Page 8 of Saint
The effect is the same.
He slumps back, as if all the fight has suddenly left him. “I think I had to tell you in person because otherwise I couldn’t have been sure,” he says quietly. “I needed to see that you were really here forever. I needed to come to terms with the fact that I am never going to know why.”
I remember that night again—that window bled utterly dry of stars and moonlight. The clamminess of the newly sealed hardwoods and the flash of my phone in the dark.
Why.
Why leave a life as a millionaire? Why leave a perfect boyfriend?
Why leave family and a cute, derelict farmhouse and sex—God, why give up sex?
Because if I hadn’t, that darkness spilling in through my farmhouse window would have taken me. I’dwantedit to take me. I was ready for it to take me.
And somehow I managed to crawl my way here instead, gasping like a drowning man who’d just clawed his way to shore. I managed to save my own life—or I managed to let God save my life.
Either way, that was the cost of surviving. My old life.
Him.
Elijah scrubs his hands over his head, his fingertips sinking into the tight curls for a moment. It’s longer now; he used to wear his hair short, with crisp, immaculate edges. Another change I wasn’t there to see.
I wasn’t sitting on the couch with him when he rubbed his face and mused about growing a beard; I wasn’t poking him out of the way with my toothbrush while he faced the mirror, posing this way and that to imagine longer hair. I wasn’t there in bed with him at night, my legs tangled with his, while he complained about his job or feeling bored with his work, I wasn’t there when he wrote his first article or when he submitted a portfolio toMode.
I wasn’t there, because I was here. Praying and chopping wood.
I wasn’t there, and this Jamie person was.
Elijah stands up, facing away from me for a moment, before he turns back. The sun abruptly shafts through a break in the clouds and drives back the pre-rain murk in the cloister, illuminating Elijah in a haze of gold.
If I were to make a stained-glass window displaying an image of God’s creativity and capacity for beauty, it would be this. It would be Elijah with an unshaven face and in those shorts, it would be his eyes in that dark gold-brown hue, it would be his mouth, that jaw, that throat. It would be a saint in low-top sneakers with a halo of Kansas sunshine around his head.
He pulls his lower lip between his teeth for just an instant before releasing it, and then he straightens up, looking at me with an expression that defies interpretation. Only his eyes seem beyond his usual control, blazing with a heat that might be fury or grief, I can’t tell.
“I loved you for a long time after you left,” he says. “I thought you should know that.”
He doesn’t have to say the next part, because I already know; I already know he doesn’t love me anymore.
And with a small nod, he turns and walks out of the cloister, the first spots of rain blooming on his shirt and his head bowed, as if in prayer.
5
from the notebook of Elijah Iverson
Shoulders.
That was my first thought when I saw him.
The kind of shoulders that could blot out the sun, shoulders which tested the seams of his monk habit. (Which is a garment designed on purpose to be loose and shapeless, so that’s...something.)
Four years of changes, and it was his shoulders I noticed first. But there were other changes too. A thick scruff on his striking jaw, calluses on his big hands. And even though those green eyes still made my heart speed, they no longer glittered with mischief and boyish joy, but something...I don’t know, solemn feels like the wrong word. Secret, maybe.
And thequietof him, quiet like I’d never seen from Aiden Bell. He listened to every word I spoke as if I were uttering a prophecy, and when he did look at me and not at his hands, his gaze was so intenselypresent. Like all of him was there with me,so very there, like he’d existed his entire life just to look at me for thirty minutes in a cloister.
That part...itislike the old Aiden, and yet it isn’t, not with the quiet thrown in along with it.
Why can’t I stop thinking about how quiet he was?
Why can’t I stop thinking about his shoulders?
