“Show me,” Auden says. “Show me.” He crowds Saint down again, this time following him so that when Saint wedges himself between my thighs, Auden is pressed against his back in a sort of reversal to how we were before. Now it’s St. Sebastian’s ass that he grinds his naked erection against. Now it’s me he locks eyes with as he steers the scene.
Although this time he doesn’t have to steer very much. Saint rakes his eyes over my quivering belly and pink-tipped breasts and grunts like a man made mindless by the cold being brought in to sit by a fire. A grunt past gratitude or awe and coming straight from a place of impolite animal survival.
St. Sebastian ducks his head to give one of my breasts a long, hot stripe with his tongue, and then he reaches down to give his cock to me. The sight of him like that—the muscles in his arms all bunched and etched in sharp relief as he grips himself, the furrow in his tight belly lined with dark, dark hair, his brown nipples pulled into little bunched points—has me spreading my legs even farther for him.
“Please, Saint,” I murmur. It’s all I can murmur, really, although there’s so much more I want to say.
Let me help.
Let me ease you.
I want to be your plaything too. As much as you are mine.
I cry out as he fits those hard, slick inches back into me with a brutal thrust that pushes me up the sheets. Before I have time to adjust or even catch my breath, he thrusts again, chasing me down and pumping his hips like I’m about to be taken away from him, like I’m the last thing he’ll ever get to fuck.
Every ram of his cock between my legs drives the breath from my body, but I don’t care, I love it, I love the gasping, grunting high of it, and despite my earlier languor, another orgasm starts knitting itself in my belly. It’s fed by the sight of Saint toiling above me. It’s fed by the sight of Auden rutting arrogantly behind him, one big hand splayed over Saint’s stomach, trouser-clad knees crammed between St. Sebastian’s and my own. I can’t see everything, but I can see how hard Auden grinds his dick against Saint’s body, how hard he thrusts against him.
I can feel it, since each thrust of Auden’s is transferred through Saint to me. In fact, he ruts against the man between us so hard that Saint collapses on top of me, sliding his forearms underneath my shoulders and burying his face in my neck as he continues pumping into me, hard and fast, hard and fast. Auden is there too, not letting up on his own pleasure for a minute, and then, after slapping Saint hard on the ass, his hands find mine. Our fingers lace and he brings our joined hands up on either side of my head, so that he can brace himself to keep stroking against Saint.
I should be crushed by these two men. Instead, I’m cradled.
I should feel left out, a mere accessory to their strange and complicated desire. Instead, I’m the keystone and the spark. I’m caught in Auden’s stare as Saint mumbles prayers against my neck, Auden’s hands squeeze mine reassuringly even as they both chase after relief. And I feel it again—it, whatever it is, the thing I felt in the thorn chapel last night, the thing that had me waking up needing more, more, more. The thing that makes the woods whisper and the air sing.
This is what you were waiting for, Proserpina Kernstow Markham, even if you didn’t know it.
This this this.
Here here here.
Them them them.
“Oh,” St. Sebastian moans against my neck. “Oh.”
His entire body shudders—violent, hot shudders—and my tender cunt can feel how he swells to that last impossible size, how he hardens to that last impossible hardness, and with another softly uttered oh, I can feel how his huge rod jerks and pulses inside me.
That’s not what makes me come, however. No, it’s Auden behind him that sends me over the brink, Auden’s rough, male grunts and the furrow between his brows as he takes his release. He looks spoiled and handsome with the imperious way he uses Saint’s body to rub against, as if he’s entitled to it, entitled to anything he wants. And when he comes, all that strength and beauty and pain seem to radiate out of him, as if he’s the bonfire from last night, as if he’s the lanterns we walked by. The clench of his chiseled jaw is heat, and the dark wings of his eyelashes on his cheeks are rays, and the part of his full, ever-so-crooked lips is light itself.
My entire body responds, a flower to the sun, a priestess to a priest, a bride to her lord—and I come. Full, clenching squeezes around Saint’s still throbbing cock. Flutters so deep in my belly that I imagine there’s a deepness inside of me that only these two men have discovered, only these two could ever reach, not only with their flesh but with their desire.
