Auden nods, and for the first time tonight, he looks concerned. Because there is no mistaking the look on Becket’s face as he strolls next to Poe, and if we can see it, other people can too.
I scan the side of the courtyard we’re standing in, making sure I don’t see any cell phones out and taking pictures, making sure I don’t see any of the worst gossips circulating through the tuxedoed horde, and that’s when I see him from across the fountain, looking lost and angry—and rather romantic standing alone like that, with his hands in his tuxedo pockets and with the jets of the fountain walling him off from the rest of us, like he’s been imprisoned behind towers of warped glass.
His hair falls dramatically into his face, and his lip piercing glints in the fading twilight of the city. Sigh. I wish he’d let me style him too.
“I thought Saint wasn’t supposed to come tonight,” I say.
Chapter Fourteen
St. Sebastian
This is a mistake.
This is a mistake and I knew it was mistake and I did it anyway.
I meant what I told Poe. I had no plans to come to this gala. I had no plans to see Auden at all, maybe ever again, because it just hurts. Too fucking much. I can barely even think of him, I can barely stand living in Thorncombe and watching the trees stir while he’s gone. Watching them preen and flutter happily when he’s back home again.
For the last two weeks, I’d avoided Thornchapel when he was there, I’d dodged his texts and his calls. When he didn’t show up at the library or at one of Augie’s worksites, I was foolish enough to feel some kind of relief. Not because I didn’t ache for him, but because I ached for him too much. Too much to pretend I was okay in front of other people.
But he didn’t come, and I thought—well, I thought maybe he was finally giving me what I asked for. Maybe he was giving me space. Maybe he’d decided I was right, maybe he’d finally concluded that we could never be together, and he was already moving on with Poe.
I tried not to hate that possibility too much, I really did.
The evenings were longer, stretching toward summer, and so many nights I found myself up on Reavy Hill again, staring down into the forest and tracing the outlines of Thornchapel with my eyes. I roamed through the woods and spent hours in the chapel, plucking wildflowers out by their stems and tracing thorns with the pad of my thumb.
I stared at the altar, at the perpetually damp stone, set among bluebells and soft shoots of new grass. It had been a grave after all; the new grass was a testament to what had been discovered and dug up, and anyway, there was just something about it. Something that wasn’t quite alive, but wasn’t quite unalive either.
Convivificat.
I would stare at the altar and try not to think of Auden. I would think of Poe’s door, of her mother’s foreword about human sacrifice. I would think about Lammas, I would think about Samhain coming after it. I would think about the summer solstice and whether I should go with Poe to her mother’s funeral, even though money was tight and Auden would be there. I would think about Ralph and my mother, and wonder what they did in these woods.
I would wonder if the trees would reach for me when I left too.
So the days passed, lonely and ephemeral save for the time I spent with Poe, and I almost believed it was over. Auden had stopped texting and calling, and he hadn’t come after me, and this was the end. This was actually the end of us, and it turns out that it was no one’s fault but a dead man’s.
I tried not to feel disappointed. I tried not to imagine Auden striding after me in the thorn chapel and pushing me into the spring grass as he crawled over me. I tried not to imagine him pinning me to a wall with a forearm on my neck as he unfastened his pants and stepped between my legs. I tried not to imagine his hand over my mouth so that I couldn’t say the words that would make him go.
This was sickness and I was sick with it. I wanted him to burn our boundaries to ashes and rule over me anyway. I wanted him to take me and make me. I wanted Beltane, I wanted sides heaving and skin slick as I ran from the god in the forest, I wanted the same thing Auden told me he wanted the day after—forever.
I wanted him.
But then I’d think of my mother or Ana María or our friends. I’d think of the inside of St. Petroc’s Church—hushed and holy—and I’d think about what I believed. What I had to believe. Being sick doesn’t excuse shit.
And then the tuxedo came.
