I am walking toward her now, my strides turning into a run, and then she’s in my arms, all warm, ripe curves and berry-sweet scent.
She’s letting me hold her.
She’s pressing her face into my neck, she’s letting me kiss her hair, and I’m shaking, I’m shaking like the leaves in the storm outside, as if it’s all I can do to hang on. And I realize I’m talking too, talking like I never do, in a nervous, quavery chatter.
“I just arrived and I saw your car and the things for the party and Abby said you’d disappeared and I was searching for you everywhere, and I was about to go outside, but I thought I’d look up here—”
I break off as she pulls back and I see the smudges under her eyes, like she hasn’t been sleeping either. Her mouth—though painted perfectly in something pale pink and scrumptious—is pressed together in some kind of struggle. And her eyes, those honey eyes normally so clear and open, are shuttered.
I’m shaking harder now, but even fear and guilt can’t stop my Domme instincts; I reach up and brush a thumb along the apple of her cheek, right where the skin goes thin and delicate under her eye. She’s wearing some makeup, but not enough to hide this.
“You haven’t been sleeping.”
“I missed you,” she says simply. My heart lifts at this, floats right into my throat, because maybe this means she’ll forgive me for missing the exhibition, maybe she’ll forgive me for being such a bastard about love.
But her eyes don’t open up for me, and strain still pulls at that plush, pink mouth.
Guardedly, I ask, “Is that all?”
She steps away from my touch and my hand hangs there in the air for a moment before I can make myself drop it back to my side. “I started a new kind of therapy this week with Dr. Joy,” she says. “Exposure therapy, a type of CBT. It’s, um. Intense.”
I’m relieved that the answer isn’t because I’ve been pondering how to break up with you, but this is a fresh cut on my heart.
New therapy? Something intense enough to give her trouble sleeping? I should know about this, I should have been there to help her. Are things really that fucked between us? That she didn’t feel like she could tell me about this and ask me for support?
“Delph, you should have told me. Even if we’re apart, I’m always here to help you with anything like that.”
She hugs herself again, chafing her arms. She’s in a tight, off-the-shoulder white top and a swishy lavender skirt with a pretty silk bow in the back. She looks like she’s ready to be fucked over a tea table.
“It’s hard,” she says after a moment, “because no one can help me. Isn’t that just silly? Laughably uneconomical? I’m surrounded with people who want to help me with anything I ask them to, but this is the one thing no one can do on my behalf. No one else can untangle the knots in my mind, no one else can forge new neural links in my brain. It will always and forever be my cross to bear.”
I hate this. I hate anything that I can’t point to and immediately solve, and I just want to fix it for her, I wish I could heal whatever wound this is myself. “I can still be there for you,” I point out. “If you’re having trouble sleeping, I can hold you, and if being inside your own mind is too hard to bear alone, then I’ll bear it with you. I’ll stay next to you, I’ll keep you safe from everything else.”
She takes her lip into her mouth—white edges cutting into soft pink flesh—and a familiar bolt of lust sizzles behind my clit. But I ignore it, still feeling uncertain and now very worried about my Delphine.
“Is this from . . . is it about what happened?”
It’s funny, how we’re all so euphemistic about it, when Delphine can be so matter-of-fact and blunt. “The rape?” she clarifies. “Yes, it is about that, except it’s—it sounds so silly to say out loud, but here it goes, I suppose. I was wearing a lipstick that night. It was called Cherry Tree.” Her voice goes a little wobbly when she says the words Cherry Tree out loud, but she keeps going. “It was smeared on the mouth of one of my rapists after he kissed me, and the memory of it . . .” Her voice does falter here, and she blinks back tears.
“It’s like it’s happening all over again. I can be in a car or watching a movie or in a restaurant, I can be in bright daylight and surrounded by people, but it’s like my body doesn’t know that, it’s like I’m still not safe, like I’m—”
I can’t listen to this without touching her. I can’t. I slide my hands over the dip in her waist and pull her close, like I can prove to her adrenal system that she’s safe if only I hold her tight enough.
“It started with the lipstick itself. I couldn’t wear it again. I ended up throwing it away. But then I found myself not wearing anything by that brand anymore, and then I started avoiding the lipstick section in stores in case I’d see the brand’s logo. Then I started avoiding the stores altogether. And then the word cherry itself began to bother me, and then the fruit, and then even pictures of the fruit. And it’s so silly, you know? So strange and so stupid when I say it out loud, and so I couldn’t bear to tell anybody. Not my parents, not Auden. Not even Dr. Joy until just last week.”
I remember her red-eyed and forcing smiles in the shower. “That day, the day of your photoshoot—it wasn’t a makeup allergy, was it?”
She shakes her head.
“No.”
“Fuck, Delph. I’m sorry, if I’d known—”
“You couldn’t have known,” she interrupts softly. “I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want to be a bother, and let’s face it, I’m already silly enough as it is, without all that bosh about cherries.”
I cup her face between my hands. “You,” I say firmly, “are not silly at all.”
Something flickers in her eyes—something fragile, followed immediately by pain. She flinches and twists out of my touch, her arms going back around herself.
