“It’s about the Holocaust,” she continues. “Wiesel says in Auschwitz a group of rabbis decided to put God on trial. They charged God with crimes against His creation, and it became a real court, a real case. They found witnesses. They presented evidence.”
In the distance, lightning stitches across the sky and wind buffets the car. There’s going to be a storm. And still I find myself settling, easing to the sound of Zenny’s rich alto, to her story.
“The trial lasts several nights,” she says, “and at the end of it, they find God guilty.”
“Good,” I mutter, as the first drops of rain splatter the windshield.
God is guilty. God deserved this trial.
“And then do you know what the rabbis do next?” Zenny asks, gathering her backpack into her lap as I pull into my parking garage.
“What do they do?”
“They pray.”
I park, turn the car off. And then I turn to look at her.
“They find God guilty and then they pray,” she says again, her eyes and her voice and her everything soft and full of something I don’t understand. But it reminds me of the way I used to feel as a child, falling asleep as a music box chimed the notes of “Jesus Loves Me.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” I ask.
“Just that you can do both, Sean. You can do both.”
There is some fuss regarding my bossiness about bedtime—Zenny wants to play our new bedroom games and pouts so magnificently after I order her to ready herself for sleep that I almost reconsider—but I only have to look at the exhaustion around her eyes to remember to hold my ground. I ask her, as always, if now is the time she’d like to declare me an asshole and have me back off, but she shakes her head with a huff and stomps off to the bathroom to brush her teeth. But I know I’ve done the right thing when she’s swaying on her feet while she waits for me to get ready.
“Get in bed,” I say after I rinse my mouth. “I’ll be right after you.”
She zombie-shuffles into the bedroom and then I hear a sleepy, happy squeal from her.
“Satin sheets?”
“And satin pillowcases,” I say, changing into a pair of drawstring pants that hang off my hips. She’s not so tired that her eyes don’t gobble up the sight of my bared torso and hips—and again, I almost reconsider Plan Tucking Zenny Into Bed. But her health is more important than fun, and I climb into bed myself to set a good example. She looks disappointed, but the moment I flip off the lights and gather her into my chest, she turns into a sprawl of tired, heavy limbs.
“I can’t believe you got new sheets for me,” she says.
“I’d get new anything for you, Zenny-bug. New everything.”
“Sometimes you are just too smooth,” she says and I know there’s got to be a smile on her face from the tone of her voice. “But it works somehow.”
“All part of the Sean Bell charm, I assure you.”
Her hair tickles against me as she nods, and I stroke her arm until I feel her breathing relax and drop into a steady rhythm.
“Theodicy,” she murmurs dozily.
“Um. What?”
“It’s called theodicy. When people try to explain how God can still be good when bad things happen.”
“Oh. Okay?”
Her lips press against my chest in the sleepiest kiss ever and then she rolls over onto her pillow, wriggling backward into the cradle of my body. Despite the serious God talk, my cock surges happily against her.
“Some people think it’s a bad idea, trying to justify God’s goodness, because it distracts us from what’s important. It tangles us up in intellectual knots, when intellection isn’t the point. We have philosophy for that. Religion is for ritual, for practice. For moral action.”
“So it’s more important to pray than to figure out God? That seems backward to me. How can you pray to something you don’t understand? To something that might not be good?”
“Credo ut intelligam,” Zenny says. “It means: I believe so that I may understand. But believe is a tricky word in English, and so the meaning of the phrase has gotten slanted over time. The Latin credo came from cor dare—to give one’s heart. What St. Anselm was saying was not ‘assent blindly and uncritically to these intellectual positions about a deity,’ but rather that the intellectual positions were less important than the practice of living a moral life or a spiritual life. He was saying, ‘I commit so that I may understand.’ Or ‘I engage with this because it is the kind of thing that can only be understood by engaging with it.’”
I turn this over in my mind.
