“It sounds perfect. Apart from the men. Change them to beautiful women, and it’s my secret Heaven.”

“It was as close to perfect as you can get in this life, I guess.”

Kyrie rolled onto her side and sat up halfway. She rested her weight on her right hand and looked down at Elle. Her nightgown fell off her shoulder and Elle had to fight off a wave of desire for her.

“So why...why if everything was so sexy and perfect, why did you say you’ve had ‘not okay’ sex?”

“What?”

“You know.” Kyrie shrugged. “After you and I were done having sex...” She blushed as she spoke. “After we were done, you said it was fine if I wasn’t okay. You said you’d had ‘not okay’ sex before. That doesn’t sound like Paradise to me.”

“Why do you care so much?”

Kyrie flashed hurt eyes at her.

“Because it’s you, and I care about you. Do you think I would be in bed with you if I didn’t care about you?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Elle, you loved him, right? Your priest?”

“Yes.” She couldn’t deny it so she didn’t bother denying it.

“You loved him, but you still left him. That scares me.”

“Why would it scare you that I left him?”

“Because if you can leave someone you’re that much in love with, how much easier would it be to leave me?”

“Kyrie...” Elle pulled Kyrie close to her and wrapped her arms tight around the girl’s thin shoulders. “Listen to me. There is no way in Hell you will ever make me as angry at you as I am at Søren. And I’m not going to leave you like I left him. I can’t stay here forever but remember, you’re the one in the convent, the one who’s taken a vow of chastity.”

“Temporary vows,” Kyrie said.

“But you’ve got final vows coming up.”

“In two years.”

“Okay, in two years, you’ll take final vows and go back to the abbey in California, right?”

“I know. I’m sorry. This is all new to me.”

“It’s new to me, too,” Elle said. “I’ve never been in a relationship with another woman before. We’ll have to figure it out together. But I’m not going to run away from you, so put that thought out of your pretty little head.”

Elle tapped her on the forehead between the eyes. Kyrie’s eyes crossed and Elle laughed.

Kyrie stretched out again along Elle’s side and laid an arm across her stomach.

Elle took a deep breath.

“I did love Søren,” she said again. “And I do love him. Still. Do you know how hard it is to leave someone you’re in love with? To walk away from them? Or worse,” she said, remembering the near-crippling pain she’d been in that night, “to crawl away?”

“I can’t imagine. I don’t want to imagine...”

“I think about it all the time. Why I left Søren. Why I haven’t gone back yet. I need to think about it otherwise maybe I’d forget why I left him and then...”

“You’d go back?”

Elle nodded.

“And I don’t want to go back. Even if I did, I shouldn’t go back. So I think about bad times, the bad things about being with him. It’s a short list but...”

“What’s on the list?”

“Not getting to spend as much time with him as I want to. Not getting to go out in public as a couple. We’ve never spent Thanksgiving together, you know? He spends it with his sister Claire at her place with her family. She knows about me but bringing me along would be asking for trouble. All it takes is one person making one phone call, and we’re front-page news, Søren and I. But it’s not just stuff like that.”

Elle felt Kyrie’s eyes on her but didn’t meet her gaze. She raised a hand to her forehead and rubbed between her eyes.

“I’ve never told anyone about this,” Elle finally said.

“Told anyone what?”

“The list of things I tell myself to keep me from going back to him... Something happened once—only once—but once was enough. If it had happened twice, I think I would have left him a long time ago.”

“What did he do to you?” Kyrie asked, the same question Daniel had asked her. This time Elle would answer.

“It’s not easy being the sexual property of a sadist,” she said with a tired smile. “It’s sexy. It’s fun. It’s intense like you can’t imagine. Fear makes it potent. Doing something dangerous makes it potent. But there’s always a risk that you can go too far and someone can get hurt.”

“You got hurt?”

Elle nodded.

“In kink, we have a thing called a ‘safe word.’ It’s nothing special, just a word that means ‘Stop, I mean it.’ If you’re doing heavy role-play stuff and you want to be able to say ‘Oh no, not that. Don’t put your big cock in me, sir, and force me against my will to have an orgasm. Anything but that,’” Elle said, putting the back of her hand on her forehead and pretending to play a pearl-clutching virgin. “You know, stuff like that. You need a word that means ‘stop’ that isn’t stop. Mine is Jabberwocky.”

“Good word. Sounds nothing like stop.”

“Easy to remember, too,” Elle said, glancing away from Kyrie’s searching gaze. “Unless you get so freaked out you forget it in the moment.”