Feast of Sparks

by Sierra Simone

  “Daddy?” she asks, worried enough to stand. Her father does not do this; Samson Quartey does not feel. He certainly does not feel inside his own office, where anyone can see.

  He doesn’t seem to hear her, doesn’t notice her getting to her feet. “I can’t believe Adelina’s dead,” he finally whispers, and it’s the first he’s mentioned Poe’s mother since Rebecca told him about finding the bones in the ruins weeks ago. “She was so happy. Always so happy. Smiling and laughing, full of life.”

  She doesn’t respond, not wanting to break the spell of her father actually talking to her.

  “I wonder if David will come back,” he says after a moment, more to himself than to her, it seems.

  “David?”

  “David Markham,” he says automatically, still lost to himself and his memories. “Proserpina’s father.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I would like to—just once—” her father ducks his head, shoulders slumping some. “Just once. Just to see him one more time.”

  “Daddy,” she says carefully. “Did you and David know each other well?”

  The light coming in from the window catches the dark amber flecks in his eyes and the high curves of his cheeks. If she didn’t know that he’d just celebrated his fiftieth birthday, she would have thought him much, much younger. Young enough to be in love.

  “Yes,” he says wistfully. “We knew each other well.”

  Rebecca remembers the picture again, the way her father’s fingers laced through David Markham’s, like they couldn’t stand not touching one another for the time it took to pose for the picture. She doesn’t want to think what she’s thinking, not only because no one likes to think of their parents having sex, but who likes to think of their parents having affairs?

  “You would tell me, Rebecca?” her father asks suddenly. “If David came back to see his daughter—you would tell me?”

  Rebecca nods because she can’t speak, because she’s too stunned to remember words. How can this be her father, this man sounding desperate to hear from a former lover? A former lover who is a man? This father who never stops telling her about the importance of family, of appearances, who said nothing when she came out to him as bisexual except “Don’t tell your mother”?

  She might be angry. She might be gutted.

  She really can’t tell, even after he mumbles a hurried excuse and then makes an abrupt exit from her office. Even after she begins packing up her work to leave and go pick up Delphine.

  It’s not that she hates feelings, Rebecca reminds herself as her driver parks in front of a sparkling glass tower in the City. It’s only that she knows feelings for what they are.

  Feelings are fictions. They are lies.

  They are myths one tells oneself in order to make sense of chemical reactions and environmental pressures. Feelings fold over on themselves like origami—tucks and deceptions, hidden planes never meant to be scrutinized. So here is anger, for example, anger that her father has had an affair, anger that he treated her queerness like a mediocre report card she’d brought home from school. But then if she uncrimps even one corner of that anger, she finds empathy, as unsettling as that empathy is, because she knows her mother has never been an easy woman to be married to and she doesn’t know how faithful she could have been in her father’s shoes either. Empathy because she sees that her father’s reaction to her coming out as bisexual had everything to do with his own story and possibly nothing to do with hers.

  And then the empathy opens up into a kind of loneliness, a loneliness for something she’s never had and has never even dared name to herself, and then that loneliness unfolds into a fear that she will never have this nameless need met after all.

  Yes, underneath all her anger, all her empathy and all her loneliness, is fear.

  Creased, ugly fear—all the more ugly for how utterly boring it is, how utterly ordinary—and it’s so ugly, in fact, that she can’t look at it for long, tucking everything back into its place and shoving it down by the time the car door opens and Delphine slides into the backseat with a pink holdall and wearing a dress so short that Rebecca sees the quick flash of red, intimate lace when she gets in.

  And just like that, all of the feelings—myths and lies that they are—melt away like ice in the sun. There’s no loneliness, no fear.

  Just the urge to press Delphine back into the seat, to wedge her thigh between Delphine’s knees and push that short, slutty dress up to her hips.

  She hasn’t had her thigh between anyone’s knees in far too long; she’s taken no one to bed since Delphine, she’s come alone since the night she beat Poe. She hasn’t even gone to the club. She knows the reason why, even if she doesn’t want to admit it to herself.

