I’m too late.
But.
But.
The last thing I see before the door closes is a miracle.
The last thing I see is Proserpina Markham blink herself awake.
Like she’s just woken from a long and violent dream, like she’s done so many times before, usually in my arms as the morning sunlight shafts in through the windows and Sir James snores on the floor.
She turns her head toward me and Saint, and she gives us a happy, sleepy smile, emerald eyes sparkling with curiosity and love. She opens her mouth as if to speak and—
The door slams shut before she can. It slams shut, and she is gone.
Lost to us.
And the minute the door closes, it has vanished altogether. There is nothing door-like left at all, no lintel, no jambs, no frame. No architrave or weathered wood.
It is gone like it never existed in the first place. There is only crumbling stone left where it stood. There is only a ruin where there was once my Proserpina.
Dark petals flutter everywhere.
I press my hand to the stone, and then my forehead. Saint’s arms come around me, and he is weeping into my shoulder, just as I’m now weeping against the stone.
She is gone and we are left.
We are left.
She is gone.
“Auden,” Delphine is saying, “Auden. Listen. Auden.”
I can’t move my face from the stone. I don’t want to. I want to spend the rest of my miserable life here, remembering her, missing her. I want to starve here, I want to freeze here. I want to die here.
“Auden, she’s alive on the other side,” Delphine says. “You saw. She is alive. Do you remember what she said? About the blessing?”
I blink my wet eyelashes against the stone.
“She said the convivificat is a blessing,” Saint says, slowly.
“Exactly,” Delphine says. “We wondered how it could be, because it sounded so much like a warning. But ‘it awakens’ sounds a lot more like a blessing now, doesn’t it? It stirs, it comes back. The door will return, Auden, and when it does, you can follow her. It’s a promise.”
“Oh,” Saint says, pressing his face into my shoulder. “Oh.”
We stay there for a long time, the magnitude of Delphine’s words sinking in. The door will come back, because the door always comes back. And when it comes back, it will be a gift, because it will be the way back to the one we love.
I’m not sure how long we’ve been there, when we finally straighten up, spent of tears and sobs. It is full dark now, but the clouds have broken to reveal a heavy orange moon.
I touch my hand to the wall. “Convivificat,” I murmur throatily to it, hoping she knows. Hoping she knows we understand the blessing and one day we will join her.
Convivificat.
I turn and take St. Sebastian’s hand, feeling it warm and strong against my own. His piercing glints in the moonlight. There are still petals everywhere.
“Let’s go then,” I say. And together the four of us walk back to the house.
Epilogue
Bid Me Come Unto Thee
Eighteen years later
He starts the day as he usually does, by tying his husband to the bed and fucking him. He relishes it even more today, because St. Sebastian is still limp and well-pleasured from the night before, when Auden wrung climax after climax from him by the light of the Lammas fire.
Auden makes him come again now, even though Saint pleads and pleads that he’s too sore from last night, that his cock aches too much to bear any kind of touch, but there is no safe word uttered at any point during the complaining, so Auden does it anyway. Caressing Saint’s erection with teasing touches as his husband twists and squirms in his bonds, trying to escape the pleasure, and then later with a lubed but otherwise merciless fist until Saint’s back bows and he releases all over his belly with a half-miserable, half-grateful whimper.
Then Auden climbs on top of him, relishing the feel of Saint’s muscular, hair-dusted thighs on the inside of his own, loving how utterly limp and pliant his martyr is right now. He positions his hard organ against Saint’s slowly softening one, and with Saint’s seed slicking the way, Auden fucks, his cock trapped between their stomachs, their balls pressed together, their chests heaving as one.
He could come at any moment, but he forces himself to make it last. He always wants it to last after a night by the fire, where everything is blurry and carnal and urgent. He wants it slow, deliberate, his senses crackling with awareness. Less wild god and more greedy, affectionate man.
