Page 114 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Chapter 31
Eight Years Ago
Three days later, the pain in St. Sebastian’s lip was gone and his skin was nearly free of Auden’s art.
He was miserable.
He was also packing for Texas. Turns out his mother’s answer to keeping fear from infecting his life was to send him to Dallas to finish school. Back to where it was hot and sunny and crowded, to where he’d have an army of cousins to defend him anywhere he went.
He hated her for sending him away from Auden.
He loved her for giving him an excuse to run away.
She left that evening to go to her monthly Thorncombe Historical Society meeting—the only group of people who seemed to like the American journalist who somehow washed up onto their shores and had a child with Augie’s brother—and St. Sebastian only debated for a few minutes about what he needed to do next. With a muttered curse and a hard bite to his lower lip, he snatched his wallet off his dresser and ran down to the bus stop . . . after leaving a short note. He was sullen about the move and had been punishing his mother with a sulky, snappish reclusiveness he knew deep down she didn’t deserve, but he also knew if she came back and he wasn’t home, she would be terrified, and she really didn’t deserve that. And he still didn’t have a phone . . .
Note left, bus hopped, St. Sebastian found himself on a tired street in Newton Abbot, home to a cheap tattoo shop where some of his schoolmates came to get piercings.
Twenty-five pounds and a hot lance of pain later, he’d made Auden’s bite on his lip permanent.
The whole way home, he couldn’t resist running his tongue over the barbell now curving through his lip, right in the exact spot where Auden had bitten him. Each stinging thrum as he touched it reminded him of the boy he was leaving behind; each sizzle of pain eased some of the deeper, rawer ache at knowing he would probably—oh, who was he kidding, it was a certainty—never see Auden again. He’d never find out what the M on his chest had meant, he’d never feel Auden’s belt or the wedge of his hips between his legs. He’d never feel Auden’s chest on his back or the searing fullness of his cock.
He’d never get to see Auden blinking awake on the pillow next to him, sunlight catching in his silvering hair as he reached for St. Sebastian to pull him close.
All he’d ever have were memories and dead hopes anchored in his flesh.
Jennifer Martinez didn’t say anything when she saw it later that night, but St. Sebastian knew she knew what it meant. And after that, it seemed like she couldn’t pack him off to Texas fast enough.
“Why can’t you move back with me?” he asked on the train to London. “You do all your work from home, it’s not like you need to show up in an office.”
She tapped her fingers on the table between them. They had a semblance of privacy—the London-bound car on a late weekday evening was sparsely populated—but he could tell she didn’t want to talk about it.
But he still resented her a little from prying him from his life here, even if he didn’t always love it, because it was prying him away from Thornchapel and Auden, and so he pushed her on it, because he wanted to push her on anything. “Mum,” he said, knowing she hated it when he called her that instead of Mamá. “Seriously. Why do we even still live here now that Dad’s gone? His parents are dead, and Uncle Augie’s nice, but it’s not like that’s a reason to stay when the rest of your family is back in Texas.”
She looked out the window, her expression unhappy. “This is where the man I love is, St. Sebastian.”
“He’s dead,” St. Sebastian said harshly. “What difference does it make if you drive past his gravestone on the way to the grocery store or not?”
“I won’t leave the man I love,” she whispered, still not looking at him. “I can’t.”
“Even if it means you’re miserable?” he demanded. “Even if it means we have to be apart?”
She leaned her head back against the seat, and St. Sebastian realized—in the academic way of adolescents learning the world—that she was not as old as she seemed in his mind. She wasn’t forty yet, and there were no lines on her face, there was no white in her hair. He realized that she had so much life left to live, and up until this point, she’d spent almost all that life on him. Her free time, her care, her worry, her laughter
, and her cooking—it all went into him and she never saved any for herself.
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” he asked, lifting his chin to disguise how quickly his anger had turned to hurt. “Is that what this is about? I’m too much trouble?”
She looked at him then, the way she looked at him when he made noise in church, and he sat up straighter and dropped his eyes out of a habituated response to that particular frown. “I love you beyond my life,” she said, her voice suffused with pain and rebuke, “and it’s killing me to send you home. Do you understand? Do you know how much I want to see you finish growing up? Do you know how much it hurts to know that what is best for me is not what’s best for you? Do you?”
Mutely, he shook his head. He didn’t like hearing the pain in her voice, or the scolding. He’d pushed her and now she’d given way, and he found he wished he hadn’t pushed her at all.
“I have to stay,” she said quietly, after a long minute. “I’m tied to Thorncombe whether I like it or not.”
“Because of Dad.”
She sighed, and he looked up in time to see her pass a shaking hand over her face. “I won’t leave the man I love,” she said simply.
And then she said nothing else, and their conversation was over.