It came like a dress in some kind of romcom, zipped into a garment bag and hung in my bedroom, a box of gleaming dress shoes underneath it. For a moment after I walked in, damp and smelling of flowers from the chapel, I couldn’t actually discern what it was. I’d never worn anything that needed a garment bag, I’d never even worn clothes that needed dry cleaning. But when I pulled the zipper down to expose a Hugo Boss tuxedo, with a gala invitation pinned neatly to its collar, I felt a corrupt thrill run through me.
This was from Auden.
I couldn’t help it, I tried the tuxedo on. And the shoes. The fit was faultless—the hem of the pants shivering on the laces of my shoe, the shoulders perfectly trim, the sleeves tailored right to the bones of my wrists.
I normally hated anything more formal than a T-shirt and jeans, I really did. But this . . .
I felt like Cinderella. Like bi boy Cinderella, and what if I went to the ball? Just to see him, nothing more? What could it hurt?
If I was Cinderella, then Becket was my fairy godmother. After he dropped off Sir James at Abby’s house, he helped me arrange last minute transportation, since there wasn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell that I was driving in London, and he offered his hotel room for the night—both to get ready in and to crash in after the gala. He helped me dress, he fastened my cufflinks for me, he loaned me a pair of dress socks when he saw the holey boot socks I’d brought to wear with the dress shoes.
And now here I am. Regretting everything.
Becket’s gone ahead to find our friends, but I’ve hung back, feeling useless and stupid among all these elegant people. Men saunter by, clearly at ease in their ten-thousand-pound suits, and women mince next to them in spindly heels, moving with the practiced concentration of ballet dancers. Words of money drift through the air like cigar smoke. Horse breeding, vacations in the Seychelles, real-estate investment in Croatia. Did we see what the Japanese stock market did this morning? Have we seen the latest symphony performance—Bartók again, how quotidian? Have we heard what happened to the Foxhill-Spencer’s au pair—scandalous really, but what else does one expect from an au pair?
I hate it, and I hate this courtyard, which is a coffin of stone, with the stony twilight sky as its lid, and I hate this city, and I hate these people.
I hate myself most of all for coming.
I turn, thinking I’ll leave, I’ll stop playing Cinderella and I’ll go back to Becket’s hotel, but then that’s when I see him through the watery bars of the fountain. I see him and then I falter.
He looks like a prince.
I’m used to him looking like the lord of the manor. I’m even familiar with him as my wild god—a being of hungry eyes and even hungrier appetites—running down prey through the trees to slake his needs.
But this—this right here is almost too much. Him in the immaculate tuxedo, him tall and lean and narrow-hipped, him with a watch glinting on his wrist and a glass of clear liquor in his hand. Everything about him so clearly and painfully belongs—everything about him is so clearly and painfully Guest.
He was born to inherit this world, he doesn’t need our forest games and our lanterns in the night. Thornchapel is his and this world of money and boredom is also his, and everything that he could ever want is already his, will be his the moment he bothers to reach for it.
He’s a prince and I’m a pauper. Rich boy, poor boy. And though we issued from the same bitter loins, though we are joined by our very essence, it is him who has the world at his fingertips and it is me who has a designated hook in the staff room of the local library.
I’m not jealous, but I hate it. I hate that at every turn, fate seems to be saying he is not for you. I hate that my only inheritance has been sacrifice. I didn’t gain a house or the land I love. I didn’t gain money or a new name.
I simply lost him.
I still mean to leave, and I’m trying to tear my eyes away when he sees me. I know Becket didn’t tell him I was coming, so I expect his surprise. I expect the part of his lips and the blink of his eyes. But what I don’t expect—what I have no defense ready for—is his pleasure. The parted lips slowly easing into a satisfied smile, and the lifting of a single brow. He puts a hand in his pocket as he lifts his glass to me and then puts it to his lips and takes a drink. Like fucking Gatsby.
The sight of Auden pleased, the sight of him in victory, it’s too much, it’s scotch straight from the bottle, it’s holding a sparkler and letting the sparks shower bright and fizzling against your hand. The very reality of him chokes me, burns me, all of it in the worst way, because it’s the way that makes me beg for more, God please, more.
I spin away, not sure if I’m going to leave, not sure if I can stay, strung as always between the ache of being near Auden and the ache of being far away, and it’s as I’m spinning that I run right into Poe.
