“That blush,” he says, his voice sounding like the low velvet of the god’s just now. “Tell me why it’s there.”
“I liked it,” I mumble, looking away. “I liked feeling your cum inside me.”
“Christ,” Auden mutters. “I can’t believe I can still get hard after the night we had, but you’re doing it.”
“It felt so good. Knowing you were feeling me bare and raw and then having you drip out of me after. Having Saint and Becket fuck me and feel that you were there first.”
Auden groans. “This kind of talk could kill a man.” But despite his words, he guides my hand to his linen-covered erection. “It needs,” he says, watching my face. “But gentle with it.”
I tug down his waistband and then continue stroking his bare flesh, gently like he asked.
“Does it hurt?” I ask, looking up at his tight jaw in profile.
“Yes,” he says. “But fuck, it feels so good. Don’t stop.”
When he comes, it’s only a few small pearls of seed at the tip, and he sucks in several sharp breaths as his stomach and thighs seize tight to throb his orgasm out into the air. And then he sucks in another breath as I bend down to lick him clean after the throbs slow and finally stop.
“Better?” I ask.
“Much,” he says. A crooked smile. “Although with you and Saint, I think my body will have to get used to being in demand.”
“I like the sound of that,” I say, and then I warn, “I can’t do any more this morning. I feel like I worked a double-shift at a dock brothel.”
He chuckles and hauls me into his lap, wrapping his arms around me and sliding a hand underneath my sheet. He cups a hand between my legs—not to play with me, but just to feel my heat and reassure himself that it’s his. “Will it be okay that I didn’t use a condom?” he asks. “Are you on birth control?”
I lean my head against his shoulder and just enjoy having his arms around me, his hand cupped possessively and affectionately between my legs. “I’m not. I’m sorry.”
Although, strangely, I’m not that sorry. I don’t think I’m sorry at all. I enjoyed it too much, and the idea of having a baby, of feeling Auden’s hands move possessively over my swollen belly . . . it makes my pulse speed up.
“Don’t be sorry, Poe,” says Auden. “I’m the one who did it.”
“And Saint and Becket,” I remind him—and myself. That makes a baby fantasy a little more complicated, doesn’t it?
I feel him laughing against my back. “God, we’re a mess, aren’t we?”
Amen. But a sexy mess at least.
“I’ll get the morning-after pill,” I tell him, knowing it’s the responsible thing to do. “And then I’ll find a clinic and get on the pill for real. I like the idea of no condoms.”
“It’s your decision,” he tells me, his voice turning serious. “I don’t want you to feel pressured into taking birth control. And I’ll drive with you today to get the emergency contraception.”
“Thank you,” I say. And I mean it, although I am getting dozy again. He just feels too good holding me like this, so strong and warm and big. I turn so I can nuzzle against his chest and close my eyes.
“Poe,” I hear him say. “Do you think the priest and the priestess would forgive their wild god anything?”
“In the real world, no,” I say without opening my eyes. “But in Thornchapel world, who knows? I think I’d let you do anything.”
“And Saint?” Auden asks in a quiet voice. I can feel his heart beating anxious and fast under my ear. “You think he’d forgive me anything?”
“He already has,” I say, and that must content Auden some, because he lets me fall asleep in his arms and he says no more.
Chapter 31
Eight Years Ago
Three days later, the pain in St. Sebastian’s lip was gone and his skin was nearly free of Auden’s art.
He was miserable.
He was also packing for Texas. Turns out his mother’s answer to keeping fear from infecting his life was to send him to Dallas to finish school. Back to where it was hot and sunny and crowded, to where he’d have an army of cousins to defend him anywhere he went.
He hated her for sending him away from Auden.
He loved her for giving him an excuse to run away.
