Angel

Paul looked at Ian. They shared a knowing smile. Paul raised his glass. “Happy New Year,” he said softly.

“Happy New Year.”

Tattoo

“And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem.”

—Isaiah 27:13

One afternoon in March, Paul walked into the church commons and found Ian there eating a candy bar and reading the Bible.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just taking a break.”

“It’s fine with me,” Paul said. “Just don’t let Julie catch you.”

He glanced over his shoulder. No one was behind him, so he stole a quick chocolate-flavored kiss. Then he tapped a finger on the open Bible in front of Ian. He whispered, “Try First Samuel.”

He saw Ian in his peripheral vision flipping through the pages as he turned to walk out of the room. He waited just outside the door with his ear tilted in Ian’s direction.

“Wow,” he heard Ian say. He smiled and went back to his office.

“And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father’s house. Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.”

—1 Samuel 18:1-4

That spring, Ian enrolled in Paul’s Wednesday-evening Bible-study class. After dinner, Paul and Ian would ride back to the church. Paul was behind the wheel, of course. Ian sat in the passenger seat clutching his King James Bible. Their discussion of the evening’s passage began before they even got out of the car.

In the class itself, Ian hung on Paul’s every word. He asked lots of questions, sometimes so many that no one else had a chance to speak. He kept right on discussing the topic on the ride home, and then in the house, until Paul finally looked at him and said, “Ian, I’m off the clock.”

A couple of weeks after the class began, Ian mentioned in passing that Julie was going to take him to the store after work and she would drive him home. Paul thought nothing of it until that evening when they were getting ready for bed. When Ian took off his shirt, Paul noticed that his left shoulder was covered with a gauze bandage.

“What happened to your arm?”

“Nothing.” He turned away, trying to hide what Paul had already seen. “I can’t show you yet.”

“Show me what?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“But why do you have a bandage on your…. You didn’t get a tattoo.”

Ian grinned like the cat who swallowed the canary. “You’ll like it, I think.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I told you, I wanted to surprise you.”

“You got it for me?”

“Yeah, what do you think?”

“I don’t know what to say.” Paul didn’t know what to say because he was fairly sure that when someone tells you he just permanently altered his body as a token of his love for you, the answer he is hoping to hear is not, “Why the hell did you do that?”

“It’s not my name or anything like that?” Paul asked.

Ian picked at the tape surrounding the gauze. “I’ll show you, but it’s not very pretty right now.” He peeled back the gauze with a slight wince and revealed a heart about three inches across. In its center was a cross.

“You see, it has a double meaning,” Ian said. “It’s about letting God back into my heart. And you did that. So this is, like, the minister in my heart too.”