A Lesson in Thorns

by Sierra Simone

  Another breath.

  “Auden gave me anything I needed, then, you know? He walked me to class, he studied with me. He went to all the legal bits he could. He’d sleep on the floor of my room when I was terrified someone might break in, and he drove me home whenever I needed to just be away. I wouldn’t have finished if it weren’t for him. Well, and Rebecca, but that’s a different story. Anyway, when we graduated, it felt natural that we should keep it up. And then when he proposed a year later, that felt natural too.”

  “Of course it did,” I say. “Oh Delphine. I can’t even imagine. I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” she says quietly. “Sometimes I forget, you know? Sometimes I’m still just Delphine Dansey, and I’m the same girl who likes silly television and lipstick and lots of champagne. And then other times, it feels like it’s touched everything in my life. Left smudges everywhere. Smudges and dirt.”

  “Both can be true.”

  “That’s what my therapist says too,” Delphine responds. “She likes the word seasons a lot. You know, ‘there’s a season for this, there’s a season for that,’ that kind of thing. A season for smudges and a season for normal. A season for same and a season for different. And I wonder . . .”

  “Wonder what?”

  The mask peels off my face and I open my eyes to see Delphine propped on an elbow, looking down at me. “I think I’m about to start a different season now,” she says. And then she drops a light kiss onto my lips. Nothing lingering, nothing deep.

  Just a soft, face-masky brush of her mouth over mine.

  “I think you’re about to start a new season too, Proserpina Markham.”

  “I’m not starting anything—”

  She puts a finger over my lips, and then smiles. “Tomorrow night. You’ll see.”

  I blink up at her. “I still think you should be the bride,” I say against her fingertip.

  Her smile grows sad. “I don’t think I’m ready yet.”

  “We are still talking about the ceremony, right? Not real life?”

  She lifts her finger and slides off my bed. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? It’s all real life.”

  And then she tosses our face masks into the trash, and leaves.

  Chapter 20

  I’m as sleepless tonight as I am normally sleepy, which is how I end up climbing the steps to the south tower with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and my phone flashlight lighting the way.

  The darkness outside feels like a living thing, seeping inside the windows and settling in the tucks and corners of the house. It’s awake, aware—but it’s not sinister, and there’s nothing baleful in its observant gloom as I push through it to get to the tower. It’s more like the night has decided to keep watch with me, as if it wants to wrap itself around my shoulders like my blanket and follow me around. Except when I finally emerge into the tower, I see that the Thornchapel night is already keeping watch with someone else.

  There’s a man standing at one of the windows. A tall man, with shoulders so wide they stretch across the gothic window casings and blot out the moon-glow view outside. I don’t need to see the tumbles of hair or the long-fingered architect’s hands to know who it is.

  I don’t need to hear his low, rich voice to know it’s Auden.

  He speaks anyway, reaching for his glass of whisky as he does. “I keep meaning to have lights wired up here. The flashlights lose their charm after a while.”

  I turn off my charmless flashlight and come up next to him. He wordlessly hands me his glass. He has something closed tight in the fist of his other hand.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I say, after taking a drink.

  “Nervous about tomorrow night?”

  I take another sip and then hand the glass back. Our fingers touch briefly as he takes it from me, and I fight off the automatic shiver that comes with his touch. “I don’t know.”

  He seems amused by this. “You don’t know?”

  “Well, nervous implies an element of fear, right? And I’m not afraid.”

  He glances over at me. The darkness makes it near impossible to read his expression. “No, you wouldn’t be, would you? You’re not afraid of anything.”

  “Categorically untrue.”

  “Okay then, Proserpina Markham. What are you afraid of?”

  I cross my arms and brace my elbows on the windowsill, looking out on the gray-green paleness of the lawn, the distant reaches of the moors beyond the ribbon-thin glint of river. “I’m afraid of never finding out what happened to my mother,” I say after a minute. “I’m afraid that one day I’ll do what she did, and abandon someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

  He doesn’t try to talk me out of my fears, he doesn’t try to reassure me. Instead he slides the glass on the sill so that it’s next to my elbow, and then I gratefully take another drink.

