A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel Book 1)

by Sierra Simone

  “Fuck, you’re nosy,” he says, still laughing. “Christ.”

  I give a sheepish shrug. “I’m sorry. I like to know things. Don’t answer if you don’t want to.”

  He takes a drink, but this time it doesn’t seem like he’s doing it because he doesn’t want to say more, but because he wants a minute to think.

  “On every objective level, yes. My life is still on hold. I’m in a job that pays pennies, and without a degree, I’ll never get to the next job up on the ladder. I’m taking some online classes, but at this rate, I’ll be thirty before I get my B.A., and I’m not even sure what I want to major in, anyway. I took over my mom’s lease because it seemed easier than trying to find a new place and figure out what to do with her stuff . . .”

  He catches his lip ring in his teeth for a moment, then continues. “But it’s so strange. Every time I think of leaving, I ache with wanting to stay. I can’t make myself go. It’s like I’ve put down roots without even wanting to, and I don’t mean family roots, because my aunt and uncle have always been here and I only barely remember my dad and his parents. I don’t mean friend roots, because I don’t really have any of those. I mean the kind of roots that happen privately between you and a certain place. Like you come to a place, and instead of planting a flag and saying mine , the place plants something in you. The place claims you, it knows your name and the crooked corners of your heart, and you’ve pledged yourself to it before you’ve even realized what’s happening. That’s why I’ve stayed, that’s why I can’t leave. Thornchapel knows my name and the crooked corners of my heart, and it wants me to make promises that I’m going to keep.”

  Chapter 7

  Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy

  That night, St. Sebastian walks Poe back to Thornchapel. It’s cold as fuck and windy as shit, and her teeth chatter the entire way. He wants to fold her into his arms, he wants to unzip his coat and tuck her against his chest. He may not be good for much, but he could do that.

  He could warm her up.

  But all told, it’s a short walk, and there’s no need. They get to the front door and she’s fine, and it’s only him who’s not fine, only him who’s jumbled up inside with all the things he could do. He could shake her hand. He could hug her. He could kiss her cheek.

  He could kiss her mouth.

  He could tell her that he can’t stop thinking about the way her eyes look like summer. He could tell her that he wants to bite the point of her chin and the arch of her throat. That he’s shaking and sick with wanting to touch her. Wanting to watch her gasp and laugh and smile. Wanting to reach that ever-unfolding bloom of her spirit and cradle it in his palms.

  He could tell her that they did get married once, after all, and why not play husband and wife for a couple hours and drive back the cold and the dark? Why not pretend Auden was there too, pretend each other’s hands were his hands, and each other’s mouths were his mouth?

  In the end, he tells her none of these things. He sees her inside and mumbles something in noncommittal agreement when she talks about calling him. He listens to his better nature; he keeps his distance. Even when she wheels abruptly around and pulls him into a hug, he manages to keep himself from pressing close, from putting his lips against the wind-tangled silk of her hair.

  After all, he knows things she doesn’t know.

  He knows the things the village knows.

  She can’t be his.

  When he gets home twenty minutes later, he stands in his dead mother’s living room and takes in the carcass of his life. His mother’s burned out saints’ candles that he feels would be cowardly to throw away, even though they gouge a hole in his heart every time he looks at them. A mostly empty sketchbook. A secondhand guitar that’s never been played. An old laptop he bought for writing two years ago, the case covered with a film of indifferent dust.

  All the relics of a boy who wanted to create, who wanted to be different and interesting and chosen. Who wanted to be the lord of the manor like the flop-haired boy with hazel eyes and too much money.

  And instead, all St. Sebastian has to show for his life is an unfinished degree, the scattered remains of abandoned hobbies, no friends, no pets, no lovers—and a lip ring.

  He’s alone, and he deserves it.

