Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  His teeth catch the top ball of his labret piercing as he thinks. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “If we do look alike, it’s almost worse, because then I feel like we should have known, somehow. We should have seen it before. We should have seen it from the very beginning.”

  “There’s enough difference, St. Sebastian. Enough that it would have been impossible to see it before we knew. We have plenty of our mothers in us.”

  “Maybe. But when I look at the bones of our faces . . . ”

  Yes. He’s right.

  The bones are the same.

  “I think we do look alike,” I say. “But then again, maybe I’m wishing for it.”

  “Why would you wish for that?”

  I press my face into the back of his head, burying my nose in his hair and closing my eyes. “Because then whenever I look into a mirror, I can almost see your face looking at me. It’s almost like having you close. It’s almost like having you back.”

  I feel him draw in a deep breath.

  I decide I can’t bear hearing whatever it is he has to say—whether it’s another explanation of why we can’t be together or why he has to stay away or why he almost certainly regrets what we’ve just done. I’m not made of stone, no matter how much I wish I fucking were.

  I pull back and open my eyes, dropping my hands from his arms. “We should probably see you off. It wouldn’t do to be late to dinner.”

  “I—” He blinks. “Okay.”

  Relieved and disappointed and wanting several impossible things at once, I lead St. Sebastian back downstairs to the front door. “I’ll launder your clothes and bring them back to Thornchapel, and Poe can return them to you.”

  “Thank you,” he says automatically, as if what would happen to his clothes is the literal last thing he’s thinking about. He shifts on his feet and looks at me. Looks away. Looks at me again. “I’m glad I got to see you again,” he says. His voice is as soft and hesitant as his gaze. “I think—I think I needed that more than the clothes.”

  He says this in the hushed voice of a penitent confessing sins, like he’s whispering state secrets and not something that was transparently obvious from the beginning.

  I touch him. Just a small brush of my fingers over the seam of the blazer, where it lays perfectly flat and divot-free on his shoulder. If we were really boyfriends, he could borrow this blazer any time. If we were really brothers, he could.

  It’s only here, in this strange no-man’s land we’ve found ourselves in, where borrowing a blazer that fits him perfectly is an excuse and maybe a sin.

  “I know, St. Sebastian,” I tell him. I let my fingers move over to the notched lapel and I smooth it down his chest, not lingering when I shouldn’t. “You didn’t need to come here for clothes, not really. You could have called Freddie and asked to meet somewhere else. You could have rescheduled. You could have asked Proserpina to send you money on your phone. You could have done any number of things that weren’t coming to my house.”

  He ducks his head. I wonder if he knows how adorable it makes him look, how it makes me want to catch his stubborn chin with my fingers and lift his face to mine. How it makes me want to slide my fingers through all that hair and yank his head back so I can bite his lips and his jaw and his throat.

  “You knew,” he mumbles to his feet. “How can you have known something I only just realized?”

  Because I pay attention.

  Because you can lie to yourself but you can’t lie to me.

  “Do you have money for a cab?” I say instead.

  “I’ll take the Tube and walk. You’re saying you knew this whole time.”

  “Do you want to borrow an umbrella?”

  “Auden, don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  He lifts his head; the deep brown of his irises is almost obsidian in the barely-lit foyer. They remind me of the earth at Thornchapel—near-black and wet, filled with secrets. His eyes could eat bones.

  They’re already eating mine.

  He draws in a breath. “You knew,” he says in a juddering kind of voice, “because you always know. Do you know that I don’t want to leave? Do you know that I want to go back upstairs with you? Do you know that I’d let you do anything to me right now? Anything you wanted, Auden, anything at all.” He steps closer, his lips parted, his hands slowly turning so his palms face me in offering.

  Outside, I hear the trees lashing and fretting in a sudden, gusting wind.

  “Anything,” I echo.

  His pulse thrums just above the collar of his borrowed shirt. “Anything.”

  I could have him now. If I wanted.