  “What else are you afraid of?” he asks, leaning down, mimicking my posture, and catching my gaze. Even in the dark, his stare is direct—convincing and commanding all at once.

  I couldn’t lie to him right now even if I wanted to.

  “I’m afraid of you,” I whisper. “I’m afraid of how I feel.”

  He takes in a sharp breath, but his eyes don’t leave my face. They search and search and search, as if he can see right through me, right to the heart of me. Still one hand is closed tight, not a fist, but close, like someone who’s caught a small insect and is keeping it trapped.

  “Are you truly afraid of me?” he asks after a minute, straightening up to his full height.

  I have to straighten up myself and tilt my head back to meet his stare. “Yes.”

  He takes a step forward, his slippered feet nudging against my own slippers, his legs pushing against the blanket. “Afraid that I’m going to hurt you?”

  I nod.

  Another step closer, and now his legs are flush with mine, his body warm and hard against me. He trails his open hand down the dark sweep of my hair, and then slowly wraps the length of it around his fist. I whimper at the discomfort in my scalp, at the pulse of heat between my legs.

  “What else?” he murmurs.

  “I’m afraid I’ll like it.”

  The admission only hangs in the air for a second before I’m being pulled down, inexorably down, until I’m kneeling in a pool of soft blanket. He’s still holding me by the hair.

  I shouldn’t let him do this, I shouldn’t be at his feet and damp between the legs when I can still recall the tickling brush of Delphine’s mouth over my own.

  He’s not yours.

  “I’ll confess something, since you confessed to me,” Auden says.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid of the same things you are, Proserpina.”

  My lips part, but no words come out. I don’t know what to say, or if I even know what to hope about what he means by that.

  His voice is gentle as he murmurs, “I want to hurt you so much that I dream about it sometimes.”

  I breathe in a shaky breath, meeting his powerful stare in the dark.

  “I’ve wanted to hurt you since we were ten years old,” he adds. “Sometimes I hurt with wanting to hurt you.”

  “What else are you afraid of?” I ask, echoing his earlier question. He gives me a fond smile, a sweet, crooked-lipped smile. Like he’s indulging me by letting me ask such a thing, and we both know it, and suddenly I want to cry at how good that feels. To be indulged at the same time my hair is wrapped in his fist.

  “I’m afraid of you letting me hurt you,” says Auden.

  “Why?”

  “Because then I’ll want to do it for the rest of my life.”

  We stare at each other for a long time, my hair pulled taut in his fist and his eyes glittering at me, and nothing can matter right now except us, nothing has ever mattered except us, and my hair in his fist and his body towering over mine. And if he wanted to pin me to the ground and shove his fingers into my mouth, I’d let him. I’d let him do anything.

  I’d
let him love me.

  I’d let him make me fall in love with him right back.

  I’d admit that I’m already in love with him.

  He doesn’t pin me though, he doesn’t stick his fingers in my mouth or yank me close to his visible erection. He carefully, deliberately squats down so that we’re at eye level, and then he uses his other hand to cup my jaw.

  Something hard and metallic pushes against my skin.

  “You deserve better than me,” Auden says. We’re now so close that even in the darkness I can see his eyes are rimmed with red. I can see a faint line in his cheek I’ve never seen before—a tiny scar that only reveals itself when the shadows are swirling just right. “You deserve someone who already knows who they are.”

  “I know who you are, Auden Guest,” I tell him softly. “I can know for the both of us.”

  I reach up and tuck my fingers under his palm to peel it away, making sure not to drop whatever he was holding against my skin. I pull his hand down and look at what’s cradled there. In the moonlight, a delicate ring glints with diamonds and antique filigree. An engagement ring.

  The same ring that was on Delphine’s finger earlier tonight.

  “What happened?” I whisper, looking up from his palm to his face.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look so sad. Or so beautiful.

