Because it’s how it’s supposed to be. Because it’s still the truth.
No matter what eternities pass, no matter how many times the door opens and shuts, you’ll always be mine.
But I’ve learned—at a deep and slicing cost—that the restless, grasping urge of mine is only worth as much as a person grasps back. Wanting is not enough. Doing is not enough. Only letting go and suffering, suffering, suffering can ever be enough.
In my own way, I’m very much a masochist, you see. Except I’ve chosen to love St. Sebastian in lieu of whips and canes.
I’m suddenly very, very tired. “I know, little martyr. I know.” I push the untouched tea towards the center of the island and straighten up. “Come upstairs and we’ll find you some clothes.”
Chapter Eight
Auden
My room faces the back of the house, and as such, it’s thoroughly skylighted and windowed. St. Sebastian stands in the fading silver-gold light as I turn on a small lamp and move over to my wardrobe. Most of my clothes are tailored, which is less of a problem in the waist than in the leg, given that Saint is shorter than me. Not by much—but enough that it might show to a discerning eye.
“Where are you going again?”
“Rostam’s,” Saint answers.
“Ah.”
“Um. Is that a bad ah?”
“No,” I say, opening the wardrobe door and moving through the crisply organized wool and cotton. “Rostam’s is rather recherché, in my view, but its affectations tend towards the voguish rather than the stuffy.”
“I’m not sure what that means for clothes.”
“It means,” I say, pulling out a few options and laying them on my bed, “it’ll be jackets on, no question, but I think we’ll be fine without the tie.” I turn and face St. Sebastian, running my eyes up his frame, and then I sigh at him. “You are so pretty that I often forget what you are wearing.”
He looks at me with something between suspicion and amusement. “And you just now remembered what I was wearing, is that it?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
I sigh again, walking over to him and plucking at the threadbare T-shirt, tsking at the jeans with holes in the knees and the hems at the back frayed from being trod on by his boots. “I could help you revitalize your wardrobe, you know. If you ever wanted.”
A stubborn chin comes up, which means he’d never let me. And I almost don’t want him to—there is something rather sexy about the boots and the jeans and the piercing. And when I remember the eyeliner he used to wear with it all . . .
Ah. I’m getting hard now.
I turn back to the bed and subtly adjust myself. “Let’s try these,” I say, setting aside a pair of dark gray trousers and a matching jacket, along with a thin cashmere jumper and a button-down shirt to wear underneath it.
It’s clearly an expensive outfit, and stylish if I may say so myself, but it’s not stodgy or overly formal. And I think it will pair well with the slightly-too-long hair and the lip piercing.
I hand him the clothes and then make to leave, so he can change. I don’t want to leave—and a mere month ago, I wouldn’t have—but here we are.
Growth, I suppose. Growth, and also if I never again see the look in his eyes like he had on Lammas day, it will be too soon.
It was like looking into the face of someone scourged. And then knowing that I was the one who had done the scourging.
But as I reach the door, Saint says, quietly, “You can stay. If you’d like.”
If I’d like?
“I didn’t think you’d want me to stay.” But I’m turning, I’m facing him again. I’m saying this even as I walk back to him like it had been my plan along.
I wonder if he’ll fight me, as we’ve fought so many times before. I wonder if he’ll resist and I’ll cajole . . . if he’ll sneer, and then I’ll snarl. But instead he says something which I hate because it means too much to me, and I never gave it permission to mean this much. I never wanted four words to affect me so powerfully.
He says, like it’s nothing at all, “I trust you, Auden.”
I trust you.
I stop coming towards him.
Nothing else in this world could undo me quite this thoroughly, and nothing else in this world could so completely ensure his safety with me.
“Okay,” I say. It comes out hoarse. A little pained. “You can trust me, St. Sebastian.”
The ends of his mouth deepen a little, tilt up, and I’m looking at another shy smile. We are suddenly sixteen again, looking at each other from across the abbey.
