Poe pads over to me as Auden distributes clothes. They both decamp to different nooks in the shelves to change, but I don’t move, determined to finish my drink first.
“Where did you go this morning?” Poe asks me quietly. “You and Auden were both wet.”
I don’t answer—or rather, I don’t answer with words. I pull up the hem of my shirt to show my stomach, which is currently inscribed with reddened bites the exact shape of Auden’s mouth. His calling card.
Hope flits through Poe’s bright green eyes.
I hate to extinguish it, but I won’t lie to her. “It can’t happen again, sweetheart. It won’t.”
“Oh,” she says. Just that. Her plush mouth is in the shape of unhappiness.
I finish my drink and kiss the top of her head before I go to a corner to change. I wish I could tell her differently; I wish I could tell her we’d be a real three once again, just like she wants. Just like Auden wants. Just like I want.
I peel off my clothes in the same place where I once fucked Poe against the bookshelves with Auden right behind me, his arms a cage around me and Poe both.
This is the hurt I choose, Poe said that night.
But what about the hurts we don’t choose? The ones that come for us anyway, the ones that chase us through time and through sins and secrets so old that they now belong more to the dead than to the living?
And if Thornchapel has chosen us, then does that mean it’s chosen this too?
Auden brought me his clothes instead of mine, and as I walk back over to where everyone is settling on chairs and sofas, I have to fight off the urge to go to him. To curl at his feet like a pet, to climb into his lap, to revel in the feel of his clothes kissing my skin. I feel like a girl in her boyfriend’s too-big shirt, I feel like a beloved child wrapped in a warm blanket.
Even when I make him cry, even when I return his love with doubt and regret, he still tries to pull me into his heart. It’s both terrible and wonderful at the same time.
“Becket,” Auden is saying as I sit, “finish the drink. And tell us what happened.”
Becket obeys—four long gulps of liquor—and then he holds the empty glass like it’s a relic he’s been charged with safekeeping. His voice is still mechanical and vacant when he finally says, “I’ve been formally warned by my bishop that I’m in danger of being suspended.”
“Becket,” Poe whispers. She reaches for his hand, and for her and only her, he offers up a weak smile.
“He’s also recommending that I take a leave of absence to spend time in counseling and prayer. And I’ve agreed to.”
“Oh.” Poe slides off her chair and moves to his feet, where she presses her face into the side of his knee. “This is my fault,” she mumbles. “All my fault.”
“It’s not, darling,” Becket says. “I was there too. I chose it too.”
My eyes meet Auden’s across the table. While most traces of the tearfulness I saw in the mudroom are gone, I still see a bone-aching sadness in his eyes. A sadness that I know must be reflected in mine.
“A leave of absence,” Auden says, breaking our stare to look over at Becket. “What does that mean?”
“Two months away. I’ll split my time between being mentored in Plymouth and going on a spiritual retreat in Argyll. Afterwards, I will be asked to demonstrate to the Bishop my renewed commitment to the church, and it was suggested to me that even if I do so successfully, I’ll be moved to a different parish, lest I be tempted by Proserpina again.” He says this last part with a smile, but his voice is blank.
“Is that what you want?” Auden asks. “To renew your commitment to the church?”
Becket stares down at his empty glass.
“I feel like there’s two of me,” he says after a minute. “One for the church and one for Thornchapel. In my eyes, both versions of myself serve God. But here, that service truly only benefits myself. At St. Petroc’s, I help over two hundred parishioners. Wouldn’t it be selfish not to choose the church?”
“Don’t priests and monks lock themselves away from the world all the time?” I ask. “How would choosing Thornchapel be any different from being cloistered away like them?”
“A fair question,” he concedes. He lets go of his glass with one hand and strokes the silky crown of Poe’s head where it rests against his knee. “But there are other reasons why Thornchapel would be a selfish choice.”
And I have nothing to say to that, not this morning. Not when I’m still sore and bite-marked from my own selfish choices.
The rain dashes against the windows while we sit, filling the silence.
