“Emily says we can fuck here,” Auden says. He’s a little breathless from the flogging himself, his color high and his eyes sparkling.
“And so you’re going to fuck her.”
Hunger is all over him. “Yes.”
“You don’t need anyone’s permission but hers,” Saint says. He says it as placidly as he can, even though he’s not feeling placid about it at all.
“I’m not here to ask permission,” Auden clarifies, in the sort of amused tone that says permission, how adorable of you. “I’m here to ask if you want to join me.”
Saint flicks his eyes over to his former lover, his former king. “Auden.”
“It’s inevitable, St. Sebastian, and you know that as well as I do.”
“I don’t know that,” Saint says. “I don’t know that at all.”
“It’s not us together, stubborn boy. It’s us with her. Surely that’s allowed.”
If it was truly allowed, then why hadn’t they done it yet? Saint wants to ask. Because they’ve jumped right into everything else that’s allowed—living together and eating together and arguing about books together. But this is toeing the line, and Auden knows it. Saint can tell by that autocratic bearing, that lifted chin. The insolence stamped all over his features, a testament to ancestors who took every green field and fluffy flock they wanted to take and damn the consequences.
“Can you truly tell me if brothers don’t do this?” Auden asks.
It’s a game they’ve been playing, one they’ve played since the day after the gala when Saint moved into the house—not into Auden’s bedroom as had once been the plan, but into the bedroom next door.
Auden had walked in and looked at the haphazard heaps of clothes and things that Saint had brought from the semi, and said, in a voice so quiet and raw that Saint had nearly died, “I want to hold you right now.”
Saint had croaked back, “Then hold me. Brothers hug, you know.”
A week later, they’d been watching Poe and Becket stroll around the walled garden while Sir James Frazer tried to eat butterflies. “Do brothers hold hands sometimes?” Auden asked.
“Brothers hold hands,” Saint decided, and they’d laced their fingers together in the sun and watched the flowers and the dog and the smitten priest and they’d said nothing, but Saint had felt the imprint of Auden’s fingers and the heat of his palm for hours and hours afterward.
So many other things to learn. Did brothers share whisky glasses? Slices of cake? Did brothers sit next to each other on the couch? Hip to hip? Head on the other’s shoulder? What if they’d had something to drink by that point? What if the world was floating and sweetly spinning and there was also a hand on an ankle, a knee, a thigh? Was that allowed? Did brothers do that?
And when the woman they loved came to bed already well-pleasured by the other, did brothers savor the slickness inside her, did they hunt for bites and chafes left by the other, did they imagine another set of hands, another set of firm thighs and powerful arms to surround her with? Did they sometimes whisper things into their woman’s ear to pass on to the other—make sure to bite him back, swallow him deep, show him your throat. Make him come so hard I hear it.
Did brothers do that?
And now Auden is pushing them even further.
Saint looks at the woman shivering on the cross, her back red and angry, her panties unable to contain the full, ripe curve of her bottom. He knows if he cupped the heat between those cheeks, he’d find her wet and open. He would nudge in and she’d be tight enough to curl his toes.
“I know you want to,” Auden whispers. “You could go first. I wouldn’t touch.”
“You’d watch though,” Saint says. It’s the line they haven’t really stepped across yet. There’s been kissing Poe in front of each other, some playful petting maybe, but actually seeing each other mate . . .
“Yes,” Auden answers. “I’d watch.”
They look at each other. They both want it. Saint knows Auden is hard—was hard from the moment he started fingering the falls of the flogger—and Saint is too hard to deny himself anything.
“Maybe brothers watch,” Saint says. Hoarsely.
“And take turns.”
“And take turns,” Saint echoes.
“And they help.”
Saint can already see it—Auden’s hands playing over Poe’s tits, rubbing Poe’s clit, maybe even seizing Saint by the hips and helping him find just the right angle to make Poe scream.
“You don’t play fair,” Saint says, but he steps forward anyway, letting Auden lead him over to the cross.
Auden’s voice is amused again.
“Why would I play fair?”
Midsummer
Becket
Centuries ago, when Masses could be bought and sold for any old cause and chantries could be founded by any nobleman with a heavy purse and a healthy fear of hell, priests were often required to say Mass at least once a day, sometimes even two or three times a day. In fact, many medieval churches were built with multiple altars simply to manage the surfeit of Masses needing said.
Becket would have made a very good medieval priest.
He wouldn’t mind saying Mass every day, or more, and even more so, he wouldn’t mind working in a chantry, speaking prayers for the dead behind a screen of lacy, ornate stone. Perhaps he should have been a monk, so he could order his days around prayers and rites, so he could spend all of his time with God and God alone, but no, he’s no monk. The sacraments mean too much to him; he is a priest through and through.
Anyway, he has his breviary, he has his daily offices, there is enough prayer to anchor him. Because while the zeal has eased, it hasn’t left him and perhaps it never will, and so it’s through prayer that he finds himself centered and calmed. It’s through the motions, the tasks, the unyielding liturgies, that he feels his hungers and fears ease. Without these little pearls of divinity strung through his day, he’d be lost. His heart was made to live inside God’s, hour by hour by hour, and if he had to leave . . .
