Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3)

by Sierra Simone

  It didn’t matter, of course it didn’t. And it hurt nothing and no one for him to treat us both to those small acts of dominance, for me to pine after him the same way I’ve done for years.

  Except I was wrong, it did hurt someone.

  It hurt us.

  After we come back from Kansas, something changes. Something I can’t define. Perhaps it was the time we shared Poe at Emily’s club, or maybe it was hearing the full story of what Ralph had done in the thorn chapel. Or maybe it was the ring, a confirmation and a kindness and a taunt, all in one. Or maybe it has nothing to do with any of those things—maybe it’s simply spring passing into real summer, when everything goes hot and lush anyway.

  Whatever it is, it’s no longer a sweet, sipping burn. It no longer pours itself into the cracks and empty spaces left behind by everything else, it’s no longer light and mutable and easily contained.

  It thickens. It pervades. Instead of a burn, it’s a crush, and instead of a sin, it becomes the fabric of my days.

  What do I breathe? Wanting him.

  What do I drink? What do I eat? Wanting him, wanting him.

  Every element is him now, every act is suffused with the memory of his touch and his voice, and it’s as if the pain feeds itself, as if it feeds me, because it only grows stronger, and me along with it. Poets write about growing weak with heartbreak, about wasting away, but I solidify, I grow in the face of my own starvation. Summer means long hours for Augie, it means my hands grow rougher and my body grows bigger. And every fiber of muscle, every lock of hair, is grown with the sear of wanting a man I can never have.

  Thornchapel knows it too.

  Storms threaten but never break. The air grows so sultry and oppressive that even our shady stone manor is nearly unbearable inside. I take to swimming in the river whenever I can because the indoor pool is too cloying. Poe starts wearing bikini tops and skirts while she works—tops that are so easy to untie and peel away from her skin . . .

  The trees are full now, the hills are green. The gorse flowers golden and the heather purple, and the ponies and the sheep and the cattle are high up on the slopes, grazing the upper pastures and occasionally congregating on roads already clogged with summer tourists.

  July is in its full promise, plump and ripe and ready. Everything has glutted itself so thoroughly on sun and water that there is nothing left to do but doze, hot and sated and a tiny bit miserable.

  Our moods worsen. Auden stalks through the house like a wolf, scowling at everything that isn’t Proserpina or scotch. The heat makes Poe sleepier and that makes her crankier, and to make up for it, she works in the library every minute she’s awake.

  And I feel like I am sixteen again, like there is a fist in my heart and no amount of working, wandering, or jerking off will make it go away. I work from dawn til dusk between the library and Augie, I bury myself in Proserpina every chance I get, any free moment is out ranging the woods and swimming in the river, and still.

  Still.

  Proserpina was right earlier this year. Whatever the three of us share can’t be segmented or portioned out, there is no cutting or slicing sections of it away. It is a cage of brambles around all of us, inside all of us—the thorns have grown straight through our flesh and bitten into our hearts and there is no chance at extrication now.

  All the parts of love save for one?

  Did we really believe that could work? As if I could excise one share of my love from the other? As if I could chip away at one facet and expect the rest of the gem to remain intact?

  No.

  It was a lie, and no one wanted it to be truer than me. But we are miserable inside of it, hungry and rough, biting at each other with words and dark glances, prowling after each other, stalking the other’s steps only to snap and snarl when we finally catch our quarry.

  Nothing helps. Nothing will ever help the torment of needing my father’s son like this.

  And still the storms will not break.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Delphine

  Just make it inside.

  All you have to do is make it inside.

  My hands shake as I unlock the lower door to Rebecca’s flat. They shake so much that I drop the keys on the pavement at first; they shake so much that I struggle to fit them into the lock and turn it. And then when I’m inside, I find I can barely see the trendy, industrial stairs in front of me. I find I can barely walk.

  Just make it upstairs. Just make it to the shower.

