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“I was just worried that maybe, I don’t know, you thought I took advantage of you in your weakened condition.”
“I had a hard-on, not cancer. I don’t think we should make a habit of it, but I don’t know.” He wiped the soap off her face with a dry towel. “I liked it. Nothing more to it.”
“Is there more to this?” She nodded at her naked body hidden under the bubbles.
“Sometimes a bath’s just a bath,” he said and flicked water at her.
She laughed as Wesley took the bottle of conditioner off the shelf and began running it through her hair. Before she realized it, tears were mingling with the water and running down her face. She knew Wesley saw but he said nothing, just kept scrubbing her down.
“S?ren used to give me baths.” She grabbed the towel and swiped at the tears. “It’s a very dominant thing to be completely clothed while your lover is naked.”
“I gotta tell you, I don’t feel a bit dominant right now.”
“What do you feel?”
He looked at her, looked like he was going to say something to her.
“I’m just glad you’re home. Wet and naked isn’t bad, either.”
Nora leaned back into the water and did her best to rinse the conditioner out of her hair while Wesley stood up and unfurled a clean towel.
“Don’t look,” she said.
Wesley laughed but didn’t object. Closing his eyes he turned his head away. Nora rose out of the water and stepped into the towel. With his eyes still closed, he wrapped it around her. She burst into surprised laughter when he lifted her off her feet and hoisted her over his shoulder. He threw her wet body, towel and all, down on the bed.
“Are you going to ravish me now?” she asked even though she already knew the answer.
“I’m going to dress you. Where are your pj’s?”
“The dirty laundry I think. I’ve been gone a few days. Sort of let the laundry go.”
“How about this?” Wesley left her for less than a minute while he ran back to his room. He returned with a clean pair of his boxer shorts and one of his T-shirts. “Good enough?”
“Perfect.” She slid the shorts on under the towel. Wesley turned his head again when she dropped the towel and pulled his T-shirt on. Sliding into his clothes felt like being in his arms—they were warm and clean and smelled like a summer morning.
She toweled her hair and squeezed as much water out of it as she could while Wesley pulled the covers back. She crawled into her bed and was relieved by the familiar scent of her sheets, the familiar fabric and Wesley so close by.
“What time is it?” The past few days time had poured through her hands like water. She only knew it was Wednesday because that was the day that came before Thursday.
“Almost midnight.” Wesley dragged the covers over her. She sighed with pleasure, feeling human for the first time since last Friday.
“Almost Thursday.” Nora saw a veil fall over Wesley’s eyes. He knew exactly what tomorrow was.
“You’re gonna go see him?” Wesley sat next to her.
She scooted closer and looked up at him with tired eyes.
“I have to.”
He nodded. He usually argued with her whenever she said she “had” to do something he knew she didn’t have to do. This time he seemed to understand.
“You still love him, don’t you?”
Nora smiled sadly up at him.
“Many waters.” She ran a hand through her wet hair and let water drop from her fingertips to the floor.
“‘Many waters cannot quench love,’” Wesley finished the quote. “‘Rivers cannot wash it away.’”
“‘Nor will rivers overflow it,’” she corrected. “Catholics use the New American.”
“N.I.V.—it’s what we use in youth group.”
“I won’t let him hurt me. I promised you I wouldn’t. I just have to see him. That’s all.”
“Okay,” he said. “But you’ll come home tomorrow night?”
“Yeah, I’ll come home.”
Wesley nodded and slid off the side of the bed. He started unbuttoning his jeans.
“What are you doing?” she asked as he took off his pants and threw them on a nearby chair.
“Told you. It’s almost midnight. Scoot over.”
He stripped out of his T-shirt and Nora moved over to let him slide in next to her. Turning off the bedside lamp, Wesley gathered her to him. She breathed slowly, relaxed onto his chest and melted into his arms. She didn’t deserve him, didn’t deserve this. He knew she would see S?ren tomorrow, and he didn’t hate her for it. She might hate herself, but Wesley would never hate her.
Nora traced his collarbone with her fingertips while Wesley slipped his hand under her shirt and slowly kneaded her lower back. She almost laughed at this foreign sensation—for once in her life she lay in bed with a gorgeous young man, and she had absolutely no desire to seduce him.
“We’re both wearing your underwear,” Nora said after a long silence.
“Could be worse. We both could be wearing your underwear.”
She smiled, knowing that even more than the bath, just having Wesley so close to her made her feel clean and sane again. When S?ren touched her she became his. When Wesley touched her, she became herself.
