Page 12 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Auden comes into view, his trousers hugging his trim hips and those bare feet still driving me to distraction. I can see the lean muscles of his abdomen and chest tensing and releasing as he breathes, the faint sheen of sweat on his chest and shoulders even though he’s only been watching.
“Look at me, Proserpina,” he says for the second time tonight, and I look up at him. Hazel eyes burning behind his glasses, his mouth still slightly swollen from kissing. His jaw is tight with anguish, and I’m not sure why until he steps forward and presses his lips to mine. “You’re so beautiful,” he says against my mouth. “You’re so beautiful, and I haven’t earned you yet.”
I want to tell him I don’t care anymore, that he can consider me earned because nothing matters—but before I can, Rebecca rains a blow across my back that buckles my knees.
I scream.
Auden catches me, tender even as his hands on my back send waves of pain where they touch my welts, and then
once I’m on my feet again, he steps back so Rebecca can strike.
And she does. Over and over and over again.
Across my back, across my ass. Thick cords of pain across each thigh—four times. She hits hard and fast and precise, moving from the side to behind me so she can use the full range of the flogger, both the meat of the falls and the nasty, wicked tips that feel like scars being made when they dig into my skin. On my sensitized, inflamed skin, each blow is agony, and each strike digs deep into my sore muscles, knocking the air right out of me.
When I can breathe, I scream again and again until I can’t scream anymore. Until my voice is hoarse and my breathing is wild and I’m so sweaty and weak that even standing feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
It should sound terrible, this flogging.
But it’s wonderful.
Sometimes pain drives me in, in, in, sending me into a place inside myself that’s still and quiet and calm, a place much like the feeling of being inside under a blanket when the wind howls outside and the sky hurls rain and thunder against the windows.
But this—this is making me fly apart, not watery-quiet, but airy and fiery and loud. This is a combustion sending me outwards, this is me trembling and shaking until I break. Every brittle and strong part of me, every blighted happiness and every hope that hasn’t yet been poisoned, every moment I ever spent with my mother and all the moments I’ll never get to have—
All I’ve been given and all I’ve been robbed of—
The girl who came to Thornchapel thinking everything is possible and the girl who saw her mother buried behind the altar—
All of it. All of me. I crack into spiderwebbing fissures of pain, and then I splinter, and then I shatter into a million pieces. A trillion. I’m nothing anymore, I’m not Proserpina, I’m not a librarian, I’m not a girl who loves summer and the smell of books, I’m not falling in love with two men, I’m not a bride or a saint or a goddess. I’m not a daughter.
I’m simply . . . broken.
One last strike lands across my ass, not nearly as hard as the ones that preceded it, but on top of the tender skin there and on top of the residual pain still coursing through my system, it’s enough to finish the job. The suffering in my body and the suffering in my mind are linked and fused, they become one and the same, and every thought or feeling too bleak or too deranged for words finally have a voice, and that voice is the pain.
The pain is speaking, the pain says:
I miss her.
I collapse, caught by Auden immediately, who cradles me against his chest while I cry. Each tear is hotter than the flogger’s path across my back, each racking sob tears out of me more forcefully than my earlier screams. I feel them both—I feel everything—as Auden crushes me to him and murmurs praise into my hair, as Rebecca carefully unties me from the beam and unwraps my rope-cinched wrists.
“I’m here,” he says into my hair as he lifts me all the way into his arms and I lean my head against his chest. As I cry and cry and cry. “You’re so beautiful and I’m here.”
He’s here.
My mother’s not.
But he is. And Rebecca is. And somewhere around here is Delphine and Saint and Becket. They’re here and I’m not alone, even though I’m the loneliest I’ve ever been.
And in the paradox of grief, in the pain and in the numbness, in the crammed-full void, in the bone-breaking relief of just suffering, there’s one last thing I want, one last fire to be doused, one last flood I need to wash me clean. Even as I bury my face in Auden’s firm chest, I squirm as the heat in my back and ass all pulls into one point low in my belly. My clitoris is hard enough that the pressure from my closed thighs sends darts of pleasure radiating through my stomach, and between my sobs start coming low, needy moans.
“What do you need, little bride?” Auden whispers to me.
Someone to fuck me, I try to say, but I’m still too far gone for words, for explaining the needs racking my body, and I just want Auden and Rebecca to figure it out, just to do it, because I’m in their hands and that’s all I want to be.
“She needs to have sex,” Rebecca says from behind us, as if reading my mind. “And soon.”
“Is this so?” Auden asks me, his brow furrowed.
