as I can, as often as I can and as hard as I can.”
She’d said the words to hurt Søren but as she spoke them, she knew them to be the truth.
They stared at each other in silence. Finally Søren spoke.
“No,” he said.
“No, what?’
“You don’t have my permission to top Kingsley again.”
“Your permission? I don’t remember asking your permission to top Kingsley.”
“You didn’t ask. If you had I would have said no. I’m saying it now. No.”
“Why not? You don’t want him anymore. Why can’t I have him?”
“Do not presume to tell me how I feel about Kingsley, Eleanor.”
“Fine, then I’ll tell you how I feel about Kingsley. I want to top him as often as I can. I’m not a submissive. I’m a switch.”
Then he took from her hand the antique wooden riding crop with the carved bone handle and broke it into three pieces.
“Also,” he said as he threw one broken piece across the room, flinging it like a newsboy tossing the morning paper. “Entirely.” He threw the second piece. “Immaterial.”
The wooden fragments of the riding crop hit the wall with a heinous crack and clattered to the floor.
A sound came out of Elle’s mouth. A sort of animal whimper like the sound she’d once heard a dog make after being hit by a car.
On leaden feet she walked over to the pile of now-worthless wood and dropped to her knees. One by one she picked up the pieces.
“You bastard,” she said, looking up at him with tears in her eyes. “That was a gift from Kingsley to me.”
“You’re no longer allowed to have any contact with Kingsley. Not until I say you may.”
“He gave this to me. It was mine. Not yours.”
“Everything that is yours is mine,” Søren said. “I own you. Your body is mine. Your heart is mine. Your future is mine. Your decisions are mine. Your life is mine. You are mine.”
She didn’t think she could do it. She didn’t think she had the strength to stand up one more time. But somewhere she found the strength and she came to her feet a final time.
“I am mine.”
“What did you say to me?” Søren asked, narrowing his eyes at her.
“I am mine,” she said again, gathering the broken pieces of her riding crop to her chest. She turned her back to him and started to walk away.
“Where are you going?” Søren called out.
Eleanor didn’t answer. She kept walking. She walked down the hallway and down the stairs. She found her coat and her purse and walked to the back door.
“Eleanor, where do you think you’re going?” Søren asked, his tone chiding. You’re not leaving, his tone said. You and I both know you aren’t actually leaving. “Eleanor, come back here this instant.”
At the door she stopped and turned around. She looked at Søren and spoke one final word.
“Jabberwocky.”
30
Upstate New York
ELLE LOOKED AT Kyrie who had tears on her face.
“Then I left,” Elle said. Three little words to sum up the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. “After I safed-out, I got into the car, and I drove away. I shouldn’t have been driving, not then. And not with all the pain I was in. But I did it. I left him.”
Kyrie didn’t speak. Elle reached out and brushed the tears off Kyrie’s face with her hand. Elle’s throat was tight, painfully constricted. But she had no tears, none. She’d cried them all out on the floor of the bathroom when she told Søren what had happened. She had no tears left for herself or him.
“Why are you crying?” Elle asked, smiling at Kyrie. “I’m the one who left him.”
“He broke your riding crop,” Kyrie said, gazing down on the three pieces of the broken twig on the blanket.
Elle reached out and grazed them with her fingertips.
“It would have hurt less had he broken my own body into three pieces,” Elle said. With each snap of the wood as he broke the crop, Elle had felt something snapping inside her. As he’d thrown the pieces across his bedroom, she’d felt as if he was throwing her against the wall, throwing her away.
“You did the right thing, leaving him,” Kyrie said.
“I know. But knowing it doesn’t make it any easier. You’d think it would.” Elle took a long ragged breath. “I used to think I wanted to marry Søren. I mean, I did want to marry him. When I was sixteen and that was the only thing I knew you were supposed to do with someone you’d fallen in love with—get married, have babies. I got older and my dreams changed. He was always in them, though. And in my dreams, he was always a priest. Because he is a priest. That’s not what he is. That’s who he is. And a good priest, too. I couldn’t let him give up who he is for me.”
“He wanted you to give up who you are for him.”
“Yes,” Elle said. “Yes, he did.” She gathered the pieces of wood on the floor in her hand. “That’s why I’m here. He can’t get to me here. If I stayed, he would have called the bishop, told him he was leaving the priesthood and made me marry him. If he can’t get to me, he can’t make me marry him, and he doesn’t have any reason to leave the priesthood.”
“You walked away from him so he could lead the life he was supposed to live.”
“Even when I hate him I still love him,” Elle said.
