The Good in Sin

Unicorn Wanted

"So what do you think?" Sin spoke as he walked through his front door, not bothering to take off his jacket while he stood before Hector, who sat at his couch with a joint burning in his hand.

"Of?" The man questioned, his tone even but his eyes mischievous.

"Autumn, dumbass," Sin began to remove his jacket.

"Hm," was the first sound Hector made, and Sin froze with his jacket falling from one of his wrists.

"What does that mean?" Sin shot in confusion.

Hector looked pensively into the fire before him, and Sin's jaw jutted slightly begging for clarity. After tapping some ash into his empty wineglass, Hector turned his gaze to his friend.

"I liked her, Sin," Hector reassured.

"You liked her, but?"

"No but. I liked her," Hector's voice asserted his feelings, and Sin trusted them while taking a seat on the recliner next to the couch Hector sat.

Passing the joint to his friend, Hector watched Sin relax out of his jacket and sit back into the chair, taking a breath out of the joint. 

A relief washed over Hector at his friend's gullibility, but it soon morphed into guilt when he realized it wasn't gullibility- it was trust. Hector liked Autumn upon meeting her. Throughout dinner Hector felt a genuine warmth at how kind and beautiful she was, and could even see why Sin was so infatuated with her.

There was a comfortability between the two that Hector saw as unspoken, and he knew his friend was invested in being with this woman.

However, there was an uneasiness that fell about her later that night, and unsure if it was something Hector had said or something going on with her internally, a feeling in his gut was screaming something wasn't right about this woman.

And Hector had been ignoring his gut feelings as of late.

"I was worried at first," Sin's voice broke Hector's anxiety. "They both seemed off when they walked in."

Hector's feeling faded the slightest, and he met Sin's eyes. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, agitated."

"Who, Autumn?"

"No, Phoenix."

Hector grew quiet again, wondering to himself if we were losing his sense of character. He didn't notice the kid was different, but then again, how could he? He knew it wasn't reasonable to expect himself to recognize the patterns of behavior in a child he didn't know for very long, yet he still worried if only he felt something untrustworthy of Autumn.

He tried to recall the night, the things she would say or the way she would talk. Her occasional lingering stares into the fire that Hector found himself mimicking.

Sin mentioned her hesitation to open up to him was a significant reason they had only progressed their relationship so far. However Hector worried his friend's infatuation clouded his urgency to find out what she was hiding. Given Sin's history, it wasn't easy to invest himself in the life of some woman and child, yet there he was putting his true nature aside to gain her trust, and Hector had never seen that side of Sin before.

The true nature of humans, Hector believed, was the insistence of protecting their secrets, rather than what they were honest about. This mindset had always saved him in the past, and he saw after whatever spell Autumn put on him, Sin no longer felt this way.

After his friend's failing engagement and hesitation towards romance, Sin once saw people for the darkness in them, not the beauty and honesty that Sin's ex tried so hard to open up to him.