I press call and then feel hope and dread both as I hear her pick up.
“St. Sebastian, if your mother were alive to see how you neglect your family, you know what she’d say.”
“Ana María,” I say in Spanish, trying to sound normal and soothing and not at all like I’ve been in hell the past two days. “I’ve been busy. I work for my uncle here—”
“I know all about you working for your uncle,” she interrupts. Ana María is the kind of relative that knows everything—even when you’d rather that she not. “And I know you call your grandmother and grandfather almost every week,” she goes on, “but you can’t call me once in an entire year?”
I could point out that my grandparents helped raise me and also that Ana María is only a cousin—my mom’s cousin at that, which makes her like a second cousin. Or a cousin once removed or something. I could point out that I’m calling her now, so it makes very little sense to scold me about not doing the thing she wants me to do while I’m actually doing it.
But I want her help, and also I can’t help but like her. She may be bossy, she may mail me selenite wands and abalone shells and smudge sticks, but she’s also funny and generous and loves all the same books I do.
Also I’ve spent the last three months doing breathlessly filthy things out in the woods, so I’m the last person who should judge about abalone shells.
“I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s been too long,” I apologize. “But I need your help.”
“Hmph,” she says, but she only manages to resist asking her next question for a few seconds. “What help?”
I take a deep breath. “I need to know about my father.”
“Richard?”
“No. Not Richard.”
I might be the first person in the world to successfully quiet Ana María for any length of time. And . . . her silence is all the confirmation I need.
“I know you know the truth,” I say after a few heavy moments without either of us saying anything. “I know you know who he was.”
More silence. I wonder what she’s looking at right now. If she’s staring at her shrine of Santa Muerte, thinking of how I’m named for her. If she’s missing my mother, who was her best friend. If she’s staring at the picture of Jesus on her wall—the picture, the only one the women in my family seem to like: a frowning, silky-bearded god with a heart of thorns.
I wonder if she’s thinking of what to say to me.
There’s the flick of a lighter and a long breath in. The habit she and my mother both picked up when they spent a semester studying abroad in France. When she speaks, I can practically see the smoke floating up toward the ceiling. “How did you find out?” she asks.
I can hardly say I found out after waking up sex-sore and happy in my half-brother’s room, so I try to find a reasonable facsimile of the truth. “Apparently Ralph had arranged for a letter to be sent after his death. To his legitimate son.” Legitimate. What a stupid word. And yet I hate all the other words even more. Acknowledged. Recognized.
Chosen.
“I just—” I don’t know how to go on, because I have every question in the entire world and yet I have no questions left inside me at all. There’s a hollowness where the questions should be, an empty fatalism, which just says of course, over and over again. Of course the one good thing I’d found, the one home, the one place for my heart—of course that would be taken away.
And of course Auden would be the one to do it.
“I don’t understand,” I finally manage to say. “When did they meet? How? And why would she lie about it to me? Why go through the whole charade of pretending Richard was my father if it was Ralph all along? And then the money—” I break off because suddenly the money makes sense, suddenly it all makes sense.
Of course that’s why he gave her the money. Of course. Ralph fathered me so he paid for me. Noblesse oblige applies to bastard sons too, and as much as I imagine it hurt my mother’s pride to take it, she did anyway.
Ana María takes an audible drag, holds it in for a long moment, and then sighs. “She was very young, you have to understand, just out of college, and we both—as girls, we both loved magic. Everything about it. So when she took the job working for the paper out there and one of her first assignments was profiling the festivals celebrated in Thorncombe, she was thrilled.”
Another inhale, the next words coming out on the coughing exhale. “And then she met Ralph. The next thing I knew, she was seeing him every day. The next thing I knew, she was in love.”
“He would have been married.” I have a faint memory of Auden’s parents being congratulated on their twentieth anniversary at Mass when I was sixteen. “He was married.”
I hear Ana María take another drag, perhaps using the time to think of what to say. “Love is often wrong, St. Sebastian. It’s often wrong about everything.”
And what can I say to that? It’s a lesson I was too stubborn to learn back when it would’ve done me any good.
“She knew he was married, of course, but I think she loved him too much to stop. And that was the first year he was trying to revive the old ways.” Ana María pauses then. “Do I need to explain those to you?”
If I were capable of feeling anything other than empty, wasting pain, maybe I’d feel shame right now. But I’m not, so I don’t. “I know them, Ana María,” I tell her. “I know the old ways.”
“She would hate that,” my cousin says. “Your mother wanted nothing to do with them after everything happened.”
“You don’t sound like you hate it,” I say.
She snorts. “Certainly not. I’m proud. But also I know you’re too smart a boy to let yourself get hurt, so that’s why I don’t worry.”
I rub idly at my chest, where those scissors keep snip-snipping my heart right out of my body.
I’m not too smart, Ana María. I let myself get hurt so badly.
She clears her throat. “That first year, the first time he tried to bring back the old ways, your mother was his May Queen. Imbolc through Samhain, every feast.”
“It wasn’t his wife?” I think of Auden’s mother, pale and trembling whenever they visited the Abbey.