Nora’s hand slid from his chest to his arm. Wesley had twice the muscle she did. He could hurt someone so much more easily than she could, and yet she knew he would never hurt anyone unless he was trying to protect someone else. She’d seen that with her own eyes.
“Wes,” she said as she felt sleep coming for her.
“What, Nor?”
I love you, she thought but didn’t say the words out loud.
“Thanks for the bath.”
28
Wesley had already gone by the time Nora rolled out of bed the next morning. Morning? she thought and then looked at the clock. It was already after noon. She dragged herself from the tangle of her sheets.
She went to her closet and dug through it. Today she would do something she did only once a year—dress conservatively. She found her only skirt that went past her knees, her only black shoes with a low heel, her only blouse that wasn’t designed to show every inch of cleavage. She even found a strand of pearls she’d received as a gift from her grandmother years ago and put them on. She pulled her hair back and up, taming the wavy mane as best she could and applied half her usual amount of makeup.
Today she was going to church.
As Nora drove she fought off the twin demons of eagerness and fear that this day always visited upon her. Shortly after three she pulled into the parking lot at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. She’d been christened here as an infant, made her First Communion here, and this was where she first saw S?ren over eighteen years ago.
Sacred Heart had thrived under S?ren’s watch. From barely over a hundred members, the church had trebled in size during his time here. A handsome polyglot only twenty-nine years old when first he arrived, he was everything priests were not usually known for being—erudite, witty and charming. Two other priests in nearby diocese had been removed from their posts for allegations of sexual offenses in the past two decades. Catholic parents brought their children to Sacred Heart in droves. They knew Father S. could be trusted. And although Nora knew who he was with her behind closed bedroom doors, those parents were right to trust him.
It was funny, she thought as she entered through the front doors of Sacred Heart, how little she remembered of her childhood here. Even Father Greg, S?ren’s predecessor, wavered in her mind as little more than a memory of elderly kindness. Then one Sunday when she was fifteen years old, S?ren had come like an Annunciation; it was as if God Himself had hailed her by name.
She paused in the foyer and glanced around. Foyer…S?ren always corrected her when she called it that. “It’s the narthex, Eleanor,” he’d said, hiding his smile. “Not the foyer.” Next time she referred to it in his presence she’d called it the “lobby.”
Glancing around, Nora tried to sift through the thousands of memories that descended on her. She saw the little shrine to the Virgin Mary in the corner of the entryway and the burning candles beneath her. Nora stood before the shrine, closed her eyes and remembered…
She’d been sixteen years old, almost seventeen, and her best and only friend was a girl named Jordan. Introverted and shy, Jordan had no idea she was also quietly beautiful. They’d gone to the same Catholic high school, had most of the same classes—all the same but for English her junior year. Nora had been in the highest-level class and Jordan, never the writer Nora was, had an easier teacher. Nora would never forget the ashen look on Jordan’s face one day after school. It took three days for Nora to drag it out of her—Jordan’s English teacher, a married man in his forties, had kept her after class and put his hand up her shirt. He’d offered her an easy A in the class in exchange for the obvious. Nora had been livid and threatened to beat the teacher to death with her bare hands. Jordan had sobbed, terrified that no one would believe her, that no one would help her. After all, this English teacher was also the basketball coach, and the team was having the best season in years. Jordan made Nora promise not to tell the school, and in return Nora made Jordan promise to tell Father S. To this day Nora still didn’t know what S?ren had done or said to the teacher. She only knew S?ren had gone to her school on a Friday and by Monday the teacher was gone.
Nora had raced to church after school that day and found S?ren praying here by the shrine to the Virgin Mary. She’d told him how grateful Jordan was, how shocked the whole school was, how nobody knew why the coach had left so abruptly.
S?ren hadn’t smiled. He’d only lit a candle.
“Was that hard to do?” She remembered standing in this very spot and asking him that question. “Telling that guy off?”
“It was frighteningly easy to put the fear of God into him,” S?ren had said. “And almost enjoyable. Why do you ask, Eleanor?”
She’d zipped up her hooded sweatshirt and plucked nervously at the ragged cuffs. “I thought it might be hard for you. You know, since you’re in love with me.”
S?ren had met her eyes and she saw she’d actually managed to catch him off guard, one of the few times in their eighteen years she had.
“Eleanor, there are suicide bombers on the Gaza Strip who are less dangerous than you are.” He started toward his office. She followed him, nearly running to keep up with his long strides.
“I’m going to take that as a yes,” she’d said when they arrived at his office door.