  Even if she’s afraid of untucking that feeling to see all the other feelings underneath.

  “Golly, this traffic,” Delphine sighs, and then begins a very Delphine routine of reflexes—checking her hair, checking her phone, running a tongue over her front teeth for any rogue lipstick, checking her phone again. She’s so beautiful that everything she does is mildly hypnotizing, like she’s living, breathing art, like she’s stepped through a warp in the very air from some immortal realm of unearthly beauty and enchantment. Rebecca can never decide exactly what it is that makes Delphine so deeply lovely, just that there must be something, some Platonic form of beauty that Delphine is hewing to. It could be those honey-colored eyes, or maybe her mouth, plump-lipped and always slightly open, like she’s waiting to be kissed. Or maybe it’s all that hair, hair so silky and so blond that to look at it is to imagine it sliding across your stomach—or maybe it’s her body, which makes Rebecca feel like a pirate, like she needs to plunder and seize and keep.

  Even now, her palms itch to run up those pale, plush thighs, they flex to squeeze Delphine’s arse and hips, to toy with the overflowing cups of Delphine’s tits. She wants to make Delphine expose those tits right here in the car, right here in the City so that Rebecca can suck them while unknowing pedestrians walk by with leather satchels and phones glued to their ears.

  She wants to coax those legs open and stroke Delphine’s cunt; she knows from Imbolc night how charmingly mindless Delphine gets with pleasure. How eager. How wet. How willing.

  Why have I been denying myself again? Rebecca thinks dizzily as Delphine starts chattering about a book she’s been reading for the book club she’s started with her Instagram followers. Why haven’t I just taken what I want? What she wants?

  These past seven, nearly eight, weeks, Rebecca has avoided Delphine, avoided her quizzical expressions and adorably clumsy come-ons. She’s answered Delphine’s texts as curtly as possible, manufactured excuses so that they’re rarely alone together and especially never alone together at Thornchapel, where the temptation to fuck is nigh overwhelming . . .

  What a stupid waste, Rebecca thinks suddenly. And all for what? Because she’s afraid to peer too deeply at what she feels for Delphine? Because she’s afraid that what Delphine really likes about her is what Rebecca can do for her and that she doesn’t like Rebecca simply for herself? That Delphine will just be another person who expects Rebecca to be perfect and tirelessly selfless? To give of herself without complaint?

  That fear again.

  And Rebecca is sick to death of it.

  After all, what has protecting herself gotten her but seven weeks of hell? What has denying them both saved her from?

  Something untwines deep in her chest as she realizes she’s made up her mind. It goes loose and floaty, like her heart wants to bob up into her throat and glide out of her mouth right on up into the sky, and the car turns into traffic to drive them to Thornchapel.

  Chapter 21

  Delphine

  Equinox

  * * *

  Rebecca is quiet during the long drive to Thornchapel, which is not unusual—Rebecca is often quiet during the drive. But today is different. Anticipatory, maybe, even though every time Delphine looks at her, Rebecca is on her iP
ad answering emails or scrolling through something important-looking—just like any other drive—and so maybe Delphine is wrong and there’s nothing different about this silence at all.

  No matter how much she’d like to imagine there is.

  Imbolc was perfect, Imbolc was magical—and it was so perfect and magical that Delphine had refused to listen to the warnings in Rebecca’s voice, to the warnings that Rebecca actually uttered.

  Tomorrow we wake up ashamed.

  Delphine knew only the most remedial etiquettes and manners around sex, so she’d assumed that this was the kind of excuse-like thing one said before sex, much like how one might say sorry about the mess when one had friends around to visit, even if the place was spotless. A dance people did before the act so they could talk themselves into doing it.

  She never considered that Rebecca might mean it. That Rebecca might actually wake up and feel shame at the thought of fucking Delphine.

  Am I so shameful? Delphine wonders. Is fucking me . . . embarrassing?

