"There are far worse things in life than living without s.e.x."

"You know, I can't think of a single bigger f.u.c.k-you to all those judgmental a.s.sholes than perfect, virginal Jesus Christ having a prost.i.tute at his feet. It's like saying 'you can't judge her without judging me. So judge me, I dare you.'"

"Safe to say our Lord was one of the first radical feminists. He constantly berated men who judged women. The woman with the alabaster jar. The woman with the issue of blood. The first person he spoke to after His resurrection was not Peter, but Mary Magdalene."

"Jesus loved the ladies. I like that."

"The more other men disparaged the woman, the more likely Jesus was to be kind to her."

"So what does it mean that this is my favorite image? G.o.d wants me sitting at Jesus's feet?"

"I think He wants you at someone's feet."

S0ren turned his back to the window as if it hurt to look at it anymore. He wore a strange expression on his face, almost pained. He took a deep breath as if to steady himself, and soon he looked as peaceful as the woman in the window. Eleanor pulled a piece of paper from her back pocket.

"Got a pen?" she asked.

He took a pen from the missal holders at the back of the pew and handed it to her.

"Why do you need a pen?" he asked as she unfolded the paper.

"New question to ask you after Thanksgiving."

"What's the question?"

She wrote two words on the paper and held it up for him to read.

S0ren read the words aloud.

"Whose feet?"

Eleanor shoved the paper in her pocket.

"One problem with that question, Eleanor."

"What?"

"Only you can answer that."

11.

Eleanor ONLY YOU CAN ANSWER THAT.

For days after her exchange with S0ren about the stained-gla.s.s window, Eleanor pondered his words. They'd lodged themselves in her heart like a bullet and she couldn't dig them out with all the scalpels in the world.

It was late on Thursday night. Nothing going on. She walked to church in the hopes of finding S0ren in his office. She wanted to talk to him about what he'd said, about how only she could answer that question-whose feet should she sit at? It felt like the answer to that question would determine the rest of her life. But she didn't understand why.

Once she stepped through the front door of Sacred Heart, she could tell from the hollow echoing sound of her footsteps she was alone. S0ren's office door was closed. She knocked but heard nothing. With a shaking hand, she turned the doork.n.o.b and found the lights off, the office abandoned.

On nervous feet she stepped inside the office. She shouldn't be in here, but curiosity got the better of her. In the darkness she reached out and ran her fingertips across the books on S0ren's shelves. Cloth. Leather. Paper. Cloth. She pressed her hands to the back of his chair-an old leather-and-wood number that had probably been here since the church was erected two hundred years ago. In the dark she traced the spiraling scrollwork of the chair's arm and ran her hands over the smooth leather of the chair.

Eleanor returned to the door, shut it and locked it. Light from a streetlamp shone through the stained-gla.s.s rose window and made a shadow of her body on S0ren's desk. She eased into his chair and shivered as she sat where he sat. The desk in front of her had featured in so many of her fantasies since meeting S0ren.

She sat up in the chair and pulled her tank top off. She stood and slipped out of her shorts. And when she closed her eyes again she heard the door opening. She didn't need light to tell her it was S0ren in the office with her. She'd know his footsteps anywhere, his breathing, his scent. And now she knew his touch as his arms came around her and rested on her lower back. She turned her face up to his and his mouth came down to her mouth, his tongue sought her tongue. He didn't simply smell like winter, he tasted like it, too, like new fallen snow melting in her mouth.

His hands roamed up her back and unhooked her bra. He pulled it down her arms and let it fall to the floor. Was this right? Was this good? Should she stop him? Could she if she wanted to? Did she want to?

No.

He sat in the chair in front of her and slid her panties down her thighs. Without a word she stepped out of them and stood naked before him. She wasn't blushing, but the faint light from the window cast a pale rose-tinted glow over her body.

"Mine," he said as he gripped her by the hips.

"Yours," she replied, bending her head to kiss him.

