“Do it,” I tell him. Fuck. “Do it. Do it before we stop ourselves.”
Something cool and slick rubs against my opening. Hand lotion, I think. Not that I care. He could tell me all he has is spit and a prayer, and I’d tell him to go ahead.
He pushes a finger inside of me and my cock swells anew, filling and throbbing back to life for him. “Auden, please, I can’t wait any lo—”
I don’t finish, because in one vicious move, he’s replaced his finger with his cock. A brutal thrust that has me crying out into the grass.
“That’s right, stubborn boy,” he says, grabbing me by the hips and hauling me up to all fours. He enters me again, blazing a path so tight and hot that I think I might combust from the inside out. “That’s right. I know you missed it. You missed me taking my pleasure inside you.”
Gone is the pleading Auden from just minutes ago, gone is whatever docility he’d adopted for my sake. He is all wild god once again, cruel and victorious, with only one goal, one drive and one need.
To fuck.
It doesn’t take long. It’s been too much time apart, there’s been too much space between us. It’s too forbidden, too filthy, it feels too good. I don’t even have to touch my own erection and it goes off, simply from Auden behind me and the silky drag of him against my prostate.
I explode and writhe back against him, my cock jerking and spilling onto the grass. He bands an arm across the front of my hips, and after a breathlessly mendacious series of thrusts, he gives a pleased grunt and fills me with his heat.
A hand, dispassionate and businesslike, reaches down and checks my erection to see if it’s wet at the tip. To see if I came.
When he finds that I did, he lets out another satisfied grunt, and then slides free. He pulls up his shorts and then stretches out sideways on the grass, yanking me down next to him and crushing me into his chest.
“Not yet,” he whispers into my hair. “I’m not ready to stop yet.”
And neither am I.
I doze for a while like this, and then I’m awakened to be fucked again. I don’t know if it’s Lammas or merely the pent-up need between us, but Auden is insatiable this time around, like he can’t settle for just one dish, he needs the entire menu.
And I encourage it.
When he kisses me, I find his hands and guide them to my throat. When he hauls me up against his chest, I twist over his lap and bait him into spanking me.
When he pushes me into the grass and wraps strong fingers around me, I wriggle out of my jeans and cover the hand curled around my hip, making it squeeze hard enough to send me squirming.
And when he crawls over me with swollen lips and tousled hair, his eyes once again like windows to the forest, I press my palm against his heart and say, “Say it and it’s yours,” just as I said that Beltane afternoon by the river.
Those forest eyes flash. “Is this the truth, St. Sebastian? Because you know what I want you to give me.”
Forever, stubborn boy. Only that.
“Right here it’s the truth. Right now.”
His eyes glitter in the gloomy light of the storm. “Only for right here? Only for right now?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “Probably.”
He sucks in a breath like I’ve just hit him, but when I reach up to touch his face, when I start to speak, try to explain that I really don’t know, that I don’t know what’s supposed to happen when we want each other this much but we’re also bound by a tie so strong it will never loosen, it will never set us free—he catches my hand and shoves it down by my head. And when he finally enters me, he does it with an angry, possessive thrust that has me crying out. He fucks me like I’m his worst enemy, like I’m prey that dared to run, and I love it so much that I can’t even regret the anger, because I’m angry too. Does he think that I’m any less furious at fate than he is?
Does he think he’s alone in wanting this always?
I meet him with all my fury, all my primal, uncontrollable need. My body doesn’t care that he’s my brother, neither does my spirit, and out here in the thorn chapel, we give each other everything despite it all. Vicious rolling in the grass, and bruising kisses, and slow, writhing grapples that always end with him winning, just like I want them to.
It’s like Beltane, but more—more honest, maybe, more raw. There’s more than love here, there’s pain too, there’s frustration and anguish and a marrow-deep knowledge that wonderful things can’t last, they never last.
Even here.
I come first, my entire body clenching in one giant fist of pleasure, and then all of it, every bit of it rushing down and out my swollen, jerking length. Hot pearls of seed fly out of me, painting my stomach and my chest, one of them landing at the top of my sternum and then slowly rolling down to the hollow of my throat.
Auden watches its progress with avaricious thirst, and then he curls his lean frame over me to touch it with his mouth, to kiss it away. I moan at the soft press of his lips, and at the ticklish tease of his tongue, and my cock surrenders even more fluid, pulsing once or twice more and leaving me utterly, utterly limp.
Which is just how Auden likes to use me, and use me he does, like I’m his own personal plaything, his sex doll. An offering sent to a king as tribute. He’s wedged so tight, even with me sated and loose-muscled, and sweat mists along his forehead as he has to use his strength to work himself in and out of me. To seek more friction, more heat, more St. Sebastian.
Lightning sparks up the sky above him, and for a moment I can’t breathe.
With his eyes like the trees and his face set in an expression of elemental dominion, and with the sky dark and electric behind him, he barely seems human at all.
And when his stomach seizes and his hips slam forward and Auden finally roars his conquering triumph, the sky roars right back at him, a thunderclap so loud that I feel it in the ground against my back. He fills me endlessly, just as the thunder seems to roll on endlessly, both me and the earth trembling as we receive it.
