Page 22 of Saint
I could look at him forever.
It’s a long-buried instinct that has me turning to Elijah, greedy for his reaction, to see if he sees what I see, something so stirring and so haunting that it necessitates devotion, it necessitates a lifetime of love laid at its feet, but Elijah isn’t looking at the crucifix right now.
He’s looking at me.
And for a dizzy, breathless, unreal moment, I think that this is how it would feel to have the Jesus on the cross look back at me. There is the same half-lidded look, the same parted lips.
The same urge to offer up the wet flesh of my heart to be scored deep with the love of this person.
But unlike the man on the cross, there is no plea in Elijah’s eyes, no supplication. I cannot decipher what’s there in its place, but it is nothing so vulnerable as all that, nothing so naked. The look he’s giving me is guarded and laced with something bitter and doubtful and hard.
A muscle jumps once in his jaw, and then he turns away.
“Where will I be for prayers?” he asks, distant and removed once more. “Over there?”
“Yes,” I say quietly and show him where the laity sits in the nave. Far away from the crucifix. Close enough that his gaze will burn the side of my face as I sing.
* * *
Before we’d goneto the church, I’d taken Elijah to the brewery, although there hadn’t been enough time to see the taproom and still get back for dinner, and then I took him around to the trailheads in case he’d like to spend some time walking this week. He had a small leather notebook and a fine point Sharpie, and he took notes the entire time, his eyes flicking from thing to thing with efficient, penetrating assessment.
It was a familiar enough sight; maybe he was taking notes for an article instead of walking through a venue before an event, but it was the same thing really. The kind of observation that missed nothing, cataloged everything. The kind of surveying gaze I spent so many of my teenage years hoping would be raked over me, and then followed with that specific elixir of older-brother’s-best-friend approval.
After we finish praying compline, he still has his notebook in hand. His long fingers are wedged between the pages, his Sharpie sticking out like a cigarette from a pack. I catch him staring at the crucifix with an inscrutable expression as I file out behind my brothers through the door near the altar.
After we bow to the altar and exit the sanctuary, I loop around the front of the church and come back to the pews, weaving through the already-chattering Knights of Columbi to get to Elijah, who is still studying Christ on the cross while old men shuffle and talk around him. He is looking at the crucifix like Jesus owes him money.
Elijah taps his notebook slowly against his thigh, the rest of his body utterly still except for the subtle lifting of his shoulders as he breathes. His T-shirt—made of something silkier than ordinary jersey—clings to his body in a way that’s almost greedy, as if it can’t stop touching those deltoids and trapezius muscles. As if it’s as enraptured with the tempting furrow of his spine as I am. And the way its hem catches on his waistband, showcasing an ass that I once spent an entire night biting...
The flare of heat low in my belly is matched by the immediate constriction between my legs, and I’m grateful I locked myself up this afternoon. The grip of the metal cage no longer feels like pain to me, only safety. Only the comforting reassurance that I’m not about to walk up to my ex in a sanctuary with a hard-on beneath my monk’s robes.
I step into his pew, and he turns to me. A single eyebrow is lifted in query, but he doesn’t speak, and I feel suddenly seventeen again, crashing down into the basement while Sean and Elijah were hanging out and having Elijah giving me this exact same look. A look that says,well?
A look that says,tell me what you want and then I’ll decide if I have the energy to react to it or not.
I feel a flush coming on. It was hard enough to pray compline tonight knowing that Elijah was here, that he could be watching me with that detached gaze while I kept my eyes fixed on my breviary. Just the knowledge that he was in the church with me was enough to make me stumble over psalms I’d chanted hundreds of times before, it was enough to send my pulse skittering through my veins at random intervals. It was enough to make me hyper-conscious of how I did the smallest and most mundane actions. Was he watching as I turned the page of my breviary? Was he watching as I sat for the reading? As I angled my body toward the altar?
It was stupid to care how I looked when I was wearing a floor-length polyester robe, and it was even stupider when I was a monk who’d chosen a life where it didn’t matter if anyone found me attractive ever again, but stupid had never stopped Aiden Bell before, I guess.
I clear my throat and try to sound unaffected by his presence. “I came to make sure you had everything you needed for the night before I went back to the dormitory.”
Elijah glances at his watch, and then up at the oculus window, where the sky is still painted in the bright colors of mid-evening. “Bed already?”
“Vigils come early in the morning,” I explain, understanding his confusion. Before I came here, I was an incurable night owl—although I still got up at the crack of dawn to work out and commute in to work. Functioning on three or four hours of sleep had become my norm. It had seemed so normal at the time, sonecessary.Ihadto exercise,hadto work ten hours a day,hadto drink and party and fuck, there was no other choice, and no one around me was living any differently—except for maybe my older brother Tyler. But he’d been a former priest who went back to college to study theology after he unpriested, like a real weirdo. I had no interest in being like him at the time.
Except now I’ve definitely surpassed him in theholy weirdodepartment, and that includes going to bed with the sun, like one of Sean and Zenny’s squishy babies.
“Should I plan on coming to vigils?” Elijah asks, looking back to the sky with something like wariness. As if he’s already anticipating how soon dawn will come.
“Guests are invited to come to as many or as few prayers as they like,” I say. “And it can vary from day to day. The only absolutes are meal-times and respecting the Grand Silence.”
“Hmm.” He taps his notebook against his thigh again. “I suppose I should at least go to my room and start typing up notes. I’ll walk back with you.”
We’ve been walking around the campus together for half the day, and still my heart gives an uneven stutter at the thought of walking back with him, ofbeingwith him, just the two of us. It’s almost worse than being seventeen and having no idea my Elijah-idolatry was actually a crush, because now I know what it is. Now I know who he is. Now that crush has had years to deepen, to grow roots around my bones and through my ribs, to thicken itself into a robust devotion that surpasses nearly everything else, and is matched only for my devotion to the suffering son of the desert. It has replaced my marrow and my fascia, and now Elijah is here, and we are walking into the fading light together, shoulder to shoulder.
I remind myself to breathe. He deserves my kindness, my assistance.Notmy torment. Nor the hunger that’s barely stifled by the metal banding my sex.
We don’t say anything as we walk, which is fine by me, because I don’t know what I could say anyway, other thanI still love you, don’t hate me, please go home.
