“Fuck you,” I say.
Confusion filters through his forest-colored eyes at that, and for a moment he looks baffled and very, very young. But then of course, because he’s Auden, he decides that everything must be the way he wants it, and the confusion is replaced by hubris once more.
“Oh, is this the game we’re playing right now?” Auden asks, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He moves his nose along the line of my jaw, breathing me in. “I’ll play, St. Sebastian. I’ll play any game you like.”
I manage to wedge a hand between us and trap it against his chest. I mean to shove him away, but I can feel the beat of his heart under my palm and the smooth, warm curve of bone and muscle that protects it. I can smell the woody, floral smell of him, and I can feel his interest pushing insistently into my pelvis.
Auden presses into me even more, his erection grinding unerringly against my own, and the bite of zippers and buttons and seams in between only makes it better. I can’t help but shudder.
“You want me to fight you for it?” murmurs Auden, licking a warm trail down my neck. He gives me a quick, sharp bite, and I give him back a reluctant groan.
“You want me to chase you again? Because I’ll do it, you know I will. And when I catch you, we can play another game.”
“Like rich boy, poor boy?”
I don’t know why I say it, I don’t know why I’m provoking him when I should push him away, but here I am, digging at our old wounds as if we don’t have a brand new one that can never, ever heal. Maybe I’m trying to remind myself that Auden was always a spoiled prince, that beneath that noble face was always an ignoble rapaciousness, and we have too much between us ever to overcome. Betrayal and money and blood.
He gives a low snarl against my throat, and his hands come up to find my wrists, gripping them so tightly that I can feel the imprint of every single finger. “I’ve already told you that you’d regret playing that particular game with me,” he says, and he ducks down to bite my collarbone through my shirt—hard enough that I make an embarrassing squeak that’s half pain, half delight.
How can he do this to me? He shouldn’t be able to do this to me.
He shouldn’t be able to make me hard and desperate and so bitterly enamored—he’s a liar and he’s selfish and it’s so, so wrong now. In fact, it’s always been wrong. From the very beginning, it’s been wrong. That kiss in the thorn chapel when we were children, the grinding, fumbling embraces of that one teenage summer . . . yesterday, in the woods, with crushed bluebells damp under my back as the wild god claimed me as his own . . .
From the moment we met, we were a wickedness. A sin and a tragedy.
Auden lifts his face from where he’s bitten me, and I get a glimpse of cheekbones and long lashes before his mouth is full and lush on mine, demanding everything he’s ever demanded from me: my soul, my body, my future, and my past.
Everything. He’s demanding everything, and right now he’s kissing me like even everything won’t be enough.
“We can play so many other games, St. Sebastian,” he says as he pants into my mouth. “We can play enemies again if you want. Lovers. Sluts. Husbands.”
Husbands.
The word sinks through me like a stone through water, its meanings rippling out with cold, rhythmic pain.
We can only ever play husbands. Because we can never be husbands.
Siblings can’t marry.
And he knows that.
Fury fills me, and shame, infecting me everywhere. “What about brothers?” I say against his lips. “Do you know that game, Auden?”
Auden goes completely still against me, his lips still molded over mine, his exhales becoming my inhales as we stay there panting and rigid. It’s as if I’ve stopped time, as if I’ve turned the amber-colored light in the room into amber itself and we’re both suspended in it. Choking on it.
I feel him take a deep breath. The shuddering, slow kind. “St. Sebastian,” he says.
I try to yank my wrists free, but he doesn’t let me, and he doesn’t pull away. Our mouths are still touching and so are our clothed cocks. I can feel the heave of his tight stomach against mine.
I finally manage to turn my head to the side, rolling it against the wall and hating how much I miss the feel of his kiss.
“St. Sebastian,” he says again. A bit wildly.
“How long did you know, Auden? I know it must have been before Beltane, but how much longer before? Before Imbolc? Before Proserpina came? Before Christmas even?”
“No,” he says quickly, “no, not then, not before Imbloc, nothing like that.”
