Page 30 of Saint
Elijah didn’t sayanything about our not-kiss in the walkway, and I can’t decide what thatmeans. Does that mean it’s not worth talking about? That he feels the same way I do and that it was habit and muscle memory and nothing more?
Probably.
I ignore the disappointment which tugs on my stomach at the thought. It doesn’t matter anyway; what difference would it make if Elijah had been as affected by our not-kiss as me? Absolutely none. None difference. And I have the polyester robes to prove it.
Since I’m on my own for the rest of the day, I catch up on emails and a few financial things, and then help out in the printing room. I’m hauling a box of ordination invitations over to the table we use for postage when I see Elijah in the doorway. His hands are at his sides, and he looks like he’s just come to a sudden stop. He’s staring at me like he’s never seen me before.
It takes me a minute to realize why—and then I flush. Since lugging things around the printing room is usually sweaty work, I’ve switched out my habit for jeans and an old T-shirt. The T-shirt is one of the few things the abbot allowed me to keep when I came here, since we all need at least one or two sets of work clothes, but my body has changed enough over the last four years that it barely fits anymore. I might as well be wearing no shirt at all.
“I. Hi.” Elijah blinks and looks up at my face. “Jamie is almost here. I thought I’d let you know.”
I set down the box and rub at the back of my neck, noticing I’m all sweaty too. Great. Like Elijah really needed any more reminders that the svelte, hyper-groomed city boy he used to love is now a pious Neanderthal.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll clean up real fast and meet you near the parking lot, if you’d like?”
Elijah nods quickly and leaves without another word. With a sigh, I finish printing postage for the invitations, set the box on the rack of outgoing mail, and leave for my cell. So I can get ready to meet Jamie.
Yay.
* * *
The sun cameout with a vengeance after the rain stopped, and so the parking lot is a furnace of Kansas-grade humidity as Elijah and I watch Jamie approach in his Jeep Rubicon. There is a bike rack mounted over the spare tire on the back. A bike rack meant for two bikes.
Elijah had never even said the wordbicycleto me when we were dating, and now he’s engaged to a man with a bike rack that can hold two bikes.
Jamie gets out of the Jeep with an easy hop and then strides toward us with a smile on his face. He’s white, with sun-tanned skin and tousled hair in every shade of blond imaginable. He has a friendly smile, glasses, and slightly sticky-outy ears. Magazine-ready muscles swell under his fitted polo and shorts. He looks like he owns a kayak. He looks like he helps little old ladies cross the road.
I am trying very hard not to hate him.
He greets Elijah with a kiss to the cheek, and Elijah gives him a slow, warm smile as he pulls way. “Hey,” he murmurs to Jamie in a low voice. “I’ve missed you.”
Cells die, my blood thins. It would be easier to suck out my own bone marrow with a green Starbucks straw than to hear those three words spoken in that voice to someone else.
Jamie smiles back at Elijah, all Boy Scout-y goodness, and squeezes his fiancé’s hand. Then he turns to me. “You must be Brother Patrick,” he says, beaming. “It’s wonderful to meet you. Thank you for letting me come.”
It would be unkind to point out that hospitality has been our Benedictine bag for a millennium and a half and that I hardly have a choice in letting visitors visit, so I force out a smile. “Happy to have you here. Welcome to Mount Sergius.”
I extend a hand for a welcoming handshake that is all about welcoming Jamie and not at all about getting him to let go of Elijah’s hand. And I’m not at all irritated when the handshake is steady and strong. Or when he goes right back to holding his fiancé’s hand after.
“Is this okay?” Jamie asks Elijah quietly, looking down at their linked hands. “While we’re on the grounds?”
My reflexive dislike vanishes in the face of a reality I shared with him before monkhood—which is that safety is contingent on space, on who is in that space, and even though I am wearing the robes of the god-man who chose people from the margins to share his heart, I know that his spaces and believers have often been the least safe of all.
“You’ll be with only me until we get to the taproom,” I assure him. “And the brothers who are meeting us there are my friends and I...” I am out of practice with how to word such things. “I trust them,” I finish.
Jamie nods, his well-muscled shoulders dropping a little from around his ears.
“Shall we start?” I ask, and then when Jamie and Elijah both look at each other—that casual checking-in glance that couples have—I slide my gaze up to the hill and breathe out a silent prayer for strength.
It’s going to be a long evening.
* * *
Jamie isas friendly as his smile and glasses make him appear, and at least two times as wholesome. It turns out he doesn’t run an eighth-grade orchestra—he’s a librarian who focuses on senior outreach. He teaches Sunday school at an Episcopalian church and has dinner with his mom and dad every week. His hobbies are biking, baking, and camping, and the last book he read wasThe Thursday Murder Club,which he’s happy to mail to me at any time!
As we make our way through the brewery tour and the bottling room, I keep glancing over at Elijah, feeling like I missed something crucial in all the years I’ve been around him. I’d never known him to camp or care about baking; he liked weird, experimental fiction, not cozy mysteries; and as far as the wholesomeness went, well...
The wholesomeness was new too.