His eyes burn into mine the entire time, and I know what he’s thinking, even if he doesn’t say it aloud.
Mine.
The thunder eventually rolls off, his cock goes still inside me. He lowers his mouth and wordlessly fits it against mine. We kiss I don’t know how long like that. Softly, silently. Because what is there to say?
Nothing’s changed. That’s the thing about being brothers.
It can’t be changed.
I hear it before I feel it. It’s a slow hiss in the trees. A heavy, sporadic patter on the altar and the wooden platform I built for Imbolc. Drops in the grass.
Auden tears away from my mouth with a curse.
“Auden—”
“I know.”
But he doesn’t move right away, and part of me knows it’s because moving will break the spell. When we pull apart, when we put on our clothes and leave the thorn chapel, reality will come back. The things we pretend to forget here we’ll have to remember. The sins we’ve committed we’ll have to answer for.
But the rain gives us no choice. It splashes onto Auden’s naked back and shoulders, onto his hands planted in the grass. I think he would stay even then, but when the rain starts falling into my eyes and I have to blink it away, something in his face softens.
“Come on, stubborn boy,” he says, getting to his knees and helping me up. “Back to the house.”
The rain drops insistently on his open sketch pad, and I shove my T-shirt over it until I can find his bag and slide the sketches inside. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him draw like this—for fun, for color and light and all the things he used to care about until architecture school ironed it out of him—and I can’t bear to see his work ruined, not even a little bit.
Auden steps next to me, holding out his hand. He’s dressed now, but his hair is hopeless. “Thank you,” he says softly, slinging the bag over his shoulder. “Here.”
He takes my T-shirt from my hands, and I shouldn’t let him, I should
n’t indulge in this one last thing, but I do. He guides the shirt over my head and helps me into it, smoothing the faded jersey over my stomach and shoulders as if it were imported silk, oblivious to the rain falling around us, and the thunder pushing through the air more ominously than ever. It’s no longer a magic sky, it’s a get inside sky, but Auden doesn’t seem to care. He takes his time, fussing with the frayed hem of my shirt like it’s the last time he’ll ever touch me.
I don’t know. Maybe it is.
His eyes meet mine. “What happens next?” he asks me. The rain is falling between us. “What happens when we get back to the house?”
I know he’s sick of this answer, but it’s the only one I have. “I don’t know, Auden.”
Impatience flits across his face. His lips are wet with rain. “Then can you make a guess?”
I flick damp hair out of my face, feeling impatient too. “I don’t know what you want me to say right now. Do you want me to admit that I’m miserable? Confused? Hurting and lonely like hell? That I could let you fuck me for a thousand years and still not be satisfied because it’s never enough with you, it’s never enough until it’s everything and forever? Because all of it’s true, you know, every bit of it, but it doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t change anything.”
His voice blends with the hissing sighs of the rain when he speaks. “It could be everything and forever, you know.”
“I don’t need reminded.”
“Maybe you do.”
We’re both soaked now, fully wet. Our eyelashes spiky, our hair going slick and clinging to our cheeks.
“We can’t solve us,” I tell him through the rain. “We can’t force our way to some different truth. There’s no place we can go where we can hide from our DNA, no imaginary time we can wait for when we’ll magically have different fathers.” I close my eyes for a minute, just so that I don’t have to see him so wet and tragic-looking standing there in the rain. “We can’t run from this.”
“So don’t run,” he whispers. “Don’t run away again.”
“And what happens if I stay? We suffer? Forever?”
“It’s better than suffering apart. Forever.”
I wish I knew he was right. I wish I could say this experiment—this all the parts of love save for one—could work with enough practice, could work in the right conditions, if only we tried hard enough. I wish I could say with certainty that what happened this morning won’t happen again.
But I can’t. And he can’t either.
When I don’t answer him, Auden drags in a deep, rainy breath and scrubs his hands over his face and hair. “Okay,” he says, resigned. “Okay. Inside.”
And so inside we go, jogging through the trees and up the path to the lawn and then to the house. The rain is so thick now that we can barely see what’s in front of us; by the time we burst through the south door into the mudroom with Sir James, we’re sopping and breathless, our clothes sticking to our bodies. Auden’s thin shirt and pale shorts are practically indecent now, and he catches me staring at the corrugations of his stomach, at the visible curve of his cock through the wet fabric.
I expect him to look defiant or maybe even vindicated. I expect smugness, arrogance, maybe even reserve.
I don’t expect sadness. And when I meet his gaze and see that he’s about to cry, that his chin is quivering, that he’s swallowing over and over again—
“Auden,” I say, not really sure what I could possibly say next.
Don’t be sad? It’ll be okay? It’ll get better?
No. None of those things are right, none of them are true.
“I fucked up,” he says, looking away. It puts his face in profile and I can see the magnificent cut of his jaw, the working of his throat as he fights to keep his emotions at bay. “I broke my word. I said no more, and that was a promise to you, and I’ve failed to keep it.”
