The Siren

“You still love him, don’t you?”

Nora smiled sadly up at him.

“Many waters.” She ran a hand through her wet hair and let water drop from her fingertips to the floor.

“‘Many waters cannot quench love,’” Wesley finished the quote. “‘Rivers cannot wash it away.’”

“‘Nor will rivers overflow it,’” she corrected. “Catholics use the New American.”

“N.I.V.—it’s what we use in youth group.”

“I won’t let him hurt me. I promised you I wouldn’t. I just have to see him. That’s all.”

“Okay,” he said. “But you’ll come home tomorrow night?”

“Yeah, I’ll come home.”

Wesley nodded and slid off the side of the bed. He started unbuttoning his jeans.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he took off his pants and threw them on a nearby chair.

“Told you. It’s almost midnight. Scoot over.”

He stripped out of his T-shirt and Nora moved over to let him slide in next to her. Turning off the bedside lamp, Wesley gathered her to him. She breathed slowly, relaxed onto his chest and melted into his arms. She didn’t deserve him, didn’t deserve this. He knew she would see Søren tomorrow, and he didn’t hate her for it. She might hate herself, but Wesley would never hate her.

Nora traced his collarbone with her fingertips while Wesley slipped his hand under her shirt and slowly kneaded her lower back. She almost laughed at this foreign sensation—for once in her life she lay in bed with a gorgeous young man, and she had absolutely no desire to seduce him.

“We’re both wearing your underwear,” Nora said after a long silence.

“Could be worse. We both could be wearing your underwear.”

She smiled, knowing that even more than the bath, just having Wesley so close to her made her feel clean and sane again. When Søren touched her she became his. When Wesley touched her, she became herself.

Nora’s hand slid from his chest to his arm. Wesley had twice the muscle she did. He could hurt someone so much more easily than she could, and yet she knew he would never hurt anyone unless he was trying to protect someone else. She’d seen that with her own eyes.

“Wes,” she said as she felt sleep coming for her.

“What, Nor?”

I love you, she thought but didn’t say the words out loud.

“Thanks for the bath.”

28

Wesley had already gone by the time Nora rolled out of bed the next morning. Morning? she thought and then looked at the clock. It was already after noon. She dragged herself from the tangle of her sheets.

She went to her closet and dug through it. Today she would do something she did only once a year—dress conservatively. She found her only skirt that went past her knees, her only black shoes with a low heel, her only blouse that wasn’t designed to show every inch of cle**age. She even found a strand of pearls she’d received as a gift from her grandmother years ago and put them on. She pulled her hair back and up, taming the wavy mane as best she could and applied half her usual amount of makeup.

Today she was going to church.

As Nora drove she fought off the twin demons of eagerness and fear that this day always visited upon her. Shortly after three she pulled into the parking lot at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. She’d been christened here as an infant, made her First Communion here, and this was where she first saw Søren over eighteen years ago.

Sacred Heart had thrived under Søren’s watch. From barely over a hundred members, the church had trebled in size during his time here. A handsome polyglot only twenty-nine years old when first he arrived, he was everything priests were not usually known for being—erudite, witty and charming. Two other priests in nearby diocese had been removed from their posts for allegations of sexual offenses in the past two decades. Catholic parents brought their children to Sacred Heart in droves. They knew Father S. could be trusted. And although Nora knew who he was with her behind closed bedroom doors, those parents were right to trust him.

It was funny, she thought as she entered through the front doors of Sacred Heart, how little she remembered of her childhood here. Even Father Greg, Søren’s predecessor, wavered in her mind as little more than a memory of elderly kindness. Then one Sunday when she was fifteen years old, Søren had come like an Annunciation; it was as if God Himself had hailed her by name.

She paused in the foyer and glanced around. Foyer…Søren always corrected her when she called it that. “It’s the narthex, Eleanor,” he’d said, hiding his smile. “Not the foyer.” Next time she referred to it in his presence she’d called it the “lobby.”

Glancing around, Nora tried to sift through the thousands of memories that descended on her. She saw the little shrine to the Virgin Mary in the corner of the entryway and the burning candles beneath her. Nora stood before the shrine, closed her eyes and remembered…

She’d been sixteen years old, almost seventeen, and her best and only friend was a girl named Jordan. Introverted and shy, Jordan had no idea she was also quietly beautiful. They’d gone to the same Catholic high school, had most of the same classes—all the same but for English her junior year. Nora had been in the highest-level class and Jordan, never the writer Nora was, had an easier teacher. Nora would never forget the ashen look on Jordan’s face one day after school. It took three days for Nora to drag it out of her—Jordan’s English teacher, a married man in his forties, had kept her after class and put his hand up her shirt. He’d offered her an easy A in the class in exchange for the obvious. Nora had been livid and threatened to beat the teacher to death with her bare hands. Jordan had sobbed, terrified that no one would believe her, that no one would help her. After all, this English teacher was also the basketball coach, and the team was having the best season in years. Jordan made Nora promise not to tell the school, and in return Nora made Jordan promise to tell Father S. To this day Nora still didn’t know what Søren had done or said to the teacher. She only knew Søren had gone to her school on a Friday and by Monday the teacher was gone.