After a minute, I look away because the more I stare at that shy smile, the less trustworthy I feel. “Let’s try the shirt and trousers first. If the jumper and jacket don’t work, I have others.”
St. Sebastian nods and is pulling off his T-shirt before I’m even finished talking. The firm lines of his back ripple and flex as he does, and when he turns to toss his shirt on the bed, the lean muscles of his stomach and chest tense and release with the movement.
A dark furrow of hair disappears into the low-slung waist of his jeans, the belt of which he works open and then leaves hanging from the loops as he reaches for the button-down.
I should stop looking. I’m going to stop looking.
He makes a fussy, petulant noise—accompanied by a fussy, petulant flapping of his hands. “What’s wrong with these?” he asks. The unfolded French cuffs dangle inelegantly over his hands, and I have to laugh.
“They just need to be folded and cuffed,” I say, smiling. “They might be more prim than we need for Rostam’s, strictly speaking, but I can do a barrel cuff to dress it down a little.” I gesture for him to button the shirt as I roll open a drawer and scan over several pairs of cufflinks organized by size and material. None of them will do. I select two tuxedo studs instead.
When I turn, he’s kicking off his boots and then his jeans, and the sight nearly gives me a heart attack.
The strong, hair-dusted thighs…the hollows behind his knees which I’ve kissed so many times. The uncuffed and uncollared dress shirt with nothing other than boxer briefs and a silver ring around his thumb.
He looks like a boyfriend right now. He looks like a boyfriend in my half-done-up shirt, in his pants, with the ring I’ve given him glinting from his hand. And I want to shove him onto my bed and crawl on top of him; I want to thread my fingers through his hair; I want to trace the ridge of his clavicle; I want to flicker my tongue into the crescent of his jugular notch.
I want to hold him in my arms with our legs tangled and his silky hair tickling my cheek, and I want to wake up and have an utterly mundane morning with him. No bleary, post-orgy morning after, no ritual hangover. Just us waking up and kissing and snuggling and then going about a perfectly ordinary, wonderfully boring day.
I hand him the trousers, although what I really want to do is say no trousers for you ever again, but I behave. He shimmies into them, fastens them around his narrow hips and then looks up to me, looking totally at a loss. “Do I tuck the shirt in? Leave it out? Do I need a belt?”
I almost make a jest about how much he needs a belt, but I stop myself just in time.
I take the two steps over to him and start tucking the shirt into the trousers . . . and I’m trying not to die at the sheer feel of him against my hands. The juts of his hip bones, the firm slopes of gluteus muscle attaching to his back. The shuddering tension of his abdomen as I tuck his shirt around the front.
“Shirt in, jumper out, no belt,” I say once I’m finished, trying to pretend that my hands aren’t burning with the first real touch of him I’ve had in a month. “Now for the studs.”
“Studs? Not cufflinks?”
I remove the first stud from my pocket and take his wrist in my hand, having him hold it up so I can start folding the cuff the way I need. “A cufflink is made to be worn with a proper double cuff—on the outside. If you wear it with a barrel fold, as I’m making now, a cufflink will irritate the skin of your wri
st. But a stud is smooth on its back side, so it won’t scratch or dig.”
He watches as I work the stud through the holes and finally fold the cuff into place.
“You said backside,” he says finally, and I roll my eyes.
“Next,” I order, and he dutifully holds up his other wrist for me to cuff.
After he’s done that, I have him pull on the jumper—which clings at the arms and stomach and hits the line of his hips perfectly—and then I step back. With the jacket, he’ll look the part. Even with the piercing. He could be a peer’s disaffected son, maybe, or a celebrity on the verge of breaking out. Someone with enough money that they can afford not to care about metal in their lip or having their hair trimmed regularly.
Unfortunately, one element does not look the part, and I bid him to stand still whilst I fetch a small sewing kit from the bottom of my wardrobe.
