Page 1 of Saint
Prologue
The air iscrushed sage and lavender, and a naked monk is singing in front of me.
He’s sitting so that I can see his lips move against the warm summer air as he sings. So that I can see the bite mark I left on his hip not an hour before.
Naked, bitten, well-fucked.
Praying.
And he’s praying with his whole body too, his lungs working, his ribs and back expanding and contracting, his face lifting to a sky so clear and blue it looks like the sky in a dream.
He thinks I’m taking notes for the article I’m supposed to be writing, but I’m not, I’m not. Instead, I’m noting the sweat running between his shoulder blades and down the muscle-banked valley of his spine to the dimples at the small of his back.
I’m noting the rich melody of his voice as he sings psalms in plainsong, the tones low and stirring as he sings them under the rustling trees of this Provençal mountain.
I’m noting the scruff on his carved jaw, the brush of his long eyelashes over his sun-flushed cheeks, the working of his throat as he sings songs thousands of years old. The hair on his thighs as he sits cross-legged with his breviary in his lap. The careful trail of his blunt fingertip over the verses on the page.
Five years ago, this same man never prayed, never even stayed still for more than a few minutes at a time. Aiden Bell was all play, all energy—frisky, kinky, frenetic, kinetic. He was exhilarating and exhausting. He thrilled and thrummed through me like a drug, making every moment blurry and sharp all at once, and the crash was always worth the high.
Almost always, anyway.
I loved him.
I still love him.
He looks over at me after he finishes a psalm and smiles. “Come,” he says, and I go, taking my notebook with me like it’s a breviary of my own. And then as I join him on the blanket spread over the soft, dry grass, he drags me into his lap with an easy strength. In his past life as a chaotic millionaire, he had a playboy’s body—lean muscles, a corrugated stomach, mouthwatering lines from his hip to his dick. But after five years of monastery labor, he’s brawny and broad, big-shouldered and big-thighed, and even though I’m tall and older than him by five years, he pulls me to him like I’m a doll, nestling my ass against his groin.
He stirs and thickens against me, but he doesn’t do anything about it. Instead, he wraps his arms around me and resumes singing his psalms low in my ear. His chest rises and falls behind me, the song vibrating through his body and into mine.
I close my eyes and listen. I close my eyes and feel.
There’s no instruction manual for falling in love with your best friend’s little brother. And there’s no manual for falling back in love with him when he’s a monk.
There’s only the aching knowledge that you yourself are a kind of momentary prayer, uttered with reverence, spoken softly into the air, and then finished with a gentle and lovingselah.
Part 1
Kansas
1
In the hermitage,I dream of him again.
This dream is slow and almost painful in its sweetness. We are on a plane holding hands, and he is scolding me for getting extra rental insurance for a car we’ve hired at our destination. I respond by scraping the pads of his fingers with my teeth until his scolds slip into shivers. We can’t bear to wait to touch each other until we get to our hotel later that day, but the cabin is full, and first-class seats aren’t convenient for under-the-airplane-blanket relief...
What if...he murmurs to me.
And it feels like the plane will never land, and maybe it never should, because at least if I’m here, then he’s here with me, and if we’re together, then that means I never left—
And then I wake up.
I’m sweating and my heart is racing and the sheets are slick with spilled semen. And my God, it’s like losing him all over again when I dream about him like this. All fucking over again.
I sit up and scrub my hair, miserable with myself.
Four years and six months. Four years and six months of choosing this life, of finding a purpose beyond making money and chasing the next hit of dopamine. Of living close to the god who found me on the floor of my farmhouse one night, the god who’d found me when the tether holding me to life itself was gossamer-thin.
It’s also been four years and six months of clawing myself free from a love I swear I still feel in my guts and in my marrow.