He kissed her mouth and her neck. She shivered when his lips lightly danced across the sensitive flesh of her chest. He took a nipple in his mouth and she wrapped her arms around his neck, holding his head to her breast. She'd never dreamed anything could feel as good as his hands and mouth on her body.

S0ren stood up and took her in his arms, lifting her like she weighed nothing and laying her back on his desk. The surface of the desk was cold and smooth against her bare back. A chill pa.s.sed through her even as his every touch set her blood burning. Without being told to, she opened her legs for him. He gripped her thighs and pushed her legs apart even more. With his hands on her hips, he used his thumbs to part her inner lips. He spread her wide and slipped a finger into her wetness. Then a second one. She opened up as he moved his hand inside her, touching the deepest parts of her.

His fingers left her and she heard the sound of a zipper being lowered. She shut her eyes tight when he pulled her hips to the edge of the desk. Then he was entering her. She'd expected it to hurt but it didn't, and her body opened up to receive him as if she'd been created for him and him alone. He filled her until she could take no more of him. Now he moved inside her, thrusting in, pulling back and then thrusting in again. Her body enveloped his hardness, coating it with her wetness, coaxing it in farther as she raised her hips in her eagerness for more. He held her b.r.e.a.s.t.s while he moved in her. He restrained her against the desk with his hips and his hands, and she lay there helpless, naked and defenseless before and beneath him. This was what she'd wanted from the second she'd seen him, and now she would take everything he could give her.

He clasped her throat but didn't grip it. Instinctively she understood why he made love to her with his hand on her neck. He owned her, possessed her. Her very life beat against the palm of his hand. She could feel her pulse pounding in her neck, pounding against his fingertips. I own you, that hand on her neck said. Every part of you. The part I'm f.u.c.king. The part I'm touching. Even the air flowing in and out of your lungs is mine.

Her breathing quickened as he increased the pace of his thrusts. Her back arched off the desk as an o.r.g.a.s.m ripped through her. Her c.l.i.toris throbbed and her innermost muscles clenched tight as a fist. They released in wild flutters through her stomach, back and thighs....

Eleanor sat up on the desk, all alone, her head aching from the blinding intensity of her fantasy and the o.r.g.a.s.m she'd given herself. She picked her clothes up off the floor and dressed quickly. She ran her hand over the top of the desk. She felt a few drops of fluid, her own, that had fallen there. With the bottom of her shirt, she wiped it off and prayed S0ren wouldn't notice anything amiss the next time he sat at his desk. She couldn't believe she'd done what she'd done on his desk. What if he'd needed something in his office and found the door locked? Would he have heard the sounds of her breathing through the door, heard her coming as she imagined him taking her virginity on his desk with G.o.d and the portrait of Pope John Paul II hanging on the wall watching them?

She shoved her feet into her shoes, slipped out into the hall and carefully closed the door behind her.

And then she heard it.

Piano music.

She wasn't alone in the church, after all.

Eleanor knew she should run for it, head straight home and pretend nothing had happened. But the music called to her like a siren's song and drew her inexorably to it. It came from the sanctuary. The notes slid under the door and out into the hallway. They wrapped their fingers around her and drew her in. She slipped through the doors of the sanctuary and followed the music to its source.

S0ren sat at the upright piano tucked to the right of the sacristy where he and the deacons changed in and out of their vestments.

She stood just feet away from him and watched as he played. No, that wasn't it. He didn't play the piano. He enslaved it. His fingers moved with shocking speed and agility across the keys. He seemed a being of pure concentration right now. Did he even know she was standing there listening and watching and wanting him? She didn't recognize the piece, but she wished she did. She wished she knew what he was playing and why he played it so intensely, as if he would die if he stopped.

Minutes pa.s.sed. Maybe an hour. She never grew tired of watching him. The music pinned her to floor the way his hand had pinned her to the desk in her fantasy. She couldn't move if she tried. She didn't try.