  He loosens my hair with a sigh, stands, and helps me to stand as well, taking care to arrange the blanket back around my shoulders so I won’t be cold.

  “I think it’s fairly obvious what happened,” he says, some of that bitter, rich-boy drawl creeping back into his voice. “Delphine’s decided to call off the engagement. Probably the sensible thing to do, given all that I’ve told you tonight.”

  “Oh Auden,” I say. His hands are still fussing with the blanket, and I see the effort it takes for him to let go of me. Like if he lets go of me, he’ll sink right through the floor and into hell.

  “Are you okay?” I whisper.

  “No,” he says. “I’m not.”

  “Do you—do you need anything?”

  His jaw works to the side a little, but when he answers, his voice is more rich boy than ever. “I think you just gave it to me.”

  A horrible, awful feeling sneaks up through my heels, it crawls up my stomach and chest and balls up in my throat. The kneeling and the hair pulling and the secrets . . .

  I whisper, “Tell me you didn’t talk about hurting me because you wanted to prove something to yourself. Or to Delphine.”

  “What does it matter?” he asks. “It doesn’t make any difference either way.”

  There’s so much ugly embarrassment inside me that I think I might split open with it, like a dress with a cheap zipper. “It always makes a difference,” I say quietly. My chin is starting to tremble now. It’s doing the thing, as Delphine would say. “It makes the difference between us sharing and you using. I thought we shared. But instead—”

  “But instead I used you,” Auden interrupts. “Yes, yes, I get it. Well, I did tell you that you deserved better, didn’t I?”

  I grip the blanket harder around myself, staring at him like I’m seeing him for the first time. “Everything I said and did, I did it out of complete honesty.”

  “Oh, is that right,” he says scornfully.

  “Except one thing,” I continue, so furious and itchy with humiliation that I can’t even look at him. “I said I knew who you were. And now I realize that I have no fucking idea.”

  That seems to break something in him.

  “I was telling the truth too, Proserpina,” he says. “Yes, maybe I’m gutted. Maybe I’m raw and angry and sad as fuck. That doesn’t mean I lied.”

  “It means,” I say, going to the stairs, “that everything we did tonight was about you and about how you feel. I don’t kneel for selfish men, Auden.”

  “But you’ll kneel for an engaged one?”

  “Fuck you,” I spit.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he says coolly.

  Oh my God. I narrow my eyes. “You’re a bastard.”

  He stares at me a moment, mouth tight, his tall, powerful body strained with rage and pain. “If only that were true,” he says finally, turning away from me.

  “If only that were fucking true.”

  Chapter 21

  “Dad?”

  I wince at the sunlight as I sit up in bed with my phone pressed to my ear. Pale and wintery as the day is, I’m still exhausted and bleary from fractured sleep and too many dreams. And from too many waking moments when I re-lived what happened between Auden and me and then had to scream into the pillow.

  “Poe,” my dad says, the p sound a little clumsy, the oe sound a little choked off.

  I pull my phone away from my ear and squint at the time. It’s late morning here, which means it’s late back home. Or very fucking early, depending on your perspective.

  “Dad, are you drunk?”

  I hear the sound of my father getting out of his favorite leather chair—a combination of human grunts and leather squeaks. “Just had a little,” he says. Slurs, more like. “Just enough to get to sleep.”

  “It’s got to be like four a.m. there,” I say. “You should already be asleep.”

  “Wanted to call,” he mumbles. “Wanted to tell you.”

  Which is when the last of the sleep-fog burns off and I remember the text I’d sent last week.

  “Is it about Mom’s family?” I ask eagerly. “The Kernstows?”

  “Should’ve known you’d find out,” he tells me. “Such a smart girl. She was always so proud of you, you know. She’d hang up your report cards in her office at the university. Bragged about you skipping grades to anyone who would listen.”

  This is the most he’s talked about my mother since she left, and I don’t want him ever to stop, but I’m also dying to know about my ancestors. “Dad. Mom’s family. I asked you about them, remember?”

