Page 5 of Saint
I don’t deserve this gift.
“I am so excited for you,” Brother Connor says, touching my hand where it rests on the St. Columba paperwork. “But I also know what we’re discussing. If you take this trip and ultimately decide to join a new order...”
The flinch at the realization is instinctive. If I join a new order, then I will never see Brother Connor again after I leave. Or Abbot Jerome or Brothers Thomas, Titus, and Andrew. I will never see my woods again or my troublesome creek.
We will write emails to each other, I’m sure of it, but we will no longer sing together or pray together or walk together under the trees. These men have become my family, and I would have to leave them behind. And for what? For some formless need I can barely express even to myself?
“Now, St. Columba’s in particular is a hard life,” the abbot begins, leaning back in his chair. “But their prior is looking for—well, he used the wordsturdy—and there’s no one sturdier than my Brother Lumberjack. Ah, yes, Brother Thomas, what is it?”
I turn to see Brother Thomas and Brother Titus crowding at the door, their shoulders heaving like they sprinted into the building.
“Brother Patrick has a visitor,” Brother Titus pants. “In the south cloister. Waiting.”
“I see the Lord is using his favorite tool to teach today—interruptions,” says the abbot dryly. “Very well, then. I assume you informed this visitor that Brother Patrick will be silent today?”
“We did,” Brother Thomas pipes up. “He said that’s okay.”
He.
I stand, my interest piqued. There’s only fourhes who would visit me at present—my three brothers and my father. I wonder if Sean has brought a baby from his growing baby pile for me to hold while he updates me on the family gossip. My ordinary, human heart warms at the thought.
“Brother Patrick,” the abbot says before I leave, “you have time to decide about the trip and which monasteries you’d like to visit. Three weeks before we’d have to finalize arrangements. And Brother Connor and I will be here any time you’d like to talk about it.”
I give both men a grateful nod, hoping they can see my humble thanks in my body since I cannot express it in words. And holding the information about the Trappist monasteries tight, I follow Brother Titus and Brother Thomas out of the office building and through the warren of covered walkways that leads to the south cloister, where my visitor awaits.
The young monks hover at the entryway into the cloistered garden, curious, and I can’t blame them. Not much happens here that’s worthy of remarking upon, and sometimes visitors turn out to be fairly interesting people—prominent Catholics or artists or visitors from other countries. But they’re going to be disappointed when they realize it’s just an asshole named Sean.
Except I finally see who is waiting for me on the other side of the fountain, and it’snotSean. It’s not any of my brothers, and it’s not my father.
It’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, with his arm slung along the back of the bench, and his long legs sprawled everywhere, like a bored king on his throne. His eyebrow is lifted ever so slightly, as if I’m the riddle here, as if I’m the anomaly in an otherwise seamlessly ordered world.
I forget how to breathe.
I forget how to think.
“Hello, Aiden,” says Elijah.
4
The fountainin the middle of the cloister spills happily under the encroaching clouds, although it’s not as lovely as the sound of my creek down by the hermitage.
It’s not as lovely as the sound of my name in Elijah’s low, throaty voice.
I manage to drag in a breath, and another, and then another. It’s difficult with him in front of me, with those dark eyes watching me, but somehow my body remembers. It remembers how to inhale and exhale, and to think that there was a time when I could nap naked around this man, when I could prop my feet in his lap and fuss for a foot massage, when I could flick cereal at him across the table because he wasn’t paying enough attention to me...
The thought that there was ever a time when I wasn’t frozen and shell-shocked just to be looking at him is an impossible one.
He doesn’t stand, but he slowly straightens up, his arm coming off the back of the bench and his hands lacing together in his lap. The fast-chasing clouds send shadows across the warm brown skin of his face and hands, briefly darkening his eyes before the sun returns again, brighter than before.
So much about him is different from when I last saw him. His face is leaner, setting off those sky-high cheekbones, and now there’s mouthwatering stubble dark against his jaw, a jaw which used to be zealously clean-shaven. And that’s not even to mention what he’s wearing: a cream-colored Henley, pale blue shorts, and low-top sneakers. Years ago, he wouldn’t have even gone out for condoms without wearing at least two dry-clean-only items of clothing, and now he’s here looking like he just got back from a vacation. A good one. To Disney or wine country or something.
Some things haven’t changed, however. That subtly cleft chin, that perfectly arched eyebrow as he observes me, those whiskey-colored eyes glittering from underneath thick lashes. A mouth so perfectly sculpted in the geometry of its upper peaks and the curve of the lower lip that it’s worthy of worship.
The studied coolness of his expression.
The deliberate grace of his self-possession.
It might be that alone—the chilly, handsome gravity of him—that sends blood futilely rushing to my cock, but there is also the rest of him to contend with. Like the strangely erotic sight of his ankles above the low collars of his shoes. The stillness of those elegant hands in his lap.