She left that evening to go to her monthly Thorncombe Historical Society meeting—the only group of people who seemed to like the American journalist who somehow washed up onto their shores and had a child with Augie’s brother—and St. Sebastian only debated for a few minutes about what he needed to do next. With a muttered curse and a hard bite to his lower lip, he snatched his wallet off his dresser and ran down to the bus stop . . . after leaving a short note. He was sullen about the move and had been punishing his mother with a sulky, snappish reclusiveness he knew deep down she didn’t deserve, but he also knew if she came back and he wasn’t home, she would be terrified, and she really didn’t deserve that. And he still didn’t have a phone . . .
Note left, bus hopped, St. Sebastian found himself on a tired street in Newton Abbot, home to a cheap tattoo shop where some of his schoolmates came to get piercings.
Twenty-five pounds and a hot lance of pain later, he’d made Auden’s bite on his lip permanent.
The whole way home, he couldn’t resist running his tongue over the barbell now curving through his lip, right in the exact spot where Auden had bitten him. Each stinging thrum as he touched it reminded him of the boy he was leaving behind; each sizzle of pain eased some of the deeper, rawer ache at knowing he would probably—oh, who was he kidding, it was a certainty—never see Auden again. He’d never find out what the M on his chest had meant, he’d never feel Auden’s belt or the wedge of his hips between his legs. He’d never feel Auden’s chest on his back or the searing fullness of his cock.
He’d never get to see Auden blinking awake on the pillow next to him, sunlight catching in his silvering hair as he reached for St. Sebastian to pull him close.
All he’d ever have were memories and dead hopes anchored in his flesh.
Jennifer Martinez didn’t say anything when she saw it later that night, but St. Sebastian knew she knew what it meant. And after that, it seemed like she couldn’t pack him off to Texas fast enough.
“Why can’t you move back with me?” he asked on the train to London. “You do all your work from home, it’s not like you need to show up in an office.”
She tapped her fingers on the table between them. They had a semblance of privacy—the London-bound car on a late weekday evening was sparsely populated—but he could tell she didn’t want to talk about it.
But he still resented her a little from prying him from his life here, even if he didn’t always love it, because it was prying him away from Thornchapel and Auden, and so he pushed her on it, because he wanted to push her on anything. “Mum,” he said, knowing she hated it when he called her that instead of Mamá. “Seriously. Why do we even still live here now that Dad’s gone? His parents are dead, and Uncle Augie’s nice, but it’s not like that’s a reason to stay when the rest of your family is back in Texas.”
She looked out the window, her expression unhappy. “This is where the man I love is, St. Sebastian.”
“He’s dead,” St. Sebastian said harshly. “What difference does it make if you drive past his gravestone on the way to the grocery store or not?”
“I won’t leave the man I love,” she whispered, still not looking at him. “I can’t.”
“Even if it means you’re miserable?” he demanded. “Even if it means we have to be apart?”
She leaned her head back against the seat, and St. Sebastian realized—in the academic way of adolescents learning the world—that she was not as old as she seemed in his mind. She wasn’t forty yet, and there were no lines on her face, there was no white in her hair. He realized that she had so much life left to live, and up until this point, she’d spent almost all that life on him. Her free time, her care, her worry, her laughter
, and her cooking—it all went into him and she never saved any for herself.
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” he asked, lifting his chin to disguise how quickly his anger had turned to hurt. “Is that what this is about? I’m too much trouble?”
She looked at him then, the way she looked at him when he made noise in church, and he sat up straighter and dropped his eyes out of a habituated response to that particular frown. “I love you beyond my life,” she said, her voice suffused with pain and rebuke, “and it’s killing me to send you home. Do you understand? Do you know how much I want to see you finish growing up? Do you know how much it hurts to know that what is best for me is not what’s best for you? Do you?”
Mutely, he shook his head. He didn’t like hearing the pain in her voice, or the scolding. He’d pushed her and now she’d given way, and he found he wished he hadn’t pushed her at all.
“I have to stay,” she said quietly, after a long minute. “I’m tied to Thorncombe whether I like it or not.”
