Feast of Sparks

by Sierra Simone

  I’m simply . . . broken.

  One last strike lands across my ass, not nearly as hard as the ones that preceded it, but on top of the tender skin there and on top of the residual pain still coursing through my system, it’s enough to finish the job. The suffering in my body and the suffering in my mind are linked and fused, they become one and the same, and every thought or feeling too bleak or too deranged for words finally have a voice, and that voice is the pain.

  The pain is speaking, the pain says:

  I miss her.

  I collapse, caught by Auden immediately, who cradles me against his chest while I cry. Each tear is hotter than the flogger’s path across my back, each racking sob tears out of me more forcefully than my earlier screams. I feel them both—I feel everything—as Auden crushes me to him and murmurs praise into my hair, as Rebecca carefully unties me from the beam and unwraps my rope-cinched wrists.

  “I’m here,” he says into my hair as he lifts me all the way into his arms and I lean my head against his chest. As I cry and cry and cry. “You’re so beautiful and I’m here.”

  He’s here.

  My mother’s not.

  But he is. And Rebecca is. And somewhere around here is Delphine and Saint and Becket. They’re here and I’m not alone, even though I’m the loneliest I’ve ever been.

  And in the paradox of grief, in the pain and in the numbness, in the crammed-full void, in the bone-breaking relief of just suffering, there’s one last thing I want, one last fire to be doused, one last flood I need to wash me clean. Even as I bury my face in Auden’s firm chest, I squirm as the heat in my back and ass all pulls into one point low in my belly. My clitoris is hard enough that the pressure from my closed thighs sends darts of pleasure radiating through my stomach, and between my sobs start coming low, needy moans.

  “What do you need, little bride?” Auden whispers to me.

  Someone to fuck me, I try to say, but I’m still too far gone for words, for explaining the needs racking my body, and I just want Auden and Rebecca to figure it out, just to do it, because I’m in their hands and that’s all I want to be.

  “She needs to have sex,” Rebecca says from behind us, as if reading my mind. “And soon.”

  “Is this so?” Auden asks me, his brow furrowed.

  I nod against his chest, everything wet from tears. “Please,” I manage to say. “Please.”

  And then I hear footsteps into the room.

  Chapter 6

  St. Sebastian

  Present Day

  * * *

  “You found us,” I hear Rebecca say as I walk in behind Becket. The white square of his collar seems to glow in the gray light of the makeshift playroom, and I try not to compare the rain-dotted gleam of his dress shoes to the mud-flecked leather of my boots.

  “Would it sound too ominous to say we followed the screams?” Becket asks.

  “Hello, Saint,” Rebecca says after she sees me.

  I nod politely in response, and then I see Auden and Proserpina, and I feel it like a fist in my chest, squeezing and squeezing, making it hard to breathe even as it sends hot, excited blood to every far-flung corner of me. My fingers tingle and my knees bend like they’re preparing to touch the floor. My lips buzz. My dick fills and swells against my zipper, keening for the tight embrace of Proserpina’s body. For the cruel grip of Auden’s hand.

  Proserpina once asked me if I had wanted to be her or Rebecca that time in the library—did I want to be the one receiving the pain or the one giving it—and truthfully, despite what I’d wanted Auden to do to me when we were teenagers, I really had always thought both. I thought I was just a switchy boy, and that eventually I’d be on both sides of the crop, so to speak, given enough time and the right opportunities.

  I don’t think that anymore. After seeing Auden’s face as he spanked Poe, after seeing his mouth red with her blood, after he held me by the throat in the shower and made me come . . .

  I have no desire that’s apart from the desire to be used by him. The desire to serve Proserpina’s pleasure however she wants.

  And so seeing Poe in his arms, the visible portions of her back and ass all red and welted and angry, seeing how she sobs quietly against his chest as he cradles her with a tenderness wholly at odds with the spoiled prince I once knew—yes, it makes me hard. It makes me want to tend to Poe, it makes me want to be Poe, it makes me want to be there between the two of them, cradling Proserpina myself while we’re both cradled by Auden.

  You said you’d die on the spot. Did you?

