A Lesson in Thorns

by Sierra Simone

  He’s waking up. He’s becoming himself.

  God help me when he’s fully awake. I’ll have no defenses against him.

  I won’t want any.

  Satisfied that Saint is the good kind of dazed, Auden finally glances down at the mess he made of himself. With an inscrutable sigh, he uses his thumb to pull down his boxers and then he steps into the spray, rinsing off his cock with the detachment of a doctor rinsing off a surgical tool.

  Once he’s clean, he glances up at me. “You’re all cleaned off?” he asks, like our orgasmic interlude was an unwelcome intrusion into our real business of washing.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Good.”

  Auden shuts off the water, helps me onto the bath mat, and then I’m wrapped in a giant towel and folded back up into his arms. I could walk right now, I really could, but I don’t make a peep to that effect. I simply rest my head against his shoulder and enjoy the feeling of being carried by the boy I married when I was ten.

  Chapter 27

  To Thee Do We Send Up Our Sighs

  St. Sebastian doesn’t know what to do with his hands or his face or his rapid, giddy heart.

  He sits on the bed next to Poe while Auden tends to her hand. He disinfects and then bandages each tiny cut, scratch, or puncture made by the thorns, and with each one, after he cleans it but before he covers it with a plaster, he bends down and gives it a soft, reverent kiss. As if the little cuts are precious to him, as if Poe is precious to him.

  Auden is unbearably handsome like this, kneeling in front of Poe with his brows drawn together in concentration and his mouth soft with tender focus. And even more unbearable is the memory of Auden’s eyes when Auden held his throat and made him come.

  Fuck, those eyes. Gorgeous and selfish and sexual and only for Saint in that moment.

  Only for him.

  Except they were for Poe too in a way, and the memory of her small hands exploring him makes him hot all over again. He would have come with her too, if he’d had enough time, he would have wrapped his hand around her own and shown her how to be rough with him, how to toss him off quick and mean like he does to himself when he needs to come.

  She’s as unbearably beautiful as Auden is handsome right now, naked and petite and curvy, her damp hair tumbling down to her waist in dark waves and her plump mouth parted as she watches Auden kiss and fuss over her cuts. Saint wants to try again—or maybe not so much try again as do it all over so he could watch her this time, watch her face as Auden pinned him to the wall by his throat and masturbated him. To tell her that he wants her like he wants Auden, that he wants them both, that he wants everything but he doesn’t know how to hold all this wanting inside of himself without breaking.

  It feels like he’s been pried open, like the air is blowing across his pulpy, beating heart, and like the slightest touch on that exposed organ will kill him.

  So he doesn’t know what to do with himself as Auden tends to Poe and then finally finishes his work, standing up and stretching his back with a low, male groan. Poe, clean and kissed and sleepy again, lays her head on Saint’s shoulder and promptly starts snoring tiny, quiet snores.

  “I need to go back out to the ruins,” Auden tells Saint. “We got out of there so fast, and I can’t stop worrying about something still being on fire.”

  Saint glances pointedly at the windows, which are striped with thick rivulets of rain. “Nothing’s still burning in that.” It costs him something more dear than he’d like to admit when he adds, “Stay. Stay here with us.”

  For a minute, Auden looks like he wants nothing more in the world than to peel off his wet boxers and crawl into bed with Poe and Saint and sleep off their strange night in a warm, tangled cuddle.

  But then he sighs, and with the sigh comes a look of resignation that Saint knows from long experience can’t be fought.

  “I won’t be able to sleep until I check. But you should stay,” he says. “She needs to be snuggled.”

  “You don’t want to be the one to do that?” Saint asks, incredulous. “You’d let me?”

  “I’m delegating,” Auden says with a raised eyebrow. “But I’ll be back, and then I’ll be seeing to her snuggling myself.”

  He says it so soberly, so seriously, that Saint can’t help but laugh a little. “You can relax, General Guest. I’ll keep the snuggling beachhead safe and surrender it immediately upon your return.”