  * * *

  Becket is not a monk, but he abides by his own little monastic rules. He likes the structured focus of ordered days, the quiet asceticism of plain meals, the undeniable rewards of regular prayer. Auden teases him about his daily penances, and Becket can’t find the words to explain that these practices are to protect him, to keep him from going too far, to make sure that he does eat and he does sleep.

  Zeal , his confessor had once told him, is a curse as much as it’s a blessing. Don’t let it consume you like a fire; keep the flames of it small .

  And so the zeal must be dampened. Smothered. He prays at regular intervals to keep himself from lying face down on the floor in ecstatic devotion for hours. He eats plain meals so he won’t be tempted to forgo every nourishment except the Host itself. He punishes his body gently with running and exercise so that he won’t be tempted to punish it with whips and hair shirts and other unsanctioned mortifications.

  His zeal is a secret, almost like a sin itself, and it’s only through his gritted teeth that he manages to keep it at bay.

  It eases, however, around his friends. Delphine and Rebecca and Auden, Poe now too, if he can count her as a friend, and he hopes he can. It eases around St. Sebastian, whom he leaves the church unlocked for, whose lip ring glints as he bows his head and murmurs empty prayers.

  Yes, around them, the zeal dims, and he feels like a different version of himself, the version he might have been if the zeal had never found him. He can be naughty and fun, smart and lively. He can feel comfortable with the desires that burden him, the desires that overwhelm him when they walk hand in hand with the fervor of his faith. With his friends, he eats and drinks and keeps late hours, with them he is only a human and not a saint.

  But he’s not with them tonight, and so there’s only been a plain meal of unbuttered bread and broth. He’s done push-ups and sit-ups until his muscles shake with exhaustion. He’s prayed the Rosary, the Chaplet, his various devotions, and spent time in silent, contemplative meditation with his Lord.

  At nine, he finishes his prayers, checks the side door of the church to make sure it’s unlocked in case St. Sebastian wants to come in. St. Sebastian, the unbeliever, who still comes in and prays and kneels and sighs. Who sits and stares at the tabernacle as if he expects God himself to crawl out and apologize to him.

  Becket the priest reads for thirty more minutes in bed, a book of Celtic mythology he ordered online last week. It’s a secret fascination of his. He tells himself it’s purely academic.

  When he goes to sleep, the zeal comes for him in his dreams. It shows him dying kings, dying gods, rain pattering on the summer-spread leaves of Thornchapel’s forest.

  And Proserpina in the middle of it all, haloed and radiant. Waiting.

  * * *

  There’s an old warehouse in Peckham, and in that warehouse is a trendy flat, and in that flat there’s a woman in bed asleep. She’s on her stomach, naked and without a cover, and her bottom is a thing of beauty. Bruises, red and purple like Valentine’s Day flowers, have turned her backside into a postmodern canvas of torment and affection. The arnica gel on her skin shines in the glow from the window.

  Rebecca watches tonight’s submissive sleep for a moment, then slides out of bed to walk to the windows and stare down at the empty street below. It’s wet from an earlier burst of rain. An indeterminate clump of litter has caught against the curb, and there’s a fresh spray of graffiti on the building opposite that she hasn’t noticed before.

  It looks cold.

  She loves her flat, wedged as it is between a car mechanic’s and an art gallery. She loves the little neighborhood it nestles in—she loves the impossibly hip restaurants and speakeasies cropping up between
the African food shops and the tattoo parlors and the upstairs churches.

  The inside of her home is both a hymn to natural light and an adoration of the city at night—the walls are more glass than brick, and from almost any place in the flat, Rebecca can look up and see the sky. She can access the fresh air and the wind and the rain, something she likes to do often when she’s folded into the city’s fussy, concrete arms.

  She accesses them now, stepping out onto the balcony Auden designed for her when he helped her renovate the flat. It was his first project out of school, and though it feels like a million years ago, it was only three.

  Only three years for her to know what forever feels like.

