Where Sinners Sleep

The cardboard box was not even a big one. That was the thing that got Evelyn the most. Three years of living in that house, three years of cooking their meals and scrubbing their floors and swallowing every cruel word Sarah threw at her like it was something she deserved, and everything she owned fit into a box that had previously held cereal. Sarah had not even looked at her when she threw it out the front door. Just opened it, tossed the box onto the porch, and said, "You have ten minutes before I call the police and tell them you broke in." Then she shut the door. Evelyn heard the lock click. Then Lily's laugh from somewhere inside the house, light and unbothered, like background music to the worst moment of Evelyn's life. She stood on the porch for a full minute just staring at the door. Then she picked up the box and walked. She did not know where she was walking to. That was the honest truth. Her feet just moved because standing still felt worse. The night air was cold and it bit right through her oversized hoodie, the grey one with the frayed cuffs that she had owned for so long she could not remember where it came from. She pulled it tighter around herself and kept walking, the box tucked under one arm, her phone in her other hand with the screen cracked so badly that half of it was just black. The streets were mostly empty at this hour. A few cars. A cat on a wall that watched her pass with complete indifference. She related to that cat more than she had ever related to any human being. Her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen, at the half of it that still worked. Google Calendar. A notification. Cheerful little bell icon and everything. Reminder: Evelyn's Birthday! 🎂 She stopped walking. She just stood there on the pavement, box under her arm, cold wind in her hair, and read that notification three times. Then she looked up at the sky, at the flat dark nothing of it, and laughed. It came out wrong, too sharp, more like something breaking than something funny. "What a birthday gift," she said out loud, to no one. "Thrown out of my own house." She had exactly three dollars and forty cents in her pocket. She had counted it twice already. The only place still open on this street was a small general store with a flickering light above the door and a handwritten sign in the window that said OPEN 24 HRS. She pushed inside. The man behind the counter glanced up at her and then back down at his phone. The store smelled like old wood and something faintly sweet. She walked the aisles slowly. She was not sure what she was looking for, or maybe she was sure and did not want to admit it. She stopped in front of a small section near the back. Her eyes moved across the shelf. Then she saw the cake. It was small, sitting slightly off to one side, with a yellow sticker on it that said REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE. It was not pretty. The frosting had smeared a little on one side and the edges of the box were bent. But it was a cake. A real one, and the sticker said two dollars seventy five. She stood there looking at it for a long time. Then she picked it up. She grabbed a single birthday candle from a pack hanging nearby, the kind that came in a multicolour set. It came to three dollars and ten cents. She put her hand in her pocket and counted out exactly that, coin by coin, and placed it on the counter. "You need a lighter?" the man asked. "Yes please." He looked at her the way adults look at teenagers they suspect of something. "You smoke? You look pretty young to be smoking." She looked at him flatly. "Mind your own business. I am twenty." He held the lighter out. She grabbed it, tucked it in her hoodie pocket, picked up her cake, and walked out. Outside the air hit her again. She stood on the pavement and looked both ways. There was a bench about twenty feet to her left, one of those old iron ones that sat under a streetlight. She walked to it and sat down. She put the cake on her knee, opened the smeared little box, and pushed the single candle into the frosting right in the centre. She flicked the lighter. The flame caught. She sat there for a moment just watching it. This tiny orange light in all that dark, flickering but not going out. Her eyes stung. She pressed her lips together hard and told herself not to do it, not here, not on a public bench at midnight, but her eyes did it anyway. She thought about her father, Hugo, in that chair he never got out of anymore, and how he had not looked at her when Sarah told him Evelyn was leaving. He had just stared at the wall. She thought about her mother's earrings, the two small gold studs in her ears, the only thing of her mother's she had ever been given. She looked at the candle. "I just wish," she said quietly, to no one, to the flame, to whatever version of the universe might be listening tonight, "that I had a family." She blew the candle out. The bench shifted. Someone sat down beside her. Close. Too close, the way a stranger never sits unless they mean something by it. She turned her head and her whole body went still. He was looking straight ahead. Sharp jaw, tanned skin, blonde hair that fell slightly across his forehead. He would have been the most attractive person she had ever seen in real life except for the fact that he had just pressed something cold and hard against her ribs. She looked down. A gun. Her brain went very quiet. "Do not scream," he said. His voice was low and completely calm, like this was just a normal conversation he was having. "And do not move." "I was not planning to do either," she said, which surprised even herself. He glanced at her then, just briefly, and something shifted in his expression. Not much. Just enough. "Kiss me," he said. She turned her head slowly and stared at him. "I'm sorry?" "Kiss me. Right now." "I do not know you." "You do not need to know me." "I absolutely do need to know you before I kiss you, that is a very basic human requirement" The gun pressed a little harder. "Kiss me," he said again, "or I will make tonight significantly worse for you than it already clearly is." She did not know how he knew it had already been bad. Maybe it was the sad cake. Maybe it was the single candle. Maybe it was the fact that she was sitting alone on a bench at midnight and she had clearly been crying. She looked past him then and she saw them. Three men moving up the street, scanning doorways, scanning faces. Looking for someone. One of them was holding something under his jacket. Oh. Oh, she understood now. She put the cake box on the bench beside her very carefully so the candle would not fall out. Then she turned, swung one leg over so she was facing him, and she kissed him. He kissed her back immediately, one hand coming up to the back of her head, and for one completely insane moment the whole night fell away. The box. The bench. The gun. Her terrible birthday. All of it just gone. She heard the men pass. Heard one of them mutter something. Heard another one say, "Get a room," in a disgusted tone and then the footsteps faded and the street went quiet again. She was still kissing him.