Page 20 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
And it slips through my fingers as all perfect things do.
Saint kisses my neck. Auden rises up and looks down at Saint’s body, presumably at the splatters of seed he left there. Saint can’t see it, but I can: the sheer, ferocious possession in Auden’s eyes as he looks at how he marked his enemy. The angry, longing twist to his mouth as he reaches around Saint’s hip and finds his sated cock.
I feel long fingers circling Saint, and I realize Auden is pulling him out of me, careful to keep the condom from slipping.
Auden looks down at me, eyes simmering. “That will be my cock soon,” he promises. “I’ll have earned you and this cunt will be mine to use whenever I want.”
Saint has no physical reaction to this, other than to replace Auden’s fingers with his own and sit up, but I have to wonder. Surely he wants to be used by Auden too.
Surely he wants for us to keep using each other, to keep fumbling for a way for us two submissives to give each other what we need.
But then he’s up and so is Auden, and suddenly I can’t keep my eyes open. The ritual last night and finding my mother this morning, being flogged and then fucked . . . it’s catching up with me. It’s joined forces with the narcolepsy, and now the entire world feels made of sleep, soft, fuzzy sleep, and I keep dropping off as things happen around me.
Auden moves me so I’m lying properly on the bed, and then he rolls me onto my tummy.
He and Saint rub something cool and slick all over my back and ass and thighs.
Someone cleans between my legs with a warm cloth.
Two long bodies crowd me on either side, bodies naked except for boxers, crisp, male hair rubbing against my legs. A big hand sifts slowly through my tangled hair, carefully unpicking the knots. Another hand rubs soothing circles all over my lower and mid-back—the places spared during my flogging.
“We should tell Bex we won’t be down for tea,” Auden says.
Saint mumbles an agreement, and they subside into silence. I dip into sleep for a long minute, like diving off a board and making it the whole length of the pool before I have to surface.
I surface to the fingers playing with my hair and Auden’s quiet voice. “I wish you would’ve hit me back.”
St. Sebastian’s voice is tired when he answers. “So you could feel better about it?”
“Did not hitting me back make you feel better about that summer?” retorts Auden.
There’s a moment of silence from St. Sebastian, and then he says, “You know it felt good to me.”
“You would say that,” Auden mutters.
“Because I’m a submissive?”
“Because you crave punishment, even when you don’t deserve it.”
They’re talking about it. Whatever it was, whatever the thing was that drove a wedge between them and poisoned their affection for each other. I pretend to be asleep still—not hard given that I’m still skirting the edge of unconsciousness—and listen.
“I deserve punishm
ent for some things,” Saint says tiredly. “You know that.”
“I know that if I were going to punish you, I’d have to care.” Auden’s pitched his voice in that slow, cultured drawl that infuriates me as much as it gets me wet, and it seems to have the same stirring effect on Saint, because he snaps:
“You call hitting me and then spraying cum all over my back not caring?”
“Well, you have a lovely back,” says Auden.
“Fuck you,” Saint seethes. “You can hate me, you can hit me, you can press my face into the dirt until you’re so hard it hurts, but you can’t pretend you don’t care.”
“One of these days, you’re going to regret playing rich boy, poor boy with me,” Auden says softly.
“I already regret it. I have since the graveyard.”
The hand in my hair stops moving, and I can feel the tension steal over Auden’s body. Apparently, mentioning the graveyard is out of bounds for them.