“I couldn’t have done that,” Kyrie said. “I couldn’t leave someone I was in love with. I don’t think I’m strong enough to do that.”
“I didn’t leave him because I’m strong,” Elle said. “I left him because I had no other choice. I couldn’t let him throw away the most important part of himself for me.”
“He might have done it anyway,” Kyrie said. “Left the priesthood, I mean. You haven’t spoken to him since you left, right?”
“I haven’t,” she admitted. She hadn’t given that possibility much thought, that Søren had left the Jesuits, left the priesthood while she was here hiding at the convent. “I hope not. If he has, then me leaving him was for nothing.”
“Not nothing,” Kyrie said, and Elle gave her a look of deepest apology.
“No, not for nothing. I met you here. I wrote a book here.”
“‘All things work together for the good for those who love God and are called according to his purposes,’” Kyrie said. “That’s my favorite Bible verse.”
“You think I was meant to come here?”
“If you’re here, then there’s a good chance you were. Maybe you were supposed to meet me so you’d write that book and have an agent who wants to read it.”
“Maybe I’m here because you’re not supposed to be a nun and this was the only way for you to find out.”
Kyrie smiled. “Maybe so.”
“So when do we leave?” Elle asked. “You and me?”
“When you finish the book. As soon as it’s done, we’ll go.”
“That’ll give me time to figure out where we can go,” Elle said. “Surely I know someone who could put us up for a few weeks while we decide what to do. Maybe I can get my old job at the bookstore back. My boss there loves me.”
“I can get a job too,” Kyrie said. “I have a college degree.”
“In what?”
“Biblical studies.”
“A BA in BS. That’ll pay the bills.”
“Oh, shut up, English major.”
“Did you tell me to shut up?”
“I did,” Kyrie said, crossing her arms in playful defiance. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll find a way to shut us both up,” Elle said, and grabbed Kyrie by the wrist. She dragged the girl to her and pushed her onto her back on the blanket. Elle lay on top of her and kissed her with the deepest passion. Kyrie moved beneath her, pushing her hips into Elle’s, rubbing her back, panting for more. Elle pulled Kyrie’s gown all the way off and tossed it aside.
Elle sat on her knees and took a length of rope out of her bag. Not real rope. Sh
e couldn’t find any at the abbey. But she did have old sheets at her disposal and she’d torn them into strips and braided them into her own makeshift rope. She wrapped the white sheet rope around Kyrie’s two wrists and tied them to the ornately carved leg of the nearest chapel pew.
“B is for Bondage,” Elle said as she tied off the knot. “And D is for Dominance. If you want another orgasm, don’t you say a fucking word until I give you permission to speak again. Nod if you understand.”
Kyrie nodded. Vigorously.
“And S is for Sadism and M is for Masochism,” Elle said, pinching Kyrie’s nipples until she recoiled in pain. “Thus ends your alphabet lesson for the day.”
Elle shoved the girl’s thighs apart with her knees, and pushed two fingers into her wet hole.
Kyrie’s back arched and Elle smiled, drunk with the power she had over this girl’s beautiful little body. She lowered her head between Kyrie’s legs and lapped at her swollen clitoris. Kyrie grunted softly from the pleasure but didn’t speak. Elle rolled her tongue over all Kyrie’s most sensitive spots and soon the grunts becomes moans, and when Elle pushed her fingers inside Kyrie and stroked her softest places, the moan became one long groan of ecstasy.
When her climax came and passed, Kyrie lay spent on the blanket, taking short shallow breaths. Elle spent the next hour doing nothing but rubbing and touching every inch of Kyrie. As she massaged Kyrie’s body, she claimed it for herself.
“My hands,” Elle said, caressing Kyrie’s palms and fingers, one by one. “Aren’t they? You can speak.”
“Your hands,” Kyrie said, wiggling her fingers for Elle.
“My arms,” Elle said, rubbing up and down the length of Kyrie’s arms.
“Your arms.”
“My back,” Elle said, massaging Kyrie’s back. She took special pleasure in the small of her back, the small waist and hips.
“Your back.”
Elle claimed every inch, every orifice, every single finger and toe and eye and nose. And the lips. Of course the lips.
“My Kyrie,” Elle said with one last kiss. “My dove.”
“Your Kyrie,” Kyrie whispered into Elle’s mouth. “Your dove.”
