“You know, I can’t think of a single bigger f**k-you to all those judgmental ass**les 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 br**sts 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.