“I’ve always been an admirer of the Cistercian monks.” S?ren stepped into his office. “Especially their vow of silence.” And he’d closed the door in her face.
She’d smiled nonstop for the next two weeks.
Nora opened her eyes and stepped away from the shrine and out of the memory. Her heels clicked on the hardwood floors grown slick and shiny with age. She thought she’d find S?ren in his office working. But she paused outside the sanctuary when she heard the sound of a piano wafting through the heavy wooden doors. Inhaling the muted notes, she slipped inside the nave and stepped quietly toward the chancel where S?ren sat at a grand piano.
He didn’t look up at her as she came to the piano. She placed her hands flat on its polished black top. Closing her eyes again, she let the subtle waves vibrate through her and into her. The last note shivered up her arms and down to her feet. As the note echoed throughout the nave and back to the altar Nora opened her eyes.
“The Moonlight Sonata,” Nora said. “My favorite.”
S?ren smiled and played a few stray notes.
“I know it is.”
Nora returned the smile and leaned forward, running her hand over the smooth black surface.
“Happy anniversary, S?ren.”
S?ren smiled again, one of his rare, genuine smiles that reached his eyes. Something caught in her chest and she let her own smile fade.
“Happy anniversary, little one,” he said, his voice as gentle as the last note of the sonata.
With those four words came a thousand more memories. She and S?ren had never, would never marry, had never dated in the traditional sense of the word, but never had they questioned what day would become the signifier of the beginning of their life together. The first time S?ren had beaten her and then taken her virginity was thirteen years ago on Holy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, the day when Christ celebrated His Last Supper. Jesus, God Incarnate, had knelt before His disciples and washed their feet on this night. Thirteen years ago tonight S?ren had done the same to her. Even as the liturgical calendar changed, they never once considered celebrating their anniversary on any other day but this too-neglected holy day, this last night of Christ’s freedom before He was taken, this last night to share a quiet moment alone with those He loved.
S?ren began playing the haunting melody again, and she let it draw her inexorably into its insistent rhythms. She watched his hands, his perfect pianist’s hands, and recalled all too well how intimately she knew those hands, how intimately they knew her. One courageous strand of S?ren’s perfect blond hair threatened to fall over his forehead. She longed to reach out and brush it back.
“You played this for me that night,” she said as the music faded. Nora closed her eyes and let the past come to her. “You were playing it when I came to the rectory.” She remembered that night like yesterday, slipping in through the tree-shrouded back door, following the music to S?ren’s elegant living room. She stood in silence and watched the priest who would become her lover that night play by the light of a single candle the world’s most beautiful piece of music as if it had been written by him and for her. “The next morning I woke up in your bed for the first time.”
“The best morning of my life,” S?ren said.
“And mine.” Nora felt the old tug of love and straightened, trying to brush it off her. “When did the church get a grand piano?”
S?ren smiled.
“A mysterious stranger had an Imperial B?sendorfer delivered to my home on my most recent birthday. I donated my Steinway to the church.”
“That was very generous of that mysterious stranger,” Nora said with a sheepish grin.
“Very generous indeed. Although the Steinway still plays beautifully.”
“It’s had a tricky sustain pedal for ages.”
“Yes, and whose fault is that?”
“That is not my fault,” Nora protested. “Do you recall what you were doing to me at the time? I had to hold on to something, didn’t I?”
S?ren looked down at his hands. His fingers hovered over the keyboard playing soundless phantom notes.
“You could have held on to me.”
Nora only swallowed, finding herself in a rare moment of speechlessness. Perhaps sensing her discomfort, S?ren dropped his hands to the keyboard and began playing again.
“The Moonlight Sonata is a strange piece of music,” S?ren said. “It’s been called a Lamentation. You can feel that when you play it, can feel the sorrow and the need in the endless repetitions. It’s simple to play but maddeningly difficult to play well. The arpeggios allow great freedom of expression. Too much freedom in untutored, unskilled hands. They say Beethoven wrote it for a seventeen-year-old countess, the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. He may have loved her. More likely he was simply trying to seduce her.”
“It would have worked for me.”
“It did work for you.”
This time Nora smiled at the memories S?ren’s words conjured. Again she slid her hands lovingly over the piano. “My God, the crimes against nature that have been committed on this piano.”
“I hope you aren’t referring to my playing.”
“Never. I know how gifted those hands of yours are.”
“Some decorum please. We are in a church, Eleanor,” S?ren reminded her with only a playful hint of sternness about his lips.
“Forgive me, Father.” She composed her features into a pantomime mask of contrition.
