Bad Habits

Rain pattered gently against the glass to Ethan’s side and he found himself lost in the beauty of the patterns that the water made as it trickled down the thin pane. Each tiny streaming rivulet would collect other water droplets as it sped down on its way, growing in size and speed before it fell out of sight, off the window, only to be followed by more and more. A seemingly eternal cycle that kept his full attention.

His sat at his desk, chin in his hand as he stared sideways. He was aware of talking in the background, but it didn’t hold his interest. He just wished he could be out there in the world instead of cooped up in here. Out there experiencing things, living life, but no. His school was like a prison to him.

The School, St. Isidore of Seville was a boarding school for wayward children, straying from the path. His parents had sent him here following an affair with one of his old school’s faculty, a sordid thing that, despite what had been said and claimed had not in fact resulted in him doing anything sexual with the teacher, not for a lack of trying. Unfortunately, they had been caught together outside of school and, acting quickly, his father had sent him here to avoid the family being ruined by scandal.

Of course, he hated it. Being somewhat of a budding womanizer the lack of female students left him woefully bare of interests save for the elderly staff, nuns all of them. Though it wasn’t all bad, there was this one, youthful and fresh faced..

“Ethan!”

He blinked, his reverie broken as he sat up suddenly, looking forward towards the front of the class, the entire room was staring at him, more than one smirk on the turned faces. The nun, his teacher, and his only ‘eye candy’, Sister Katherine, stared at him, delicate eyebrow raised, perturbed.

“Should I assume you heard everything I just said?” she said, voice youthful, unlike the majority of the other Sisters inhabiting the school, but no less strict or haughty for it.

“Uhhh.. Yes Sister Katherine?” he offered, his face flushing red as he glanced around at the others, feeling a combined blossom of embarrassment and upcoming dread well up inside of him.

“Oh, excellent, so you wouldn’t mind at all repeating to the class what I just said, would you?” She swept a hand out over the rest of the room then eyed him expectantly.

He hesitated, looking around briefly at the sea of unhelpful faces before turning his gaze to the chalkboard on which she had been writing, perhaps his only chance at reprieve, his eyes quickly scanning over the lines before he adopted his most confident of expressions.

“About how Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton were the founders of calculus?” he tried.

He got the momentary pleasure of watching her appear surprised, but it was short lived, her expression hardening. “While your eyesight is certainly not in doubt your ears are. Jonathan, would you mind repeating to Ethan what I just told the class?”

A boy sitting near the front sat up, surprised to have been called on, “Uh, ‘If that boy is staring out of the window and not listening to me I’ll have him in my office after class’, Sister Katherine?”

“Well done.” she said, pointedly and glared at Ethan.

She seemingly took his look of resignation as an understanding as to his fate as he found himself slinking back down into his chair, sighing as he looked forward. A telling off would just sum up his day.

Sister Katherine was an oddity to Ethan. Vestigial robes covered all but her oval, youthful face, hiding her figure, her form and even her hair from him. He suspected her hair might be fair of color by the lightness of her eyebrows, but that was the only clue he had to go off of.

Despite this, she had become the object of his nightly fantasies. She was young, pretty and moved with a grace that the others seemingly lacked.

That, and there was something in her eyes just seemed to draw his attention. A certain depth to her that seemed to hint that the visage he saw before him, writing and talking was just the surface of something more.

Ethan paid attention for the remainder of the lesson, not wanting to dig the hole beneath him any deeper. The subject, the history and an introduction to calculus, was as boring as he imagined it would’ve been. But Sister Katherine’s soothing voice made it almost bearable. When she wasn’t angry or laying down the law her voice was almost honeyed.

The class continued without any further interruption until its end, the bell signifying for most the end of the torturous lesson and the relative freedom that came with the end of the day, but for Ethan now it only brought a pang of fear.

He had in his short stay here so far managed to keep himself out of trouble, but the stories he had heard from other students regarding punishments here put him on the edge of his seat.

He hadn’t heard much from the others in regards to Sister Katherine’s preferred method of punishment. Should he expect her to be as cruel as some of the older nuns? They still seemed to favor the cane and following a snarky comment early on during his stay from another student he had witnessed a particularly vindictive nun dolling out fifteen lashes across the knuckles on each of the boy’s hands, leaving them red and raw.

