Page 82 of Saint
The lovely thingabout staying in a Trappist monastery is that no matter how early you leave, the monks are usually awake to see you off, and thedoublelovely thing about Trappists is that the Grand Silence of the morning is totally sacred, so there are no Midwestern Goodbyes. Just fond handshakes and hugs and several bottles of beer for the road, and then Brother Luc is driving us to the train station at Cavaillon, where we’ll begin our patchwork trip to London, and then on to Dublin, where we’ll drive a rented car to the west coast and St. Columba’s.
The breaking dawn is cheerful and sweet-smelling, but I’m too preoccupied with Father Jordan’s words to enjoy my last glimpses of the hills and the valley carpeted with freshly shorn lavender. It’s only once we’re out of the valley that I realize what I’ve done, and I twist around in the back seat to look, but it’s too late. The place where Elijah and I spent afternoons in a dreamy, lust-sweet haze is already behind me. The place where prayer and sex scented the air in equal measure, where loving God and Elijah both didn’t feel like a betrayal of either, is falling farther and farther away, and now it’s on to the last stop. On to Ireland.
* * *
Somewhere near Lyon,I spill a giant coffee all over my scapular and habit, and because I’d bought myself a big, sweet coffee-milkshake-thing instead of a grown-up coffee, there’s no doubt that very soon I will be a sticky monk, and not in a kinky way. I find my suitcase and change in the small, swaying bathroom of the train, my shoulders bumping noisily against the walls, and then I emerge in the one pair of street clothes I brought.
Elijah raises his eyebrows. “Khakis and a button-down? For me? Be still my heart.”
“Very funny,” I say. “This outfit was on top in the suitcase and the bathroom was too small for me to open everything up to find a new robe.” I fit my bulk between the table and the seat and sit down across from him.
He looks out the window, his brows still digging into his forehead, and I wonder if he’s trying to spy one of the little villages which are tucked into the hills here, but then I realize he’s looking at our reflection in the window. The reflection where we’re sitting together and I’m not in a monk’s habit and we could just be any two men. We could be anyone.
“What if...” I say, looking at him in the reflection, and a slow, excited smile breaks across his face.
“Yes,” he says. “What if.”
* * *
It’sevening when we get to London, but London evenings have long legs in the summer, and so there’s still light kissing the tops of the buildings when Elijah and I walk hand in hand into the Tate Modern. We show the tickets we bought earlier during our train ride to the employees at the stiles, and then we’re inside the belly of the forbidding modern art beast. There’s a clump of young people near the entrance, all dressed in the painfully curated way which comes with trying to broadcastthis is mewith clothes and accessories. Two of them—both young men—are making out against the wall while the group deliberates over their next move.
It makes me feel nostalgic for those days, when all that mattered was the next spot you were going to, the next drink you were getting, the next mouth you could kiss. But it also reminds me that I’m here,now, with the man I love in a big foreign city and I’m not wearing monk robes and we are on a date. Unbelievably, impossibly, on a date.
I lace my fingers through Elijah’s and squeeze.
“So,” he says as we walk into the big central hall of the museum. “What would you like to see while we’re here? Dali? Rothko? Warhol?”
“I don’t care,” I say honestly, looking at him. “I just want to be with you.”
In the strange, shadowy light of the Turbine Hall, Elijah looks back at me, his eyes dark and glimmering with the reflection of the narrow, artificial lights of the space. There’s something almost pained to the angle of his eyebrows, to the notch that’s carved itself between them, and instinctively I reach out to rub at that notch with my thumb.
“Don’t look so sad,” I whisper, my heart twisting. “I’ll pretend really hard to like Rothko, I promise.”
He lets me rub at the space between his brows right there in the middle of the museum. It’s so much like how it used to be before I became a monk, when the city was ours, when we went to every exhibition and opening and reading because Elijah wanted to and because he was too handsome for me to refuse even though I don’t understand any art that’s not a bowl of fruit.
“I’m not sad,” Elijah says finally, looking at me from underneath my hand. “How can I be sad when you’re saying shit like that?”
Satisfied that the line between his brows is erased, I drop my hand and find his again. I bring it to my mouth and kiss his knuckles. Softly.
In the light of the hall, every rise and hollow of his perfect face is sketched in light and shadow. Light at the ridge of his nose and the square of his jaw, light along his cheeks and touching the sharp peaks and edges of his mouth. Shadows in the faint, stubble-covered cleft of his chin and under his eyelashes.
He shivers as I kiss his knuckles, and then he says after I finish, “I think this might be my favoritewhat ifgame.”
I smile at him, but maybe it’s my turn to look sad now, because thiswhat ifgame is one of the simplest we’ve ever played, it’s the closest to not a game at all.
What if we were together?
Lovers, boyfriends, partners, spouses—we didn’t specify, and I’m glad, because the way Elijah handled getting the Oyster cards for the Tube while I held his iced coffee and satchel felt very spouse-y, and yet the way he preened a little after I glared and practically snarled at the docent just inside the door who was definitely flirting with him? That felt very new boyfriend-y.
Almost as if we can have a taste of our entire past and our entire future here in this one night. Newness and oldness both, the thrill of the chase and the deep passion for a heart that I’ve felt beat against my own for months and months.
We are husbands as I hold his things while he takes pictures with his phone; we are brand new lovers as I fumble for the right responses to the paintings and sculptures so he’ll think I’m sophisticated and cerebral; and when we pass through an empty exhibit room with a convenient half-wall and I push him into the corner and shove my tongue in his mouth, then we are just Aiden and Elijah.
I do the kissing the rest of the night, actually. On the rooftop bar at the Tate, in another rooftop bar Elijah finds near the Globe, against the railing of the Millennium Bridge as the Thames washes quietly below us. Every chance I get, I press my mouth to his and taste inside, and he lets me, he slides his hands into the cheap fabric of my button-down and holds me close as I nibble gently at his mouth, as I kiss his upper lip and then his lower, and then slowly search out every last secret in between.
We’re kissing on the bridge, when I think, dizzily,this is what we could’ve had.If I hadn’t left, if I’d found some other way to slay my demons. If I’d stayed. In that alternate timeline, we might be kissing on this very same bridge, listening to this very same city churn indifferently around us. We might be here as boyfriends still or even as husbands, and I would be Elijah’s to kiss and use as an iced coffee holder whenever he wanted. Any time. All the time. Always.
My feet are planted on the outside of Elijah’s, my hands braced on the railing on either side of him, and when I pull back a little to catch my breath and check that we’re safe, I’m close enough to feel him panting too. To see the pupils of his dark whiskey eyes blown wide with lust, to see how he searches my face like he wants to commit every eyelash to memory.