And all along my heart, fresh lacerations gape open.
“Pet,” I say beseechingly. “Please.”
“We need to talk,” she says hollowly. “Before we do anything else, I have to talk to you.”
I try to take confidence from the fact that she missed me, that she told me ten days ago she was still mine as long as I wanted her to be. And then I say what I know she needs to hear—what she deserves to hear.
“Delph, about that night, about missing the exhibition. I won’t make excuses about the day I’d been having or how much my mother needed me then, because you still deserved better. And I am so, so sorry, you’ll never know how sorry, because the last thing I’ve ever wanted was to hurt you, and my most important job as a Domme is not to let you down and I failed. And I also realized—”
I reach for her hand and press it against my heart. I wait until she drags those big, soft eyes up to mine. “I realized I love you, Delphine Dansey. I was a fool to think I didn’t, and when I think of how dismissive I was, how cruel I was when you tried to tell me how you felt, I could tear myself apart with my bare hands.”
My heart is hammering against her palm, and it looks like her heart is hammering too—underneath the sleek golden waves, her bare shoulders heave up and down, like she’s struggling to breathe.
“I love you,” I say, staring into those Old Hollywood eyes, “and I think maybe I’ve loved you for a long time. Maybe even since you came to stay with me. And I want everything with you—not just kink, not just dates and fun—but love. And even more if you want it—marriage and kids and a second home so the kids can go to some pretentious school I’ll hate—anything for you, Delphine. Everything you want, I’ll give you.”
A welling tear spills out of one of her eyes, followed by another, and then another, streaking so prettily across her cheeks. I lean forward and kiss them.
“I love you,” I say again. “Do you think you can forgive me for that night? Do you think you can love me still?”
The salt taste of her tears is still blooming on my lips when she tears herself away.
“Delph—” I say, but she cuts me off.
“I was with someone else,” she blurts. “That night. You didn’t come and so I played with someone else instead.”
And.
And I’m finally cut to death.
All those gashes on my heart, all those shallow wounds, it’s nothing compared to this, it’s nothing compared to having her words bayonet their way into valves and chambers, feeling her tear off the whole mangled organ from my aorta like fruit from a tree. Every place where I’m soft, where I’m vulnerable—every wall that I’ve let down for her—everything is mutilated, butchered. Hacked into bruised, pulpy nothing.
She cheated on me.
I’ve been in agony for days, loving her, pining after her; I only missed the exhibition because I was trying to help someone else—
And she cheated on me.
“Who?” I manage to ask, although what does it matter? It doesn’t matter.
“Emily Genovese,” she answers, meeting my gaze with one of defiant misery. “She was in town, so I invited her to Justine’s. When you didn’t show, she offered to take me up on the stage.”
Emily Genovese.
Grief—frantic, jealous, painful grief—threatens to swallow me whole.
“What did you let her do to you?” I ask, suddenly and morbidly desperate to know. “Did you go to your parents’ to hide yourself from me? To hide marks I didn’t give you?”
She’s already shaking her head. “She spanked me, Rebecca. Only that. Until the kiss.”
I don’t want to know. I need to know. “Did you fuck?”
“No.” Her voice is thick with tears, but she meets my eyes so I’ll know she’s telling the truth. “We didn’t fuck. No one came. No one even tried to come.”
“But you kissed,” I say.
“In the lobby, afterwards. She started it, but I—” Delphine looks away now, sucking in a deep breath as if to steel herself into giving me every piece of the horrid puzzle. “I kissed her back, Rebecca. There was a moment when I knew what was happening, and I chose it anyway. For another few seconds, at least.”
I don’t think I can breathe. My eyes are hot, my heart is gone, my veins are dry. I’m nothing and I’m dead.
“Why?” I whisper. “For the sin of standing you up? For not saying I love you? Why did you get on that stage with her? Let her taste the mouth you knew belonged to me?”
Delphine winces at my use of the past tense, and she turns away so she’s in profile again. “I didn’t think you wanted me,” she says miserably. “I thought you were embarrassed of me—too embarrassed to show me off to your friends at the club.”
This is the literal last thing I would have ever guessed she would say. My mouth is open in shock. “You didn’t think I wanted you?”
With her profile contrasted against the rain, I can easily see the defensive workings of her jaw, the quivering of her chin. “No, Rebecca. I didn’t.”
I’m almost sputtering, that’s how utterly gobsmacked I am. “You’re a fucking model, Delphine. You’re famous, wealthy, brilliant, beautiful—and you thought I didn’t want you?”
She swallows, looking down at her feet in their ballet flats. “I’m not a model like most people use the word, Rebecca. I have the body I have.”
“Yes, a body I’ve been insatiable for! A body you’ve made an entire brand about being proud of!”
“It’s not like—” She’s crying now, tears sliding over her cheeks like rain on the windows. “—It’s not like I was completely at peace with my body and then I made the brand. I made the brand because I wasn’t at peace and I was tired of feeling alone about it all. And it still didn’t get any easier—I have to have an assistant moderate my comments on an hourly basis, because people tell me horrible things about myself every day. Every day, Rebecca, someone reminds me that the world doesn’t think I’m worth anything. Not desire, not respect, not the ability to travel, not decent medical care. So yes, I’m still insecure; so yes, I didn’t think you wanted me, or if you did, you were embarrassed by your own attraction.”
