Page 77 of His Elder

Three months of tentative, terrifying courtship. We didn't jump back into where we left off in Barcelona. We couldn't. Those people—Elder Price and Elder Vance—were gone, burned to ash in a disciplinary council room in Spain. We were strangers with shared memories, circling each other warily in the Seattle rain.

Our coffee dates turned into walks around Green Lake, hands buried deep in our own pockets, maintaining a careful distance that had nothing to do with mission rules and everything to do with fear. We were terrified of breaking the fragile thing growing between us. We talked about safe things: arthistory, microeconomics, the weather. We avoided the big things: God, families, the two years of silence.

But the gravity was still there. It was inevitable.

It broke on a Tuesday. Sam had come to my tiny studio apartment to help me stretch canvases for my capstone. It was late, raining hard, and the buses had stopped running.

"You should stay," I’d said, trying to sound casual while my heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "I have a couch."

Sam had looked at me, holding a staple gun in one hand, his hair dusted with gesso powder. He didn't look at the couch. He looked at my bed—a mattress on the floor in the corner.

"I don't want the couch," he’d said quietly.

That night, we didn't have sex. We just slept. Fully clothed, on top of the duvet, facing each other. We held hands like we were afraid the other would dissolve into smoke if we let go. It was the most intimate night of my life.

The next morning, Sam didn't leave. He made coffee. He sat in the corner and read while I painted. And slowly, over the next few weeks, his things started migrating into my space. A textbook on the desk. A toothbrush in the cup. A stack of sweatshirts that smelled like him instead of turpentine.

We didn't have a conversation about moving in. It just became a fact. One day, I came home to find him organizing my chaotic bookshelf by colour and subject, humming under his breath. He looked up, caught me staring, and shrugged. "It was driving me crazy," he said.

"You live here now, don't you?" I asked.

Sam smiled—a real, easy smile that reached his eyes. "Yeah. I think I do."

That was six months ago.

Now the scent of garlic and basil hung in the air, a warmcloud that clung to the canvas drop cloths and mingled with the sharper smells of turpentine and linseed oil. Our apartment was chaos, a controlled explosion of our two lives colliding. Sam’s economics texts sat in neat, intimidating stacks on a small desk a city planner would admire, while my own work was a beautiful disaster. Canvases leaned against every wall, studies of the Seattle skyline and the grey wash of the Puget Sound sky tacked over cracks in the plaster. A half-finished portrait of Sam, caught in the act of laughing at something I’d said, sat on my easel, the charcoal ghost of his smile waiting for colour.

I stirred the tomato sauce, the rhythmic scrape of the wooden spoon against the bottom of the pot a familiar, comforting sound. On the couch, Sam had his feet kicked up on a pile of my old sweatshirts, a thick book resting on his chest. The late afternoon light, filtered through the drizzled-on windowpane, caught the gold in his hair and the sharp line of his jaw. He was a composition I never tired of studying. The furrow of concentration between his brows, the way his thumb traced the edge of a page, the relaxed slope of his shoulders. He looked peaceful. He lookedhome. Two years ago, that peace was a costume he wore, stretched thin over a framework of panic. Now, it was real. It was something we had built together, board by board, in this small, damp apartment.

I turned off the burner, wiped my hands on a paint-stained rag tucked into the waistband of my jeans, and walked over to him. He didn't look up from his book, lost in whatever complex theory of market failure held his attention. I knelt on the floor beside the couch. His feet were bare, long and elegant, the same feet I remembered from a lifetime ago. A different country. A different world.

I took one of his feet in my hands. The skin was cool. He startled, his eyes lifting from the page. A slow smile spread across his face, easing the thoughtful lines there.

"My feet are still sore from nearly two years in those cheap dress shoes," he said, his voice lazy and warm.

I laughed, rubbing my thumb into the high arch of his foot. I felt the tension there, a phantom ache from thousands of kilometres walked on unforgiving pavement, chasing a god who’d already turned his back. "You're lucky you had me there to, uh,ease the strain, at least for a while."

Sam raised a single, perfect eyebrow, a gesture that still sent a ridiculous jolt through my chest. "Is that what you call it? 'Easing the strain'?"

I grinned, my gaze flicking from his eyes down to his mouth and back again. The memory was so clear, a forbidden snapshot in the dark of our Barcelona apartment. The weight of his foot in my lap, the frantic beat of my heart, the sheer terror and rightness of it. But there was no terror now. Only the soft rasp of his skin against my calloused fingers and the low hum of the fridge. I trailed a finger from his heel up the sensitive line of his ankle, watching his breath catch. "It's a very...hands-on... approach to healing. Or, you know. Not always hands."

His playful expression softened into something else. Something darker, heavier. He closed his book, the soft thud of it landing on the floor breaking the quiet. He was looking at me now. Really looking. The banter fell away, leaving a heat that had nothing to do with the radiator and everything to do with the way his pupils had blown wide, swallowing the blue.

“Eli.”

My name. Just my name, but spoken with a wrecking-ball weight I remembered from a dark apartment in Spain.

I didn't kiss him. Not yet. I slid my hands up his calves, feeling the muscle tense under my palms, and hooked his legs over my shoulders. I leaned forward, burying my face in thecurve of his neck, inhaling the scent of him—coffee and old paper and the salt of his skin.

"Bedroom," I murmured against his pulse point. "Now."

Sam didn't argue. He scrambled up, his movements losing their usual economic grace in favor of urgency. We stumbled into the bedroom, a tangle of limbs and hands, neither of us willing to break contact for the second it took to walk through the doorway.

The room was small, dominated by a mattress on the floor. It was our sanctuary. No white shirts hanging in the closet, no rulebook on the nightstand. Just us, and the grey Seattle light fading against the window.

Sam reached for me, his hands fumbling with the button of my jeans. "I need—" He cut himself off with a frustrated noise when the denim wouldn't give, yanking me closer until our hips collided.

"Patience," I teased, though my own hands were shaking as I pulled his shirt over his head.