I use the hand on her backside to grind her against me in just the right way, keeping pressure on her clit, and then I lower my mouth to her ear and confess all sorts of filthy things to her. That I think of her when I fuck my toys at home, that I had to lock myself in the library bathroom and jerk off last week, just thinking about her pretty tits, about how soft they are and how tight her berry-pink nipples get. I tell her that I never want to stop fucking her, that she makes me feel so good I can’t stand it, that I want to come on her backside, on her belly, on her cunt. I want to make her as dirty as she makes me, I want her to know what it’s like to crave fucking like craving food or air or sleep.
With my desperate words in her ear, she comes—a fast, mean orgasm that has her clawing my back and squirming wildly in my arms. Her legs tighten around me, her cunt gives me those irresistible little flutters, sweet squeezes as if she’s trying to suck my orgasm right out of my body.
I follow her immediately, sinking into that soft heat over and over and over again as I spill jagged, urgent pleasure into the latex. The orgasm is almost crushing in how good it feels; each heavy pulse sends waves of selfish bliss everywhere—tightening my thighs and tingling in my toes, racing up my spine to the nape of my neck and then buzzing down to my fingertips. Everything is dizzy, hazy, brilliant, and sweet. And for a moment, nothing hurts. For a moment, I can almost imagine a life where a day without Auden doesn’t scratch scars onto the skin of my pathetic heart.
Chapter Ten
St. Sebastian
Once I’ve succumbed to the need I have for Proserpina, the rest of my self-control melts away. I let her convince me to stay the night—although I can’t bear to sleep in the bed that should have been for all three of us—and so we end up sleeping in one of the guest suites instead. She’s unpredictable to sleep with, sometimes afflicted with the fretful dozes of an insomniac and then other times hibernating like a little bear, but tonight she’s yawning and slow-blinking before we ever get into bed. Sir James is back inside and already chuffing softly in his sleep, taking a whole corner of the bed to himself.
“Promise me you’ll think about the gala,” she says, crawling under the covers and snuggling right into my arms. It feels so good to hold her that I could cry. “Promise me you won’t shut yourself out from everything. From the rest of us.”
I have a lot of things I could say to that—defensive and bitter things, maudlin things—but instead I say the most painfully honest thing of all. “It’s not about shutting myself out, Poe. It’s about him. It’s about seeing him, talking to him, brushing shoulders with him while he wears a tuxedo and smells like a forest. I can’t do it. I can’t see him being so . . . him, and then be okay. I just can’t.”
“Because you’re still angry with him?” she whispers.
“Because I’m still in love with him.”
“Then why separate yourself from whom you love?”
Through the window, I watch a moth-eaten cloud stretch across the sky, trying to reach the moon. It makes me feel lonely in a familiar way, in my usual way.
“Loving him is wrong,” I say. “That’s irreducibly true, Poe. It can’t be navigated around. It’s just wrong. But I also don’t know if I can stop, and until I figure out what to do about that, I don’t know how I can be near him.”
“It’ll break him,” she murmurs on a yawn. I don’t need to see her face to know her eyes are closed. “You’ll break him if you stay away.”
It won’t be the first time.
The thought, and the sheer truth of it, makes me miserable. But what am I supposed to do? Really? Drop everything I know about right and wrong—admittedly not much—and embrace a life of iniquity with him? Eat forbidden fruit forever?
How could a love like that, unholy and unhealthy, ever survive?
Here, it could.
The thought comes unbidden, but intoxicating nonetheless. I push it away.
“Don't forget,” Poe murmurs again, and then presses her closed fist to my chest, right above my heart. She falls asleep clenching her fist over and over again, the heartbeat the three of us share, and when it finally stops and she starts snoring in my arms, I gently take her hand away from my chest and try to forget the feel of it. The memory of our joined love.
But still I lie awake a long time, Thornchapel awake around me too, with owls and breezes and restless trees who miss their master.