“Because of Dad.”
She sighed, and he looked up in time to see her pass a shaking hand over her face. “I won’t leave the man I love,” she said simply.
And then she said nothing else, and their conversation was over.
When St. Sebastian landed at DFW and walked out of the gate into a milling crowd of smiling, hugging, cheek-kissing Martinezes, he’d already left everything of himself behind, scattering it like ash over the ocean.
On the flight over, he’d put in his earbuds, opened the window shade, and over the darkened water, he’d dropped every part of himself into the waves. He cradled the St. Sebastian who stole a wedding kiss for himself in his palms and then let that boy slip through his fingers down to the ocean floor.
The St. Sebastian who fell in love, the St. Sebastian who’d dared to imagine a future of filth and fun with an arrogant, gossipy princeling who loved to draw and bite. The St. Sebastian who’d dared to take something he thought was for the taking. His laughter, his longings, his undeniable hunger for trouble—
Gone. All of it dropped down, down, down, to be crushed by the pressure and boiled by furious vents in the deep.
These alone he kept: the silver stud in his lip to remind him what he’d lost, and his name.
Well, half of his name at least, because he didn’t deserve to be called after a saint who’d chased death twice, he didn’t deserve a martyr’s halo. He didn’t deserve the name of someone protected by death, someone who welcomed it, who danced with it. Despite his mother’s hope, he was no living example that death intertwined seamlessly with life.
Six cowardly, death-fearing steps had robbed him of all of that.
And so when he was pulled into a huge hug of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, and he heard his name coming at him from every angle, he knew what he had to do, he knew the last part of himself to fling away and never look at again.
“It’s Saint now,” he told them. “Just Saint. Nothing else.”
Chapter 32
St. Sebastian
Present Day
* * *
For the first morning in years of mornings, I wake up with hope.
Auden’s bed is soft and pillowy and big, and Sir James Frazer is stretched out next to me, snoring gently and twitching his massive paws. Outside is a sky the color of the Virgin’s robe, with the distant swell of greenish moor reaching up to kiss its hem, and everything seems so warm and happy that even I am charmed by it.
I’m even more, ah, charmed, when I stretch and feel aches everywhere aches can live. My muscles, my hands, my knees. My cock, sore from orgasming over and over, my arse for even more obvious reasons. The bite mark on my chest has darkened to a purple so royal and beautiful that I reach for my phone and take a picture. I’m going to take a picture of it every day so that I can know it in every color, every shade, and then when it fades, I’ll make Auden give me a new one.
It’s thinking of Auden, and then of Poe, that finally makes me sit up. Sir James gives a whine at this, not ready for naptime to be over, until I scratch his ears and he settles his head back onto the blankets with a contented sigh.
“Sorry,” I tell him. “But I need to go to my place and get some of my things, and I can’t do that without breaking the snuggle trust.”
I’m going to get my things so I can move in.
Holy shit.
I’m going to live at Thornchapel.
For my entire life, Thornchapel had been the unattainable, the perfect representation of everything I didn’t have and everything I’d never be. Even after the others came to stay and I was slowly invited into their ranks, I still felt apart from them, from this place. It never even occurred to me to ask to move in, or even stay here on anything more than an occasional basis, because Thornchapel was like Poe or Auden—so far above me that hoping for it was a kind of insanity.
Except I do have Poe. I do have Auden.
And now I have Thornchapel too.
I’m going to live here with the people I love, I tell myself in wondering awe. I’ll get to spend my days following Poe around and watching her smile. I’ll get bitten and bruised by Auden whenever I want. The three of us will be together in bed, and there will no longer be anything between us. No more secrets, no lies, no conditions. Just two subs and their flop-haired Dom. Just a priest and a priestess and a king.
Happily ever after.
