“De gustibus non est disputandum,” I murmur.
Auden lets out a laugh as weak as his smile as he turns to search for his glass. “Quite right.”
“Auden, what do you want?” I ask as he walks over to the coffee table and retrieves his drink. “I mean, truly. What is it that you want from this?”
“Him,” Auden says without hesitation, simply and firmly and also with enough despair to raise goosebumps on my arms. “I want him.”
We stare at each other for a long moment, and it’s not the boy I grew up with looking at me. It’s Auden of Thornchapel, the Guest heir, the wild god.
It’s a king, and I don’t know how to feel about a king standing in my living room holding warm gin when kings are supposed to stay in the woods. Safely inside our little Thornchapel games.
But even kings need advisors, and so I give him my honest advice. “Maybe you know what you want,” I say. “But do you know what you’re willing to lose in order to get it?”
Auden’s lips part as he looks at me. And then he slowly shakes his head. “I don’t—I don’t think I do. Should I?”
“Yes. And be prepared to lose him anyway. Brothers, Auden. Brothers! And you lied to him about it?”
“It wasn’t lying—oh, hello, Pickles.”
Delphine has opened the door to the bathroom, letting out a cloud of steam and the animated chatter of her favorite podcast—something about romance novels and blooding?—and she emerges from the steam in a silk robe that clings to every soft curve of her. It’s short enough that when she turns to close the door, I can see the delectable curves of her arse.
“Just grabbing some turmeric and beet juice before I do my oil cleanser,” she says, and Auden and I both nod, as if this is a sentence that has any real meaning for us. She digs in her bag for a moment, pulls out a trendily packaged bottle of orange liquid, and then disappears back into the bathroom, like a busty phantom of self-care. But not before she loops by to drop a kiss on my cheek, which I intercept with a hand on the nape of her neck and a kiss of my own, right on her lips. Quick, hard, and ruthless, like I like. She’s pink-cheeked and bashful as she walks back into the bathroom and closes the door.
After her podcast starts up again, Auden turns to me and says, “Something’s changed between you two.”
I finish my drink and start walking toward the kitchen. “Yes.”
“Is this more than just kink?”
“More how? And don’t think I don’t know you’re trying to change the subject.”
He turns and looks at me, taking a long, insolent drink as he waits for me to answer my own question. Which I refuse to do. He may be my best friend, but Delphine is my business.
Mostly.
“You hated each other,” he says after it’s clear that I am not going to answer. “For years. All those awkward parties, Bex, do you remember? All those parties when you and Delphine would have to be in the same room and so you’d bicker nonstop?”
“I remember it quite well, Sir Guest. As well as I remember you wrestling St. Sebastian in front of your house because you hated him so much.”
His eyes darken. Another drink. “Point taken.”
The look on his face is almost enough to make me feel bad for bringing up St. Sebastian again. “Look, Delphine and I don’t hate each other now,” I say, although even as I say it, the words feel flimsy. Disingenuous.
She said she loves you.
“You don’t hate each other now,” he echoes. “Is that all? Is that the only reason she’s here getting kissed like that?”
I look at the window across from me, at the woman reflected there. Tailored clothes, lifted chin, perfect flat behind her. Everything as it should be. No chirpy blond tarts who cover sinks in lipsticks and bottles of micellar water. No shoulders hunched against unravelling feelings.
No vulnerability, no tremulous smiles, no declarations of love.
I answer how the woman in the reflection would answer. “She needs a Domme. I’d like a sub. It suits.”
“Does it? You’ve always talked about how spoiled you’ve found her, and how irritating it was.”
I’m irritated now, actually, although I can’t exactly explain why. It makes my voice sharp when I answer, “Well, it wasn’t until this year I realized I could be the one to fuck it out of her.”
Auden knows me too well to let me get away with saying something like that. I watch as his reflection sets its drink down and crosses its arms. “Bex. Seriously. Is everything okay between you two?”
I love you.
Like it was nothing at all, easy as breathing.
I love you.
