Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  I thought I couldn’t trust you, but the truth is that I can’t trust myself.

  I should stay still, I should stay still, I should stay—still—

  I lean forward. My mouth is so close to his erection that I can practically feel the heat of his body against my lips. His hand tightens in my hair, but not upwards, not away. It’s infinitesimal, but I feel it like an earthquake.

  He’s pulling me closer.

  Chapter Nine

  Auden

  I open my lips and press my mouth to his wool-covered erection. I can still smell him, the faint smokey smell, and I can smell the clean wool, and everything is perfect, and then he slides his other hand into my hair, and everything is even more perfect. I relish the kicks his cock gives against me, as if I’m not moving fast enough for it, which I’m not, I know I’m not, because I’m not moving fast enough for myself either.

  I look up and meet his eyes as I let go of the needle, which dangles from the almost-finished hem. And then I slide my hands up his thighs. I have never knelt like this, never looked up at someone like this, and it’s beautiful, it’s galvanizing. It wouldn’t get me hard on its own, but it’s almost like I wouldn’t need it, not in the end. Like the release would be someplace deeper than my groin, the catharsis still soul-rocking, no matter what fluids I did or didn’t emit at the end.

  Not that it’s a particularly salient issue at the moment. St. Sebastian, no matter what, stirs me, and so having his urgent cock brushing against my lips and his thighs trembling against my hands and his eyes like pools of pleading midnight is enough.

  “I don’t want to be us right now,” I tell him in a whisper. “Please, I don’t want to be us.”

  He nods slowly. “We’re not us,” he says. “We met just now.”

  My hands move up to the waist of the trousers. “I don’t know your name or where you came from. All I know is that you have the sexiest mouth I’ve ever seen.”

  “All I know is that you have adorable hair and too much money.”

  I grin up at him slightly, my fingers on his trouser fastenings. “I also know you need your cock sucked before you go out tonight.”

  “It’s a good thing I found you then, because I wanted a pretty, rich boy like you to do it.”

  The trousers are open, and I can pull his boxer briefs down. There is fabric everywhere—cashmere, cotton blend, wool, whatever cheap stuff his underthings are made of—but he’s thick and proud at the middle of it all, surrounded by flattened curls of silky black hair and capped with a gorgeous, swollen head. Veins meander enticingly down the length of him.

  “We’re not us,” I say, looking up at him.

  “We’re not us,” he repeats and then frees his hand from my hair to take hold of himself. I lick the tip of him—salty, slick—and then tongue-trace the crown where it flares and then dips to form the apex of his frenular delta.

  “We’re not us,” he says again, as he pulls me forward and I swallow him whole.

  He tastes like soap and skin, and he smells much the same, although even here linger traces of his sharp, wintry scent. He’s as hot as a branding iron against the inside of my lips and on the top of my tongue, and thick enough that I already feel a slight ache in my jaw. And when I suck for the first time—hard and noisily—my tongue flattening under his shaft as I drew him back to my throat—his knees buckle and my hands on the backs of his thighs are the only thing keeping him upright.

  “Oh my God,” he says hoarsely. “What the fuck. Oh my God.”

  Encouraged, I do it again.

  And again.

  Alternating the sucking with flickers of my tongue, and savoring the way his hard flesh swells and swells in my mouth. My experience with this is deeply limited—I was a virgin until three months ago—and while I went down on St. Sebastian on Beltane night, we were all in such a frenzy that I wouldn’t say technique had been a particular preoccupation at the time.

  So each ragged gasp of his, each moan . . . each grunt as his hips punch helplessly forward . . . all of it is the tastiest praise, and I revel in it. I relish it.

  I’m gloating, in fact, gloating like a Roman general on a triumphal march. Drape me in purple and crown me with laurel, I’m conquering this uncertain librarian with nothing but my mouth. Take me to Jupiter’s temple, because I’ve despoiled him of every transparent pearl of pre-cum he possessed, more precious than gold itself.

  “I’m close,” he whispers. “Fuck. So close.”