Finally, his cock swells and then pulses his seed between them. There’s not much left after last night, but it’s enough to make them even stickier, even messier. Sated, Auden drops a kiss on Saint’s mouth, licking the small scar where his piercing used to be.
Saint had to remove it after taking his first supervisory position with the library, and now that he’s the manager of the county’s flagship branch, there’s no question of it ever going back in. Auden misses it, and he thinks Saint does too, given how often he catches Saint sucking on his lower lip. But Auden knows exactly where the scar is and worships it often, biting it and kissing it and pressing on it with fingers and thumbs.
Things will change, but sometimes the memory can be enough.
Not always.
But sometimes.
He roots against Saint’s temple, pressing soft kisses to the scattered threads of silver there.
“Don’t uncuff me,” Saint whispers. “I want to stay like this a while longer.”
“You have to get to Exeter for your meeting,” Auden says, although he doesn’t stop nuzzling Saint’s face and neck. “And I have a call with Isla in an hour.”
“Why do we have jobs again?” Saint complains, turning his head to kiss Auden’s jaw. “Or rather, why isn’t my job being tied to your bed?”
“I ask myself this question every time you leave,” Auden says, amused and serious at the same time. These moments sustain them both, when the power is naked between them, when the vulnerabilities and the cruelties are fed by trust and rewarded with the same.
It is the only thing that sustains him, he thinks sometimes, when the gaping hole in his chest seems to grow bigger and bloodier by the day. The unhealable wound left by Proserpina Markham. By her absence.
“Besides, I need to let Hilda Davidson out,” Auden says, reluctantly pulling away from his lover and sliding off the bed to get a wet flannel.
“You know that dog would sleep until noon if you let it,” Saint calls after Auden, as if that dog isn’t the same dog Saint spoils rotten. However, Saint has a point about Hilda Davidson’s disposition. Unlike Sir James Frazer and his successor, a cheerful corgi named Joseph Campbell, Hilda isn’t rambunctious or energetic in the least. Even when she was a puppy, she’d trot halfway to a toy and then throw herself on the ground for a nap. And as Auden steps over the dog to get to the en suite now, Hilda’s ears don’t even twitch.
“God help us if we were beset upon by robbers or thieves,” Auden says, stepping back over the lump of snoring bulldog, flannel in hand. “She’d be the last to know.” He climbs onto the bed and carefully cleans Saint’s stomach and groin, taking his time. When he’s done, he tosses the rag to the side and uncuffs his husband, massaging each wrist and ankle after he works the padded leather free.
Saint sighs in pleasure and closes his eyes, but Auden watches and watches, not wanting to miss a single flutter of his eyelashes or contented part of his lips.
Eventually the room becomes too bright to ignore, and they both get dressed for work. St. Sebastian has long ago given up his collection of T-shirts and ripped jeans—at least during the week—and has allowed Auden to furnish him with proper work clothes, not the cheap trousers and ill-fitting button-downs he had before. This has backfired somewhat, as it means before he leaves the house, Auden is confronted with Saint looking like a magazine editorial for broody, dark-eyed men in expensive clothes. St. Sebastian
is very often almost late for work, since Auden has trouble keeping his hands off him after he’s dressed.
“Auden Guest,” Saint says now, exasperated. They’re at the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle, and Auden has been sliding his hands under Saint’s jacket and over the taut curve of his arse.
“St. Sebastian Martinez-Guest,” Auden teases back.
“We’ve just spent the last twenty-four hours fucking like we were twenty-five again.”
“Mm,” Auden hums, skating his palm over the fresh erection in Saint’s virgin wool trousers. He can’t imagine how sore his husband’s poor organ must be right now. He wonders if he could get St. Sebastian to cry even as he climaxed. The mere thought has Auden so stiff he can barely breathe for the throbbing in his cock.
“So surely you leave me unmolested for a few hours while I go to work?”
Auden thinks about this for a moment and then resumes his groping. “No.”
Saint huffs. “You’re only like this because I’m in all this expensive shit.”
