Feast of Sparks
Page 34
But they’re all grins and laughs when they separate, like the battle was all in good fun, and the god is still smiling when he turns to Delphine.
With her, and with her alone, does he ask permission, murmuring something low while he takes her hand. He lifts it to his lips, keeping his eyes on her the entire time he does, and she responds with something I can’t quite make out, but it sounds like shy agreement.
He’s more Auden than god now, cradling Delphine’s hand with both of his own and bringing it to his chest as he leans down to give her a careful kiss. I think it’s the first time they’ve truly touched since their engagement ended, and there are all sorts of emotions running through Auden, evident in the clench of his jaw and the short stutters of his breath as he kisses the woman who should have been his bride in truth. A woman he might still love.
There’s a tug of jealousy somewhere in my chest as I watch them, especially after Delphine breaks the kiss and says something teasing to Auden, who responds with something teasing of his own. And then Rebecca says, “I’d expect better from you, Sir Guest,” and Auden’s laughter fades. He turns back to Delphine with a serious expression on his face, and then he kisses her for real this time, the same way he kissed Becket. Searching and searing, but not, as my jealous heart helpfully notes, with the same possession and demand as with me and Saint. The two of us alone belong utterly to the god and to the man the god dwells in.
St. Sebastian must be thinking something similar, because I feel his hand slip into mine, and when I tear my eyes away from Auden and Delphine, Saint kisses the top of my head and then squeezes my hand. Once, twice, three times, in a rhythmic clench like a heartbeat.
Our heartbeat.
This is us, he’s saying to me. This is us as a three.
Reassured, I can watch Auden finish kissing Delphine, can watch how tenderly he studies her face afterward, as if to make sure he wasn’t too rough or needy with her. She is smiling and shaking her head in response to something he’s asked, and I’m suddenly reminded of our game of Spin the Bottle all those months ago. The first time we wandered past the boundary of what ordinary friends did with each other. We’d been so uncertain during that game, awkward and aroused, unsure what came after sharing a kiss in the service of a game.
And now look at us. Setting the world record for fastest fall from innocence—Spin the Bottle to pagan orgy in less than four months.
It’s here. It’s us. It’s Thornchapel.
I’m aware of the drums again, and then Becket has his own drum back, and before I can even question what we’re doing, we’re circling around the fire again. I’m holding Saint’s hand, and then I’m holding Delphine’s, and then Rebecca is leading me, and I’m aware of Auden—the flickering firelight changing him back into the god once more—gazing at me with glittering eyes. We’re singing again, dancing again, hearing music from some other place again, and as we round the fire with steps and stomps that feel like they shake the earth, I swear I catch something at the edge of my vision.
Something that should not be there. Something behind the altar. A door.
When I turn again to look for real, it’s gone. There’s only the green grass swelling up to the altar, and the gray stone where the altar had been excavated—along with my mother’s bones. I stop moving for a second, simply staring at it, wondering if it was a trick of the light, some glimmer of the setting sun through the trees. Or maybe some kind of grief-induced hallucination? Although I don’t feel particularly waterlogged with grief now. And I’ve already seen the door prior to this moment—and that was before we found the bones.
“Bubbles!” Delphine says, swirling past me and handing me a glass flute of cold, fizzy glory. Only here would there be ancient rituals of sex and death, of antlers and mud and fire, and then piles of fresh, clean pillows and chilled wine and also hampers of charcuterie and fruit and caviar and bone china to serve the feast on. It’s like heaven—all the best parts of being alive brought together in one place—and we even have our own god.
At least for tonight.
I toss back the champagne, and then I drink some more, and twilight settles in at the edges of the clearing, fogging the far spaces with shadows. And then I’m aware that Sir James is running around the fire with us, jumping happily until he spots something small and food-like hopping between the trees and darts off to chase it.
“That’s probably fine,” Becket declares, with champagne-infused solemnity. “I think dogs can go in and out of the circle. Dogs,” and he sounds very serious here, like he’s about to impart an important theological point, “are not people.”
It’s dark enough that the fire is the brightest thing in the world, and as we sing and dance and swirl dizzy dizzy around it, I gradually become aware that I’m being stalked. That for every jump and leap and spin, my progress is matched by the antlered god, and that for every turn around the fire I make, the god is getting closer and closer. He has eyes for no one else, and soon he stops the pretense of dancing altogether and simply walks toward me with purposeful but unhurried steps.
I’m not being hunted. I’m already caught.
No one else seems to notice as the wild god approaches me and I move backwards and away from the fire. They’re caught up in the flames and the song, and the platform is under the blanket of approaching night, a place of half-shadow. The backs of my calves hit the platform, and I can’t move back any farther, I’m trapped.
It’s exactly where I want to be.
The god stops just out of reach. “Proserpina,” he says.
With the fire at his back, he’s beautiful, he’s so beautiful, and I realize with a breathless rush of rightness that this is it. There are no more maybes after this, no more half-measures, no more half-love. This is us—after grief, after anger, after too many hurts to name—finally taking something that’s earned. “Yes?” I ask.