“Your mother is like St. Anselm,” Zenny goes on after a short, cute yawn. “She’s willing to engage in a spiritual practice while coexisting with a host of complicated ethical and metaphysical questions. A comfort with doubt concurrent with a commitment to living a spiritual life—that’s amazing.”
It occurs to me that it’s Zenny’s goal to live like that. That somehow in the midst of tragedy and impending death, my mom has found a relationship with faith that could make even a nun envious.
It’s a curious thought.
“Tyler’s middle name is Anselm,” I say, apropos of basically nothing, but I don’t have any response to her insights. She’s too smart and I’m still too close to the howling boy kicking his car open in a fit of drunken pain.
“See then?” Zenny murmurs, and I know she’s very close to sleep now. “I bet she already knows all this.”
I snug my little nun in close and stare at the lights outside as she sleeps in a temptingly sweet burrow against me. I think about God on trial and my mother’s rosary until my thoughts blend into unhappy dreams, dreams I can’t remember when I wake the next morning.
It’s a Saturday, and Zenny has a clinical rotation today—her first—and she has to stop by the shelter afterwards to help with dinner. I practically gnash my teeth in frustration, because after being so twisted up over God and Mom last night and after my (very noble and very stupid) insistence on sleep instead of play last night, my cock is approximately the hardness of a carbon dwarf star, and the gravity of its need is insane. My thoughts, my hand, everything feels like it’s pulling toward my aching organ, and I just want to fuck it all away, I want to ride Zenny until my chest stops hurting and my thoughts are clear again.
But I won’t, not even when I get her back tonight, because of the plan. The stupid fucking plan that I can’t let go of. Although as much as I’d like to fuck her, I am pretty excited about tonight.
We’re going on a date.
I have to call in a favor from Aiden (sigh), but even that can’t dampen my excitement as I get everything ready.
“Sixty dollars,” Aiden’s saying as I finish up a few odds and ends in my home office before I get Zenny from the shelter.
“Sixty? Are you insane?”
“Oh, like you’re not good for it,” Aiden says dismissively. “And are you going to tell me who this girl is or what?”
I think for a minute. Aiden’s not exactly what I would label “trustworthy.” Once, right after college, he promised to help me move a couch into my apartment, and then moved to Belize the next day. (He came back a month later with a sunburn, a fresh hatred of tequila, and a vague story about a girl named Jessica.) Last year, I spent God knows how many hours touring lofts and condos with him, examining minute differences between exposed brick and stained concrete, and then he up and bought a creaky farmhouse in the middle of nowhere without a word.
The nice word for Aiden is spontaneous and the less nice word is flaky, and either way I slice it, I’m not sure that I can trust him with a secret like this. For all I know, he’ll meet another Jessica and somehow end up at the Vatican telling the Pope about Zenny and me.
But also I have this adolescent need to talk about her. I want someone else to know how fucking smart she is, how fucking pretty, how fucking sweet and tart all at once. I want to talk about her contradictions and her layers, I want to talk about the things she dredges up inside me�
��these old sensory glimpses of churches and rituals—about the version of Sean I remember when I’m around her.
I want to talk about how much I want her, how much I need her, and how much that doesn’t scare me.
“It’s Zenny Iverson,” I say quickly before I can change my mind. “Zenobia. Elijah’s sister.”
A silence yawns on the other end.
“Aiden? You still there?”
He doesn’t answer right away, but when he does, his voice is strangled. “Elijah’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“The nun?”
How does he know about that when even I, Elijah’s best friend, didn’t? “It’s a long story,” I say.
“You’re taking a nun on a date,” Aiden says, as if he’s a teacher laying out a remedial logic problem for a student to solve. “You’re dating a nun.”
“Not…exactly,” I hedge. “It’s complicated.”
“Oh my God,” Aiden says. “Elijah’s going to kill you.”
“Elijah is not going to know,” I say firmly. “Because Zenny and I won’t tell him.”
“But—” Aiden makes a fretting noise.
