A Lesson in Thorns

by Sierra Simone

  I assess it all myself, taking in the wet, bare trees and trodden, brownish grass. Mist sparkles in between the branches and in a faint haze around the chapel walls, and the air seems curiously muffled. No wind, no woodland noises. Even our own voices seem to come from a great distance.

  Everything is wet and cold and quiet.

  It’s so far away from the Thornchapel of my dreams, from my memories of a vivid, whispering place, that disappointment tugs hard in my chest. A little embarrassment too, because I’ve been so excited for our Imbolc ceremony, and I’d been picturing something magical and evocative, like in the painting of Estamond. But right now it just looks like a place. Lovely with its mist and its quiet, but still just a place, still just an ordinary clearing with an equally ordinary historical site. Not the kind of place a smart girl should have spent twelve years dreaming about and making the locus of her every fantasy and desire.

  I suddenly feel very stupid and obvious.

  The others, however, don’t pick up on my mood, except maybe Saint, who’s watching me more closely than I would like. I flush and look away while Delphine chatters out an explanation of how it will all work tomorrow.

  “Rebecca says she’s getting the thorns for us, and Auden found some lanterns out in the shed. They look like they’re made for parties more than anything, so they may be fragile, but they’ll work. Oh! And we’ll have all the cakes and ale out by the altar, all ready to go after the bride says her whole bit about cows and wells and stuff, and then we move on to eating.”

  The bride. Ah.

  I clear my throat. “Actually, that’s what I came out here to talk to you all about.” I extract the book from my pocket.

  “It looks like there’s more to being the bride than we initially thought.”

  “Of course, it should be out of the question,” I say.

  It’s nearly an hour later, and we’re all around the kitchen table now, stripped of damp clothes and cupping mugs of tea between our chilled fingers. Sir James Frazer is dozing on a large cushion by the range, and the book in question is in the middle of the table. Becket and Rebecca look thoughtful, Delphine looks positively aglow with excitement, and Auden and Saint wear matching scowls.

  Everything about them should be a contrast—light brown hair to dark, hazel eyes to near black, tailored wool to mud-streaked denim—but when they both frown, they almost look like brothers. It’s those proud cheekbones and carved jaws, I decide, and maybe also the long eyelashes and too-pretty mouths. A mixture of young male power and vulnerable beauty.

  I go on with my half-explanation, half-apology. “It’s obviously a very, very old rite, and my guess is that it predates Christianity by a big measure of time. And if we had trouble reconciling ourselves with the Victorian version of our ceremony, then I imagine we’ll struggle even more with this. But as Becket said, this is our Imbolc and we get to shape it however we wish, so we don’t have to do anything with this book. We can put it back on the shelf and forget about it.”

  Auden pushes back from the table and stands up, going over to a large window that looks out onto the driveway. “But that’s not what you want to do, is it?” he asks.

  I swallow down the denial wanting to worm free from my lips. I refuse to be ashamed of the things I like. For the most part. Unless the shame is part of the fun.

  “What I want is immaterial,” I say diplomatically. “It’s up to Delphine. And of course, she won’t—”

  “I think we should do it!” Delphine says. Every face in the room except Sir James Frazer’s turns toward her in shock.

  “What?” she asks, surprised by our surprise. “Why not? What’s so different about it than playing Spin the Bottle?”

  “A lot,” many voices answer at once.

  She waves a hand. “We’re not all such prudes as all that, are we? It’s just sex.”

  “Kinky, ritualistic, muddy sex,” Saint observes. The light catches on his lip ring as he leans back in his chair and crosses his arms, his eyebrow raised as he looks at us. “If we couldn’t handle a kissing game, how are we going to handle watching two of us fuck?”

  “Well, it’ll be Delphine and Auden,” I say in a placatory voice. “So it’s not such a radical—”

  I don’t break off because Saint scowls again, but because Delphine corrects me.

  “It won’t be me.”

