Before I fucked it up.
Before he found the one thing that could hurt me as much as the memory of hurting him.
Poe steps forward, as if she’s stepping between us to stop a fight, which is ridiculous since both of us are still slouched on either sides of our little book-and-glass arena. “This is what I mean,” she says, frustrated. “This is exactly why I can’t just say screw it and do what I want, which is to fuck both of you constantly. Preferably at once.”
We both react visibly to her words. What red-blooded people wouldn’t? The idea of non-stop sex, the three of us together, long, hard muscles pressed against her giving flesh . . . a spread of fingers and mouths and tight places needing fucking?
“There’s not just something between me and Saint,” she continues, “or something just between you and me, Auden. This is between the three of us, because the something between you two isn’t only hatred and it isn’t only lust, and you know it. There’s something else. And either we let that grow or it hurts us all.”
Auden takes another drink, then straightens up. “Out with it then,” he says imperiously, like the lordling I always knew him to be. “What would you have us do, little bride? Fuck each other once a day, like medicine? Like a vaccine against enmity? Because I’m telling you I can fuck St. Sebastian Martinez all day long and still not forget what he did to me.”
“I’m not asking you to fuck him or forget what he’s done,” Poe says impatiently. “I’m asking you to forgive him.”
Her words coincide with the end of one of Becket’s songs, and so they hang in the air, not loud enough for the still-gossiping others to hear, but loud enough to cut across Auden and me like a whip.
“And this is a condition of what, Proserpina?” Auden asks dangerously. “If I don’t forgive him, then what will you deny me?”
Poe shivers a little, licking her lips, and I know she likes this dangerous, possessive version of Auden as much as I do. But she fights past it. “If the three of us can’t be together, then—then I’m sorry, but none of us should be together.”
Auden tenses at that, but he doesn’t speak. Not yet.
“I don’t know if it started when we were children or if it’s the kink or if it’s something else, some kind of Thornchapel magic, but there’s a beat . . . a pulse. Right here.” She puts her fist in front of her—in the middle of our triad—and clenches it over and over again. A beating heart. A beating heart between the three of us. “It’s meant to be the three of us. And if it’s not, if we pair off, I’m worried this thing we have will sicken and die and we’ll be worse off for it.”
“So it’s forgiveness or nothing,” Auden elucidates. “That’s a very extreme and uncompromising order, Ms. Markham.”
She lifts her chin, luscious mouth set in determination.
“And what if I tried to work on forgiveness,” Auden suggests, looking over at me in a way that makes my toes curl in my boots, my cock jolting at the same time as my mammal brain signals run. danger. run. “What if I’m working on it, but then I’m flogging you one day and your little cunt needs to be fucked? What if I’m letting you kiss my feet—yes, Proserpina, I see how you look at my feet—until you beg me to let you bury your face in my lap and suck me off? Or what if St. Sebastian is all alone in his empty library and you go to visit him, and you just can’t resist the boy with the sad brown eyes, the boy who just needs his throbbing cock not to hurt anymore? What then?”
I’ve straightened without even knowing it, drawn in by Auden’s coarse and carnal words. Poe is practically swaying on her feet, lips wet and wetter from all the licking and nibbling she’s doing to them.
“What if we get to Beltane and nothing’s settled? The May Queen will be the lord of the manor’s by right—the lord’s to penetrate, the lord’s to fuck. Will you deny us that? Deny me or Saint or Rebecca or Delphine? Deny our priest, if our priest needs inside you? If he’s the lord this time? You look over at that fire, Poe, you look over at Father Becket Hess, so tall and fair and strong, and so, so, so fucking good. You tell me if he needs to fit his long cock inside you to feel better, that you’d stop him? If he’s meant to claim you by the fire, that you’d say no because Saint and I haven’t kissed and made up yet?”
Poe’s eyes are glued to Becket now, to his long fingers currently working open the foil of a champagne bottle, to the fire burnishing his golden hair bronze.