  If I pushed, he’d break. If I pulled, he’d fall. All I have to do is say yes to this churning, crashing need inside me, and I could have him at my feet, I could have him on his stomach and I could be inside him with my palm against his throat and this blazer crushed between us.

  And he’s looking at me like we’re sixteen again and about to kiss in a bed of flowers, like we’re starting over at the very beginning and there’s nothing between us, nothing but delirious, innocent lust—I could have him.

  I could have him.

  But having and loving are only sometimes the same thing.

  I take a step back. “You’ll be late if you don’t go now,” I say. The words come out gentler than I feel them; they feel like razor-wire leaving my mouth.

  “Auden . . . ” he says. Pleads. “But I—I miss you.”

  He says it like I don’t miss him in return. He says it like I’m the bad guy here, like I’m the one who left, and maybe this is the hardest part of loving someone, maybe this was always the test. Not letting him leave, but making him go.

  I take his hand, wrapping my fingers around his so that my thumb rests on the Guest family ring. My hand is shaking. My entire body is shaking.

  Grab him.

  Bite him.

  Bruise him.

  Outside the trees are thrashing and behind my eyes it feels like all I can see is forest and rain. I drag in a breath, forcing the feeling down inside me, as if I can tamp whatever it is back into my belly, as if I can pretend that I don’t want to run and chase and hunt. I’m not a king, I’m not so twisted up in Thornchapel that even the trees feel my lust and my pain. I’m just a London boy with a non-Smythson bag and good hair. I’m just a friend and a brother and I’m going to do the right thing, because I’ll pay any price not to have St. Sebastian look at me like he did at Lammas.

  Because I’ve finally, finally learned that I can’t choose us for him.

  He has to do it on his own.

  “Listen,” I say. “You and Proserpina will always be my air and my water—the very things that make up my blood—and that hasn’t changed, because it will never change, it can’t. I can’t.”

  I put my free hand against his stomach, pressing the ejaculate-damp shirt into his skin. Mine, the gesture says. My own thing.

  “This is me. But you are you, and I love you as you are, and don’t you see it? Don’t you feel it? You were right about me. A few minutes alone with me, and I have you dressed like a doll and wearing my cum, and if you spend the night with me, I’ll have you shivering and spent and marked all over. If you come back to Thornchapel, I will never stop looking and reaching and wanting. I can’t be trusted.”

  He’s shaking his head, even though I’m only repeating his own words from Lammas back to him. “You can’t be trusted,” I remind him gently. “You had your reasons for leaving. Have they changed so much that you can abandon them all now? Truly?”

  He’s stopped shaking his head now, and he’s staring up at me with a look so hopeless I can’t stand it.

  This is what no one told me about love, about being the Thorn King, about everything.

  You can be broken, and still you must let people break you again and again.

  You must help them break you, if necessary.

  You must allow your own sorrows, your own torments and regrets, to be subsumed in the face of t
heir own.

  You must cut yourself apart piece by piece and plant those pieces far and wide in the lives of those around you, and then you must not lament when they don’t take root. You must cut yourself apart and do it all over again. As many times as it takes.

  As many times as it takes.

  “Go, St. Sebastian,” I say, letting go of his hand. I can still feel the worn crest of his ring against my thumb. The G surrounded by twining, twisting thorns. “Just go.”

  He swallows. Whispers, “I’m sorry.”

  And then finally, mercifully, he turns and opens the door. I watch him take the steps with the vague stagger of a dying man, and then I watch him slope off into the evening, shoulders hunched forward and head down.

  I think he’s crying.

  I know I am.

  Chapter Ten

  Rebecca

  “So he just went?”

  Auden doesn’t look up from where he’s stroking Poe’s hair in his lap. It’s our first night down from London, and we’re in the library after supper. Poe has predictably fallen asleep, curled on the sofa like a cat, her head pillowed on Auden’s thigh and one hand twisted in the fabric of his trousers. Her fingers even knead and flex in her sleep, as if she’s afraid her owner will get up without her and she needs to reassure herself that he’s still there.