I don't have to be at the library until after lunch, so I let myself doze later than usual, well past dawn. Poe is predictably still asleep next to me, a tangle of blankets and long, dark hair, and I spend a long time simply looking at her, savoring her closeness, her trust, the innocence of her sleeping face which never quite vanishes, even when she's awake.
But eventually I get up and treat myself to a shower and one of the new toothbrushes stocked in the bedroom’s en suite, and by the time I get out, Poe is blinking against the sunlight like a sleepy kitten.
I sit down on the edge of the bed and stroke her hair away from her face. “Morning,” I say.
She mumbles something mostly unintelligible, and I wish there was no real world, no other life than this, and I could just spend the day in bed with her, napping and fucking and napping some more. But she has an entire library to catalog and I have my own little kingdom of picture books and free Wi-Fi to manage, and there's something else I need to do anyway.
“I need to go,” I tell her. “I just wanted to say goodbye first.”
She pouts. “No. You can't leave.”
“We both have to work,” I say, kissing her on the nose and then nuzzling her neck. “And Sir James is ready for breakfast.”
The dog in question has been trotting in and out of the room all morning, eagerly wagging his tail whenever I so much as look at the door, and it’s him jumping up on the bed and snuffling wetly at Poe's face that finally has her sitting upright and opening her eyes for real.
“Hate you both,” she mumbles, but then she slumps against me and lets me pet her hair for several minutes, yawning and grumbling and finally turning back into a living girl.
“Are you going now?” she asks.
“Yes.” I don’t mean to say more, but I’m addicted to sharing my most private thoughts now, I guess, because I add, “I’m going to look through my mom’s office some more. And I’d like to call her cousin before I go to work.”
She gives me a squeezing hug, but she doesn’t remark on it, she doesn’t exhort me to be brave or anything condescending like that. Instead, she just says, “Okay. Let me get dressed and I’ll walk you out.”
Like the besotted wraith I am, I drift behind her as she goes down the hall to the bedroom she shares with Auden. The same bedroom the three of us were supposed to share.
It’s very hard not to imagine the version of myself who moved his threadbare T-shirts into the dressers, and left his scuffed boots next to Auden’s gleaming dress shoes in the massive walk-in closet. Who already has a stack of books on the end table, who’s already had to take off Auden’s glasses and put them on the same end table after he fell asleep wearing them.
A whole other life, stolen away.
Except it wasn’t really stolen, was it? It was never mine, it was never meant to be, it was always a lie.
I just didn’t know it before.
But even with the lingering ghosts of the Life That Might Have Been, I’m still content to watch Poe move around, sleepy-eyed and sulky, fumbling for clothes and flinging socks and bras around like a teenager getting ready for school. When she goes in to use the bathroom and brush her teeth, I wander around the room, the dog at my heels.
Almost nothing has changed since the morning I found Auden’s journal, save for Poe moving in her things too. She has a book on the bedside table just like I would have, and librarian habit has me picking it up and flipping through it. It’s a book about ancient British religion, and after nosing through the front matter—it was published fourteen years ago through a university press—and scanning through the
chapter headings, I’m about to set it back down when I see Poe’s last name. Or more accurately, her mother’s last name.
Introduction by Dr. Adelina Markham
Curious, I page through to the introduction, reading about Dr. Markham’s background in Neolithic Mediterranean rituals and how she views the author’s work on ancient British religion. One section in particular catches my eye:
The nuances of when, where, and how humans were sacrificed are vagarious and so intrinsically complex that they defy easy explication, even in a book entirely devoted to the matter. It is frustrating to the historian, of course, because we crave categorization, we crave indexing, but above all, we crave understanding. We must never forget, however, that the bones, bogs, wicker men, sacred groves, and altars all belonged to people, and people are inherently inconsistent and illogical; they are given to fear, erratic behavior, and all manner of specious thinking.
They are also hopeful, imaginative, compassionate, and profoundly selfless.
