“Yes, but while you’re thinking, consider also that the other sites on the Thornchapel grounds would provide context. Not only for people reporting on the finds, but for your dear friend Tobias, who would very much like to see this Neolithic stone row you’re hiding in the forest.”
Part of me is curious about what Tobias would see if he went back to the chapel. Would he see the door too? The black roses around it? Can anyone see it, or only people connected to Thornchapel or the valley?
But the rest of me is more cautious than curious. If the door is dangerous, then I don’t want anyone involved who isn’t already. I don’t want to risk Tobias, blithe and ridiculous though he may be, nor any of the other archaeologists or journalists or researchers who might come after him. Not until I know more about the door. Not until I can verify its safety.
I adopt my best landed-gentry prick voice. “I’m afraid I can’t help you there. You remember what I told you about the deer management scheme we’ve taken on?”
“I do,” Tobias says. “But surely this man you’ve hired isn’t deerstalking at all hours around your property?”
He’s definitely not—because he doesn’t exist—but this was the best lie I could come up with in order to keep Tally and his team clustered close to the house. “I told him to come at any time of the day, whenever was the most convenient. The roe deer are absolutely mad on my woods, and we’ve set a fairly high quota to achieve a decent reduction. So he’s out there quite often. It’s better to stay away from the woods for now, as a safety precaution.”
“In case he mistakes an archaeologist for a roe deer,” Tally says, his voice flat with disbelief.
“Health and safety, Tally. Can never have too much. At least if I don’t want the county coming after me.”
That’s all nonsense, but I say it with plenty of privileged ennui—that “isn’t having a grand estate such a bother” tone—and Tally finally seems to buy it. “You used to hate the idea of hunting,” he says after a minute. “In school, remember? You never went with anyone when you were invited. What changed your mind?”
I still don’t like the idea of killing animals for sport, or for any purpose that’s not strictly utilitarian. Although other kinds of hunting, like stalking a dark-eyed boy through the trees and tackling him next to the river . . .
For a moment, my mind is filled with trees and water, with bluebells and St. Sebastian. With antlers and drums from another world. And suddenly, a breeze moves through the square as I cross through it to get to my townhouse. A breeze that feels restless and lonely, like me, and the trees shake and nod with it, as if agreeing with me that I should be running right now, I should be hunting.
I go still.
This is not supposed to happen here.
I mean, it’s not supposed to happen at all, but I thought that at the very least, this was contained to my home, to the valley around it.
Stop it, I think. To the trees. To myself.
They stop.
“Auden?” Tobias prompts.
I step out of the square and hop the curb to the pavement that leads to my front door. And then I see—
There’s someone lounging on my front steps, wearing a threadbare T-shirt and scuffed black boots—
The remaining light catches on his lip piercing and his dark eyes—
The trees start stirring again, and the wind kicks up so fast that leaves and litter scoot down the street along with it.
“Ecological responsibility changed my mind, Tally,” I answer. “Say, can I phone you later? Something’s just come up.”
“Of course. I’ll just occupy myself with not getting shot by your hired deerstalker, shall I?”
“Fine, Tobias,” I say, already dropping the phone from my ear and ending the call. I reach the foot of my steps and stare at the beautiful boy lounging on them. The wind whips at our hair and our clothes as we look at each other.
He looks a little thinner than when I saw him last, a little more made of angles—or perhaps it’s only how he’s sitting, with his feet planted on the stair below and his elbows propped on his knees, his hands and shoulders tense. The old T-shirt stretches over his shoulders and arms and back, thin enough in places that I can see his skin, supple enough that it clings to his frame in such a way that I can viscerally and miserably imagine every swell of muscle and curve of bone.
I want to push him back against those stairs and hold him in place while I map every inch of his body, I want to scream at him for leaving me, I want to scream at him to leave me again.
I want to chase him through this leafy square like a god, and then catch him and eat him.
I do none of these things, even though the very air and earth around us seems to demand it, seems to demand that I do something, that I take or protect or speak or move—something.
When I step forward again, mounting the first step and looking down at St. Sebastian, the square quiets down a little. And when I speak, the air itself seems to settle and sigh.
“Let’s go inside,” I say.
“As you wish,” says my half-brother. And I move past him to unlock the door, and in we go.
Chapter Seven
Auden
I close the door behind me and then look at St. Sebastian slouching in the middle of my foyer. Slouching as if he’s scowly and cross about being here, even though he was the one haunting my doorstep like a lonely cat before I got home.
But I know him well enough now to know that when he seems scowly, he’s actually uncertain, and to know that when he’s quiet and watchful, like he is now, he’s expecting to be hurt.
It gouges something in my chest to think he’s come to expect hurting from me.
I want to drop to his feet and apologize. For loving him, for making us play house even when it was a terrible idea, for pinning him against a museum wall and fucking him like I was owed it.
But I also want him to drop to my feet. I want to haul him close and run my nose along his neck. I want to say I don’t care about what the world says, you were made to be mine, and then I want to kiss him until we’re sixteen again and he’ll let me do whatever I want to his body, anything at all.
