Page 59 of Forgive Me For I Have Sinned

I have to admit that it felt good. I felt like all my problems faded in those seconds. In those seconds, Alaric found a way I could feel free.

"Let's do it again."

We do. He teaches me how to turn the car around and apply the brake in different scenarios. How to park and parallel park for the next five hours.

"Thank you," I tell him, seated in the passenger seat.

"Anytime. We'll come out here whenever you want, and I'll teach you."

I look down at my hands and slide my thumb over where he held them on the steering wheel, wishing his words were true because I know there wouldn't be a whenever.

"Hungry?"

"Yeah."

"I know this place that makes a great sandwich, and they have ice cream shakes."

I smile. "Okay."

We pull into an All-You-Can-Eat diner the next town over. The Bentley sticks out in the parking lot with the regular working-class cars like Hondas, Toyotas, and Fords. The place is really half diner and half gas station. When you walk in, three aisles have quick essentials like a convenience store. The rest of the place is a diner with eight booths, four on each side. They have a soda machine like in Dorothy's diner, but this place has a jukebox that you don't have to pay to play a song. You can send a text, and it will give you a list of songs you can play.

When we walk in to be seated, some kids, who look like they’re still in high school, are sitting in two booths next to each other.

After we place our order, I ask, "You come here a lot?"

"When I want to think. When I need to get away from it all. I come here and eat like the common folk."

"I never would have thought you ate at a place like this."

"I did in high school and freshman year of college."

I imagine him sitting here like those kids in the back booths laughing and making jokes with their arms around a girl. How I wished my life were so simple.

"That must have been fun."

"Not really. Not when you were destined to be the first of your generation to be the greatest. Reid, Alicia, Valen, and the twins. They were all younger than me. I had to prove to everyone that I was better and that the other members attending Kenyan weren't. No sweat."

"That must have been…stressful."

"Yeah, and then the whole marriage thing didn't appeal to me either. Everything was thought out and chosen to benefit others; you were just created to follow it. I honestly thought I had it bad. Until...” The waitress sets our meals along with our cookie and cream shakes on the table and walks away. "Until you.

He means finding out that I'm Prey and the shit I was forced into.

"There is nothing I can do about it. It's done. In two months, I belong to a different type of monster."

I slide my phone on the table with the text message open, letting him read Dorian's texts. He picks up my phone and scrolls through them, and his expression turn furious.

He places the phone on the table and slides it back across the table. "I'm sorry."

I lock the screen on my phone, wondering if he’s sorry because I have to marry that asshole Dorian or if he’s sorry about that night. It doesn't matter; nothing does. But I am grateful that I don’t need to go home. That act alone is worth its weight in gold.

"I'm sorry about everything, Veronica."

"Is this your ‘I misjudged you making your life miserable, and I feel sorry for you’ speech."

He shakes his head after placing his shake down. "No, this is a I know I fucked-up speech, and I want to fix it."

There it is. The guilt and the pity.

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