  My scalp stings from his hands in my hair, and my eyes water from trying to take him down my throat, and there is the gentle ignominy of the sounds I’m making as I swallow him, of the slickness on the outside of my lips, and this is what my lessons with Rebecca missed.

  She taught me how it felt to be flogged, to be bound, gagged, clamped. She made sure I knew how it felt to be thirsty or itchy or have a cramp in my leg that couldn’t be stretched out because I’d been cinched into a fuckable little parcel. She wanted me to feel what a submissive would feel so when it was my turn to hold the flogger or tie the rope, I’d have a bone-deep awareness of what I was doing to their body.

  I submitted to it with mere academic interest, with an impatient eagerness to be done with it all, and every lesson she taught, I was already mentally in the future, doing what was done to me to my two librarians, my priest and my priestess.

  But now, being on my knees with the floor hard against them and my throat aching as I choke on St. Sebastian over and over again, feeling him pull my hair, looking up and seeing him wild and unchaste, I understand so much more. I understand so much more the pleasure of this—of service, of submission.

  And there’s something inside that understanding, inside this moment, something that almost feels like an answer . . .

  It flits away before I can grab at it. And then St. Sebastian is coming, drawing in a sharp, shuddering breath and releasing into my throat with jerking pulses, again and again and again. I wonder if this is the first time he’s come since Proserpina came back to Thornchapel. I wonder if he’s been using those toys he used to like so much in her stead.

  The thought of it has me so stiff that I’m reaching down to rub my length with the heel of my palm out of pure, self-soothing instinct, the same way I’d wiggle a leg that had just been bruised or suck on a fresh paper cut. My balls are drawn up so tight that I’m not sure I could even move right now. Not unless I come first.

  “I can’t believe I came that fast,” St. Sebastian says breathlessly. “Fuck.”

  I can believe it. Not because I’m brilliant at giving head, but because we’ve been starved for each other. If St. Sebastian so much as curled his fingers around me, I’d be spurting onto the trousers I’d just so painstakingly hemmed.

  Saint looks down at me, and then he gives me a small smile. “You’ve got—just here . . . ” He reaches down and wipes something from the corner of my mouth, his thumb warm and a little rough against the edge of my lip. It’s his own spend, just a tiny bit, and he licks it off his thumb like it’s a stray bit of cake batter. Like it shouldn’t go to waste.

  I could die right now.

  “I should finish the trousers,” I manage to say. I don’t want to spoil this by insisting on my own orgasm—if never coming again in my life is the price of having St. Sebastian near me, then I’d pay it in a heartbeat—and I also don’t want Saint to think I feel owed his attention and his body. I’ve done enough of that, I think.

  But Saint, martyr though he is, won’t let me martyr myself. “Stand up,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to be done yet,” he says honestly.

  And I could laugh or cry, because that’s been our never-ending refrain since he found the letter. We steal touches and orgasms, we wrest moments away from normal life where brothers don’t, and then we fight like mad to stay inside the bubble of stolen time for as long as possible.

  It never works. We always feel worse after. And yet.

  “Okay,” I repl
y, and I get to my feet. He’s already fumbling with my clothes as I fully straighten, his dark hair tumbling over his forehead and his piercing pulled into his mouth. I can’t handle it, his eager hands on me, and so I help him, I work open the fastenings and unzip myself and then he’s reaching into my pants and freeing me.

  My organ strains between us, hard and urgent-looking, and he takes hold of it immediately, the silver ring on his thumb glinting with our family crest as he gives me a short, rough stroke.

  “Fuck,” I mumble, my head dropping between us. “Ah. Fuck.”

  I wasn’t lying to myself earlier—I truly am about to come merely from him holding me—and then he slides his free hand around the nape of my neck and pulls me close. His lips move over mine in a whisper of skin and metal, and his tongue slips into my mouth. It’s such a different kind of kiss than we normally share because it’s not especially filthy or forceful.

  It’s how we would kiss if we really had just met on the street.

  It’s how we would kiss if we weren’t us.

