Page 7 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“I know,” he says, frustration lacing his tone. “But I can give you something else in its place, something you’ve chosen. And maybe I can’t carry your pain for you, but I can tuck you into my arms and keep you safe from everything else while you feel it.”
I blink up at him. His words should be too much, they should be too intense, it’s not even been a month since I’ve come back to Thornchapel—but they’re not too much at all, they’re exactly what I needed to hear.
He leans down so he can speak gently into my ear. I catch that Thornchapel scent of his—trees and flowers, pepper and citrus. “So may I?” he asks. “May I give you something else?”
I let my chin drop to my chest and my eyes close. Fuck, I’m tired, and my chest aches, and all I want is for Auden to do what he’s promising and carry me away. “You may as long as you don’t say May I to me again tonight.”
It’s as if I slapped him, and I have no idea why. Auden jerks back, his lips parted in shock. He levels a wary, almost wounded, gaze down at me, and I don’t have time to ask him why he’s looking at me like that because Rebecca steps next to me with her phone in her hand.
“No may I’s. So it’s going to be one of those kinds of nights,” Rebecca observes. “Then let’s get the boring stuff out of the way so we can get to the tears. I’ve texted Saint, and he’s almost finished with the interview. Delphine is on the phone with her parents and Becket is on his way from the church. Poe, would you like them to watch or would it be better if I told them to stay away?”
“They can watch,” I mumble. Something’s spilling in from the new wedge of cold air between me and Auden, something like exhaustion and weary, dreary grief, and I feel myself ghosting again, blurring at the edges. “I’m used to people watching.”
And I really am—back home in the university town of Lawrence where I worked, I was a bit of a kink-scene party girl. Clubs, munches, play parties, I loved it all. The more the merrier, and nothing got me hotter than hearing the moans and grunts and rustling clothes of people getting off while they watched me serve or suffer. But if I’m honest, having Delphine and Becket join us doesn’t even feel like those scenes full of strangers and scopophiliacs, it just feels right, like when all of us are together, some essential connection is made that can’t be made when we’re apart.
“Yes. I’d like them here,” I answer again, making sure Rebecca can hear the consent in my tone.
“Then I’ll let them know they’re welcome. We’ve never discussed your hard limits—or your preferred safeword. I’ll need those now.”
It’s so hard to think, so hard to remember how these things go when it feels like my only memory, the only memory I’ll ever have again, is of bones and mud.
“No edge play. No spit.” My safe word back home was Boolean Operator, but that’s not what comes out of my mouth next.
“My safe word is convivificat,” I tell them, and then sink to my knees to await their instructions.
Chapter 5
Proserpina
Present Day
* * *
Down here, the idea of kissing Auden’s feet transforms into a necessity. It’s the most natural thing to want, and by natural, I don’t mean easy or understandable—I mean natural in the most violently inevitable way possible. Lions eat gazelles, tornadoes rip into the prairie earth, death follows life—and Auden’s feet require kissing, because he is a king and a predator and above me in every way.
Not always, not outside this room, but here and now, I am his supplicant, I am the unworthy worm on the steps of his temple, and the dazzling, dizzy clarity of that intoxicates me. I can feel myself slipping deeper and deeper into the waters of worship, feel how the world muffles its noise and its needs until all that’s left is who I am and what I have to do. And all I have to do is obey.
“Auden, my bag is in the corner,” Rebecca says, dropping to crouch next to me. The Italian cotton of her garnet-colored jumpsuit pulls tight around her legs and her chest, emphasizing her long limbs and her slight curves. She too is above me, a queen, and so beautiful and sharp it hurts to look at her. “Will you bring me a length of rope and the three floggers inside?” she asks him, who answers in the affirmative.
Her apprentice thus dispatched—and me mournfully watching his perfect, kissable feet move away as he goes—Rebecca turns to look at me, catching my chin with her fingers so she can properly assess me. She must be satisfied with the haze of submission already glassing my eyes and flushing my cheeks, because she nods to herself and stands up.
“Undress, Proserpina. Then I’d like you back on your knees.”
I dressed quickly this morning when Saint called, and so I’m just in boyfriend jeans and a sweater with holes for my thumbs. Unlike my friends—with the eternal exception of Saint—I’m not dressed in clothes that cost more than my monthly grocery bill. But still I know what Rebecca expects of me. I undress without tease or delay, but I make sure to fold my clothes neatly in a small stack on the floor; no matter how cheap they are, I sense Rebecca would be displeased if I treated them—and by extension, her instructions—carelessly.
Auden turns around and comes back to us right as I finish, and I can hear the long breath he lets out at the sight of me naked and on my knees.
“She’s a sight, isn’t she?” Rebecca says.
“She is,” Auden says. His voice is hoarse.
“What would you like her to call you?” Rebecca asks. I watch as her ankle-booted feet cross over to his bare ones; lengths of rope and leather dangle into view as he passes them to her.
He doesn’t answer for a minute. “Auden is fine,” he says finally.
For some reason, Rebecca laughs, although without raising my eyes, I can’t see why. “Hmm,” she says. “I think you’re not telling her the truth right now.”
Another pause. An exhale with a shudder ruffling the edges. “Sir would work.”