“Jennifer said Clare never loved Thornchapel, not the way Ralph did. She didn’t want the rituals to happen at all, and maybe she thought if she refused to participate, then Ralph wouldn’t do them at all. Which was foolish. That man did whatever he wanted.”
“I saw a picture of Ralph and some other adults here at Thornchapel,” I say. “It seemed—well, I think they might have been doing the same thing Ralph did with my mother, keeping the old ways and all that. Clare was there with them.”
“Maybe she changed her mind? Maybe she realized that Ralph would never stop? I don’t know. But I do know the year your mother was his May Queen was the year she conceived you, and after Jennifer found out she was pregnant, she stayed away from the estate and everything associated with it. She didn’t see Ralph for a very long time. Years, in fact. She refused to see him until well after Richard died.”
I look up at the picture of my father sitting on her desk, resting atop a stack of old receipts. Richard Davey, eyes crinkling and mouth wide in a happy smile, a splotch of white paint on his neck. “Do you think Ralph knew she was pregnant?”
“No,” Ana María admits. “I’d almost like it better if he had so that I could hate him for that too, but he didn’t know until you were twelve, and the minute he found out, he started helping. With money, I mean. He wanted to meet you, but Jennifer said he couldn’t unless he was ready to claim you and actually be involved in your life. The way she saw it, you were better off thinking Richard was your father and not knowing Ralph at all if all Ralph was going to do was refuse to acknowledge you.”
I’m still looking at the picture. The happy face of the man who reared me even though I wasn’t biologically his. “Why did Richard do it?” I ask. “Why did he fall in love with a pregnant woman? Claim me as his own? Raise me?”
Ana María
sniffs. “Women don’t just cease to exist as people once we’re pregnant. Your mother was beautiful and smart and bright like sunshine. She and Richard fell in love, and it was never a question to him that he would raise you.”
“She was done with Ralph though, after that first year? They never . . . you know . . .”
A couple long drags on the cigarette.
Finally: “I told you earlier, St. Sebastian. Love is often wrong. And it is never, ever simple.”
And with a feeling like hot needles pricking the inside of my body, I recall what my mother said to me when I left England after the attack in the graveyard.
I have to stay. I won’t leave the man I love.
I thought she meant Richard Davey then. I thought she meant his grave and all the memories she’d made with Richard in the too-short years they had together. But no.
She meant Ralph.
“How?” I ask. “And for how long?” I search my memories, but I can’t remember anything that would have ever made me think she was sneaking off to fuck Ralph Guest. She took the occasional research trip, maybe, and she left sometimes for historical society meetings, but . . .
I can practically hear Ana María shrug. “Jennifer hinted something awful happened to him—something he couldn’t bring himself to tell her about. Something in the thorn chapel. I think it changed him. He was still a monster, but he was a broken one when he came back to your mother. And anyway, I think she couldn’t help but love him still. To her, he’d always be her May King. Her lord of the manor.”
I lean my head back against the bookshelves and stare up at the ceiling. I suddenly feel very foolishly and obviously like my mother, making the same mistakes, falling for the same breed of broken Guests. Except my mother’s sin was loving a married man, and mine is a sin of much greater magnitude.
Jesus. No wonder she was so scared and angry when Auden and I started seeing each other. No wonder she wanted me back in Texas, far, far away from Auden’s floppy hair and cool, arrogant drawl.
Too far away for him to draw on my skin or bite my lip.
Too far away for us to fall into reckless, terrible love.
Which we did anyway.
“She should have told me,” I say, vehemence staining my words with anger. “She was a fucking coward.”
This earns me a blistering scolding. “Do you think it was easy for her?” Ana María snaps. “Do you think it was easy raising a son on her own? Do you think she wanted to have a son with a married man who would never claim her or him? If she didn’t tell you, it was because she wanted to keep you safe from all of it. She wanted to keep you away from the darkness Ralph had made.”
“She was afraid of what I’d think,” I say angrily. “She was afraid I’d judge her.”
“Can you blame her?” Ana María demands. “Look at how you’re reacting now!”
“She lied to me my entire life! And because of her lies, I didn’t know any better, and I—”
Fell in love with Auden Guest is what I was about to say, but I manage to choke the words back before they pass my lips. Because here’s something as terrible as it is true:
No one can ever, ever know.
No one can know that I fell in love with my brother, that I made vows to him beside the river. That he chased me and caught me and mounted me and that I liked it. That he, Proserpina, and I were going to live together, that he was going to be our Dominant, that we were going to be our king’s priest and priestess, and we were going to be very fucking happy.
It’s a crime and a sin and a stain I’ll never be free of, what I’ve done with Auden Guest. What, even now, I ache to do with Auden Guest.
“You what, St. Sebastian?” Ana María asks carefully. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I mumble. “Nothing happened.”
Silence hangs between us then. I stare at Richard Davey’s picture, still rubbing at my chest.
My body aches the tiniest bit, and I remember what it felt like to have the wild god over me, inside me, feral and cruel and snarling with the need to fuck. My cock thickens at the memory…at the thought of it happening again.
It can never, ever happen again.