“Demonstrably false,” Auden purrs, shoving a hand right into the front of Saint’s trousers now. Despite his earlier protests, Saint pushes his penis into Auden’s touch. “I like you on the weekends in your boots and jeans too. Especially with eyeliner.”
“I’m too old for eyeliner,” Saint says faintly, his pelvis rocking back and forth, back and forth.
“But you wear it for me anyway, because you know how wild it makes me. Do you remember last weekend?”
“Yes,” Saint groans, his pelvis rocking faster. They went to the supermarket to get ingredients for a cake, but on the way back home, Auden looked over to see Saint in his ripped jeans and eyeliner, head resting against the window as he sang along with the song on the radio, and he suddenly couldn’t take it. He cranked the Land Rover into a hedge-lined turnoff and had Saint in the back of the car in a matter of seconds. They went at it like young men, even with silver at their temples and fine lines beginning to branch around their eyes, even with wedding rings and years of marriage behind them, and Auden sucked Saint off like they were young men too, with accidental teeth and fumbling fingers and Saint’s jeans only just barely shoved out of the way.
Auden pulls his hand free of Saint’s trousers now and thoroughly enjoys the panicked whimpering that ensues.
“You can’t leave me like this,” Saint whines, turning to face his Sir.
“Oh but I can,” says Auden with dark glee. “Just think of how needy you’ll be all day, how difficult it’ll be to sit through your meeting knowing I’ll be waiting for you at home.”
The knot of Saint’s Adam’s apple bobs up and then down. “You’re a sadist.”
Auden straightens Saint’s clothes and flashes him his wickedest grin. “You like it.”
“No,” Saint sighs. “I love it.” He looks down at his wedding ring, which is none other than the Guest family ring, the crest faintly visible in the morning light of the kitchen. “She loved it too.”
She. Proserpina.
Their ghost, their grief.
Auden often wishes she were a ghost; he wishes she would haunt them. He wishes he’d walk into the chapel one day and find her like he found Estamond. He wishes he could dream her, hallucinate her, summon her. Because life without her . . .
It is difficult.
“Yes,” he says, the bloody hole in his chest widening a little bit more. “Yes, she did.”
The first few years were the hardest.
Waiting on a knife’s edge of heartache—hoping, lamenting, praying, enduring. Day after day, week after week. Year after year. They went into the chapel on every cross-quarter feast, every solstice, every equinox. Every time, thinking this could be it—this could be the day. This could be the day the door opened, and Saint and Auden would step through and have her in their arms once again.
But feast after feast, the wall behind the altar remained stubbornly a wall. There was no flicker of wood or metal, no glimpse of bruise-colored roses, there was only stone and blackthorn and the usual dog roses, red and white and pink.
The door didn’t come; the door never came.
And each time it didn’t come, each feast where they built fires and ate cakes and prayed prayers, was a fresh blow, a new wound.
It was like losing her all over again.
It felt like losing themselves all over again.
Auden was very, very aware that there was a time between Estamond and his father when the door never came at all. More than a century.
Too long for anyone to wait.
At first, St. Sebastian didn’t want to marry without Proserpina there. It felt wrong, he said, when they’d always envisioned a future with the three of them. It felt like giving up.
Auden agreed with the emotional dimension of his argument, but he also couldn’t tolerate the possibility that something could happen to him and Saint would be faced with byzantine legal or medical struggles. And also he just . . . wanted it. He wanted rings, he wanted a wedding night, he wanted to show off Saint at pretentious work events—the whole thing. If they couldn’t have Poe, then this felt like something they could have while they waited. Maybe it was only a part instead of the whole, but it was at least a part.
But Auden didn’t seduce him into it, he didn’t cajole or push. He waited as patiently as he was able, he reminded Saint that he was Saint’s no matter what. Even if they never married, even if they were never affianced, all of Auden’s forevers belonged to Saint, and that would never change.
