Saint

an m/m standalone in the Priest series

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The fountain in the middle of the cloister spills happily under the encroaching clouds, although it’s not as lovely as the sound of my creek down by the hermitage.  

It’s not as lovely as the sound of my name in Elijah’s low, throaty voice.

I manage to drag in a breath, and another, and then another.  It’s difficult with him in front of me, with those dark eyes watching me, but somehow my body remembers.  It remembers how to inhale and exhale, and to think that there was a time when I could nap naked around this man, when I could prop my feet in his lap and fuss for a foot massage, when I could flick cereal at him across the table because he wasn’t paying enough attention to me . . . 

The thought that there was ever a time when I wasn’t frozen and shell-shocked just to be looking at him is an impossible one.

He doesn’t stand, but he slowly straightens up, his arm coming off the back of the bench and his hands lacing together in his lap.  The fast-chasing clouds send shadows across the warm brown skin of his face and hands, briefly darkening his eyes before the sun returns again, brighter than before.

So much about him is different from when I last saw him.  His face is leaner, setting off those sky-high cheekbones, and now there’s mouthwatering stubble dark against his jaw, a jaw which used to be zealously clean-shaven.  And that’s not even to mention what he’s wearing: a cream-colored Henley, pale blue shorts, and low-top sneakers.  Years ago, he wouldn’t have even gone out for condoms without wearing at least two dry-clean-only items of clothing, and now he’s here looking like he just got back from a vacation.  A good one.  To Disney or wine country or something.

Some things haven’t changed, however.  That subtly cleft chin, that perfectly arched eyebrow as he observes me, those whiskey-colored eyes glittering from underneath thick lashes.  A mouth so perfectly sculpted in the geometry of its upper peaks and the curve of the lower lip that it’s worthy of worship.  

The studied coolness of his expression.  

The deliberate grace of his self-possession.

It might be that alone—the chilly, handsome gravity of him—that sends blood futilely rushing to my cock, but there is also the rest of him to contend with.  Like the strangely erotic sight of his ankles above the low collars of his shoes.  The stillness of those elegant hands in his lap.

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 be here?  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 as kink, chastity for fun—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 word conversation is 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.

“It was the first time I understood the need to leave the past behind so thoroughly that I never had to think about it again,” he says. “I would have paid someone to buy that thing, just so I wouldn’t have to look at that goddamn key on my key ring anymore.”

Of course, I know that feeling well too.  But in my case, I’d had to leave the past so that I could have a future—any future—at all. 

“I’m a writer now,” Elijah says abruptly as the clouds cover the sun again.  Shadows fall everywhere in the cloister.  “Did Sean tell you?”

I shake my head.  He hadn’t told me.  And maybe I wouldn’t have believed him if he had, because Elijah had never been the “work in solitude with a big mug of tea” kind of guy.  He was more like the “coolly charming his way through an art gallery event with a glass of wine” kind of guy.  And of all the things I fucked up between us, perhaps this is the best evidence of my profound carelessness with the people closest to me: I’d never had any idea that he actually wanted to be a writer.  None at all.

“I’m a staff writer for Mode.”

I know the surprise shows on my face, because he makes a dismissive noise.

“It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” he says, although working for the bestselling men’s magazine in the country sounds fairly glamorous to me.  “There’s a lot of interviewing minor celebrities.  A lot of ‘These Ten Belts Will Make Any Man a Man of Style.’  That kind of thing.”

I’m still very impressed.  I swivel my head so he can see that, my pleasure for him and my pride in him.  There’s a lacerating sort of satisfaction in knowing that he’s thriving now, without me.  That I was right to leave him, to extract myself from his life.

Everyone really is better off with me here at Mount Sergius.  

“Aiden,” Elijah says.  “I didn’t actually come here to talk about the house or Mode.”

I look at my own hands again.  Here it comes, I think to myself.  Here comes the excoriation I deserve, the accountability he’s allowed to demand from me.  This is its own liturgy—the liturgy of closure after heartbreak, a reconciliation not of God to human, but of man to man—and I will pray this liturgy with him.  I will bow my head and nod along.

I wouldn’t have been able to do that four years ago.  I suppose that means this monk thing is working.

But instead of dropping into the long litany of ways I fucked up, Elijah says, in a voice that’s once again cool and inscrutable:

“I’m getting married.  Soon.”

I suck in a breath—or at least I try to.  My ribs move but nothing else seems to work the way it should.  Not my throat or my lungs, not my diaphragm, and not my heart, which is stuttering in an abnormal tattoo.  A stupid knot cinches my throat shut, and it aches, it aches, like all the misery flooding through me is snagging on one spot, the spot where voice and breath meet.

Married.

Elijah Iverson, the love of my life, the adoration of my God-pledged soul, married to someone else.

A pole-axe to the head would have hurt less.

“His name is Jamie,” Elijah continues in that same voice.  “We met a couple years ago at a gallery exhibition.  He proposed last year, and I said yes.”

I nod.  

I nod and I nod and I nod, because what else can I do?  I cannot speak.  I cannot speak.  

Even if I could force words past the balled clench in my throat, I’m silent today.  I’ve already promised all my words to God, and I’ve worked too hard to learn how to keep promises to break one now.  

Even so, I feel the words coming, piling on my tongue, crowding against my lips.  I press my mouth together; I turn away.  I squeeze my eyes shut and fight, fight, fight.  I won’t speak them, I won’t utter a thing.  I owe God and Elijah that much at least—my silence and my acceptance.

“I didn’t think I needed to—”  Elijah pauses, as if searching for the right words.  “Well, the longer I thought about it, the more it didn’t feel like something I could have Sean tell you.  And I—ah—fuck, Aiden, will you look at me?”

For the first time, the composed calm of his voice falters, and his words are unsteady and rough.

I look at him.  He is so beautiful, and even now, even with everything, my cock tries to swell at the sight of the muscles bunched and tense under his thin shirt, at the tempting contours of his thighs.  At the bulge in his shorts I’d have to be dead not to be aware of.

He stares at me with dark amber eyes, his mouth set, his stubbled jaw tight with some emotion I can’t name.  “You left,” he says in a thick, angry voice.  

It’s inevitable—it’s even what I expected when I first sat down on this bench—but I still flinch at the words.  At the accusation buried inside them.

“You left me.  For this,” he says.  “What should I have done, Aiden?  Stayed frozen in time, like a fly in amber for you?  Refused to move on or live again?”

I shake my head.  No.  No, of course not.  I left him to become a monk, I left him to marry my god, to give my heart to my god, to give my body to my god, and so I cannot be jealous of this Jamie now, not when I picked another lover first.  That the lover was Jesus Christ seems immaterial to the situation.  

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’d wanted it 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 to Mode.

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.

Coming September 7th! Preorder Saint now!

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