Saint (Priest, #3)

by Sierra Simone

I loved him. I still love him.

There’s no instruction manual for falling in love with your best friend’s little brother. And there’s no manual for falling back in love with him when he’s a monk. There’s only the aching knowledge that you yourself are a kind of momentary prayer, uttered with reverence, spoken softly into the air, and then finished with a gentle and loving selah

It’s been four years and six months of trying to let Elijah Iverson go.

It’s the sound of Brother Patrick’s life, not Aiden Bell’s.

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.

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.

“I love him so much,” I whisper, rain running off my head and down to my lips, where the drops fall along with my words to the mud and grass below. “And it hurts and I want it to stop. Please, Lord. If you love me, make it stop.”

“I’m still in love with him.” He nods as if this doesn’t surprise him. “You loved him deeply when you came here.” “I don’t want to love him.” Brother Connor regards me. “I hope, sincerely, that you do not believe it’s a sin for you to love him. You did not used to.” “It wasn’t a sin for me to love him then, but I can’t help but feel that it is now. I came here to pledge my heart to God and God alone, and so what does it say about me that there is still another object of my devotion? That no matter how much I pray and work, a hunger for someone other than my lord still gnaws at me? I would feel the same way if I were still in love with a woman after four years of being here.” “I think,” Brother Connor says, “that is a very human way of seeing things. If God’s love is boundless, then becoming more Christlike means growing a love that is like Christ’s—without boundary or border. And a boundless love, by definition, would effortlessly encompass many loves, would it not?”

“You’ve made up your mind then. About the trip.” “I have,” I say, and a new energy fills me, something akin to what drove me to Mount Sergius in the first place. It’s something close to hope. “I’m going to go.” Brother Connor touches my arm, gently, fondly. “I’m happy for you, Brother Patrick. My only worry is that you’re going now not to seek but to flee from something. Or someone.” I shake my head. “This is what I’m supposed to do. I know it. I know it like I knew I was supposed to come here almost five years ago.” “Then I am happy for you,” he says softly. “And you are certain?” “I’m certain. I even know the three monasteries I want to visit.” We begin walking to the church, the bells insistent now and comforting in their peals. “Then I suppose we should tell the abbot,” Brother Connor says. “And get you a new passport.”

The thing about falling in love is that by the time you realize it’s happened, it’s already too late. Your boyfriend already has sprinkles for you in the pocket of his Tom Ford suit. You’ve already had bubble-gum kisses on a warm city night. You’ve already let him swallow your heart. But that’s Aiden Bell for you. Or it was.

“Good, good. Now again,” Titus says, like he’s the teacher in a training montage. “Harder this time.” “I’ve heard that before,” I say, before I can stop myself, and both Titus and Thomas blink at me. “Did you just make a joke?” Thomas says, letting go of his handle to press his hands to his face. “Brother Patrick made a joke. Brother Patrick can have fun!”

Because my brother Sean is married to Elijah’s sister, Zenny, and they’re currently producing squishy, dimpled babies at a rate that would make the pope himself shed an approving tear.

Chapter Fifty-Three of St. Benedict’s Rule says that all guests are to be welcomed as Christ himself would be. With the caveat that even Christ would have to endure scratchy bath towels and lukewarm scrambled eggs, I suppose. But I understand the heart of the rule, the idea behind it. Anyone who comes here should be greeted warmly, with trust and kindness. Even if you’ve screwed them in multiple hot tubs and still want to put your tongue in their navel sometimes.

“It’s not awful having you here,” I tell him. (It’s a lie, but it’s the kind of lie I think God will forgive.)

“You’re bringing me another guest right now?” Claudia demands. “Right now? On this day?” “Yes?” I offer hesitantly, and she shakes her head hard enough that her shoulders move too. “No, Brother Patrick, you are not. A water pipe ruptured upstairs and now half my rooms are flooded, and I’ve already had to move eleven Knights of Columbus over to the dormitory. So your guest is going to have to stay in the dormitory too.” AHHHHH, goes my brain. “I…I see” is what I end up saying, in a voice that’s somehow pleading and gruff all at the same time. She narrows her eyes at me and then clearly decides she doesn’t have time for whatever my deal is. She gestures to the check-in desk behind her. “Towels and soap are behind there. Two towels, one bar of soap.” She looks at Elijah. “If we get this mess fixed, you can stay in the guesthouse, but otherwise you’ll be with the monks during your stay. I promise they don’t bite.” “Actually, Brother Patrick used to bite me quite often,” Elijah says with a small smile, and Claudia laughs because she thinks he’s joking. He’s not joking. “You’re funny. Brother Patrick could use a funny friend. Okay, towels, soap, et cetera. Have a nice evening, gentlemen.” And then Claudia is heading back up the stairs, and we’re left on our own to go to the dormitory. Together.

