“Rebecca is coming to visit tonight. She’s excited to see you again.”
Rebecca.
St. Sebastian didn’t know how he felt about this. It should be nice to see another friend from that summer—in fact, he missed all of them with a fervor that was downright embarrassing—but he didn’t want to share Auden. Not a little bit, not at all. He wanted those hazel eyes only on him, those spoiled smiles trained on him alone. He wanted more kissing and more biting and the things they both wanted the kissing and the biting to lead to—and none of that would happen around Rebecca.
Auden seemed to sense his hesitation.
“Don’t worry,” he said, bending down and nipping at St. Sebastian’s earlobe. “This won’t change my plans for you today before she gets here. Turn over on your side.”
Slightly mollified, St. Sebastian obeyed, and was even more mollified to feel the rigid column of Auden’s dick brushing against him as he turned over underneath him. “What are your plans for me?” he asked as he got settled and Auden hunted for another marker. “More kissing?”
“You don’t even need the wine to be bold with me anymore,” Auden observed. “I can’t decide if that’s a good or a bad thing.”
“I’m always this way. You just made me nervous at first.”
“Hmm,” Auden said, uncapping a marker and arranging himself so that his knees pressed against St. Sebastian’s belly and so that he could bend over St. Sebastian’s ribs to keep drawing. “I like the idea of making you nervous.”
St. Sebastian didn’t have to ask why. It was the same reason he’d sported a hard-on while Auden had licked blood from his lip, the same reason he wanted Auden to touch him whenever Auden pleased, however Auden pleased.
Uncertainty, power, pain, shame—it was the song they both heard, the melody they both played. And St. Sebastian wanted to play it forever.
“But you’re okay with me being bold too, right?”
Auden frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
St. Sebastian drew up his arm to pillow his head; with his free hand, he plucked idly at the lush carpet of grass. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” Auden said. The marker began its wet tickles again. “Tell me.”
St. Sebastian took a minute, then plunged into unvarnished, insecure honesty. “For the same reason that I like you saying tell me. Or roll over. Or hold still. If that’s what we’re doing, then shouldn’t I be more . . . docile?”
The marker paused. “I don’t want you docile,” Auden said. He lowered his head so he could catch St. Sebastian’s gaze. “I want the boy who marched up the aisle of the thorn chapel and stole a kiss for himself. I want the boy who threw rocks and picked flowers all in the same day. I want you as you are, St. Sebastian Martinez. No other way.”
And, as if to sear his words into St. Sebastian’s memory forever, Auden lowered his head even more and kissed the bare skin above St. Sebastian’s heart.
The kiss was warm, firm, and St. Sebastian couldn’t help threading his hands through Auden’s thick hair to hold Auden’s mouth against his chest, any more than he could help the speeding of his heart or the renewed throbbing of his cock. And Auden let him—just for a moment—Auden let him tug at his hair, let him twist and twine his fingers in the soft waves of it. For all the times Auden had touched St. Sebastian, St. Sebastian had never gotten the same privilege, had never been able to explore the tempting, well-bred flesh of the boy he wanted. He knew instinctively that it had to be earned, that this moment was an indulgence or a kindness, and when Auden finally reached up and seized St. Sebastian’s wrists, he didn’t feel angry or rejected. Only bereft.
Still holding St. Sebastian’s wrists, Auden nuzzled into his chest and caught a nipple between his teeth. Pain sizzled and flashed through St. Sebastian like a fizzing, popping sparkler, and Auden nipped again, this time following the bite with a hard, hot suck, which nearly killed St. Sebastian dead.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“You asked my plans for you,” Auden said, giving St. Sebastian’s nipple a parting kiss and then sitting up. He still held St. Sebastian’s wrists in his hands. “I think I’ve just added this to them.”
“More,” St. Sebastian pleaded, without shame. Or with it, and still not caring. “Give me more.”
Auden did let go of his wrists now, giving St. Sebastian an evil smile. “Now, where would be the fun in that?”
St. Sebastian groaned. “Please, Auden. Please.”
