“And what hadn’t you seen before that night?” Rebecca asks in a low voice, almost not sure if she wants to know the answer. Not sure if the answer will change something that’s best left unchanged.
“I saw Poe and I realized I wanted to be her,” Delphine says simply.
Rebecca realizes she already knows this.
She’s known this for three years.
But she doesn’t let herself think about that week three years ago right now. She doesn’t ever let herself think about it.
Delphine goes on. “I wanted to have that same expression on my face—the ecstasy, but also the pain and the trust. Ever since it happened everyone has been so good to me, so kind, and sometimes I feel smothered by it. But at the same time, if I’m brave, if I try to be strong, then I still want people to be kind and good to me after. I want to be rewarded and petted, and what I saw that night with Poe was that I can have both. I can be tested, I can be brave, and then afterwards, I’ll still get to be coddled. It seems like the best of both worlds.”
“People shouldn’t want to be consensually hurt so they can feel brave,” Rebecca says.
“Well, Poe told me that there’s as many reasons for doing kinky things as there are people who do them, so there.” Delphine sticks a tongue out at her, and it’s so ridiculous, so adorable, so sweet with her face still stained and shiny with tears and her nose red from the cold, that Rebecca laughs.
She laughs so she doesn’t kiss her.
Then Delphine’s face changes, and she looks down at her hands in her lap. Rebecca has a sudden foreboding that Delphine’s about to ask the obvious question.
Will you hurt me like you did Proserpina ? she’ll ask, and what could Rebecca possibly say but yes? For the sake of kink, of course, not because she likes Delphine, not because the idea of Delphine cuffed to her bed makes her want to growl with hunger.
But that’s not what Delphine asks this time. Instead, she asks, “Rebecca, why have we never gotten along?” And then she turns those big, honey-brown eyes up to Rebecca, and Rebecca suddenly thanks Jesus in heaven that Delphine is not actually her sub, because Rebecca would be in so much trouble. That fuck-me mouth, those huge, liquid eyes.
They wouldn’t leave Rebecca’s bed for days.
“I think we’re just incompatible,” Rebecca says. It’s another constant of theirs, another known variable, and so she’s never given it a lot of thought. They simply don’t get along and they never have, and that’s that. It doesn’t bear further examination.
“Incompatible because you’re a genius and I’m just a blond on Instagram?” Delphine doesn’t sound accusatory or defensive, only curious, and something about that makes Rebecca’s chest ache. Like Delphine is so used to being told she’s silly or pointless that she’s accepted it herself.
“You’re not just a blond on Instagram,” Rebecca says. “And my IQ is only part of me, not all of me. No, I only meant that you’re bossy and I’m bossy, and we both like having our own way too much.”
“You could spank it out of me,” Delphine offers with a laugh, standing up.
“Maybe I will,” Rebecca says, and Delphine laughs again, but Rebecca doesn’t. She means it.
She wants it.
But she still doesn’t like Delphine, she’s certain of that—or mostly certain, at least. This incessant craving for her is just an itch, that’s all.
Just one of those itches that you have for three years, and which burrows its way into every thought, feeling, and hunger you have.
* * *
Rebecca guides Delphine out of the maze, and Delphine is grateful, because she thinks she only found the center on her own through sheer luck and she probably wouldn’t have found her way back out again. She’s only been through the maze a few times in her life, and only ever with someone else who knew where they were going, so it’s nice to have Rebecca leading the way.
No, it’s better than nice. It’s good . Fun. Rebecca sometimes puts a hand on Delphine’s back to guide her past corners where the hedge has gone a little scraggly, or sometimes she’ll just tug impatiently on Delphine’s coat when she thinks Delphine isn’t walking fast enough, and now that Delphine knows Rebecca likes to spank people, she sees it everywhere in Rebecca’s behavior. She’s been doing a lot of research since her talk with Poe, watching a lot of porn and reading lots of books and forums and internet posts, and so she wonders about all the things Rebecca must do for fun. If she does more than spank people, if she flogs them and paddles them and ties them up and drips hot wax on their skin.