I come like the good bride I am; they’ve drained all of themselves for me and with me. And so for a moment, all of us are limp and speechless and mindless. A sweaty, heaving tangle of bodies. A living, sticky communion.
I don’t think anyone wants to move, to stir or to speak, because this moment is perfect. No matter what existed before it or what will exist after it. This moment alone, suspended in time, is perfect.
And it slips through my fingers as all perfect things do.
Saint kisses my neck. Auden rises up and looks down at Saint’s body, presumably at the splatters of seed he left there. Saint can’t see it, but I can: the sheer, ferocious possession in Auden’s eyes as he looks at how he marked his enemy. The angry, longing twist to his mouth as he reaches around Saint’s hip and finds his sated cock.
I feel long fingers circling Saint, and I realize Auden is pulling him out of me, careful to keep the condom from slipping.
Auden looks down at me, eyes simmering. “That will be my cock soon,” he promises. “I’ll have earned you and this cunt will be mine to use whenever I want.”
Saint has no physical reaction to this, other than to replace Auden’s fingers with his own and sit up, but I have to wonder. Surely he wants to be used by Auden too.
Surely he wants for us to keep using each other, to keep fumbling for a way for us two submissives to give each other what we need.
But then he’s up and so is Auden, and suddenly I can’t keep my eyes open. The ritual last night and finding my mother this morning, being flogged and then fucked . . . it’s catching up with me. It’s joined forces with the narcolepsy, and now the entire world feels made of sleep, soft, fuzzy sleep, and I keep dropping off as things happen around me.
Auden moves me so I’m lying properly on the bed, and then he rolls me onto my tummy.
He and Saint rub something cool and slick all over my back and ass and thighs.
Someone cleans between my legs with a warm cloth.
Two long bodies crowd me on either side, bodies naked except for boxers, crisp, male hair rubbing against my legs. A big hand sifts slowly through my tangled hair, carefully unpicking the knots. Another hand rubs soothing circles all over my lower and mid-back—the places spared during my flogging.
“We should tell Bex we won’t be down for tea,” Auden says.
Saint mumbles an agreement, and they subside into silence. I dip into sleep for a long minute, like diving off a board and making it the whole length of the pool before I have to surface.
I surface to the fingers playing with my hair and Auden’s quiet voice. “I wish you would’ve hit me back.”
St. Sebastian’s voice is tired when he answers. “So you could feel better about it?”
“Did not hitting me back make you feel better about that summer?” retorts Auden.
There’s a moment of silence from St. Sebastian, and then he says, “You know it felt good to me.”
“You would say that,” Auden mutters.
“Because I’m a submissive?”
“Because you crave punishment, even when you don’t deserve it.”
They’re talking about it. Whatever it was, whatever the thing was that drove a wedge between them and poisoned their affection for each other. I pretend to be asleep still—not hard given that I’m still skirting the edge of unconsciousness—and listen.
“I deserve punishm
ent for some things,” Saint says tiredly. “You know that.”
“I know that if I were going to punish you, I’d have to care.” Auden’s pitched his voice in that slow, cultured drawl that infuriates me as much as it gets me wet, and it seems to have the same stirring effect on Saint, because he snaps:
“You call hitting me and then spraying cum all over my back not caring?”
“Well, you have a lovely back,” says Auden.
“Fuck you,” Saint seethes. “You can hate me, you can hit me, you can press my face into the dirt until you’re so hard it hurts, but you can’t pretend you don’t care.”
“One of these days, you’re going to regret playing rich boy, poor boy with me,” Auden says softly.
“I already regret it. I have since the graveyard.”
The hand in my hair stops moving, and I can feel the tension steal over Auden’s body. Apparently, mentioning the graveyard is out of bounds for them.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Auden says. The slow drawl is broken with anger and something else. Shame?
“What do you want to talk about then?” Saint pushes. “The fact that we’ve come twice with each other since last night? Or maybe that I’ve fucked—also twice now—the girl that’s always been meant for you?”