It might not have been him, but he found his hands instinctively rubbing at his knuckles regardless, almost feeling the ghost of the pain that had brought that boy to tears and left him humiliated, forced to face his peers with red knuckles and tear stained cheeks.

As the class filed out Sister Katherine let her gaze sweep coolly across where Ethan was still sat, a frown touching her lips as she drank in the sorry sight of him. He wondered if he looked as worried as he felt, and wondered if that would in fact somehow illicit mercy in her.

He lowered his gaze demurely and waited for the last of the other students to file out of the room.

Once they had he heard Sister Katherine close the door and sigh regretfully. Moving to where he sat and leaning herself on the desk one up from him, looking down at him, hands clasped on her lap.

“Ethan.. You’re usually such a good attentive boy. What happened today?” she asked, voice regretful, almost sad even, causing a pang of guilt to run through his chest.

He shrugged a little and looked back towards the window, the water smattering against it still, though it’s pace had lessened over the course of the lesson as the clouds had moved on.

“Tell me.” she pressed, a hardness in her voice.

He looked from the beauty of the window to her face and saw in it a similar beauty. She, like the rain on the window, was so wonderful to look at. Though admiring them both could prove dangerous he thought.

“I was just looking at the rain against the window. My parents told me that God could be found in beauty. Not in calculus.” he looked down from her, ashamed.

Katherine gave him a disapproving, but pitying look. It was sad for a boy such as Ethan to be wayward from God. He was just so pretty, it was impossible that he had been sculpted by anything other than the almighty in her opinion.

With his short black hair and his dusky brown eyes, she had no doubt he would grow into a handsome disciple of God. But in his lost youth he had such a naive innocence that urged her mind towards sin.

She suppressed those feelings as she did every day and focused back on the task at hand. “You know I must punish you. I cannot allow the other students to feel they can get away with foolery in my classes. I don’t relish the thought, you know, but I have no choice.”

He nodded simply, trying to cover his hands, a movement she recognized in many of the students when they had done wrong. The cane was ever present in their minds, even if they had never felt it before.

She felt her heart wrench a little. She really had been intending to cane him, but as she looked down at him she felt such resolve melt away. This boy was trying to find God, just in his own way. Was that truly something to punish with pain and humiliation? Perhaps there was another way.

“You will return to my quarters and assist me with my chores. You will clean, you will wash, you will scrub and you will sleep on the floor of my room as penance.” she stated with a firm nod, though an ulterior plan was already forming in her mind.

Ethan looked up sharply, his eyes going wide. He had known of students who had endured this treatment at the hand of other nuns, to have to spend the evening scrubbing floors until their hands ached, washing clothes until their arms were numb and sleeping on the cold hard wood of their floors, unable to get a moment’s sleep due to the knots and warping of the ancient floors.

In his eyes, she recognized that he perhaps would’ve preferred the cane. But she could not step back now. She would have to proceed.

“You will have an hour to eat and I suggest, pray. See if you can find God through prayer rather than through staring out of the window during your lessons. If by the next hour you are not in my quarters I will not be impressed.” she warned sternly, adding a severe tone to her voice. She didn’t want him to suffer further, but could not afford for him to be lax.

He nodded lamely and stood, shuffling from the room to join his classmates in the food hall, leaving Sister Katherine behind, though forefront in his mind.

She watched him go and leaned herself back against the desk, her breath quickening, a hand moving between her thighs to press against a swelling urge, trying to persuade it to shrink. “Not yet..” she prayed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ethan sat down with a tray of simple staples besides Jonathan who gave him an apologetic look. “Sorry, Ethan.. I didn’t want to get myself into trouble too, you know?..”

Ethan took a bite of bread and shook his head dismissively, “If you hadn’t of repeated her I wouldn’t be in any less trouble, you would just be in more. Don’t worry about it.”

Jonathan nodded, relief washing over him. The guilt had obviously been weighing on him. They ate in silence for several long moments before he finally turned his head to Ethan, hesitated and eyeing his hands.

“She didn’t cane you?”

He shook his head.

“Did you have to write lines?