  Delphine doesn’t have nearly three million Instagram followers because she worries about lovers being ashamed of her, she has nearly three million followers because she does precisely the opposite. Because she talks about all the times she feels dishy and delicious. Because she tells other people to feel good about their bodies too. Because she reminds her followers that any clothing brand, airline, celebrity, doctor, or lover who makes them feel less than fully comfortable in their own skin is an arsehole, and that it’s never too late to burn everything to the ground.

  And right now Delphine is the biggest hypocrite in the world, because she’s spent the last seven weeks unable to believe any of her own puppies-and-rainbows, all-bodies-are-good-bodies shit.

  Now whenever she posts a picture of herself, she’s wondering how Rebecca would see her, how Rebecca thinks of her body. Does Rebecca see the dimples on her thighs and that hip crease, that one hip crease that Delphine spent years sighing at—and then regret taking her to bed? Does Rebecca wince at the memory of sleeping with her? Does Rebecca look at her own body—which is perfect, it’s the kind of body a teenage Delphine used to ache to have, all svelte and high-breasted and lean—and long for someone else, someone thin, to sleep with?

  And the worst and bleakest and unhealthiest thought of all—a thought so grim and horrid she can barely even think it to herself—does Rebecca remember the horror Delphine lived through in Audra Bishop’s back garden and then think of Delphine as damaged goods?

  Delphine doesn’t recall any hesitation from Rebecca on Imbolc (at least not after she’d finally convinced Rebecca to have sex) and she knows Rebecca enjoyed it. She remembers how Rebecca made sure she enjoyed it too. But maybe something’s changed. Something must have changed, because Rebecca has spent the last two months avoiding her as much as possible—and pretending nothing happened between them when she can’t avoid her—and it hurts. It’s making her doubt everything she’s told herself and her followers for the last four years.

  Maybe she’s not beautiful.

  Maybe she’s not worth someone’s time and affection.

  Maybe what happened to her at university has made her . . . less than. Beneath someone as sophisticated and unbroken as Rebecca.

  You know that’s not true, a reasonable voice says. It sounds a lot like her therapist. You’re thinking the meanest things possible about yourself because it’s the easy way out. It’s easier than pushing through this while believing good things about yourself.

  She doesn’t want to be reasonable right now. She wants to wallow. She wants to get to Thornchapel and drink lots of Prosecco and cry in her bed—and then blame Rebecca for it all.

  Very mature, the reasonable voice says.

  Fuck off, Delphine thinks back.

  For a long time while Rebecca works next to her in the car, Delphine lays her head back and pretends to sleep, but really, she’s trying not to cry. She’s trying to keep the tears burning at her eyes from spilling onto her cheeks, not only because they would be embarrassing but also because she had eyelash extensions done this morning and she’s not supposed to get them wet for another eight hours.

  But when they get to the house—Delphine having fallen asleep for real after all—Rebecca doesn’t give her the chance to storm off to the kitchen to see if Abby left any Prosecco to chill. Rebecca stops in the hall next to a neat stack of plastic pipes and turns to face Delphine.

  “My room,” Rebecca says. “Now.”

  “No,” Delphine says, knowing she sounds petulant and not caring. “You can’t make me.”

  “Oh, is that so?” Rebecca asks, folding her arms across her chest. One perfect brow is arched at Delphine’s impertinence, and Delphine feels a flicker of excitement, the kind of excitement one might feel at a big storm blowing in. Every cell in her body instantly remembers what it was like to be at Rebecca’s command, to serve Rebecca’s body in the velvet dark of Imbolc. Every nerve ending fires to life at the thought of Rebecca touching her, kissing her, biting her.

  No, Delphine chastises herself. Because fuck wallowing, fuck hating herself. She is lush and sexy and she has hundreds of DMs every day from followers who love her body exactly the way it is—or at the very least would boff her.

  And Rebecca is one of the few people on this planet who knows exactly why it was so hard for Delphine to trust someone with her body, why Delphine waited so long to have sex, and so she doesn’t get to pick Delphine up and put her down like a secondhand toy.