My dormitory is officially packed to the rafters with timeworn Knights of Columbi, and normally I wouldn’t mind at all, except it’s looking more and more like the only empty room left is going to be the one next to mine. Please, God. Please don’t do this to me, don’t test me like this. I’ll fail, and we both know it.

You’re so pretty, he used to tell me, in that same low, appreciative voice. Usually before I was bent over the nearest flat surface. You’re the prettiest man I’ve ever seen.

“I want to see someplace that means something to you,” Elijah says suddenly. “I want to see the place where you wish you could spend all your time.” “Well, then,” I say. “We ought to go to the hermitage.”

“I thought—I just think it’s better if I’m not in the larger world at all,” I try to explain. “I’m not buying a private island to fill with coke mirrors and swimsuit models. I’m not taking anything away from anyone; I’m not in the world making it a worse place.” “Why is that the only option?” Elijah demands. “Why does you being out there mean you’ll make it worse?” “Because that’s what I did!” I answer, louder than I expect. He looks at me, his lips parted like I’ve surprised him into silence. “Because that’s what I did,” I say again, quieter this time. “I came here to learn how to be good. How to be empty of everything but faith and devotion. And when I came here, I gave all my money away—some as a donation to Mount Sergius, but most of it went to nonprofits around the country. So me leaving did concretely make the world a better place because those places all have millions of dollars they wouldn’t otherwise.” “You could have made more better if you’d stayed,” Elijah says. “You could have done more good. Instead of being here, where nothing you do matters outside the abbey walls.” “I should have stayed in the secular world so I could earn more money to eventually donate?” I ask, not bothering to hide my incredulity. “Is that all I’m worth? Earning money?” “You know that’s not what I meant,” Elijah replies. “You know that’s not what this is about.” “Do I?” I fire back, and then immediately regret it. Shame and anger are filling me like wine overfilling a cup, and I feel so...

“This,” he says, gesturing around to the cottage that has held so many of my best and worst moments, “is a waste of privilege. A waste of a life. You have blown a hole in the hearts of everyone who loved you for absolutely fucking nothing, and I hope it was worth it. I hope God was worth it.” And then he pulls open the door to the hermitage and he leaves. I don’t follow.

“Can I sit?” he asks in a low voice. The words are as hard and smooth as pebbles. I have no idea if he’s here to continue our fight or tell me he’s leaving, but it doesn’t matter because I want him to sit. I want him to stay. Even if it’s only to tell me things that will hurt me again. “Yes,” I say, and then I can’t help it, I smile. He looks startled by that smile, his eyebrow lifting and his eyes intense on my mouth as he sits. “What are you thinking about?” he asks. “Nothing,” I say, ducking my head and smiling harder. “Lying is a sin,” Elijah replies. “Or at least that sounds like something I’ve heard before.” It must be the impending firefly show making me giddy because I decide to say it. “I was thinking about how strange it is that I used to lick the sweat off the back of your neck, and now you have to ask if it’s okay to share a bench with me.” It’s dark enough that when I look back over at him, his eyes are nothing but glitter and shine. I have no idea what he’s thinking, but once—just once—I see a muscle jump in his jaw.

“I’m sorry,” he says, lifting his head to look at me. A brow is lifted ever so slightly, but there’s a knot above the bridge of his nose too, as if I’m some kind of puzzle he can’t decipher right now. “You’re sorry?” I repeat, and it occurs to me that I should be the one apologizing—I left him years ago after all, and I was equally culpable for the muscle-memory moment last night and… “For what I said in the hermitage yesterday afternoon,” he clarifies. “I have some complicated feelings about how this kind of life relates to our responsibilities in the world, but I realize now that I hadn’t untangled those from my complicated feelings about you. What I said—the way I said it—I meant it to hurt. And I’m sorry for that. You didn’t deserve that. Not from me.” I huff out a short laugh—barely audible over the patter of the rain. “I think I deserve a lot more than that, Elijah. Especially from you.” He shook his head. “I don’t want it to be that way between us.”

