The Saint: The Original Sinners Book 5 (10 page)

“You think God cares about what we want to do?”

“Of course. Desire is the most compelling of all human emotions. Desire prompts human beings to the heights of glory and drags us into the depths of Hell. Out of desire for Helen, Menelaus launched a thousand ships to win her back in a deadly war. Out of desire to save His people, Christ allowed Himself to be crucified. Desire is a God-given gift. Like any gift, we should use it to honor Him.”

“Desire is from God?”

“It is. Like any tool, it can be used for good or for evil. We’ll try to use your desire for good. Which leads me back to the question—of all these images in the windows, do any of them speak to you? And by that I mean, do any of them touch your heart or stir emotions or desires? Think about it. Study the windows. Take your time and—”

“That one.” Eleanor didn’t even have to look at the window. Without even taking her eyes off Søren she pointed.

Søren looked at the window she’d indicated and then back at her.

“Are you sure of that?”

She nodded. “Yeah, it’s always been my favorite. I sit in the pew beneath it every time I come to church.”

Søren walked to the window and stared up at it. Eleanor stood next to him.

“It’s the story from Luke, right?” Eleanor asked. She’d looked up this story after she’d fallen in love with the window.

“Yes, Luke chapter seven. Christ was invited to dinner at the home of a Pharisee. A woman in the town who all knew to be a sinner came to Jesus and knelt at his feet. She anointed him with expensive oils. She bathed his feet with her tears, she dried them with her hair. An act of utter humility on her part. Humility and submission.”

“It’s so pretty,” Eleanor whispered, not knowing quite why she felt the need to lower her voice. Something about this window always made her feel reverent. The woman was draped in a purple robe, Christ a red one. The sinful woman, kneeling before Jesus, focuses only on Christ’s bare feet as she washes them. Two men sitting behind Jesus glare but Jesus looks at nothing and no one but the woman. “She looks so peaceful. You don’t think she’d be peaceful, right? I mean, she’s in public crying and sitting at this man’s feet while other people talk about her. I remember reading that the Pharisee guy told Jesus she was a sinner. And Jesus told him off. I don’t think she gives a fuck what that Pharisee said about her. Why should she care? Jesus was letting her wash his feet. I think that’s why she was crying. She was happy to be so close to him.”

“There’s a tradition in the church,” Søren began, his voice also low and reverent, “that it was Mary Magdalene who washed his feet with tears and dried his feet with her hair.”

“The prostitute?”

“She may not have been. The Bible doesn’t say, but church tradition has perpetuated that story.”

“I hope she was a prostitute.”

“Do you?” Søren sounded intrigued by her comment.

“It means more if she was a prostitute. I mean, this is Jesus, the guy who never committed any sins. He’s never even had sex, right?”

“There is no evidence he ever married so no, following Jewish law he would have been chaste, a virgin most likely, although he may have married young and been widowed. There’s little to no evidence of that, but it would account for why no one made any mention of his being unmarried, which in that day and age would have been considered highly bizarre for a Jewish man.”

“Jesus a widower?” Eleanor had never even considered the possibility.

“It’s one theory. Far more likely is that the miraculous circumstances of his birth led him to believe he would be called to perform a special mission for God. He remained unmarried for the same reason a soldier being sent into battle would remain unmarried. He knew one day he wouldn’t be coming home.”

“So Jesus was a virgin.”

“That would be my guess.”

“Poor guy.”

“There are far worse things in life than living without sex.”

“You know, I can’t think of a single bigger fuck-you to all those judgmental assholes than perfect, virginal Jesus Christ having a prostitute 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? God wants me sitting at Jesus’s feet?”

“I think He wants you at someone’s feet.”

Søren 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.

Søren 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 Søren about the
stained-glass 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 Søren 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.
Søren’s office door was closed. She knocked but heard nothing. With a
shaking hand, she turned the doorknob 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 Søren’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-glass rose window and made a shadow of
her body on Søren’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 Søren.

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 Søren 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.

Søren 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 passed 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 breasts 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 fucking. 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 orgasm ripped through her. Her
clitoris 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 orgasm 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 Søren 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 God 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.

Søren 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 passed. 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 Søren 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,” Søren 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 god.

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?” Søren 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.”

Søren 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,” Søren 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 sex with anyone you
wanted whenever you wanted to. This is fucking 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 Hell 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.”

Eleanor felt the floor shiver under her feet. Her eyes filled
with tears.

“Søren?”

“When I was fourteen I decided to become a priest,” he said.
“Once I made that decision, I felt peace in my heart for the first time in my
life. And I didn’t know why or from where that peace came. It should have scared
me—a life of poverty, a life of celibacy and chastity, a life of obedience to a
community that could and would send me all over the world. But I knew there was
a reason I needed to be a priest. I was certain of it. And that certainty
carried me all the way through seminary and all the way here. And now I know why
I needed to become a priest. Because God knew long before I did that I would
need to be a priest to find you and help you and keep you on the right path. And
I will keep you safe even if it kills me.”

A lone tear traveled down her cheek and dropped onto the floor.
Now she was grateful he wouldn’t look at her so he wouldn’t see her crying.

“And if I weren’t a priest,” Søren continued, “I would
likely be dead. There were moments when I was your age and younger, foolish
moments when I feared I didn’t deserve to live. The things I’d done, the things
I wanted to do, taunted me constantly. I worried God had made some terrible
mistake when he’d made me, and perhaps the world would be better off if I wasn’t
in it.”