Page 64 of Saint
“You mean, where does nearly naked and covered in flower petals rank against jumping into a fountain with a tie around your head?”
Man, a fountain swim sounds really nice right now. “Yes.”
He shakes his head, the corner of his mouth pressing in, like he can’t decide whether to smile or pity me. “I’m not sure. You, um. Are you going to put your habit on again?”
My grin fades a little. And then a lot. Because the times we’ve been together in the past week have been in the dark—or I’ve been fully dressed—and this is the first time he’s really seen me in almost five years, the first time he’s seen my body since it’s changed. There’s dark hair covering my chest now, and my stomach—a stomach that is no longer flat and rippling with muscle but is now solid and undeniably convex.
Perhaps I wouldn’t be self-conscious if it weren’tsodifferent from my old body. My vodka-and-protein-shake body. And right now, with the way Elijah is looking at me, with the way his question hangs in the air—as if he’s trying to save me from embarrassing myself—I feel like a caveman. Big and clumsy and hairy, and so far away from the man I used to be, and I’m reaching for my habit before I even fully digest this feeling. And I shouldn’t care anyway, because itdoesn’t matter. The bigness and wideness of it not mattering can’t be measured in miles or kilometers, but in vows of the soul and pledges of the heart. Not in distance and decisions, but in fireflies in the cloister.
But even with it not mattering, it matters, and my face burns a little as I pull my habit over my head and zip it up to my throat.
“Bien,” Brother Luc says to me, as he walks up with another monk whose name I can’t remember. “You are ready to head back.”
“Back for what?” Elijah asks.
“Naps, of course!” Brother Luc says with a laugh. “Best part of the day.”
“I’ll need to shower before I do anything,” I say as the two monks climb into the little truck. “I’m gross and covered in petals.”
“If you don’t want to nap,” Brother Luc says, “you should see the grotto behind the chapel. Many pilgrims come to visit it—it’s said the shrine there is where the Virgin first cried her tears for the sick child.”
“C’était d'abord un sanctuaire païen, mais on ne le dit pas aux visiteurs,” the other monk says and Elijah laughs.
“It was a pagan shrine first, but we don’t tell the visitors that,” Elijah translates for me.
“And maybe you will find our missing American priest while you’re up there, hm?” Brother Luc says before starting the truck. “Tell him to come down and eat something other than locusts.”
With a wave, they drive off, and I look to Elijah. “Grotto after I shower?” I ask.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
36
The grotto is old,pretty, and also very creepy. It’s the entrance to a small cave, flooded with water from a spring inside, and guarded by weathered stone statues of the Virgin and some other saints, which stare at us with sightless eyes as we approach.
I don’t know as much about pagans and history as my brother Tyler does, but even based on my limited knowledge, the place has a super pagan vibe to me. The water swirling at the Virgin’s feet; the gnarled trees interrupted by upthrust crags of limestone and clumps of yellow-flowered woad.
Elijah takes his sunglasses off and tucks them into the collar of his shirt, squatting down to dip his fingertips in the water. His jeans pull tight around his thighs and ass as he does, and I vividly remember how it felt to crowd him against the wall in the hermitage, and I want it. I want it again. Him and me, touching, and then he lifts his head to look at me, and I know he sees the wanting all over my face.
His lips part, and he slowly stands up, and maybe he doesn’t mind my new body so much, because he steps toward me with dark, hungry eyes.
And then his phone rings.
My first thought isreally? Reception up here on Pagan Water Hill?
My second thought iswho would be calling us now?It’s got to be balls early back home.
“Is it Sean?” I ask. “Or Zenny? Are they up with the babies? Answer it and make them show us the babies on FaceTime—”
Elijah shakes his head slowly as he holds the phone in his hand like it’s a live grenade. “It’s not Sean or Zenny,” he says. “It’s Jamie.”
“Oh,” I say. And then it hits me even deeper. “Oh.”
Eyes on his screen, Elijah lets out a long, trembling exhale. And then he silences the call.
“Elijah,” I say, not sure what I want to tell him, but knowing I need to saysomething. Apart from telling me that it was okay to blow him in the ruins at Semois, he hasn’t breathed a word about him and Jamie, or about the engagement, and I suddenly wonder why, why he hasn’t brought it up, and maybe it’s because I’ve assumed wrong, and he and Jamie are actually still together...
Elijah looks up at me, and whatever he sees there makes him exhale again. “We ended our engagement,” he says after a minute. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”