  She knows why that is, but she’s not going to admit it to herself, at least not tonight. Just like she’s not going to examine why she took a curvy blond sub to bed either, not when she’s tried so hard to stay away from the blondes, not when she’s made sure any white girl she plays with has red or brown or pink or blue hair.

  She can tell herself the truth about this at least: the idea of white-gold hair brushing against her thighs is like a kick to the chest. She thinks of it and then she can’t breathe.

  Rebecca leans against the railing and lets the wind nip at her fingers and toes, and she tries to pretend that tomorrow she will be back in control. Tomorrow, when she goes to Thornchapel, she will know herself again, and in that knowledge there will be no room for wanting the person she also hates.

  * * *

  On the other side of the Thames, Delphine debates whether or not to stay with her fiancé for the night. She stays often, she adores his high-ceilinged townhouse with its combination of newly fitted skylights and original features, the place he bought after his father’s death for a fresh start. She doesn’t adore her own flat, a glassy, soulless cove in a City high-rise. There is a spa and a swimming pool, however, and a view that is almost worth the millions of pounds the place cost her parents.

  It makes for good Instagram pictures.

  Truth be told, she wants to stay the night with Auden, and so she agrees. She loves him, of course she does, and she reminds herself of this as she changes into a borrowed T-shirt and brushes her teeth. If she didn’t love him, then why would she keep a toothbrush at his house? Why would she have consented to marry him?

  He saved her life once, and how could she not love the boy who saved her life?

  Auden showers while she changes, and then he climbs into bed with her still warm and damp, and clad only in boxer briefs that cling to the sinful curves of his tight ass and strong thighs. That reveal the heavy, lazily thickening shape of his cock.

  He wraps her in his arms, his chest to her back and one of his legs sliding easily between hers. She knows that he does it so he can snuggle her close without also pressing his erection into her bottom. It’s thoughtful, because Auden is thoughtful. It’s gentle because Auden of all people in the world knows why she needs gentleness.

  He kisses the back of her neck. “Good night, Delphine,” he says, and nothing else. He expects nothing else, because he’s good. He’s just so good .

  “Good night, Auden.”

  And they slowly circle the well of sleep together. There’s no sex, there’s no kissing. No playful fondles or cupping favorite parts of each other’s bodies. There’s only this chaste snuggle, the way friends might snuggle, if one ignores the massive erection that occasionally grazes her backside whenever Auden shifts.

  She and Auden have been engaged for a year—dating for another year before that—and it’s always been like this. They’ve never fucked. They’ve only ever kissed, and Auden’s been nothing but patient. He never pushes her, never asks for more, even though she knows he wants her. When he holds her, she can feel his muscles trembling with pent-up need, she can feel his hands shaking when they slide over the dip of her waist and the generous flare of her hips. Once she caught him masturbating to a picture of her in a bikini that she’d put on her Instagram.

  It was so sweet and cute that she almost wanted to have sex with him right then just as a reward for being the most adorable fiancé ever.

  But she simply can’t bring herself to, and she doesn’t know why. She’s been in therapy since . . . well, since it happened, and she carries out all her therapy assignments dutifully. She can masturbate, she can communicate. Whenever she looks at Auden, all she feels is safety and warmth. And when Auden looks at her, she knows all he feels is sweet, affectionate need.

  It should be the easiest thing in the world to part her legs for him. She should have done it months ago. She wants to do it, in an abstract, intellectual kind of way. But whenever she imagines Auden tenderly making love to her, imagines his sweet kisses and gentle, careful hands, her body just refuses to respond. It stays asleep.

  And she has no idea how to wake it up.

  * * *

  In London, the witching hour is no darker than any other time of night, something that should be comforting, and instead is disorienting. Auden rests his head against his study’s window and looks out onto the quiet Knightsbridge street below. The leafy square outside is kindled with pretty lamplight, and some of the other houses around have one or two windows glowing against the shadows. The ambient light of the city turns the sky into a haze of purple-gray.

  At Thornchapel, the witching hour is so dark that he can’t even remember what the light looks like, what it feels like.