  “Don’t play Domme with me right now,” Delphine goes off. “You don’t get to pretend you want me when you’ve been giving me every sign that I’m unwanted for the last two months. You slept with me and then acted like it never happened, you used me, and all I wanted was you, and if you didn’t want to sleep with me again, all you had to do was tell me so—”

  Delphine doesn’t get the last part of her rant out because Rebecca is suddenly there, suddenly close enough to kiss, and then she is kissing, she is licking across the arch of Delphine’s upper lip and then licking inside. She is stroking Delphine’s tongue with her own and molding her lips to the shape of her mouth. She has her hands in Delphine’s hair, twisting and pulling and sending sharp tingles all over her skin, electricity that gathers at Delphine’s nipples and in hot sparks around her clitoris.

  “I don’t make decisions lightly, pet,” Rebecca says, pulling back just enough that her eyes can meet Delphine’s. “Not about the things I want. The people I want.”

  “You seem to make lots of light decisions at your club,” Delphine points out in a petulant whisper. She tries to pull away, but Rebecca doesn’t let her.

  “I haven’t slept with the same person twice in a row since uni,” she says, making sure that Delphine is looking into her eyes, like she wants Delphine to see something important, like she wants Delphine to decode something underneath her words. “Not from the club, not from anywhere. Do you understand what I mean?”

  Delphine moistens her lips. “So I’m out of habit?”

  Rebecca gives a throaty little laugh, seemingly as much directed at herself as at what Delphine said. “Yes, you could say that. You’re very much out of habit for me.”

  The husky way she says it sends shivers everywhere, but then an unpleasant voice wonders, what if she means your body? What if you’re out of habit for her because she’s used to thin bodies?

  Delphine should say this. Delphine should ask. Just a few seconds ago, before that kiss, she’d been brave. Her entire job is to be brave, actually, to tell other people to be brave, and here’s her chance now to do it for real. And yet she can’t force the words out. She can’t even think of words, when it comes down to it.

  All she can think of is Rebecca’s soft, full mouth. The smell of her skin, floral and almost mossy, like a cool forest in spring. Rebecca’s eyes, which even in the daylight are such a deep brown it’s hard to tell where the iris starts and the pupil begins, and which are currently appraising Delphine with a combination of
hunger and utter determination.

  Brave feels an awful lot like petulant right now, like picking a fight, and the thought of that is suddenly horrifying. How can she reveal how insecure and weak she really is in front of this woman who’s surely never felt a moment’s insecurity in her life? Can she bear to see this look of Rebecca’s—which is the look of a woman who very much seems to like what she sees—change into confusion and then to disgust when Delphine starts begging her for assurances? When Delphine reveals the inevitable—that she’s not the plucky, positive guru everyone thinks she is, but miserably and grossly needy?

  “Delph,” Rebecca murmurs and then nips at Delphine’s lower lip. “Let me have you. Let me have you right now and I promise I’ll make it so good.”

  Oh, who is Delphine fucking kidding? There’s only one answer to this, no matter how desolate she’s been these last seven weeks.

  “Yes,” Delphine murmurs back. “Yes, Mistress.”

  Chapter 22

  Auden

  Equinox

  * * *

  The offices of Harcourt + Trask are in a renovated coach manufactory in Belgravia, and they’re almost too sleek, a too effortless-mix-of-old-brick-and-new-glass, and sometimes Auden finds himself wincing when he walks inside. The two stories of the office have been renovated in such a way that the second floor is not a full floor, but is instead something more like a rectangular gallery above the first, meaning that someone on the first floor can look up through the opening in the second floor and see the exposed Victorian roof supports and the sloped ceiling—all painted a near-painful white. He supposes the intention was to create the illusion of air and light—same with the glassed-in meeting rooms with their modish, brushed steel chairs and tables—and perhaps it would work if it weren’t so aggressively stylish, weren’t so see? see how fashionable we are????