“Jamie is coming to the abbey later today.” I must have heard him wrong. “Sorry, what?” “My fiancé,” Elijah says, and there’s a stubborn set to his mouth now. “He’s a microbrew enthusiast, and when I told him about the beer here, he was really excited, so I invited him to come up this afternoon and spend some time in the taproom. He knows who you are to me, so it’s not a secret or anything.” “Ah,” I say faintly. How did we go from him looking at me like that to Jamie coming here today? “Well, I can be present as little or as much as you’d like while he’s here.” “There’s no need for that,” Elijah says. “I’m perfectly comfortable having you around.” Right. Because I’m not just an ex; I’m a monk ex. I should be the safest ex who ever exed. And I’m definitely not swallowing down acrid thoughts right now at the prospect of meeting Jamie; I am definitely not already prickling with jealousy.

I am trying very hard not to hate him. He greets Elijah with a kiss to the cheek, and Elijah gives him a slow, warm smile as he pulls way. “Hey,” he murmurs to Jamie in a low voice. “I’ve missed you.” Cells die, my blood thins. It would be easier to suck out my own bone marrow with a green Starbucks straw than to hear those three words spoken in that voice to someone else.

As we make our way through the brewery tour and the bottling room, I keep glancing over at Elijah, feeling like I missed something crucial in all the years I’ve been around him. I’d never known him to camp or care about baking; he liked weird, experimental fiction, not cozy mysteries; and as far as the wholesomeness went, well… The wholesomeness was new too. Does Elijah play any what if games with Jamie? Jamie, who is good and earnest and who drinks from his reusable water bottle during the tour like a responsible adult and probably never forgets to wear sunscreen, even in the winter? Does Jamie ever trap Elijah against a kitchen counter and daisy-chain bites around his collarbone? Does Elijah ever text him during the day with instructions for later that night? I don’t know what’s worse: Elijah sharing those kinds of games with Jamie—or them having sweet, vanilla sex with lots of eye contact and cuddling and eight hours of sleep after. Because if they are having sweet, vanilla sex, then maybe that’s what Elijah really wanted all along. Maybe I was some wild oats to sow, or worse—maybe I corrupted him.

A few of the glasses are mine on account of the impromptu drinking game I invented, which is called Drink whenever watching your ex-boyfriend with his fiancé makes you feel sad.

“Ask us anything. As your new best monk friends, we’re going to acquaint you with all things monastic.” Jamie laughs, but Elijah bumps his shoulder, the corner of his mouth tilting up. “It’ll help me with my research, you know,” he says. “Oh, yes,” Brother Titus agrees. “You should help him with his research. Come on, ask us anything! How much we miss Chinese food and pizza⁠—” “How much we miss Netflix⁠—” “And Chiefs games⁠—” “If we wear underwear under our robes⁠—” “Why Brother Patrick won’t show us his tattoo⁠—” I choke on the beer I’m drinking, coughing it down as I shake my head violently. “No. Shh. Stop.” Elijah lifts an eyebrow at me from across the table, his eyes glittering with mischief. “You haven’t shown these gentlemen the masterpiece that is your tattoo?” “This is what I’m saying!” Brother Titus bursts out. “The mystery is more than I can bear!” “It’s from an event in my life that I’m not proud of,” I attempt to explain, and then Jamie—gentle, rosy-cheeked Jamie—says three words I’d hoped to literal God I’d never hear again. “Ohhh,” he says, his eyes round. “Is this about Flamin’ Hot Aiden?” I drop my face in my hands, slumping my shoulders in deep, bodily misery. “I’m sorry,” Jamie whispers, and he does truly sound sorry, the sweet asshole. “Sean had just called you that once at a family dinner⁠—” I groan. Fucking Sean. Of course it would be him. “Okay, well now I have to know,” Brother Crispin asks from the edge of the table. “What is Flamin’ Hot Aiden?” “A ...

“So,” Jamie says as everyone settles back in their seats, “I do have a question actually. How does one become a monk?” I recognize immediately that he’s trying to be polite and helpful and shift the conversation to something less embarrassing to me. Little does he know. “Well, if you’re Brother Patrick,” Brother Amos says, grinning behind his beard, “you come in through the gift shop.” The brothers all laugh; this is a perennial fave. It’s the “Free Bird” of Mount Sergius stories. I usually never mind it being a favorite because it is funny, but now with Jamie and Elijah here—Elijah who still knows so little about why and how I came to the abbey—it feels like agony waiting to happen. Elijah straightens up. “Sorry, you said through the gift shop?” “Oh yes,” Brother Crispin says. “One morning, right after the gift shop opens, Brother Patrick comes staggering in.” “In his pajamas,” Brother Amos adds. “Walks right up to the counter where we keep our cash register and says to me⁠—” “‘I’d like to become a monk, please,’” Brother Amos finishes for him. Brothers Thomas and Titus are already cracking up.