  When I manage to trip my way up to the flat and see I’m alone, relief quivers through me so violently that I have to stop walking. I have to drop to my knees, my bag sliding off my elbow and spilling tubes of lipstick and a bottle of half-drunk kombucha onto the reclaimed wood planks of Rebecca’s floor.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  The floor helps. The floor is where I feel loved and held—where I kneel for the woman I love—and even knowing she doesn’t love me, even knowing she can’t ever, ever see me like this, I still feel better down here. Not good, sure, and definitely not okay.

  But better.

  Breathe. Make it to the shower.

  I can crawl now, I can make myself move. Slowly I make it to the bathroom, every limb trembling, my stomach and chest juddering with long, ugly noises that aren’t quite sobs and aren’t quite moans either, but some hellish keen in between. Thank God I’m alone, thank God, thank God.

  I never want Rebecca to see me like this.

  When I get to the bathroom, I force myself to stand. My feet hurt from the heels I wore this morning for the photoshoot, and my skin burns and prickles so much that I think parts of me are bleeding.

  But that’s not why I’m crying. That’s not why I had to crawl across the floor.

  I shove off the romper I wore to the photoshoot and kick off my sandals. I glance up in the mirror and see myself naked—my skin covered in angry red marks from the clips and tape and pins—and see my hair and makeup still as pristine and perfect as they were an hour ago at the studio. My lips still painted in a bright, vital red.

  Lady Danger.

  Usually one of my favorites, but today, it looks too much like Cherry Tree, which means I flinch at my own reflection.

  I grab a clean flannel and rub at my mouth, desperate to scrape it off, to feel it scraped off, and then I swipe a bottle of micellar water off the vanity and step into the large shower, turning it as hot as I can stand and sinking to the floor as the water sluices down, flattening my hair and streaming over my back and shoulders. And all the while I wipe roughly at my face, using the micellar water to clean everything off, every last stitch of makeup. Like if I can clean my skin, then I can clean my insides too. Clean my shaking, ugly guts.

  It was supposed to be a photoshoot like any other photoshoot. In fact, it was a photoshoot like any other photoshoot. A brand I’d modeled for before, with a photographer I liked. When I woke up this morning—early, earlier even than Rebecca for once—I’d felt nothing but excitement. Modeling is hard, it’s often painful, it’s often awkward, and even with a fat-positive company and photographer, it’s hours and hours of reckoning with one’s body in clothes that don’t always fit and under bright lights that hide nothing. It’s hard not to hear every shitty comment that someone’s posted on my Instagram aloud in my head. It’s hard not to hear my own shitty thoughts aloud in my head.

  And yet, for all that’s hard and miserable about modeling, I love it. The beeps of the camera, the clicks of the shutter, the sharp, chemical scent of hairspray. The thrill that never goes away from being dolled up, being petted and praised, being posed and directed and made to suffer in tiny ways.

  Which, now that I think about it, was probably a sign I would end up being a kinky girl.

  And anyway, there’s also the satisfaction of getting to model clothes made for bodies like mine. Every time I do it, I’m taking part in something new and huge and exciting—I’m changing the world. Maybe I’m not shepherding souls like Becket o
r building things like Auden. Maybe I’m not a genius like Rebecca or clever like Poe, but I am doing something. Something that would have meant the world to a baby teenager Delphine, still trying to shop at all the same stores her friends did, still trying to pretend she didn’t spend hours picking her clothes because nothing she owned ever, ever, ever made her feel pretty.

  So today should have been wonderful. Even better because tomorrow night was a big exhibition at Justine’s, and so after all that hard but good work, my Mistress would reward me with a hard but good scene in front of the entire club.

  But today wasn’t wonderful. And it was because of the cherries.

  I should have told my manager about them, I know I should have. I should have told my assistant or my publicist. I definitely should have told my therapist. I should have told so many people, but I didn’t, because when it’s not bothering me, when I haven’t thought about cherries for hours and hours and even days, it seems like such an insignificant problem. Something I can ignore when it pops up.

  Something that of course I can just deal with, because it’s trivial and fucking ridiculous.

