Author: Tiffany Reisz

Wesley raised his hands and rubbed at the headache blossoming behind his eyes. He breathed through his hands to center himself before dropping them to his thighs and meeting Søren’s gaze.

“How are you like this?” he demanded, the questions pouring out of him like wine into a glass. “How are you a priest and a sadist? How can you say you love God and yet you sleep with Nora? How can you hit women and still claim to be a man of the cloth? How are you...you? I can’t figure you out, not to save my life.”

Søren paused again. Wesley had never known anyone to do that—to stop and think before speaking.

“You might be surprised that I’ve asked that of myself many a time. When I was a child especially, I had these thoughts...desires... I didn’t understand them. I saw what my father was, how he was with my stepmother. Brutal, violent, dangerous, merciless.”

“Your father was abusive?”

“Yes, he was a monster. He did horrible things to his wife and my sister, to my own mother. I was only five when I was sent to school in England. I withdrew as much as I could there into my schoolwork. I feared I’d been tainted by my father, feared I was like him.”

“You are, though, aren’t you? I mean, you enjoy hurting people.”

“I do, yes. It is different, however. My stepmother was powerless to stop my father from grabbing her by the hair and dragging her into the bedroom. She had no recourse, no safe word, nothing. Whenever Eleanor and I are together, anything I’m doing to her she can stop with a single word. I know she’s told you all of this. Why do you need to hear from me?”

“I want to get what she sees in you. Other than the obvious.”

Søren laughed softly. “The obvious? I suppose that’s your tactful way of saying I’m not horrific to look at.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Wes conceded.

“I’m going to tell you something private, something I never imagined I would talk about with anyone other than Eleanor.”

Wesley crossed his arms over his chest. He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to hear anything private from Søren, but he knew he couldn’t leave, not yet, not when he still hadn’t done what he needed to.

“Okay...tell me.”

“Eleanor and I met when she was fifteen. She was seventeen before I told her what I was. I waited until after my father died to tell her. It wasn’t a conscious choice. Looking back I think I feared Eleanor would attempt to exact some sort of vengeance on my father for what he did to my sister.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“After he remarried and fathered my younger sister Claire, I made certain he could inflict himself on no other woman again.”

Wesley shivered at the cold tone of Søren’s voice.

“What did you do?”

“Let’s just say I made certain he could never father children again.”

Wesley’s stomach plummeted through the floor.

“But...you’re a Jesuit. Nora said you’re a pacifist.”

“I was eighteen when I castrated my father. Not a Jesuit yet. I was halfway to Europe by the time he woke. He assumed my sister Elizabeth had done it although he could prove nothing.”

Søren smiled and it was the most chilling smile Wesley had ever seen in his life.

“You look horrified,” Søren said.

“I am horrified.”

“I told that same story to Eleanor the night of my father’s funeral. She wasn’t horrified. She was proud of me.”

“No...Nora wouldn’t...”

“Eleanor can be a bit barbaric herself. One of her more attractive traits. One of millions.”

One of millions... The words reminded Wesley of what he’d come to say, but he couldn’t quite say it yet.

“I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side,” Wesley admitted.

“You couldn’t if you tried.”

“That’s good to know.”

Søren took a sip of his wine and turned on the piano bench so that he and Wesley sat facing each other.

“Telling Eleanor about my father, what he did to my sister, what I did to him in return, that wasn’t all I told Eleanor that night. I asked first if she was certain she wanted to know the entire truth about me. I warned her it would change how she saw me, how she saw us, possibly even how she saw the world. I’d long suspected Eleanor was of our ilk. The first time I met her she had self-inflicted burns on her arms. Teenagers inflict harm on themselves for only two reasons—either they’re in pain or they love pain. Eleanor was of the latter variety.”

“So you told her what you are?”

“I did. I told her all my secrets that night, all the ones that mattered. I told her I was a sadist who could only become aroused by inflicting pain, mental or physical, on another person, and if we were to be lovers someday, I would hurt her. I would have to. I told it all to her, and I did not spare her the gruesome details. When she was fifteen she made it abundantly clear she desired me. When she was sixteen she made it even more abundantly clear that she was in love with me and she knew, despite my best efforts to hide my feelings, that I was in love with her, too. I dropped all pretense, all subterfuge, and I laid out all the dark, stark truth before her.”

“What did she do?”

“She said the three most beautiful words I’d ever heard in my life.”

“I love you?” Wesley guessed.

Søren emptied his wineglass with one swallow and sat it back on top of the piano.

“‘Is that all?’” Søren said the words so casually Wesley wasn’t sure he’d even heard him right.

“What?”

“That’s what Eleanor said to me when I told her the sort of horrific stories that would send anyone else running for their life. She said, ‘Is that all?’ I didn’t even know how to answer at first. I’m not sure I remember what I said. But I do remember her laughing, and breathing a sigh of relief. She said she’d been worried something was actually wrong with me. Perhaps terminal cancer or that I was a serial killer. Or even worse, she said, I could be impotent.”