  Yes, St. Sebastian. I did.

  I’m not going to be cradled by Auden any time soon, I think. I pull the top ball of my lip piercing into my mouth so I can feel the slight pinch in my lip, as I always do when I’m longing for Auden.

  I hear footsteps behind me, and I turn to see Delphine coming into the doorway, her face pale and her hair uncharacteristically messy and pulled into a bun on the top of her head. “Sorry, I’m late,” she says to me, Becket and Rebecca. “Just finished talking to Mum and Dad.”

  “We’re done anyway,” Rebecca says, casting an assessing gaze over to Auden and Poe, who are completely absorbed in each other right now. Then she turns to look at me. “But she needs fucked.”

  I blink.

  “Why?” Becket asks. “She looks like she’s in no state for it.”

  I can’t decide if I agree with him or not—it does look like she just needs to be cuddled until she sleeps—but I was also in the chapel with her last night, and in the shower too. I’ve seen what her need looks like, seen how inflamed she gets after she’s been given mastery and pain.

  “I’m telling you, she needs someone to have sex with her, and I think it should be someone she’s already had sex with. Like Saint.”

  “Or me,” Delphine says, and I think I catch a frown whispering across Rebecca’s lips at that, but the room is too dim to tell.

  “I don’t want to sound imperceptive,” Becket says, “but why does it matter? And shouldn’t she get to choose?”

  “She will,” Rebecca says. “But I also think she’d say yes to anyone right now, and I’m not sure she’ll wake up tomorrow morning and thank us for taking advantage of that.”

  “Ah,” Becket responds.

  “It should be St. Sebastian,” Auden says. I hadn’t thought he was listening, but apparently he was, and now he’s looking at me from across the room. When our eyes meet, I feel it deep into my bones.

  Why does he have to be so handsome? Why does he have to have eyes the color of every ache I’ve ever had?

  “I’ll do it,” I say.

  “I can tell you’re really falling on the sword here,” Rebecca remarks.

  Auden’s still looking at me, and when she says that, he looks away. I wonder if he’s thinking of the time I didn’t fall on a sword, I wonder if he’s thinking of the time I ran away from him, feet pounding over the soft grass of Methodist graves.

  “I think I’ll make some tea,” Becket decides, giving Proserpina and Auden one last look, as if the priest in him is torn about leaving such a battered lamb in the arms of a wolf. But then Auden tucks Poe higher against his chest, kissing her temple as he does, and Becket makes up his mind and goes to the door. “Come down when you’re done and we’ll be waiting with drinks.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Delphine offers, and Rebecca nods.

  “Me too,” she says, and then she walks up to me, putting a hand on the place where my shoulder meets my chest. “Keep him there with you and Poe,” she says in a low voice only I can hear.

  “Auden?” I ask back, just as quietly.

  She nods. “He’ll want to leave. He feels . . . excluded . . . from whatever it is that you and Poe have right now. And maybe he is. But also I think both of you need him there. You and Poe are like air and water, and he’s earth. He’s fire. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “He’s necessary.”

  “He balances you,” she corrects. And then she narrows her ey
es at me. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten what you did to him all those years ago. If you hurt him again . . . ”

  Guilt, so familiar it’s almost comforting, rushes up to meet me.

  “Believe me, Rebecca, I haven’t forgotten either. I never can.”

  Auden’s room in the old wing of the house is exactly what I’d expect. Despite its temporary nature while he renovates the south wing, he’s put up bookshelves upon bookshelves, lined with rows and rows of graphic novels. There’s a small desk in here, with none of the usual architect’s trappings—no tools for scaling measurements, no adjustable triangles, no L-squares. Just pencils and pens and a lamp. Just several sheets of glaringly blank paper.

  A large bed dominates the space, made up with pillows and blankets in such a complementary mix of colors and fabrics that it has to be deliberate—and no doubt purchased by Delphine when she was Auden’s fiancée.

  Which was up until just a couple days ago.

  God. I feel like we’ve all lived a lifetime since then.