I don’t even have the words for this, that’s how nonsensical it is. “We were together publicly, Delphine. Photographed, Instagrammed, Tatlered—everything. I hardly hid you.”
“Because you don’t care about those things. But it felt like you did care what the people at Justine’s thought.”
“Delphine, the only reason I hadn’t played with you publicly was because I hated the idea of sharing you so soon. I was—” I don’t relish admitting this “—jealous. Possessively so. The idea of other people getting to see what was mine made me want to lock you in a tower and breathe fire at anyone who came near. Always, my time and my work and my energy have been at the disposal of someone else—even my mind, especially my mind—and I’ve always been expected to give it all without complaint or reserve. You were the first person who was just for me, the only thing I’d ever had that didn’t belong to anyone else. So no, I wasn’t eager to share you, but it wasn’t because I was ashamed, Delphine. It was because I was so fucking proud to call you mine that I could have died.”
And now I am dead. Not of pride, but of pain. Pain she sowed and watered and nurtured into torment. Her and Emily Fucking Genovese.
I press my fingers against my eyelids, trying to press the heat out of my eyes. I feel worse than dead, I feel like I’m dying. Because death would be a relief and there’s no relief for me here. I’m shredded pulp and jagged bones.
“Rebecca,” Delphine says, still not looking at me. “I’m sorry. I know—I know that’s not enough, that it could never be enough, but you should know all the same. I’m so sorry it hurts.”
Yeah. It hurts me too.
“Do you think . . . ” She stops and then starts again. “I meant what I told you in that text. I’m still yours. If you want me to be.”
I could almost laugh. In fact, I do laugh, a short bark that grates its way past my lips.
She finally lifts her eyes to mine. The hurt there—the pain—it almost matches my own.
But I’ve fallen for those eyes before, and I know where it gets me. I know now what happens when I offer her my love, when I show her where I’m softest, rawest, tenderest—I know what happens when I believe even for a second that I could have something good in my life. Something wonderful. Too wonderful to be true.
I can’t be broken. I won’t be. She doesn’t deserve that, she doesn’t deserve my pain, my sadness, my anguish. Those I’ll have to save until I’m alone.
So for now: “I don’t want you to be mine.”
And even that’s not enough, so I add emphatically, “In fact, I would like to never see you again.”
Her face crumples, but she nods, as if she was expecting it.
“Yes, Rebecca.” And she hugs herself once more, crying while the rain cries behind her. A pearl girl in a pearl world.
I don’t watch. I turn around and I leave.
I leave her behind.
I walk down the stairs, find my bag, and then go to my car and get in. I’m wet, the world is wet, my face is covered in rain and tears, and yet there’s no doubt, no hesitation in what I have to do. I’ll call Auden later and explain. Apologize for missing his birthday. But I have to get away from here. I have to get away from her.
I put the car into drive and start back toward London.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Rebecca
That night, I dream of Göbekli Tepe.
I dream of walking there alone, because it’s mine, because it’s mine to tend to, except when I step between two stones, I find that I’m not at Göbekli Tepe at all, I’m in the thorn chapel, staring at the altar. And behind the altar is a door.
I’m back at Thornchapel the next morning.
The storm has gone, and with it, the heat, and when I get out of the car, I’m not immediately oppressed by the summer sun. But I barely notice, surprised as I am to see that mine is the only car in the drive. St. Sebastian’s junker is gone, as is Delphine’s baby blue Aston Martin. And when I get inside, there’s no Poe hummin
g to herself in the library, no Becket milling around, no Auden in his office. I don’t even see the dog.
I go outside.
My feet know where to take me before my mind does, and I’m on the path to the thorn chapel, picking my way through the mud. I rub at my chest as I walk, my mangled heart giving me trouble.
I was Tea Set Barbie all along.
God, how I loved her.
And this is the worst part of it, the hardest part—even now, I still love her. Even now I want to curl around her, to kiss her, to stare worshipfully at her. To make sure her therapy is going okay and that she feels safe. To give her spanks and pets and orgasms and spoil her until I die.
What a miserable fool I am.
When I get to the thorn chapel, the whole place feels new-washed and vital. Lusty trees rustle their leaves, birds flit everywhere, and the storm has torn off a veritable carpet of roses and berries to walk on. Auden Guest stands in the middle of it, facing the back wall of the chapel while Sir James sits and pants next to him.
I come to stand beside him, and he looks over to me.
“You came back,” he says.
“I had a dream,” I respond. To which he nods, as if no further explanation is needed. Perhaps it’s not.
“Where are the others?” I ask him.
Auden recites a litany of heartache. “Becket has to leave St. Petroc’s. Delphine went back to her parents’. St. Sebastian left me, and Proserpina went with him.”
“Poe left you too?”
He lifts a shoulder in a shrug, his eyes going back to the altar. “There was a promise. I’m making her keep it. It’s complicated.”
Doubtless. “So you’re alone here.”
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 42