Page 100 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“Yes, but that was at church, and so I couldn’t do this.” He pulls me close and kisses me again, and I let him, each skilled stroke of his tongue reminding me of the charming, thoughtful friend I know and love. It’s just Becket, the kisses reassure me. The same Becket as always.
After a few minutes, he breaks away and takes my hand again, and we walk past the house and up to the ridge above it. There’s a public footpath snaking along the crest of the moors, and just beyond the path, a cluster of kistvaens: boxes of stone sunk into the earth, long empty of whatever and whomever they once held. They are the same kistvaens my mother studied as a student. Perhaps the same kistvaens that the ancestors to the Kernstows buried their dead in.
We stop in the middle of the trail, near an exposed shelf of stone, and Becket turns to look down at the farmhouse. It looks like a painting you’d hang in your bathroom right now, a watercolor of a place perfect in its own dereliction, but I suddenly don’t want to see it anymore, I don’t want to think about it.
The look on Becket’s face as he stared at the hearth . . .
“It’s strange, though,” Becket murmurs as he looks at the farm. “I barely remember coming here. I know I must have run or walked, but I don’t recall doing either . . . I don’t remember getting dressed or locking up the church. I was home, and then I was here, with you.”
That is strange, but I can’t say that to him. I should say something reassuring instead. “I don’t remember getting dressed most mornings either,” I offer up. “Habit and all that.”
“Mm,” he says, not sounding comforted or convinced.
“Becket,” I say. “Look at me.”
Unlike in the farmhouse, he does look at me, and he does it as soon as I ask him to.
“I’m here,” I tell him, because it’s the only thing I can give him, maybe the only thing any of us can truly offer to someone else. “I’m here with you. Maybe you don’t remember before, but you remember right now with me, right?”
He takes a deep breath. “Of course.”
I pull him over to the stone shelf and make him sit down. I sit next to him and wrap an arm around his back. I want to ask him so many questions, like if he’s lost time here at the farmhouse before, and what he was thinking when he stared at the hearth, and if all of this started when we started going to the chapel in the woods. But I manage to keep quiet, even though it nearly kills me.
“Poe,” he says after a minute. “You said a while back that if I ever needed to show you—”
I’m kissing him before he can finish, climbing back into his lap. It feels so much better in the sunshine, away from the cheerless murk of the farmhouse, and his response feels better too—gratified surprise followed by a heavy shudder that moves through his entire body.
The same Becket as always.
“You can always show me,” I whisper, nipping at his lip. “Any time.”
His hands—the same hands that page through holy books and hold chalices aloft—find my ass, and pull me so my sex is settled firmly against his. There’s nothing but my panties and his thin athletic clothes between us, so every hard, eager inch of him is discernible. Instinctively I rock and rock and rock against him, chasing the friction, savoring everything about him—his hardness, his heat, his sculpted mouth made for prayers and pleasure.
“I feel so clear with you,” he says, kissing my jaw. “Like everything is real.”
“Real? Oh—” One of his hands has slid between us and moved under my skirt, stroking my pussy over the cotton of my panties. Thoughts shiver right out of my mind like water on a hot pan, and I can’t hold on to a single one while he’s touching me like this. It’s been so long since I’ve been touched properly—instead of teased to heighten my agony like Auden’s been doing—and my body is so primed, so ready for it, that I think I might be able to come just like this. Come just from the soft sanding of his fingers over my panties.
“Should I be asking Auden’s permission?” Becket asks, biting the lobe of my ear.
“He said I could come today,” I manage. He also said I’d be punished for it, but that’s almost as much as an enticement as the climax itself, if I’m honest.
A gust of wind buffets around us, warm and ruffling my skirt up around us, and I remember where we’re at. Remember that the stone digging into my bare knees is not a Thornchapel stone and that the sun around us is not Thornchapel’s sun. We’re not tucked away into our little world of make-believe and sex, where we can do whatever we want and the consequences never come.
“Becket, we shouldn’t—not here—”
“There’s no one,” he whispers, kissing my neck. “We’ll be fast.”
I look around us, my pulse thudding against his tongue as he flicks it over my throat. He’s right—there’s no one to be seen. Just the perennial sheep and a herd of ponies in the distance. We can’t even be seen from the road leading to the farmhouse from here.
But.
“It’s summer in Dartmoor,” I protest weakly, my voice breaking as Becket’s fingers find their way past my panties. I’m so wet that my skin is slippery to the touch, and it takes no effort for him to slide a finger inside of me. “S-someone is bound to be w-walking along—oh God—Becket—”
His thumb is on my clit now, and it’ll take nothing to send me over the brink, nothing at all. I’m almost there already, the muscles between my legs clenching tight, my thighs trembling around his hips.
“We’ll be fast,” he promises again.
And then he pulls back to meet my eyes. His are a turbulent blue, as if he’s fighting off whatever he was feeling in front of the hearth, and I can feel the fight all over his body, in his thighs and chest and arms and even in the hand between my legs. Like he’s consumed with something and can only just keep himself from being burned alive by it.