She wonders if Rebecca fucks them after. If Rebecca’s ever wanted a sub of her own.
Not just a friend to spank for the night, but someone who would crawl for her all the time, who’d be available for her use always and in all ways.
It could be her. It could be Delphine.
Delphine could be available for her use always and in all ways.
As soon as she thinks it, she flushes again, but thankfully, Rebecca doesn’t seem to notice, and when they get to the house, Rebecca darts away faster than Delphine can say anything else, although she’s not sure what she would say. Hey, I know you hate me, but please spank me and whatever else comes to mind?
Hey, I think I may have ended my engagement because I can’t stop thinking about you hurting me for fun?
No, she couldn’t say that. Not that it matters, since Rebecca vanishes.
But Delphine feels better for having talked with Rebecca; she feels stronger, happier for having her coat tugged and her skin saved from the hedges by Rebecca’s careful guidance. It was as if Rebecca was thinking, if you get hurt, it’ll be by my hand and nothing else .
Rebecca probably wasn’t really thinking that. But Delphine thinks she would like it if she had been.
So, with her better and stronger self, and her nose still red from the chill and her eyes still swollen from crying, Delphine goes to find her ex-fiancé in the one place he likes best to hide.
Auden’s in his tower, head bowed, hands braced on a windowsill as if he can’t hold himself upright without support, and Sir James Frazer is a sprawl of fur and dream-twitching paws on the floor. There’s a laptop and a couple sketchbooks on a trunk, as if he’d tried to work earlier, but he’s still in the same wrinkled clothes he was wearing last night and his hair is tousled in uneven tumbles, which doesn’t seem like a good sign.
Delphine’s throat tightens. She hates that she’s done this to him, she hates that she’s made someone she cares about so sad, and yet—can’t he see this is for the best? Not just for her, but for him too? She saw him when he was spanking Poe, she knows that there’s something inside him aching for their friend—not to mention the fact that he’s obviously still in love with St. Sebastian, despite what St. Sebastian did to him. He wants two other people as much as or more than he wants her, and everyone knows it.
So surely he feels freed? At least a little?
“You were very kind last night,” Delphine says to his back.
He doesn’t turn to face her. “Why wouldn’t I be kind, Delphine?” he asks. “I love you. Of course I’d be kind.”
“I hate doing this to you,” she says. “You’re just so good.”
At that, he finally turns. Anger and hurt are everywhere all over him, in the knots of his tensed, furious muscles and the tremble of his hands by his sides and the fast blink of his long eyelashes. “I am not good,” he says in a low, shaking voice. “I am not good and I am not kind. Please don’t say that about me.”
“You are good,” she counters. “A good man wouldn’t have agreed to wait to have sex with his fiancée, and you did, you did agree. And it’s been two years and I still wasn’t ready, and you’ve never pushed me once. You’ve been so patient.”
He shakes his head, a hand coming up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I haven’t been patient, Delphine, not in my thoughts. I promised you I would wait for you, and I might have kept that promise in the most objective sense, but God, if you knew how unhappy I was sometime
s, the things I thought about, the things I wanted—”
“Then see? This is all for the best.”
He closes his eyes. “There’s more to love than sex.”
“For some people, I think? Because some people only need a little or they don’t need it at all, but lots of people need a mix of the two. And then there are others who need it more than the rest, and I think that’s you, Auden. I think you’re starved for it.”
He opens his eyes and looks at her. “I’d starve for you.”
“Because you’d starve for any one of us—even St. Sebastian. Because that’s the kind of person you are!”
He drops his hand, then turns both toward her in a gesture of pleading, of offering. “Tell me what I can do to change your mind, Delphine. Tell me who you want me to be, what you want me to be, and I’ll be it. And I’ll wait forever if you aren’t ready—”
“I think I’m ready now,” she blurts out. “Just—just not like how it would be with you.”
His hands slowly sink back down. “What does that mean?”
