“No …” She nearly choked on the word. The thought of Søren dead was an insult to everything she believed in, especially him because she believed in him the most.
“When I felt the first stirrings of the call to become a Jesuit, those feelings started to fade and new ones took their place. God had created me for a reason, made me like I was for a reason.”
“Like what? You’re—”
“My call to the priesthood saved me, Eleanor. Like it saved you. If I weren’t a priest you wouldn’t be in this sanctuary and neither would I. So please …” He stopped and raised his hand, holding it up almost in a posture of surrender. “Please don’t make this any more difficult than it already is.”
He lowered his hand again.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am. I told you months ago that the new rules I created were for my sake, because of my need for boundaries. I’m asking you to honor that.”
“I can,” she promised. “I will.”
“Thank you,” he said.
She wanted to say more, to say she would never go into his office again, not without permission anyway. He hadn’t said anything about what she’d done on his desk but she was certain he knew, and it was because of that he couldn’t look at her right now. She imagined he wasn’t looking at her for her own sake—to protect her from the embarrassment. But strangely, she felt none. Only sadness that he was right. As much as she wished he wasn’t a priest so they could be together, she knew that they would never have met if he wasn’t a priest. What had brought them together was the very thing that kept them apart. She wanted to say all that to him but before she could open her mouth, the sound of a car horn discreetly honking interrupted their tense silence.
“That’s for me,” Søren said. “I have to go.”
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t answer that,” he said.
“Can’t or won’t?”
Søren rose off the piano bench and walked past her, still without meeting her eyes. She followed behind him.
At the door to the sanctuary he paused.
“We won’t ever have to have this talk again,” Søren said. The sentence was phrased like a statement but she heard an order lurking under the words. She knew what he meant. They would never have to have this talk again because she was never going to sneak into his office and masturbate on his desk again. “And we’ll pretend we didn’t have to have this talk. By tomorrow we’ll both feel better. In a week it will be a distant memory. Yes?”
“Okay,” she said.
Søren nodded. He put his hand on the door handle but didn’t push it open.
“Are you sure you don’t remember what it is that you wanted to ask me?”
“I’m sure.”
“If you think of it …”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, remembering the question she’d wanted to ask him and deciding not to ask it. “Are you sure you can’t tell me where you’re going?”
“Quite sure. I will say this—I wish I could take you with me.”
She smiled. Finally some of the tension started to leave her body.
“Me, too. I’d go anywhere with you.”
Søren met her eyes for the first time that night and gave her the faintest of smiles.
“Don’t worry. Someday you will.”
And with that, he pushed open the door and strode into the night. In front of the church in a shadowy patch of street sat a car, but not any old car. Søren entered the back passenger side and the car drove away.
Eleanor couldn’t believe what she’d seen. But she had seen it. She knew cars. She knew all cars, all makes, all models. But it made no sense what she’d seen. Whose was it? Where had it come from? Where was it going?
Maybe someday she would get her answers to those questions. But tonight she had to content herself with the answer to one question. Only you know the answer to that, Søren had said when she’d asked him whose feet she should sit at.
Now she knew what he meant. It was her decision whose feet she sat at. Only she knew the answer to that question because only she could make that choice. Søren couldn’t tell her, her mom couldn’t tell her, God couldn’t tell her. It was her choice alone. Whose feet? She already knew the answer.
And the answer was being driven away right now in a gleaming, glorious, pristine, worth-a-fortune 1953 Silver Wraith limousine-style …
Rolls. Fucking. Royce.
12
Eleanor