Page 6 of Saint
I, of course, still know the truth about those hands, about the man they belong to. I know that under all that poise and coolness is a searing, trembling heat.
Am I being punished for my dream? Am I being tempted as some kind of test?
How can he behere?Now?When it’s been nearly five years since I left him standing in a gravel driveway with a crumpled tie in one hand and the key to my house in the other?
“Aiden,” Elijah says again, and then he frowns a little. “No, sorry. Brother Patrick now. Right?”
I make some stupid gesture that’s like half nod and then half wave of my hand, trying to indicate that it’s okay, that I go by both. My religious name is like a spiritual robe—I’ve put it on to wear for the rest of my life, but I’ve put it on over the top of everything else. I am still Aiden Bell underneath it. Even when I don’t want to be.
I force myself to step forward, to come to the bench and sit at the very end, like I would with any other visitor. Although no other visitor would have my flesh straining against the metal currently caging my sex.
How funny to think this cage began as something playful and sexy—chastity askink, chastity forfun—and for the past four years, I’ve worn it to suppress the very urges that inspired us to buy it in the first place. Although sometimes, in the deepest reaches of night, I wonder if I wore the cage so much in those early days because it reminded me of him. Because it felt like him touching my body, even if it was by proxy of a toy.
Elijah looks over at me. “They said you weren’t speaking today.”
I nod, and he squares his shoulders, hands still cradled in his lap.
“Okay,” he says. “Well, I suppose I can still have this conversation. It’ll just be shorter than I’d imagined.”
It’s been years coming, and yet the misery that follows the wordconversationis a punishment on par with any hair shirt. A conversation that I deserve, given the way things ended.
A flash of memory: me, nearly five years ago, sitting against the wall of my living room and staring out into the inky country night beyond the window. There had been no stars that night, and no moon. Only a darkness like a palpable thing—like oil, spilling in through the window, spilling past my bare feet and under my pajama-clad ass.
Pouring down my throat.
The next morning I’d gotten in my truck and driven here for the very first time.
I realize that Elijah still hasn’t spoken, he still hasn’t started his conversation, which no doubt will be exactly the reckoning I dread—and have earned for myself. I broke up with him after a year of dizzying happiness, not by sitting down and talking like a rational person, but by joining a monastery.
I look over at him and find him watching me, but this time it’s sans eyebrow. He’s watching me with parted lips, like a man stunned, and then he gives a hard swallow, which has the knot of his Adam’s apple moving up and then back down.
“You’ve changed,” he says. And then his eyes trail down from my face to the place where my shoulders test even the generous seams of my black Benedictine habit. “A lot,” he adds, in an unreadable voice.
I try to curl my shoulders in, looking down at my lap. I was vain in my former life, and that vanity still occasionally pushes its way to the surface. Like right now, when I’m remembering how I used to be a lithe Peter Pan type, slick and groomed and lean from a life that burned candles at both ends, and sometimes in the middle too.
And now I’m Brother Lumberjack. Who has to have his robes custom-tailored and who has cooked his fair skin under the sun so long that he has fine lines coming from his eyes and freckles spattering his face. And who currently has his cock in a cage because he can’t stop dreaming about his ex-boyfriend.
Not that anyone else knows that last part.
So of course Elijah is startled by my appearance, of course he’s shocked. I used to look fantastic, and now I look like I live with bears. Mean ones.
I keep my eyes on my hands where they curl around the papers the abbot gave me. I don’t want to see Elijah’s face as he processes how I look now, which is a silly vanity, I know, I know, but I can’t help it. A weak part of me wants him to think I’m handsome, because he is still so gorgeous, still so breathtakingly gorgeous.
“I assume Sean told you about the farmhouse,” he says after a moment.
I nod, my head down, my body rippling with awareness as he shifts, pulling one knee up onto the bench so he can turn toward me. I allow myself one look at his legs—shorts pulled taut over strong thighs, calves dusted lightly with hair, those well-formed ankles so taunting their nakedness—before I look back to my lap.
I remember what it felt like to trail my lips down his shins and up the backs of his calves. I remember kissing the firm knobs of his ankles on my way down to suck his toes. I remember those thighs pressed to the back of my own as he took his pleasure inside me.
And now we’re sitting on a bench, as far apart as possible, while the wind tugs at the hem of my monk habit and flutters the edges of the papers that could take me all the way across the world.
“I couldn’t keep it,” Elijah explains. “I’m not cut out for cows and fences.”
I nod again. He’d sold it right before I’d taken my simple vows, a year or so after I’d left. Sean had come to tell me, and that afternoon, I’d gone down to the creek and chopped wood until my hands were splintered and raw and I could barely breathe. And then, finally spent, I’d sunk to my knees and sobbed until it was time for vespers.
It made sense, of course—I’d known when I’d left it to him that he would probably sell it. Renovating the farmhouse had been my dream, not his, and his job was in the city, planning events for corporations and nonprofits at one of Kansas City’s biggest event venues. Commuting practically to Lawrence and back would be a chore, even if he had wanted the farmhouse to begin with.
But the sale of it had felt so final. Its own kind of vow.