  Auden lays Poe on the bed, arranging her back into the pillows and then carefully unloosing her arms from his neck when she refuses to let go. She’s still crying a little, and her hands slide down to his bare forearms.

  “Stay,” she says thickly. “I want both of you here.”

  Auden looks at her and then at me. “I can’t,” he says in an anguished voice, and I remember what he said this morning, that he’d died on the spot, that he was dead. I don’t want him dead, but I also can’t regret anything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours . . . and I especially can’t regret anything that’s brought me and Poe together.

  But I love him as much as I love her—even if that love has been so thoroughly poisoned that even calling it love feels like a disservice to all the torment it’s endured—and I hate seeing him hurt.

  I’ve hurt him enough for lifetimes.

  “Stay,” I echo, stepping forward so that I’m on the other side of the bed from him. I take off my shirt, and his eyes burn over my naked torso like coals.

  My body responds like those coals have just been fanned into flame.

  “Stay,” I plead again.

  He drops his eyes down to Poe, tearful and flushed and naked. I can only imagine what a sight she is for a sadist right now—a feast of need and vulnerability, a living altar offering of delicious lust. And then he looks back up to me, hands flexing restlessly at his sides, and I know what he’s imagining. He’s imagining breaking me too, imagining me next to Poe just as flushed and raw and ready for the final act. His twin possessions. His two kept things.

  Keep me any way you want, I want to tell him. Just so long as you keep me close.

  I reach down and pop open my jeans, unzipping them and then kicking off my boots. He swallows.

  “I don’t know if I can watch the two of you . . . together,” he says finally.

  “Then don’t watch,” Poe says. “Fuck me instead.”

  Auden reacts like he’s been struck. He lets out a grunting, pained breath, his eyes slamming shut. “I haven’t earned you,” he tells her tightly, opening his eyes again and staring down at her with the yearning of a prisoner. “I won’t take anything I haven’t earned.”

  I finish taking off my jeans, followed by my socks and boxers. The moment my erection bobs free, Auden’s flexing hands tighten into fists. And then they flex again, fingers stretching all the way out, as if he’s already imagining whaling on my arse until I come.

  “Then start earning her now,” I tell him, putting one knee on the bed. I’m shameless enough to know that it’s showing off my thighs, my already tightened sac, my heavy, swinging cock. Shameless enough to want him to notice my body again like he did yesterday in the woods when he kissed me. Like he did in the shower when he tossed me off so hard my eyes rolled back in my head. “Help me fuck her the way she needs.”

  “Yes,” Poe says eagerly, seizing on this idea, her hands going back to Auden’s neck. “You can tell him what to do, tell me what to do . . . It’ll be like you’re guiding us. Like you’re fucking us both.”

  He takes one of those hands itching to hurt me and uses it to gently brush a tear off her jaw—and I know he’s going to cave. He’d do anything for this little dreamer-priestess of ours, our bride of thorns. He’d do anything to make her happy.

  Even crawl into bed with his worst enemy.

  “Okay,” he says. “Fine. But this stops the minute either of you need it to—or I need it to. Got it?”

  “Yes,” Poe and I both answer.

  “Poe’s safeword is convivificat,” he tells me. “In case you hear it and I don’t. And you need a safeword too.”

  “I don’t have one,” I say. “I’ve never needed one.”

  “That’s debatable,” he mutters to himself. Then to me: “Think of one.”

  But my mind is blank—or not blank, rather, but just blaring you’re going to be in bed with Auden and Poe, you’re going to be in bed with Auden and Poe over and over again at top volume.

  “I can’t,” I admit. “I can’t think of one.”

  He sighs. “How about may I?”

  My heart wants to tear right in half, and he meets my gaze. He knows. He knows what the words may I between us mean, he knows how I hated them. So I can’t decide if he means this as a punishment or a kindness, but I do decide it doesn’t matter.

  It’s fitting, as most punishments and kindnesses are.

  “May I, it is,” I say, climbing all the way onto the bed as Poe lets go of Auden’s neck and turns to look at me.

  “Promise you’ll tell me if I scare you,” he says to us both, and my heart finishes shredding itself, because once upon a time, a prince of a boy said that to me in a bed of flowers, and it was the happiest I’ve ever been.