  I turn to face her. I’ve been framing this entire discussion around the fact that if we did do this bananaballs thing, it would be the two of us who were already paired off, the two who were already having sex. And I’ve been doing a very good job of pretending it didn’t bother me too. “Delphine, you wanted to be the bride in the beginning, remember? It was one of the first things you wanted from this, and if this makes you feel like you can’t be the bride, then we’re not doing it. End of story.”

  “No, not end of story,” Delphine argues back. “I wouldn’t have known that I wanted this until you told us about it, but don’t you think—” her voice drops and pink rises to her cheeks “—don’t you think it sounds like fun?”

  Well, I can’t lie about that.

  “But it can’t be me,” she says. “This book says she’s supposed to be a virgin, and I’m not.”

  Becket, Rebecca, and Auden clearly know something Saint and I don’t, because there’s an explosion of angry protests at this, protests so heated and fast that I can’t make out what any individual person is saying before she flaps her hands at them to get them to shut up.

  “I know, I know. But there’s more to it than that. Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about the whole ‘bride’ thing anyway.”

  She says this last part lightly, but after she finishes speaking, her eyes drop briefly to her engagement ring. I can’t help but glance over to Auden, who’s also looking at Delphine’s hand, and there’s so much grief in his face that I hate myself for every moment I ever wished the two of them apart.

  He loves her. Whatever else is true about Auden, he loves Delphine Dansey.

  My sadness at that comes with a wave of exhaustion so severe that I make myself stand up and pace so I won’t fall asleep at the table.

  “So,” I say, swallowing down the knot in my throat—a knot for Auden and Delphine—and for me too. “You’re saying we should do this, but you don’t want to be the bride.”

  “Exactly,” Delphine says, all beams and bounces once again. “Now, who in here hasn’t had sex?”

  Rebecca makes an impatient noise. “Virginity is a construct. A meaningless, destructive construct that I think we can all agree to ignore in this conversation.”

  I think about all the years I’ve waited, of my conclusion earlier this month that sex was merely a step and not a gateway. I think of how I feel with every person here in this room, how I feel more hunger and more rightness with any one of them than with anyone else I’ve ever been with—as if it was always meant to be here, always meant to be them.

  Can something be meaningless and meaningful at the same time?

  “I agree that it’s a construct, but—” I stop my pacing to face everyone. I start over. “We’re right to say that a first time doesn’t have to mean everything, and it doesn’t even have to mean anything. But it can mean something if we want it to.”

  “Spoken like a virgin,” she replies, but her eyes are friendly.

  “So Poe’s a candidate,” Delphine wraps up for us, taking a drink and looking over her mug at us like we’re giving her gossip. “And . . . Becket?”

  Becket blushes. Actually blushes, looking down at the fingers laced in his lap. “Ah . . . no. I’m not a candidate.”

  “Becket,” Delphine gasps.

  “I didn’t always know I was going to a priest,” Becket mutters.

  “I’m not a virgin either,” Rebecca says. “Not that it matters.”

  We all look at Saint.

  He crosses his arms even more tightly across his chest and looks at us all defiantly. “Define virgin,” he drawls.

  “Oh, for fuck
’s sake,” Delphine says. “Have you had prolonged contact with someone’s cock, cunt, or arse?”

  That wipes the sullenness right off his face. He looks speechless at Delphine’s crass language, and I know how he feels, given that she could barely say pussy to me the other night.

  “What?” she says, noticing all of our expressions. “If we’re going to do this, we need to get over being embarrassed about these things.”

  Maybe so, but it seems to me like Delphine’s changed more in the last week than I would have thought possible.

  “Fine,” Saint bites off. “I haven’t had prolonged contact with anyone’s genitals, and they haven’t had contact with mine.”

  “Did any of the brief contact result in someone having an orgasm?”

  Is it me, or do Saint’s eyes flicker in Auden’s direction?

  “No,” Saint says. “No orgasms were the result.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Rebecca cuts in. “Orgasms can’t be the metric—”

  “Orgasms or contact,” Delphine clarifies defensively.