“I want to hear you say you love me.” There’s Auden’s voice under the god’s, and although it sounds like a king demanding worship, I hear the vulnerability in it. The need. “I want you to say that you’re mine to love.”
I’m the one who steps forward. The one who kisses the spot over his heart and then at the base of his throat.
“You know this already,” I tell him with my mouth against his neck. He smells like soap and trees and wood smoke and sweat.
“That’s not enough,” he pleads, more Auden spilling back in. He twines his hands in the hair at the back of my head like he did before and pulls my head back and searches my face with almost frantic urgency. “Do you know how dangerously much I love you? Do you know how much it hurts? Do you know that I can barely sleep, barely work, barely eat, for how deeply you’ve crawled inside me?” A jagged inhale. “I used to think love could only hurt when it ended, but now I know better. The best kind of love hurts all the time. You make me hurt all the time. You have since you showed up all sleepy and smiley with your questions and your big green eyes, you have since I saw the welts on your legs and knew you wanted the things I’ve hated myself for wanting to give.”
“Auden,” I breathe, stunned.
He drops his forehead almost to mine, pressing it against my flower crown, and closes his eyes. “I’ve always loved you, you know. I loved you while I was still a child. But I knew I loved you as an adult when I realized you make your love hurt as much for me as I make my love hurt for you.”
I reach up and cradle his cheek and jaw in my hand. “Are you my Dominant right now? Or my wild god?”
He gives me a smile that’s sad and fond and hesitant. “Both.”
“Then I’d say that I don’t want to make you hurt. I’m the submissive, remember?”
“It would hurt to love you no matter how you liked your kinks. The soul of you, Poe, is a soul made for living, and living hurts most of all.”
I use my other hand to frame his face. “Then live with me.”
His eyes shine with more than firelight. The sharp seize of his chest and stomach tell me he’s br
He’s always been the Thorn King. I just didn’t know until now.
“I think,” the Thorn King says, “that I’m ready for my kiss.”
His sculpted lips brush against mine, soft and slow, licking into my mouth with the same sultry pace, until he’s able to kiss me so deeply my knees are buckling and my breath is coming in short, small pants.
When I kiss you next, it’ll be because I’m enjoying what I’ve earned. What I love.
It’s the god and not Auden who pulls away from my mouth and stares down at me with a conquering hunger. And then my hair is free, my rose crown tossed carelessly aside, and I’m up off my feet, nestled in his muscular arms as he climbs the platform and lays me down on the pillows. He kneels up between my legs after he settles me onto the makeshift bed and stares down at my body, his gaze ravenous. I feel like some kind of sacrifice laid out like this, with my white dress rucked up to my knees and without a bra to keep my nipples from being lewdly visible through the fabric. I can tell the god feels the same, because he pops open his jeans without looking down and gives himself an absent stroke or two while he takes me in.
I spread my legs a little farther apart in invitation, just so he gets the hint. I want to be a sacrifice, I want to be taken and claimed, and if he doesn’t do it, then I’ll do it myself.
There’s the tiniest crook to one corner of his mouth, as if he’s recognizing this, and then he gives himself one final stroke over his boxers before letting go.
With impatient motions, he tugs at the bodice of my dress until my breasts are naked to his gaze, and then he pulls with tight, frustrated movements at his antler headdress until it’s off and he can toss it into the grass next to the platform. I’m about to complain—being fucked by the horned god would be really sexy with actual horns in the mix—but then he bends low, captures a nipple in his mouth, and gives it a long, hot suck. He licks it once and starts to move to the other one, but when my back arches to follow the pleasure, he splays his palm over my sternum and pushes me back down.
“Stay still,” he says, the words all dark and velvet. “You’re mine to taste however I want.”
“Half the fun is squirming,” I complain. I wriggle underneath him, twisting with the ache building between my legs and trying to get my breast closer to his mouth again.
“Oh really,” he says, eyebrow raised in the most Audenlike way, and I should have heard the warning in his tone and recognized it for what it was. But I didn’t.
I let out a surprised squeak as he grabs my wrists and pins them to either side of my head. His thighs are planted wide and they spread my own far enough apart that the hem of my dress barely covers my naked cunt. I writhe even harder underneath him, loving the feeling of being pinned, of being trapped. Of being forced and made. Struggling like Fay Wray, twisting and yanking against the inevitable capture.
“Now,” he says, pleasure curling in his voice like smoke, “let’s try this again.” He dips his head to tongue my nipple, which sends tense, urgent pleasure arrowing right down to my cunt.
“Fuck,” I whisper faintly. He pulls on the tip of my breast with hot, slick suction, breaking the suck to take it in his teeth. It’s enough to singe me with the first flare of pain, but then he kisses it again, keeping the sting balanced with sweetness.
My wrists stay locked down as he moves his attention to the soft undercurve of my breast, kissing and nipping his way to my ribs and then back up to my nipple, which he laves until I sigh and then sucks until I whimper. My legs aren’t trapped though, and so my bare feet slide everywhere—deeper into the blankets, to stroke along his calves, to twine around his hips. It’s one of the times I squirm against the dirty bliss he’s conjuring that my dress finally falls back far enough to expose my sex.
