Not that Auden despises the transparent and the obvious, not always. After four projects at Harcourt + Trask and several from his school days, his favorite design is still a lobby for a Chicago skyscraper that is unabashedly obvious. Initially the client had wanted something opulent, something Gilded Age that could nod to the other nineteenth century buildings nearby, but Auden and Isla Harcourt proposed something different altogether. Their design eliminated the first two floors of the building—currently tenantless anyway—and created a space that was almost breathtaking in its waste of useful city real estate. Doorways so tall they seemed to stretch up to the sky, a ceiling far enough up to create a near cathedral, all of it walled by glass and pale, pale stone.
When the client saw it, they immediately understood. The space was the opulence. The sheer immoderation of it was the ostentation they craved. Why create fussy cornices and coffers when one could prove the very same point with profligate absence?
It was a very pedestrian design, from an artistic standpoint. It wasn’t the kind of thing that landed one in Architectural Digest, no one was winning RIBAs for spacious lobbies, and Auden knew that. He liked it anyway.
It was space where there should be none, it was light where there should be weight, it was balance and echo and air when all around it was exhaust and din. It was a cathedral—or perhaps a castle—carved out of one of the world’s busiest, densest cities through nothing but vision. His vision at that, his and Isla’s.
So he’s probably too hard on the Harcourt + Trask offices. In their own modest way, they’re proving the same point. Here’s our second floor with a gaping hole in the middle because we can afford to waste Belgravia real estate, etc., etc. Not everything can be on such a scale as that cathedral of a lobby, not everything can be trying to change the world. (But God, why not?)
Normally he leaves around lunchtime Fridays to get to Thornchapel, but he’s staying late to finish up an email to Isla, updating her on a client call he had that morning. He’s officially nothing at Harcourt + Trask, just more bespectacled, leather-satchel-carrying grist for the mill, but even though he’s not a partner or a junior partner, he’s become Isla’s favorite employee. An immodest part of him knows it’s because he’s talented, at least more talented than the other young architects he works alongside, but he suspects it’s also because he volunteers to take on the shit work no one else wants to do.
Talk to municipal officials about a problem with the soil pipes? Auden will do it.
Field a call from a client angry about delays in building approval? Auden will do it.
Running copies for a meeting? Fixing a jam in the upstairs plotter printer? Coffee run?
Auden will do it.
He’ll never tell anyone this, but one of the proudest moments in his life came last year, right here in this office. It was the week of his father’s death, and he’d come in to arrange bereavement leave with Isla. She’d given him a hard look over her desk after he finished talking and said, “You never mentioned that your father was Ralph Guest.”
He initially had almost no reaction to this. He was exhausted that day, worn down from the last month of Ralph’s life, which had been a series of medical misadventures, one after the other, increasing in torment and scale, and there was no one but him to bear the brunt of it. No sibling, no mother. No aunts or uncles. Certainly no friends—Ralph had done a good enough job driving those off. And so when Ralph finally passed on and then Auden discovered his work still wasn’t done, that there were services to arrange and probate to handle and so many other miscellaneous and pointless tasks that nonetheless had to be carried out in the wake of a death, he wanted to lie down and sob.
Not because he missed his father, but because he missed sleep.
“I would have thought,” Isla mused then, looking at him in his rumpled clothes and even more rumpled hair, “that you would have traded on that more here. Certainly Trask would have wanted to curry favor with someone like your father. You could’ve had your own office, been on the way to being a junior partner already.”
That’s when the reaction came, a slow bristle that moved through his chest. “That’s not how I want my life to be.”
“No need for indignation, Auden. I find it quite refreshing, if I’m honest. The fact that I had no idea you were that kind of Guest speaks a lot, because I think you’re one of the best architects in this firm. And now you can know, completely and genuinely, that you won that opinion on your own merit and nothing else.”
Auden hadn’t been able to speak, the bristle in his chest replaced with something almost light, almost happy.
It was pride. Real, deserved pride. The kind he’d never been able to feel at school or even at Cambridge, because sure, he’d excelled in those places, but he’d excelled because he’d had every advantage along the way . . . And because the Guest name came with entitlements. The kind of entitlements that meant all success came easy—as easy as if it’d been purchased. It hadn’t been purchased, of course, nothing so gauche, but it had been implied, and in Auden’s world, implication was reality.
And so he’d taken the job at Harcourt + Trask precisely because he knew that Isla was Glaswegian and was newish to the London spheres his father was part of, and he’d applied and interviewed in utter secrecy and silence, so there could be no chance of his father catching wind of it and trying to pull strings. He’d wanted this one corner of his life to remain untainted, free of those insidious Guest implications.
He’d wanted, just once in his life, to earn something.
So anyway, he’s won Isla’s respect free and clear, and he tries never to jeopardize that, even when it means the occasional late day like today. It also means that he’s at his desk when Andrew Cremer, the family solicitor, calls.
“Guest,” Auden answers crisply, wedging the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he can finish typing the email.
“Mr. Guest,” Cremer says politely. “Do you have a minute?”
A very large part of him wants to drawl Does it matter? because they both know it doesn’t matter at all what Auden has time for. If Cremer needs him, then there’s nothing for it. Whatever it is must be done.