“But you did know before Beltane.” Before you caught me and claimed me. Before you made me swear never to leave you.
He takes a minute to answer.
Finally: “Yes.”
I struggle to get free again. “Let me go, you fucking wanker.”
“No,” he replies, as easily as anything. “Not unless you use the right words.”
I turn my face back to his, stunned. He’s leaned back so he can study my face, but my hips are still pinned by his and my wrists are still trapped high against my chest.
“Are you kidding me?” I ask. “That’s over. All of the kink, all of our . . . well, whatever we had—that’s over now. That’s done.”
“Whatever we had?” Auden repeats with narrowed eyes. “You can say it, St. Sebastian. In fact you better say it to me, because if you call it anything else, I’ll tie you to my bed and write it all over your skin so you don’t forget. It’s love, and it’s not over. It’s not done.”
“Are you insane?” I demand, my voice breaking over my anger and my shock and the secret rush of warmth I still feel at hearing Auden tell me he loves me. “Are you mad? This isn’t normal for siblings. We aren’t normal! We can’t—I won’t . . . Damn you, Auden, let me go.”
“Use your safeword, and I will.”
I open my mouth.
I can’t make the words come out.
May I, I think. May I, May I, May I. But still my tongue won’t move; the sounds won’t push past my lips.
Auden’s mouth curls up at the corner. “That’s what I thought.”
“Fuck you,” I retort.
“No,” Auden says heatedly, his hands tightening on my wrists, “fuck you. Just yesterday you promised—you promised me that you were mine, you promised me forever together. You swore. And now you’re running away again? You couldn’t even keep your promise for twenty-four hours?”
I sputter, tripping over the words as they tumble out of my mouth. “There is no promise, Auden! Things have changed! We are—we’re brothers—brothers—we’re related, we share blood, we share DNA, we share a fucking father, for God’s sake—”
“Half-brothers, and we didn’t grow up together, and it doesn’t—”
“—and you lied about it! Jesus fucking Christ, Auden, you lied about it.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
He sniffs. “That’s not lying.”
I glare at him. He glares right back at me. “That’s a juvenile justification and you know it,” I say.
“I was going to tell you.”
“When? After you’d fucked me again? Or after Lammas? Or maybe ten years from now when I finally worked up the courage to ask you to marry me?”
Auden’s glare softens into something boyish and vulnerable. He blinks long-lashed eyes at me. “You want to marry me?”
“Oh my God, Auden, that’s not the point,” I groan. “The point is we can never get married, and we can’t be together, and we can never be together again, and you knew and you didn’t tell me. You let me—you let us—yesterday, we—”
I can barely get the words out. He and I have done something unthinkably bad, something so wrong that even the word wrong isn’t heavy enough. We were more wrong than wrong—we were corrupt and unholy. Immoral and depraved.
“I know what we did yesterday,” Auden says, his voice as gentle as t
he grip on my wrists is firm. “I don’t see the problem, and I don’t see why you can’t keep your promise to me.”
I stare at him a moment, totally confounded. “Auden…am I talking at thin air right now? Am I not making sense? Is it my accent? Should I switch to yours?” I say the last part in my best I wear a regatta blazer to actual regattas voice, and he makes a face.
“Don’t do that, you’re terrible at it,” he says. “Listen, it’s not like—this isn’t like you’re thinking. I didn’t wait to tell you because I was trying to trick you, I waited because I wanted to find the right way to explain it all. Say it the right way so that you wouldn’t run away from me when I told you, so that you wouldn’t sever your heart from mine. I didn’t want this to be the end of us. And why should it be? Why shouldn’t you belong to me?” he finishes with a wild urgency.
I search his face. His stupid, handsome face, where even now I see glimmers of yesterday’s revels. A small bruise in the shape of Rebecca’s bite on his jaw, visible even under the shadow of his day-old beard, a small scratch disappearing into his cinnamon-colored hair from his run through the trees. The vibrant flicker of those hazel eyes—the eyes of the forest.