I make to pull my hair down out of its bun and then realize I’m doing it to fidget. And I don’t fidget. “Everything’s fine.”
He still doesn’t drop the subject. “I care about Delphine, you know,” he tells me. “Very much.”
“Is this the talk where you warn me, one man to another, to treat your ex-girlfriend well?”
Auden frowns. “No warnings. I don’t think you need them, despite how you’re acting right now.”
I bristle a little at that, turning to glare at him. “And how am I acting?”
Unfortunately, Auden also knows me too well to be properly terrified of the Quartey Stare. “Like a rake,” he says.
It’s so far away from what I was expecting him to say that I nearly laugh. “A rake?”
He’s giving me his crooked smile now, and dammit, he’s too adorable to keep bristling at. “An inveterate rake, even. A new submissive every night before this, and now you’re having one move in but it’s only about the sex, no feelings. It is very rakish, you have to admit.”
I part my lips to speak—and then I realize I have no idea what I want to say. I am a rake, I guess. I’ve certainly been acting like one with Delphine.
“I have to say this, even though I know you will anyway,” Auden says, “but please take care of her. She’s not as . . . confident . . . as she seems sometimes.”
Of course she isn’t. No human could be. No person is entirely self-assured, entirely positive, entirely poised all the time. And yet, Delphine makes everyone believe it. She makes everyone believe that she wakes up with clear skin, bouncy hair, all the answers. She makes even cynics believe that she can turn any obstacle into a caption-worthy learning moment.
She makes lovers believe she can say I love you and be perfectly content not hearing it said back.
She’s new to all this, I remind myself. You’re the Domme. It’s your job to teach her. It would have been crueler to let her believe she really loves you when you know better. When you know it was just the scene making her feel that way.
Then why is guilt dripping like sticky tar down my throat? Making it impossible to speak?
No.
No, I don’t do guilt. Guilt is an indulgence—an excuse to avoid action because it feels like some sort of penance. But it’s not, it’s the ignis fatuus of penance. It changes nothing and leads one nowhere.
I imagine swallowing all that guilt down, all the uncertainty—along with that breathless, brilliant, idiotic something—I felt when Delphine whispered those words. I push it all away until I’m myself again, and there’s no guilt.
Or worse . . . hope.
“I know,” I finally say. “I know.”
“I wish,” Auden says, and then stops, and then starts again. “I wish we were home right now. All six of us.”
“Yeah,” I say, suddenly feeling it too. Missing the way the rain echoes through the library, the pop of the burning logs even when it’s too warm for a fire. The huffs of Sir James Frazer, and Delphine curled up in an armchair, and Becket arguing with me about something. Missing the rustling press of the trees from all sides, except to the south, where the grounds slope up past the river into louring, windy moorland.
Missing the way Delphine and I can spend hours fucking in a giant bed, half drunk and giddy with knowing there’s nowhere to be in the morning, except outside on the groun
ds I love anyway.
She said she loves you, and for a minute, you wanted to say it back.
“Want some more gin?” Auden asks abruptly.
God. Yes, please.
“Make it a double,” I say, and then decide to go help him so he doesn’t forget the ice.
Chapter Nine
St. Sebastian
Not far from the thorn chapel and overlooking the River Thorne is a heathered ridge called Reavy Hill. There are no footpaths here, no obvious beauty spots, no standing stones or dolmens to photograph. It’s a wild, gorse-ridden heap, striped with overgrown reaves on one side and rolling down to the thick woods of Thornchapel on the other. I can see the proud stone head of the house among the trees—the tower in particular looking stupidly pretty in a sea of pear-green leaves. Farther off, Thorncombe clusters around the river, a chocolate-box-worthy huddle of stone and thatch, with the medieval St. Brigid’s preening in the middle of it all. It’s easy to understand why the people who built the standing stones, and later the reaves and roundhouses, decided to stay in this veiled and winding vein stretching south to the sea. Even easier to understand why everyone after them stayed too. Like my mother.
Like me.