“Please. Such a good word coming from those lips,” Auden said, touching the tiny bite wound on St. Sebastian’s lower lip and then grinning crookedly at the shudder the touch provoked. “For that, maybe a little mercy.”
And then he bent and kissed St. Sebastian for real—a deep, hot kiss—stroking his tongue against St. Sebastian’s like all of St. Sebastian’s mouth already belonged to him.
Which it did. Maybe it had since that day in the thorn chapel.
St. Sebastian arched up against him, cock seeking friction, skin seeking Auden’s hands, and Auden broke the kiss with another wicked smile, smiling even broader when he looked down and saw the helpless throb of St. Sebastian’s neglected hard-on. “God,” Auden said, “I can’t wait to do everything to you.”
“Tell me,” St. Sebastian begged, and then at Auden’s lifted eyebrow, he added, “Please. Please tell me what you’re going to do to me.”
Auden considered this a moment, looking at St. Sebastian’s flushed cheeks and heaving sides, running the top of his marker over St. Sebastian’s denim-covered cock and smiling to himself at St. Sebastian’s ensuing whines. “Okay,” Auden decided. “I’ll tell you, so long as you remain perfectly still while I finish my drawing.”
And there was never a more immobile canvas than St. Sebastian Martinez that afternoon. He kept completely still as Auden drew along his ribs and hip, and then continued onto the tight lines of his stomach and chest. And as the marker worked, Auden spoke.
He spoke of how he’d make a new rule that St. Sebastian could never wear cheap gingham boxers again—no underpants at all, actually—because he’d want to reach into St. Sebastian’s jeans any time he wanted and feel St. Sebastian for himself. They’d start today, back at Thornchapel, and once St. Sebastian was in jeans and nothing else, Auden wanted to see what he looked like kneeling, crawling, tied to his bed. Auden wanted to push the tip of his cock around St. Sebastian’s bruised mouth, and then he wanted to come down St. Sebastian’s throat. He wanted to climb all over St. Sebastian’s body and rub his cock everywhere on it, he wanted to jerk off over St. Sebastian’s belly and hips and thighs and he wanted to splatter his markered creation with his cum. He wanted to make St. Sebastian masturbate for him; in fact, he had a whole list of filthy, depraved acts he wanted St. Sebastian to perform while he watched, like a lazy, bored king.
Just the idea of that last one had St. Sebastian trembling and rolling his hips against nothing.
“How much fan fiction have you been reading?” he asked weakly when Auden paused to survey his work.
“I’ve read enough,” Auden said absentmindedly, eyes narrowed down at St. Sebastian’s chest, which was now covered in a sprawling landscape of trees and stones and roses, a very familiar landscape—
“Auden, is this the thorn chapel?” St. Sebastian asked, realizing the truth as he propped himself up on his elbows to stare at his stomach.
It was beautiful how Auden drew it, all lines and geometry married with elegance. Married with vision. There was a sparsity to his composition that was the opposite of stark, that invited the mind to fill in the empty spaces with depth and color and shade. There was this sense of Auden behind each and every stroke, this poignancy and ache that could only come from a pretty boy who wanted to hurt someone he liked and hated himself for it.
The thorn chapel seemed more alive in marker on his skin than it ever could in a photograph or a painting, and it distressed St. Sebastian, deeply and forlornly, that this magnificent rend
ering would disappear and fade away in a matter of days.
Auden, however, looked suddenly alight with inspiration, and straddled St. Sebastian’s hips with a fresh marker in hand. “One last thing,” he said, already pressing St. Sebastian flat and beginning to draw. “One last thing.”
Right over the skin of St. Sebastian’s heart, where Auden’s mouth had been earlier, Auden swirled a big letter M, so flawless and ornate that it would have made professional calligraphers weep. And with a few more strokes, the thorns and branches of the thorn chapel scene began to crawl over the M, claiming it, twining and twisting around it so that the M was as much a part of the thorn chapel as anything else.
“What’s the M for?” St. Sebastian asked, curious.
“Martinez,” Auden answered promptly.
“That seems a little prosaic,” St. Sebastian said, looking up at Auden, who suddenly wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“Perhaps that’s what makes it unexpected.”