  “I think,” Becket says, “this just proves how flawed the notion of virginity is to begin with.”

  “That is what I’ve been trying to say this whole time,” grumbles Rebecca.

  “But,” Becket says, shooting a look over at his friend, “that doesn’t mean we can’t break it down and re-appropriate the parts we find appealing or useful. If we choose the elements we like, with open eyes, with intention, I see no problem with it.”

  Silence lays heavy in the room, Becket’s assured, priestly voice ringing through our thoughts as we think this through, each of us shifting a little as the silence stretches on.

  Eventually Rebecca realizes we’ve all started staring at her for her answer, and she heaves a giant sigh. A Delphine Sigh. “Ugh,” she says. “Fine.”

  “So that settles it,” Delphine declares. “Poe and Saint are our virgins—”

  “I’m a virgin too,” Auden says quietly.

  The room goes still.

  “What?” Delphine exclaims, her expression one of horror.

  She can’t be any more stunned than I am, because she and Auden are engaged, and if he’s a virgin, then that means they’ve never . . .

  God.

  They’ve never had sex.

  “There wasn’t anyone else before you,” Auden says, leaning back against the counter, his eyes on Delphine. “And I meant every promise I made to you about . . .”

  He presses his mouth closed, as if deciding that’s too private for the rest of us to hear, and changes course. “So by everyone else’s definitions, I’m a virgin too.”

  “Oh Auden,” says Delphine, a sad note in her voice. “I never realized . . . I just assumed that there must have been someone you wanted before we started dating.”

  “There was,” Auden says tiredly. “But he didn’t want me back.”

  Saint next to me goes very, very still. So still I think I can hear his heart beating like it’s outside of his body.

  “I think we should do this,” Becket says abruptly, before Auden can say anything else.

  “Why?” Auden asks. “And please try not to forget that you are a Catholic priest when you answer this time.”

  “It’s my opinion as a Catholic priest that we’re talking about this in the wrong fashion,” Becket says. “These kinds of things aren’t meant to be dissected in the bright light of day. Rituals are supposed to be acted out and performed. And the explanation for why they’re done is always going to feel flimsy when it’s held up without context and without the actions that imbue them with meaning. The doing of them is the explanation, it is the understanding. They are built to reach inside us and expose the things that words can’t excavate, the longings and the joys that reason and logic can’t puzzle out.

  “If we want to consider doing this with any degree of fairness, then we’ll have to set aside logic for the present moment. We’ll have to listen to the parts of ourselves we’re not used to listening to. The little slivers in our hearts that we’ve trained ourselves to ignore—those tender soul-splinters that ache when we hear the wind sighing a certain way or when we see the stars glitter over the sea. Those slivers haven’t forgotten how to hope that there’s something more to this world than we can see or touch.

  “We can sit around this table all night and find a thousand reasons why it would be silly or prohibitively difficult to perform a ceremony we have no personal connection to. Or we can decide that we’re willing to approach it the way it’s meant to be approached—not cynically, not ironically, but with fascination and respect. It’s the same I would ask of any non-Catholic coming to Mass.”

  “This is different than Mass,” St. Sebastian says.

  “Why?” Becket asks.

  Saint swivels his head to look at Becket. “You mean aside from the ritualized sex?”

  “Well, Mass has ritualized cannibalism, so I’m not sure which is more civilized in your view,” says the priest in a mild tone.

  “The cannibalism is symbolic,” Saint argues. “We’re talking about actual, non-symbolic sex.”

  “Just because it’s real doesn’t mean it’s not symbolic,” I interject.

  “You know what I meant,” Saint replies with a touch of exasperation. “And I want to do the Imbolc ceremony—I do—it’s just that this part is . . . I mean, how? How will we look at each other afterward?”

  “I managed to look everyone in the eye after being spanked, didn’t I? You can still look at Becket even though he had his tongue in your mouth.”

  Saint’s cheeks darken the slightest bit and he swallows. “That’s different.”

