Page 28 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
It was the first time Auden had said anything about being queer, and he said it with an easy confidence that both relieved and disgruntled St. Sebastian. As adept as he was at talking to his friends online, he still felt clumsy and oafish even skirting the topic in real life, and here was Auden just tossing out the word like of course it was an option, of course there was no sense talking about it euphemistically.
“Both?”
“Hmm,” Auden said. And then he turned to St. Sebastian and grinned. “It makes me jealous, you know. I think if Proserpina ever came back and chose you, I’d die with jealousy on the spot.”
“I don’t think you would.”
“No?”
“I think you’d just try harder.”
Another laugh. “Maybe so.”
And then St. Sebastian, as usual, wasn’t sure how to feel. For all he’d learned—that Auden was definitely bi and not just sending mixed signals, that he also missed Proserpina—he felt like somehow he knew even less.
After all, it wasn’t the usual start to something more than friendship, with the both of them being preoccupied with someone else. The same someone else. Right?
But the days went on, unusual or not, talking and drinking and learning.
St. Sebastian learned that he liked everything about Auden, liked all the things he also hated. The wealth, the posh accent, the magazine-worthy clothes, the education so expensive St. Sebastian could have bought a house with what it cost. He liked hearing Auden talk about light and color and form, about composition, about why this artist was a genius and that artist was a hack, and he liked hearing Auden talk about other people. (If Auden had one sin other than arrogance, it was that he could be gossipy when baited into it—but the gossip was always supremely delicious, because it was infused with that uncanny perception Auden had.)
Most of all, St. Sebastian liked that Auden seemed to make the very air around him crackle with possibility, like Auden’s existence so electrified the molecules of the air that it sent them bashing around at higher speeds than usual. Like Auden carried embedded in himself some new, undiscovered physical law that wasn’t gravity, wasn’t magnetism, but something made of the two and more. When he was around Auden, he felt a thrilling and boundless future waiting for him, as if just over the next rise, he felt like he could almost grasp at how all the messy and separate parts of himself would one day knit into something real and valuable and powerful.
Auden had that effect on everyone, he noticed. The clerks at the shops, the pizza delivery boy, the well-heeled parishioners at the abbey masses. They were all drawn to him, animated beside him, made more beautiful and more interesting just by being near him.
There was a word for that, and St. Sebastian had read too many fantasy novels to call it charisma or charm.
He wouldn’t say the word to himself during the day, but at night—at night after a long day of drinking and walking and swimming and laughing—he’d admit to himself that he knew exactly the word for what Auden was. He knew the thing that made this pretty-eyed boy different from every other pretty-eyed boy with too much money and enviable fluency in Latin.
Magic.
It sounded foolish, even at night and in bed alone when St. Sebastian allowed himself to think about it, but sometimes foolish things were true. Sometimes the unbelievable happened even though it shouldn’t.
Whether he knew it about himself or not, Auden Guest was magic.
And when St. Sebastian was around him, he felt like he was magic too.
Chapter 11
St. Sebastian
Present Day
* * *
It’s a strange week.
Rebecca, Auden, and Delphine decide to forgo their weekly pilgrimage to London, and instead we hole up at Thornchapel like we’re having the bleakest house party of all time. Although, it’s not that bleak, not truly, because together the five of us can coax smiles out of Proserpina—and even a laugh once, courtesy of Delphine regaling us with the latest Instagram-influencer drama, something involving denim vests and mushrooms.
Becket and I have our jobs to attend to, and so we’re in and out of the house more than the others, but at night, we both bunk down in the library, huddling under blankets on the sofas while the fire crackles itself to sleep. I don’t sleep in the same bed as Poe again—or Auden—and they aren’t sleeping in the same bed as each other, either. As if the night we shared has driven the three of us further apart instead of closer together.
What am I talking about? There’s no as if. Of course it wedged us further apart, because it peeled away all the pretense and exposed the raw and inevitable truth. Auden will never forgive me, and I’ll never stop needing him to. And in between the mess he and I have made of each other is Proserpina, the woman we both want more than anything.
What was the M for?
For mistake, St. Sebastian. For mistake.
Fuck. How can it hurt so much? Still?