  But then when it is bothering me, I can’t ignore it, it’s not trivial at all, all I want to do is hide, hide, hide from the world and myself and my own mind. All I am is ashamed and crazy, and my therapist hates the word crazy—

  But when I’m like this, when the cherries are in my mind and my thoughts are going cherry tree cherry tree cherry tree and I can feel wet grass against my shoulder blades and see the cloud-covered moon behind heavy, monstrous shadows—

  When I can feel a tongue shoved wet and squirming into my mouth—when I can see a face in the moonlight as it lifts its head, its mouth smeared with Cherry Tree—its lips stained with the same color I’d so happily and carefully applied just two hours earlier—my lipstick, on him—cherry tree cherry tree cherry tree—

  I feel crazy. I feel crazed. Frantic, unconsolable, unreasonable.

  Driven mad by something that’s entirely in my mind.

  How can I tell people? How can I tell them and have it make sense? I can’t, because it doesn’t make sense. It makes no sense that I can easily muster the actual words rape and assault, that I can talk about what happened, that I can describe it and sound normal and well-adjusted and calm. And yet the mere memory of the lipstick I was wearing that night plunges me into panic.

  The mere memory of it.

  It sends me straight back there, back to that garden, and then breathing is impossible and my skin burns and my heart pounds and I can’t feel my fingers, my lips, my anything other than the roiling, metallic tightness in my chest. Nothing is real except the desperate, desperate feeling that I’m about to die.

  I’m ashamed of it. And that’s why I haven’t been able to tell anyone, not even a therapist or a lover or a friend. Not even Auden, not even Rebecca, not even my mother.

  Not even when I feel like I’m full of cherries on the inside, a pretty doll stuffed full of shiny fruit. Like when I open my mouth to speak, cherries will fall out instead of words.

  Like even my tears will be red and sweet.

  I should have said no when I saw the cherry-patterned swimsuit. I should have faked a diva fit, faked sick, faked something. I should have pulled my manager aside and made her deal with it.

  So many things I should have done and didn’t. I didn’t want to be dramatic. I didn’t want to let anybody down. I didn’t want to bother anyone.

  And so, while my mind screamed itself hoarse, while my shoulder blades tickled with the memory of wet grass and my heart tried to slam its way out of my chest, I let the stylist help me into the swimsuit. I let them touch up my lipstick—a red which all of a sudden seemed perilously close to Cherry Tree—I let them fluff my hair. I held my shoulders back, I popped my bottom out, I tilted my pelvis back so my thighs wouldn’t press together as much. I kept my angles dynamic, my mouth warm, my eyes intimate.

  I gave them everything they wanted, even though I could feel each and every cherry on that swimsuit sinking through the fabric and branding itself into my flesh. Onto my tits and my arse, onto my hips and my cunt. Acid-etched cherries all over my skin.

  But I smiled and posed and tossed my hair anyway, even as my skin was scored with cherry upon cherry, because that’s what they wanted, because I didn’t want to let anyone down.

  Because I wanted to be easy.

  Just like I wanted to be easy for Rebecca, and look what a mess that’s become.

  But is that such a crime? I wonder, staring down at the lipstick-smeared flannel in my hands. Is it so bad to want to be easy for someone one loves? To want to spare them the worst of one’s demons? To absolve them of trying to fix the unfixable and trying to share the unsharable?

  It can’t be. I refuse to believe it is.

  I did the right thing today, and I powered through. I only hope—well, I don’t remember the rest of the shoot really—so I just hope I didn’t seem off. I hope no one could see how the stupid cherries from a stupid bikini scorched themselves onto my skin.

  “Delph?” I hear a voice call over the noise of the shower. “Pet?”

  Rebecca.

  Oh bleeding hell.

  I scramble to my feet just in time for her to walk into the bathroom, looking polished and ravishing in a tailored black jumpsuit. She stops at the entrance to the shower—a large, subway-tiled walk-in with benches and multiple showerheads—and tilts her head at me. “Delph?” she asks, sounding concerned.

  “Bex!” I chirp as brightly as I can, forcing a smile. “You should be at work!”