I try not to stiffen at that—at the reminder of Ralph’s stupid belief that I was somehow destined for Auden, and at the reminder that, for whatever reason, Saint believes it. I want to sit up and inform them both that I’ll choose whom I belong to, because while I’d love to kneel for someone, I only kneel when I want and for whom I want.
Possession? Sounds delicious. Plaything? Sign me up.
Puppet without a choice? Not so much.
But I don’t sit up and tell them that, not yet, because damn it all, I’m too curious.
“I’ve already told you how I feel about it,” says Auden.
“I know,” Saint replies. I can’t read the emotion in his voice. “It kills you.”
Kills him?
Next to me, Auden sucks in a deep breath. But he doesn’t correct Saint, doesn’t counter with any kind of alternative. Meaning it must be true, or close enough to the truth.
Kills him.
I knew there would be some jealousy swirling around—sometimes it feels like our little band is made of nothing but jealousy. My jealousy of Delphine when she was engaged to Auden, Saint’s jealousy of Ralph’s delusional belief that I belonged to Auden, Auden’s jealousy of the burgeoning affection between Saint and me. There’ve even been times when I’ve felt waves of jealousy coming off Rebecca about Delphine, and waves of jealousy coming off Becket about . . . well, about everyone. Every one of us free to fuck and fight while he’s collared by God.
But to hear the stark proof of it . . . the pain Auden feels about what Saint and I have and about what we’ve done. It hurts. It feels wrong. I can’t diagnose how it feels wrong, or why. Because I don’t feel any guilt or shame about sharing a bed with Saint—God knows, I’ve been falling for him since I’ve gotten here. Since we kissed when we were children.
But I don’t like sharing something that shuts Auden out.
Are the two of us fucking up by fucking each other?
“I’ll earn her submission,” Auden says finally. “I’ll earn having her in my keeping. That’s what matters.”
“You’re very confident.”
“Obviously.”
“What happens if she still wants to be with me instead?” St. Sebastian’s words are edged with hostility, but I hear what’s underneath them. Fear. He’s worried that I’ll leave him for Auden.
Christ. Auden is in agony that I want Saint; Saint is terrified I’ll choose Auden. And yet, when the three of us are together, all that agony and terror fuse into something holy and filthy and wonderful. How? How can the three of us trip into these moments of beauty when there’s all this jealousy and fear webbed between us?
And how could we ever repeat what we shared today when it’s obvious that the two of them still hate each other as much as they crave each other?
This question flowers slowly in my mind as Auden answers, quietly, “Then I’ll wait.”
St. Sebastian doesn’t have an answer to that. Neither would I.
Sleep creeps back in as the boys lapse into silence, and I’m almost entirely under the surface when I hear St. Sebastian ask, “What was the M for?”
The question makes no sense, and I wonder if I’m already asleep, already dreaming when Auden says back, “For mistake, St. Sebastian. For mistake.”
And to that—whatever it means—Saint doesn’t have an answer. At least not before I drop into a deep, dream-packed sleep for good.
Chapter 8
Eight Years Ago
Three restless days after seeing Auden at the Abbey, St. Sebastian kicked listlessly around his house, finally heading down to his favorite spot on the river for a swim. All the obvious haunts were frequented by a pack of boys from school he didn’t mess with—scowling, smoking lads who didn’t like him because he was smarter than them or because his skin was browner than theirs or because they knew he’d kissed Jared Kress behind the library last summer—or for all of those reasons put together. So far he’d managed to evade them by keeping to himself and staying out of their way—since they lived in the market town two miles down the road, it wasn’t always hard—but there was no guarantee his luck would hold, and he wasn’t interested in finding out what would happen if they managed to corner him somewhere even remotely isolated.
So swimming in a spot only he seemed to know about it would be.
And the fact that this spot bordered the grounds of Thornchapel was irrelevant to him; so was the fact that he had not glimpsed Auden Guest once since Sunday.
He didn’t care.