“You can sew?” Saint asks.
“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” I say, breaking the thread with my teeth and then threading the needle. “It’s not exactly molecular neurobiology, is it?”
“No,” Saint says as I kneel down at his feet and begin folding the hem up to the right length. “But I guess I never thought of rich people needing to know how to sew. Didn’t you have servants for that?”
I finish folding the hem—raising it a little more to accommodate the vamp of whatever shoe he’ll borrow—and use the pins from the kit to keep it in place. “Don’t move your ankle or you will be stabbed and I shan’t be sorry. And I didn’t grow up in Downton Abbey, St. Sebastian. It’s not as if I had a valet.”
He makes a scoffing noise, and if he were still mine, I’d make him pay for it. Some swats on the bottom . . . maybe some cock down his throat so he could turn those scoffs into sounds more pleasant to my ears.
But as much as I’d like to bite that scoff right off his tongue, it does make me smile a little. He is so determined to see me as some kind of princeling that I almost wish I were one, just to please him.
“We had help with cooking and cleaning,” I explain, as I start sewing, “and there was a tailor we used often, but things needed to be sent in to him. And often my mother wasn’t well enough to even send things in, you see. I can’t remember when I realized this, that there were things I couldn’t count on Mummy to do, but I was only seven or so when I taught myself how to sew, so it must have been before then. I taught myself to cook too if there was no one around to help with meals that day, and I taught myself how to put out fires that had been left burning, how to put plasters on my own scrapes, how to schedule my own checkups and teeth cleanings—and then manage to get her there with me so I could have them done.”
Saint’s hand brushes the crown of my head, and when I look up, his eyes are liquid jet in the evening light. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “That I doubted you and also that the adult you were with wasn’t able to take care of you.”
I shook my head, looking back down. “She took as much care of me as she could. She loved me fiercely, I think, and the great shame of my life is that I never told her how much I loved her back. How much I appreciated that she tried to take care of me, that she wanted to. How much I understood that she had been doing her best, that she never gave up on being my mum, even when her disease was eating her all the way up.”
When he speaks, I hear a pain in Saint’s voice which is kin to my own. “I have to hope mothers know how we feel. That they know these things even if they’re unsaid.”
I do more than hope. I pray. But I don’t say that now. Instead I finish a series of tiny stitches and roll up the hem to properly knot the thread and seal the new seam. If this were a real alteration, it would be ironed to a crisp line, but it’ll pass for the night without the ironing, I think.
“I’m surprised no one noticed. Did your dad not notice? That you were doing so much to raise yourself?”
I let out a long, weak breath—not like a sigh. Something fainter. Deader. “He wasn’t around very often. He traveled for work frequently.”
Ralph Guest had earned his wealth—on top of an inherited fortune—in the twilight world of land and property investment. All of it legal, but much of it morally dubious. My father had the gift of seeing a bucolic sweep of land and envisioning something insidiously manicured and symmetrical. Something just lovely enough to entice buyer after buyer, but hollow enough to be a net loss for the world. Retail parks, airport expansions, soullessly curated housing estates for the upper-middles. And it was a deep hypocrisy, because Ralph Guest used all of his influence, money, and power to make sure that the same kind of development he made millions doing never came to his precious Thorne Valley.
They say to leave the world a little better than you’ve found it, but Ralph Guest left the world a little flatter than he’d found it. A little more leveled and paved.
“And when he was home,” I continue, moving on to the other leg and beginning to pin up the fabric, “I think he was rather proud of my independences and irritated at any part of me that was still childlike. Which reinforced those independences, of course.”
“But there must have been other adults around. Grandparents? Teachers?”
