Page 95 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“Have you been crying?” Panic floods his face. “Is Mom okay?”
“She’s fine. I called Dad on my way here. They’re settling her into her room now.”
He visibly relaxes. Then grows suspicious. “So why are you here again?”
“I—I need your shower. And some clothes.”
He stares down at me, eyes narrowed. “But you have a shower at your house…” he says slowly, as if I’m trying to trick him somehow. “And clothes.”
“Zenny’s at my place right now. Getting her things. She doesn’t want me there. And I can’t go back to Mom and Dad like this.”
“Like what?”
I gesture impatiently at my rumpled clothes. “All post-fuck.”
“So wait, you fucked and then you broke up?”
“Goddammit, Aiden, can you just like—I don’t know, shut up for half a second and let me use your shower?”
“Ah,” Aiden says sagely, leaning against the staircase wall. “You’re hurting.” And then in the voice of someone in the throes of a dawning realization. “You’re in love with Zenny Iverson.”
The sudden, sharp urge to kill Aiden and bury him in his bucolic paradise outside nearly overwhelms me; I’m still fighting it off when a third voice comes from Aiden’s bedroom.
“Who’s in love with who now?”
“He’s in love with Zenny—oh shit—” Aiden’s face goes pale as Elijah comes out of Aiden’s bedroom, shirtless and very obviously in the throes of his own dawning realization once he sees me standing at the foot of the stairs. I am also being dawned upon. Because Elijah and Aiden may have been peripheral friends for a long time, but peripheral friends don’t wander out of each other’s bedrooms shirtless at night.
“What’s happening with Zenny?” Elijah asks.
Aiden looks nothing short of panicked, and I’m panicked too—but I’m also heartbroken and exhausted and too torn up to lie.
“Zenny and I have been…seeing each other,” I say. “And I love her,” I add, knowing this absolutely makes nothing better in Elijah’s eyes.
“You’ve been dating my sister?”
I’m too raw for this. “You’ve been fucking my brother?” I demand back.
Aiden flinches. “Guys, please.”
“No, no guys please,” Elijah says, livid. “I asked you to do one thing, Sean, one fucking thing, and that was to protect her. Not to fuck her! Obviously!”
“Well, apparently you’ve been fucking my little brother, so I guess we’re even now.”
Elijah clamps his jaw closed and I know he’s fighting off the urge to fling himself down the stairs and pluck out my eyeballs. “That’s different,” he says, with audible strain. “You know it is.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. Defeated. “She ended it.”
“I still don’t forgive you,” Elijah says. “Not even a little.”
What does it matter? Really? Zenny won’t love me, my best friend hates me, and my mother is about to be beyond the reach of love or hate. Why am I bothering to argue about any of it? I deserve the scorn, don’t I? Deserve the anger? And as good as it would feel to fight right now, to sweat and to bleed and to vent my anger at something instead of holding all this pain inside, I love Elijah too much to make him the target of it.
Elijah makes a noise of disdain at my silence and turns on his heel, back into Aiden’s bedroom.
Now it’s my turn to slump against the wall. I look up at my brother, young and bear-like in his broad body and shaggy hair. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask quietly. “I would have understood.”
Aiden sighs and comes down the stairs, sitting a few stairs up so he’s more or less eye-level with me. He braces his elbows on his thighs and puts his head in his hands, scrubbing at his hair. “It’s…I don’t know. Lots of reasons.”
I put my head against the wall. A failure as a lover and as a son and now—fourteen years after Lizzy—as a brother once again. “Fuck, Aiden. I feel like shit that I didn’t—that I wasn’t someone you could talk to about this.”