“Hi,” she says, smiling up at me. She takes me by the lapels and gives me a soft kiss.
She smells like the flowers in the thorn chapel right now, and this dress—this fucking dress. Her breasts are bound high and tight by the strapless bodice, pushing them up and making delicious swells and curves that I want to trace with my tongue. Her nipped-in waist and healthy hips are hugged by the silk too, presenting all the places she’s the most grabbable, the places where someone could seize her and haul her off to a corner to be enjoyed.
“You look incredible,” I breathe. Like a princess, I almost say, but then I don’t, because it’s too close to Auden being a prince, too close to the ways they fit together so easily and he and I never will.
She makes a purring noise, sliding her hands down my tuxedo-clad torso. “You’re not looking so bad yourself,” she says, and I know it’s no accident that her fingertips graze my semi as she drops them from my stomach.
“Poe,” I groan quietly.
“We could find a nice, dark coat room,” she whispers. “Just for a few minutes.”
My cock kicks in my pants at the thought. I pull my lip piercing into my mouth. “Yeah?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says, eyes sparkling. She takes my hand, presumably to lead me off somewhere and have her way with me, but Delphine is approaching us with two older people trailing behind, a genuine smile on her face and her mouth already open to call out to us.
Next to me, Poe heaves an unhappy sigh. I try to subtly adjust my jacket to keep my cock hidden. But we both stay put and wait for Delphine to reach us.
“Just who I was looking for!” she exclaims. “Proserpina Markham, St. Sebastian Martinez, this is my mother and father. Freddie and Daisy Dansey.”
The two adults next to her have already stepped forward, both of them tall and flaxen-haired, both of them very attractive. They have red-hued cheeks and lines around their eyes, like they spend their days drinking and laughing in the sun. They look wealthy, they look like the kind of wealth that predates William Pitt the Elder, but I immediately like them anyway. When Freddie shakes my hand, he does it warmly, and when Daisy presses her fingers in mine, it’s impossible not to return her welcoming grin.
I’ve often found Delphine’s boozy chirpiness rather endearing, if alien to me, but it’s even more endearing now, seeing that she’s come by it honestly. And when Freddie gives her a quick, affectionate kiss on the temple, I see that she’s always known love, always always, and it reminds me that I have too. I may never know how to feel about Ralph Guest, but I will always have known the fierce, protective love of Jennifer Martinez.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” Daisy says. “We just love meeting Delphine’s friends, and now our Pickles is dating Samson Quartey’s daughter! Just think, you two have grown up together and now you’re in love . . .”
Delphine clears her throat a little and takes a drink. “In love is a bit premature, Mummy, honestly. We only just started dating.”
“Nonsense, I saw how you were looking at her. Wedding bells any day, I say.”
“Mummy,” Delphine groans. “I just ended an engagement. I can hardly jump into another one right now. What would Nanna think?”
While they spar, Freddie smiles at me, tilting his body in that unmistakable way that says I’m about to initiate small talk.
I brace.
“I knew your mother,” he says so only I can hear. “She was a truly wonderful person. I was—well, I was very sad to hear of her passing.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling like he’s just given me a kindness and a laceration at the same time. “Um, thank you. And yes, it was hard. It’s still hard.”
He studies me a moment. “Delphine still spends a lot of time at Thornchapel. All of you do.”
“I mean, I live there—well, not there there, but in Thorncombe. It’s where my mother lived too.”
Freddie nods, slowly. He has a face so symmetrical and pleasing that it’s hard to imagine anything bad ever happening to him. And yet there’s a haunted look in his eyes when he says, “Daisy and I know Thornchapel well. We spent a summer there once, when Delphine was young.”
I know. I remember you there.
But I don’t speak, because I don’t know if he knows that I remember. I don’t know if he remembers that I was there at all. But I do say, “How did you know my mother? If you don’t mind me asking?”