  “I remember,” he says tiredly. “I just didn’t want to tell you.”

  “Don’t I have a right to know?”

  “Don’t I have a right to keep you safe?”

  I kick off my blankets and stand up, grumpy. “Dad.”

  Somewhere on the other end, there’s the sound of a bottle clinking into a glass. “I know, I know. But talking about your mom’s family meant talking about your mom—”

  He breaks off, and my heart twists. I can’t forget that he’s been hurt too, that his life ended the same day mine did.

  He takes an audible drink, and I pace up and down the length of my bed twice. Then he says, “You’re right. Your mother was a Kernstow.”

  “From here?”

  “From the far side of the Thorne Valley. North of Thorncombe.” When he speaks again, his voice is less wobbly, more certain, as if relaying the bare facts makes speaking easier. “Can you guess which Kernstow alienated her family and beloved twin brother in the 1860s by marrying the wrong man?”

  I have a guess. “Estamond?”

  “Estamond.” A hiccup. “She married a Guest.”

  I stop pacing, thinking about Estamond and her happy, fruitful marriage. About Ralph Guest and how much he wanted me to marry Auden. Kernstows and Guests, now and then.

  “Was that a problem?”

  “The Kernstows were forbidden to marry the Guests from time out of mind,” Dad says. “That was the story your mother found. So when Estamond married into the Guest family, it caused a major rift, and led to her twin brother selling the Kernstow farmstead and moving to America with his son after their parents died. He never saw his sister again, or so the legend goes.”

  “I see,” I say, going over to the window again. The sky has grayed over, silvering the air with rain.

  “It should be a boring story,” he says. There’s a tired sort of irritation to his voice now. “There should be nothing to it. My ancestors left Yorkshire in 1901 and came to America, and there’s no mythos around it. It shouldn’t have mattered that your mother’s family came from near Thornchapel, it
shouldn’t have made a difference to anyone or anything.”

  “But it did?” I ask breathlessly, sensing I’m finally about to learn something about my mother, anything; even the tiniest ancestral morsel that might help me understand why she came here. Why she came back.

  “It made a difference to Ralph,” Dad says. “He would have married her if she would have consented. Well, and if I would have given her up, which never would have happened.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say slowly, trying to fit the pieces together. “He was in love with her? Did she love him back?”

  Dad exhales. “I keep forgetting that there’s so much you don’t know.”

  But that’s your fault! I want to say, but I hold my tongue. I want answers more than I want to punish my father for not giving them to me sooner.

  “I think Ralph did love her,” Dad says after a minute. “Or at least he thought he did. He was certainly obsessed with her, and obsession can often feel like love, especially when pain is involved. Or power.”

  “Are you saying they had an affair?” I ask, knowing it’s a tactless question, but barely caring. If she and Ralph were having an affair, then the explanation for why she went back is obvious, and I can begin to let go of her disappearance. I can stop attributing to Thornchapel all the sinister and beautiful qualities that I’d attribute to a temple or a god-garden or a cemetery. I can stop believing it’s suffused with high, holy magic, and I can stop imagining that the high, holy magic chooses people for itself and pulls them inexorably back into its rustling, sun-dappled heart.

  “They didn’t have an affair in the sense that you’re thinking of it,” Dad answers vaguely.

  “Then they did have an affair in some other sense?”

  “I can’t talk about this with you.”

  I make a frustrated noise. “Why not? She’s gone, Ralph’s dead, what difference does it make now?”

  “Exactly. And what difference can it make now?”

  “It makes a difference to me,” I tell him. “I want to know why she came back here. And I deserve to know. And I deserve any pieces of her that are left, because she took herself away from me, because she left me nothing but doubt, and I’m scared of living with that doubt inside me for the rest of my life. I’m scared it will spread to everything, that it will cover over my heart like mold, and then that mold will spread and spread and spread, and everything that’s fresh and bloody and alive in me will wither and decay until there’s nothing left. No pieces of her or me. Nothing.”