Page 5 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
It feels like years ago—and yet—
“Strange,” I say. It’s almost a relief to talk about something else, even if that something else is something I don’t understand. “Like I woke up different. Like there’s these moments when I can still feel the thorn chapel, even now.”
She slows, stopping on the landing to look down at me. At some point today, she’d pulled the top half of her braids into a quick bun, leaving the other half down, and it makes her look younger, like a college student getting ready to study. It’s a look only amplified by her expression, which I’ve heard Auden teasingly call her genius at work look. She looks like I’ve just given her the most puzzling answer of all time.
“What?” she asks.
I shrug. I don’t even know what I mean, I don’t even know how someone would even begin describing what I felt last night in the ruins. “The air felt a certain way,” I try, although even that flattens last night down so much as to make it meaningless. How do I describe what I heard? What I saw? What I think Auden saw? “And I can still feel it. Not all the time, but sometimes. It’s like I left the chapel, but the chapel—”
“Didn’t leave you,” Rebecca finishes for me, seeming to realize something. Then she sighs. “Yes.”
I peer up at her. “Do you feel the same way?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it’s like . . . a ritua
l hangover or something?”
“Becket would probably say yes,” she says, but she looks like she doesn’t really believe it herself.
I’m personally not sure what to believe. Four years in the kink world have acquainted me intimately with the lingering endorphin highs or crashes that can follow a scene—but this feels different than anything I’ve ever felt. It feels more than chemical.
I push my fingers against my eyes again. It’s too much to think about, too much to hold inside myself, both the heavy, carnal joy of last night and the memory of white bones in dark mud.
Behind the altar.
All this time she was right behind the altar.
All this time, she was right there in the chapel.
A warm hand circles one of my wrists and gently tugs my hand down. “Shhh,” Rebecca soothes. “I’m glad to know I’m not alone in feeling strange today, but what I really wanted to know was how your body felt this morning. If you were sore.”
Oh.
“I am sore, but I like it,” I say. In fact, the sharp ache in my thorn-bitten hand and the dull throb in my pussy have been the twin anchors holding me to the ground all day. The tender, piercing reminders that I am here, I am alive, that last night I was a saint and a goddess and a bride.
Rebecca gives me a fond smile. “Of course you like it.”
She slides her fingers from my wrist to my hand and gives it a squeeze; pain blooms hot and fast and I gasp.
“I want to help you feel better,” she says. “May I?”
Suddenly, nothing sounds better. Why would anyone give me a blanket and a biscuit when I needed leather and teeth? When I needed tears instead of tea?
“That sounds amazing,” I reply.
“May Auden help?” she asks, ducking to catch my eyes. “I’m going to be teaching him.”
“Teaching?”
“He asked me last night if I would teach him how to be a Dominant. Surely you’ve noticed he has some interest in kink,” she adds dryly.
Oh. Yes, I have noticed. It was hard not to with all the blood-kissing and also that time he came in his pants just from spanking me. Or that other time he came just from jerking off Saint in the shower while he held him against the wall by his throat. Rebecca adds, “And I think you’d like him there, learning on you.”
Learning on me. Does anything sound better? Auden Guest discovering what gets him hard by doing the things that get me wet? To be the one privileged enough to see him vulnerable, student-like, clumsy? To watch as his excitement kindles into a lifelong lust that a thousand beatings, fuckings and suckings can’t sate?
Rebecca seems to know exactly what I’m thinking. “The two of you have something.”
