Page 3 of For I Have Sinned
When a beat passes where neither of us speaks, he breaks the silence. “Are you new here?”
My eyes widen, and I laugh. Somehow, I find myself joining him on my knees, dropping my bag to the grass next to me. I’m close to him. Probably too close to be appropriate. I don’t move. He just watches me.
“I’ve been here my entire life,” I say. “Zaiden Nyles.”
His gaze flits to the sign beyond me. The one outside our real estate office.
I nod. “Yep. I’m that Zaiden. I don’t recognize you, though. Are you new here?”
He looks at the flowers and then at the cathedral before nodding. “I suppose. I’ve been here for a couple years.”
“Your name? Or is it a secret?”
There’s a smirk on his face when he looks my way again. I feel it in my core. Everything in me jumps. Everything. I nearly squirm in an effort to adjust myself.
“Ellsworth Sanna.”
“Reverend?”
The smile fades, and he closes his eyes. “Something like that, yeah.”
Two
ZAIDEN
I stay with Ellsworth Sanna for the next hour. He doesn’t talk much, even as he watches me out of the corner of his eye. Instead, he continues to arrange flowers. Moving them around, over and over. I’m not sure he’s actually going to find the exact perfection he’s aiming for today.
“Are you waiting for a sign?” I ask when he’s moved the same red pot three times.
He snorts. “No.” His answer is quiet. I swear, there’s a bit of a bitter note in it. “I’m trying to make sense of the colors I have left.”
He’s got half a dozen colors. Red, purple, blue, yellow, pink, and orange. Three or four of each. “Why not a rainbow?”
Ellsworth stills, his hand hovering over a flowerpot. When he doesn’t move to pick it up, I lean forward and do so, pulling it back. He follows me with his eyes this time. Those green eyes that look at me in a way that I can almost feel. Like he’s touching me. Everywhere.
“A rainbow?” he asks, his voice tight.
I nod. “The elementary school kids would love that.”
Tension in his shoulders releases. He glances at the cathedral again before looking at the flowers. I catch the tip of his tongue peeking out of his mouth, tracing his bottom lip, and I get distinctly uncomfortable without understanding why.
“Yeah. I could do that.”
For the next few minutes, I watch as he arranges flowers again. Moving them so they’re in an appropriate color wheel pattern and he sets them in a grid that’s clearly a rainbow. When he takes the last one from me and sets it down, he chuckles quietly under his breath.
“They’re going to think I’m flipping them off,” he mutters quietly as he sits back to look at them.
“Why?”
“Rainbow?” he asks, turning his attention to me. Another hint of a smirk on his lips and again, I can feel it inside me. I shiver, swallow, and stare. “Are you unfamiliar with what a rainbow symbolizes in our modern civilization? What the church would love to stamp out?”
I open my mouth to answer that I have no idea what he’s talking about when my phone rings and I jump. His smile widens as I nearly fall backwards over my bag in my startlement.
Reaching for my phone, I answer the call.
“Did you fall in the shower?” Liam asks.
Confusion makes my brows furrow as I turn to face the road. What would make him ask that? “What?” I scan the surrounding sidewalks, thinking maybe he’s having me on.