  He’s come to his study to do something shameful, which is to slacken the hot ache in his body now that Delphine is asleep, and he closes the curtain against the glass so he can be alone with his sins.

  It would be so much easier if he didn’t have these hungers so often , if they weren’t so fierce, if they didn’t continue tangling inside of him like ever-growing, ever-knotting thorns. He feels insatiable sometimes, he feels like he’s choking on the weight and the heat of his unending needs.

  He needs to fuck. And he can’t.

  Or rather, he won’t, he won’t ever do anything that could hurt Delphine.

  He doesn’t settle in, he doesn’t need to, lots of practice has made sure of that. This is something he has to do at least two or three times a day, and he’s as embarrassed by it as he is helpless to stop it. He’s learned how to be fast and quiet. Ruthless with himself.

  He loves Delphine, and so it’s her on his mind when his hand finds his thick, rigid organ and clenches a fist around it. But as always, his thoughts slide sideways, away from the sweet, passionate lovemaking he should be thinking about and back to the urges that afflicted him as a young man, the urges that afflict him still.

  He wants to fuck and fuck and fuck, he wants to paint more bruises on Proserpina’s pale legs and he wants to pin St. Sebastian to the ground and screw an apology right out of him. He wants to share Delphine, he wants Delphine to share him, he wants to feel the sting of flesh against his hand when he spanks someone and he wants them to love the sting so much that they’ll do anything to have it again.

  He wants to hurt and be hurt in return, although he wants the hurts in different ways.

  He’s already hurting now.

  He comes with a grunt and then an ashamed sigh. He comes feeling like he’s being unstitched at the seams. And tomorrow he’ll have to go to Thornchapel and see Poe and maybe see St. Sebastian again and have to pretend he’s not unraveling. Pretend he isn’t growing a tree of thorns inside his chest and that those thorns don’t have names.

  Delphine. Rebecca. Becket.

  St. Sebastian.

  Proserpina.

  His thorns, his regrets.

  His hurts.

  Chapter 8

  The next day is Friday, and I continue my informal census of the books, counting by shelves to get a rough idea of how many books I’ll be working with. They’ll all need to be cataloged, but not all of them will need to be digitized if they already exist in digital form thanks to another library.

  Cremer has responded to an email I sent a couple days ago, and I’m given permission to or
der all the boxes and storage containers I’d like, which I do. I also order a dehumidifier for the room, although I’m mostly pleased with my humidity readings, given the age of the house. I respond with a query about our budget for data storage and backups, and then by lunch, I find that I’m ready to truly begin. I’m starting at the far corner by the window and pulling down the first shelf’s worth of titles when I hear Saint say my name from the doorway.

  I turn, arms full of books, and smile big. He must not have to work today, because he’s back in a T-shirt and jeans, and with a leather jacket and that lip ring, he looks like every bad-boy fantasy I’ve ever had. I want to kiss him, and I want to feel his lip ring against my clit, and I want him to be the one I break my strange little virgin curse with. This bad boy with eyes like winter trees who’d rather talk about death than friendship.

  I hop down from the ladder, set the books on the table, and bounce over to him. “Hi!”

  My cheerfulness cracks his guarded expression the tiniest bit; there’s a small tip to his lips that wasn’t there before.

  “Hi,” he says. Almost shyly. “I shouldn’t be here, but I just—I knew Auden wasn’t going to be home yet, and I thought you might be hungry.” He holds up a plastic storage container of what looks like homemade soup, and then he looks incredibly pained. “This is stupid. I’m sorry, I should go.”

  “No, wait! Stop!” I move over to him and grab at the soup container like it’s the last bottle of wine in a hotel room at a library conference. I clutch it to my chest and beam up at him.

  He does stop, he stays right where I’ve ordered him, but he doesn’t smile back down at me. Instead he stares at me like I’m a vase he broke. A pearl he chipped.