Chapter 42 Sylvan
FORTY-TWO
SYLVAN
“Don’t you have practice or prayer or wishful thinking to engage in today? Aren’t you playing TMU?”
Prayer. She’s trying to be a brat but staring at her in this corner of Addam’s—a brunch and bar that seems just up her alley with its Gothic church converted into a restaurant and all the black paint and gargoyle heads everywhere—I realize she has no idea what pressure point she’s pushing on.
I smile at her, ignoring the question. TMU is a cake walk. A springing board to gain points, but we’re nearly leading in conference standings. Scouts are at nearly every game, and while I know nothing ever comes mid-season, next year, I may not be here. Freshman star, that’s what they’re saying.
They’re not wrong.
“Eat your food.” I glance at the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit on her plate.
A rarity in Ontario, but where she’s from?
Some people see it as a daily occurrence.
Addam’s is probably the only place in fifty kilometers you can get it, save maybe the dry and dusty version McDonald’s and Tim Horton’s offers up.
She looks down at her plate, her palms flat on the deep purple table, stacked on top of one another.
Her light hair is piled up in a messy bun high on her head, a few strands around her face.
She’s not wearing any makeup, although there’s a streak of mascara or eyeliner below her low lash line, and her eyes look puffy. Tired.
Her lips are pushed into a pout, her shoulders hunched up around her neck beneath that Drayton U hoodie that isn’t a hockey one and should be. And she’s so fucking hot, I want to bite her throat.
But I push my tongue against my top teeth and stay on my side of the booth, the rest of the place empty this early on Halloween.
I imagine how it’ll feel to get her alone inside Castle Morack.
She might not know she’s going yet, but she will soon.
And Faust is going to come, too.
My plans for them will pan out because I know what strings to pull.
Now I just need to figure out which ones make Neve Devine eat.
“Was it you?” she asks quietly, flicking her eyes up to mine. They’re green, or brown, or both; it’s always hard for me to decipher exact shades, but I know it’s one of those.
What I don’t know is precisely what she’s asking about.
And I don’t want to answer until I do.
It’s the same dilemma I had every time I was called in for “confession” with Deliverance.
Nothing like the Catholic rite, this was one-on-one, face-to-face with Preacher Tim in a darkened room, only a blood red candle between us, his big eyes looming above my head as he went through a list of sins I may or may not have committed that week.
If I hesitated on one, my voice broke with a “no,” or if I blinked too much, Preacher Tim would take that to mean that not only did I commit the sin, I was lying about it too.
There were no “Our Fathers” for penance.
Just his hands around a steel rod, my body splayed out before the candle.
It was my fingers that hurt the most. Or my hand when it was carved.
Nothing else.
No where else.
Below my neck, I felt numb.
When Sister Ennis saw me after camp, in the communal showers, and I had my hand wrapped around myself, a horny teenage boy, thinking he was alone, she dragged me naked to Tim’s office.
I will never forget how he looked at me, pupils blown, pulse racing in his throat.
Maybe. That’s how I answered Neve the last time she asked me if I did something that she sees as a sin. A crime.
But “maybe” was never good enough for Tim.
“Maybe” meant you hurt more, bled more, bruised more.
Once, he threatened to knock my teeth out with his hand around my dick.
Shame, hot and dizzying, rolls through me, and I clench my fingers into fists beneath the table as I force myself to smile at Neve, the same way I always smiled at my parents when I walked home to our shithole house. Not in lack of luxury; in an overabundance of dedication to Deliverance.
A framed photo of Father Tim hung above my bed until I left that house.
I threw myself into hockey because it was a sanctioned escape, the one sport the church looked upon with God’s grace.
I knew why.
Professional players with roots in branches of Deliverance sent back huge sums for tithes. They expected the same of me.
Even now, the reason I never signed that contract that could’ve taken me all the way to Minnesota, the one regret I might have in my life—although Neve sitting across from me is relieving the feeling—was the thought of paying Preacher Tim makes me see my own shade of red.
Was it you?
I hold her gaze. She hasn’t blinked once, and despite the fact I could’ve easily done whatever I wanted to her in that alleyway because she’s so close to fainting as is, she looks strong with her lips pressed together, a furrow between her light brows.