  It’s this sweet, wet kiss, this utterly normal kiss, that does me in. The slow dance of his tongue, the warmth of his lips, the buss of his piercing on my mouth. I don’t even lick it or nip at it like I want to, because we’re not us. We’re two men who’ve never met before now, never fell in love and fell in hate, never ran through the trees together as a bonfire burned nearby. We don’t share a father, a history, a vow.

  We share nothing but this. A kiss in the London gloaming.

  It’s my turn to fumble at his clothes, yanking up the jumper so that it’s out of harm’s way. And then the harm comes, abruptly, and I’m gasping against Saint’s mouth as he continues to stroke me, as he pulls heat and tension up my thighs and down my belly and right out of my flesh. We both break the kiss to look down at where I’m spending in his hand, spurting onto his stomach as I continue to hold the jumper up to his chest.

  I don’t know if I can use the word romantic right now, given the circumstances. Given what we are to each other and what we have to pretend in order to have this moment. But it feels almost . . . nice. Simple.

  Yes, that’s it. It’s simple. Not dull or trivial—I don’t mean that—but sincere. Straightforward in a way that sometimes only the filthiest things can be.

  We wanted, so we did. End of.

  It’s feeling so good that my own knees are threatening to buckle now. So good that all I want to do is collapse back onto my bed and stare at the mess I’ve made of him. I’ve dressed him up, tailored him to a hasty perfection, and now he’s all untucked, with his thick, satisfied cock still pushing through the placket of his trousers, with his jumper shoved up to his chest, and with the cotton poplin of his button-down shirt wet and spattered with my climax.

  Now he really looks like a boyfriend.

  I press my forehead to his. “I’ve ruined the shirt, haven’t I? I’ll fetch a new one.”

  “No,” he says. His voice is husky and rough—barely audible. “I want to wear this one.”

  “You want to wear my cum on your shirt to dinner. With Delphine’s dad.”

  I can feel more than see the lift of his shoulder. “The jumper will hide it.”

  “It’ll be wet a while yet,” I caution him.

  The breathlessness in my own voice undercuts the warning in my words, however. I want him to do it—I want him to walk around London and talk with handsome men while my seed dries next to his skin. It’s exactly the kind of filthy game I’ve spent years wanting to play with him. It’s exactly the kind of filthy game that strangers don’t play with each other.

  “We’ll never not be us, will we?” I murmur, slotting my lips against his. I don’t push in when I do. I don’t push my tongue into his mouth. Instead, I speak like this so that his lips move with mine as I whisper to him. “We’ll always want this.”

  His cool piercing kneads at my lip when he says, “It’s why I had to leave.”

  “And it’s why you leaving doesn’t matter.”

  He doesn’t argue. I don’t provoke.

  We both know it’s true.

  Eventually, we have to pull apart, we have to tuck ourselves away and straighten our clothes. I finish the hem of Saint’s trouser leg, and then I find him a pair of dress socks and Oxfords—deep brown, with some brogueing along the vamp and the toe cap, the kind of shoes that say I have money but I don’t care that I have money, which is exactly the Freddie Dansey energy St. Sebastian needs to match tonight.

  I kneel down and help him into the shoes, not because he can’t do them himself—he protests quite irritably that he can—but because I like this feeling so much more than I can explain. Kneeling at his feet, helping him, serving him. Making sure his socks are straight and his laces tied perfectly.

  I stand up and study him, nodding finally as I hand him the blazer. “Keep the jacket on through dinner—unbutton before you sit down—and if you cross your legs, don’t prop your ankle on your opposite knee because the trousers will pull too high on the calf.”

  St. Sebastian slides himself into the blazer and I swallow.

  I’ve always known he was beautiful. Even when we were children and he was tearing the heads from flowers, he was beautiful . . . and later, when he found his uniform of boots and old T-shirts and—if I was lucky—some eyeliner, he was even more beautiful. The firm mouth, the high cheekbones, the black vampire eyes. The slight cleft of his chin and the cut angles of his jaw and nose. Even the way he curves his shoulders in when he puts his hands in his pockets, the way he blinks in long, almost-sultry blinks, the way one front tooth is ever so slightly longer than the other, enough that I feel compelled to run my tongue along them both just to make sure.