Finally the piece ended and S0ren lifted his hands off the keys. He kept his head bowed as if in prayer before lifting it. He didn't look at her.

"I can't talk to you right now, Eleanor," he said.

"Can you look at me?" she asked, and despite the echo in the nave, her voice sounded small and timid.

"No."

She stuffed her hands in her pockets.

"Are you mad at me?" she asked.

"No."

Eleanor let that "no" hang in the air between them. She wanted to believe him, but she sensed tension in him. His jaw was set tight and his posture stiff.

"Please talk to me," Eleanor begged.

"What would you like me to say?" His voice sounded stilted, as well.

"Anything. I don't know." She grasped for words. Something told her he knew exactly what she'd done in his office, but surely if he did he would say something to her about it, yell at her, punish her.

He looked up at the ceiling.

"They make a kind of goggles for horses. Blinders, they're called," S0ren said. He raised his hand and put it to the side of his eyes. "They can only see forward when they wear them. No peripheral vision. I wish I had some."

"Are you sure you're not mad at me?"

"The opposite, I promise."

She searched for something to say and came up empty. So she asked the stupidest question she could think of.

"So ... you play piano?"

"I do," he said.

"What were you playing?"

"Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4."

"Where did you learn to play like that?"

"My mother is a piano teacher."

"Weird," she said.

"Weird that my mother is a piano teacher?" He sounded almost amused now. Good. She feared what she'd done in his office had changed things between them irrevocably.

"Weird that you have a mother. I thought you fell from the sky. You know, like a meteor. Or an alien."

Or a G.o.d.

He smiled slightly but still didn't look at her.

"I have a mother and a father. I love my mother. I hate my father."

"You've got one up on me. I hate both my parents."

"You don't hate your mother."

"No. But I don't like her very much, either. I think the feeling's mutual."

"She loves you."

"Are you sure about that?"

"How could she not?" he asked, as if it were the most foolish idea in the world to consider for one second that anyone could not love her.

Eleanor fell silent again. She'd never had a more painful conversation in her life. Even her allocution before the judge when she'd pled guilty for the car thefts had been less awkward and uncomfortable than this nightmare chitchat.

"Why did you come here tonight?" S0ren asked her, his eyes still on the wall in front of him.

"I wanted to talk to you," she said. "I had a question."

"What question?"

"I don't remember it now. Seemed important at the time."

S0ren clasped his hands together and rested them in his lap. He wasn't praying now. At least it didn't seem like it. It looked more like he was trying to control himself, trying to hold his hands down to keep them from doing something. Doing what?

"This is going to be difficult for us," S0ren said. "You and I working together. You understand this?"

"I ..." She paused and thought about the question. "I think I do."

"I'm a priest. Do you also understand that?"

"No."

"No?"

"Of course I don't understand why you're a priest." The words she'd been holding back since the day she met him rushed out. "You're twenty-nine and you're the most beautiful man on earth. You could have any girl in the world you wanted. You're brilliant and you could do any job you wanted. You could get married and have kids. Or you could have crazy s.e.x with anyone you wanted whenever you wanted to. This is f.u.c.king Wakefield, Connecticut. You walk two miles south of here and you reach the end of the world. There's nothing here for you. You're wasted in this place. You could be running the world if you wanted and the world would probably be okay with that. I hate following the rules, but I would follow you into h.e.l.l and carry you back out again if I had to. Do I understand why you're a priest? No, and I don't think I ever will. Because if you weren't a priest ..."

"If I weren't a priest," he repeated. "Do you know what would happen if I weren't a priest?"

"Yeah," she said. "You and I could-"

"You and I could do nothing," he said. "If I weren't a priest, Eleanor, you and I would never have met. If I weren't a priest, you would be in juvenile detention right now because Father Gregory wouldn't have been able to help you the way I did. If I weren't a priest, you would have a felony conviction on your permanent record. You would graduate from high school in detention and the likelihood of you getting into college would be practically nonexistent."