“I love you,” he tells me, and I don’t know if I can survive it, this feeling like I’m being scythed down just like the barley and the wheat around us. I don’t know if I can survive him.
“Say it back to me,” he begs. His voice has lost some of that coolness now, some of its indolence. He sounds a little breathless, a little rough. “Tell me what I want to hear.”
Still spoiled though. Rich boy.
“You already know what you want to hear,” I say, eyes still closed. “You already know how I feel.”
His hand finds my cock and he gives it quick, vicious strokes, pulling me up to my toes every time he squeezes his fist to the tip, and following my hips with his own every time I rise up so there’s no escaping his fuck.
“You’re not playing fair,” I complain in between grunts. My lower belly is poured full of heat and my erection is so swollen that I feel like I might split apart. Every single muscle is wire-tight and thrumming. “You’re resorting to tricks.”
“I never promised fair. I never promised that I wouldn’t use tricks.”
“You said there would be rules.”
“For you and my little bride,” he murmurs wickedly. His hand is too much. His thick cock wedged against my prostate is too much. “Not for me. I am the king and you are mine to keep and to fuck. I make the rules. And the rule right now is you have to tell me you love me.”
I should have known. I should have known he wouldn’t leave here without taking everything. I should have known he wouldn’t let me hide from this.
“Fine, I love you. Are you happy?”
He reaches for something else in his pocket, and once he has it, he kisses my neck again. “I’ll be happy when you’re in my house. In my bed. In my arms. I’ll be happy when I can fuck you whenever I need. I’ll be happy when I can feel that piercing against my cock whenever I want. I’ll be happy when you, Poe, and I are truly, actually together, the way we all know we’re supposed to be.”
“We’re not supposed to be anything, we’re—”
“I know what we are,” he interrupts. “It doesn’t change that you’re mine. It doesn’t change that you want to be mine.”
“And you?”
“Well, I’m yours, of course,” he says simply. “Yours to eat and ruin too.”
It’s too much. The hand, the fuck, his words. His thorny, cannibal heart.
I grunt as the pleasure finally takes me, as it snaps through me hard and cutting and keen, and as the first pulse surges up, Auden’s hand is replaced with a handkerchief. He catches my climax with the soft, expensive-feeling cotton, standing patiently as I spurt out every last drop.
The orgasm goes on a shamefully long time, pulse after pulse, so thick and forceful that he can see how much I loved this, how much my depraved body hungered to be used in just this way and only by him. It would knock my feet out from underneath me, it would bend me double, it would have me boneless and staggering to the floor, but he holds me up as he finishes tenderly milking my orgasm, he keeps me upright not only so I can empty into his handkerchief, but so he can stay inside me as I do. So he can feel every seize and shiver and clench of my groin as I release.
“Good boy,” he whispers, giving me an approving nip on the neck as I slowly stutter to a finish. “I didn’t want you to dirty your tux with what you let me do to you.”
The handkerchief disappears, and then his bare hand returns to pet me. Fondly. Appreciatively. “Now hold still, I need to come.”
His cock is wedged tightly inside of me, he’s jammed in so thick and so deep, and every rock of his hips has him shivering, murmuring to himself, squeezing my hips and cock and biceps at turns, as if to reassure himself that I’m really here, he’s really fucking me, he’s really using his stubborn boy the way he needs. And here I am doing the same thing—trying to memorize the feel of his lips on my neck, the fit of his erection inside me, the low rumble of his pleasure-words under his breath as he eases his needs with my body. I want to stuff myself so full of him that even when we’re apart, I can feel his hands and hear his voice. His possession most of all—that is what I must never forget. I must never forget how it feels to be whole.
He comes with a ragged sigh, one hand on my throat and the other wrapped tight around my waist. I feel him inside me, I feel each and every throb, and without a condom, I can feel the slick heat of his release too. His orgasm feels as good as mine, which sounds like it shouldn’t be true, and yet it is, it is. Feeling his satisfaction, his jerking, pulsing animal pleasure—it eases something inside me. It scratches some itch I can’t describe—service, submission, love, something—and it makes me feel like I’ve just swallowed the sun.
