Page 14 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“I can tell you’re really falling on the sword here,” Rebecca remarks.
Auden’s still looking at me, and when she says that, he looks away. I wonder if he’s thinking of the time I didn’t fall on a sword, I wonder if he’s thinking of the time I ran away from him, feet pounding over the soft grass of Methodist graves.
“I think I’ll make some tea,” Becket decides, giving Proserpina and Auden one last look, as if the priest in him is torn about leaving such a battered lamb in the arms of a wolf. But then Auden tucks Poe higher against his chest, kissing her temple as he does, and Becket makes up his mind and goes to the door. “Come down when you’re done and we’ll be waiting with drinks.”
“I’ll go with you,” Delphine offers, and Rebecca nods.
“Me too,” she says, and then she walks up to me, putting a hand on the place where my shoulder meets my chest. “Keep him there with you and Poe,” she says in a low voice only I can hear.
“Auden?” I ask back, just as quietly.
She nods. “He’ll want to leave. He feels . . . excluded . . . from whatever it is that you and Poe have right now. And maybe he is. But also I think both of you need him there. You and Poe are like air and water, and he’s earth. He’s fire. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“He’s necessary.”
“He balances you,” she corrects. And then she narrows her ey
es at me. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten what you did to him all those years ago. If you hurt him again . . . ”
Guilt, so familiar it’s almost comforting, rushes up to meet me.
“Believe me, Rebecca, I haven’t forgotten either. I never can.”
Auden’s room in the old wing of the house is exactly what I’d expect. Despite its temporary nature while he renovates the south wing, he’s put up bookshelves upon bookshelves, lined with rows and rows of graphic novels. There’s a small desk in here, with none of the usual architect’s trappings—no tools for scaling measurements, no adjustable triangles, no L-squares. Just pencils and pens and a lamp. Just several sheets of glaringly blank paper.
A large bed dominates the space, made up with pillows and blankets in such a complementary mix of colors and fabrics that it has to be deliberate—and no doubt purchased by Delphine when she was Auden’s fiancée.
Which was up until just a couple days ago.
God. I feel like we’ve all lived a lifetime since then.
Auden lays Poe on the bed, arranging her back into the pillows and then carefully unloosing her arms from his neck when she refuses to let go. She’s still crying a little, and her hands slide down to his bare forearms.
“Stay,” she says thickly. “I want both of you here.”
Auden looks at her and then at me. “I can’t,” he says in an anguished voice, and I remember what he said this morning, that he’d died on the spot, that he was dead. I don’t want him dead, but I also can’t regret anything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours . . . and I especially can’t regret anything that’s brought me and Poe together.
But I love him as much as I love her—even if that love has been so thoroughly poisoned that even calling it love feels like a disservice to all the torment it’s endured—and I hate seeing him hurt.
I’ve hurt him enough for lifetimes.
“Stay,” I echo, stepping forward so that I’m on the other side of the bed from him. I take off my shirt, and his eyes burn over my naked torso like coals.
My body responds like those coals have just been fanned into flame.
“Stay,” I plead again.
He drops his eyes down to Poe, tearful and flushed and naked. I can only imagine what a sight she is for a sadist right now—a feast of need and vulnerability, a living altar offering of delicious lust. And then he looks back up to me, hands flexing restlessly at his sides, and I know what he’s imagining. He’s imagining breaking me too, imagining me next to Poe just as flushed and raw and ready for the final act. His twin possessions. His two kept things.
Keep me any way you want, I want to tell him. Just so long as you keep me close.
I reach down and pop open my jeans, unzipping them and then kicking off my boots. He swallows.
“I don’t know if I can watch the two of you . . . together,” he says finally.
“Then don’t watch,” Poe says. “Fuck me instead.”
Auden reacts like he’s been struck. He lets out a grunting, pained breath, his eyes slamming shut. “I haven’t earned you,” he tells her tightly, opening his eyes again and staring down at her with the yearning of a prisoner. “I won’t take anything I haven’t earned.”
