Page 68 of Saint
“No, Aiden,” he says. “We wouldn’t.”
We stare at each other from across the altar. From the corner of the chapel, the well burbles on, unperturbed by the small griefs and miseries of men.
Elijah sighs and passes a slow hand over his face. “We wouldn’t,” he says again, finally. “We wouldn’t still be together, because I cared about him too much to fake a life where I wasn’t still in love with you.”
Still in love with you.
The words roll over me like a wave, they crush me like deep water. I can’t breathe and my chest is collapsing, and I love him back, I’ve loved him all these years, andhe’sstill in love with me...
“Elijah,” I whisper, stepping forward, and he holds up a hand, stopping me.
“No,” he says, eyebrows lifted, and he looks pained right now, like he’s in so much pain. “Please don’t. I already know. I already know everything you’re going to say, and so you don’t have to say it. You’re a monk. You’re going to stay a monk. Whatever we have here is going to end when we get back home.”
I draw a breath to speak, but then I stop. Because that’s not what I was going to say...but also he’s not wrong either. He’s not wrong about the monk part.
And the ending part.
“I love you too,” is what I do say. It had been what I was planning to say anyway, but there’s no missing what is unsaid now. There’s no missing that it’s anI love you but...
He certainly doesn’t miss it, because his mouth tilts into a sad smile. “Do you?”
“You must know,” I say. “I’m not that good an actor. You must have known the moment you saw me again. You must have realized that I’d never stopped loving you.”
He shakes his head. “You left, Aiden. Why would I have thought you still loved me?”
The knowledge that I’m going to have to tell him about that night—about all of it, even the parts that feel impossible to put into words—flaps its wings inside me like a restless bird. But he saves me from myself by speaking again, and I’m granted a reprieve.
For now.
“I thought I had stopped loving you,” he says bluntly. “I threw all my energy into trying. And I thought since I began to love someone else that I’d succeeded in doing it, that I’d buried the part of myself that loved hopeless, careless millionaires. And then I saw you walking into that cloister, and I’d realized that all the work I’d put into un-loving you had been for nothing. And maybe it would’ve always been for nothing anyway, but especially because you were different. You’d changed, and I was just as vulnerable to this new version of you as I had been to the old.” He passes a hand over his face again. “Maybe more so, if I’m honest.”
“I didn’t need to see you again to know I still loved you,” I say softly. “Elijah, this whole time...” I don’t finish. I can’t finish. It feels both too obvious and too important to shove into a few small words.
He meets my gaze, and his eyes are soft and open.
“Then maybe this was supposed to happen,” he says. “Maybe we were always meant to end up here, together. Maybe God wanted that for us.”
“But God also wants you to be happy and have what you need,” I say, stepping all the way to the altar so that I can put my hand next to his. My thumb brushes against his pinky, and it’s so warm compared to the cool stone of the altar that I sigh. “I feel like I’ve stolen something from you.”
He shakes his head at my words. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You haven’t stolen anything. After our kiss in the hermitage, I...”
He rubs his pinky slowly along my thumb, his eyes on our hands as he does. “I’ve built a life for myself where everything has a point and a meaning, where every minute is filled with doing, and all that doing always has a reason. There are no abrupt road trips to see a bison herd you saw on the internet. There are no two a.m. picnics under the stars. No random days off so we can spend the day watching superhero movies in chronological order. And I’d thought—I’d thought, okay. All of those things are whimsical and silly and that’s what I loved about them, and since you were a monk, all the whimsy would have been austerity-ed right out of you, and therefore what I loved about you would be gone too. But I was wrong.” He looks up at me. “You’re as intoxicating quiet as you are laughing. And you’re as beautiful serious as you are silly. And you are altogether more potent like this, more powerful, more stirring, and maybe it’s because silliness and contemplation are so much the same thing. Maybe it’s because no matter what you’re doing, you’re reminding me that I’m here and alive and that there’s more to living than work. That sometimes we can sleep in or play or pray and have nothing to show for it.”
I come around the altar, not able to stand the separation between us any longer. “You’ve made me want to be better because you are so smart and self-possessed, and when I’m with you, I want to eat up life with great big bites, I want to feed life to you until you’re full. There’s never been anyone like you, and all I’ve ever wanted was to give you everything.”
And knowing I couldn’t—realizing viscerally that I would let him down over and over again—had been so much of what had broken me that night.
Elijah lets me cup his jaw in my hands, and his eyes shut, his thick eyelashes resting against the crests of his cheeks.
“I’d rather have you for three weeks in Europe than spend the rest of my life wishing I’d kissed you one last time,” he whispers.
Yes. Yes.
“I love you,” I tell him, the thrill of being able to say the words almost enough to blunt the pain waiting for us after our trip is over.
He opens his eyes and kisses my palm. “And I love you,” he says roughly, but I see the knot between his brows as he says it, I feel the tension in his jaw.
Funny howI love youcould be enough for any other couple in the world. The beginning of a happily ever after.