  “I have the afternoon off for my hair appointment,” she says slowly as she searches my face. I know she’s missing nothing—not the puffy eyes, nor the abraded and swollen lips. “I thought I’d come home and see you before I went. Are you all right?”

  “Oh yes,” I say, still forcing the brightness out. Sunny, happy, easy easy. “It was capital.”

  She frowns down at the flannel in my hands. “You always say not to remove makeup that way.”

  “Photoshoot makeup,” I say, coaxing a laugh up. “There’s something the stylist used that was making me swell up and itch, so I needed to scrub it off.”

  “Ah,” Rebecca says, immediately sympathetic. “That’s terrible—I hope your manager gave them a talking to.”

  “Oh yes, you know Kendra. She tore them a new arsehole.”

  Rebecca nods, seeming satisfied, and it’s funny, isn’t it, how easy it is to lie after enough practice. How easily people will believe one, especially if one lies with a smile on one’s face.

  “I should probably get going,” Rebecca says, but she doesn’t move. Her eyes are on my body instead—where the water trickles over my shoulders and down my breasts to drip off my nipples. Her fingers curl in on themselves, like she’s trying very hard not to reach for me, and I see the quick dart of her tongue as she licks at her upper lip.

  Warmth—so unlike the churning, cherry-shaped heat I’ve been feeling all day—floods me. I feel hot and alive in a good way, in the best way, and suddenly I want Rebecca more than I want anything. I want her to curl her fingers into me, I want her to lick me.

  I sink to my knees again, and this time it’s not because I can’t walk. This time it’s my choice.

  When I kneel to the woman I love, I exist again. I get to have feelings that aren’t cherries, I get to have choices that aren’t escape or survive.

  “Don’t flirt,” Rebecca chides me. But her pupils have dilated into liquid pools of hunger, and she takes a step closer.

  “It wouldn’t take long,” I whisper, peering up at her from under my wet eyelashes.

  She laughs, and a dimple I almost never see flashes in her cheek. “Since when has not long with you ever been enough for me?”

  I smile up at her, sliding my knees apart so that she can see between my legs.

  Her eyes drop to my pussy and her smile fades into a hungry expression. “I thought I told you not to flirt.”

&nbs
p; “Can you blame me?”

  “I have an appointment.”

  I spread my knees even more. “I could help you relax before you go.”

  She comes closer. She’s wearing cobalt Blahnik flats I bought for her last month after I’d finally had enough of looking at the horrible wool things she normally wore. I picked them because they have a raised vamp that exposes the top of her feet, the delicate cambers of her tarsals and metatarsals, and even now I want to lean down and press my lips there. Show her my devotion.

  But then she lifts her foot to step forward and panic flares through me.

  “Stop! You can’t get those wet!”

  Rebecca laughs again, a low, throaty ha. But she does stop, just out of range of the spattering water. “Have I finally found something stronger than your lust?”

  “They’re Blahniks and they’re suede.”

  “And you’re adorable and you’re ridiculous.” She leans forward enough to tug on a wet lock of my hair. “I really do need to go.”

  The idea of her leaving, of not having her hands, her kisses, her pain—it sears me with abrupt fear. “Tonight then? We could play tonight?”

  Her mouth twists in regret. “I’m going to be home too late to play, I think.”

  I sulk. “You’re going to make me wait until tomorrow.”

  “Delph,” sighs Rebecca, “I’ll probably have to work late tomorrow to make up for lost time. I’m missing this afternoon and evening as it is—”

  Alarm blares through me. “Tomorrow night is the exhibition at Justine’s. You promised we could go.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Right.” But she doesn’t look enthusiastic.

  “Bex,” I say, trying to sound cool. Trying to be easy. “I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks.”

  And I have been. I’ve been so excited to scene publicly at our club, where everyone can see us. All the submissives Rebecca has taken home, all the Dominants she’s friends with—she’d claim me in front of all of them. Everyone would know I was hers and I wouldn’t have to wonder anymore if she was . . . hiding me . . . somehow. Keeping me as a convenient fuck.