Delphine flushes hard for the third time that day. “I think I’m cut out for something . . . different. Like what Rebecca did with Proserpina.”
“Kink?” he asks.
“You know what she does?”
“I was there for the spanking, too, Delphine, given that it happened on my lap. Yes, I know what she does. I’ve known it since I designed her loft with hooks in the ceiling and racks for flogging.”
Delphine’s been to the loft once, but she doesn’t remember any rings or racks. She’s disappointed in herself for not noticing.
“I can be kinky,” Auden says. “I want to be, but I didn’t want to frighten you.”
Delphine weighs this, just like she weighed it last night when she argued with herself about whether or not to break things off. She could ask Auden to be kinky with her, she really could, but . . .
“No,” she says. “I want to be someone else and that can only happen with someone else. I was with you because I was grateful for all you’ve done, but I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t.”
Auden flinches.
“If we decide it’s me tonight, I’m going to do it,” Delphine says. “And if we decide it’s you, you should do it too. And maybe it will be a nice way for us to say goodbye to each other?”
“You’re saying,” Auden says slowly, “that you don’t want to marry me, but you’d be happy fucking me in a ritual? After you’ve broken up with me?”
“Yes. I’m changing, you know,” she explains, after seeing his incredulous reaction to her answer. “I’m waking up. Except I wasn’t asleep.”
“What are you waking up to, then?”
She shrugs. “What I really want. Pleasure. Pain. Magic in my life.”
“We all want those things,” Auden says. “I want those things. Why can’t we want them together?”
He looks so sad just then, so tired and alone silhouetted with the expanse of Thornchapel behind him, that Delphine goes up and hugs him. She hugs him like she used to hug him when they were children, when they were both adolescents in the same stuffy and luxurious world. She hugs him like someone hugs their best friend.
He takes in a deep breath, his muscles tight under her arms, but after a long moment, he carefully hugs her in return.
“I’ll always love you,” she whispers. “Always.”
“I know,” he sighs, and she can hear the rumble of his voice with her face against his chest. She can feel the breath entering and leaving his body.
“And if it’s us tonight, I want you to know that I’ll be glad, because even if I can’t marry you, I still trust you with my body. I still love you.”
He holds her tighter but doesn’t say anything.
“And if it’s you and someone else, then I’ll be excited for you.” He doesn’t respond to that either, and eventually the hug ends.
He breaks the awkward silence as they step apart. “I hope you stay here at the house,” he says gruffly. “We’ll get you your own room and everything. But I like having all of us together too much to see you go. Even if it’s hard.”
“I think I’d like that,” Delphine says, feeling lighter. She’d been worried about that, anxious that Auden would excommunicate her from the group for the crime of not marrying him, but she should have known better. Whatever he likes to say, he is good, and she’ll be allowed to stay. They’ll be all together, and that’s what matters.
* * *
It’s fully dark now, and Becket should be arriving any minute, but Auden decides to go out to the chapel one last time before they go there as a group. He uses the excuse of bringing some blankets out to use later, but really he just wants to see it by himself, see it in the cold beam of his flashlight before it’s lit in the glow of lanterns and fires. He wants to lay down his feelings about Delphine and everything else before he picks up a lantern and pretends to care about this ceremony.
He skips the maze and hops easily onto the path as it emerges from the maze’s tunnel and meanders into the trees. The clever topography of the grounds means the route can’t be seen from the house or from the lawn, and only someone who knows Thornchapel’s every last secret knows about the deep-sliced trail at the border of the woods. Being its lord, he knows every last secret—or at least he’s pretty sure he does.
He eats up the walk with long, impatient strides, very aware that the others will soon be waiting on him, waiting for a ritual that might rip apart the perfect little world they’ve built. The tiny, perfect kingdom of his favorite people—well, his favorite people and St. Sebastian—nestled in the heart of Thornchapel, protected and happy and his.
And maybe they’re about to throw that all away.
Christ .