Never in a thousand years did I think God would be this sadistic or this pitiless, to put me in a position where I have to refuse this man.
“You know why I can’t,” I say finally. “We can’t. We just—it can’t be, Auden. You know this.”
His eyes stay stark and raw on mine as he says, “But I want you.”
“You can’t.”
“But I want it,” he says, and with his eyes like that and his voice so low, there’s no mistaking what it is.
“You can’t want it,” I whisper, and his grip tightens on my wrists as he pushes them out to the sides until my arms are spread on either side of me and my wrists are pinned to the wall. It’s like I’m about to be crucified, like I’m already on the cross, but without the nails and the thorns, because Auden himself is all the nails and thorns I’ll ever need.
“Oh, can’t I?” he says. “Because I do, St. Sebastian, I do want it. I need it. I don’t care what that makes me, I don’t care what that means for my immortal soul. I’ve known you were mine since I kissed you in the thorn chapel, and I’ve known that you wanted to be mine since you let me bite your lip until it bled.” His eyes drop to my lip piercing now, and I can feel how much he wants to pull on it and kiss it. I can feel how much he wants that labret running along his shaft, how much he’d love to see it gleaming in the dark while he fucks me. “You can run away all you want, but it’s too late. You already swore to me. I’ve already known what it was like to have your heart in my hands, and it’s simply too late.”
He ducks his head enough to move his lips over mine—something both more and less than a kiss—something like a promise made with touch instead of words.
And fuck me if I don’t want to promise something right back.
“It can’t be too late,” I whisper. “Even if you did wait to tell me until you got what you wanted.”
Auden doesn’t lift his mouth from mine, and I feel his words as much as I hear them. “And what did I get, my little martyr? What do you think I wanted?”
I wish so much I weren’t still hard as I answer him. “You wanted to fuck me.”
“No,” he says, tugging on my lip piercing with his teeth. “I wanted what I still want.” He kisses me again. “I want forever, stubborn boy. Only that.”
I let him kiss me. I let him kiss me as he fucks against me, clothed and slow, and I let him kiss me as he keeps my wrists pinned to the wall like a sacrifice. I let him because letting him makes me feel like myself in the best possible way. I let him because letting him feels like living, even when it also feels like dying.
Maybe I am a little martyr. And he’s my Diocletian, my emperor and my persecutor both. I’d let him martyr me as many times as he wanted; he’ll never stop wanting.
He murmurs the words again, in between slow, silken strokes of his tongue. Little Martyr.
It was meant to be, I think dizzily, kissing him back and earning myself one of those low groans I love so much. Auden was born to torment me, and how can I resist such a thing? Such a tormenter? Even if he is tied to me by blood as well as desire?
My mother named me for a tormented man, after all.
My mother.
The memory of her sears through me like fire. Her words that summer. Tell this boy you have to stay home, and then don’t see him again.
Suddenly I can’t think, I can’t breathe. I can’t even be.
Panic and shame thud through me.
Mamá.
She would be so horrified to see us right now. Crushed and queasy and despairing.
I rip away from Auden’s kisses, gasping for breath. “May I,” I choke out, hating myself and hating Auden and hating Ralph and hating everyone and everything in the entire world, everything everything. Hating the words because the words sound wrong, just like they sounded wrong coming out of Auden’s mouth all those years ago. And yet they have to be said, they have to, because if they’re not said, if I let Auden keep kissing me and fake-crucifying me, I’ll never let him stop. I’ll let my own brother do hellish things to me and I’ll love every second of it—and every second of it will infect me, until all my memories of my mother are flecked with spots of rot and shame. Until I can’t look at myself in the mirror for fear of what she’d see if she were alive to look at me.
“May I,” I murmur again, and Auden’s still so close, close enough that he could easily recapture my mouth, and part of me wants him to. But the other part of me is noticing with some alarm that Auden hasn’t let me go yet, he hasn’t backed away. He hasn’t even lifted his lips from where they hover near my cheek. And his hips . . .