It’s the same look Elijah gave Jesus on the cross after his first compline here. Jamie looked at me like he needed to make sure I was staying exactly where I’d been put.

“I came here for you,” he says finally. His voice is strange. “Here to the hermitage?” I ask. “Or to the abbey?” “Both.” I step closer and then stop myself. I don’t know what I’m doing or what I even want. I watched him make out with his fiancé in the parking lot last night; I listened to him jerk off thinking of that same fiancé. This is a man who loves someone else and who emphatically does not love me anymore. His face is still wet as he looks back to me with his brows drawn together and up into his forehead. “I think I just wanted to understand,” he says, and it sounds like he’s pleading something, like he’s admitting something. “Can you blame me for that? Can anyone?” “You wanted to understand why I left,” I say over the drumming of the rain. “I thought if I saw what you left me for—if I stayed here and found whatever it was that drew you here in the first place, then I’d be able to leave you alone in my mind. I’d be able to forget you.”

“After we fought here in the hermitage, I was going to find you and tell you that I was leaving the abbey early, that there was nothing here for me to understand. That you’d deprived yourself of everything for nothing. But when I found you to tell you all that, you were sitting in the cloister, and then⁠—” He gives me an agonized look. “The fireflies,” I say. “That was the night with the fireflies.” “I thought you’d chosen the Church over me, but you didn’t, did you?” he asks in a jagged voice. “You chose God over me, and somehow that’s worse than anything else I’d ever thought of because I can’t compete with God, Aiden.” He gives a short laugh which sounds like it’s been punched out of him. “I can’t compete with fireflies in the cloister.”

“Aiden,” he whispers as I kiss his neck. His stubble stings my lips. When I lift my head, I see that his pupils have dilated nearly to the edge of his irises. His mouth is parted, but his jaw is tight. “So you are in chastity.” “Yeah,” I say, shuddering as his long fingers curl around my caged bulge. “I have to be.” “Why?” he asks breathlessly. “I think of you too much.” We can’t stop looking at each other, frozen but not actually frozen—mouths swollen and chests heaving and hips pressing—but we’re not kissing and my arms are still braced against the wall on either side of his head. His hand still curls possessively over my cock. “You think of me too much,” he echoes. “You’ve been thinking of me.” This somehow feels more dangerous than kissing—it’s a more sinful sin than pressing against each other. No longer a mere violation of celibacy, but a flickering threat to my devotion to God. To what is supposed to be a singular and whole offering of my heart. This feels like admitting my heart wasn’t mine to offer God in the first place. After a long moment, I speak. “Yes,” I say. “Not just after you came back. Since I came here.”

I helped Elijah cheat—made him cheat even. On a Sunday school teacher who likes baking. Who does that? A bad man, that’s who. Selfish. I’m still so selfish.

“I’m not upset that I kissed a man, Father Abbot. I’m upset that I kissed anyone when I vowed not to. And that I led him into sinning against someone else…” Selfish. Just like I’ve always been. And fuck, what if it’s how I’ll always be? “Vows are not meant to be burdens, Brother Patrick,” the abbot says gently. “They are meant to clarify our lives and why we’re here. Perhaps what is causing these larger feelings is not guilt that you tested the boundaries of your conversatio morum vow, but rather an invitation from God to ask yourself what you really want before you take your solemn vows. To ask yourself if you feel called, truly, to your life here.” Conversatio morum. Fidelity to monastic life. Meaning poverty, prayer, and, crucially, chastity. Along with a vow to stability and obedience, it composites the simple vows I made almost three years ago. “I don’t need an invitation,” I say, panic rising in my throat. I have to be a monk—I can’t not be a monk. It’s what saved my life. And if I stopped… I don’t let my thoughts drift any further than that. I can’t think about what might happen to me and my stable but tentative okayness if I’m not a monk. “I know what I want,” I add as quickly as I can. “I know what I’m called to do. I’m supposed to be a monk. I just messed up is all, and it won’t happen again. I’ll make sure of it.”

