Page 65 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“Everything okay?” I ask, because she looks very pensive right now, and not a little sad.
“Oh, yes,” she assures me. “I’m just thinking about things.”
I lean next to her, bumping her hip gently with my own. “What kinds of things? More about the birthing center?”
“I wish. It’s more like thinking about the birthing center made me think about that first mission trip, and that made me think about being a teenager again…like, I just—” She stops, and I get the feeling she doesn’t want to tell me. Or that she does, but doesn’t think she should. Finally she just lets it tumble out. “I’m not much older than the people in the rink, but I already feel like I missed out on so much. I didn’t have Saturday nights to goof around—if I wasn’t doing homework or volunteering or at a debate tournament, it was a dinner party with my parents’ friends or some society event we needed to be seen at. My teenage years were spent trying to make myself into the perfect Iverson daughter, and after I rejected all that, I felt like I had to work even harder. I had to be the best nursing student, the best postulant, to make throwing all that away worth it, and—”
I let her find her thoughts, her center. She’s twisting her fingers together as she talks, and twisting them hard enough to make her knuckles go tight. I don’t like that she’s hurting herself in her agitation, so I slide behind her and cup her hands with my own, forcing them to relax.
She sighs and melts back into me, her hair tickling irresistibly at my neck.
“I guess I just worry that I’ve thrown away the last three years too, trying to prove that I can succeed like this. Like, maybe this whole time I wasn’t working hard for just myself; even if it felt like I was doing it to spite my parents, in a way, it was still for my parents.”
“Are you saying you’re having doubts?” I ask, unable to quell the happy little spit of excitement kindling in my chest. “You can stop trying to prove your parents wrong and stop this nun thing and just marry me instead?”
She shakes with laughter in my arms. She thinks I’m joking.
Wait, I am joking right?
I’m definitely joking. Totally. I’m just joking that I want to see Zenny at the other end of a church aisle in a gorgeous white wedding gown, her nose ring glinting mischievously from under her veil. Or that I want to spend every night for the rest of my life kissing that delicious mouth and watching her sweet belly slowly grow with our children and cradling those tiny babies in my arms as I watched them coo and chirp and blink themselves to sleep.
Of course I’m only joking that I want to spend the rest of my life with the most beautiful, fascinating, sexy woman I’ve ever met. It’s all a joke. Ha ha ha. Hilarious.
Oh my God, I’m so fucked.
“Sean? Are you okay? You went all rigid and quiet all of a sudden.”
“Totally fine,” I lie, but unfortunately, my voice is all knotted and tight, and it makes it patently clear how not fine I am. I feel like I can barely breathe, because I don’t even know who Sean Bell is anymore, and all I want in the fucking world is to be close to this girl, but even having my arms around her doesn’t feel close enough. I’m acutely, painfully aware that she’ll never be mine. She’ll always be God’s.
But before she can call me out on my obvious upset, the DJ’s voice comes over the PA system, silencing all the chatter across the rink.
“And now we have a very special couples’ skate tonight. This song goes out to Zenny, from Sean.”
Zenny swivels in my arms, and there is no way to tell if she’s amused or alarmed because the expression on her face is very much both of these things.
“Zenny, Sean says you can make this sinner change his ways,” continues the DJ, and it’s actually a lyric from the song I picked, but he delivers it with such oozing smarminess that it really sounds like something a lover would say, and for a moment I wonder if I would say it. I already want to marry this girl—what else about my old sinner’s ways is going to change from being around her?
Bruno Mars’ “Locked Out of Heaven” starts playing as the lights dim and the disco balls start spinning. (Sixty dollars at work, everybody, sixty dollars that are now in the possession of the assistant manager—an assistant manager who also happens to be an old frat brother of Aiden’s.)
“I love this song,” she says, and it’s the most warily anyone has ever said those words in the history of the world.
I laugh and tug on her hand to pull her back onto the floor. “I know,” I tell her. “I did some research before we came here tonight.” I don’t tell her that “research” involved me scrolling through her Instagram like a lovesick teenager.
The DJ chides all the non-couple skaters off the floor, and soon it’s just pairs of awkward teens, and then me and Zenny, the only adults. And despite her initial wariness, Zenny warms up to my little gesture, holding my hand tightly and singing along with the words and looking so deliciously kissable that it’s everything I can do to keep skating an
d not swing her up into my arms and dash away with her like some kind of rollerblading caveman. And at the end of the song, she even allows me to tug us into a slow-rolling kiss in front of everyone, letting me nibble and taste at her lips until the rink breaks out into whoops and applause and she pulls away with a bashful smile.
“I’m sorry you missed out on so much teenage fun,” I say, as the song changes and we start skating again. “But you have to admit that some things are more fun as an adult.”
She gives me a naughty little smile. “Oh really? Show me another thing, then.”
“Is that a dare, Zenny-bug?”
The eyebrow goes up. “Are you up to the challenge?”
I make an arrogant boy noise and tug her off the rink floor, onto the bad carpet and toward the skate rental counter.
“Sean? Where are we—Sean!” My little rule-follower is panicking as I look both ways to make sure no one’s around and then duck under the counter, pulling her with me.