Freddie looks down at his drink. And then he looks up at me. He seems to be searching my face for something, some answer to a question I can’t even begin to guess at. “I grew up with Ralph and Ingram Hess, you see. School chums and all that. When he decided—I don’t know how much you know about what Ralph wanted to do at Thornchapel—but when he decided to start, I was there. Ingram Hess too. And your mother.”
Poe is next to me, Delphine and Daisy are next to her, they are teasing and laughing and they might as well be a million miles away. “Mr. Dansey . . .”
His voice is pained. “Freddie. Please. Please don’t—” He stops, like he’s not sure what he wants to say next. “I—I knew your mother well, St. Sebastian. I don’t want there to be distance between us.”
I can guess what he means when he says he knew my mother well, and now I wish I had my own drink, Jesus Christ.
“The festivals,” I say, some morbid part of me needing to know. “You celebrated the feasts in the woods.”
He nods slowly. “Yes.”
“With my mother.”
I wonder what he is thinking of now. Of the past? And if so, which one? The one with my mother? Or the more recent past, with Poe’s parents? Is he thinking of the present? Of his own daughter in the thorn chapel, chasing after the same things that made their generation so broken, so sour, so dead?
“You understand then,” he says, his words slower than his nod. “You understand what the feasts were.”
“Yes.”
At that, his eyes do flick over to Delphine, and I see him wrestle with something. Protectiveness, probably, because I see the concern in his forehead and around his mouth as he looks back at me. “I’m not sure how much is my place to say, St. Sebastian. I’m not sure how much your mother told you.”
“Nothing,” I say, surprised at how tired I sound. “She told me nothing. But I learned—later—she was the May Queen that year. The year she became pregnant with me.”
Again, Freddie is searching my eyes, my face, hunting for something. How much I actually know.
“And I know Ralph is my real father,” I say, giving him the answer he’s looking for. I’m not sure why I tell him this—we’ve only just met and it’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me, which is honestly a pretty high bar, and it’s also intensely private. Private en
ough that speaking it out loud gives me a near-illicit thrill, like I’ve just touched a painting in a museum. Like I’ve just lit up a joint. I say it again, almost buzzed off the sheer impropriety of it. “I’m Ralph Guest’s son.”
Freddie chews on his lip, and this time his eyes go to his wife, who is still chatting animatedly with Poe. “I know Ralph wouldn’t have wanted—”
But whatever he’s about to say, whether comforting or damning, I don’t know, because we’re joined then by Becket, Rebecca, and Auden.
Auden shakes Freddie’s hand and kisses Daisy’s cheek—clearly the broken engagement hadn’t fractured the warm sentiment between Auden and his ex-fiancée’s parents. Becket does the same, reminding me that Freddie had grown up with his father, and then Rebecca is clucked over by Daisy as if Daisy already considers her a daughter-in-law. Rebecca tolerates it well, although I catch her exchanging more than one wry glance with Auden, as if Auden had already warned her what it was like to be a new member of the Dansey family.
But it is Auden my eyes go to, and it’s Auden I hear, Auden who is at the center of everything just by existing. He laughs and takes sips of gin, and he’s all easy charm like he doesn’t need to bruise and scratch when he’s behind closed doors, like he doesn’t hold my throat in his grip, even when he’s miles and miles away.
He meets my stare, his teeth digging into his lower lip, and I know what he’s thinking, I know he’s remembering biting my lower lip, I know he’s thinking of my piercing and what it means, what it’s meant from the beginning. I know that he wants to bite me right now, and I can’t tell him I don’t want it. I can’t even tell him I didn’t come here exactly for that purpose, because I don’t know why I came at all.
And it’s so hard to remember all my good intentions, my lectures to myself about my mother, about sin, when I’m looking at his cruel, beautiful mouth.
“Excuse me,” I say abruptly to everyone. “I need to—” The words and their accompanying gesture is pointless because I’m already walking away, I’m already striding with long, hurried strides to the other side of the fountain, to the escape promised by an open doorway on the far end of the courtyard. Some kind of art exhibition, I think. I’ll go in there and catch my breath and figure out how to leave, because there’s no way I can stay. There’s no fucking way. Not when just looking at Auden’s mouth makes me want to weep.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 19