We can surmise from archaeological evidence and contemporary accounts that many victims of human sacrifice consented to their own deaths and willingly allowed themselves to be slain, often in brutal and painful ways. Why they consented is a matter for conjecture, but it seems reasonable to suppose that ritual murder was an act that straddled both violence and abnegation, and that sacrifice was an act that was seen to benefit the community and the land the community needed to survive.
Complicating our search for meaning is the gradual ebbing of the practice before the pervasion of writing into the communities that performed ritual sacrifice. In fact, one may even go so far as to say that there is a strong inverse correlation between written history and human sacrifice—that the latter declined in the face of the former, but again, why that might be is beyond what the data can tell us.
In the face of this absence, we are left with mysteries, and our only recourse is to find more mysteries to add to the record, in the hopes that somehow all these unanswered questions will elucidate themselves. And to that end, the work of Dr. Katy Davidson has been invaluable, particularly in the excavations in the Thorne Valley, where I first met Dr. Davidson as a student many years ago, and where she has conclusively proven a span of human religious activity dating back to the Neolithic. Dr. Davidson uses the Thorne Valley ritual landscape as a synecdoche for the religious life of ancient Britain as a whole, showing the transmission of ideas from the Neolithic all the way to the Roman occupation and into Saxon rule—
“I see you found my mother’s introduction,” Poe says from behind me. “Cheerful stuff, right?”
“It’s interesting. Where did you find it?”
“I was looking for something about Estamond, actually, and I noticed this because it was so much younger than all the books around it. And then once I saw my mom’s name, I obviously had to read it. But there’s also a lot in there that’s on brand for us.” She says it in an oddly light voice, as if she’s trying to make a joke, but she’s too troubled to pull it off.
“I did notice your mother referenced the Thorne Valley. She was a student digging here?”
Poe lifts a shoulder. “That’s what the introduction says. My father never said anything about it, but it would explain why she came here when we were children, maybe? Maybe not? But here, look at this—”
She flips to a dog-eared page toward the end of the book and points. I read:
The standing stones on the Thornchapel estate are a well-guarded secret, as is the chapel situated to the west of them. The Guest family, who have officially owned the land since the Domesday Book, but very probably for much longer, have only allowed one excavation of the site, in the late 1980s. The stones have been in place there for at least four thousand years, while the chapel is of early Norman construction. The altar inside the chapel, however, is an interesting case, as it seems to predate the standing stones, but also bears testimony to the various faiths that have been practiced there. The excavation uncovered two Neolithic jet beads, a pair of bronze divination spoons, a mix of Roman and Saxon coinage, and a small lead cruet that could have possibly been used for sacramental wine after the Guests commissioned the family chapel. This speaks to an incredible continuity of worship centered on one site, especially one so remote, and indeed, it is hard not to conjecture why that might be. Even the Romans were curious; it is said that when they first encountered the Dumnonii living in the Thorne Valley, they asked the Britons why the altar in the woods was so deeply sacred to them.
We don't know what words the Dumnonii used to explain it, but we do know how the Romans translated what they said. Convivificat.
It stirs. It resurrects.
It is perhaps no wonder the Christians felt so at home there.
I look up at Poe, and she’s staring back at me with an I know, right??? face.
“Convivificat,” I say aloud, thinking of the words etched onto the altar. The lettering looked newer than Roman to me, just by the shape of the letters, but how much newer is hard to say. Long enough for the grass to grow over the altar, I suppose.
“I still don’t know why she wrote it,” Poe says, looking down at the book with distinct yearning. “But it’s nice to know the history of it, you know?”
“And the altar.”
“Isn't that part wild?” she asks. “The altar being older than everything else in that clearing?” And then she frowns to herself. “Well, other than the door, maybe.”
“The door?”
She looks away from me and the book, off to the window. As if she’s embarrassed. “It’s going to sound very, um, bizarre, but I’ve seen a door. Behind the altar. Mostly in my dreams, but also glimpses of it when I’m awake, and then Auden saw it too. After Beltane.”