“There’s no buts, man. It’s not like you’re going to see him to tell him, and no one else is going to tell him, and it’s going to be fine.”
Aiden is still making agitated sputters.
“And anyway, we should be talking about you. I notice you haven’t been raiding my fridge the past few days; I wondered if you’d died or something.”
“I’m just busy,” he says, and there’s a note of evasion in his voice. But with Aiden, evasion is sometimes par for the course. He’s Belize Boy, after all.
“Okay, fine. I won’t pry. Just tell me if you’re dating a nun too.”
That earns me a laugh. “I’m not as bonkers as you.”
“Yet,” I warn, and I do mean it as a joke, but it does come out with a prophetic sort of ring and hangs in the air as we finish making plans for tonight and wrap up the call.
Chapter 18
“Where are we going?” Zenny asks. “And why is there sixty dollars tucked into your console?”
“You’ll see. And there’s sixty dollars because it’s a fancy date, Zenny-bug.” I’m kidding, obviously, because I could easily spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single night with her—and I considered it, I really did. I thought about whisking her away to St. Bart’s or Paris or the Seychelles, but somehow I knew that wouldn’t impress her.
And I do want to impress her. Or more accurately, I want her to have fun, I want her to be happy, I want her to feel what it’s like not to have the world on her shoulders. I want to see her smile and laugh. I want tonight to belong to her, not to her nursing degree, not to her shelter, not to her family’s subverted expectations. Nothing gets to claim her tonight but laughter and bad pizza.
Zenny misses the humor in my tone though, because she rubs her hands uncomfortably on her jeans. “Should I change?”
I glance pointedly down at my own clothes—jeans and an artfully rumpled button-down. “You’re dressed perfectly.”
“Okay,” she says, and then makes a noise that is somewhere between nervousness and self-deprecation at said nervousness. “Between the new nursing scrubs and the jumper, sometimes I feel like I forget how to dress for the real world. Not that I know where we’re going in the real world,” she adds pointedly.
I don’t take the bait. It’s going to be a fucking surprise. I shift gears as we merge onto the interstate south, and then I ask, “So you’ll wear the habit all the time after your vows, but you don’t have to wear the postulant’s uniform all the time now?”
Zenny leans back against the headrest and props her sneakers up on the dash. It’s such a young thing to do, such a college thing to do, and it makes me smile.
“Every order has their own rules about dress,” she says, not seeing my smile. “With SGS, when and where the postulant wears her uniform is determined between the postulant and the prioress. In my case, the Reverend Mother wants me in street clothes more often than not, because she’s concerned about my youth. We agreed on the shelter and at monastery events, and that’s it for me. But I’ve seen some postulants wear their uniforms all the time.”
I think about this for a minute. Come to some important conclusions. “I still want to fuck you in your postulant’s uniform.”
This earns me a lip bite and a very studious examination of her sneakers. “Okay,” she murmurs, and I don’t miss the way she squirms in her seat.
My smile gets bigger.
On the way to our date, Zenny guesses all sorts of places we could be going, all of them wrong. She guesses restaurants and movies—which I scoff at like a cynical Wakefield pirate—and then suggests other things I almost wish I’d thought of, like the arboretum or the local improv club. But no—we’re going to a place less classy and far more juvenile than an improv club, and I tell her that, which puzzles her for a long time.
I finally exit the highway on one of those indiscriminate suburban exits, the kind that have a hotel for no reason and a McDonalds and a chiropractor’s office, and navigate a few turns to our destination. Then I park the car and turn to face her.
“Well?” I say.
She gives me one of those Hollywood starlet eyebrows. “Are you actually taking me to a skating rink?”
“Yes, I am, Zenny-bug. Your skates are in the trunk,” I say as I grab my things and open my door.
“Wait…my skates? I don’t have any…” she trails off as she follows me outside the car to the trunk and sees that she does, indeed, have a pair of skates.