Plus it makes me hard all over again.
“One more,” he says gently. “I can’t send you out there like this.” I feel him reach for something else in his pocket, and after the tearing of a wrapper, I look down to see him rolling a condom on over my renewed erection. He’s like Mary Poppins with that inner tuxedo pocket.
“I’m afraid you’ve already defiled my handkerchief,” he explains as he rolls the latex all the way to my base. “And walking around with cum on your tux is rather infra dig.”
I think I laugh a little, a soft puff of air that has my body clenching around his erection, which hasn’t softened one bit since he came.
He takes in a sharp breath at the abrupt squeeze of my channel around him, and then he’s moving fast, hard, rough, his earlier release easing his way and making his fuck slick and wet. And he matches his own pleasure with mine; he fists my latex-covered cock and jerks me like I jerk myself at home. Brutally. Impatiently. With a ruthless pace and a cruel grip.
I don’t stand a chance.
The merciless ride against my prostate, the elegant, watch-wearing fist I’m fucking, the vulgar selfishness of the man behind me using me like this—there’s no way I ever stood a chance. My second orgasm rips through my guts and tears through my groin, and I fill the condom with long, heavy jolts; I empty all of myself into that primal, aching moment, my heart pushing up to the vaulted ceiling of barley and wheat and floating there as Auden finishes inside me. He chases every drop, every swell and pulse, he denies himself nothing.
He would deny me nothing too, I think. If I let him have me.
I can’t let him have me.
My heart tumbles to my feet, flopping and shivering wetly around the spiky awns and kernels and stalks already drifting dry and dead on the floor. My eyelids are burning even as he carefully slides the condom off and puts it somewhere, even as he extricates himself and uses something—his handkerchief again?—to catch any spend as he pulls free.
It wasn’t as if I’d forgotten all my protests, all my reasons and fears, when I let Auden fuck me. It was only that I wanted Auden more than I wanted to be good. And now that we’re no longer joined, now that we’ll have to step back and fix our clothes and leave this chambered tomb of barley, the horror of what I’ve done—knowingly this time, knowing who he is to me—crowds up in my throat and chokes me.
Is it always going to be like this? Me pushing him away, hiding, denying, until our control snaps and we fall on each other like hungry animals? Is it entirely hopeless? Should I stop resisting? I can’t live without his love, and yet succumbing to it will always be wrong, our family and friends would think it wrong, everyone would think it wrong.
Our desires are so forbidden, they shouldn’t even be shaped in words. In thoughts. They shouldn’t even be acknowledged, except to a priest under the cover of confession.
Auden has tidied up behind me, and I know I should pull my tux together too. I just can’t, I can’t move from right here with my forehead and hands braced against the wall. If I move, if I turn and I see him, I will start to cry. And I may not have much to my name, but I’d still like to have some dignity. Some pride.
But again, I underestimate Auden’s attunement to me, his acute perception. His hands on my body as he puts my tuxedo to rights are solicitous and calming, like
he’s coaxing a skittish horse into staying still for him. When he’s done dressing me, he gently turns me around.
“Oh, St. Sebastian,” he says, because I’m already crying, dammit, the shame and the misery of it all is too much. I think I could cry for the rest of my life and still have sorrow yet to spill.
“Come here,” he whispers, and I come, stepping into his arms and clutching his jacket like a child. The minute his arms slide around me—strong and certain and a little bit acquisitive—I cry even harder, as if his comfort doesn’t shore up my walls but rather weakens them, and within seconds, I can barely breathe, I can barely think, all I can do is hold on to him as I cry and cry and cry, as I grieve every single second of a life which seems determined to rip the people I love away from me.