“I think you’re lying.”
Auden sighed, capping the marker and tossing it on the grass, but he didn’t move from off St. Sebastian’s hips. “Fine, it stands for more. Since you begged me for more earlier.”
“Really?” St. Sebastian asked.
Auden still wouldn’t look at him.
“I think you’re lying again.”
“I think you’re overestimating my artistic depth,” Auden said, finally moving off St. Sebastian to get to his knees and stretch, both his tone and his body language telling St. Sebastian that the subject was closed for now. “And now that my depthless work is completed, I think I’m ready to go back to the house. My parents will be gone until this evening, and it’ll be some time before Rebecca’s car gets here, and I know exactly what I’m going to do with you until then.”
It should have been embarrassing how fast St. Sebastian sat up—it certainly made Auden laugh harder than St. Sebastian had ever heard—but St. Sebastian was too horny to care. Only a couple weeks ago, he’d been a poor, lonely, fantasy-novel-reading, bondage-porn-watching bi kid with more flawless grades than times he’d kissed someone. And now . . .
Well, now he was a fantasy-novel-reading, bondage-porn-watching bi kid who was about to have more kisses than good grades. And he may have still been poor, but lonely? With Auden staring down at him with green-brown eyes full of cruelty and lust?
St. Sebastian didn’t think he could ever feel lonely again. Not while he could remember what Auden looked like, looking at him like that.
Auden got to his feet with the unconscious grace that St. Sebastian hated and loved, a grace like Auden alone existed in one of those sad-piano-soundtrack movies with gardens and waistcoats and things, like Auden alone inhabited a world of beauty where even the most mundane movements and activities must be beauty, they must. Beauty was a law there just like gravity, just like conservation of momentum, like heat and motion and time.
It simultaneously made St. Sebastian aware of his own lack of sophistication, grace, and beauty—and also reminded him that for some reason, Auden didn’t perceive that lack, didn’t see him as any less worthy of lust and admiration.
Auden looked at St. Sebastian like St. Sebastian was the most beautiful thing in the world . . . right before he hurt him, of course.
It was that friction, right there, that kindled a fire in St. Sebastian’s chest. He knew the vocabulary for everything: kink and submissive and Dominant and aftercare, clamp and collar and pegging, bastinado and single tail whip and quirts and ring-gags and metamours and on and on and on. But what he hadn’t learned was the word for how it felt to have Auden look down at him like he wanted to eat him alive. What it felt like to have Auden’s art all over his skin and what it felt like to hear Auden say things like I always see you. I couldn’t bear it if you ran away from me.
It made his chest ache and his throat ache.
What was the word for that?
And why hadn’t he found it anywhere on the internet?
Auden threw St. Sebastian’s shirt at him—not before taking one final moment to rake St. Sebastian over with a look so suddenly feral and proprietary that St. Sebastian almost begged him not to wait for Thornchapel and for the privacy of his room. He wanted Auden to kiss him now, to do all those filthy, mean things to him now, waiting would kill him and he didn’t mind grass stains on his back or mud on his knees if it meant being able to belong to Auden immediately.
But before he could say anything, Auden’s posture changed, straightened in a way St. Sebastian thought of as Auden’s in public posture, which screamed unearned wealth and indifference and entitlement—it was a mirror to the posture Auden had with St. Sebastian alone, which was still mildly disdainful, but suffused with a playfulness and a perceptiveness that erased the sting of the former.
“Put on your shirt,” Auden said. It was the kind of command that couldn’t and shouldn’t be disobeyed; for all the hundreds of reasons why it might be a bad idea to take off a shirt, it was rarely a bad idea to put one back on.
So St. Sebastian put on his shirt and stood up and that’s when he saw.
It was the clump of smoking scowlers St. Sebastian had managed so successfully to avoid, and they were here now, in the graveyard, seven of them with their pallid skin mottled and red-splotched from the heat—and maybe alcohol already—and their voices rising with the shove-y, swaggering rumpus of boys about to make trouble. Two boys, St. Sebastian had noticed from observation at school, seemed to be in a near-constant contest for alpha status, and the five others split and merged and split again around those two as they walked up the slope, moving and lagging at random intervals like they were demonstrating Brownian motion on human scale, all of them reacting to the molecules that were the two vying leaders, Billy and Lee.