  “But why does it have to be?” I ask. “Think about it—if we had a wild night, say, with lots to drink and maybe more kissing, and two of us ended up fooling around in the shadows of the library—why would that be acceptable and normal, but choosing to have sex in advance isn’t?”

  “Because it’s not normal,” he says. “No one else is doing this, Poe; there’s not a greeting card you give to the person you’re going to fuck in the mud, there’s not an Imbolc Day sale on Prosecco and chocolate, teenagers aren’t sneaking off to have ‘Celtic goddess role-play’ sex.”

  “I believe it’s called aspecting,” Becket observes.

  “My point is,” Saint says, talking over the priest, “we don’t have any reference for this—the uniquely Thornchapel way of celebrating Imbolc. We don’t have a script for what comes after. There’s nothing and no one we can look at who’ve done exactly what we’re going to do.”

  Unless our parents did it before us . . .

  “I didn’t realize you were such a traditionalist,” Becket says.

  “I’m not! I’m fucking not at all, but you all don’t get it, you don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to see someone you care about, someone you’d tear out a lung just to talk to, and you can’t. You can’t talk to them because what you’ve done to each other in the past is an iron door without a lock between you.”

  Auden doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t have to. He closes his eyes and tugs at his hair as he turns back to the window.

  If Saint notices, he doesn’t show it. He finishes, “And I don’t think I can bear it if that happens with us. I’m sorry if that’s too honest, if I sound too desperate, but I don’t want to lose you, I don’t want to lose this.” He looks at all of us, Auden too, even though Auden can’t see him looking. “I just got it back. I don’t want to risk it. I can’t.”

  I take a seat again, so I can put my hand over Saint’s on the table. “Maybe there’s another option other than it tearing us apart?”

  He sighs. “What would that be?”

  “It brings us closer together.”

  A slow ripple moves through the room as everyone processes this.

  “Maybe,” I continue, “maybe we do this and we’re better for it. It won’t be a door, but a link. A bond. A knot tying us together.”

  “I vote yes,” says Rebecca
suddenly, surprising us all. And then she makes a face at our surprise. “Well, Poe had a point about the spanking, actually. It reminds me of kink, of some of the more ritualized kink scenes I’ve done. And thinking of it like that . . . it makes a certain kind of sense to me. Not logical sense, like Becket was saying. Like an intuitive sense, I suppose. A mythological sense.”

  “I say yes, obviously,” Delphine votes.

  “Me too,” agrees Becket.

  “And me,” I say. I look over at Auden, who’s still facing the window, and then over to Saint, who’s chewing on his lip ring. “But it has to be all of us. We all have to agree.”

  Saint shifts, scowls a little around where he’s pulled his lip piercing into his mouth. “I guess,” he mumbles.

  “That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says, louder this time. “I’m saying yes. But I’m also saying—asking—for this not to hurt us. I don’t want to not belong again.”

  And then his cheeks flush very dark indeed, and he scowls even deeper, as if it cost him everything to be so honest with us. I reach down and squeeze his leg in encouragement, and to my surprise, he traps my hand there and laces his fingers through my own. The firm heat of his thigh through his jeans sends warmth everywhere through me, up to my cheeks and down to my cunt. It feels so private, so intimate, to have my hand against his leg, to be touching him under the table, and I flush as deeply as Saint does as I try to keep my mind on our conversation and not just the supple stretch of male thigh pressed against my palm.

  It’s just Auden left now, and I feel certain he’s going to say no. He’s going to say no because this is madness, or because it’s not emotionally safe for any of us, or because Saint said yes. He’s going to say no because he can’t stop fighting Thornchapel, he can’t bear for it to have any more influence over him than it already does.

  He’s going to say no because his imaginary kingdom never included muddy, holy, fire-lit sex in the woods.

  He finally turns to face us. His hands are at his sides, and his eyes are downcast, their dark lashes revealing only a small, hooded glimpse of tormented hazel.