“You’re too smart a boy to let yourself get hurt,” my cousin tells me, repeating what she said earlier. “Tell me I’m right, St. Sebastian. Please.”
“You’re right,” I say automatically, but I don’t know if I believe it. I don’t know if it’s true.
Because I am very, very hurt right now, and there’s a miserable, traitorous part of me that wants to go find the source of my pain and be wrecked all over again. And when I end my call with Ana María and see a text from Auden—
Come back to me.
—I very nearly cave and go find him. I want to so badly, in fact, that I leave my phone in the kitchen and go early to the library, determined to stay so busy that I’ll forget all about him and how much I long to crawl back to his feet.
Chapter Eleven
Rebecca
The day of the gala, I’m sitting in my office with a fine-point marker in my hand and my desk covered with site plans for the Severn riverfront revitalization. I’m supposed to be making revisions so my junior architect can start rendering the plan in Photoshop, but I’ve done nothing but stare at the slopes and bends and loops, my mind playing strange tricks on me.
Somehow the slopes have become generous curves. And the bends have become arches, sinuous and beckoning. And the loops are sliding, silky hair, catching on itself as it drapes over a pillow.
The river—flattened in the CAD drawing to a few squiggly depth indicators—becomes palpable wetness against my fingertips. It becomes the slick, gin-soaked kisses I stole from Delphine last night. The fevered moment when she took my hand and pushed a single fingertip inside of her. Not deep, not any deeper than the first knuckle, but my god, I could have been inside her past my wrist for how good it felt. Her eyes had shone up at me, brimming with so much trust I wondered if I could drown in it, and I could hear the memory of her words, a memory I kept curling my thoughts around—I love you.
And the inside of her, a place I had traced countless times, licked and lapped at—it was softer than I ever could have imagined, tighter too. And wetter—the kind of wet that has me wet just remembering it, squirming just from looking at a fucking CAD drawing, Jesus Christ.
I toss the marker down and stand up, pacing over to the window and scowling. The place between my legs aches now, aches enough that if I press my thighs together, pleasure sizzles up from my clit to shower sparks in my belly.
I lean my forehead against the cool glass and try not to feel miserable. I hate this, I think. I hate having the order of my thoughts rifled through, I hate the misbehavior of my body. Always, always, there had been a line drawn between work and sex. Work was the gift, and sex was the thing that kept me going when it felt like the gift would break me. Fucking was for the body and work was for the mind.
Except now my mind is invaded.
Even now I can imagine I smell her—although I know that can’t be true—but still. A smell like the scent she favors—berries and violets, ripe and delicate all at once.
When I remember it, my belly hollows. I feel like my chest has been cracked open and my heart is beating out in the open air and everyone can see the ugly ordinariness of it. The thin skin of it, the greedy blue veins, the way it skips and speeds up for someone who will invariably rend it in two. Everyone will see the sloppy, idiotic organ and say yes, she was a genius, but a fool for all that.
I roll my forehead against the glass, imagining my chest suturing itself back together, imagining a plate of armor over it, imagining all of me encased in concrete like a radioactive tomb. Heart, thoughts, cunt—all of it suffocated with necessity and focus.
You’re just worked up because you know what you’re going to do this afternoon, I reassure myself. It’s just the anticipation any Domme would feel. You have your own sub now and it’s normal to be excited.
There. That�
�s it. We’re going back to the club this afternoon, and it’s going to be unbearably sexy, and anyone in my place would be just as distracted. Maybe even more so. If I were Auden, I’d already have tossed off in the staff loo, so there’s that at least.
Our first visit to the club went well enough, I suppose. I decided that we’d go in a voyeuristic capacity only; I wanted Delphine to acquaint herself with the space without being preoccupied with the possibility of performance. I wanted to ease her into it all, the way I hadn’t eased her in our first night together in London; I wanted to keep her heart safe.
And if a consequence of that was keeping my own heart safe, could I be blamed?
At any rate, I’d forgotten that Delphine was a performer. That performance intoxicated her, that she found a heady meaning in it. That she craved being watched and witnessed. The entire time we’d been there, safely ensconced in a plush leather booth as we watched scene after scene on the main stage, she’d been enraptured, captivated, practically twitching to leap up onto the stage herself and fling herself at the feet of strangers as a willing victim.
It had pleased me—she would thrive there, she would love it—but there had been a small snake of jealousy moving through my guts too. Was she so willing to have another person top her? Was I just a . . . I don’t even know, some kind of shortcut to what she needed? Was her loyalty to domination in general and not to me?
Was she with me not because I was Rebecca but because I was a mistress?
I knew I had no right to ask those questions. After all, I was the one who kept telling myself I only wanted Delphine for the submission. I was the one saying this was about kink and sex only, I was the one who told Delphine she didn’t really love me. But every time she gasped as some other Dom showed off their skills, every time she leaned forward to see more of the flogging, more of the dripping wax, more of the sneers, praises, and comforts that the Doms gave their subs, the surlier I became. Eventually, I dragged Delphine home and pleasured her until she was hoarse with screaming, and even then I found myself curling around her like a dragon as she slept. Like someone would come and take her from me.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 15