Lee walked in the middle of the band, his steps slow and unhurried and bored, like he’d been dragged into a scene he was obviously too cool for. Billy was in front, as always, twitchy and edgy and laughing and loud, performing recklessness, performing a brittle, near-hysterical bravado that wound the others boy up, all the boys except for Lee, who stayed bored and cold no matter what.
Of the two, Lee was the most dangerous.
Not that St. Sebastian was interested in testing either of them.
“We need to go,” he told Auden as Auden watched the boys come toward them. “We need to get out of here.”
Auden shot him a look that said I will own Thornchapel one day and no one makes me leave, and St. Sebastian knew they were doomed. Instinctively he knew it, instinctively he knew that Billy and Lee and the others would hate a spoiled posh boy as much as they hated the poor, half-Mexican one, and instinctively he knew that they’d already metabolized the fact that St. Sebastian had been shirtless when they entered the graveyard.
It wasn’t as if St. Sebastian thought that if they were less of what they were, that if God had tweezers and could pluck away just Auden’s poshness or just the Americanized vowels of St. Sebastian’s voice or just the queerness or just the poverty or any of it, that they’d still escape danger.
It’s just that being all of what they were made this so fucking inevitable that St. Sebastian couldn’t stand it.
“Auden,” St. Sebastian tried again, as Billy was about to step into earshot. “We have to run.”
Auden frowned at him, like he couldn’t understand at all why St. Sebastian was nervous. “Why?”
At that moment, St. Sebastian could have screamed, screamed at this perfect boy who’d never been anything other than rich and white and adored, who’d never lived anywhere other than one of the most global and diverse cities in the world, who’d only come to the country to visit his ancestral seat and have servants make him picnics while he swam in his indoor pool and drank in the garden. He could have screamed at this boy who had never ever had to move, had never had to choose between pride and safety, who’d never had to tailor the definition of dignity around the reality of survival.
But there was no time to scream these thing
s, and the urge to scream was dampened immediately with wary fear as they were officially approached. Billy stepped up to them, swinging a half-empty two-liter of cider from his hand. “Martinez,” he drawled, coming to a stop a few feet away but still swinging his bottle. “Who’s your friend?”
“I’m Auden,” Auden said, in the most Auden-like way possible, all public school accent and imperious, condescending expression.
“Oh, did you hear that, lads?” Billy said, banging his cider bottle faster and harder against his thigh. “He’s AHHHH-dn!”
This was greeted by howls of laughter and mimicry, and St. Sebastian seized his chance through the noise.
“There’s a way down to the village,” he whispered quickly, urgently. “Over the far wall by the church. If we make it to the road, we’re safe.”
Auden just looked determined. “We don’t have to make it anywhere.”
Jesus fucking Christ, St. Sebastian wanted to shout. Are you stupid? Are you too stupid to see what’s right in front of you?
“It’s nice to see that Martinez found a friend,” Lee said, joining Billy and giving Auden and St. Sebastian a bored once-over.
“Well, this has been lovely,” Auden said. “Unfortunately, this graveyard is taken, so I’m afraid you’ll need to find somewhere else to do . . . ” Clearly at a loss to describe what it was these boys were doing, Auden made a vague motion at Billy’s sloshing cider bottle. “. . . this.”
St. Sebastian could feel his jaw literally drop. The fucking balls on Auden, the fucking unnecessary balls, because they had been about to leave anyway, and now Auden was drawing a line in the sand of a beach they’d planned on abandoning. Why? What point could this exercise in power possibly fucking serve?
But Auden didn’t budge an inch, not when the boys reacted to this with visible anger and excitement—because it was an excuse, Auden had just handed them an excuse to escalate—and Auden didn’t budge either when Billy stepped forward, another foot closer to them.
“What the fuck did you just say?” Billy demanded, face flushing. “Did you just fucking tell me to fucking leave?”
Feast of Sparks Page 18