“I think it’s time we started preparing for your trip, don’t you?” “You’re still going to let me go?” I ask, my voice cracking with relief. “I thought maybe you might⁠—” In my peripheral vision, I can see his bushy eyebrows slant down in a frown. “That I might punish you for a kiss by taking away something important to you? No. You are a man seeking God, not a teenager who took the family car without permission. But I am letting you go on a condition.” “What’s that?” I ask, ready for anything. Hair shirts, fasting, a hundred rosaries a day, anything—I’ll do it. He nods up at the sun. “That you take God’s invitation. Use your time away to ask yourself what you really want.”

“God is not supposed to test me beyond what I can bear,” I say. “And neither are you.” “Is it beyond what you can bear, Brother Patrick?” the abbot asks calmly. I mumble a “I don’t know.” “Because,” says the abbot, “the choice is yours. If you tell me that you do not want this, that you cannot bear it, then I will tell Mr. Iverson that he cannot come.”

“So you really needed more for your article than what you got at Mount Sergius?” There are so many questions inside that question, but they’re buried deep. A coward’s gambit. I know it. I think he knows it too, although he doesn’t seem to relax. “I did,” he says, his body still held perfectly motionless. “I hope I’ll find what I’m looking for over the next three weeks.” “And what’s that?” I ask, still a total fucking coward. I’m hoping he’ll volunteer something—anything other than this cool reserve he’s put back in place between us. Even if it’s anger or something worse, I want to know. I want to know. “Answers,” he says quietly. “Always answers.”

“About the answers. It’s because every time I leave, I have more questions.” And then he adds, “And because every time I leave you, the only thing I can think about is coming back.”

“Built for strength and not endurance, I see,” Elijah remarks, nudging me with his hiking boot. “That’s not what the strippers used to say,” I pant, and Elijah laughs so loud and so bright—so happily—that I feel his laugh running through my body like water. Like fun water, like a rippling swimming pool or turquoise ocean waves. His laugh feels like a vacation destination all in itself, and then I remember that I used to hear it often. That even though I was a flake and a jackass, I could always make him smile. I could always make him laugh.

“I’ve been meaning to properly interview you, but…” He sighs. “I guess it’s hard to separate the questions I want to ask as your ex-boyfriend from the questions I want to ask as a writer.”

“I can’t believe you were never worried about the coaster still being there by the time you died,” Elijah laughs, shaking his head as he writes in his journal. “Like this whole plan depended on a wooden roller coaster still being there in sixty years or whatever.” I’m glad he can’t see my face. I reach for another beer bottle and open it, so I don’t have to answer. So I don’t have to tell him that the Aiden from before never planned on living that long.

He’s laughing hard enough now that he’s scrubbing at his face, and I wish I could watch him laugh forever. I wish we could stay just like this—remembering the funny things, the good times. As if our year together was just sex and terrible local art and vacations and dirty games that ate up all our hours with sighs and sweat, and there’d been nothing hard about loving each other, nothing painful at all.

“Remember the games we used to play at them?” What if… “Well. We used to play games everywhere,” I say, and my voice is low, a little hoarser than it should be. “We did,” he says, and his voice is low too, almost a whisper. Like we don’t want to be overheard, even though we’re half a mile away from the abbey and that abbey is miles and miles away from the rest of the world. We are totally and completely alone, and we are still whispering. “Do you ever think of them?” I ask, and I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t ask that. It’s dangerous for me, it’s dangerous for him. We shouldn’t be talking about this. For a moment, I think Elijah isn’t going to answer. His face is turned away, and as we step into the clearing filled with half-broken arches and small cloisters now choked with ferns and moss, he doesn’t say anything at all. That’s good. That’s a good thing. A smart thing. Healthy, even. And I shouldn’t have even spoken the words aloud, because do you ever think of them is the same as I think of them all the time, and he doesn’t need to know that; it’s not fair to make him know that when he’s engaged and I’m still married to Christ. But then we’re in the middle of the clearing, and the trees are moving, and there’s a faint tinkling from the mossy well nearby, and he says, quietly, “I always think about them.” I turn to face him head-on, and he’s closer than I thought. Close enough for me to see the small cleft in his chin under his stubble. Close enough for me to see the lighter thre...

