Page 55 of Saint
He doesn’t speak, but when he runs a flat, possessive palm over my bicep and shoulder, I know he’s real. This is real. And I want—Iwant. After years of denial, polyester, and missing human touch so much I could cry, Iwant. Selfishly, carnally. Not for the betterment of a community or for the improvement of my immortal soul or for the rewiring of my brain.
I just...want.
I sit up and grab his arms, and he lets me. He lets me pull him down and flip him on his back, lets me straddle him and lick at his mouth until he parts his lips and gives me his tongue.
We don’t say anything—we aren’t alone in the guesthouse after all, and even whispers carry their own risk. I can’t imagine one of those sweet old ladies telling on me, but I have to stretch my imagination to accommodate not only the danger to my vocation but the danger to myself—or more importantly, to Elijah.
But we’re quiet, so quiet, even though I don’t feel quiet on the inside at all. I feel loud with how much I want this, how much I need it, like my desire is a bell tolling over and over again, high peals mixed with low, bone-thrumming vibrations.
I kiss Elijah with every day of denial and every hour of chastity I’ve lived since I left him. And then I push down my own pajama pants, grab his hand, and guide it right to my erection, which is hanging heavy and swollen between us.
His strong fingers curl around me, and it’s the first time I’ve felt this in so long. The tug of a hand on my unconstrained skin, the squeeze and stroke done only for pleasure, only for sex, and this—I’d forgotten this too. How fuckinggoodit feels.
His hand is big and tight, and he’s doing short but slow strokes, so that I feel every centimeter of his squeeze over me. I drop my forehead to his and I’m able to look down my chest and stomach to the sight of him jerking me off. And then his hand disappears to trace around my testicles, to fondle me gently and teasingly until a growl rumbles through me and I reach down to put his hand back where it belongs.
This time, I wrap my own fingers around his, and together we stroke and stroke until—in an embarrassingly short amount of time—my hips are punching forward and my muscles are quivering hard enough that I must be shaking the bed. The pleasure burns through me like a fire through kindling and spills out of my organ, a thick stripe of white all over the muscles of his stomach, followed by another and another.
The sensation is mind-blowing, incredible, awful, delicious. Unsurvivable. I can barely endure it, I can barely keep breathing. It’s too much for one body to handle, and I slump onto Elijah, letting him take my weight as I breathe in the lingering scent of sage and soap on his skin.
His hands come around my hips and slide down to my ass, palming me and parting me so that air kisses my intimate skin. If this were five years ago, if we were anywhere else, I’d be doing the same to him, reaching into those overpriced linen pants and finding the places of him that were just for me.
I’d make him tell me what game he wanted to play—the needy monk whose control has finally snapped and he has to take what his visitor is offering? Or maybe the game where the monk is obligated by centuries of tradition to offer his guesteverykind of hospitality?
Or maybe we could play the game where I make up for leaving him all those years ago. Make up for it with anything he wants.
But we aren’t anywhere else. We’re here in a Trappist guesthouse with a clump of gossipy, old women, we’re within a stone’s throw of a building full of monks who would almost certainly tell my abbot I had a man in my room if they found out.
I allow myself one last inhale against his neck, and then I peel myself free, giving him a soft kiss before I stand and walk over to the small hook where I’ve been hanging my towels. When I walk back to him, towel in hand, his eyes glitter at me, unreadable as ever. But his movements when he takes the towel to scrub his stomach aren’t quick or agitated. He seems more thoughtful than anything else.
I wipe off my own skin and watch him as he stands and ties the string of his pants. His erection stretches all the way to his hip, but when I reach for him, he shakes his head.
“Good night, Aiden,” he murmurs, and then he’s out of my room with soft footfalls and the barely-thereclickof the doorknob.
I stare at the door a minute, not sure how to feel about what just happened. The chemicals in my blood tell me I’m sated and content, but my chest is still full of all the things it was before: regret and not-regret, a desire to be God’s and the ache of still being Elijah’s.
This is not a riddle for the dark, but that’s never stopped painful riddles before in my experience. In the sunshine, under the blue sky, anxieties and miseries can feel so small. Nothing more than puddles in the road, their edges already drying, their surfaces reflecting nothing but the open sky above. But in the blear of night...that’s when they like best to visit. When they can spread themselves against your ceiling as you try to sleep, when they can lean over you with clicking teeth and long, greedy fingers.
And as sleep finally, fitfully closes around me, I have the uneasy thought that I’ve bitten into an apple that I can’t untaste today. That folding myself back into the Brother Patrick of yesterday might be impossible.
No,I think fiercely.I learned how to live without this once.
I can do it again.
Part 3
France
32
From the notebook of Elijah Iverson
I don’t knowwhat I’m doing right now. What am I doing?
I was supposed to use this train ride to catch up on emails and organize my notes.
But I’m not working so much as I’m staring at the screen of my laptop, and I’m not staring at the screen so much as I’m watching Aiden out of the corner of my eye. He’s sleeping with his arms folded on the table between us, his head pillowed on his arms and his eyelashes long and dark against his cheeks. If not for the monk’s robes and the stray thread of silver glinting in his hair, he could be a college student stealing a nap between classes. He could be nothing but Sean’s little brother again, long limbs sprawling and dangling everywhere as he sleeps on the basement couch.
Over the course of the last two months, I’ve essentially upended my entire life, and it’s because of this big, green-eyed monk in front of me, and I don’t even know if I entirely understand why. He left me, in the worst possible way, without a goodbye, without an explanation, with only a quick phone call that night to tell me that he was taking care of some things before he joined a monastery and that he was leaving me the farmhouse to keep or to sell.
