I ignore them. If God Himself couldn’t stop me right now, then I’m certainly not going to let the trees do it.
I’m only here to say goodbye to her, I tell the trees. Calm down.
I glance down at my watch and then at the invitation I’ve got clutched in my hand. Elijah had wordlessly handed it to me during my mom’s funeral, and I don’t know what he wanted me to do with it—or if he simply wanted me to know that Zenny was still going to be a nun, despite le detour de Sean Bell. But I’d known what I needed to do the moment I saw it.
The monastery door is open, and I step inside the wide foyer, following the muffled, hymning sonance down the hall to the small chapel, slowing my steps the closer I get. And the slower I walk, the faster my heart hammers.
I tell my stupid heart to stop. That we’re only here to say goodbye. If Zenny can be brave enough to reveal how she feels in the face of this, then I can be too. I can set her free. And I’ll never recover, sure, because she’s it for me, she’s all a sinner like me gets—my one and only chance flashing like a firefly in the dark, too high up to catch. I’ll spend the rest of my life hurting with wanting her, missing her with swift and fierce aches. I’ll spend the rest of my life jealous of God, no matter what fledgling truces He and I have struck.
But I don’t want that for her; I don’t want her to waste any of her precious heart on an old sinner like me. I want her to live free and happy and full.
Without me.
It’s been two days since Mom’s funeral, and it’s weird to be approaching the chapel now, since it’s my second time in a religious space in almost as many days. Or maybe it’s weird how not-weird it feels.
Maybe I’m reformed.
The chapel doors are closed, and I have an uncomfortable foreboding that I might be too late, a foreboding that turns into a metallic panic I can taste in my mouth.
You can say goodbye just as easily after her vows as before, I remind myself, but it’s about more than that. I wanted her to feel free as she walked down the aisle to meet God, I wanted her to walk to God without any other claim on her heart. She deserved that at least, that final unmooring, that final atonement. She deserved that from me. And I’m too late to give it to her.
But then I hear a small hiccup coming from somewhere in the hallway, followed by a nose being blown. Curious, I follow the sound to its source: a small room off the side of the hallway and around the corner from the chapel’s entrance.
Inside, wearing the wedding gown she should have been wearing for me, is Zenny.
Crying.
Pacing.
Fucking gorgeous.
I had a thousand things I was going to say in this moment, a thousand smooth apologies and pretty speeches, but they all fly out the window the moment I see her crying. I can’t see it without wanting to make it better; I can’t bear the thought of anything making her sad, ever. It’s like physical pain.
“Zenny-bug,” I whisper and she starts, turning around to face me.
“Sean?” she asks…and then promptly bursts into a fresh round of tears.
I don’t care that we’re in the monastery, I don’t care what’s happened before this moment, there’s only her and her tears and doing whatever I can to stop them. I stride forward and sweep her up into my arms, like she’s my bride in truth, and then I carry her to the bench on the side of the room, sitting down with her cradled in my arms.
She buries her face in my chest, her slender body hitching with sob after sob, and there’s the silk and tulle of her bridal skirt everywhere around us, clouds of it. And I hold her close, crooning low and wordless at her ear as I rock her, as I stroke her hair away from her face and band her snugly against my torso and chest, holding her as I’ve wanted to hold her for the last week. Tight and close, with my face in her hair and her hands clutching at my chest.
“What is it, Zenny-bug?” I murmur. “What makes you so sad?”
She shakes her head against my chest, crying even harder, her hands now holding on to my T-shirt hard enough that the fabric is bunched in her palms, as if she is worried I’ll try to let her go.
Silly Zenny. As if I’d ever let her go.
I’ll hold her as long as she lets me. I’ll hold her for the rest of my life.
“I can’t tell what I’m supposed to do anymore,” she says tearfully into my chest. “I can’t tell what I want and what God wants and whether the two are the same thing.”
I don’t speak—I definitely have not built myself up to be the authority on what Zenny should do when it comes to taking her vows. So I just hold her and cradle her and kiss her head. I stroke her arm and make a deep, tuneless hum in my chest.
Slowly, so slowly that I don’t even take note of it at first, her sobs turn into muffled tears and the muffled tears turn into tired sniffs, until she’s slumped against me, enervated and quiet.
By degrees, I become aware of her body nestled against mine. The slender curve of her waist under my hand. The tickle of her curls against my throat. The firm curves of her ass cradled in my lap, the hook of her knees over my thigh.
Heat—unwelcome but unstoppable all the same—floods me, inflames me. I shift, trying to keep her innocent of my hardening cock.
“How long do you have?” I ask, wondering if I should make myself scarce before someone finds their newest novice in a man’s arms, in her Jesus wedding dress no less.
I feel her head turn to glance at the clock. “Thirty minutes. They’re praying about accepting me into the order, and then the rite will begin.”
I finger the beading on her wedding gown. It’s a few years out of fashion, and I have the feeling it was bought secondhand. Donated maybe. She still looks stunning, though, a vision right out of my reckless, unguarded dreams. The dress has straps draped across her shoulders, like Belle’s gown in Beauty and the Beast, a close-fitting silhouette of silk from her small, sweet breasts down to the tempered flare of her hips, and from there it spills into a kind of frothy madness that is very enchanting. I run my hand through the froth, closing my eyes and imagining—just for minute—that she really is my bride, that this is our wedding, that she’s in my arms because she wants to be there and not because I was an available chest to cry into.
I imagine that I can kiss her.
I imagine that I can love her.
Her hands have loosened in my T-shirt, and a finger now scrolls idly over my chest, up around the collar of my shirt to the bare skin of my neck.
“You shaved,” she murmurs.
“For the funeral,” I explain. That morning I could practically hear my mom clucking about what a ruffian I looked like, so I finally took a razor to the beard. I’d barely recognized the man in the mirror when I was done—the week of hospital life had carved fresh hollows under my cheekbones and smudged grief under my eyes. (My hair hadn’t suffered though. I was spared that at least.)
Zenny clears her throat and tilts her head up at me. “Why are you here, Sean?” she whispers. “Why today?”
“I came to make things right,” I say honestly. “I messed up. And I didn’t want you dragging that down the aisle with you.”
Her long eyelashes are still threaded with tears and they sparkle as she blinks. “You messed up,” she repeats carefully. “So you came here. Today. Right before I took my vows.”