“So I need to know exactly how you plan to deny us all, little bride, including yourself. Will you shun Saint and me, but take comfort in the others? Are Saint and I to take comfort in the others as well? Because I heard what you asked earlier, I heard you ask about lust and pain. If you’re asking for our bodies to quiet while our hearts decide . . . maybe before Imbolc . . . maybe before the six of us knew what we’d feel like in the circle, with the fire and with the thorns and with each other. But there’s no going back now.”
“There’s no going back now,” she repeats in a whisper, her eyes moving from Becket to Auden and then to me. “Maybe we can be with the others, but just . . . just not with each other while we figure this out. It’ll be an incentive for you and Saint to really work at it, because God, I need it. I need it right now.”
A noise rips from Auden’s throat—a growl. “Proserpina.”
“The thought of either of you being with someone else makes me furious,” she says, swallowing. “But it also gets me hot. Oh God. So hot.”
It’s my turn to rumble a low growl.
When did I move so close to her? When did Auden? But we have, we’re surrounding her, and I’m close enough that I can see the pulse pounding in her neck. “Maybe,” she says breathlessly, “maybe we don’t start this quite yet. Maybe the three of us can take the edge off one last time—”
She hasn’t even finished speaking before Auden has her caged against the back corner of the bookshelves, in the place of deepest shadow where the others by the fireplace won’t be able to see. I’m over there just as fast, in time to see his hand delve under her skirt as if he has every right to what’s under there.
“These tights,” he hisses. “Once I earn you, you’re never wearing this shit again. I want your pussy naked and available for my use, understood?”
She nods and then arches, and I don’t have to see to know that he’s cupping her. Hard.
“There’s a condom in my pocket,” he says to me, even though he doesn’t take his eyes off the beauty trying to seek relief against his hand. “Roll it on your cock.”
“But don’t you—”
He cuts me an irritated look, and I know what he’ll say. That he means it about earning her; he needs something else in place before he penetrates her. I have no idea why he’s so consumed with nobility now. He certainly wasn’t when he was planning to tie me to his bed and beat me with a belt until I came. Back in the day.
“Why do you even have a condom?” I mutter as I slide my hand into his pocket. I can feel the sharp cut of his hipbone and the defined bottom ridge of his oblique as I do. And then, inevitably, the hot, thick root of his dick through the thin fabric of his pocket lining.
His face remains the same—impassive and fearsome—but his body can’t hide how it reacts to my touch with deep, barely perceptible trembles. Something I take a deep schadenfreude-esque smugness in, since I have so few victories against him in our long history.
“I have a condom because I’ve been a walking wall of lust these past two weeks,” Auden finally answers as I pull the packet free.
“But you haven’t earned Poe yet,” I say, unzipping my jeans without preamble. Auden’s gaze drops to where my hand is pulling out my swollen inches. “So who were you planning on fucking?”
“There was no plan for me to fuck,” Auden says. His eyes are still tracing the outline of my erection as I roll on the sheath. “I knew it was for you.”
I almost come into the condom right then and there.
I can feel that beat, that pulsing, between the three of us so strongly right now, and I
know Auden and Poe can too. I know they can feel that what we have together is more than biology, more than our odd little religion, more than years of knowing each other. Those things we have with the other three in our group.
But this? This holy, ravening, primal, and marrow-deep need for each other? This is something unique to the three of us, and there’s no denying it, no arguing with it. Fighting it is as pointless as screaming up at a storm on the heath.
Auden reaches down with his other hand; I hear the tear of fabric. The muscles in his arm contract and flex as he works her underneath her skirt. “So wet, little bride,” he purrs. “So ready to be fucked in this little hole.”
He grabs my hand and pulls me forward before I can react, and he guides me to her. Past the tear in her cute librarian tights to the place where she’s wet enough that a man could shove in with a single stroke. My shaft—huge and latex-shiny in the dark—pulses as Auden presses my fingers into her with his own until two of my fingers are curling up inside her and both our hands are wet.
