“If you can’t tell me,” Kyrie asked again, “can you show me?”

Elle laughed. Could she show her? One easy way to do it.

“Give me your hand,” Elle said. Kyrie obeyed without question. “I’m going to bite your wrist. Is that okay?”

“Will you do it hard?”

“Yes. But I won’t break the skin. Do I have your permission to bite you?”

“Sure, I guess. Yes.”

“Good.” Elle raised Kyrie’s wrist to her lips and sank her teeth deep into the soft flesh at the wrist bone. Kyrie flinched but didn’t cry out.

Then Elle kissed her in the same spot. A warm, soft, sensual kiss on the bite mark and the inside of her wrist.

“Elle...” Kyrie breathed. Elle released her hand and Kyrie pulled it back against her chest, cradling it in her other hand.

“Did you like that?” Elle asked.

“I liked the kiss after you bit me. And the bite, too.”

“What would you say if I said I would do it again, but only if you let me bite you again?”

“I’d say...bite me.”

“What if I said I’d make you feel amazing but only after I hurt you? Would you let me hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think would happen if every time I hurt you I also made you feel good afterward?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’d want you to hurt me so I could feel good.”

“You’d associate pain with pleasure?”

“I would.”

“You’d want the pain because it meant you’d have pleasure, too?”

“Probably.”

“Would the pleasure mean more to you because you earned it?”

“I think so.”

“If I told you it turned me on to hurt you and then pleasure you in that order, what would you think?”

“I would think you should do that to me then. Hurt me and then pleasure me.”

Elle smiled. “That’s kink. It’s also kink when your deepest sexual fantasy is to be treated like a sex slave or punished by a teacher or tied up like a prisoner or spanked like a child.”

“People do that?”

“I do that,” Elle said.

Kyrie held out her hand again to Elle. “Will you do it me?”

“Kyrie—”

“Please?”

Almost nine months...Elle hadn’t been intimate with anyone in that long. No wonder she dreamed of sex almost every night and woke up coming. And Kyrie...she wanted her. This young virginal...

“You’re a nun.” Elle took Kyrie’s hand but only to hold it. “If we do this—”

“I’m just a starter nun.”

“It’s called a novice, not a starter nun.”

“You know what I mean. I don’t take final vows for two years,” Kyrie said. “I want to know what I’m giving up.”

Elle closed her eyes and shook her head.

Somewhere out there, far in the distance, she heard a sound she thought she would never hear.

“Can you hear that?” Elle asked.

“No, what is it?”

“God laughing at me.”

Elle opened her eyes.

Then she stood up.

She pushed her chair under the doorknob.

Kyrie was already on the bed, her hair down and unbound. She was a vision of loveliness and innocence. And Elle wanted her. Wanted her as she’d never wanted a woman before in her life. But she wasn’t a woman. Not yet. She was a girl, chaste and pure, and she’d never even been kissed. The hunger to be the first lips on Kyrie’s lips was physical in its urgency. Elle wanted hers to be the first hands on Kyrie’s body. But even more than that, she wanted to feel again what she felt those nights with Kingsley, the nights he’d let her hurt him, dominate him, use him. She needed to feel that power again.

She needed to own this girl, body and soul. In two years, Kyrie would take her final vows. In two years, her beautiful long hair would be shorn to the scalp. In two years the door on Kyrie’s life would lock and it would never be opened again. Kyrie would never be opened again.

Innocence had its virtues, but ignorance had none. To let this beautiful girl walk away from the world without ever having tasted the pleasure it offered was more than a crime. It was a sin. A shame. And Elle wouldn’t allow it.

“Are you praying?” Elle asked, seeing Kyrie’s head bowed. The starlight made itself a halo in her hair.

“Yes. The prayer of St. Augustine.” Kyrie looked up at Elle and met her eyes in the dark. “Lord, make me chaste....”

Elle finished the prayer for her.

“But not yet.”

21

Haiti

“WHO WAS SCARED?”

Kingsley closed his eyes. Juliette’s voice carried over the air and the waves and the water on the sand. It carried over the beach like the signal of a lighthouse to a ship lost at sea.

“No one.” He shoved the length of carved bone into his pocket. He turned and found her standing ten feet behind him. She wore a yellow dress, bright as the sun. “I was talking to myself.”

“It didn’t sound like it. Were you praying?” She walked on bare feet across the sand to him.

“Something like that.”

“To God?”

“To a man,” he said. “A man who thinks he’s God sometimes. But he can’t be God, can he? Not if he’s scared.”