  The lost-boy-ness of him, the sharp loneliness of him . . . it’s the kind of beauty that makes poets reach for their notebooks and also stick their hands down their pants.

  But perhaps familiarity has filtered him in my mind—or maybe I’m a shallow, moneyed jackass after all—but seeing him in quality clothes is staggering. I’m staggered by him. And for a real moment, I’m forcefully reminded that he is as much a Guest as I am, that if things had only been a little different, he would have grown up like me, he would have grown up knowing to wear a jacket to dinner. He looks fucking incredible. Still him, still the pout and the piercing and the hair that I’m fairly certain was last cut four months ago by a blottoed Delphine, but a him that looks more like the son of Ralph Guest of Thornchapel than Richard Davey, Devonshire painter.

  I can’t deny I like it. Not more than I like his usual uniform, certainly not, but I do like it. Rather a lot.

  I want very much to shag him right now.

  St. Sebastian mistakes my horny appraisal for judgement, and he starts plucking nervously at his cuffs. “I probably look stupid,” he mumbles.

  “You look like every boy I wanted to fuck at Cambridge, but even better, because you’re the boy I wanted to fuck since I knew what fucking was.”

  He blushes, red dusting his light bronze cheekbones, and I want to push him against the wall and put my tongue in his mouth again.

  But I don’t.

  “Truly, you look perfect.”

  “Is there anything else I should know?” he asks, turning to face my mirror and still fussing with his sleeves.

  I shake my head as I come behind him. “It’s only the usual smart restaurant nonsense. Start with the outside fork, butter your bread on the plate, and use the lavatory before the meal starts, that kind of thing.”

  “Not about the restaurant,” he says. “Is there anything I should know in order to have dinner with Freddie? He’s so . . . you know. Like you and Delphine are.”

  “And yet you successfully eat with Delphine and me quite often.”

  Saint huffs out a breath, blowing long strands of inky hair off his forehead. “You know what I mean.”

  Well. I do. Freddie is the sort that wings Latin mottos about in the cheerful, vaguely ironic way of someone who was tortured with Latin for the
entirety of their education and then developed Stockholm syndrome with it. He has four middle names, and a signet ring so old that it’s nearly impossible to make out its seal, and his great-uncle is a marquess.

  But for all that, Freddie is as good-natured as anyone can be. I’ve known him all my life—and before Delphine broke things off, he was to be my father-in-law—and I have never known him to be cool or contemptuous. All the manifold blessings of his life have resulted in an unshakably sanguine personality, and he is genuinely friendly to everyone, because why wouldn’t he be? Why wouldn’t the world be full of friends for him? He goes through life with his beautiful wife and his beautiful daughter, tipsy and charming and accidentally making money even though he doesn’t need it.

  “Freddie is a good man, and kind,” I assure Saint. “He won’t penalize you for some obscure faux pas. Only the middle-classes care about etiquette-policing, you know. The real uppers can’t be bothered.”

  “I think you and I have different definitions of middle-class,” St. Sebastian mutters.

  I smooth the sleeves of the blazer over his shoulders and biceps and our eyes meet in the mirror. “You don’t need to play a part,” I say. “Freddie knows who you are. This isn’t an audition. Only dinner.”

  He nods, but we don’t break our stare in the mirror and I don’t lift my hands from his arms. I’m not too proud to say that I could squeeze his biceps and shoulders for a very long time and not get bored.

  After a moment, he asks my reflection, “Do we look alike?”

  I’ve asked myself this question every day since I first read my father’s letter, asked and asked and asked. Is that the same high forehead, the same long nose, the same jaw? The same sharp-edged mouth? Do we have the same throat, or is that just how throats look? And do we have the same hands, or am I only imagining that his fingers are as long as mine, that our basilic veins twist up from our wrists in exactly the same way?

  “What do you want the answer to be?” I ask.