“I would pretend to be a monk,” I say. His voice is pure gravel when he asks, “Yeah?” “Yeah,” I breathe. “And it would have been years and years since I’d been able to fuck. I’d be desperate.” “How desperate?” he asks. His chest is heaving, but his arms and hands are still, like he can’t bear to make any movement that might break the spell. But I’m beyond spells now, I think. I’m speaking prophecies and parables, whispering a game I’ve thought of so many times. “So desperate that I can’t take it anymore. Not after I see you. You’re so beautiful, and I think I could ask you…” “Ask me what?” Elijah prompts. “If I could kiss you. If you’d let me remember what it was like to be kissed. If you’d let me touch you and hold you and then make you come.” Elijah’s whiskey eyes are almost all black now, a ring of amber around a circle of onyx. “And if you did ask me, and if I said yes, what would happen then?” “Then I’d start at the end,” I say, trembling all over. “I’d start on my knees, needing to taste you. And then after you’d used me, I’d ask to be kissed. Kissed until the bells ring for prayer.”

how am I supposed to save my body for God when this feels so necessary, so inevitable? So right?

“You’re wearing your cage again,” he moans into my kiss, a hand sliding between us to curl around me. “Yes,” I manage to say, inhaling as he cups me. Everything is still sticky and hot, and all I want is to push him down onto the moss and then make out with him until we both die of old age. “Please tell me you have your key,” he says. “Please, please⁠—” “It’s back at the guesthouse,” I say, dropping my lips to his jaw. “Aiden,” he groans. “You’re supposed to have it on you all the time.” He pulls back a little and gives me an eyebrow which I think he thinks is stern, even though his lips are swollen and his eyes are still half-hooded. “Are you giving me a lecture about safe chastity practice right now?” I laugh as I press my face into his neck. “Yes! As your former key holder⁠—” “For that one month, and even then I barely had it on because you were too horny⁠—” “I am duty bound to remind you to be safe! What if we fell off the hill and they had to helicopter you into a Belgian hospital and then they had to call in firefighters to saw that thing off your dick?” I’m laughing too hard to keep kissing his neck, and I pull back to grin at him. “Firefighters? That sounds hot.” “Oh my God, it does not.” “You know it does.” “Someone has to be responsible for you, Aiden,” Elijah says, exasperated. “Fuck knows you never are.” And just like that, I feel the cold gel of reality sliding over my skin. Yes. Yes, I am irresponsible, aren’t I? Sucking off my ex-boyfriend in my habit and sc...

He left me, in the worst possible way, without a goodbye, without an explanation, with only a quick phone call that night to tell me that he was taking care of some things before he joined a monastery and that he was leaving me the farmhouse to keep or to sell. He left me just as I was loving him the most, just as I’d been about to declare my love in the most romantic way I could think of.

I’ve broken up with a good man and flown halfway across the world for what is essentially total uncertainty in the shape of a monk.)

He’d wanted to surprise me that night. Dinner, flowers, a declaration of love. But in typical Aiden fashion, I’d shown up late and half-drunk from a dinner celebrating a new deal at work. It wasn’t unusual for me—I was late to a lot of things or I missed them altogether. I showed up a mess or I turned into a mess when I was there. Sometimes it was for easy-to-understand reasons, like a meeting running long, like oversleeping after an international flight. And sometimes they were for less easy-to-understand reasons—reasons I couldn’t even articulate if I’d tried. Like sometimes I would truly, really mean to remember something, but I’d get sucked into something else—work, play, whatever—and not realize that hours and hours had slipped by. Sometimes it would be because I’d get home after a long day of work and know I’d need to change to meet Elijah at some event or party, but I’d sink down onto my bed and find myself literally unable to move. And it wouldn’t be that I’d forgotten that the event was important to my boyfriend, and it wouldn’t even be that I didn’t want to go, because often I did. It was more like my pilot light would suddenly go out, and there would be nothing left to animate me, no heat or energy or life at all. Like being sunk into liquid concrete, sunk into a substance where even the slightest movement required superhuman effort. But how do you explain that to a disappointed boyfriend and not have it sound like I chose to stare at a wall instead of come to t...

As my fingers slide down his tattoo, I realize I’m the right direction to properly see the collage. The grid which I now recognize as the grid of streets from our neighborhood. The tree which I now see is the tree from his backyard with tiny little rungs leading up to a tiny treehouse in its branches. And the words inked in a small, typewritten font under the collage. They are in Latin, and I have enough grasp of the dead language now to know what they mean. Quid si. My heart flips over, once, inside my chest. It means: what if. I look up at him, and he looks back at me, and I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Not at all. What if. He’d put that on his body…why? As a remembrance? As a reminder? I open my mouth to ask, but then other people begin boarding the train and he pulls his arm off the table and clears his throat.