Auden manages—just barely—not to be a shit. He actually likes Cremer quite a bit; he knows that Cremer works hard to shield him from the ugliest and knottiest realities of being a Guest, and it’s not Cremer’s fault anything that reminds Auden of his father makes him instantly fifteen years old again. “Yes, Mr. Cremer,” he says heavily. “Anything you need.”
Cremer clears his throat. “It’s something rather unusual, Mr. Guest. There’s been . . . a delivery.”
“A delivery?”
“From your father.”
Auden’s hands go still over his keyboard. He’s still looking at the screen but he sees nothing. “My father’s dead.”
“Yes, sir,” Cremer says patiently. “Nevertheless, it is from him.”
Auden thinks for a moment of the note Proserpina received from her mother, that strange Latin word sent twelve years after her death. “How?” he says, hoping he sounds very, very normal right now, and not like he’s being haunted by the tireless, grasping ghost of Ralph Guest. “How can this be?”
“He’d arranged a delayed delivery with a courier service last year, a couple months before his death. It would have been after the first heart attack, I believe, given the date on the package invoice.”
“It’s a package?”
“Yes, sir. A small one. We took the liberty of opening it—it was addressed to me—and inside there was a letter directing me to give you an envelope in the circumstance of his death or mental incapacity. I hope it goes without saying that I have not opened that envelope.”
Auden taps his fingers lightly on the keyboard, not typing, just trying to exorcise the sudden anxiety pricking at the inside of his chest. Ralph and his fucking mind games.
“Forward it to Thornchapel, Mr. Cremer. I’ll read it then.” Or throw it in the fire.
“Very well, sir. May I ask how the renovation is coming along?”
Auden sighs and stands up, deciding to finish the email to Isla on the car ride home. He thinks of Proserpina’s wide green eyes and St. Sebastian’s pierced pout. “It’s going well enough that leaving it feels like agony, Mr. Cremer.”
There are moments when Auden can almost remember the boy he was before the wedding in the chapel. They usually occur on the road to Thorncombe—passing by the service area outside Ilminster where his mother would get him Burger King if they were traveling without Ralph, for example. Or that stretch of B road just west of Bovey Tracey that gradually pulls itself out of woods and fields and hedgerows into staggering moorland vistas—vistas which a young Auden didn’t care about in the least, but those first clumps of heather and gorse meant his chances of seeing wild ponies increased greatly, and that was something young Auden cared about very much. And of course, St. Brigid’s-in-the-Moor, so medieval and evocative that Auden imagined somewhere inside there were ladies with steeple-shaped hennins and men in poulaines and all manner of romantic-looking people.
And then there is Thornchapel itself, the small, rattletrap bridge (now a giant fucking headache to get his contractor’s trucks and trailers over) that to a boyhood Auden was a moat bridge or sometimes a bridge into Faerie or sometimes a bridge over a dizzying crevasse. The merry Green Man door knocker, which always seemed on the verge of winking to Auden, and the library where he’d pretend he was at Hogwarts or Rivendell, or maybe, when he got older, the monastery in The Name of the Rose.
And sometimes when he sees these places—but not always, and not often enough for him to be armored against them—small darts of memory will pierce right through his chest, gone before he can grab hold of them and leaving only their wounds as proof they were there.
He doesn’t know what he feels about them, exactly, because he’s had more than a decade to leave the boy who made them behind, and because he’s overwritten them with new memories.
And because he knows what he knew as a boy was wildly wrong, all of it, every bit of it. The mother who bought him Burger King was already drinking then, and was keeping much deeper and darker secrets from Ralph Guest than feeding their son cheap food. He was never, no matter how hard he willed it, going to turn into a wild pony that could run as far and as free as it wanted, and any romantic thoughts he might have had about St. Brigid’s were complicated from their inception by his parents’ silent and bitter war over his religion—his mother being so C of E as to have a bishop in the family, and his father being a scion of one of the only recusant families in Devon.
And now he knows that maybe Thornchapel is a magic place, but it isn’t a safe place.
So what is it that bothers him so much about remembering that young boy? He doesn’t know, but he’s still grasping reflexively at those darts of memory as the car pulls onto the Thornchapel drive. As if remembering the boy who used to think the world was bigger than it was will help him be a man who knows for a fact it is.
He doesn’t wait for his driver to help him get his bag out of the trunk—he grabs it himself, thanks him, and gives him the time he’d like to be picked up early Tuesday. And then he makes for the house with long strides, feeling like he’s bleeding from the entry and exit wounds of remembering a time when he thought he was loved and Thornchapel was the best place in the world.
He finds his solace the minute he steps through the propped-open door and into the hall—touching the Green Man knocker as he always does when he walks past it, like paying a toll—and sees Proserpina Markham walking through the middle of the hall with her arms so piled high with books that her chin is the only thing holding them in place. Her hair is in some kind of braided bun thing, which he likes because it exposes the long lines of her neck and shoulders, the sweet place between her shoulder blades—and because he can fantasize about being the one to take all that hair down, to unpin it and unwind it, to lightly scratch at her scalp until she’s purring with pleasure. And the dress she’s wearing—a low growl builds in his chest when he notices it. It’s short, so short that the hem swishes around mid-thigh, and the demure Peter Pan collar does nothing to offset how it’s tailored to hug the tempting swell of her tits and the oh-so-palmable curve of her bottom. He wants to grab her and carry her up to his room right now, books be hanged, just have them tumbling straight to the floor as he hauls her off and has her all to himself for as long as he damn well pleases.
