“I want to suck on you,” I’m saying, low and urgently. “I want to put my mouth on the place where your cock grows from your body. I want to run my nose along the curve of your groin. I want to kiss the crown of you until it’s wet for me, and I want to push the tip of my tongue into your slit. I want you to make noises for me, and I want your knees buckling for me. I want you so undone for me that when you finish, you hate yourself for it. You hate yourself for spilling your seed and ending what you wished would last forever.”
His eyes are wild and his jaw flexes as he tries to breathe and seems to fail. “Christ, Auden—Jesus Christ. I can’t even imagine what you would say if I were the one on my knees.”
“You don’t want to know,” I say—and I say it as honestly as I say it grimly. He doesn’t want to know. Not because it would scare him—although it would—but because he’d want it too much. Because he’d shudder and beg me for it, and then we’d find ourselves how we always found ourselves: spent and bruised in our different ways.
“I think I do,” he whispers. “I think I do want to know.”
“Do you know what I was doing? Before you found me here?”
“You were running.” He touches his tongue to his piercing. “Like on Beltane.”
“Do you remember what happened when I caught you? Right here? What I did after I pushed you into the bluebells?”
I can see the hitched contractions of his ribs under his T-shirt; when he speaks, his words are stilted with lust. “Of course I remember.”
“I caught you and then you were mine. I fucked you like it. And that’s only the beginning of what would happen this time, because this time I wouldn’t be catching you, I’d be taking you back.”
“Fuck—Auden—” Saint drops abruptly to his knees, his face in front of mine. He stares at me with desperation, with a surrender which is beautiful and yet all too wrong, and I know what he’s going to say before he says it, and I know that I’m going to hate it.
“I don’t know how I thought I could fight this,” he mumbles, letting his forehead press against mine. “I don’t know how I thought I could resist. I can’t. I can’t anymore. I give up. You win.”
It should be perfect. It should be what I want.
It’s not.
“I win,” I say, hearing my own voice and knowing it sounds flat.
“Yes, Auden,” he says, nudging his nose against mine. “You win.”
I can smell him over the damp of the riverbank and the leaf-churned woods. I can smell his fire-in-winter scent, and I breathe it in deeply, as deeply as I can. I breathe it in like I’ll never be able to draw another lungful of air ever again.
I pull back so I can see his eyes. Rings of coffee around a jet center. Defeat is all over him.
Defeat I haven’t earned.
“I feel like a starving man,” I murmur, studying his face, “looking in on a feast, seeing a banqueting table stacked with pies and meat and wine. All I crave is right there, all that would sate my hunger and slake my thirst. If only I’d be let inside.”
“What—”
“And then someone comes out with a crust of bread to give me instead,” I finish over him, my throat aching, pain thudding behind my eyes. “And how can I refuse it, Saint? How can I say no when I’m starving? But yet how am I supposed to feel? Knowing I’m being given a scrap when just beyond the wall there is a carnival of plenty?”
St. Sebastian draws back now too, hurt pulling on the edges of his mouth. “This isn’t a scrap, Auden. This is what you wanted.”
“No,” I say, my throat and eyes hurting even more. “No, I wanted you to choose, and you haven’t chosen. You’ve only given in, you’ve folded, you’ve crumpled. That’s not choosing a life with me, St. Sebastian. It doesn’t even meet the legal definition of consent.”
“You’re asking too much of me,” he says. His mouth is trembling and he’s blinking fast. He’s trying not to cry. “You always ask too much.”
I press the heel of my palm to one burning eye. “I know this, St. Sebastian,” I say, my voice raspy and choked. “Which is why you have to ask of it of yourself first. You have to choose. You’d let me rut into you right here, right now, and then in a few weeks’ time, you could get those test results and curse yourself for every stroke I gave you, every pinch, every kiss. We both deserve better than that inevitable regret.”
I can barely see as his chin drops to his chest. A familiar panic crawls through my ribs and up my spine as my vision fades, as I struggle to breathe around the agony stabbing at my eyelids, and then suddenly I’m hunched over and leaning on my hands, weeping petal after petal onto the ground. Dark red, near black. Wet but whole.
When I’m done, there is a scatter of petals between my hands.
I finally suck in a real breath, actual tears running down my face from the effort and the pain of it. My head hurts.
“Auden . . . ” Saint whispers. His eyes are wide as he looks from me to the rose remnants on the soft dirt of the riverbank. I make myself stand up and then I wipe at my eyes with the back of my hand.
“The others will be waiting,” I say, stepping over the petals and picking up my shirt and trainers to carry with me. “We should go back to the chapel.”
“Auden, what are those?”
I shake my head, not in the mood to share anything with him, much less something I don’t understand. Much less something that terrifies me.
“Nothing,” I say. “They’re nothing. Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty
Suffer Me Not To Be Separated From Thee
St. Sebastian
The others are standing in an awkward semicircle outside the chapel when he and Auden arrive. Becket, Delphine, and Poe are silently passing around a big growler of beer while Rebecca paces in front of the rose-lined entrance. They all look up at him and Auden as they come into the clearing—Poe and Delphine with relief, Rebecca with impatience, and Becket with something deeply inscrutable.