Poe rocks against us both, her hands scrabbling for any kind of purchase until she manages to brace one on the bookshelf behind her and the other on Auden’s shoulder.
“Please, please fuck me,” she begs, and I know at this point she doesn’t care who she’s talking to. Auden or me—or hell, maybe Rebecca or Delphine or Becket.
“Oh, we’re going to,” Auden growls, and I like that we, I like it so much that I couldn’t deny Poe is right about fixing whatever is between the three of us even if I wanted to. Could I have ever been content without knowing this? Knowing the feel of Auden’s hands on my hips as they are now, guiding me between Proserpina’s waiting thighs as she wraps her arms around my neck? Knowing once again the feel of being between them, as I was that night, of Auden reaching around me and gripping my cock with a casual arrogance that has me shuddering?
He notches my tip against her, his hand moving past me to grip her arse under her skirt, and then he brings us together, like we’re his to join. His pets to breed, his concubines to amuse him. It’s this I’m thinking of as I sink deep into Poe, letting out a long breath as her sweetness grips me, squeezes me.
“How does she feel?” Auden asks in my ear. He sounds bored, but I know that trick for what it is; I know that when his blood gets hot, his voice gets cold. And maybe it’s the thrills dancing up my body from the head of my cock to the soles of my feet, maybe it’s Poe biting her lower lip like she wishes it were my mouth she was nibbling—or maybe it’s the sheer fucking filth of this moment, Auden and me wedging her against the bookshelves in the dark while the others continue to laugh and drink only a stone’s throw away—
Whatever it is, I want to test Auden’s coolness, I want to make him feel for me just a little bit of what I feel for him always—desperate, clawing ache. A pining so animalistic and rough it shames me.
I want him to shame me.
And maybe it’s that last impulse more than anything that makes me do it. I turn my head to his—he’s so close that I can feel his breath on my cheek, so warm in the cool air of the library—and I kiss his throat. Right next to his Adam’s apple, right in the little hollow there. I kiss him and then I part my lips just enough to taste him with a small dart of my tongue. He tastes like clean skin with just the barest hint of sweat, like a man just beginning to get worked up. And he smells—God, he smells how he always smells. Like this wonderful, terrible place tucked into the wild, wind-whipped moors. Like Thornchapel.
He stills at the touch of my lips, as if he can’t bear to breathe, and then at the flicker of my tongue, he lets out a low sound of fury. For a minute I wonder if he’ll hit me again, and I don’t care how wrong it is, how against the rules of kink, I want to eat up all his passion, all of his energy, I want him to be lost like me and I want to see it and feel it and take it into my body to remember as long as I live.
He doesn’t hit me.
He bites me.
In a movement so quick, I lose all my breath in a hard grunt, Auden is behind me, pinning Poe and me even tighter against the shelves and shoving me deeper than I thought I could go in her, so deep that the silky heat of her is sliding around the bare base of my erection above the condom. And then he bites my shoulder hard enough to make me cry out—a cry that he muffles with his palm.
“You don’t want to answer me? Fine,” he says in my ear. He keeps his lips close to my skin as he turns to speak to our girl. “Poe, how does Saint feel? Does he feel big? Deep? Like he’s all the way up to your belly? To your chest? Are you going to come around him like a good girl?”
She manages a shaky nod. “Yes,” she whispers. “More. I want more.”
“You want more than a fuck in a room full of people?” Auden asks, voice low and dangerous. “More than hiding in the shadows so your friends won’t see you getting a cock between your legs? A dirty little ride in the dark because you just can’t go without it?”
Thud. Her head falls back against the shelf, the pale curve of her throat and the lift of her chin only just visible out of the shadow. “When you talk to me like that,” she murmurs. “God, I can’t live without you talking to me like that.”
I know she can’t. I felt her body pulse and tense at his dirty words, I can see her breathing now, fast and fitful, like she’s just emerged from the deepest part of a lake.
Auden knows it too. It only takes a glance at the confident set of his jaw and the curl at the corners of his mouth to see that he knows exactly what he’s doing to her. And to me.