Wesley laughed. He couldn’t stop himself. So Nora.

“Sounds just like her.”

“That seventeen-year-old girl was braver than I was that night. I’d been anticipating shock and disgust from her, and I prayed with time she would understand and accept or at least forgive me for being what I was. Telling her the truth seemed like the greatest of risks, and yet I loved her too much to keep her in the dark any longer. I’d feared she would spurn me. Instead, she said she belonged to me and knew she belonged to me from the moment we met, and her body was mine to do with what I wanted. She loved me. She trusted me. She knew I wouldn’t hurt her even if I hurt her. And we kissed for the first time, and I felt something I never dreamed I’d feel.”

“Happy?”

“Normal. I felt normal. I’d felt loved in the past, and I’d certainly felt happy. But never normal. She so readily accepted everything about me that I’d worried she would fear or despise, I felt almost foolish. When Kingsley and I were teenagers at school, we often congratulated ourselves on what beautiful freaks we were. Typical teenagers thinking we were so different from the rest of the world. We were two lost souls who’d found each other in a wasteland. But with Eleanor, I didn’t feel lost anymore. She simply saw nothing wrong at all with what I was. I might as well have told her that I had a bad habit of drumming my fingers on the desk, and I would have gotten the same reaction. The same patronizing, ‘Is that all?’ My God, I thought I loved her before that. After...you have no idea.”

“I think I do have an idea.”

“Yes...” he said, resting his elbow on the piano fallboard. “Of course you do. I apologize. I’ve loved Eleanor as long as you’ve been alive but it’s wrong of me to dismiss your feelings for her simply because they’re younger than mine.”

Wesley winced at the words, visibly. Søren clearly noticed because the priest laughed at him.

“Do I even want to know what that expression was indicative of?” Søren asked.

“No. Maybe...” Wesley sighed heavily. “I need to tell you something and I don’t want to say it, but I try very hard not to be an ass most of the time. My father can be an ass, and I’ve spent my whole life trying not to turn into him. But every now and then I say stuff and I hear it in his voice.”

“Terrifying thought that one can so easily turn into one’s parents.”

“My father’s no monster, though. He’s a good man. He’s just...an ass. I think the word Nora used was imperious. He’s old money, at least for this country. I think he thinks he’s kind of a king. He does nice things for people because he’s...what’s the word I’m looking for? Nora would know.”

“Magnanimous?” Søren offered.

“That’s it. Magnanimous. It’s not normal charity or kindness. It’s ‘Here, let me show you how rich and powerful I am by paying for your son’s surgery or buying your farm that’s going into foreclosure and allowing you to stay on it.’ He loves the gratitude, the homage from the peasantry. He does the right things, but not always for the right reasons.”

“Better than doing the wrong things. Trust me, I have seen that side, as well.”

Wesley rubbed the back of his neck, still sore from where he’d been knocked out.

“I used to try to understand what it was about my father that bugged me. And it wasn’t the magnanimous gestures. He’s got the money to spend, he’s helping people, go for it. Great. He dotes on my mom, he’s fair with people. He was never abusive or violent. If anyone ever tried to hurt me or Mom, he’d destroy them. No doubt. He’s a good father, and I do love him.”

“But?”

“But I don’t think I’ve ever once heard him say, ‘I’m sorry, I was wrong.’ I told that to Nora and she said, ‘Being a rich white son of a bitch means never having to say you’re sorry.’ She said that and I decided I’d be the kind of man who would say it, who would apologize when I said or did the wrong thing. I would admit it if I got something wrong. So...” He paused.

“Take your time,” Søren said, almost smiling. Wesley appreciated that Søren was at least trying not to laugh at him.

Wesley took a deep breath. Like a Band-Aid, he told himself. Rip it off.

“I’m sorry,” Wesley said. “I was wrong about you.”

Søren said nothing for a minute, a minute that lasted an eternity. The silence felt like torture as the words hung in the air between them and taunted Wesley with the truth.

“Thank you, Wesley. I’m weighing whether or not to ask you what specifically you’re apologizing for or to simply accept the apology as a gift of grace.”

“I’ll tell you. I should tell you. I don’t want you thinking I like you or anything. I’m not saying I like you. You did shove me into a wall and hold me there by my throat, after all.”

“Yes, after you rushed at me fully intent on causing me bodily harm,” Søren reminded him. “Yes?”

“Okay, yes. You called me her puppy.”

“I’m a sadist, young man. You’re lucky I only put you into the wall. Anyone else I would have put in the hospital.”

“And that’s the reason,” Wesley conceded. “You didn’t put me in the hospital that day. And you didn’t put Nora in the hospital that day she went back to you.”

“Oh, I see...” Søren reached for his wineglass and seemed to notice it was empty. He put it back down again on the piano and stared at the empty cup a moment. “She told you what happened?”