When Elle had finished taking ownership of every part of Kyrie’s body, she helped her dress and rise to her feet. She’d made her come three times, and Kyrie was light-headed now, weak from pleasure as Elle was weak from happiness. She had something in her heart she hadn’t had when she came here months earlier—hope. A real agent wanted her book. Kyrie wanted her. They had a plan to leave, to go back into the world. Elle could work and pursue a writing career. She could do that. She wanted to do that. She could see it all happening, the dominoes falling ahead of her, the tumblers clicking into place. They could have a life together, her and Kyrie. She could make this work somehow and she’d do it on her own, without Søren.
Hand in hand they walked through the trees back to the abbey. Silently they slipped inside and Elle escorted Kyrie all the way to the door of her cell. Somewhere in another hallway, footsteps echoed. Kyrie pulled her inside the tiny room and shut the door silently behind them.
Elle grabbed her and kissed her over and over again, the thrill of almost getting caught sending her heart racing and making her blood burn. She remembered this feeling, the exhilaration of reveling in the forbidden. Sometimes she’d wondered if she desired Søren so much in spite of the fact he was a priest, or because of it.
“Thank you for telling me the truth,” Kyrie said in the smallest of voices. If they were caught...well, what did it matter? They were leaving anyway. “I needed to know.”
“You earned it.”
“Will you be okay?” Kyrie asked. “When you’re back out there, out in the world?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you won’t go back to him, will you?”
“No,” Elle said.
In the distance she heard a sound. Nothing more than a motorcycle in the distance, its engine purring and humming as it lingered at a stop sign. Søren’s? Maybe. She walked toward the window to hear it better, walked toward it as if drawn to the sound by an invisible cord wrapped around her heart.
Kyrie reached out and took Elle’s hand in hers, stopping her in her tracks.
“Come to bed,” Kyrie said. “Please? Be with me again. One more time tonight.”
Elle pushed her to the bed and laid her down onto her back. They would be tired tomorrow, but who cared?
And outside the gate she heard the motorcycle drive off.
She was safe. Whoever it was had gone.
She’d told Kyrie the truth. She wouldn’t go back to him.
Not now.
Not ever.
Not yet.
31
New York City
CALLIOPE SENT THE Rolls-Royce to pick Kingsley up at the airport. But when his driver took the turn to head back to Riverside Drive, Kingsley called to the front.
“Wakefield first,” he said.
His driver, a young semi-unemployed actor named Roland, did as Kingsley said.
A bone-deep exhaustion suffused Kingsley’s entire body. He felt like a soldier again, returned from battle, wounded and tired and numb. His driver had noted the unnecessary weight he’d lost and quoted Shakespeare at him. Kingsley had a lean and hungry look about him, according to Roland, and Kingsley found the Julius Caesar reference appropriate. Men with too much power were on his shit list today. Time to have a little talk with one of them.
“Should I leave you and come back?” Roland asked when he opened the door of the Rolls for Kingsley.
“Wait for me,” Kingsley said to the boy. “This won’t take long.”
Today was Saturday and Søren always said Mass on Saturday evenings. It would be over by now, but knowing Søren’s habits, he’d still be at the church or in the rectory. He couldn’t have gone far.
Kingsley was pleased to see the church empty of the faithful when he entered it. He was hardly fit for human company at the moment. His last bath had been yesterday in the ocean and he’d neither shaved nor slept in two days. He had on yesterday’s clothes—dark pants, a black T-shirt. He’d left his black jacket in the Rolls and Juliette he’d left behind in Haiti.
He knew he would never see her again. The one woman he could have spent his life with, and she’d ordered him away from her and out of her life.
He’d lost it all. Again. He should be used to it by now, he thought, losing everything and everyone he loved. He’d certainly had enough practice to be an expert at it. If only one could get paid for losing the people you loved, Kingsley could turn pro.
Inside the sanctuary Kingsley saw a familiar blond head facing the front of the church. The head was slightly bowed. He was praying. Good. Kingsley hoped God was listening right now. Kingsley had a few things to say to Him, too.
Kingsley took one step forward on the hardwood floor, and it was enough to alert Søren to his presence. The blond head turned and the priest rose from his pew. It might have taken him a second longer than usual to recognize Kingsley. The Caribbean sun had turned his olive skin to bronze. His hair was longer now and needed taming, and he hadn’t changed back into his usual uniform of expensive custom suits and boots and everything fine. Søren walked toward Kingsley with long purposeful, almost-eager strides.
Søren too appeared gaunt, as if he’d grieved in secret all this time.
His steps quickened as they neared Kingsley, and it took everything Kingsley had in him to not hasten the inevitable and go to him.
“Kingsley.” Søren breathed his name more than spoke it. A sigh