She doesn’t startle. Points for that. She turns slowly, cutting a stare through the dim light around us like she’s cataloging me for later. It takes me a moment to register her response, so caught up in her presence.
“...praying.”
One of the first genuine smiles I’ve smiled in a while crooks my lips.The fuck you are,I want to say.
I stand and close distance on my terms—one pew back, one pew over. Controlled. If you want a woman to trust you in a room like this, your hands have to be boring until she tells you otherwise.
“Sanctuary,” I tell her. “It means no one is allowed to hurt you in here. You know that, right?” I leave the rest unsaid.Including me. Especially me.
I want her to challenge me.
I want to break this saint and bend her to my will.
She says she reads Latin like that’s supposed to scare me away. It doesn’t. It just makes me want to ask her name and file it underdangerous in the right hands.
She asks if I get tired of being named before I can introduce myself. I do. I say so. I give her the soft lie I use in rooms that don’t deserve the truth. “Casey.”
She gives me “Caterina,” and it lands like the first time you touch a bruise and know it’s going to heal fine.
“That’s a saint’s name,” I say.
A strange look flickers over her face. “Depends on the day.”
“What about tonight?”
“Tonight I’m a girl who has until midnight before reality sucks me back in.”
I laugh softly. “Then we’re pretty much the same. At least for tonight.”
Her phone buzzes again, and after a glance at the screen, she stands. She gives me a quick, nervous smile.
“Seven,” she tells me. “You need to leave by then. Try not to steal anything while I’m gone.”
“I don’t steal,” I say. “I claim.” With deliberate slowness I allow my eyes to drag over the delicate bone structure of her face, then the fine petiteness of her body, like a question and an answer, all at once. “And I wait for what’s mine.”
She hesitates, inhaling sharply, then turns on her heel and leaves in a wash of cold air and cathedral bells.
When she’s gone there’s nothing to hold me in the present. My hands remember the shape of rope on skin. My chest remembers the weight of a dark, square room with no windows. I open my fingers and count to eight until none of it is here anymore.
It’s Tiernan’s text that drags me from the encroaching memories.
Tiernan: You alive, birthday boy?
Cayce: Still at church. Behaving terribly.
A beat. Then his answer comes.
Tiernan: Need company?
Cayce: No.
I look at the confessional. Mark the old wood and aged brass sign. The tiny grill where a voice becomes a vibration against your skin while you ask forgiveness for your sins.
Cayce: Just time.
Restless, I walk the perimeter of the sanctuary once, because I’m me. Check the side doors, the sacristy corridor, the little alarm box where the red light blinks steady.
People think churches are soft places, places of sanctuary and freedom. They’re not. They’re made of rules and locked cabinets and centuries of practice saying we keep what comes here safe.