  “You’ll never scare me,” I tell him. “You never could.”

  “Things have changed a lot since we were boys,” Auden responds, and goes to run his hands through his hair. And then seems to remember that he’s in charge, and drops his hands again, shoving one hand between Poe’s legs instead. She spreads them and moans, pain chasing pleasure across her face as each roll of her hips sends her sore arse moving over the blanket.

  Auden looks down at her in wonder, lips parted, and then he lifts his wet fingers to the light. “Saint,” he says in a strangled voice. “Come clean these for me.”

  My cock gives a jerk of hot need at that, swelling even more as I crawl closer to Poe and raise up on my knees so that Auden can reach over her and stick his fingers in my mouth.

  “Shit,” Poe whispers from below us, watching as I lick and suck her sweet taste from Auden’s fingers, watching as Auden and I watch each other. Without a shirt, I can see exactly the effect I still have on him, I can see the seize and stutter of his torso as he fights to keep his breathing even, I can see the pulse pounding like mad at the base of his neck.

  I can see the head of his erection outlined against his hip, big and plump, and the thickness of his organ leading back down to his root.

  I suck on his fingers like I’m sucking on another part of him, gratified to see that pulse pound harder, those glorious muscles in his chest and belly tightening and heaving in need. He still wants me. He still wants to belt me and spank me and fuck me. He wants to fit his cock inside my arse and ride me until we both come in a slick mess.

  I knew that already, of course. I saw him come last night just from holding me by the neck and jerking me off. I saw his eyes that night in the tower when I crawled to his spend-coated cock and licked him clean.

  But you can want to fuck someone you hate too, and when I finish licking his fingers and then nuzzle my nose briefly into his palm, I look up into his face and see all the torment there. The old bitterness, the old anger, all of it threading through the lust and through the desire, and it’s personal, it’s so personal, he looks like a king who’s about to make war not because he has to, but because he wants to.

  He looks like a man about to fuck not
for fucking’s sake, but for revenge.

  It’s shameful how much my body responds to that. How loudly my heart echoes my thought from earlier—

  Keep me any way you want.

  Just so long as you keep me close.

  With a low curse, Auden pulls his hand away from my nuzzling. “Sit on the edge of the bed,” he orders me. “Feet planted on the floor. Legs wide.”

  I do as he asks, moving to the edge of the bed where he’s standing, and I sit the way he wants me to—spread thighs, feet flat on the floor, my rigid length pointing straight up to the ceiling, the tip glistening in the light.

  He lets out a long breath—at my obedience or just at the sight of me naked and waiting, I don’t know—but either way, I take some satisfaction in that breath. Some satisfaction that wanting me is stronger than hating me, at least right now. That I can shake his control even if I can’t earn his forgiveness.

  Auden walks over to the small table by the bed and pulls a small foil square from a drawer. It’s hard not to wonder if this is the first condom he’s ever pulled out of that drawer, if this is the first time this bed has seen anything dirtier than a kiss. And I look at him walking back over to me as he tears the packet open with his teeth, I look at his flushed cheeks and tensed breathing, and I wonder how he’s made it this long. I mean, I know he loved Delphine—probably still loves her in whatever way you can love a woman who cries off your engagement—but still. It seems inconceivable that someone who needs as powerfully as Auden could have restrained himself for so impossibly long. I can’t decide if that restraint proves how safe we all are with Auden . . . or if it’s evidence that we’re not safe at all, not now that he’s freed from the only thing that held him back.

  “Stay still,” he says, and then he steps between my legs and I realize what’s happening right as he presses the latex sheath to my crown.

  I groan at the feeling, at the slippery kiss of it as he positions the ring, and then at the pressure of his fingertips as he rolls it right down my shaft. Is it me or does he take extra care with it, extra time to roll it all the way to the base and check the fit? Is there a moment when his hand drops as if to cup me and then pulls away? Is there a new heat in his eyes when he straightens up to stare down at me, like he’s beyond turned on to see my body positioned the way he wants, gloved by his will and ready for his command?