I start sewing. “There were, and I should have asked them for help, or told them what was going on. Perhaps my mother would have been made to seek treatment that way. Perhaps she’d still be alive. But you’re acting like we’re all little vehicles of common sense straight from birth, and not jumbles of loyalty and fear and misplaced mammalian instincts. I went out of my way to make sure that no one knew my mother was sick. I built my days around the pretense that everything was perfectly fine at home, that my mother was as vibrant and attentive as any other mother. I wish I could untangle why for you—if it was embarrassment, or a fear that she would be taken away, or a deep-seated belief that no matter what, my mum and I were better off together than apart—but I can’t. Most likely, it was a combination of all of those things.”
“I’m sorry,” Saint says again.
I stitch my way around the front again. I don’t look at him because I’m worried I might cry if I do. I’ve never told anyone about this before. I’ve obviously railed against my father. I’ve talked matter-of-factly about my mother’s addiction and death.
But never have I talked about that little boy teaching himself to sew so his teachers wouldn’t know his mummy didn’t notice the holes in his jumpers. Never have I talked about the child who stayed up late every night to make sure all the fires were out in his house because his mum would pass out intoxicated while they were still burning.
It makes me feel little and scared all over again to talk about it, and I hate it, I hate it.
“Auden,” Saint whispers, and his hand is in my hair again, and suddenly my head is resting against his thigh. It feels so nice here—he is so warm and solid through the fine wool of the trousers—and when I press my forehead against him, the rest of the world is darkened to nothing. There is only his hand in my hair, and the faint bonfire-in-winter smell of him. Only the swish of my eyelashes against the wool, and his soft, slow breaths.
“Thank you for telling me,” he says, and I nod against his leg. I think this is probably against the rules, whatever the new rules are, but I can’t lift my head yet. He’ll see me crying if I do.
His fingers are sifting through my hair now, scratching gently against my scalp, and it feels so good to be touched like this, like there’s no expectation of me, like there’s nothing I need to earn because it’s already earned. It feels like safety. It feels like love.
And yes, I’m kneeling, yes, I’m mid-act of service, but it doesn’t bother me at all, it feels so very, very right. Maybe I’m an emotional submissive as well as an emotional masochist, or maybe sometimes even kings need to kneel, I don’t know. All I know is I could rest my head here forever, and sewing up this hem forever would be a close second-best.
“I should keep hemming,” I mumble, but I don’t move any. “I know your dinner is soon.”
&
nbsp; “I have ninety minutes and it’s only half an hour away. Plus I could probably finish hemming them myself.”
“You shan’t,” I sniffle, offended into action by the sheer ridiculousness of the idea. “You’d probably do a . . . a running stitch or something.”
“Oh no, not that.”
I glare up at him, even though my eyes are still wet and my cheeks are still flushed, which surely ruins the effect of the glare. “It would pucker.”
A smile pulls at his lips. A real one, not a shy one. “Auden. Now you’ve said pucker.”
That works a laugh free from my throat somehow, torn right out, and once it’s out, I find everything feels slightly more bearable again. I’m still wet-eyed, I can still feel that unpleasant quiver in my chin, but St. Sebastian is here. He is here and he is him, and I’m a callow, selfish man if I can’t draw comfort from that alone.
His hand is still in my hair, rhythmically pulling and tugging, and I’m still on my knees looking up at him—and it seems to occur to him a split second before it occurs to me that this is how we would be if I were about to suck him off. And once—just the once—his fingers tighten in my hair to the point of pain, as if he’s imagining it, as if he’s playacting what it would be like to have me like this with my mouth available for his use.
I blink up at him. I don’t speak at first, and I don’t move, I don’t want to move, because I want all of it so much. I want to touch him, to taste him, to hollow my cheeks around him.
Suddenly it feels like the only answer, the only palliative. The only cure for sad kings left with half their cloven heart and a host of rustling trees for company.
His eyes are so dark as they look down at me, and his lower lip is so soft as he worries the top of his lip piercing between his teeth. I wonder if he’s thinking of our last fight, of how he admitted he was the one who pushed us into fucking on Lammas. How he was the one who couldn’t stop himself from wanting.
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 8