“Auden’s crying rose petals,” Saint says. He doesn’t know why he says it, except there’s this reflexive instinct to assure everyone they hadn’t been fucking by the river. And it’s an instinct he doesn’t really understand, because hadn’t he begged Auden to do just that not twenty minutes ago? Wasn’t he the one to kneel at Auden’s feet on the night he returned and say everything’s changed now?
But he’s feeling differently now anyway. Embarrassed, ashamed, angry. All the messy feelings that come with rejection.
At any rate, Auden reacts like a younger brother who’s been tattled on, scowling and glaring. He still hasn’t put his shirt on.
“Auden?” Poe asks, sounding concerned.
“It’s nothing,” Auden says shortly. “It’s just—it’s like the trees moving or the river rushing. It’s peculiar, but it doesn’t seem to do any harm.”
“Yet,” Saint points out. “It doesn’t do any harm yet.”
Poe and Becket exchange a glance, and then Poe says, “I think Saint has a point.”
“What are my options?” asks Auden. “Go to a doctor? Find an ophthalmologist whose expertise is in ocular plant matter?”
They’re all silent. The options are limited and they all know it.
But that doesn’t mean Saint has to like it.
“I just don’t want you to be sick is all,” he tells Auden, although he sounds more stubborn than doting right now and he knows it. “I don’t want you to hurt.”
Auden’s eyes soften the tiniest bit, but his mouth is still etched into a line of displeasure. Displeasure that Saint put there.
But what is Saint supposed to do? He thought Auden liked surrender, but all of a sudden, surrender on its own isn’t good enough? Saint has to make promises along with it? He has to swear oaths and pledge vows to a future that is only one test result away anyway?
This is more of Auden’s incomparable arrogance. More of that rich-boy hubris. This is the same Auden who withheld money from Saint’s mother just because he could.
“I think I can grow flowers,” Rebecca says suddenly, and everyone turns to where she stands in the chapel entrance. “No, I know I can. Watch.”
Rebecca
It’s only been roselles and violets so far, which makes a frightening kind of sense when she thinks about it. And she has been thinking about it, all day. All day while she’s been pacing the perimeters of Thornchapel, testing, testing, like this is an experiment that must be refined for variables, and not what it so obviously is, which is insanity.
And so far she’s learned this:
She can grow flowers—under her palms, not inside her eyes or whatever fucked-up thing Auden has going on—on the Thornchapel grounds, but nowhere else. The minute she passes the equinox stones to the east or Reavy Hill to the west—or the river to the south or the stream crossing Thornchapel’s drive to the north—she is like every other gardener who must buy seeds and water them and wait.
She can only grow one flower at a time, but if she uses both hands, she can grow two at once.
She cannot grow them with the soles of her feet or her knees or her elbows or her lips.
Yet.
And there is a price, which she only learned an hour ago when she was conducting her experiment here in the clearing.
Or maybe it’s not a price, as such, but a consequence. A reaction.
She kneels now and presses her hands to the grass. It takes a moment, but soon she feels the now-familiar tickle of plant tendrils against her palms.
“Watch the rose canes around the chapel entrance,” she tells the others. “Watch what happens.”
They watch. And soon they see that as Rebecca grows two flowers—two violets this time, delicate, innocuous—two dark roses bloom along one side of the ruined chapel door.
She lifts her hands all the way, and the violets bob among the soft grass in the cool September breeze.
“Fuck,” she hears St. Sebastian say, at the same time Poe and Delphine explode with awe and excitement.
“That is so cool—”
“That is marvelous, Bex, really so marvelous!”
Becket says nothing, but his gaze is far away, like he’s considering the implications of this. Only Auden meets her look with something like what she’s feeling. Something like worry.
“The roses,” Auden says after a moment. “If you grow something—”
“Then the roses grow too. Which means . . . I don’t think Thornchapel and the door’s roses are the same thing, Auden, which means Thornchapel and the door aren’t the same thing. They are different, even though they are tied together. Or maybe not tied, but . . . ” She searches for the right word. “Correlated? Responsive?”
Auden runs a hand through his hair, his eyes on the roses beside her. “Sympathetic,” he says after a minute. “They resonate together. Like strings on a hurdy-gurdy or something. And so a change in one provokes resonance—or change—in the other. You think?”
“Makes sense to me.”
“Not to me,” sniffs Delphine.
Rebecca abruptly regrets spending all day wandering the valley and the moors when she could have been playing with Delphine’s toy again. Tonight, she promises herself. It may be a terrible idea, but it’s too late, she’s flung herself right into this terrible idea’s teeth and she has no plans to free herself from it. She will take what she wants, come what may, and face her feelings tomorrow.
“If they are sympathetic to each other,” Delphine goes on, tossing her thick blond waves over one shoulder, “Thornchapel and the door, then we should have been able to close the door ages ago.”
“Why?” asks Auden curiously.
“Because you seem to be Thornchapel’s hurdy-gurdy too. Or maybe Thornchapel is yours—but either way, if you and Rebecca have resonance with Thornchapel, and Thornchapel has resonance with the door, then shouldn’t you be able to affect it somehow? By the transitive property of flower magic or whatever?”