I can make you weak.
I don’t say it, but the thought makes me hard, and I shift slightly in my seat.
“You’ll have to clarify for me.”
She lifts her chin as if in defiance. “Last night. Were you watching us?” Still no blinking, but I think she’s blushing. It’s impossible to tell without asking, but it seems as if the tops of her cheeks have darkened slightly.
“Us?” I pull my head back in a mimicry of surprise. “Who is us?”
She blinks. She can’t tell if I’m lying, or if I genuinely don’t know that she was doing the walk of shame from my captain’s house before the sun fully rose this morning.
Is it shameful? Deliverance would say she’s a harlot, the worst kind of woman. My mother never even spoke to a man—even a cashier at the grocery store—in order to avoid anyone thinking of her that way.
But my father didn’t carry the same shame.
I caught him jerking off to bondage porn more times than I can count on one hand, although I never told him.
I just watched over his shoulder like a ghost, listened to the sounds he made when the release of breaking free from his reality whispered through the air while Mom was at her lady’s prayer meeting or visiting the elderly or whatever other saintly shit she did.
I always wondered though, what her kink was. What’s her dark secret? Her shame? I knew my father’s, and it was so predictable as to make him boring.
But Mom’s? She truly is an angel, so far as I can tell.
Nothing like the woman sitting across from me, and for that reason, I want to save her. Or corrupt her with my sins. At least I can keep her safe.
She should know that.
Haven’t I proven it?
I might have failed when Mother went to confession and she came home in tears—a woman who is a saint, so far as I can tell, unless Preacher Tim made her a sinner—and I might not have had the guts to murder him to stop her sadness, but for Neve… I’ve done my best, haven’t I?
She ran into Faust’s arms that fateful night, then later, mine.
God, or someone like him, decided I should be her guardian.
She’s redemption. A chance to do over my wrongs where my mother was concerned.
She takes a breath, then pushes the plate away. When it first arrived, she took a tiny bite, no biscuit, but a part of the egg and cheese.
And while I only ordered a plate of bacon—now gone—I’m not the one lacking in the calorie department. Neve is gorgeous, flawless, but she’s tired and pinched and she needs to fucking eat.
The iced coffee with a drop of milk she devoured doesn’t count.
I open my mouth to tell her I’m not letting her leave here until half that biscuit is gone, but before I can, she’s talking, staring out the tinted window that overlooks the snow-dusted side street edging campus.
“Either someone else is stalking me…” There’s an undercurrent of true fear in her words.
I felt it when I was a child. My first memories are with Preacher Tim in that darkened room with the candle between us.
The one I didn’t know to call red, not at first. It was brown, I told Mom when she asked me about it as she waited anxiously outside the preacher’s luxurious house, right in the gardens, her head bent and hands folded together in prayer.
Mom suspected then I was colorblind, but it never concerned her.
It was what happened to me with Tim that ate her alive.
The fear made her too thin; she threw up everything she tried to eat.
I remember thinking she was always pregnant when I was a child and suffering from morning sickness, until I understood no baby came, and on the weeks Tim was traveling to meet with other delegations, she was at peace, and she ate everything.
It was my time with Tim that gave her the courage to tell my dad we needed to leave.
They still haven’t, but they supported every move I made in hockey to get me far away from Refron.
I haven’t been back since I moved into the hockey house.
Then from there, it was always going to be Drayton. More scouts, more eyes, more chances to never go home.
Neve holds my gaze. “Or it’s you.” She whispers the words, but now, with this option, she doesn’t hold the fear she did, thinking it was someone else.
Or maybe that’s only what I want to believe.
“Tell me who you were with last night.” I try not to let jealousy harden my words. That twist in my gut I always had when Mom would laugh at Preacher Tim’s jokes during our monthly dinners, hosted by my mother, and every woman who was a member of Deliverance.
I wanted to break his neck.
I wanted to bury his body.
He didn’t deserve good things.
He doesn’t deserve good things.
But I can’t save Mom.
Neve, though…
She swallows, her slender throat rolling with the motion. God, I want to bite her so badly. Taste her blood. What is she like, on the inside?
“Do you know?” she whispers.
And for once in my life, I find it hard to lie.