His chest hurts with Delphine’s decision, but it hurts even more knowing that he’s not as crushed as he should be. He aches with his own selfishness, the selfishness that tells him he can finally stop hating himself for wanting Proserpina, the gross relief that he can finally release all the perverse needs inside him.
How fucking miserly is he? How callow? That he feels owed somehow for all the years he’s held back?
That he wants to make up for lost time and he already knows with whom he wants to do it?
He’s not good, that’s for certain. And if he ever had doubts about that before, he knows it now, when he should be bent over with heartbreak, and instead his body is already yearning for someone else.
God, what if it’s him and Proserpina chosen tonight? What if he gets to have that petite body under his, her wrists bloody with thorns and her neck arched with pleasure-pain as he fucks into her sweet cunt? What if he gets to tell her something like what Delphine told him tonight?
I think I need more of what Rebecca showed us, I think I might be like her .
I think I need to spank you and then fuck you and then spank you again.
Even just thinking about it has him so hard that he feels like a walking obscenity crime. It’s a good thing he’s alone and it’s dark, because there’d be no mistaking the swollen length pushing against his zipper.
Except then a figure resolves itself out of the darkness, coming toward him with a fluid and wary grace. Auden’s flashlight catches the glinting metal of a lip ring, and then Auden lowers it, so it won’t blind St. Sebastian.
“I was just about to head back to the house,” St. Sebastian says, “but I wanted a few more minutes here alone. You know?”
Auden can’t stop watching Saint’s mouth in the indirect glow of the flashlight. It’s all shadows and metal, and his cock wants it, his cock wants back inside that shadow mouth, and his hands want Saint’s hair to twist and yank, and his own lips buzz with the need to kiss and suck the strong, supple curve of Saint’s throat.
Fuck .
He hates Saint. He can’t ever forget that. He can’t ever forget what it felt like to have his cheek taped back together and his broken arm set. He can’t forget what he felt like to breathe with a cracked rib
for weeks and weeks.
He can’t, he can’t, he can’t.
“You don’t know,” St. Sebastian says, surprised, and Auden realizes he’s been staring at Saint’s exposed throat for so long that he thinks Auden isn’t going to answer. “I thought you might understand how this place feels sometimes. Like when you’re alone here, you’re alone with God.”
“You don’t believe in God,” Auden finally manages to say, over the roar of his lust and angry memories.
“No,” St. Sebastian agrees thoughtfully, “no, I guess I don’t.”
Auden wants to grab him and shove him to the ground, drive Saint to his knees and make him swallow his aching length. He wants to feel that piercing against his shaft, and see Saint’s long, dark eyelashes fluttering up at him, wet with breathless, cocksucking tears. It’s all Auden wants right now, it’s consuming every thought, every sense of self-preservation he has.
“Well, I guess we should head back,” Saint says, oblivious to Auden’s struggle. “The others are probably waiting.”
Saint starts to walk past Auden, and Auden grabs his arm.
Saint stops immediately.
Not because Auden forced him, not because Auden wrestled him to a stop, but because Saint felt Auden’s hand on his arm and stopped on his own. He stopped like he was being obedient. And then when he looks over at Auden, when his so-dark-in-the-darkness eyes dip down to where Auden’s hand circles his bicep, he bites his lower lip and says, “Yes, Auden?” in the way that someone might say, ask me anything and I’ll say yes.
Blood pools even more in Auden’s groin; he could come just standing there and listening to Saint talk to him in that voice. So he doesn’t speak at first, he only squeezes ever so slightly, testing the hard curve of St. Sebastian’s upper arm. The muscle is so firm that Auden has to squeeze hard to feel the flesh denting under his fingertips.
Saint goes completely, utterly still.
“You’re not wearing a coat,” Auden says after a long minute.
“I’m not cold.”
And indeed, even though he’s in only a T-shirt and jeans, both smeared and flecked with dried mud, Saint’s not shivering and there are no goosebumps under Auden’s fingers. Saint’s skin is almost hot to the touch, so hot Auden almost wants to slide his other hand up Saint’s shirt to warm it up.
A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel Book 1) Page 23
