Page 3 of Forgive Me Father For I Have Sinned…7 Times

“Yes now!”

I rolled my eyes and headed downstairs, leaving my phone on the bed so they couldn’t confiscate it for whatever I had done this time.

“What did I do wrong this time?” I asked when I stepped into the kitchen.

“Don’t get me started on all the things you did wrong yesterday, Miriam,” my mother huffed, her face pinching together awfully as she pinned me with a harsh glare. “But last night was the cherry on top of the cake.”

“It was just a book.”

“Just a book?” My father roared, looking just as disgusted as my mother. He stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder, looking like the perfect tag team. “How can you say that-thatfilthis just a book? It’s from the Devil!”

I rolled my eyes. “You two are being dramatic.”

“You won’t be saying that when you’re burning in Hell,” he scoffed.

“I’ve done worse than read a smutty book,” I sneered, and my parents flinched as if I had physically attacked them.

My mother gasped, and my father abruptly left the kitchen.

“You’re going to walk down to the Church right now and confess your sins, Miriam!” She demanded, pointing an angry finger at the door. “But make sure that you get changed first. I don’t want the Pastor to see you dressed like that,” she snarled at my choice of pyjamas: an oversized top and short shorts. “He’s already concerned about your commitment and loyalty to the Church. I don’t want to confirm it with you turning up there looking like a common hooker.”

“I’m pretty sure hookers are more stylish than me,” I smirked, unable to help myself from jesting even though my mother looked at me like I had grown three heads.

“I’m serious, Miriam.”

The smirk slipped off my face. “You have got to be joking,” I scoffed, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m not going to Church, and I’m not confessing anything to anyone. Especially not to your precious Pastor.”

My mother’s glare hardened, and before I knew it, I was dressed in a little black dress which was five inches longer than I would have liked and covered so much of my chest that I might as well have worn a black bin bag, I was heading out the door to Church.

“Don’t return home until you’ve confessed all your sins, Miriam!” She screamed after me. “This will be a new start for you! Make the most of this opportunity!”

“How about I don’t come home at all?” I scoffed and made a point of slamming the door shut and stomping down the steps.

Every rebellious bone in my body–all two-hundred and six of them–begged me to turn the other way and spend my day doing literally anything else, but I knew my parents would check with boring old Pastor Clark to make sure I actually went to Church to confess my sins. If they learned that I defied them, I would be in even more trouble than I already was.

Not for the first time, I wondered if it would be easier to find my own path in life instead of living like this–with no savings and on a gap year after college. The logical thing to do was to live at home while I worked on my book, work part-time to save some money and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, but it was proving to be more trouble than it was worth.

Naturally, my parents weren’t a fan of me becoming an author, and that was without me telling them what genre I wrote.

Confessing my sins was literally one of the worst things my mother could have forced me into. Not only was Pastor Clark a boring old fart that smelled a little like mouldy old cheese, but my list of‘sins’was so long that I would be stuck in the confession box all day, and my book wouldn’t edit itself.

I managed to turn the ten-minute walk to Church into half an hour, but it still felt too soon.

When I slipped inside, I wasn’t surprised to find the holy building empty. It was nine in the morning on a Saturday. My parents were the only ones crazy enough to send their teenage daughter to Church on a Saturday morning.

“Hello?” I called out, dragging my feet down the aisle as I looked around for someone. Anyone. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

I didn’t expect an answer because the Church was empty, but it came from above me.

“Hello. Can I help you?” An unfamiliar masculine voice answered from above, the tone low and husky, and I craned my neck back to spy a man standing on the second floor, leaning over the railings and staring down at me with a small smirk.

This man wasn’t Pastor Clark.

He couldn’t be further from Pastor Clark if he tried.

While Pastor Clark was a short, tubby man in his sixties and always had that old man smell, this man had to be at least forty years his junior. The scruff on his jaw made him look older, but I estimated him to be nearing thirty at the very most. His hair was wound in tight blonde curls, giving him an angelic look, and his eyes were hazel brown with emerald green flecks in them, giving them so much depth. The scruff that decorated his jaw hardened his otherwise soft look, and I gulped as he stared at me so intently it felt like he was slowly undressing me with his eyes.

Very non-Pastor-like, if you asked me.

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