Pressing on the bruise over my heart, I allow myself a few more minutes of near-giddy hope and anticipation, and then I make myself climb out of bed. Auden and Poe left for Exeter this morning to get Poe emergency contraception, and I want to have my essentials packed and back here when they return, so that we can—
Well, I don’t know, actually. Start, I guess. So that we can start this new, perfect life right away.
I wave away thoughts of the practical (should I actually move out of the semi or should I hold onto it and use it as a sort of storage unit? Also how ridiculous my old car is going to look parked in the gleaming new garage Auden’s built?) and get dressed. I’d woken to Auden moving quietly through the ruins, having already cleaned up after the entire group and ferried most of the supplies and rubbish back to the house, and then we’d all gathered as many blankets and pillows as we could and stumbled blearily home. I was too tired and sore to even contemplate anything other than sleep, and so I toppled right into Auden’s bed the minute I walked inside. The last thing I remember is Auden and Poe brushing my temple with goodbye kisses, and Poe joking that she was going to go find an antidote for my magic Beltane jizz.
I was too sleepy to laugh then, but I laugh a little now as I pull on my shirt and also flush a little, remembering how tight and slick her body had been for me. How fucking with a bare cock felt like dirty, potent magic, and how shockingly and crudely satisfying it felt to leave my orgasm inside her.
My shaft pulses as I remember, thickening and then sending a wave of soreness ricocheting through my belly. I wince as I adjust myself.
It’s a good thing Beltane’s only once a year. I don’t know if I’d be able to survive this much fucking otherwise.
When I’m ready to go, I get my phone and take a look around Auden’s room—the room that will soon be mine too.
The wide wood planks gleam with newness, and the pale walls are lined with bookshelves. Hooks and ropes stud the beams, and the bed—a custom thing that’s wide enough for three people and a dog to sleep comfortably—is made with discreet hooks and bolts and fastenings. Underneath it are two large trunks, full of the tools of Auden’s new trade, and at the end of the bedroom is the door to the large ensuite, which has a shower built with convenient handles and footrests.
Ah, to be a kinky architect.
It’s Auden’s desk, though, that tugs at my heart the most. He does most of his work in the dedicated office one floor up, and so I think this desk is supposed to be a place for not-work. For inspiration. But there’s only blank paper and neat cups of ink pens on it now, and I wonder
how long it’s been since he’s drawn. Truly drawn, not for work, not plans, but drawings for himself, drawings of people or places or feelings.
It makes me sad that he hasn’t been, a sadness that feels too profound for something so small, but maybe it’s not a small thing at all. It feels big. It feels big enough to fill my chest and push into my throat and burn at my eyes.
I think that’s why I do what I do next, although I can’t be sure, because the simple curl of curiosity is there too. I walk over to the desk and thumb through the blank paper, as if I expect Auden to have hidden his art inside the stack like camouflage. I open the wide drawer under the top, having the sudden and heartbreaking image of him drawing something and then shoving it away in a fit of pique.
The drawer is empty, save for a leather journal, which I pull out and open before I can talk myself out of it.
My breath stutters when it opens to a picture of me. Adolescent me with eyeliner and a scowl and hunched shoulders. When I turn the page, it’s a teenage me again, standing in front of a priest with my lips parted, waiting for communion. On the page after that is a sketch of Proserpina, less precise and less detailed than the others, as if he were drawing her from memory and imagining what she’d look like at fourteen or fifteen. Which he would have been.
This journal must have been his when he was a teenager, his version of a diary, and my chest tightens even more as I think about him saving this. Keeping it. Even when he thought he’d never see Poe again. Even when he hated me. He kept these.
I close the journal, desperate to see more and also knowing that I’m not allowed, that this is a privilege I haven’t earned, and I need to put it back where I found it. But something falls out of the book as I close it, and I bend down to pick it up.
It’s a letter of several pages, folded in half, and I’m feeling guilty enough for having snooped through the journal itself that I’m not inclined to snoop further—until, that is I see my name on one of the pages that slipped free.
Feast of Sparks Page 36