We end up on the ground, I don’t know how. I only know that one moment we’re standing, and then the next I’m in his arms on the floor, sitting between his sturdy thighs and nestled into his chest. He holds me tight, he drops kiss after kiss onto my hair, he croons things so low that I can’t hear them, I can only feel them as they rumble through his chest and throat.
I can’t remember someone ever holding me like this, ever, not even my mother or Richard Davey, even though they must have when I was little. But having Auden hold me and the weight of my unhappiness so easily, like I and it weigh nothing, having him cradling me and tending me like there’s nothing in the world he’d rather do—it’s a gift I cling to greedily. This one thing can be mine right now, this one solace.
I’m not sure how long I cry. Long enough that the breast of his tuxedo jacket is wet and one of my feet has gone numb from having my legs draped over his thigh. Long enough that I feel disoriented when I stop, dizzy from all those juddering, seizing inhales and wild, uncontrolled exhales. But it hasn’t been long enough that Auden’s arms have grown tired. I’m still held as tightly to his chest as ever.
Silence creeps back into our little tomb of grain, filling up the space where my sobs had been. There is only our breathing and Auden’s heart beating steadily against my ear and my occasional sniffles. I feel very small like this, even though I’m not small, even though my legs are as long and muscular as his, even though I fill his arms.
I feel a strange, sad peace. A numb kind of safety.
I wish we never had to leave this room.
I reach up and stroke the line of Auden’s lapel. “Did you get me a tuxedo just so you could fuck me in it at a swanky party?”
“Well, obviously,” he says wryly. Tenderly.
I look up at him. And then I notice his bowtie is gone. “What happened here?” I ask, lifting my hand to stroke the exposed hollow of his throat.
“As I’ve mentioned, you’ve already made use of my handkerchief, and I didn’t want to send you back into the fray still dripping with me.” The corner of his mouth tugs up. “Or rather, I wanted to, but I wasn’t going to.”
“So you used your bowtie?” I ask incredulously. “What happened to not being infrared or whatever?”
“Infra dig,” he corrects, “and in my case, everyone will assume my sartorial transgressions are for the sake of being roguishly fashionable.”
He’s probably not wrong. With his collar open and his throat naked, he’s still the cool, arrogant prince from earlier. Just more rakish now, a little more dangerous. A little more like the wild god he is inside.
“Are you saying I don’t look roguishly fashionable when I transgress?” I ask.
Auden gives a soft laugh and tugs on my lip piercing. “You always look perfect to me, and that’s what matters. Anyway, I think we can both agree there’s a material difference between losing a bowtie and having semen spattered on your trousers.”
We fall quiet again, Auden still using his thumb to toy with my labret. “Tell me why you were crying,” he says.
My voice is tired. Hoarse from the tears.
“You already know why.”
There’s an abrupt stillness to him now. “Do I?”
“Auden.”
He presses his face into my hair. Not to comfort me, but for himself now, as if he can’t bear this. “Will you hate me for loving you?” he asks brokenly.
“I don’t know.”
He pauses. “Will you hate yourself?”
That. That I do have the answer to.
“Yes.”
A long moment. A moment that stretches through us and through the years and years we’ve been tied together and into a past that neither of us were there to see or change. A moment filled with shadows and silhouettes—our father, my mother, our little bride. Our friends. A proud house in the wind-scoured moors, and a ruined chapel in the woods.
“Then no more,” Auden says, and his words are guarded and carefully pronounced. But when I push out of his arms to sit up and look him in the face, his eyes are filled with a raw agony that flays me alive.
“Auden,” I say again, not sure what I’m going to say next, but knowing I have to stop him from looking like that or we’re both going to die. “We—”
He shakes his head, reaches out to touch my mouth again. The place where he first marked me, a prince and pauper wrestling in a cloud of lavender and baby’s breath. “It’s enough now. I love you and Proserpina with a hunger like I could eat the world and not be full. But I love you too much to push you. I love you too much to let you hate yourself.”
I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t have anything that would make him feel better.
Because he would push me and I would hate myself.