“A door,” I repeat. “Like an actual door? A door that takes up space in the real world?”
She winces. “Yeah.”
I have walked every inch of that clearing in every possible weather, mood, and time of day, and I’ve never, ever seen a door behind the altar. So why does the idea of it raise goosebumps along my arms?
“Hmm.” But I don’t say anything else about it and neither does she.
I set down the book and we walk downstairs together, Sir James running ahead of us, and then wheeling back, and then running ahead again.
“Also I didn’t mean to pressure you about the gala,” Poe says as we reach the door. “If seeing Auden is too painful, then I understand. I just—surely there is some way you can stay close to each other? Even if it looks different than you thought it would?”
I kiss her.
I kiss her because I love her, and I love her hope, and I can’t bear to snuff it out.
But I know the truth, and the truth is that there is no staying close to Auden Guest.
You either fall at his feet or flee into the hills. That’s it.
I walk home.
The walk itself is very easy—a mile of barely used country lane, lined by ancient hedges and frowned over by enormous, creaking trees. There’s some hills—but where aren’t there in Dartmoor, honestly—and there’s the occasional walker using the lane to jump onto the next section of public footpath, but other than that, it’s an easy, lonely heaven. When I was a boy, I liked to pretend that I was on my way to the Prancing Pony; when I got older, I used to put on my headphones and listen to all sorts of sad and wistful music and imagine myself in a sad and wistful music video. Now I see it as Dr. Davidson might see it—a lane following the route of an ancient road, which follows the line of an even older path. An artery running from the valley’s heart out to the village, a thread connecting the sacred to the profane.
How did Poe’s mother see it, I wonder, the lane which ribboned through the trees to her eventual death? Did she know? Did she have an inkling the last time she came here? Was there a part of her that knew as she walked over the bridge and into the world of Thornchapel that she’d never see another dawn?
And my own mother? How many times must she have walked down this road�
�a tiny me skipping or sulking by her side—and had to pass the turn for the estate, had to listen to the whisper of the little streamlet guarding the old house from the rest of the world?
Was I conceived after a walk down this lane? Did she walk back to the village afterward feeling happy? Ashamed? Hopeful? Ralph was a monster, and my mom was perfect, and so how did they come together? How could it ever have happened?
There’s some halfhearted drizzle by the time I get to the house, enough to make all the rooms gloomy and gray, and by the time I take off my jacket, kick off my boots, and hunt down an apple to eat, I feel that dull ache in my chest again. Those blunt scissors around my heart.
Snip snip snip.
I poke around my mom’s office for a minute or two, not sure what I even want to find, and then I spend an embarrassing amount of time looking at the picture of Richard Davey on my mother’s desk, too shy to actually pick it up. He’s gingery and red-cheeked and grinning. If I concentrate very hard, I can remember clambering over him, hugging him, pulling on his beard. I can remember the sharp, painty scent of him; I can remember how he used to draw me robots and mermaids whenever I asked, which was often.
He loved me.
And I know, in an abstract sort of way, that Richard is still my father. That Ralph’s DNA can mean as little as I want it to—at least when it comes to how I think of my family and who raised me.
But it still feels like something’s been ripped out of my hands, something I didn’t even know I was supposed to hold onto, and now I can never get it back.
Suddenly I’m backing away from the picture, I’m pressed against the wall, I’m sliding down to the floor and staring at the half-eaten apple in my hands like it holds all the answers. Like it can reassure me that I was loved and that I deserved it, and that those robots and mermaids and cuddles were given out of anything other than pity.
I wanted to do this, but later, because it’s too early, it’s still so early in the morning in Mexico City. But I can’t stop myself from finding my phone and pulling up Ana María’s number. She’s a vampire, though, so maybe she hasn’t even gone to bed yet. Maybe she’s still awake, curled up on her couch with her latest paranormal romance and a cigarette.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 14