Page 39 of Saint
“Both.”
I step closer and then stop myself. I don’t know what I’m doing or what I even want. I watched him make out with his fiancé in the parking lot last night; I listened to him jerk off thinking of that same fiancé. This is a man who loves someone else, and who emphatically does not love me anymore.
His face is still wet as he looks back to me with his brows drawn together and up into his forehead. “I think I just wanted to understand,” he says, and it sounds like he’s pleading something, like he’s admitting something. “Can you blame me for that? Can anyone?”
“You wanted to understand why I left,” I say over the drumming of the rain.
“I thought if I saw what you left mefor—if I stayed here and found whatever it was that drew you here in the first place, then I’d be able to leave you alone in my mind. I’d be able to forget you.”
My heart skips and stutters, feeling both too big and too small for my chest all at the same time. “Leave me alone in your mind?” I whisper. It’s too much to hope for—it’s too much to hope he means somethinggood, something fond, when he says things like that. I am Flamin’ Hot Aiden after all, hardly worth brooding over, hardly worth remembering except for all the times I made everyone else’s lives harder.
He looks at me like I’m being intentionally obtuse. “Don’t.”
“I’m not.”
“Youare. Stop it.”
The rain drones on, a relentless tapping on the roof, and then thunder rolls through the room.
“Did you find what you were looking for, at least?” I ask. I don’t know if he can ever understand why I chose an abbey to run to if he doesn’t know why I was running in the first place, but I’m curious to hear what he thinks.
“No,” he says. And then he closes his eyes. “And yes.”
“What does that mean?”
He opens his eyes. Summer in Kansas is never cold, but itfeelscold compared to the simmering frustration in his amber gaze right now.
“At first I didn’t understand it. At all. It’s everything you used to hate, Aiden, like seriously everything. Waking up early, doing the same thing every day, no travel, no fun, no sex.Praying.” He starts pacing again. “I kept thinkinghow was this a better choice than me?How? Was I that bad of a boyfriend? Was our fight that night so bad that you gave up on living a real life entirely?”
My rain-wet T-shirt is clingy and clammy, and I pluck at it as I say, “Thisisa real life, Elijah. And the fight we had before I came—”Had nothing to do with me coming here, I’m about to say, but Elijah keeps going as if I haven’t spoken.
“And I was pissed. And hurt. And then pissed all over again, because I’m getting married this year, and I shouldn’t give a shit about why my ex-boyfriend became a monk. And I—” His thumb is rubbing against his fingers again. “After we fought here in the hermitage, I was going to find you and tell you that I was leaving the abbey early, that there was nothing here for me to understand. That you’d deprived yourself of everything for nothing. But when I found you to tell you all that, you were sitting in the cloister, and then—”
He gives me an agonized look.
“The fireflies,” I say. “That was the night with the fireflies.”
“I thought you’d chosen the Church over me, but you didn’t, did you?” he asks in a jagged voice. “You choseGodover me, and somehow that’s worse than anything else I’d ever thought of, because I can’t compete with God, Aiden.” He gives a short laugh which sounds like it’s been punched out of him. “I can’t compete with fireflies in the cloister.”
I should say a million things right now. I should say that it doesn’t matter—that I chose God in spite of Elijah, nottospite him. I should say that Elijah doesn’t need to compete with anything or anyone ever again, because I’ve taken vows and he’s engaged, and this is between more people than just the two of us now.
I should tell him that I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused and ask him how I can make sure I don’t cause him any more.
But I don’t. I don’t say any of those things because rain has gathered in the small dent above his upper lip, making a little dish out of his philtrum, and suddenly nothing else matters, nothing at all.
I take a step closer to him, my eyes on his mouth.
“Aiden,” he says hoarsely.
I catch a glimpse of gold-brown eyes, his agitated hands, and then he’s against me, and I’m against him, our wet clothes pressed between us and his mouth hot on mine. I’d forgotten what a kiss was, what it felt like, what it meant to have someone taste my hunger and lick the urgency right off my lips. The shock of it nearly sends me to my knees.
His lips are warm, firm, barely yielding to the hard kiss I’m giving him as he kisses me back just as rough, just as fiercely. But I’m the one to demand entrance, to slot my lips against his and stroke against the seam of his mouth with my tongue until he lets me inside.
And then—oh.Andthen.
His tongue is hot, strong, slick, and the moment I feel it, all control leaves me. I’m hungry for that tongue against mine, hungry for it on my neck and in my navel and on the secret places of my body, and I have the sudden, desperate fear that I’ll never be close enough to him to satisfy this need, that there’s no kiss deep enough to fix me and I’ll be splitting, burning, yawning open with hunger until I die.
I’m walking him back, I’mpushinghim back, and then he’s against the wall, shoving his hands up my wet T-shirt as my hands find his face and hold him still for my kiss.