I don’t know what to do with these two instincts, these two halves of myself. The part that bends toward tenderness, caring for, tending to—and the part that craves taking. No matter how much I try to ignore the latter, it never leaves me, it never stops flexing its hands and reaching for what it wants.
But of course, I don’t betray any of this. I give my half-brother a polite, I’ll lead the way nod, and say, “Follow me,” as I move through the foyer and into the kitchen.
When I bought this place, it was a mess. Purchased by a Russian businessman who never ended up living in it, it had gone slightly derelict inside, and it hadn’t been modernized after the 1960s.
I’d loved it for that. Not that it was ugly, but that the ugliness was an invitation, that the whole place needed to be made new again. It felt almost like consent—like the property was saying strip me, mark me, give me a love that sands me down and knocks through walls—and when I was inside of it, revising plans, solving problems, thumb-printing a hitherto invisible vision into glass-and-rivets reality, I felt like I do now during a good scene. Or during a feast. I felt like a king, even if I didn’t have a forest to run through or a green-eyed girl to kiss afterward.
Anyway, I’m quite proud of the house as I lead St. Sebastian through to the back. Though the front is still a traditional face of pale ashlar and brown brick, the inside has been entirely opened up with windows and loads of skylights and a huge bifold door leading out to a narrow garden with a small studio built at the back. I kept the things I loved: the original hardwoods, the beautiful staircase, the fireplaces—and then I made the rest a hymn to light.
The silver-heather light of winter.
The rosy refulgence of summer.
Light for scrolling on an iPad and for curling up with a book, sunshine for breakfast and the glimmer-glow of the city f
or after-dinner cocktails.
I’d done it because I liked illumination as a guiding principle, and because I wanted to liberate things like Crittall windows and pitched skylights from the faux-industrial aesthetic. And also because I wanted to stretch my architectural legs before I tackled something bigger and older, like Thornchapel.
I didn’t do it because I wanted to know what the late evening light would look like reflected in St. Sebastian’s eyes. I didn’t do it because I wanted to know if he would shove his hands into his pockets and squint up at the sky when he walked under the glass roof of the kitchen extension. I didn’t do it because I wanted each vein in his throat and every long and sooty eyelash outlined in perfectly diffused light while I stared at him.
But I should have done it for those reasons. Because seeing him here now, no other reason could ever make sense. Why would I design a house if it wasn’t for the sole purpose of seeing St. Sebastian inside it? Why would I go to all the trouble of refinishing floors and refurbishing Victorian fireplace inserts and browsing through hundreds of Farrow and Ball paint colors if it wasn’t to see St. Sebastian in the middle of it all, kicking his boots against the floor and stretching out his T-shirt as he ducked his head and hunched his shoulders?
Why would I ever build anything at all if he wasn’t going to be inside it?
I’ve stopped us in the kitchen, and I gesture for him to take a seat while I pull open the doors to the garden and put a kettle on.
He doesn’t sit. Instead he drifts around the space, pretending to look at things so that he doesn’t have to look at me.
“Sit down,” I tell the back of his head.
He tenses a little but doesn’t turn. “I don’t want to.”
I could make you, I want to say. I could make you sit, and then I could tie your hands together and play with your cock until you couldn’t stand even if you wanted to stand.
“Have you eaten supper?” I ask instead.
He turns his head a little. I can now make out the high curve of his cheek and the striking slant of his jaw. “I’m supposed to have a late dinner in a couple hours.”
“I’m about to make supper for myself, I could—”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?” he interrupts. “Aren’t you going to berate me for leaving you again, point out how hideously inconsistent I am for showing up at your house, and then make me do something utterly debasing to prove your point?”
Yes. Let’s skip straight to the debasement. I want to know if you’re hard. I want you to unzip those jeans and then I want to push you to your knees. I want to see what your erection looks like in the city twilight and then I want to see if I can make you come before the tea finishes steeping.
“No,” I say instead. “I’m not. We’ve done this too many times, the game where you leave and then I chase you and bully you into giving me what I want. I don’t want to be that kind of man. At all.”
That does make St. Sebastian turn to face me, his hands still shoved into his pockets and a frown curving his mouth. “You never bullied me,” he says. “That wasn’t what I—that’s not how I meant you were like our father.”
“Wasn’t it?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light as the kettle clicks off and I start pouring the water into a teapot. “I assumed that’s what you’d meant.”
He flicks the hair out of his eyes and blinks at me as I turn to face him. “There’s a difference between coercion and seduction,” he says. “You never coerced me.”
I could coerce you now.
You could tell me your safe word, and then I could bend you over my kitchen island and lick your hole until you spray cum everywhere.
“What difference does it make?” I ask in a tired voice. “It made you miserable in the end. You can’t be happy with me, and I can’t live with you unhappy. It doesn’t take Bex to figure out that equation.”
He hunches his shoulders again, looking away. “I guess not.”
“Although maybe I did lie earlier, because I do want to know why you’re here, actually. Why you’ve come from . . . wherever it is you’ve come from.”