“When will you go?” Auden finally asks, sounding very unhappy. He’ll miss his friend, and I realize I will too. Becket was the priest who said my mother’s funeral Mass, the priest who let me inside his church not to pray but to hurl accusations at God’s feet. I trust him with my soul, and more importantly, with the curvy librarian tucked into a miserable ball by his feet.
I don’t want him to go.
“Tonight,” he says. “Well, this afternoon, actually. I’ll need to be in Plymouth tonight so I can meet with my counselor in the morning.”
“Are you okay?” Poe asks, and it’s the most important question, the one we should have asked from the beginning. “Are you doing okay with this?”
“No,” he says bluntly, his hand still on her head. “I’m not okay. And yet I know I’ve been straddling two paths for too long, praying a single foot on each would be enough—but it’s not enough, not even close. Wherever I choose to serve God, I must do it with my whole heart, and the time has come for me to choose.”
Poe nuzzles his hand. “You’ve always given everything your whole heart. You surrender to yourself better than anyone I know.”
Pain carves itself into his expression. “Sometimes,” he says in a ragged voice, “that has been to my detriment.”
For a moment, I think he’s talking about loving Poe, but the look on his face . . .
Horror. Like he’s remembering horror.
But the expression fades and then he glances up at the clock on the mantel, his shoulders slumping in resignation. He cups Poe’s head and then leans down to kiss her forehead. “It’s time for me to go. Goodbye, Poe. Goodbye, you two,” he says to me and Auden. “If you see Delphine and Rebecca, you’ll let them know everything? Give them my goodbyes? I’m not sure how much internet access I’ll have while I’m gone, so I don’t want them to think I’ve ghosted Thornchapel altogether.”
“They wouldn’t think that,” Auden assures him. “And we’ll give them your goodbyes. Here, hand that to me.” He holds out his hand for Becket’s empty glass, and then Becket stands up. Poe does too.
Auden gives her a subtle nod, and then her eyes flick over to me, seeking approval. I nod too, knowing she wants to give Becket a more private goodbye.
“I’ll walk you out,” she says, and with a final look at Auden and me—and the library too—Father Becket Hess leaves us to face his future.
I immediately get up and get another drink, and without a word, Auden joins me, extending his glass for me to fill it.
“Table full of fancy drinks and we’re drinking the same shit as always,” I mumble, looking back at Delphine’s hard work.
“I daren’t touch them unless the hostess allows it,” Auden says, a bit dryly, although his eyes are still somber. “And mind your tongue. This is a single malt scotch from a rare cask. It’s hardly shit.”
“What Becket said,” I say, after taking a drink. “About straddling two paths. About choosing where to put his heart.”
I stop, not sure where I’m going with this, or how to continue. But Auden must sense it before I do; he somehow knows where this is going.
“St. Sebastian,” he says. “Don’t. Don’t do this.”
“I thought I couldn’t trust you. After you lied to me, after you kissed me in my mother’s office, I thought you’d stop at nothing to have me, I thought you’d wage war on the space between us until ther
e was none left and I was yours again.”
“Don’t,” he says. “Please.”
I can’t stop myself. I won’t. It needs to be said. Like Becket’s reckoning, this sword has been dangling over us for months, and it’s time to look up and name it.
“Don’t you see? Don’t you understand what happened this morning? That was me—all me. I thought I couldn’t trust you, but the truth is that I can’t trust myself.”
He steps forward. He’s close enough to touch me, but he doesn’t. “Don’t say it,” he pleads.
But it has to be said. “I need to leave.”
I hear the glass shatter before I realize he’s flung it against the wall. “Goddammit,” he roars. “How many times will you run away from me? How many fucking times, St. Sebastian?”
I don’t step back, I don’t cower in the face of his rage, even though it burns like a fire, even though rivulets of whisky trickle past and the floor is a spray of shattered glass.
“This time is different,” I say. “Because this time I’m telling you. This time you know why.”
