Page 25 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“Yes, Mom?”
She tilts her head and very deliberately pronounces, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—”
I put both hands over my face and mumble into my palms. “Oh my Godddddd.”
“Keep reading, son, I haven’t got all day,” Emmett says, and Rosalie on the other side of Mom grunts her agreement, even though I know for a fact she usually naps through most of Sean Bell Story Time.
For the last three months, the Thursday morning infusion crew has been listening to me work my way through the last two Wakefield Saga books. Mom and I have been buddy-reading romance novels since she caught me sneaking In the Bed of the Pirate back to college with me after Lizzy’s funeral, and instead of teasing me, she loaded me up with the next two paperbacks in the series. Ever since then, we’ve been devouring books together in our little Bells-only book club, and while we like some romance novels set in the here and now, we really prefer our books with rogues and roués and castles and shit. And when Mom was diagnosed with cancer, we both knew we needed some mental comfort food, so back to the Wakefield Saga we went, to the very books that founded the informal Bells-only Book Club.
Plus it makes the chemotherapy sessions go by faster.
I wonder if Zenny knows what she started with that pirate book all those years ago.
I keep reading, ignoring the protests from literally every patient in the room and the nurse when I skip over the sex scene.
“Oh come on,” Rosalie groans, her eyes still closed. “We’ve been waiting weeks for this.”
“Guys,” I sputter. “I can’t read this in front of my mom.”
“Pretend I can’t hear you,” Mom says. “You were really good at pretending I couldn’t hear you when you were a teenager sneaking girls into your room.”
“I’m going to leave. I swear to all that’s holy, I’ll do it. I’ll leave you here to watch Ellen all day.”
“If you leave, make sure you leave the book,” Mom says crisply, my threats as useless as they were when I was a boy. “And then I’ll read the sex scene out loud.”
Somehow that is much more mortifying to imagine, and after the patients threaten to revolt and physically take the book out of my hands, I relent and read aloud the scene of the disgraced duke finally claiming Eleanor’s maidenhead.
There is applause throughout the room as Eleanor climaxes and the duke finally unleashes his torrents of passion into Eleanor’s womb.
“‘It was everything I dreamed of,’” I read in Eleanor’s voice.
“‘But the duke winced at this,” I read, and my own conscience prickles uncomfortably as I speak the words. “‘He immediately felt the guilt of what he’d done, the terrible weight of it. He’d vowed once upon a time to protect this girl, and here he was tumbling her without the slightest hint of what she deserved from him. She deserved a wedding, a future, a promise of love. And all he’d given her were a few moments of pleasure and a lifetime of regret.’”
“Sean, my boy.”
I look up to see the one person that I would happily see castrated and then dragged behind a team of wild horses and then maybe castrated again for good measure. (Okay, maybe not, but I’d definitely draw a dick on his face if I ever found him passed out.)
“Don’t come in,” I tell the man standing in my doorway.
“I’ve got to say, you really know how to pick them,” Charles Northcutt says, coming in. He’s white, my age, possibly in better shape, although it could be that he just dresses to show it off more. He’s also a pompous dick and Valdman’s other favorite employee.
I hate him.
“Don’t sit down,” I say.
He sits down. “That nun, Zenobia, holy fuck, she’s something else. I bet the body she’s got under all those Jesus clothes is to die for.”
The cloud of red anger is instantaneous. I look down at where my hands rest on my laptop keyboard and they’re shaking. What the fuck is wrong with me? I hate Northcutt and I think he’s a dog, but I’ve never gotten so personally incensed at the stupid shit he says—although maybe I should have been getting personally incensed before.
“What do you want, Charles?” I ask in a flat voice that makes it clear that I don’t care. Except maybe I care a little bit if it’s about Zenny; I have to push away from my desk and cross my arms so that he doesn’t see how fucking furious I am to hear him talking about her that way. Which is purely because she’s Elijah’s little sister. And I promised to keep her safe…and Northcutt is not safe.
Unfortunately, Northcutt is not fooled by my forced nonchalance, and a new glitter enters his eyes. “So why’d you hand this back over to Valdman, eh? The nun turn you down?”
“I keep my dick in my pants when I work,” I bite back, which is a lie, and we both know it. I’ve never crossed any kinds of lines with subordinates or coworkers, but I’m the king of the work party fuck, the convention hotel bar hookup, the entertainer of bored wives. And I’ve literally never cared, except right now I do care, because I don’t have any moral high ground on Charles, and that’s not a good feeling. I would like to think of myself as very different from him. I mean, I’m a white man myself, but the first white man to make another white man go oh God the privilege is real was Charles Northcutt.
“Well, whatever the reason you handed her over to me, I wanted to thank you. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun peeling the virginity off that one.”
Thwack.