He doesn’t notice at first, too consumed with tasting my breasts to look anywhere else, but when he lets go of one wrist to stroke himself again, the back of his hand brushes over the silky skin between my legs.
He goes completely and utterly still.
I didn’t want our first fuck to be the kind of tender, gentle sex that first times are supposed to be. I wanted Auden as his most tortured, his most arrogant, and after I saw him as the god, I wanted him as the wild god and Thorn King. Of course I did, because I’m the girl who gets antsy if she isn’t flogged twice a week; I’ve never been interested in gentle, and I probably never will be. I want filthy, I want invasive, I want the kind of breathless possession that ruins you for anything else.
All that said, when the god freezes over me, his muscles growing very taut and very still, and then his forest eyes flash to mine in an expression of dark appetite, of blazing, mindless hunger . . . I feel a very real bolt of fear. Terror as primal and animalistic as the god’s hunger bleeds through my mind, and I’m just as still as the god is, quivering, barely daring to breathe. Had I really thought I’d seen true dominance before? Real power? Had I really thought that power was about postures and words and ropes and kneeling and perfectly timed flicks of flogger falls?
Had I?
Because I was wrong. I was so wrong that it could almost be funny if it weren’t so terrifying. So thrilling.
This is power. Power that comes not even from strength—though every carved muscle in his arms and chest and stomach is sweat-sheened and poised to strike, though I can feel his firm thighs tightening and readying against mine.
No, the power is coming from him, from inside him, from whatever wild and thorny heart beats in his chest, from whatever thoughts are flickering behind those forest eyes. This is not only my Auden, already a king with kissable feet and a knack for tying knots, but something old and young and holy and earthy all at once.
This is my wild god and he’s about to devour me.
With a noise, I try to twist away, not because I don’t want to be devoured but because I’ve surrendered myself wholly to the inevitability of being devoured and all that’s left of me is instinct.
And instinct is saying, he will take you, he will eat your heart.
The god’s eyes darken at my attempt to get free. And before I’ve even managed to sit up, I’m tackled back to the platform, his body heavy and unrelenting over mine. He noses over my throat while one of his hands is down at his jeans, shoving them farther down his hips. When I try to wriggle free again, I see the hewn, sun-kissed muscles of his back sloping down to his narrow hips and then beyond them, the hard swells of his ass, so firm that shadows gather in the hollows at the sides of his cheeks.
He pins me down again, his shoulders and arms like steel bars, big and immovable, and as we struggle, I feel the broad tip of his erection against my thigh. My body doesn’t know what to do, what to feel—surrender, it whispers at the same time it also chants flee, flee, there’s no mercy here, not from him.
His hips shove forward again as he growls down at me, all primal fury that his sacrifice is trying to escape. There’s the flash of dancing fire reflected in his eyes, the white edge of his teeth as he growls again, and then the hot press of his crown against my opening. I gasp as he pushes forward, gasp again as my soft, wet flesh yields to him, and I realize exactly how wet I am. How swollen and ready to be fucked.
“Please,” I breathe up at him, not even sure what I mean, because it definitely isn’t please, stop. It’s more like make me surrender. Make me yours.
One eye is orange and glittering with reflected firelight and the other eye is black with creeping forest shadows as he looks down at me. “You’ve always been mine,” the god says simply.
What can I say but yes?
I’ve always been his.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Yes.”
The god takes my lips with a hard kiss, as if to stop me from ever trying to take it back. He keeps his weight on me—hands on my wrists, chest to chest as his hips give a powerful thrust, and I’m impaled on his arousal.
He hisses as he pulls back, as if my cunt is almost too good, and I feel the cool air kissing the wetness along my folds. When my May King finally penetrates me fully and buries himself inside me, every inflamed inch of my body sings to vivid and ecstatic life. Not because he’s inside me, although it hurts so good I think I might come just from being filled in this way, but because he’s taking me. It wouldn’t matter how he took me—if he used my mouth or my hand or spread me wide and ate my cunt until I screamed—it’s the taking that matters, it’s the claiming and the possession and the undeniable brand he’s carving onto my heart.
He held back before. For me, for Saint. For the three of us.
He’s holding back no longer.
His massive cock slides free and then slams in again with a thrust that has us both grunting, and then the god is pumping into me in earnest, his hips moving fast and faster as the drums around us beat madly. I can hear the others around the fire singing and laughing, and surely there’s no way they don’t know, but also of course they know, it’s what we’re here for. And when I look over and see Saint and Becket kissing while Delphine whoops and dances around them, I know they’ll be joining us soon.
The thought of having even more hands and mouths to play with has me purring underneath the toiling god, and the sound seems to drive him to some new, insatiable hunger, because he ducks his head down to kiss my breast as one of his hands searches out my waist, my hip, my ass. He squeezes a cheek with a giant hand, using it to angle my cunt better to his liking, to open my hips so he can fuck me with hard, filthy strokes.
-->