He gives me a sad smile, like he knows all this without me having to speak it aloud. “I told Rebecca about our father, and you know what she told me? She told me that I needed to know what I wanted and what I was willing to lose in order to get it.”
“And?” I ask, my voice still hoarse. “What do you want?”
“You, St. Sebastian. I want you. And I don’t mean for sex, even though that’s part of it, I mean that I want your face and your voice and the way you smile when you think no one is looking. I want to talk to you and see you, I want to come home and know you’ll be there. I want to go on walks with you and argue about books with you, and just—do everything with you. Live with you and grow old with you and die with you. That’s what I want. That’s what I will die without and what I refuse to give up now.”
That agony is still in his eyes, sparkling green and brown in our art exhibit sanctuary, but the agony no longer cuts me down. It lures me in, beckoning me to a place of pain we share together.
“Be my brother, St. Sebastian,” he says. “No kissing. No kink. No fucking. But come to the house and live with me. Share my inheritance. Share our bride. Surely that’s—it’s not unheard of, is it? It’s not a sin? Two brothers living together? Loving the same woman?”
My breath is caught in my throat. A knot of hope and pain. “We could be together then.”
“Yes,” Auden says, with what would be eagerness if there wasn’t still so much longing written across those elegant features.
“We could have each other.” I’m almost stunned at the simplicity of it, the near inevitability of it. “It would be the way it was always meant to be between us.”
Auden’s mouth twists a little. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“We could love each other,” I say, ignoring him, something deep green and glossy unfurling inside me. Something born of winter finally seeing the light. “We could have the rest of our lives together.”
“All the parts of love, save for one.”
“And we’d still be a three.”
Auden nods, a tired, kingly finality. “We’d still be a three.”
I feel stupid that I haven’t thought of this before, that I haven’t begged for it or spoken it into being or even imagined that it could be a solution. It’s the answer to everything, it’s balm from Gilead at last. We’ll have each other. We’ll have Poe.
What else could possibly matter?
How hard could it possibly be to resist the car
nal blossoms of our desires when the roots are fed elsewhere? With his attention, with his time—I surely won’t need his cruelty then, nor his crude lusts. I won’t crave them when so much else is being given to me.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. I’ll move in. I’ll be at Thornchapel. I’ll be your . . . your brother. For real now.”
The smile he gives me then. Like the chapel itself—haunting, beautiful, broken and whole all at once. His smile is the center of the world. “Good.”
He gets to his feet and helps me up, and together we dust off all the bits of harvest detritus from our tuxedos. He keeps his touch impersonal, and quick, but I’m so, so aware of him as he brushes off the back of my trousers, the sides of my thighs. Not an hour ago, he would have used this as an excuse to maul me. To get me hard. Now it is nothing more than what one friend would do for another. Platonic solicitude.
It feels strange. Nearly as wrong as anything else, but maybe I’ll get used to it.
We slide out of the small barley tomb and emerge into a gallery that’s still as vacant and empty as ever.
“I suppose we should get back,” I say, turning to find Auden staring at my mouth like he wants to eat it.
“One last kiss,” he says, lifting his eyes to mine. There’s no power in them now, no arrogance. Only pure, young longing. “Please, St. Sebastian. I want . . . I want to kiss you one last time.”
He’s not even finished before I’m in his arms, slotting my lips against his, opening for him as I always do. His tongue is hot, silky, and he strokes my tongue expertly with it, exploring every corner of a mouth that no longer belongs to him. He drinks his fill of me, one hand in my hair and the other at the small of my back, and for a single perfect instant, everything is how it is supposed to be. We’re how we’re supposed to be.
He gives my tongue a lingering caress with his, and then he nips at my bottom lip, sucking it and the piercing into his mouth. When he pulls away, he takes my heart with him.
He looks at me with swollen lips and glittering eyes. Without his bowtie, I can see his pulse thrumming like mad in his throat. “Shall we?” he asks, gesturing toward the door.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 21
