wears her uniform is determined between the postulant and the prioress. In my case, the Reverend Mother wants me in street clothes more often than not, because she’s concerned about my youth. We agreed on the shelter and at monastery events, and that’s it for me. But I’ve seen some postulants wear their uniforms all the time.”
I think about this for a minute. Come to some important conclusions. “I still want to fuck you in your postulant’s uniform.”
This earns me a lip bite and a very studious examination of her sneakers. “Okay,” she murmurs, and I don’t miss the way she squirms in her seat.
My smile gets bigger.
On the way to our date, Zenny guesses all sorts of places we could be going, all of them wrong. She guesses restaurants and movies—which I scoff at like a cynical Wakefield pirate—and then suggests other things I almost wish I’d thought of, like the arboretum or the local improv club. But no—we’re going to a place less classy and far more juvenile than an improv club, and I tell her that, which puzzles her for a long time.
I finally exit the highway on one of those indiscriminate suburban exits, the kind that have a hotel for no reason and a McDonalds and a chiropractor’s office, and navigate a few turns to our destination. Then I park the car and turn to face her.
“Well?” I say.
She gives me one of those Hollywood starlet eyebrows. “Are you actually taking me to a skating rink?”
“Yes, I am, Zenny-bug. Your skates are in the trunk,” I say as I grab my things and open my door.
“Wait…my skates? I don’t have any…” she trails off as she follows me outside the car to the trunk and sees that she does, indeed, have a pair of skates.
“I didn’t want to take a chance on them not having rental skates available,” I explain as I lift our things out of the trunk and shut it. “So I noted your shoe size and had my assistant order some skates.”
She stares at me a moment and then shakes her head in incredulity. Her face is crinkling up into an amused smile, however, so I know I’m not in too much trouble.
“Okay, rich boy,” she says.
“This is not a rich-boy date,” I protest, offended. “This is exactly the kind of normal date normal people go on.”
She laughs. “With their custom-ordered skates and their Audi R8 parked outside?”
“Well, I’m not going to compromise on everything.”
She tucks an arm into my elbow, glowing up at me. “I have to admit, this is exactly the kind of date I’d want to go on if this were real. Let’s do it.”
And we go inside, pay our six-dollar admission fees, and stroll into the dimly lit, badly carpeted lobby. Top-forty pop music blares awkwardly through the mostly empty space, and the smell of stale popcorn permeates the air, and Zenny’s if this were real chafes at me. I’m starting to have the uncomfortable feeling that I’m in a Wakefield novel myself, that I’m the hapless hero or heroine who starts to fall in love even though I know better, even though I know that’s not the arrangement, even though I know I’ll have my heart broken.
But I can’t stop. It’s like watching a tornado carve up a prairie field, like watching hail tear through leaves and roofs and dirt. It’s happening, and all I can do is take shelter.
Zenny’s skates fit perfectly, and so do my new blades, and she gives a delighted little clap of her hands as I pop up and skate backwards around the table. The light pings off the stud in her nose, and she’s so fucking hot, so fucking young, and I want to fast forward to the end of the night and what I have planned, but I manage to keep myself under control. As soon as she has her skates on and she’s stowed her shoes, we roll out to the rink itself, a wood-floored affair crowded with disco balls and scores of teenagers too young to do anything more interesting with their Saturday nights.
“I didn’t know you could skate like this!” she exclaims, as I move in circles around her.
“Elijah and I played roller hockey, remember?” I say, moving in front of her and skating backwards as she tentatively skates forward.
“I was a baby,” she points out in playful exasperation. “Of course I don’t remember.”