He still put on his eyeliner and his tightest T-shirts, and maybe even smudged some lip gloss he stole from his mother onto his lips, but he didn’t care if he saw Auden.
Like he’d said, the fact that they were friends for a summer meant nothing in the face of four years of mutual avoidance. Or whatever it was called when one boy pretended not to notice another boy’s throat and mouth and stupid, flopping hair whenever that boy came to visit, and the other boy honestly forgot the first one existed.
He didn’t care, he didn’t care, and he made himself say it out loud as he got to the stony, shady bank of the river and started yanking off his T-shirt. “I don’t care,” he said out loud. “I don’t care.”
“What about?” inquired a polite voice from behind him, and St. Sebastian nearly stumbled into the river.
“Fuck,” St. Sebastian managed, adrenaline pounding through him and his shirt still caught around his neck. “You scared me.”
Auden emerged from the trees, his hands in his shorts pockets and the sleeves of his chambray shirt rolled up to expose his forearms. A watch glinted on one wrist, and St. Sebastian stared at it, as if staring at the comprehensive symbol for everything that made Auden’s life different from his.
“Here,” Auden said gently, stepping up to St. Sebastian and curling those fingers over the bunched cotton around St. Sebastian’s neck. He looked into St. Sebastian’s eyes at the same moment his fingers brushed against St. Sebastian’s bare skin. “May I help?”
St. Sebastian felt very strongly that he should say no, that pride demanded he say no, that this was just as shameful as Auden kneeling over him in the graveyard, maybe worse. But with the shame and the bruised pride came a thick, urgent heat that St. Sebastian was not used to feeling around anyone else. He usually only felt it alone, with his hand on himself and his mind full of things he found in furtive, sporadic searches on the internet.
Maybe he’d hate himself for it later, but he still blurted out what he really wanted to say. “Yes.”
“Oh good,” Auden said, observing St. Sebastian’s turmoil with a gaze that was uncomfortably perceptive. Especially as it lingered over St. Sebastian’s mouth, which was still stained with gloss. “Be
a shame if you’d curtailed your plans because of me.”
St. Sebastian didn’t have all the right words for the things that turned shame and helplessness into lust, even though he’d googled many. But what he did know was that Auden pulling the T-shirt off him and then trailing a lazy stare down St. Sebastian’s bare chest and stomach—lingering on the black line of hair running from his navel to his jeans—was the single most stirring moment of St. Sebastian’s life. More than porn, more than kissing Jared, it was this, it was Auden. And if he didn’t get away from him and into the water, there’d be no hiding it. He turned away and toed off his shoes and popped open the button on his jeans.
Behind him, Auden observed, “You haven’t come to see me.”
“Been busy,” was St. Sebastian’s curt reply.
“Yes, I can see that. Swimming is important work.”
St. Sebastian was not going to be able to turn and deliver the scathing retort he’d like to about not being at the beck and call of the lord of the manor, and the reason was currently pushing at the placket of his jeans as he unzipped himself. He considered zipping back up and jumping into the water jeans and all, but there was only one thing more powerful in life than fear and that was the agony of wet denim. So St. Sebastian stripped off the jeans and risked Auden seeing the erection his shorts did nothing to hide.
The river was mostly a splashy, shallow thing, but a small burr in the bank here created a pool calm enough to wade in and deep enough to jump in, and he plunged into it as fast as he could, his stiff cock a humiliating weight as he did. But he needn’t have worried—when he turned, Auden was busy undressing himself and not looking at St. Sebastian at all.
Which was a good thing, because St. Sebastian didn’t think he could tear his eyes off him if he tried.
Auden undressed with the carelessness of someone who didn’t know what his clothes cost—his shirt was flung across a rock and the sleeve dragged in the water, his shoes were dropped onto some damp gravel along with his shorts. The watch stayed on, because of course it must be some waterproof thing meant for yachting or water-skiing or whatever it was the Guests did when they went on their sunny vacations, and his designer label black briefs stayed on too.
Feast of Sparks Page 7
