The Angel (The Original Sinners 2)

“Søren can put the fear of God into a sub by just showing up,” Griffin said with barely concealed envy.

“I know. I love that man,” Nora said, smiling with pride. In their huge underground kinky community, no one commanded more respect or fear than Søren. Sometimes she thanked God Søren had gone into the church and not the military. He’d be a dictator for sure.

“One final thing about Mick,” Griffin said, folding the checklist back up.

“Mick?”

“That’s what I’m calling him. Michael has too many syllables.”

“Okay, what’s the final thing about Mick?”

Griffin rolled onto his side and met Nora eye to eye. He reached out and freed her hair from her black hair clip and caressed her face and neck. Bad, Nora thought. It had to be bad news if Griffin was buttering her up.

“It’s just, and don’t freak out,” Griffin said, opening her shirt, pulling the strap of her bra down and taking one of her ni**les into his warm mouth.

“Freaked out is not why I’m feeling now,” she said, leaning back to give him better access to her br**sts. “Tell me the freak-out part while I’m turned on.”

Griffin slid his hand under her skirt between her thighs; he slipped a finger under her panties and inside her.

“It’s just, the thing about Mick is,” Griffin said as he pressed a second finger into her wet warmth, “he’s bi.”

8

Alone in the room Nora and Griffin had given him, Michael unpacked his duffel bag. His skateboard, wheels up, he’d packed on top of his things and that came out first. Now that he held it in his hands, he almost regretted bringing it. Nora knew he was a skater, but Griffin didn’t. Surely someone like Griffin would find skateboarding childish. Michael sat the board on the floor and rolled it under the bed.

He unpacked his clothes—jeans and T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks, the usual—and tucked them in the empty dresser. Putting his rather ratty clothes inside furniture that probably cost more than his mom’s car felt a little wrong. Digging once more in his bag, Michael found his most precious possession and pulled it out.

Right after he’d moved with his parents to Wakefield and started attending Sacred Heart, Michael heard rumors that the writer Nora Sutherlin attended that same church years before she’d become the Nora Sutherlin. One day at the mall he’d snuck off to the Borders store and found a copy of her book The  Red. The cover had a picture of a woman’s wrists tied with a bloodred silk ribbon. He remembered staring at the picture for so long without blinking that his eyes had started to water. But there was no way they’d let a thirteen-year-old buy a book like that. He thought about stealing it, but even the idea of shoplifting made his stomach churn with guilt. He found a fantasy novel about kings and unicorns that was the same price and size as The Red and he switched the covers. He didn’t need the cover. The image of the tied wrists had burned into his retinas. When he looked at it, looked at those tied wrists and pale hands, he couldn’t help but imagine his own wrists and own hands. It spoke to him, that image. It whispered to him. Love, he thought, when he first gazed on the image, looked just like that.

He bought the book and took it home. After his parents had gone to bed he’d stayed up all night reading it. He stayed up all the next night reading it again.

When Father Stearns started counseling him after his suicide attempt, Michael finally worked up the courage to ask him about Nora, who Father S called Eleanor. For some reason the first question that came out was, “Is she pretty?”

Father Stearns answered, “Michael, Eleanor is without a doubt the most beautiful woman who has ever or will ever live. If you could take a nighttime thunderstorm and turn it into a woman, you would have a very good idea what she looks like. And a fairly good idea how she behaves as well,” he’d said and smiled. Michael was quiet for a long time after that. He loved storms at night, how they made the whole house shiver with the force of the wind and the rain and how they broke the sky open with white light. After a long silence his priest had paused and turned to him. He looked at Michael for a long moment. “Would you like to meet her?”

Father S had made him a deal: if Michael could go one entire year without harming himself in any way—no burns, no bruises, no cuts, no suicides attempts—he would arrange for him and Nora Sutherlin to meet. Eleven months into their deal, Michael had been at Sacred Heart doing homework. His mom had gotten a new job after the divorce was finalized. It paid better than her old job but it meant she had to work until 11:30 p.m. some evenings. She didn’t like leaving Michael home by himself. Father S had offered to stay late at church on those days so Michael wouldn’t be alone.

A Monday night, a school night, he remembered. He was working on a Mendel chart due in biology the next day. He heard Father S on the phone with someone but couldn’t make out what he was saying. It sounded as though he was speaking French. He did that sometimes on the phone. Sometimes French. Sometimes another language that sounded maybe like Swedish to Michael, but which he later learned was Danish. Michael heard Father S hang up the phone. When his priest emerged from his office, he wore that same sad smile again.

“She would do her homework out here too,” he’d said without preamble. Michael didn’t have to ask who “she” was. “You could always tell when she was working on her math homework.”

“How could you tell?” Michael had asked.