Page 7 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“Okay,” Dad says. “Be safe getting here…I mean, it won’t change anything if it takes you an extra five minutes…”
He trails off, lost. I know how he feels. I know exactly how thoughts get fuzzy and stumbling after the adrenaline of rushing someone to the hospital.
I hang up the phone and look back at Mary, who is chewing on her lower lip with her brow furrowed in concern. “Is everything okay?” she asks.
I run a hand over my face, suddenly feeling very, very tired. “Uh, it’s not actually. I have to go.”
“Oh.” But even though she seems disappointed, she doesn’t seem annoyed that I’m abruptly breaking away from our moment, like some women would be. If anything, her expression is—well, it’s kind. Her eyes are warm and worried and her lips are pulled into a little frown that I’ll forever regret not being able to kiss off her face.
“If you were older, I’d ask for your number,” I murmur. “I’d make sure we finished this.”
“We wouldn’t be able to,” she says, glancing away, something vulnerable and very young in her face, and fuck if it doesn’t pull at every corner of my lust and also at the bizarrely intense protectiveness I feel toward her. “This is kind of my last night out,” she clarifies. “For a while, anyway.”
Last night out? And then I remember that it’s August, that she’s a student, that she seems like the kind of woman to take her studies seriously. “Of course. The semester’s starting soon.”
She opens her mouth, as if she’s about to say something, correct me maybe, but then she presses her lips together and nods instead.
I take her hand and raise the back of it to my lips. It wouldn’t be right taking a real kiss before I dash off—something about it feels sleazy, even to me—but this, well, I can’t resist this. The silky brush of her skin against my lips, the smell of something light and floral. Roses, maybe.
Fuck.
Fuck.
It really hits me that this is the last time I might ever see this woman, the one woman I’ve met in years that I desperately want to see more of, and there’s nothing I can do about it. She’s too young and she’s not offering me any way to contact her anyway—and I have to get the fuck out of here and up to the hospital.
I drop her hand with more reluctance than I’ve ever felt over anything in my life, and I take a step back.
“It was nice to meet you, Mary.”
Her expression is conflicted as she says, “It was nice to meet you too, Sean.”
I turn, feeling something yank in my stomach as I do, as if my body is tethered to hers and begging me to turn back, but my mind and my heart are already racing ahead to the hospital. To the emergency room which I know far too well.
“Whatever it is,” Mary calls out from behind me, “I’ll pray for you.”
I look at her over my shoulder, alone on the dance floor, surrounded by city lights, draped in silk, her face that intriguing combination of wise and young, confident and vulnerable. I memorize her, every line and swell of her, and then I say, “Thank you,” and leave her to the glittering lights and relentless cicadas.
I don’t say what I really want to say as I leave, but I’m thinking it all the way to the valet stand, bitterly repeating it in my mind as I roar up the road to the hospital.
Don’t bother with that praying shit, Mary. It doesn’t work anyway.
Chapter Two
I used to believe in God like I believed in cancer. That is, I knew both existed in a kind of distant, academic sense, but they were concepts that applied to other people; they were personally irrelevant to Sean Bell’s life.
Then cancer tore through my family with wind and knives and teeth, thundering and massive, and it ceased to be academic, it stopped being distant. It became real and terrible, more vengeful and omnipresent than any deity, and our lives became reoriented around its rituals, its communion of morphine lollipops and anti-nausea meds, its hymns of vaporizers and daytime television.
We were baptized into the Church of Cancer, and I was as zealous as any new convert, going to every doctor’s appointment, researching every new trial, using every connection I had in this city to make sure my mother got the best of everything.
So yes. I believe in cancer now.
It’s too late for me to believe in God.
I pull into the hospital parking garage, park the Audi, and then jog through the emergency room doors, ignoring the looks I’m getting in my tuxedo. I go right to the triage desk, and just my luck, it’s a nurse I fucked a few weeks back during Mom’s last stint in the hospital. Mackenzie or Makayla or McKenna or something like that. Her mouth twists into a bitter smile when she sees me, and I know I’m in for it.
“Well, if it isn’t Sean Bell,” she says, tilting her head up and narrowing her eyes at me. I’m suddenly grateful for the glass barrier between us, otherwise I think I might be in danger of actual bodily harm. For me, it was a desperate, needy escape stolen during long hours in the waiting room, a momentary distraction with a pretty, available body—but it had been clear after she gave me her number and her schedule that it had been more than just an escape for her.
“Hey, so my mom is here and I need to see her. It’s Carolyn Bell, and I think she got in not too long ago.”