“No, Auden. I was there too.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not enough. I know you, Saint, I heard you when you said you’d hate yourself for loving me. And still I let it happen. I really am no better than our father. Selfish to the last—”
My mouth is open to argue—regrets and sins aside, the responsibility is mine—but then a massive thud reverberates through the house, the sound of something huge slamming against stone.
Auden and I exchange instantaneous, wide-eyed glances, and then we’re both darting out of the mudroom and down to corridor to the main hall, where the noise seemed to come from. Sir James bounds ahead, barking wildly, and between the three of us, I know we’re leaving water everywhere.
“What in the bloody he—”
The storm has blown the front doors—both of them—wide open, and wind and rain are howling into the gap, wetting the flags and sending gusts of damp air through the massive room. But that’s not what has Auden staggering to a halt and staring.
It’s Father Becket Hess, kneeling in the doorway, dripping wet and framed by silver sheets of rain. The blowing wind lashes at him like a heaven-sized whip.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
St. Sebastian
At some point Delphine must have arrived, although she’s nowhere to be seen as we urge Becket into the library.
But her handiwork is everywhere—the room is filled with sprays of lavender and hung with garlands of fresh-smelling greenery. The tables are laden with all sorts of bready treats: rolls and pastries and homemade loaves with an artisanal butter bar—I suppose in keeping with the Lammas theme of harvest and grain.
There’s small cakes and finger sandwiches and petit fours and piles and piles of fresh fruit. There’s neat rows of cocktails that even I can acknowledge are very pretty—fizzing flutes of champagne, coupe glasses filled with drinks the color of violets, highballs garnished with tiny heads of lavender. And at the center of it all, a naked tier cake with frosting the color of cream and heaped with blackberries and more lavender sprigs.
Even Becket, in the state he’s in, pauses to stare.
“Delphine really outdid herself,” I marvel as Auden tugs Becket over to a battered leather chair.
“You,” Auden says to him, “sit.” Then to me, he says, “I’m going up for dry clothes. Get him a drink, will you?”
It’s not even noon, but if ever a man looked like he needed a drink, it’s Becket in his priest’s collar and shirt, soaked to the bone and looking shell-shocked. I glance at the clock as I walk over to the sideboard and pour out a scotch. He would have only just finished Mass an hour ago, and St. Petroc’s is at least fifteen minutes away—more in a downpour like this. I wonder what could have sent him running here so quick after the service when normally he likes to chat with his parishioners.
And from the look of him, it wasn’t because he was excited for lavender cake.
“I saw Rebecca’s car outside too, next to Delphine’s,” Becket murmurs as he accepts the scotch I hand him. “Do you think they’re trapped outside in the rain?”
I shook my head. “They must be upstairs. Auden and I were just outside and we didn’t see anyone.”
Becket’s eyes flicker with the first sign of interest I’ve seen from him yet today. “Were you in the thorn chapel?”
I suddenly decide I’d very much like a drink of my own. “Yes,” I say, walking back over to the drinks. “We were. Hypocritical of us, I know.”
“It’s only hypocritical of Auden, and I suspected he’d end up there today anyway,” Becket says. His voice is more wooden than usual, and it’s hollow like an empty room. Or an empty church. “I wish he’d accept the inevitable.”
I uncap the bottle as I look at him. The rain keeps the room dark, and despite Delphine’s efforts with glass lanterns full of flickering candles and strings of lights hung over the tables, the room is full of storm-shadows. It’s hard to get a good look at his face from here—save for his eyes. That radiant, unearthly blue.
“What’s the inevitable?” I
ask.
“That Thornchapel has already chosen him, even if he hasn’t chosen it back.”
I want to tell him he’s wrong, but I can’t.
“And,” Becket continues, “we all must accept our inevitable too.”
“Which is?”
Lightning flashes outside as he answers, in an empty voice. “That Thornchapel has chosen all of us along with him.”
All of us.
The truth of it is colder than the clothes sticking to my skin, and I finish pouring my drink so I can take a few much-needed swallows. And as I do, I think of the storm sparking above Auden’s head as he fucked me, I think of his voice thick with tears back in the mudroom.
If this is what it feels like for us to be chosen, I don’t think I like it very much.
I take another drink and then walk back over to the circle of sofas and chairs and sit across from the pale-lipped priest. I’ve never seen him like this. Never shaken, never silent and haunted.
Worry nestles in my gut.
“What happened?” I ask. “Did something happen during Mass?”
He stares at the rain-streaked windows. “After Mass. It was after.”
But he doesn’t elaborate and so I don’t push. I’ve always hated it when people pushed me for answers—except for Poe, but not all of us can be adorably curious librarians.
Some librarians are just sulky boys with good taste in music who never finished their degree.
And anyway, Auden is coming in with an armful of dry clothes and a still-sleepy Poe trailing behind him. She’s pulled on a thin tank top and pajama shorts, and she’s not wearing a bra, a fact that Becket and I become aware of at the same moment. My sore cock gives a kick at the sight of those hard nipples pressed against the fabric of her shirt.
Becket just gives a small shiver and bows his head.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 40