I sit perched atop a clumsy jumble of granite—which is too squat to be a landmark but still tall enough to earn you some scrapes as you climb it. Auden and I used to come here, as teenagers, flushed with stolen wine and nervous adolescent attraction.
I stare down into the trees, picking out the thorn chapel’s clearing and the teasing crook of one menhir as it peeks through the branches. The rest of the clearing—the other standing stones, the crumbling chapel, the altar—is mostly hidden from view, but I still feel it there, like an extension of myself, aware, breathing, alive. Waiting for me to come back. I look up toward the house, with its glittering windows and grim crenellations.
Is it waiting for me too?
Was it always?
“Thought I might find you here,” a voice says from behind me, and I turn to see a sweaty Becket climbing up onto the boulder next to me—gracefully and without a single scrape at all, despite his flimsy workout clothes, damn him.
I grunt in response and turn my eyes back on the house. It’s impossible to see the front, much less which cars are in the drive, but I know Auden’s already left for London. He usually leaves by late afternoon on Mondays, and anyway, the last few weeks he’s been gone, it’s like Thornchapel itself can sense it. The moment he leaves, you can see the trees arch and stir and shake, you can hear the breeze kick up in fretful gusts, and you can see the warblers and finches and stonechats hopping anxiously about, fussing and flapping their wings in vexation. The river throws fits: sulking and drying into trickles, then surging suddenly again, as if in a tantrum, and then finally, in defeat, abating into its usual whispers and sighs.
Auden is gone, and so even the river weeps for him.
Becket is good at long silences, and the sun has started to sink when he finally says, “Poe is looking for you, you know.”
I know. My phone is in my pocket, turned off after the seventh text message she sent me. I know hiding isn’t healthy, I know it’s something I would have done five months ago. I know she deserves a response at the very least. And it’s perverse, me hiding, because all I want to do is see her. All I want to do is crush her to my chest and fill my hands with her hair as I feel her breathe against me. In fact, I came up to Reavy Hill not to watch the sunset or the herd of wild ponies grazing and swishing their tails, but to watch the house. As if by watching the house I could somehow be closer to her, somehow soak up her comfort without having to expose anything of myself.
Because seeing her, actually seeing her—worry slithers in my belly at the mere thought. She told me via text that she knows about Auden and me, and if I look at her and I see her knowing . . .
I don’t know. It just feels like something that can’t be undone. The final stitch in the shroud of what Auden and I had.
“I don’t have my stole, so I can’t hear a confession at the moment,” Becket says in a casual, oh hey, here’s a fun fact kind of voice. “But if you wanted to talk, just as friends, I’m here.”
I scrub my face with my hands, pulling down on my cheeks as if I can pull the skin away from my face. “I think I might need a confession, actually. I’ve sinned.”
“We’re all sinners,” Becket says placidly. “If we didn’t sin, perhaps we’d never know the gift of grace. The free and undeserved clemency of God. And maybe that would be its own kind of tragedy.”
Grace.
I think of Mamá for some reason, how she would hold me and wipe my tears away when I was little, even after I scratched and kicked at her. How she’d still kiss my cheek and help me with homework and leave my clothes washed and folded in perfect squares on the bed even when I told her I hated her, I hated our life, even when I snarled and sneered at her because I was fifteen and angry and felt like I was deeply and uniquely alone. Still, she loved me.
Grace. Free and definitely undeserved.
“Shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace?” I murmur. “God forbid.”
“Romans,” Becket says, recognizing the verse’s origin immediately. “Book of the angsty.”
“I’m not angsty,” I say reflexively, and then Becket laughs, reaching over to pluck at my hand, where I’ve colored in my fingernails with a black Sharpie.
“I was bored at the library this morning,” I protest, curling my fingers into my palms. I don’t tell him how I wrote a capital M on each nail before scribbling over it.
“Mmhmm,” Becket says, clearly still amused.
I sigh and look over at the man next to me, his classically handsome profile limned by the dipping sunlight. He’s got his legs crossed like a child at school, and his eyes are dancing with more mischief than kindness.