So I simply deflect. “Tell me.” I lower my voice to match her volume.
She takes a jumpy breath in. “Faust,” she says softly, watching me carefully.
And I can’t stop it. Not now. The ease I hold onto so tightly, the one skill aside from skating I’ve gotten so incredibly good at, it seems to slip with her.
“Did he feel as good as I did?” The words sound as if they are coming from someone else.
Floating free of my restraint, like my mind has a separate voice and I can watch it with some distant, mingling horror, but I can’t stop it.
It’s the same sensation I get when I’m fighting on the ice.
Someone else is throwing the punches, getting the penalties, risking ejection. Someone else is taking over my control.
The same feeling when I went numb on the table for Preacher Tim.
“Did you get as wet for him as you did me, Neve?” My voice is clinical and detached, but I’m not. I’m not, Neve.
Her eyes widen, and she jerks back from the table, but she doesn’t get up and leave. She doesn’t run from me.
That has to count for something, doesn’t it?
“Did you fuck him?” My voice breaks on those words, the same it would with Preacher Tim, even when I was telling the truth.
I paid for it then.
“Did he come inside you?” The sharp knife lodges in my throat, and I don’t recognize the way I speak anymore.
Neve takes a breath through her nose.
Another.
Her complexion is pale.
“Did you do it?” she presses. “Jackson and Will and—”
“Don’t say their fucking names.” Who am I now? My cover is blown. This is not the version of me she is supposed to see.
I’ll scare her off now.
I’ll make her run.
But the thought makes me laugh out loud, her brows knitting together as I do.
Where can she go? She’s stuck here. She has a car, sure, but her entire world is here now.
She has a brother, but what is he going to do?
Whisk her away to Manhattan? Yeah, I know all about him too, and he’s not going to take her.
Not in the middle of the semester of her last year. Not when she’s so close to graduating, one step closer to dealing with psychopaths like me every single day of her working life.
She had a business over the summer, coaching. I found the website. But she shut it down, and I wonder why. I like to believe she wanted more danger. More complication. More of someone like me.
I slap my hand to the table, making her flinch.
I hate myself for that.
“Don’t be scared of me,” I whisper, beg her, plead with her. “Please, Neve.”
“What did you do?” she asks quietly, but there is a horrible fascination rolled into the words.
Has anyone ever stood up for her like this? Been obsessed with her like this? I don’t fucking think so.
“Tell me, Sylvan.” She grits her teeth as she leans closer now. If this table wasn’t between us, I might eat her alive. “Tell me what exactly you did.”
“Did you fuck him?” I have to know. I remember how she said his name when she should have been screaming mine.
I love Faust. Respect him. I want to fuck him, too. But in this competition, there’s only one winner, and it has to be me, unless he’s shattered it.
What will I do to him tonight, if he has? Would it be unprecedented, a freshman going after his own captain on the ice?
I don’t mind being the first.
But it would ruin my career. Ruin my education.
It would send me… back.
For her, I’d fight to stay. For her, I could make hurting Faust look like an accident.
“No,” she whispers, and for all my time with Tim, I can tell she isn’t lying.
The relief barrels through me.
I don’t have to hurt Faust.
I don’t have to do something that I might regret.
I don’t have to.
And I can still win this. Or maybe we could do it together. One of us—me or Faust—would have to give this sport up, but for her, would I?
My shoulders drop.
My spine isn’t so rigid.
I want to hug her so tight.
“No?” I want to hear it again.
She shakes her head once. “No,” she confirms.
“Please don’t,” I whisper, and she doesn’t recoil, her eyes searching mine. “Please. Not yet.”
“Sylvan.” The way she says my name, it makes my dick hard all over again, and I can’t wait to have her begging for it. “What happened to your parents?”
Fuck.
I feel dizzy. Like she did, when I caught her before she hit the ground. How does she know what to ask? What does she know of me?
No one knows I came from Deliverance.
No one knows why my parents don’t come to games. Hockey may be sanctioned, but leaving the country is frowned upon. Preacher Tim wouldn’t want anyone to escape now, would he?
Some people assume I don’t have any parents.
I let them think it.
But her… maybe she knows me just as well as I know her.
“What parents?”
She frowns. Then she says, “I have to go.”