He clasped her throat but didn’t grip it. Instinctively she understood why he made love to her with his hand on her neck. He owned her, possessed her. Her very life beat against the palm of his hand. She could feel her pulse pounding in her neck, pounding against his fingertips. I own you, that hand on her neck said. Every part of you. The part I’m f**king. The part I’m touching. Even the air flowing in and out of your lungs is mine.

Her breathing quickened as he increased the pace of his thrusts. Her back arched off the desk as an orgasm ripped through her. Her clitoris throbbed and her innermost muscles clenched tight as a fist. They released in wild flutters through her stomach, back and thighs….

Eleanor sat up on the desk, all alone, her head aching from the blinding intensity of her fantasy and the orgasm she’d given herself. She picked her clothes up off the floor and dressed quickly. She ran her hand over the top of the desk. She felt a few drops of fluid, her own, that had fallen there. With the bottom of her shirt, she wiped it off and prayed Søren wouldn’t notice anything amiss the next time he sat at his desk. She couldn’t believe she’d done what she’d done on his desk. What if he’d needed something in his office and found the door locked? Would he have heard the sounds of her breathing through the door, heard her coming as she imagined him taking her virginity on his desk with God and the portrait of Pope John Paul II hanging on the wall watching them?

She shoved her feet into her shoes, slipped out into the hall and carefully closed the door behind her.

And then she heard it.

Piano music.

She wasn’t alone in the church, after all.

Eleanor knew she should run for it, head straight home and pretend nothing had happened. But the music called to her like a siren’s song and drew her inexorably to it. It came from the sanctuary. The notes slid under the door and out into the hallway. They wrapped their fingers around her and drew her in. She slipped through the doors of the sanctuary and followed the music to its source.

Søren sat at the upright piano tucked to the right of the sacristy where he and the deacons changed in and out of their vestments.

She stood just feet away from him and watched as he played. No, that wasn’t it. He didn’t play the piano. He enslaved it. His fingers moved with shocking speed and agility across the keys. He seemed a being of pure concentration right now. Did he even know she was standing there listening and watching and wanting him? She didn’t recognize the piece, but she wished she did. She wished she knew what he was playing and why he played it so intensely, as if he would die if he stopped.

Minutes passed. Maybe an hour. She never grew tired of watching him. The music pinned her to floor the way his hand had pinned her to the desk in her fantasy. She couldn’t move if she tried. She didn’t try.

Finally the piece ended and Søren lifted his hands off the keys. He kept his head bowed as if in prayer before lifting it. He didn’t look at her.

“I can’t talk to you right now, Eleanor,” he said.

“Can you look at me?” she asked, and despite the echo in the nave, her voice sounded small and timid.

“No.”

She stuffed her hands in her pockets.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“No.”

Eleanor let that “no” hang in the air between them. She wanted to believe him, but she sensed tension in him. His jaw was set tight and his posture stiff.

“Please talk to me,” Eleanor begged.

“What would you like me to say?” His voice sounded stilted, as well.

“Anything. I don’t know.” She grasped for words. Something told her he knew exactly what she’d done in his office, but surely if he did he would say something to her about it, yell at her, punish her.

He looked up at the ceiling.

“They make a kind of goggles for horses. Blinders, they’re called,” Søren said. He raised his hand and put it to the side of his eyes. “They can only see forward when they wear them. No peripheral vision. I wish I had some.”

“Are you sure you’re not mad at me?”

“The opposite, I promise.”

She searched for something to say and came up empty. So she asked the stupidest question she could think of.

“So … you play piano?”

“I do,” he said.

“What were you playing?”

“Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.”

“Where did you learn to play like that?”

“My mother is a piano teacher.”

“Weird,” she said.

“Weird that my mother is a piano teacher?” He sounded almost amused now. Good. She feared what she’d done in his office had changed things between them irrevocably.

“Weird that you have a mother. I thought you fell from the sky. You know, like a meteor. Or an alien.”

Or a god.

He smiled slightly but still didn’t look at her.

“I have a mother and a father. I love my mother. I hate my father.”

“You’ve got one up on me. I hate both my parents.”

“You don’t hate your mother.”

“No. But I don’t like her very much, either. I think the feeling’s mutual.”

“She loves you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“How could she not?” he asked, as if it were the most foolish idea in the world to consider for one second that anyone could not love her.