Right now, he’s not a priest. He’s just a hot guy in sweaty running clothes who happens to be my friend. And five months ago, I would have dodged even the idea of having friends, because I’ve only ever had one friend before, and that friendship died in a Methodist graveyard after a few weeks anyway. But something has changed, I guess, because I don’t run away. I don’t continue on in stony silence.
I say, “I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to promise not to say a word about it. Not just to other people, but like, right now. To me. I don’t think I can listen to it yet, not from someone whose job is knowing sanctity from sin.”
Becket nods, his expression open but also carefully neutral. His confession face, probably.
I still feel compelled to add, “And I’m probably going to need a real confession at some point.”
At that, Becket raises his eyebrows, a small smile on his lips. “Saint, I can’t even get you to take the host most Sundays. I’m not fussed if you don’t come to confession.”
“You haven’t heard what I’ve done yet,” I mutter.
Becket touches my knee, his hand warm over my jeans. “I’ll happily hear it, when you’re ready,” he says. “And as a priest, it’s my job to tell you that confession is essential to remitting your sins and restoring the sanctifying grace inside your soul. But as your friend, I’ll tell you that I don’t think God always plays by his own rules. Come when you’re ready, and don’t let your fear be stronger than your love.”
Mamá’s face flashes in my mind.
“That’s very wise,” I say, a bit impatiently. “But the problem is my fear should be stronger.”
Becket’s as patient as I am impatient, and he just gives me a slow nod, like of course I know better about fear and love than a fucking priest, and I’m scrubbing my face with my hands again, like I can scrub away everything that I am. Ralph’s son. Auden’s brother.
A man who still wants someone he shouldn’t.
“Sorry,” I say. “Okay. Here it is.”
I tell him. I tell him about finding the letter from Auden’s lawyer, I tell him about my middle name. With my eyes fixed on t
he house where it rises stony and stern from the trees, I tell him about Auden finding me. About what came after.
“I safeworded,” I finish. “I stopped him. But, fuck, I didn’t want to. I wanted him. I wanted it, even though I knew it was wrong.”
When I look over at Becket—expecting to see that neutral priest face again—his brows are drawn together and his eyes cast down, but he doesn’t seem disgusted, only thoughtful. Although it’s strange—when he looks up at me, I can’t see any of what those thoughts might be, whether they’re good thoughts or bad thoughts or anything. His eyes are rather like staring into the bluest part of a fire or the ocean on a calm day, and for a fierce, fleeting moment, I’m struck by how unfathomable they are. How unfathomable he is.
The part of me that’s always hearkened to loneliness, to the wild bevels and peaks of this place, recognizes something in him, something almost the same as me but not quite.
Mamá joked once that I was like a druid, someone who absorbed lore and stories and safeguarded it for the next generation. It fit the teenage boy with stacks of fantasy novels in his room, and it fits the man who spends his days scanning RFID tags and helping pensioners with the internet.
But if I’m a druid, then Becket is something else, something baneful and holy and darkly recondite. It dances deep in his eyes, this nature, a part of Becket that’s beyond manners and cheer. A part of him that was born to walk in the desert with God and God alone.
But the moment leaves me as moments do, and I’m back to being miserable about myself, and Becket keeps his word, saying nothing. There’s only the breeze and the bleating sheep down by the reaves and the quiet rush of the river nearby.
“In every book I ever read,” I hear myself saying, “the bastard is always angry. He hates the heir, he resents the heir, and there’s no end to his despair or jealousy or bitterness—but what happens when he’s also in love with the heir? What happens when he doesn’t want what the heir has, but who the heir is? I always felt a certain way about this place, I always felt claimed by it, but I didn’t feel at home here until he claimed me. Until he marked my heart and my body, and said you’re mine. It was like everything made sense then: who I was and where I belonged and where I needed to be and everything just finally felt right for the first time since we were kids playing in the chapel. Like I’d had thorns around my heart for so long that I’d forgotten there were supposed to be roses too.”
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 12