Why, my sweet, sulky boy, why? When I’ve turned myself inside out trying to give you space, when I’ve refused to let myself know where you are, when I’ve spent all these nights clinging to Proserpina and wanting to cry because my bed is still too empty and still too cold?
The tea is done steeping, and I busy myself with that while he shuffles his feet, takes a breath to speak, and then shuffles his feet some more.
And then he utters the last request in the world I expect to hear.
“I need to borrow some clothes,” he mumbles. “Nice ones.”
I am legitimately at a loss for what to say. “You want to borrow clothes,” I repeat instead.
His cheeks are going pink. “Yes. For my dinner tonight.”
For the first time, it occurs to me that dinner could mean date. That dinner could mean someone else, someone new, and I suddenly can’t see, I suddenly can’t breathe. The jealousy is in my teeth and my bones, a primal fury is boiling my blood.
No. NO.
MINE.
It never occurred to me that he might find someone else. That Proserpina wouldn’t be enough, and he would let himself be courted by . . . others.
Other Dominants?
I want to tear the entire world in half just thinking about it. My hands are shaking when I set them on the counter. “No.”
That does seem to surprise him. “No? I can’t borrow any clothes?”
“Does Proserpina know you’re meeting someone for dinner?”
He looks confused. “Yes.”
“And she’s okay with it?”
“Why wouldn’t she be? And why can’t I borrow your clothes?”
I study him, every fiber in every muscle in my body quivering to pounce. If he were still mine, I’d have him on the floor and moaning in seconds. I’d have him cuffed to my bed and gasping as I left handprints all over his faithless, temperamental backside.
But he’s not yours. That’s the point.
“Brothers do that,” he adds. “They borrow each other’s clothes.”
Brothers do that.
My blood burns hotter, brighter. My entire body is an alkali metal dropped into water. I might explode. I am exploding.
“Don’t you dare,” I seethe. “Don’t you fucking dare say that to me.”
His eyes narrow. “Because I left?”
“Because I would have played brothers with you for the rest of my life if you let me. You were the one who said we couldn’t. You were the one who said we had to have nothing because we’d never stop wanting everything.”
“I—” His jaw is tight. “I know that.”
“And now you show up on my doorstep, asking to borrow my clothes so you can meet somebody else, like we really are brothers and I’m supposed to wish you well on your date—”
I see the moment he realizes why I’m so furious, the moment he understands.
“Auden,” he says, something lifting his cheeks and the corners of his mouth. Something like a smile.
It freezes me mid-explosion. The fury is still there, but it’s hit a wall, and that wall is the barely-there smile of St. Sebastian Martinez.
“I’m not going on a date,” he explains. “I’m having dinner with Freddie Dansey.”
Not a date.
Not a date.
“Oh,” I manage. I could still easily shove him against a wall and bite his heart out, but I also can’t stop looking at that smile. “Oh.”
And then I say:
“Wait. Freddie Dansey?”
He lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “I know. He called me a few weeks ago, saying he’d like to get together. He said he wanted to talk to me about my mom.”
I blink at him, bafflement seeping in around the fading jealousy. “Freddie Dansey knew your mum? But she wasn’t there that summer.”
“She was there the very first summer. And Freddie was one of the first people to
start everything up with your dad, along with Becket’s dad,” Saint says. “He told me about it at the gala.”
The gala. That’s right. Freddie and Daisy had been there, and I had seen Freddie and Saint talking alone together. But I’d been so preoccupied with teasing Poe with that remote-activated toy, so ensorcelled by the sight of Saint in a tuxedo, that I hadn’t paid it much mind.
“And Freddie kept calling and calling after that,” Saint continues, “and then he got Delphine to call on his behalf, and honestly, it was getting kind of annoying. I had some time this week to come up and meet with him, so I said we should grab dinner and talk. And then maybe he would leave me alone. I didn’t say that last part to him,” Saint adds quickly. “I’m not that rude.”
You’re never rude. You’re either brutally honest or hiding yourself from the rest of us, but never rude.
“But he sent me the name of the restaurant after I got to the city today, and it’s someplace posh,” Saint says. “And I didn’t know anyone else here and I don’t have the money to buy anything nice on such short notice. You were my only option if I didn’t want to be kicked out of a restaurant for wearing a T-shirt.”
I stare at him over my tea, my hands still planted on the counter. His eyes run over my taut arms and shoulders, and then he studies my face.
“You were jealous,” he says, a little shyly, like he’s not totally sure it’s true. “You were jealous when you thought I was going on a date.”
“Of course I was,” I say. “That will never stop, St. Sebastian. I can keep myself from reaching for you, from kissing you, from dragging you back to me, but I can’t stop how I feel. I can’t pretend that there wasn’t a time when you were mine. Or that I don’t want you to be mine still.”
His eyelashes flutter as he looks down at my hands—spread and tense—and then back up to my face. “Sometimes, I think . . . ” His voice is as soft as his eyelashes. As soft as his mouth. A whisper of silky beauty. “Sometimes I think I don’t want you to stop how you feel. I think I wouldn’t be able to breathe if you stopped thinking of me as yours.”
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 7