Even now we are pressed together so tightly that I can feel every thick inch of him. Hard and wanting.
Everything I know about kink, everything I’ve ever read or heard, dictates that when a submissive says a safeword, the Dominant should spring back like a vampire leaping away from the sun. Or a tempting virgin.
But Auden doesn’t do that.
Instead, he closes his eyes and takes in a shuddering breath, agony sketched all over his face. His entire frame is shivering against me, like the effort it’s taking to keep from devouring me whole is more than he can bear, and for a moment, I think he’s going to give in. I think he’s going to take me, safeword or not, and I hate that it thrills me a little that he might do it.
“Please,” I whisper, my voice breaking over the word. “Please.”
He sucks in another quivering breath—one that ends on something sounding like a sob—and then he abruptly shoves himself away, wheeling around to face the window as he runs a hand through his hair. The fabric of his henley clings to his shoulders and sides, and I can see the heave and quiver of each rapid breath as he drags it in.
“Auden,” I start, but he gives a sharp jerk of his head, still facing away from me.
“Give me a minute,” he bites out, his fingers tightening in his hair as his other hand flexes dangerously at his side. “If you don’t want me to touch you, then I need a fucking minute.”
Ignoring the quickening in my blood at the realization that he’s about to snap—fuck, why is it so sexy to see him about to snap?—I point out, a little petulantly, “This is supposed to be about giving me a minute, not you. Or don’t you know the rules?”
“When,” says Auden, “have we ever done anything by the rules?”
And he’s right. But then of course, so am I.
“I never wanted to say it,” I say to his back. “You know I didn’t.”
His voice is tired when he replies. “I know, St. Sebastian. I remember that summer too.”
“You begged me to stop you if you went too far. And last night—you said the same thing last night too.”
Auden turns enough that I can see his face in profile; he looks profoundly sad, although the jumping pulse at the side of his t
hroat tells me he’s aching to pin me against the wall again. “And is this too far?” he asks quietly. “Am I too far for you now?”
My mouth is dry. My body is a living contradiction of shame and angry arousal. “I can’t unknow it, Auden. And I can’t forgive that you hid it from me.”
Auden nods, once. Not in agreement or concession, but in mere acknowledgement.
“Tell me how you found out,” he says. It’s a command I’m not sure I obey because I want to, or because it feels good to obey him with something, anything at all, now that there’s this impossible gulf between us.
“Your journal,” I admit. “I found it in your journal.”
“Spying on me?” he asks, but he doesn’t sound angry. It’s hard to tell with him turned, but it sounds like there would be a fond tilt to the corner of his mouth if I could see it.
I’m honest now, too honest for my own good. “I just wanted more of you,” I mumble. “I wanted to touch the things you touch and see the things you see. I wanted to feel closer to you.”
My confession has him turning all the way around, his hands dropping by his sides to flex and flex and flex, and his erection still swelling unapologetically between his hips. His eyes are like the forest again—alive and hungry.
“This isn’t over, St. Sebastian,” he promises in a low voice. “I hope you know that.”
“It has to be over. Stop being such a bad fucking Dominant and accept it.”
The edges of his mouth tug down, and it’s not fair for any man to look so good in his displeasure. “I think you’ve forgotten last night. The thorn chapel.”
“Owning Thornchapel doesn’t mean you get to make up whatever rules you want.”
He ignores this because of course he does. He’s Auden Guest, lord of the manor, and his family has done whatever they’ve liked in this valley for fifteen hundred years. “What about Proserpina?” he asks. “What about the three of us?”
I think of Proserpina clenching her fist between us, pumping it like a shared heartbeat. The shared heart that somehow beats for all three of us.
My chest is tight. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I know,” he says with that impossible arrogance. “I know that both of you are mine, and I also know that Poe is as much yours as you are hers. I’d rather you not hurt her while you and I—” he makes an impatient gesture “—figure this out.”
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 6