Page 13 of Of Saints & Savagery
I blow him a kiss.
I’m not looking to make problems on the field, though, and I have enough enemies in this town already, so I give up resting my elbows and just sit back with my ass against the edge of my seat while I recite the Lord’s prayer. Mom smiles at me when she’s done, and we all slide back into our pew. After the service, we file out. I hug my parents goodbye, letting Mom hold on for longer than necessary, the way she always does. They’ll go home, and I’ll go back to my dorm.
The holiday break is over.
I’m standing under the awning on the side of the church having a smoke when I hear footsteps coming my way.
“Hey,” Duke Dolce says, stepping under and brushing raindrops off the shoulders of his ten-thousand-dollar coat. “Can I have one of those?”
I hold out the pack of cigarettes, and he takes one. For a minute, we smoke in silence. I don’t know the guy, but I’ve heard stories about his family. He’s crazy like me but different, belligerent and rude and angrier than a guy that rich has any right to be. Once, I ran into him at a race, and I thought maybehe was searching for the same thing I was, but I couldn’t be sure, and neither of us were trusting enough to risk asking. Since then, we’ve orbited each other uneasily.
“What’s it like?” I ask after a minute. “Having her back?”
“My sister?” he asks, dragging on his cigarette before answering. “Weird. She’s different.”
“I wouldn’t care,” I say, leaning back on the wall when a gust of wind blows the rain in sheets against the building, soaking our feet, the bottom of our legs.
“Oh shit, your sister’s dead too, right?”
“Not dead,” I say. “Gone.”
“Right,” he says. We smoke in silence another minute, watching the downpour. “Thing is, you never forget them, you never stop missing them, but you get used to it, y’know? You think she’s never coming back. And then she does, and you’re like, shit, it’s been however many years, she’s so different. But you kinda just accept that. This is who she is now. Of course she’s changed. The hardest part… I think it’s realizing how muchyou’vechanged. You look at yourself through her eyes, see what she sees now when she looks at you compared to who you were when she left. That’s the hard part.”
I don’t know what to say to that because I’ve never thought about it. I’ve thought about seeing her again a thousand times, more than a thousand. Every single day, I’ve thought about Eternity. I’ve already reminded myself she’s not a kid anymore, that she’ll be different if we meet again. But I haven’t thought about how much I’ve changed, all the things that have changed me.
Eternity was a kid when she was taken, but so was I.
Duke tosses the cigarette butt onto the wet pavement. “What are you doing after this?”
I drop my head back against the stone wall, letting the smoke curl up from my lips in a cloud. “I gotta get going.”
“Same,” he says, but he stays.
He eyes me, his gaze moving up and down my body, assessing the damage we could do to each other. I think, it would be easy to pull him into the crypt, to find a corner in the murky depths and beat away the frustration and turmoil in a few quick strokes, fists clenched around each other, teeth on stubble, hot tongue on rain-misted skin, fevered breath curling into the hollow of his throat.
But there are people who are easy come, easy go, and then there are people who look simple enough but once you let them in, they stick on you like a burr that you can never quite shake. I can’t do that kind of complication right now. I’m still figuring all of it out myself. And maybe I’m reading all this into something that doesn’t exist, that isn’t there any more than my sister is there in the shadow of the sanctuary when I step inside, around the next turn in the tunnel when I explore the maze with my friends—the ones who remain.
“I gotta go,” I say, and I flip my hood up and jog through the rain. My insides are all churned up and messy, and I can’t stop thinking about what he said, about how much I’ve changed. Juvie did that to me. Juvie and Mercy.
I’m in her room before I can think better of it.
“Why did you tell the judge I killed my sister?” I demand.
Mercy scrambles up from a nest of pillows and blankets she’s made on the floor, dropping the book she was reading. “What?”
“You told him I went back and killed her,” I say, rage shimmering through me. “I was with you. Why did you lie?”
“I didn’t lie,” she says, backing around her bed. “I didn’t tell him you killed her. I told the truth.”
“Then why did everyone think I did it? Why did they think I fucked my own sister?”
“I—I don’t know,” she cries. “I told them about what you did, when we were kids. The thing I confessed.” Her voice flags, and she looks away.
“The thing you liked,” I say flatly.
“I… He asked,” she whispers. “If you’d ever done anything like that before.”
“And you thought that was like raping and murdering my own sister?”
