Page 71 of Saint
The narrow bed is not made for two people, and it’s definitely not made for a giant lumberjack-y monk straddling someone, but I manage somehow, my knees on either side of his hips and one hand braced against the wall as I grip myself and start working my dick again. Elijah watches me with frank interest, his hands sanding up my hair-dusted thighs and back down again as I rub myself in front of him.
“I might have to spend the night more often,” he murmurs, eyes on my erection. “Fuck, Aiden. That’s it. Show me how you come, I want to see it. Show me show me—”
My balls draw up tight, my stomach clenches, and with a grunt, the climax erupts out of me with thick ropes of release all over his own erection and his stomach.
He tenses as he watches it, his jaw tight and his mouth open, his eyes darting everywhere like he doesn’t want to miss a second of it, not my face, not my body, not the release itself painting him all over. And it’s not until I’m totally finished that he growls and finds my hand, putting it back on his shaft, which is now slick with my seed.
“Finish what you started,” he says, and I do, I fist him and stroke, and his hips try in vain to fuck up into my touch, but my bulk holds him down, and all of him is tense, damp, straining, and with an abrupt inhale and his eyes on mine in the moonlight, he spills all over my hand, all over my fingers and everywhere until we’re coated in each other, until everything is shivering, slippery relief.
He reaches up, and I duck my head down, allowing him to curl his fingers around the back of my neck and pull me down for a long, searching kiss. His lips are so warm and so firm, and I hate that they’re not mine to kiss always, I hate that we’re on borrowed time.
I hate that the time has to be borrowed at all, but it does, I know it does.
I can’t live without prayers and ordered days and quiet cloisters. I know because I tried once.
I ended up on my farmhouse floor.
“Just a minute,” I whisper into his kiss and then climb off the bed. One furtive dart into the bathroom later, and I’m back with some damp washcloths to clean us off. And then after we’re finished, I sit on the edge of the bed and cradle his hand in my lap.
“I wish I could lie down here with you,” I say, running my fingers along his palm.
He makes a little purring noise and then adjusts himself so that his arm is all the way in my lap, so I can run my fingertips over it as well. He always did love to be petted after sex.
“We could fit,” he says, sounding drowsy.
“I don’t think so. You’d have to lie down on top of me.”
“No complaints here.”
I keep tickle-stroking his arm, not sure what the protocol is for a monk scheduling a hookup. “Tomorrow afternoon, after I’m done helping with the lavender harvest...”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes.”
38
“So explain celibacy to me then,”Elijah says.
We’re on a hike to find the final spring that inspired the location and the name of the abbey, and even though my muscles ache from another long day helping with the lavender, and even though my stomach is growling and my uncaged cock is fussing at me for attention, I can’t remember being this happy in...well, in a very long time. I’ve been content at Mount Sergius, I’ve been at peace, and I’ve felt joy that cleaves me right down to the bone, but just the simple happiness of hard work and a sunny day and a hot guy?
It’s been so long that it feels brand new to me. A new feeling that’s been invented just now in these stony hills under this hot Mediterranean sun.
“Well,” I say as we pass through the narrow cleft of rock that’s supposed to lead to the spring, “when a man and God love each other very much...”
“Ha,” Elijah says dryly. “Ha ha.”
“There’s not much to explain,” I tell him. “It’s exactly what it seems like. When you become a priest or a monastic, you give yourself to God. All of yourself, including your body and bodily desires.”
“But why?” Elijah asks, stopping to look at me. “Why do you have to give up sex to devote your life to God?”
“The Church says that—”
“I can Google what the Church says,” Elijah replies impatiently. “I want to know whyyouagreed to do it. Why you did it until we came here. What value you found in it.”
This stops me. Not because I haven’t thought about it, but because I’ve never had to talk about it with a non-monastic before. The only person I really could talk about it with is my older brother Tyler, but since he lives on the East Coast, we generally only talk over the phone, and talking about celibacy while I’m on the abbey phone in the common room is the literal last thing I want to do.
And anyway, Tyler Bell isn’t exactly a role model for well-executed celibacy.
I take a minute, turning Elijah’s words over in my mind. “I think,” I say, “when it’s done right, it’s a way to be present for other people in a really full way. I’ve heard some people talk about it like it sublimates sexual energy into emotional and social energy, and others like it fosters relationships by ensuring that sex can’t ever be a factor. But for me, it was more about focus. I spent my entire adult life chasing sex, loving sex, having it whenever I could, and so really for the first time, I was putting all of my energy into the parts of life that weren’t about sex. It was less about what my body was doing than where my mind was. Not in denial of my body, but fully in it, fully participatingwithit to turn my entire being towards loving God and his creations.”
