Page 7 of Saint
“It was the first time I understood the need to leave the past behind so thoroughly that I never had to think about it again,” he says. “I would havepaidsomeone to buy that thing, just so I wouldn’t have to look at that goddamn key on my key ring anymore.”
Of course, I know that feeling well too. But in my case, I’d had to leave the past so that I could have a future—any future—at all.
“I’m a writer now,” Elijah says abruptly as the clouds cover the sun again. Shadows fall everywhere in the cloister. “Did Sean tell you?”
I shake my head. He hadn’t told me. And maybe I wouldn’t have believed him if he had, because Elijah had never been the “work in solitude with a big mug of tea” kind of guy. He was more like the “coolly charming his way through an art gallery event with a glass of wine” kind of guy. And of all the things I fucked up between us, perhaps this is the best evidence of my profound carelessness with the people closest to me: I’d never had any idea that he actually wanted to be a writer. None at all.
“I’m a staff writer forMode.”
I know the surprise shows on my face, because he makes a dismissive noise.
“It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” he says, although working for the bestselling men’s magazine in the country sounds fairly glamorous to me. “There’s a lot of interviewing minor celebrities. A lot of ‘These Ten Belts Will Make Any Man a Man of Style.’ That kind of thing.”
I’m still very impressed. I swivel my head so he can see that, my pleasure for him and my pride in him. There’s a lacerating sort of satisfaction in knowing that he’s thriving now, without me. That I was right to leave him, to extract myself from his life.
Everyone really is better off with me here at Mount Sergius.
“Aiden,” Elijah says. “I didn’t actually come here to talk about the house orMode.”
I look at my own hands again.Here it comes, I think to myself. Here comes the excoriation I deserve, the accountability he’s allowed to demand from me. This is its own liturgy—the liturgy of closure after heartbreak, a reconciliation not of God to human, but of man to man—and I will pray this liturgy with him. I will bow my head and nod along.
I wouldn’t have been able to do that four years ago. I suppose that means this monk thing is working.
But instead of dropping into the long litany of ways I fucked up, Elijah says, in a voice that’s once again cool and inscrutable:
“I’m getting married. Soon.”
I suck in a breath—or at least I try to. My ribs move but nothing else seems to work the way it should. Not my throat or my lungs, not my diaphragm, and not my heart, which is stuttering in an abnormal tattoo. A stupid knot cinches my throat shut, and it aches, itaches, like all the misery flooding through me is snagging on one spot, the spot where voice and breath meet.
Married.
Elijah Iverson, the love of my life, the adoration of my God-pledged soul, married to someone else.
A pole-axe to the head would have hurt less.
“His name is Jamie,” Elijah continues in that same voice. “We met a couple years ago at a gallery exhibition. He proposed last year, and I said yes.”
I nod.
I nod and I nod and I nod, because what else can I do? I cannot speak. I cannotspeak.
Even if I could force words past the balled clench in my throat, I’m silent today. I’ve already promised all my words to God, and I’ve worked too hard to learn how to keep promises to break one now.
Even so, I feel the words coming, piling on my tongue, crowding against my lips. I press my mouth together; I turn away. I squeeze my eyes shut and fight, fight, fight. I won’t speak them, I won’t utter a thing. I owe God and Elijah that much at least—my silence and my acceptance.
“I didn’t think I needed to—” Elijah pauses, as if searching for the right words. “Well, the longer I thought about it, the more it didn’t feel like something I could have Sean tell you. And I—ah—fuck, Aiden, will you look at me?”
For the first time, the composed calm of his voice falters, and his words are unsteady and rough.
I look at him. He is so beautiful, and even now, even with everything, my cock tries to swell at the sight of the muscles bunched and tense under his thin shirt, at the tempting contours of his thighs. At the bulge in his shorts I’d have to be dead not to be aware of.
He stares at me with dark amber eyes, his mouth set, his stubbled jaw tight with some emotion I can’t name. “Youleft,” he says in a thick, angry voice.
It’s inevitable—it’s even what I expected when I first sat down on this bench—but I still flinch at the words. At the accusation buried inside them.
“You left me. For this,” he says. “What should I have done, Aiden? Stayed frozen in time, like a fly in amber for you? Refused to move on or live again?”
I shake my head. No. No, of course not. I left him to become a monk, I left him to marry my god, to give my heart to my god, to give mybodyto my god, and so I cannot be jealous of this Jamie now, not when I picked another lover first. That the lover was Jesus Christ seems immaterial to the situation.