He always knows.
Quietly, as quiet as we can manage, we begin to move, Auden behind me with his hands braced on the shelves on either side of our corner, me with my hands full of warm, curvy arse, and Poe pressed up against the books, like some kind of primitive librarian sacrifice, impaled over and over again by my need. By her own wish and by Auden’s command.
This is, incidentally, the only place I want to be for the rest of my life.
I know it won’t be.
Which only makes me fuck her all the harder, all the needier. I love her gasps, her stitched breaths, her little squirms when she gets close to coming. I love how she changes and transforms—the fierce woman who seizes her pleasure one instant, and in the next, Auden’s little bride, staring up at him with big, big eyes and parted lips, going loose and soft in my arms like a doll, my own little fuck doll. And the beauty of it is I can’t tell who’s using who, whether she’s using me or Auden’s using me or if I’m using both of them to fulfill the filthy fantasies I’ve been imagining for years.
Auden doesn’t change, not now. His breathing stays even against my neck as he shields our fucking bodies from view, and while his hips stay tight to mine, he doesn’t chase my thrusts. Still in control. Not lost to pleasure like Poe and me.
“Shorter,” she gasps. “Grind me against you—oh fuck, that’s it. That’s it.”
She practically climbs me as I obey her, using my grip on her arse to move her like she needs, rubbing her hard little bead against me with every stroke. She hoists herself higher to get the angle she wants, she squeezes those soft thighs against my hips as I fuck her through the rip in the middle of her tights, she wraps her arms ever tighter around my neck and bites my earlobe. And then I hear kissing.
She and Auden are kissing with me between them—and as he utters a crude oath into her mouth and finally, finally, thrusts against me, she comes in a series of bewitching flutters around my length.
That incredible hot-cold tension twists right in the pit of my belly, and then snaps with a rush, a wave breaking—and breaking—and breaking—
I’ve crushed Poe completely to the shelves now, my face pressed against the side of hers and my hips just rutting and rutting and rutting, furiously emptying every last drop of my spend into the latex. Pouring myself out for her, into her, but not really. Not really into her.
God, just the thought of it though . . . spilling inside her with nothing between us . . .
I collapse
against her as my cock slowly stops jerking, my heart pounding so hard I think it’s slamming against the inside of my chest. She’s so soft and warm and sweet against me, and I never want this moment to end, I never want to pull out of her, because once I do, once I tie off this condom and we straighten our clothes, then it’s over. This in-between space of uncertainty punctuated by vicious fucks—it’s got to be killed and buried. Like everything else interesting and worthy, it has to die.
“Is this really what you want?” I can’t help but ask her. “For this to stop?”
Our breathing is one, shared as we press belly to belly against the shelves. Auden still cages us in with his hands, but he’s as motionless as a statue now that we’re done. Regretting this careless lapse into vulgarity, maybe. Regretting agreeing to Poe’s request that we work toward some kind of peace, almost certainly.
She shakes her head. “I don’t want anything to stop, Saint. Dammit, you could do this to me ten times a day and it wouldn’t be enough.” She eases away; I reach down to keep the condom steady as we separate. It was so warm in that opening in her clothes, a warm, tight place just for me, and now everything is all draft and chill once again.
Auden moves, finally, pushing past me to help Proserpina straighten her clothes.
She lets him, like a little queen, her shoulders back and one eyebrow lifted as she looks at me. “It wouldn’t be enough, but neither is whatever this is now. I won’t trade sating my body for sating my heart, not when I can have both. What we have now, it can’t last.” Vulnerability shines in her eyes, and she looks away as she swallows. “Maybe you don’t want something with me to last. But I do.”
Auden sighs, wraps her in his long arms. She does that thing where she buries her face in his chest and then peeps out, like a rescued kitten. It makes my heart try to squeeze out between my ribs to get to her.
And then he bends down and says something against the exposed shell of her ear, something I can’t hear. Her kiss-stung mouth pulls into a wide, wide smile.
Feast of Sparks Page 13