Saint (Priest, #3)

by Sierra Simone

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...