SYLVAN
“Don’t you have practice or prayer or wishful thinking to engage in today? Aren’t you playing TMU?”
Prayer.She’s trying to be a brat but staring at her in this corner of Addam’s—a brunch and bar that seems just up her alley with its Gothic church converted into a restaurant and all the black paint and gargoyle heads everywhere—I realize she has no idea what pressure point she’s pushing on.
I smile at her, ignoring the question. TMU is a cake walk. A springing board to gain points, but we’re nearly leading in conference standings. Scouts are at nearly every game, and while I know nothing ever comes mid-season, next year, I may not be here.Freshman star,that’s what they’re saying.
They’re not wrong.
“Eat your food.” I glance at the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit on her plate. A rarity in Ontario, but where she’s from? Some people see it as a daily occurrence. Addam’s is probably the only place in fifty kilometers you can get it, save maybe the dry and dusty version McDonald’s and Tim Horton’s offers up.
She looks down at her plate, her palms flat on the deep purple table, stacked on top of one another. Her light hair ispiled up in a messy bun high on her head, a few strands around her face. She’s not wearing any makeup, although there’s a streak of mascara or eyeliner below her low lash line, and her eyes look puffy. Tired.
Her lips are pushed into a pout, her shoulders hunched up around her neck beneath that Drayton U hoodie that isn’t a hockey one and should be. And she’s so fucking hot, I want to bite her throat.
But I push my tongue against my top teeth and stay on my side of the booth, the rest of the place empty this early on Halloween.
I imagine how it’ll feel to get her alone inside Castle Morack.
She might not know she’s going yet, but she will soon.
And Faust is going to come, too.
My plans for them will pan out because I know what strings to pull.
Now I just need to figure out which ones make Neve Devine eat.
“Was it you?” she asks quietly, flicking her eyes up to mine. They’re green, or brown, or both; it’s always hard for me to decipher exact shades, but I know it’s one of those.
What I don’t know is precisely what she’s asking about.
And I don’t want to answer until I do.
It’s the same dilemma I had every time I was called in for “confession” with Deliverance. Nothing like the Catholic rite, this was one-on-one, face-to-face with Preacher Tim in a darkened room, only a blood red candle between us, his big eyes looming above my head as he went through a list of sins I may or may not have committed that week.
If I hesitated on one, my voice broke with a “no,” or if I blinked too much, Preacher Tim would take that to mean that not only did I commit the sin, I was lying about it too.
There were no “Our Fathers” for penance.
Just his hands around a steel rod, my body splayed out before the candle.
It was my fingers that hurt the most. Or my hand when it was carved.
Nothing else.
No where else.
Below my neck, I felt numb.
When Sister Ennis saw me after camp, in the communal showers, and I had my hand wrapped around myself, a horny teenage boy, thinking he was alone, she dragged me naked to Tim’s office.
I will never forget how he looked at me, pupils blown, pulse racing in his throat.
Maybe.That’s how I answered Neve the last time she asked me if I did something that she sees as a sin. A crime.
But “maybe” was never good enough for Tim.
“Maybe” meant you hurt more, bled more, bruised more.
