Sinner

Chapter 1-3

“Savor it,” she repeats. And then she nods, relaxing. “I like that.”

She takes my hand and I lead her farther onto the terrace, where a tent with a dance floor has been erected, waiting for the after-dinner crowd to come for drinks and dancing. But it’s mostly empty now, and there’s only a lone employee carrying out trays of waiting champagne flutes and a speaker piping in music from the sextet in the lobby.

“How about a dance first?” I ask.

She looks around the tent, and some of her earlier confidence creeps back into her expression. “Are you sure you’re any good at dancing?”

“I’m excellent at dancing,” I say, nettled. “I’m like, probably the best in the world at it.”

“Prove it,” she dares, and so I do. I do what I’ve been hungry to do since I saw her, and I slide my hand around the dip of her waist, resting it against the tempting dimples at the small of her back and fighting the urge to slide my hand even lower. And then I pull her close to me as my other hand tightens around hers.

She shivers again. I smile.

It doesn’t take me long to find the music and sweep us into a simple two-step. I’m a serviceable dancer—some cousin demanded all the Bell boys take dancing lessons before her wedding, and I’ve managed to squeeze some use out of that exhausting experience at functions like this—and I’m pleased to find that the beautiful woman in my arms looks suitably impressed by it.

“You’re not bad,” she admits. As we move across the empty floor, the city glittering around us and the cicadas chirruping merrily, she meets my eyes with a look I can’t read. It feels like so much, like there’s so much there, history and weight and meaning, and I can almost hear the hymns in the back of my mind, taste the stale-sweet paste of a communion wafer on my tongue.

“You’re not bad yourself,” I say back, but they are just placeholder words, nothing-words, words to fill the air because the air is already filled with something thick and nameless and ancient and my heart and my gut are responding with a kind of keen fervor I haven’t felt in years. And it scares me. It scares me and thrills me, and then she moves her hand from my shoulder to the nape of my neck in a gesture both tentative and determined, and it feels important, it feels adorable, it feels like my body is going to rocket apart from the lust and the protectiveness and the sheer mystery of what I feel right now.

“What’s your name?” I murmur. I need to know. I need to know her name because I don’t think I can walk away tonight not knowing.

I don’t think I can walk away at all.

But something about my question makes her stiffen, and suddenly she’s guarded again, a careful shell in my arms. “I’m about to change it,” she says cryptically.

“You’re about to change your name?” I ask. “Like…for witness protection or something?”

That makes her laugh a little. “No. It’s for work.”

“Work? Are you even out of college?”

“I’m about to start my senior year. But,” she says sternly, “a girl can work and go to school at the same time, you know.”

“But the kind of job where you have to change your name?” I study her face. “Are you sure it’s not for witness protection? Like super sure?”

“I’m super sure,” she says. “It’s just a very unusual job.”

“Are you going to tell me about this job?”

She tilts her head, thinking. “No,” she decides aloud. “Not right now, at least.”

“No fair,” I accuse. “That was clickbait-y and you know it. Plus I still don’t know what to call you.”

“Mary,” she replies after a moment. “You can call me Mary.”

I give her a skeptical look. “That sounds fake.”

She shrugs, and the movement makes her fingers tighten ever so slightly around the back of my neck, and it feels so f*****g good I want to purr. I’ve been in bed with gorgeous women, experienced women, more than one woman at a time, and somehow the play of Mary’s fingers through the short hair at the nape of my neck is more intense, more stirring, than anything I can remember ever feeling. I pull her in a little closer as the music sweeps into a softer, more melancholy song; the cicadas whirr along with the strings as if they’ve invited themselves into the sextet, loud and comforting and familiar.

“I haven’t danced like this in years,” Mary admits as we step easily around the floor.

“You’re too young to sound so old,” I tell her.

She gives me a sad smile. “It’s true.”

“That you haven’t danced like this in years or that you’re too young to sound so old?”

“Both,” she says, still with that sad smile. “Both are true.”

I urge her into a small spin, selfishly wanting to see the flare and wrap of her dress along her body, and when I see it, I have to trap the growl rumbling in my chest. God, those hips. That waist. Those small, high t**s, braless and palm-sized under her dress. I yank her back into me, sliding my hand slowly across her back, teasing my fingers along the straps crisscrossing her spine.

She shudders at my touch, her lips parting and her eyelids going heavy. I slow our dancing steps, releasing her hand so I can trace the line of her jaw.

