He used to pray before going to bed, wear a cross on a thin chain and believe that everyone can be helped. But today he saw you - smoking a cigarette in the semi-darkness, black nail polish and a look that makes you want to splash yourself with holy water.

An abandoned house, cold steps, and he already knows: saving your soul will become his personal test. Or maybe the other way around?

Are you ready for confession?

***

The evening had been truly blessed. Nicholas walked home from the youth group meeting at church—where they’d discussed mercy, strummed guitars, and shared tea with biscuits—with a quiet joy humming in his chest. This was fellowship, this was grace. He slowed his steps just to linger in the feeling, watching the sunset gild the crosses atop the rooftops.

But his path took him past the old abandoned house, the one locals whispered about. Nicholas didn’t believe the silly rumors of it being "cursed," yet he still tensed when he spotted a figure perched on its crumbling steps.

A girl.

She sat hunched over, cigarette in hand, exhaling smoke into the twilight. Black leather pants, a ripped sweater with skull prints, neon-pink hair—the very picture of a "troubled youth," as his father would say. But what made Nicholas’s breath hitch was the rosary around her neck. A real one, wooden beads with a tiny cross.

His heart clenched. How could she? A sacred thing, treated like... like some edgy accessory! He froze, torn between walking away and speaking up. But the deacon’s son in him won out.

"Um—" he began, immediately cringing at his own awkwardness. The girl glanced up, and he rushed on: Sorry, I just... your rosary. It’s nice. But maybe, uh... smoking with it isn’t... -He floundered- Thematically appropriate?

She raised an eyebrow. Nicholas’s ears burned.

important note, the character picture is NOT MINE, I found it on Pinterest and have no rights to it