It’s getting harder and harder to remember why he doesn’t do just that. Why he hasn’t taken what he wants, especially when that what is as sweet and lush and ready to be marked and bitten as Proserpina is.
If only that wedding in the ruins were real, he thinks and not for the first time. Then Proserpina would be his, then he could have her for his own and kiss her plump little lips until she panted for more. He could take her to his bed and do every dark and filthy thing he’d ever wanted, he could sketch pain and pleasure across her skin, he could fuck her until they were both too spent to move, and then she could crawl inside his arms and live there forever and he’d keep her safe from everything, every sad and cruel thing that came for her.
“Little bride,” he says as she notices him.
Her eyes brighten—so green that Auden can imagine that God painted the world using the green of her eyes—and then nearly does exactly as he imagines and drops her books to run to him. Well, she doesn’t truly drop them, she’s too much a librarian for that, but she does set them on the metal folding chair that seemed to appear from nowhere when the renovation started, and then she scampers over like a good little kitten, and Auden has her exactly where she belongs: in his arms.
“I missed you,” she breathes into his neck. Auden buries his face in her hair and just inhales her—the smell of leather and paper and something else not quite identifiable but that reminds him of wildflowers and grass waving under a hot sun.
“I missed you too,” he says, hauling her up against him so that her legs are around his waist and his hands are full of her arse, covered in those thick tights he both loves and hates. His fingers flex and grab; he lowers his mouth to nip at her collarbone. “Have you been good while I’ve been away?”
He started asking her this after that night Saint fucked her in the library. (Every time but once she’s answered yes. The one time she answered no was the time she told him about Becket giving her an orgasm in the church, and Auden had been so simultaneously jealous and aroused after she described it to him that he’d had to clench his fists to keep from grabbing her and taking her right there and then.)
“Yes, I’ve been good,” she whispers. “But you could punish me anyway.”
God, he wants to. He wants to turn her over his lap and redden her flesh with his palm, he wants to see her shivering and sightless with need from being flogged. Some days, it’s all he thinks about.
Twice in the last four weeks, Rebecca has facilitated scenes between them. Nothing elaborate, but she showed him how to wrap rope in more complicated and useful ways and how to use a riding crop and a paddle. He’s enjoyed the aftercare as much as the scenes themselves, the feeling of Proserpina all warm and limp and sniffly, curled up against his chest, and those were the only nights where he allowed himself the luxury of having her in his bed. Not for sex—although he was sorely tempted and always had a swollen erection throughout—but to cuddle her and stroke her hair and murmur praise until she fell trustingly asleep in his arms.
But he’s worried that he’s tested the limits of his self-control, that he’s pushed himself too far and now all the bonds keeping him to his word are cracked and strained, and if he so much as spanks Proserpina tonight, he’ll turn into an animal. He’ll give in, and he’ll fuck her until she admits that she’s his, that she’s as much his as he is hers.
Stop.
You promised you wouldn’t.
He knows that’s not entirely true—he promised that he’d attempt restraint—and it’s possible that the three of them have
crossed into territory where the restraint does more harm than good. But he also knows that if there’s any challenge Proserpina sets for him, he’ll rise to it. And that’s what he whispered in her ear that night in the library, after she said she wanted to build something lasting with them.
I want more than lasting. I want endless. I want forever.
And I’m going to earn it, no matter what you ask of me.
And he’s going to. He’s going to earn her, he’s going to prove himself worthy of her complete and utter trust, so that when she becomes his little bride in truth, she’ll know that he means every damn word of his wedding vows.
And there will be wedding vows. He’s not sure when he decided this for sure—maybe he knew it even as a child. Maybe that’s why he went along with the wedding game, because he already knew it was his destiny to have Proserpina for his own.
Auden clutches her closer, close enough that he can feel the hammer of her happy heart against his. She will be mine.
“Auden,” she murmurs, squirming against him. “Please. Just something small. A little spanking maybe. Or you could make me crawl to you.”
He groans in his throat. “Poe, if you crawl to me, I’m going to end up fucking you.”
She lets out a short breath. “I think I’d like that. Let’s do that then, please.”
She’s writhing in his arms like a kitten indeed, but she’s not trying to get down, she’s trying to get closer, trying to rub her stiff nipples against him, trying to seek friction for her clit against the firm wall of his stomach. “I’m tired of waiting,” she complains. “I’m tired of this halfway place where I can jump into your arms but you can’t jump my bones.”
Auden privately agrees, but he also knows she was right in the library that night. There is something between the three of them. And while Auden sees this denial and attempt to forge something with St. Sebastian as a way to earn Proserpina, that’s not the whole reason he’s doing it. It’s barely even half.
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