“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t act like you get to decide who I trust.”
His gaze softens just a hair, and that almost makes me angrier because it looks too much like care and he ain’t allowed to give me that. “I don’t want you trusting anybody,” he says quiet. “I want you careful.”
I shove my cart around him. “You don’t get to want things from me.”
Behind me, I hear him sigh like he’s tired or mean. Probably both.
Elijah is the opposite of complicated.
He holds doors. He listens when I talk. He doesn’t touch me unless I reach first, and even then it’s careful, fingers brushing mine, hand at the small of my back like he’s asking permission without saying it out loud. We’ve been seeing each other for months now and he still hasn’t done more than kiss me. It’s sweet in theory, like a movie that thinks restraint is romance.
In practice, it makes me feel like I’m positioned at the brink of something that never quite tips over.
The first time I lean in, thinking maybe he just needs encouragement, he presses his forehead to mine and smiles instead.
“I’m trying to do this right,” he says.
“Right how?” I ask, because my patience ain’t a holy virtue.
“Slow. Respectful.”
It should feel sweet. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it feels like he’s holding me at arm’s length and calling it kindness.
He keeps asking me to come to Pearly Gates.
“You’d like it,” he says. “It ain’t what people think.”
That ain’t exactly true. Pearly Gates has a reputation in this town like mold in a trailer, stubborn and hard to scrub out. Doomsday prep sermons. End-times charts. Videos that circulate every few years like urban legends. Folks stockpiling canned goods and quoting Revelation like it’s a weather report.
“I don’t mind church,” I tell him. “Just not that one.”
He frowns gentle, like he’s disappointed but trying not to show it. “You shouldn’t judge it without seeing it.”
“I’m not judging,” I say careful. “I just want something quieter.”
There’s another church on Main, a small brick building with a white steeple that needs repainting. The kind of place that sings off-key and passes casseroles around after service. Nobody’s rich there. Nobody’s polished. Everybody knows everybody’s business, but they at least pretend to have manners about it.
“Come with me there Sunday,” I suggest. “Just once.”
He hesitates.
That’s new.
But he nods. “Alright.”
Sunday morning smells like perfume and potluck, cheap coffee and hand lotion and old hymnals. I wear a simple blue dress, nothing flashy, nothing that could be mistaken for attention seeking in a town that calls a woman a whore for dancing with a biker. Elijah looks handsome in pressed slacks and a white shirt, Bible tucked under his arm like always, smile calm like he expects to be welcomed anywhere he goes.
When we step inside the sanctuary, heads turn.
Hell never stops watching.
I feel it before I see her.
Bethany sits two pews ahead, spine straight, hair immaculate, wearing a pale yellow dress that screams money and control. She turns her head slow when she senses us behind her, and when her eyes land on me, her lips curve into something sharp.
“Elijah,” she says sweet as a church mint and twice as fake. “Didn’t know you were still slumming it.”
My stomach drops so hard it feels like falling.