And finally, one night as Saint was sitting at Auden’s feet in the library, both of them reading while an arthritic Sir James Frazer napped by the fire, Saint looked up at Auden and said, simply, “Okay.”
There was no question what he was agreeing to. Auden felt like he couldn’t breathe. “Yes?”
Saint nodded and then rested his head against Auden’s knee. “Yes.”
Auden had tackled him right to the rug then, kissing him so deeply that they’d both been gasping for air when they finished, but smiling too.
“You won’t regret it,” Auden vowed fiercely.
“Oh, Auden,” Saint sighed. “I know.”
They were married a few months later, at Thornchapel, the ceremony small and private but no less lavish for its intimate size. Auden would only get married once in this world, and so he spared no expense when it came to flowers and food and marquees and music. (And with Delphine Dansey planning it, no expense would have been spared anyway.)
It was indulgent on the order of a king—a wedding fit for the lord of the manor.
And so they married, and so the years circled on, a giant wheel which ground from despair whenever the door failed to appear to the ordinary joys and toils of life.
St. Sebastian took a supervisory position at the library and helped his uncle Augie sell his business and finally retire. He and Auden visit the family in Texas every year, and Thornchapel is often filled with visiting grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles with brand new anoraks and selfie sticks. He talks often about finally cataloging Thornchapel’s library, but he never starts and Auden never pushes him to. Neither of them can bear to pick up where Proserpina left off.
Samson Quartey also retired, earlier than anyone expected, and passed the reins of Quartey Workshop to Rebecca. He then moved to America, where he lives with David Markham to this day, both of them teaching at the university and adopting more dogs than their house can hold. After he left, Rebecca expanded Quartey Workshop into one of the largest and busiest landscape architecture firms in Europe, building on the foundation he laid.
Delphine founded a line of lipsticks, which turned into a full-fledged beauty brand. A handful of years ago, she expanded into clothing—plus-size lingerie and formalwear, and then sportswear a few years after. She has Freddie’s knack for accidentally making money she doesn’t need.
She and Rebecca married at Thornchapel too, two years after St. Sebastian and Auden. A wedding so big that it was featured in every pos
sible society rag and was attended by several minor celebrities and even a princess.
They live here whenever they’re not in London.
As for Auden, Harcourt + Trask is now Harcourt + Guest, after Trask retired and sold his share of the business to Auden. They’ve won some RIBA awards, been in the right magazines, appeared on television a few times. He still loves the work, the vision, the marriage of the ephemeral mind to things like glulam and steel, but the loss of Poe changed him in a way that is difficult to articulate.
He finds that he loves architecture in a distant, disassociated sort of way now, as if he’s playing an architect for television rather than being one in real life. The things he really loves—his husband, his friends, sitting in the woods with a notebook and pencils and sketching whatever comes to mind—call to him more and more. He’s finally earned the success he craved as a be-scarfed, be-satcheled young man, and the irony is that now he really couldn’t care less. He just wants to make love to his Saint and laugh with his friends and draw when the light is good.
He often draws her. He tries to capture the way her lips would crease from their own fullness, or the way her brow would pucker while she scoured books for the metadata she needed.
But it’s been so many long, full years. And so he finds that he’s beginning to lose these tiny quirks, these little singularities that made up Poe Markham. He knows she isn’t dead, he believes that as much as he believes anything. But forgetting her feels like death. It feels like finality. It feels like something closing in on him, a loss even the Thorn King can’t outrun.
And again the wheel of the year turns.
Midwinter, Imbolc, equinox.
Beltane, midsummer, Lammas.
Equinox and Samhain and then midwinter again, on and on and on.
Dogs are adopted, trips are taken, small fights are fought and then resolved. Sex is had, kisses are stolen in the morning and at night before sleep sets in. Sometimes Auden has to go run through the woods alone. Sometimes St. Sebastian disappears to wander the hills by himself. Sometimes they find each other crying. It is a lesson they have to continually relearn, that it is better to cry together than alone.
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 38