“Mary,” I rumble.

“Sean,” she sighs, and she says it like she’s been waiting to say it, she says it without hesitation, without worry, without the usual clumsiness of someone saying a name they’ve just learned. And the sound of my name on her lips unlocks a deep, heady need, something familiar and unfamiliar all at once, like a prayer chanted in a new tongue.

“Do you still want that kiss?” I ask her in a low voice. All of her seems ready now, there’s no fear anywhere in her face, but I want to make certain, I want her to want this as much as I do, I want her to burn with needing my mouth on hers.

She blinks up at me, her eyes pure liquid heat, and when I run my finger across the plump line of that full upper lip, she shivers again. “I want it,” she whispers. “Kiss me.”

I bend my head down, pulling her flush against my body so that every tight curve of hers is smashed against the muscled length of me, and I am about to replace my finger with my lips, about to finally taste her, about to kiss her until she can’t stand on her own two feet anymore…when a jarring bar of flattened pop music ricochets through the air.

And then suddenly Kesha is singing from my pocket. (Yes, I like Kesha. Who doesn’t? She’s great.)

“Um,” Mary says.

“s**t,” I say, letting go of her to fumble for my phone, taking a step away as I finally manage to accept the call and put the phone to my ear.

“Sean,” my dad says from the other line. “We’re at the ER.”

I give my arm an impatient shake to clear the tuxedo cuff away from my watch so I can see the time. “KU Med?”

“Yeah.”

“I can see the hospital from here. I’ll be there in ten.”

“Okay,” Dad says. “Be safe getting here…I mean, it won’t change anything if it takes you an extra five minutes…”

He trails off, lost. I know how he feels. I know exactly how thoughts get fuzzy and stumbling after the adrenaline of rushing someone to the hospital.

I hang up the phone and look back at Mary, who is chewing on her lower lip with her brow furrowed in concern. “Is everything okay?” she asks.

I run a hand over my face, suddenly feeling very, very tired. “Uh, it’s not actually. I have to go.”

“Oh.” But even though she seems disappointed, she doesn’t seem annoyed that I’m abruptly breaking away from our moment, like some women would be. If anything, her expression is—well, it’s kind. Her eyes are warm and worried and her lips are pulled into a little frown that I’ll forever regret not being able to kiss off her face.

“If you were older, I’d ask for your number,” I murmur. “I’d make sure we finished this.”

“We wouldn’t be able to,” she says, glancing away, something vulnerable and very young in her face, and f**k if it doesn’t pull at every corner of my lust and also at the bizarrely intense protectiveness I feel toward her. “This is kind of my last night out,” she clarifies. “For a while, anyway.”

Last night out? And then I remember that it’s August, that she’s a student, that she seems like the kind of woman to take her studies seriously. “Of course. The semester’s starting soon.”

She opens her mouth, as if she’s about to say something, correct me maybe, but then she presses her lips together and nods instead.

I take her hand and raise the back of it to my lips. It wouldn’t be right taking a real kiss before I dash off—something about it feels sleazy, even to me—but this, well, I can’t resist this. The silky brush of her skin against my lips, the smell of something light and floral. Roses, maybe.

Fuck.

Fuck.

It really hits me that this is the last time I might ever see this woman, the one woman I’ve met in years that I desperately want to see more of, and there’s nothing I can do about it. She’s too young and she’s not offering me any way to contact her anyway—and I have to get the f**k out of here and up to the hospital.

I drop her hand with more reluctance than I’ve ever felt over anything in my life, and I take a step back.

“It was nice to meet you, Mary.”

Her expression is conflicted as she says, “It was nice to meet you too, Sean.”

I turn, feeling something yank in my stomach as I do, as if my body is tethered to hers and begging me to turn back, but my mind and my heart are already racing ahead to the hospital. To the emergency room which I know far too well.

“Whatever it is,” Mary calls out from behind me, “I’ll pray for you.”

I look at her over my shoulder, alone on the dance floor, surrounded by city lights, draped in silk, her face that intriguing combination of wise and young, confident and vulnerable. I memorize her, every line and swell of her, and then I say, “Thank you,” and leave her to the glittering lights and relentless cicadas.

I don’t say what I really want to say as I leave, but I’m thinking it all the way to the valet stand, bitterly repeating it in my mind as I roar up the road to the hospital.

Don’t bother with that praying s**t, Mary. It doesn’t work anyway.