It’s a fair point, and Rebecca can see that Auden has no more answer to it than she has.
“Well,” he says, drawing a deep breath. “On that note, perhaps it’s time to light the fire. Maybe we can conjure up that transitive magic tonight.”
Proserpina
The mood in the chapel is different tonight, and she’s not sure whether she hates it or whether this thing that feels like hate is actually sadness instead. Sadness for what they’ve lost, nostalgia for what they had. Regret . . . but for what, she doesn’t know.
She does know that she doesn’t share the wariness Auden and Rebecca both have for the door. She does know that when she dreams, more and more often she dreams of it. She dreams of Estamond here in the chapel, she dreams of the Guests who came before Estamond too. She dreams of the Kernstows—she thinks—although those dreams are different. Blurrier. Merrier even.
She dreams of fires.
She dreams of blood.
She dreams of a golden torc flashing in the dark.
And once, just once, she dreams of the cists, of their builders. They dig graves in a forest covered in roses and they weep.
“We’ll start with singing,” Becket says, “if that’s acceptable to everyone. I also suggest we drink.”
If the response to singing is rather tepid, then the response to drinking is beyond enthusiastic. They scramble for the cooler while Auden and Rebecca work on the fire, all of them needing the escape, the excuse, the energy. They’ve brought no energy of their own for revelry tonight, they’ve brought no excitement or hope. Only fear, and in Proserpina’s case, curiosity.
The fire catches and they drink and Becket begins to sing—and they drink. The last of the equinox sun sets directly to the west, sinking into the moors and dying a slow red death. They drink some more.
Gradually, habit takes over. They sing with Becket, they move around the fire. They smell the sex hanging in the air like smoke, they breathe it in.
But they do not forget why they’re doing this.
They do not forget the door.
Delphine
The fire is high when Rebecca finds Delphine. A brush of fingers against hers, and when Delphine looks, the fingers snap. Delphine drops to her knees like the earth has rocked underneath her, and Rebecca gives her an approving nod.
“Platform,” she orders, walking away from Delphine without looking back. With utter confidence that Delphine will follow.
It’s that confidence she missed, that authority . . . and the clarity that came with submitting to it.
Mostly she just missed Rebecca. The sway of those slender hips, the cascade of braids over that shoulder, the architectural way she holds the fingers of her right hand as she walks.
The tips pressed together, the knuckles arched. Poised for a sharp, Domme-y snap.
Rebecca didn’t specify that Delphine should crawl, but the platform is very close, and Delphine would like to crawl. It would make her happy. She knows that she’s only getting a sliver of Rebecca—a sliver that’s still undoubtedly poisoned by what Delphine did—but she is determined to make the most of it. If all she gets from Rebecca is the impetus to submit, then Delphine will submit the bloody hell out of herself. She’ll wring herself dry with it.
Rebecca reaches the platform and sits, watching Delphine crawl toward her with a stillness that belies danger. The fun kind.
When Delphine reaches Rebecca’s feet and dares to look up, she sees the fire reflected in Rebecca’s eyes. Rebecca pulls up on the long, scarlet dress she’s wearing today, exposing her bare feet and smooth calves, and then the firm lines of her thighs, which she parts. Even though dusk has faded and the shadows are everywhere that the firelight is not, Delphine can still make out a subtle wetness there.
There is nothing between Rebecca’s flesh and Delphine’s mouth but air, and Delphine can’
t stand it, she can’t stand being so close.
“Please,” she breathes. “Please.”
Rebecca studies her. “It should be earned.”
“Then I’ll earn it. However you like. Please, Mistress.”
The honorific seems to affect Rebecca, because she closes her eyes and swallows. Her hand clenches tight around the hem of her dress. “I’ve missed hearing that word on your lips.”
“I’m sorry,” Delphine blurts, even though she knows she shouldn’t, she shouldn’t disturb this unspoken game of pretend. “I’m sorry. You must know how sorry I am, how sorry I’ll always be. I love you and I hurt you, and I wish every day I’d done differently. And I will never, ever do it again.”
Rebecca opens her eyes. They are impossible to read like this, with the jumping flames mirrored in them, with the shadows everywhere else. For a moment, Delphine thinks that she might respond. That she might accept or refuse the apology.
But she does neither. She merely slides her free hand into Delphine’s hair and pulls Delphine’s mouth to her waiting cunt.
Becket
He cannot be here now and not think of then, that other autumn, that fateful Samhain. He cannot see the door and not think of Adelina Markham.
He cannot be here without thinking of the logic that underpins the Eucharist and rituals like it.
Sacrifice and love. Offered flesh. Blood and blood and blood.
Death to secure life.
The door will demand more than a stilted, fearful rite. He knows this. Its price is too steep to pay with fire and sex alone, and he worries that the price will be paid by the wrong person. He looks at Auden, his exposed skin gleaming in the light of the fire as he makes love to Proserpina. He looks at Rebecca perched on the edge of the platform, her head thrown back and her hips bucking mercilessly against Delphine’s servicing mouth. And then he looks at Saint and Proserpina, currently kissing as Auden ruts between her thighs.
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 23