  “He just went,” Auden confirms.

  “Well?” I ask impatiently. “And then what?”

  He finally does look up at me. “And then I masturbated with my tears as lube. Twice.”

  His tone is dry, droll, flippant. Peak Auden.

  “I can’t tell if you’re smiling because it’s a lie and you’re joking or because it’s true and you’re being self-deprecating.”

  “Do you honestly want to know the answer?” His mouth is still on the verge of a grin, his voice still wry and teasing, but there’s something in his eyes . . . something like pain. Like he’s still bleeding internally from St. Sebastian’s visit.

  “I want you to be happy,” I say. “Emphasis on the you, by the way.”

  “I thought he’d become your friend too.”

  “I can be chums with someone and still not forget the time they left my best friend for dead in a graveyard.”

  The corner of his mouth drops. No more smile. “It was more complicated than that,” he says quietly.

  “Everything about that boy is complicated.”

  “But that’s why I—” He stops. Sighs. “It doesn’t matter. The whys don’t matter. I only wish that I didn’t have to be the strong one and make him hurt me. It was hard enough when he did it all on his own.”

  I watch him go back to rubbing Poe’s hair between his fingertips, and my own fingers tighten around the stem of my martini glass.

  I’m jealous.

  I’m so jealous it hurts.

  If Delphine were here . . .

  No, I’m only jealous of the idea of a sub tucked against me like a kitten. It’s not that I want a specific sub here, it’s not like I’m imagining sunshine hair all over my lap or the way certain doll-like lips would feel against my finger as I traced them.

  “I suppose that’s growth,” I say. “Given that you threw a glass at him last time he left you.”

  “It wasn’t at him,” Auden says, exasperated.

  “Tell it to the constables.”

  He gives me a ha ha very funny expression.

  I sip my martini and then sigh down at it. Auden never puts in enough vermouth. “I think you did the right thing, although I’m still vexed with Saint for making it necessary. Also why don’t we just drink the gin straight from the bottle if we’re going to make the martinis like this?”

  “Winston Churchill said the ideal martini was a glass of gin while looking at a bottle of vermouth, and who am I to question the great bulldog himself? As for Saint, I would like to think that I’ve gotten stronger or wiser in the last month. Or at least better at hurting myself to help him.” Then Auden’s shoulders drop, and his eyes close before he speaks again. “Doubt isn’t permission. That’s what I’ve learned, I suppose.”

  Doubt isn’t permission.

  I think about this as I take another drink and Auden opens his eyes and resumes stroking Poe’s hair. Over by the fire, Sir James stretches and groans like he’s had a long day of work, when in reality he spent most of the day barking at the archaeology team and then napping with Poe after he was banished for bad behavior.

  “Doubt isn’t permission,” I agree, “but sometimes it’s very, very enticing. Especially to people like us.”

  “Enticing,” he says. “Yes.”

  “Those moments of doubt . . . ” I’m thinking of Delphine, uncertain and delicious in the leather lingerie I made her wear. I’m thinking of her honey-gold eyes flashing up to mine as Auden watched her eat my cunt. “That moment when there’s nothing but hesitation, nothing but fear. When all the reasons why not are hanging in the air like pollen, just waiting for you to blow them away, and then you do. When you turn hesitation into relief, into eagerness, when you turn fear into pleasure. It’s a kind of alchemy. It’s addictive.”

  “It’s more than the alchemical moment, though, isn’t it?” Auden says. There’s remorse in his expression when he looks at me. “It’s tempting on its own. The pushing, I mean.”

  “We don’t need safe words because we’re safe lovers, Sir Guest.”

  “No,” he says. The fire gives a lonely pop, with a single, stray spark tracing down to the foot of an andiron. “I suppose not.”

  I take another drink, thinking of Delphine.