  Auden’s dimple dents in, as if he’s fighting a smile, and then it disappears again. “Keep her warm,” he orders, as if Saint is his to order, and then he leaves.

  I’m not his to order, Saint reminds himself as he carefully settles Poe under the covers. One soul-quaking hand job didn’t erase the years of pain and guilt and anger between them. One perfect moment with Auden cracking open his every fantasy and bringing them to life didn’t change the ugly, spotted truth.

  They could never be anything more than enemies. Anything closer than two men who want the same woman.

  He turns off the light, strips off his boxers, and climbs into the bed, pulling Poe close against him. She’s dozy and limp and warm, and burrows trustingly into his chest in a way that makes him strangely and fiercely protective. Tomorrow, he tells himself, tomorrow he’s going to sort this all out with her. He’s going to apologize for all his indecision and all the times he pushed her away, and then he’s going to choose her over everything else. Everything.

  It feels like he’s just had this thought, just made this promise to himself, when he opens his eyes and realizes the rain has stopped and Poe is awake.

  “What time is it?” he asks, his voice husky from the sleep he hadn’t realized he was having.

  “Close to three,” she says.

  He’s probably only been asleep for an hour or so, then. He blinks at the dark windows, knowing Auden is still probably out in the ruins, checking for fires and gathering their things. He feels a stab of guilt for not helping, and tells himself he’ll help tomorrow. He’ll take care of the fallen tree and anything else that still needs doing.

  Poe’s up on one elbow staring down at him, her delicate, ethereal face in an expression of troubled unhappiness.

  Alarmed, St. Sebastian sits up. “Are you okay? Are you hurting? Do you need me to get anything?”

  Slowly, Poe shakes her head. “No, I—God, it’s the strangest thing.”

  Fuck. “Tell me what it is and I’ll fix it.”

  She takes his hand under the blanket and presses it hard against her cunt. It’s as hot and wet and swollen as it ever was, as if she hasn’t already been satisfied twice tonight.

  “Can you fix this?” she whispers. “Because it aches, Saint.”

  He can’t help it, he explores her with his fingers, the first touch of her sweetness that he’s had. She’s soft there, so fucking soft, and wet in a way that makes his entire body shudder just to touch. He wants her, he wants her like this, exactly like this, and it’s not that he thinks he’s incapable of vanilla sex, it’s just that the idea of her needing him to help, of him having no choice but to offer his body—

  It makes it all the more rousing in a way he can’t quantify. Like the difference between wine and whisky, or rain and thunder. One is good, but the other is a treat.

  One is a comfort and the other is a thrill.

  “You want my hands or my mouth?” he asks her. He wants to give her both, he wants to give her so much pleasure that when she thinks of tonight, she’ll think of him alongside Auden and Delphine. He wants to take care of her, make her happy, because Proserpina’s happiness is like a sunshine that feeds everything; it’s like water trickling through him, sweet and life-giving.

  He’ll do anything to make her happy.

  “What if,” she murmurs, “you give me something else?”

  It takes him a moment to understand.

  “Proserpina . . .”

  “I’ve been sure for weeks now,” she tells him. “Since the day I found you in the Thorncombe Library. I knew I wanted t
o do this with you.”

  He runs a hand over his face, hardly daring to dream this is real. “You might still be sore, though. I don’t want this to hurt.”

  She gives him a wicked smile. “I like things that hurt.”

  “Fuck, Poe. You’re killing me.”

  She laughs, but then the smile fades a little. “Do you want to? I mean, will it be okay for you since we’re both—well, I’m not—” She pauses. “In the shower, I noticed you needed—”

  Saint presses a finger to her lips and she stops talking. “Yes, I want to. Yes, I’ll be okay. If I need something more during, then we’ll figure it out, right? There’s nothing that two people who like each other can’t figure out if they’re willing to try.”

  And he means it. But really, this is enough—her needing him and his body. The illusion of having no choice but to serve her with pleasure . . .

  Her smile comes back. “Okay.”