“I didn’t want to take a chance on them not having rental skates available,” I explain as I lift our things out of the trunk and shut it. “So I noted your shoe size and had my assistant order some skates.”
She stares at me a moment and then shakes her head in incredulity. Her face is crinkling up into an amused smile, however, so I know I’m not in too much trouble.
“Okay, rich boy,” she says.
“This is not a rich-boy date,” I protest, offended. “This is exactly the kind of normal date normal people go on.”
She laughs. “With their custom-ordered skates and their Audi R8 parked outside?”
“Well, I’m not going to compromise on everything.”
She tucks an arm into my elbow, glowing up at me. “I have to admit, this is exactly the kind of date I’d want to go on if this were real. Let’s do it.”
And we go inside, pay our six-dollar admission fees, and stroll into the dimly lit, badly carpeted lobby. Top-forty pop music blares awkwardly through the mostly empty space, and the smell of stale popcorn permeates the air, and Zenny’s if this were real chafes at me. I’m starting to have the uncomfortable feeling that I’m in a Wakefield novel myself, that I’m the hapless hero or heroine who starts to fall in love even though I know better, even though I know that’s not the arrangement, even though I know I’ll have my heart broken.
But I can’t stop. It’s like watching a tornado carve up a prairie field, like watching hail tear through leaves and roofs and dirt. It’s happening, and all I can do is take shelter.
Zenny’s skates fit perfectly, and so do my new blades, and she gives a delighted little clap of her hands as I pop up and skate backwards around the table. The light pings off the stud in her nose, and she’s so fucking hot, so fucking young, and I want to fast forward to the end of the night and what I have planned, but I manage to keep myself under control. As soon as she has her skates on and she’s stowed her shoes, we roll out to the rink itself, a wood-floored affair crowded with disco balls and scores of teenagers too young to do anything more interesting with their Saturday nights.
“I didn’t know you could skate like this!” she exclaims, as I move in circles around her.
“Elijah and I played roller hockey, remember?” I say, moving in front of her and skating backwards as she tentatively skates forward.
“I was a baby,” she points out i
n playful exasperation. “Of course I don’t remember.”
“Oh yeah,” I say. And she’s right. In fact, Elijah and I both quit roller hockey the year Zenny was born—me because it was not one of those sports that netted lots of attention from girls, like basketball or football, and Elijah because he was so busy with his ten trillion other extracurriculars that he had to start dropping things to make time for the activities he really wanted to do.
A quick bite of shame follows the realization. Because what am I doing with this girl, really? Who do I think I am? There’s got to be a special hell for men who fuck their best friend’s sister, especially when their best friend’s little sister is much, much too young for the kind of fucking I like to do.
I execute a few figure eights around Zenny, trying to push these thoughts away, and my antics earn me more clapping, which only makes me peacock more. I know I’m thirty-six, but it feels really good to show off sometimes, okay? Even on rollerblades.
It only takes Zenny a few laps for her legs to remember how to move on skates, and then we settle into a nice pace, holding hands and talking to each other over the music. I feel like a kid, like a teenager, electric that she’s holding my hand, stealing glances at her tight ass moving under her jeans. The breeze created by our movement plasters her T-shirt against her body, and under the thin, worn-through cotton, I can see the divot of her navel, the smooth cups of her bra. I can see the place where her hips flare out from her narrow waist, the outline of the button of her jeans. A button that I plan to have unbuttoned very soon.
I adjust myself subtly as we skate, and sneak a look at my watch. Twenty more minutes and I’ll be able to put my sixty dollars to work.
“See something you like?” Zenny asks dryly, noticing my gaze and my not-as-subtle-as-I-thought handling of my cock.
“Just reading your T-shirt,” I pretend to lie, knowing she’ll see right through it and not caring. I want her to know how much I look at her, how much I want her. I want her to have me at full force, full desire, not only because it’s what she wanted out of this arrangement, but because I don’t know if I can actually hold myself back. It might kill me to pretend to want her less.
Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2) Page 127