  “Although,” Auden says after a minute, “easy surrender is very sweet too.” He’s looking down at his sub now, a small, fond smile on his face, and I snort.

  “They haven’t invented something yet that Poe would say no to. You could wake her up right now with two fingers inside her, and all she’d do is purr at you.”

  His smile widens into an asymmetrical grin. “I know.”

  “She’s a good sub.”

  “She’s a good everything,” he says. “I love her.”

  Jealousy slices me into sheets thinner than Bible paper, and I drain the last of my martini.

  “I worry about her sometimes, though,” he says softly.

  “That she doesn’t say no enough?”

  He nods, smile fading. “Not with kink—well, not with that necessarily—but with life. With everything else. I love that she’s curious, but sometimes . . . ” He trails off.

  He doesn’t have to finish. I know what he means. I know he’s thinking of Poe plunging eagerly into the world of Thornchapel, of pushing us to do the feasts, of wrapping herself in the love of two boys who thought they hated each other. Who stayed even after she found her mother here.

  She’s too many yeses, and not enough nos. If she were a kitten for real, she’d be the kitten who gets stuck on top of cabinets and trapped inside the sleeves of jumpers left lying on the floor.

  “You’ll be there to keep her safe,” I assure Auden.

  “I hope so,” he murmurs. He runs a palm down her arm and then settles it over her heart, as if to convince himself that she’s still here and okay and hasn’t gotten herself stuck atop a cabinet he can’t get her down from.

  I had that responsibility for Delphine too. For a few brief months.

  I stand up before the thoughts can bloom into memories of welts and velvet. “Another martini? I’m making them this time, by the way, you’re barred from the mixing from now on.”

  “Yes, fine.”

  I’m at the sideboard we use as a bar when Auden says, “I invited Tally to stay the weekend here, starting tomorrow, so we should take care not to mention the door. Or anything else in the woods.”

  I’m not bothered by this—although Tobias is exactly the type of British boy I rarely have patience for—but it does feel strange keeping so much of Thornchapel from an archaeologist who’s actively studying Thornchapel. “Do you think maybe we’re being too secretive?” I ask as I turn
and carry the drinks back. “I’m not proficient in archaeology, but I do know context is vital for its application. Geographic context in particular.”

  Auden’s brows are drawn together above his nose. He accepts the drink and sets it on the small table next to the sofa, and says, “Have you been out there? To the door?”

  To the door, he says. Not to the chapel. As if the door is swallowing up the things around it, and it’s all that’s left.

  “Not since Lammas.”

  He chews on the inside of his lip, looking down at his lap and then up at me again. “You should go,” he says. “You should go see it.”

  “What, tonight?”

  It’s past dark already, and wet, and the gin is already cool and tickling in my veins. But Auden still nods.

  “Tally and his team will be back tomorrow morning, and then he’ll be staying the night, and he’ll almost certainly be using supper and drinks to wheedle us into looking. I think you should see it before then.”

  “You could have mentioned this earlier,” I grumble, but I don’t sit. Now that the idea of going to see it is out and floating around inside my mind, it’s hard to pack it back away.

  “I could have,” he says. “I’ll admit that my thoughts have been . . . tangled . . . today.”

  Because of Saint’s visit to him yesterday. I understand more than he knows. I can still vividly recall the taste of my own tears as I wandered around London and ached for Delphine. As I bought a necklace I had no business buying.

  “Does Tally still think you’re culling deer on the estate?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. It was a flimsy lie to begin with—”

  “It was.”

  “—and I don’t know how long it will hold up. Especially if he’s here for much longer.”

  I fix my oldest friend with a look that he winces at. “Rebecca, don’t. I know you don’t like lying, but . . . ”

  I take a drink without my eyes leaving his face, making my response clear without words.

  “ . . . but I think you should go look at the door first. If you see it and still think we should tell Tally the truth for the sake of archaeology—”

  “—and for the sake of not being our parents—”