  And that’s how St. Sebastian ends up rolling on a condom that Poe pulls out of her nightstand from a box she’s been keeping “just in case” she managed to seduce him. The fact that she even thought she’d have to try to seduce him at all when he’d spend the rest of his life in bed with her if he could is laughable, but also brutally touching.

  He’s wanted. He’s desired. He’s so wanted and desired that the sexiest, smartest woman he’s ever met has been hoping and wishing to fuck him. It makes him feel powerful and strong, and when he parts her legs with an impatient thigh and wedges the head of his erection against her cunt, he feels even more powerful still. He slides into her with one unrepentant thrust and covers her body with his own.

  She comes almost immediately. He’s never done this, never had any kind of sex until this very night, but some instinct makes him reach between them and fondle her clit while he strokes into her. It’s hard—hard to concentrate when his thick organ is squeezed into the tightest, wettest, hottest thing he’s ever known, when his climax is practically shredding the inside of his belly, when even in the darkness, he can make out the quiver of Poe’s tits and the open, breathless part of her sweet mouth—but he does it. He manages to rub her clit just right, and then she’s trembling and shaking and finally fluttering around him with delicate contractions that rip away the last of his control. He takes her hand and pushes it into his hair.

  “Pull,” he gasps out. “Pull hard.”

  She pulls.

  Giving in to the primal, mindless urge to mate, he pumps his hips hard and deep, thrusting forcefully enough to make her cry out and bang the headboard against the wall, feeling the sweet, controlling anchor of her hand in his hair all the while. It’s enough, it’s more than enough, and with a low grunt, he fills a condom for the very first time in his life. Pulse after wet, hot pulse, he stays buried in her until he’s drained the last of himself, until her thighs loosen from around his hips.

  And before he pulls out, he kisses her mouth and whispers, “You have me, Proserpina.”

  And she says back, simply but happily, “I have you.”

  Becket is nearly violent with frustration when he gets to the south door and realizes he’s not alone, but years of fighting back the blistering zeal means he’s able to pretend his way to a smile and a “Fancy seeing you here,” and he fakes it well enough that Auden smiles back.

  “Proserpina is resting with Saint,” he says. “And I thought I’d go check the ruins one last time and maybe bring some of the things back. How’s Delphine?”

  “Chipper. Wide awake and talking a mile a minute. So I also thought I’d check on the ruins.”

  Auden laughs a little and bends to pull on his rain boots, and Becket does the same. Sir James Frazer, who can hear boots being put on from two villages away, bounds into the makeshift boot room and wags his tail at Auden.

  Auden’s mouth slants in what seems to be a regretful contemplation of how much mud Sir James Frazer will bring back in with him, but he ends up opening the door with a sigh. “Oh, all right,” he tells the dog, who gives his master a happy look and then trots out into the rainy night.

  Both men pull on coats, and Auden flips open the top of a bench to extract umbrellas and an old flashlight. He hands it to Becket along with an umbrella, and then wordlessly they follow the dog outside.

  It must be near two in the morning, and the darkness, if anything, is even thicker than before. The old flashlight’s beam, while a pleasantly nostalgic yellow, is not much stronger than Becket’s lantern from earlier, and by now, the rain has so slicked the world over with mud that the path is downright treacherous. Not that any of that slows down Sir James, who tears off into the woods at random intervals and then tears back, reappearing with even muddier paws and a few extra wet leaves clinging to his fur.

  Still though, despite the unwelcome addition of another person, Becket’s frustration eases. Auden is quiet as they walk, as if caught up in his own thoughts, and Sir James is always good company, and anyway, Becket is doing what he needs to do, what the zeal demands of him. He’s going back to the chapel.

  If there had been any earlier doubt that he’d remain unmoved during the ceremony, if there had been lingering mental distance between him and these old rituals—well, it’s all obliterated now. He feels different, unwoven or unmade, like God has unknotted the bindings of his soul and let it sprawl everywhere like a mess of roots and branches and vines. He’s felt this loose and grasping before, but never this much, never this wildly, and the zeal has never consumed him this deeply for so many hours at a time.