I’m backed suddenly into the bookshelf next to the sideboard; hard wood edges and leather spines dig into my back as Auden braces his hands on either side of me.
“You are mine,” he snarls wildly. “And I’m sick to death of us pretending otherwise. Fucking or no fucking, you belong with me, you belong here, and there will be no talk of leaving, no talk of choices. If you want to be utterly celibate, if that makes you feel better about being in love with me, then so be it. But we will be together.”
“We can’t be together, Auden! We can’t even make it three months without breaking down and fucking each other, how on earth do you think we can do this for the rest of our lives?”
He leans in closer, all muscle and potent, furious man. “I. Don’t. Fucking. Care. We’re doing it anyway.”
“Let me go.”
“Never.”
“Auden.”
“Never.”
“Do you think I want this? Do you think I wouldn’t rather this be any other way? Jesus Christ, Auden, stop acting like I’m throwing some kind of pointless toddler tantrum and think. You know me. You know you. And you know Poe. If things stay as they are, then we’ll end up where we started, and that’s not permitted to us now.”
“Who permits things?” he asks angrily. “Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. The government, the church, the people in the village—they all know it’s wrong because it is wrong. Brothers don’t do what we do.”
He glares at me. “Then let’s make our own rules about what brothers do.”
“I won’t do that. Even for you.”
He’s trembling against me now, his every muscle tense and vibrating with possession. “What can I do, St. Sebastian? Tell me. Tell me and I’ll fucking do it. Because I am at my wit’s end here. I’d give you everything you wanted, I’d cut the beating heart out of my chest for you, and still it never seems to be enough.”
“Don’t you understand?” I say pleadingly. “There will never be anything that can be enough. Because there’s nothing that can be done.”
“No,” he says in a fierce voice. “No, I don’t accept that.”
“It doesn’t matter what you accept. It’s like a law of physics—it’s true no matter what you believe or think. Now please step back so I can go.”
His nostrils flare and his hands tighten on the shelf on either side of me. “Absolutely not.”
I try to push forward, and he only shoves me against the bookshelf harder, his chest and hips flush against me now. “Auden, you can’t keep me here.”
“Like hell, I can’t,” he mutters darkly, and I know this is pointless. I can argue with him about our future for another ten years, and he will never accept anything that isn’t me by his side forever. I have to tell him the one thing I know that will make him back off. And the terrible part? This thing is actually true.
I take a deep breath. “You’re acting like him right now,” I say. I say it carefully, knowing the words are incendiary. That they’ll scorch whatever they touch. “You’re acting like our father.”
The effect on him is immediate, devastating. He flinches away from me as if I’ve hit him, staggering back a few steps and curling in on himself. He shakes his head. “No.”
“You’re being selfish and you’re trying to keep people who don’t want to be kept. That’s not how kink works, it’s not how family works, and it’s definitely not how love works.” I set my glass down. “You said it yourself in the mudroom: you’re no better than him. You’re choosing the same things he would have in your shoes. Unless . . . ”
“Unless I let you go,” he says numbly. “So that’s the equation you’re proposing. I’m not our father if I let you leave me.”
Pain lances through my chest, and I try to ignore it. The hurt and shame in his face—it’s gutting to see. Excruciating. I want so badly to take it away, and yet I can’t, because I need him wounded, I need him weak. Not because I want to hurt him, but because I don’t stand a chance against him when he’s strong.
“I’m going,” I say. “And you have to let me.”
He blinks those big hazel eyes at me. He looks so young all of a sudden, almost like he did when he was sixteen. Elegant and arrogant and vulnerable all at once. “We fell in love when you were in Thorncombe too,” he reminds me. “Twice, in fact. You don’t have to be living here for us to be in love.”
“I won’t stop loving you,” I say, and it’s the truth. But I don’t say the other true thing, which is that I won’t be in Thorncombe.
If I’m going to leave, then I need to leave for real. Someplace where the temptation of Auden Guest can’t reach me ever again. What that means for me and Poe, I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out.
I hope.
“Is this goodbye then?” he whispers. “Is this our goodbye?”