No. He won’t have to leave.
He doesn’t try to reconcile what he’s done with the exhaustive, molecular laws of the church. He knows when he confesses—which he will—that his confessor will think him in a state of grave sin. He knows that his confessor will remind him that a priest is not allowed to perform sacramental rites while his soul is apart from God. He knows the ways any other priest will see what’s happened in the thorn chapel, he knows the words they’ll use—sin and separation, blasphemy and lust. False gods, sacrilege, heresy. Fornication. The sin of Sodom.
Sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance.
These are all grave sins according to canon law, and yet he does not feel a gravity, he does not feel a danger. It’s helped him love God more, not less, and it has made him happier and healthier and more whole.
How can that be grave? Mortal?
But still, he must confess, right? He loves this vocation, he loves this church, he even loves its fussy little rules, its centuries upon centuries of thought about what it means to lead a holy life. He may not agree with all of those thoughts, he may not agree with even half, but he does agree that these things must be thought about.
And who will change this place if not him and people like him?
The problem with confession is that he must be repented of his acts, he must plan on doing them no more, and is he truly ready for that?
Ready to say goodbye to the thorn chapel?
The others have slept late, were still stretched over guest beds and sofas when he woke to the pink glimmer of dawn outside his window. Instead of waking them, he decided to go for a run, and after that, he went to the Catholic Church only a few blocks away to pray his daily office in the sanctuary there. When he started, it was fully morning and a cluster of old ladies were praying the rosary in the front two pews.
Now he is alone, save for a lone man kneeling with his head ducked in the back.
Even though Becket is finished with his prayer
s, he finds he’s not ready to leave. The church is a cheerful place of Romanesque arches and fake barrel vaults, recently refurbished and chilly with air conditioning. It couldn’t be further away from St. Petroc’s damp stone and leaded glass, and it’s easier to think here. Easier to sift through what must be done.
He has to honor his ardor for God, but how? How can he give up stained glass for the broken walls of the chapel? Why should he have to make that choice?
He doesn’t.
He won’t.
“Excuse me,” a voice says, and Becket realizes he’s been so deep in his own thoughts that he didn’t notice the praying man from earlier approaching him.
“Hello,” Becket says.
Sunlight glows through a window, turning the man’s blond hair into a jeweled halo. His features are sculpted with a stern beauty usually reserved for statues of demigods.
“I think I’ve been waiting for you,” the man says, and then he sits down with a muscular grace. He’s wearing a priest’s collared shirt and black slacks, but he’s also got on a dark pink cardigan, paired with a decent amount of stubble, and he looks like he’s just wandered out of a locally owned coffee shop where he was reading a Russian novel or something equally sapient and pretentious.
“Waiting for me?” Becket asks, but as soon as he asks, he feels it—the brush of the man’s soul against his own.
It’s another soul of zeal, another heart of fire.
Becket meets the man’s dark eyes and decides to ask a different question. “Why have you been waiting for me?”
“I’m here to hear your confession.”
They are not in a reconciliation room or a confessional. Becket didn’t come here for this, and in fact, he was thinking he wouldn’t do this until later. Much later.
And he has questions—so many questions—but he is used to questions at least, he has heard the other-drums in the forest and watched his friend transform into the Thorn King. If this man says he has been waiting for Becket’s confession, how can Becket say he’s wrong?
Becket thinks for a moment. “I’m not sure how repentant I am,” he says.
The man pulls a stole out of his cardigan pocket. It’s reversible—one side white, one side purple—and it’s the purple side he arranges facing up after he kisses it and puts it over his shoulders. “We do a disservice to penance by conceiving of it as a static state. I’ve learned from a good friend that sometimes it’s a journey. Sometimes it leads to unexpected places.”
“And my journey is to begin now?”
The man inclines his head, but doesn’t speak.
Becket looks over at him. “I don’t want to make a mockery of this sacrament by pretending shame or transformation. I don’t intend to change what I’m doing.”
“And yet you are torn. You have two hearts where there should only be one.”
Becket’s lips part with surprise. “Yes.”
“What sins there are, there is new life also. But one does not feed the other.”
Becket moves his eyes away, to the small niche set into the wall next to him. It’s filled with a carving from the Stations of the Cross: Veronica Wiping the Face of Jesus. “Then what does feed new life?” he asks.
“Choice.”
Choice.
Beyond this niche, there is another Station, and then another. Jesus falling, falling again, Jesus stripped, nailed, killed. But it wasn’t a journey of passivity.
It was a journey of choice.
The man’s hand rests on top of Becket’s. Warm, big. Again Becket feels the man’s soul, clean like snow and hot like flames. “I used to feel the same as you—that there could be no confession without purity of purpose. But now I believe sometimes the feet must move for the heart to follow. And I also believe we won’t make a mockery of this,” the man says. “Together, we will make it holy.”
It is impossible not to believe this man. It’s impossible to resist his goodness, his faith. His fervent clarity. “What is your name?” Becket asks. He needs to know, he needs to have something to cling to before he wades into the thorn-edged whirlpools of his deeds.