  All he wants is to kneel in front of the chapel’s altar and cry. With gratitude and wonder and sheer awe at the hand of God in his life—a hand that can reach him even through fire and sex and cakes and ale.

  But when they get to the thorn chapel and Auden begins hunting down their things by the light of his phone, Becket doesn’t go in front of the altar. Instead he walks behind it to examine the tree.

  It has fallen some ways—the stump was a good ten feet outside the chapel wall, and is now a broken, splintered mess from where the trunk has cracked away and fallen—and the force of the fall was enough to drive it deep into the grass hump that served as their altar.

  He tells his parishioners not to assign meaning to events like this, not to confuse coincidences with omens, but he can’t take his own advice. This feels like an omen to him.

  He’s just not sure if it’s good or bad.

  I know what you did.

  Troubling memories stir to the surface of his mind, and Becket takes a step away from the altar and the tree. He looks away, he tries to think of earlier tonight, of Delphine and Poe gilded into holy figures by the light of the fire, he tries to think of St. Brigid and candles and cookies and the dog and Auden moving through the ruins like a methodical ghost doomed to pick up wet blankets—he tries, he tries, he tries.

  I know what you did.

  It was his own voice that had said that. Not now, but six years ago.

  Here in this very place.

  I know what you did.

  He closes his eyes, but it only brings the memory closer to the fore, only shows him the ruins as they were that summer—lush and green and rippling with magic. He’d come to them on his own, rented a car and driven away from his grandmother’s house in Cornwall, where he’d been staying for the summer.

  He’d parked in the village and picked his way over the public footpaths ringing the valley until he’d managed to sight the house, and using the house and the river as reference points, had tramped his way through the wilderness to the thorn chapel.

  For a long few hours, he’d been alone with God, his thoughts and feelings bent wholly on the contemplation of the divine and what it wanted from him.

  And then he was no longer alone. He’d known it from the prickle along the backs of his arms and his neck, he’d known it from the way the breeze changed, as if it was trying to tell Becket the truth about the intruder.

  Bad.

  Wrong.

  The intruder had been none o
ther than Ralph Guest, Auden’s father. He’d stridden into the clearing with his head down and expensive flowers clutched in his fist, and so he hadn’t seen Becket until they were inside the walls together.

  “You’re not allowed here,” Ralph said once he noticed Becket, glaring at him with that haughty, dangerous cool that only a Guest could muster.

  “You don’t recognize me?” Becket asked. It had been six years, after all, since he’d been here last, so he shouldn’t have been surprised, but it did confuse him a little. How could he not be indelibly burned into the memories of everyone here when they were all burned into his?

  Ralph’s mouth had screwed up into an angry, little sneer. “Of course I recognize you.”

  Bad, the thorn chapel seemed to whisper around Becket. Wrong.

  “Why do you have flowers?” Becket asked him then, but he already knew why.

  He already knew where Ralph would lay them down too.

  Ralph’s eyes had narrowed then. “Don’t. Test. Me,” he’d hissed. “I could still call the police. It’s only for the sake of your father that I won’t.”

  The hand clutching the flowers had been shaking though.

  Ralph Guest was afraid. And Becket knew why.

  “I know what you did,” he told the older man. “I know what you did here.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Ralph said uncertainly. Fearfully.

  “I know what you did.”

  Ralph’s fear crystalized into anger, and he’d taken one threatening step toward Becket, which was all it took to send Becket running, scrambling up steep hills through the woods until he emerged onto a footpath, back sweaty and palms covered in mud from how often he’d fallen.

  He’d been too frightened to return for years, too frightened even to think of it; only taking the collar had given him enough sense of safety to return. And by then, Ralph was too sick to terrorize anyone any longer, even people trespassing into the chapel ruins.

  In the here and now, Becket walks back to the altar and the tree. It’s too dark and wet to see much, even with the flashlight, but he knows the exact spot he’s looking for.