Page 65 of Saint
I just blink at him. It’s what I’ve hoped, and hated myself for hoping, for all sorts of reasons, and even in the middle of my relief and the murky guilt spawned by that relief, I feel doubt too, because a broken engagement doesn’t necessarily mean a broken relationship, or broken love. He might still bewithJamie, even if they’re not getting married. He might still love him.
And I have no right to care, but goddammit, I do.
Elijah laces his fingers behind his neck and walks away from the grotto, and then back toward it, his satchel bumping against his thigh as he turns.
“Iended the engagement,” Elijah clarifies. “I came home from Mount Sergius, and I told him what happened, and he wanted—he was ready to—”
He stops pacing and drops his hands to his sides.
“He was ready to forgive me,” he says dully. “He thought it was just an understandable lapse. An innocent mistake. Like there’s something understandable about cheating on your fiancé. Like there was anything innocent about how we kissed that day.”
The apology I need to say—what I should have said that day and every day since—crowds against my lips and tumbles out. “Elijah, I’m so sorry,” I say. The wind threatens to blow my words away before they can reach him, and I step forward, coming close enough to touch him. “I’m so, so sorry for what happened that day. For what happened between you and Jamie.”
“I know,” he says.
And I finally speak aloud the fear I’ve felt since he told meI canat Semois. “But you can’t choose me,” I whisper. “You can’t choose me. Because I can’t choose you back.”
His eyes glitter in the sunlight—liquid shadows ringed with dark, dark gold.
“I know,” he says again.
But then his hands are in my habit and scapular, yanking me close, yanking me to his mouth, which is hot and angry against mine, and then we are kissing, fumbling for each other, and Elijah says, “I know,” again, in a breathless rush against my lips, and then I say the magic words. The ones he’d inked on his arm in Latin.
“What if...?”
He pulls away, mouth wet and pupils blown wide. “Yes,” he says, not even waiting for me to finish the sentence. “Yes.”
He grabs my wrist and he’s hauling me off somewhere—to the chapel, I realize as we pass back into the woods—and we’re both rushing now, practically jogging, until we crash through the wooden door of the empty chapel and we’re all over each other again, his hands yanking impatiently at my habit as I’m trying to pop open the button of his jeans.
“You’re desperate for it,” Elijah whispers, pulling me deeper and deeper into the cool shadows of the chapel. “You’ll do anything for it.”
Yes, yes, this is the game, this is thewhat if. I’m a monk who’s aching, dying, pleading. He’s the stranger wicked enough to take advantage of it. It’s the only game I want to play for the rest of my life, this one where I’m shoving my hands down the front of his pants and he is dropping his satchel to the floor so he can shove me back against the stone altar.
“I’ll do anything,” I beg, rubbing my face against his jaw, his neck. He smells like sage and soap and Elijah, and his scruff chafes against my lips and cheeks. He smells like how I hope God smells. Clean and botanical and real.
I find the stiff length of him behind his zipper, and he gives a ragged groan that has my toes curling in my shoes.
“Anything,” I mumble against his neck, my breath practically punched out of me by lust, because he’s so huge and hot in my hand, so alive, so necessary. “I’ll do anything.”
“Oh, I fucking know you will,” he replies. A little coldly like a stranger would, but also like maybe an ex-boyfriend would, because of course this game is not a game at all, it’s the raw and unvarnished truth. I spent years denying myself out of a convert’s zeal, out of a need to atone, and now here I am, my cock straining in its cage and my entire body trembling with that sweet, sick misery which is unsatisfied lust. I’m brought absolutely low with it, and I don’t care, I don’t care that I’m begging, that I’m forsaking, that I’m nothing more than flesh craving flesh, a mortal heart craving another very mortal heart, and that I’m surrendering something more vital than my body right now.
The vows I made, the promises I made, the life I swore to lead...they are gone now, blown away in the dry, pagan wind whispering outside the chapel. They’ve been blowing away since Semois, since that day in the hermitage.
Maybe even since the day I saw Elijah sitting in the cloister, waiting to tell me that he was getting married.
Elijah takes my jaw in his hand and gives me a deep, searching kiss, the kind where his tongue fucks ruthlessly against mine, and then he just as ruthlessly spins me around and shoves me back into the altar.
“Bend over,” he rasps, pushing my habit up to my hips and then pulling my boxer briefs down past the curve of my backside. He runs an appreciative palm over one cheek and then tugs the briefs down my legs and then off one foot so he can kick my feet apart. “This fucking thing,” he says, sounding pissed as his fingers find my cage and the tumescent flesh inside it. But he presses his naked organ to my ass as he says it, and so I know that he’s at least as turned on as he is angry, maybe more so.
“I can come in it,” I pant, closing my eyes against the feel of his erection moving against me, shaking with the need to rock back into him. “You can make me come in it.”
“Is that what you need, Brother Patrick?” he murmurs. “Someone to milk this cock until you don’t have to be hard during your prayers anymore?”
“Yes,” I say miserably, my head hanging between my shoulders, my breath juddering in and out. My cock is dripping now, the clear pre-cum that would taste like salt if either of us could taste it, like the actual salt of the earth.
“You’d have to be careful,” he says, his voice low in my ear. “Maybe you’d need it again. And again. Maybe you’d need it every day. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to last a single night without having all this lust fucked right out of you.”
“It’s too late to be careful,” I mumble between inhales, and I mean that in every possible way it can be meant. It’s too late, it’s too late, it’s too late. There’s only this, only now, only his fingers running up the center of me to find the place where I open. They are rough, insistent, just like a careless stranger’s—or an angry ex-boyfriend’s—would be.