“Jordan Brady,” the priest says.
Becket smiles at him. “I’m glad you were here today, Father Brady.”
Jordan nods. His hand is still on Becket’s, and the weight of it is reassuring, comforting. Like being shepherded.
Becket lets himself melt into the feeling and takes a deep breath.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says, and then he begins to speak.
Midsummer
Delphine
Delphine feels like she’s lived entire lives in this room.
She’s shackled to a leather-upholstered thing which is mostly bed, but partly bench, and studded all over with convenient bolts and eyes and hooks for binding down submissives. There’s no walls as such, just the facsimile of walls made with cheap black curtains, and the ceiling is the warehouse’s ceiling—so high above her that she can barely make out the metal girders holding it up.
She can’t remember any noise that’s not the cool snap of Rebecca’s voice or the harsh buzz of the vibrator. She can’t remember any smell other than the bouquet of sex and Rebecca’s own scent—mossy, botanical, green.
She can’t remember any other feeling than this: acute, miserable pleasure.
“Once more,” Rebecca says, and Delphine strains against her bonds.
“I can’t,” she pants. She’s already come three times, and the orgasms from that vibrator are mean. Mean, mean, mean. Sharp and greedy and bright.
“Oh, I think you can,” Rebecca says calmly. Her braids are pulled up in a high pony, and they swish over her shoulder as she leans down to tap Delphine’s open mouth. “What did you say this lipstick was called again?”
“Violet Fury,” Delphine manages. “It’s Fenty.”
“It’s slutty. I like it.”
Rebecca had let Delphine pack for her, and so tonight her Mistress is dressed in an outfit much sexier than what she normally wears. Tight jeans, shiny black heels, a cropped leather jacket. When Rebecca leans over to wedge the vibrating wand against Delphine’s pussy again, the sides of the jacket part and move open, revealing nothing but a lacy red bralette underneath.
Despite her calm voice and amused expression, Rebecca’s body is less coy—her stomach caves and swells with quick, urgent breaths. Her dark nipples are hard and jutting against all that red lace. And in her jeans is the final thing Delphine had packed for her. Rebecca had been shocked, since Delphine has shied away from anything but Rebecca’s fingers since the night of the gala, but her mistress was too tantalized by the possibility of getting to use it that she didn’t question why.
Which was good, because Delphine didn’t know if she could actually explain why she wanted to pack it, or why suddenly the idea of Rebecca wearing it now made her wet and squirmy instead of cold and apprehensive. It came on like spring, the easing of her anxiety; one day there was mud, cold and bare, and the next day there were daffodil shoots, tender and clean. Like the last three years of talk therapy and group sessions and the occasional anti-anxiety med had been all for tilling and planting and weeding, and now finally there was a bloom, a harvest on the horizon.
Anyway, she packed it and Rebecca pretended that she wasn’t turned on by her sub asking for such a thing, and now Rebecca is wearing it tonight: a slim pink cock tucked up against her fly. Delphine fondled it so much on the way here that the moment they parked the car, Rebecca bent Delphine over the bonnet and spanked her bottom for bad manners.
Delphine could have cried with happiness.
“I’m glad we came back tonight,” Delphine says. Auden, Saint, and Poe are back at Poe’s father’s house, having the awkwardest “meet our girlfriend’s dad” dinner of all time, and Becket went to Clinton Lake for a walk in the moonlight, leaving Delphine and Rebecca alone to their devices. It took them less than a minute to decide they wanted to go back to Orthia’s, and off they’d scampered, giggling the whole
drive there like teenagers sneaking off to snog.
“Me too,” Rebecca says, her eyes raking over Delphine’s naked frame. “Me too.”
“Can I come in?” someone asks.
Rebecca eyes blaze over Delphine’s body once more and then she straightens up and sighs. “Yes,” she answers, and Emily Genovese saunters in, all boots and eyeliner and attitude.
“I just wanted to play the part of hostess and make sure you had everything you needed,” Emily says. “And also to tell you Poe invited me to the funeral, so I’ll see you tomorrow too. Fuck, your submissive is pretty.”
“I know,” Rebecca replies, pride and wariness in her voice.
“May I?” Emily asks, gesturing at Delphine, and it’s Rebecca’s turn to be the hostess. She nods once, eyes narrowed, and steps back, allowing Emily to run an appreciative hand over Delphine’s tits and stomach. “Pussy too?” she inquires, asking both of them now.
Delphine surprises herself by answering, “Yes.” She can feel Rebecca’s surprise too. Even though she’s had Rebecca’s fingers inside her multiple times, it’s not something she’s ever expressed an interest in sharing. But something about tonight, about Emily’s no-nonsense attraction to her—it just feels right.
And then when Emily slides experienced fingers into her, it feels so good that Delphine thinks she might be able to come again, even without the wand.
Emily’s voice is raw with lust as she works her fingers in and out of Delphine and leans down to lick a hot stripe up the curves of Delphine’s stomach. “You are very lucky,” she says to Rebecca.
“I know,” Rebecca answers, promptly enough, but her voice sounds strange to Delphine’s ears. As if she’s struggling to be polite.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 23