I step closer, close enough to kiss his cheek, which I do. “Let’s pretend this morning was our goodbye.”
“We have to say goodbye precisely because of this morning,” he says in a surly tone, but when he turns to kiss me, his gaze is raw and sweet. I let him kiss me—soft, chaste kisses. Kisses for beginnings. Or for endings.
“This morning was inevitable,” I tell him. “We both know that. It was always going to be this way. A choice.”
“A choice,” he echoes brokenly.
“I love you,” I tell him again, because he needs to know it, because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to say it to him again. “I love you, Auden Guest.”
And then it’s my turn to walk out of the library and prepare to leave. I go upstairs to my room to pack and to think about how I’ll explain all this to Poe, and my phone rings as I walk into my bedroom. I don’t recognize the number, so I let it ring and go to voicemail while I find a bag and start throwing essentials into it. When my phone alerts me I have a new voicemail, I hit the button to listen to it.
“Hello, St. Sebastian,” says a warm, polished voice that I can’t quite place. “My daughter gave me your number, and I hope that’s quite all right, I didn’t know of any other way to contact you with some degree of privacy. And Delphine says you don’t have Facebook or WhatsApp or any of the other places where I could message you . . . ”
Delphine—ah. This must be her father, Freddie Dansey.
Strange for him to be calling me.
“I was hoping you could call me back and we could speak sometime. I debated reaching out, you know, but I think this is too important to go undiscussed.”
And then he gives his phone number and asks me again to call.
When the message ends, I’m so completely baffled by it that I don’t even delete it. But neither do I call him back—I hate the phone and I hate talking to people I barely know and combining the two is a special kind of hell.
And it’s not like I don’t have more important things to do right now. Like upend my entire life and walk away from the man I love in order to preserv
e what’s left of my soul.
“Sorry, Freddie,” I mutter and toss the phone on the bed so I can use both hands to shove clothes in my bag. “Maybe another time.”
Besides, if it’s really important, he’ll call back, I’m sure.
But what could Freddie Dansey, of all people, want to discuss with me?
Chapter Thirty-Three
Rebecca
The Long Gallery is on the upper story of the Jacobean section of the house—a pointless space, I’ve always felt, built for some long-dead Guest ancestors to show off how many paintings they owned, built for promenades and for amusing bored house guests in between their extramarital trysts and amateur theatricals.
The only good thing about the gallery is its absurd number of windows. Huge, diamond-paned things lining the wide space on both sides. It would have cost Auden’s ancestors a fortune to buy them all four hundred years ago, and it cost him a second fortune to restore them this year, but it was money well spent. They afford a view that’s like something out of a movie, something out of a magazine about period homes in the countryside. The green and ancient forest with the stark, foggy hills rising up above it, glimpses of the pretty village to the east, a teasing glint of river to the south. The Thorne Valley in all its secretive perfection.
But I’m not up here for the views right now. I’m here for the blond standing alone in a window-lined alcove.
“Delphine,” I say, my voice soft.
I’m surprised she can hear me over the rain lashing against the glass, but she does. She turns, silhouetted by the silver world behind her, and my heart flips over in my chest.
Beautiful.
She’s so fucking beautiful.
The entire room is the color of rain—the windows to the storm, the gray wood paneling the walls and planking the floor, all of it pale and argent—and it makes her silvery too. She’s made out of pearls today: her hair, her skin, even her perfect, rosy lips are the shade and sheen of unspoiled nacre.
My pearl.
God, I’ve been stupid.
For more than a week I’ve been denied her, and if I needed any more proof that I’d fallen in love, I certainly had it after ten sleepless nights and just as many miserable days—unable to work, eat, or even think without her sunny smiles and breathless kisses. My bed, my arms, my days, they all bore the burning imprint of her absence. I felt like she’d gone to the Cotswolds with one of my lungs, or maybe my liver, or maybe all my nerves and nerve endings since I couldn’t seem to feel a damn thing without her. Since I felt half dead.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 41
