My parents didn’t leave right after. Still haven’t left.
This feeling of wrongness, of enduring another year in that hellhole, it eats at me.
Later, my father told me they chose God over me, and not Deliverance.
“Fuck your god.”The words left my lips before I could think. And instead of violence, instead of hitting me like the church had dozens of times, my father knelt his head, and he fucking wept.
A blow to the brain would have hurt less than his tears.
“Did you hear me, Sylvan?” Neve’s Southern drawl drags me back. It’s filtered through nearly four years in Toronto’s suburbs, but it’s there, if you listen.
Which I do.
I swallow hard. “Tell me again,” I whisper, because no. I didn’t hear her.
She’s silent for a moment, to the point I wonder if she hung up on me. Then she asks,“Did you do it?”
THIRTY-NINE
FAUST
“The guy who died…”
“The most recent one.” I glance at the dark hot chocolate Neve forced me to order. The one I paid for, alongside hers.
A two minute walk from her apartment above Midnight Blackwell’s Used Books Emporium, we’re tucked away in Afterlife, the coffee shop and dessert bar that I’ve never once stepped foot into. Thursday night, it’s more crowded than I assumed it would be when she texted me to tell me to meet her here.
Her roommate was in and she didn’t want to bother her. For some reason, I was fairly certain she meant she wanted to hide whatever she had to say to me from her.
Neve tucks a lock of blond hair behind her ear, then curls her fingers into her gray Drayton U hoodie.
She needs a hockey one. Better yet, I want to see her in that jersey again. With my name on the back. The one that cost us a game because Sylvan couldn’t stand it.
“Mitchell,” I add, when she doesn’t say anything.
She looks over her shoulder, like someone will hear me, but there’s no one in the booth behind her. Turning back to face me, she inhales deep.
The scent of ice cream and funnel cake and espresso fills the air, butherI catch the scent of more than anything. Incense. It must be her perfume, but there’s something beneath it that I know is all her own.
I want to press my nose to her neck but I clench my hands in my lap and look at her instead, just waiting for her to speak.
Her throat rolls as she swallows, and even that turns me on.
Her hair is pulled up into a messy bun, tendrils falling around her face that she keeps trying to rake back, although a heartbeat later they fall into the same place. Her eyes are glinting with some sort of feverish excitement, or maybe the fact that she drained the hot chocolate in front of her, with a milk mustache that I absolutely refuse to tell her about to prove it.
She’s not wearing any makeup that I can tell, and all I can imagine is making her come the way Sylvan did.
But better.
Still, with men dropping dead around campus, two of which had a connection to her, I doubt that’s the first thing on her mind. And yeah, maybe I want to keep her safe more than I want to fuck her.
I’ve never felt that before. Not with anyone more than my mother, and that was in a very different way.
Neve leans in, across the table, and lifts her eyes to mine.
Her palms are pressed down in front of me, and I have the wild urge to grasp her fingers in my own, but I don’t dare.
Whatever she wants to say, it’s serious.
