Page 137 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
He takes my T-shirt from my hands, and I shouldn’t let him, I should
n’t indulge in this one last thing, but I do. He guides the shirt over my head and helps me into it, smoothing the faded jersey over my stomach and shoulders as if it were imported silk, oblivious to the rain falling around us, and the thunder pushing through the air more ominously than ever. It’s no longer a magic sky, it’s a get inside sky, but Auden doesn’t seem to care. He takes his time, fussing with the frayed hem of my shirt like it’s the last time he’ll ever touch me.
I don’t know. Maybe it is.
His eyes meet mine. “What happens next?” he asks me. The rain is falling between us. “What happens when we get back to the house?”
I know he’s sick of this answer, but it’s the only one I have. “I don’t know, Auden.”
Impatience flits across his face. His lips are wet with rain. “Then can you make a guess?”
I flick damp hair out of my face, feeling impatient too. “I don’t know what you want me to say right now. Do you want me to admit that I’m miserable? Confused? Hurting and lonely like hell? That I could let you fuck me for a thousand years and still not be satisfied because it’s never enough with you, it’s never enough until it’s everything and forever? Because all of it’s true, you know, every bit of it, but it doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t change anything.”
His voice blends with the hissing sighs of the rain when he speaks. “It could be everything and forever, you know.”
“I don’t need reminded.”
“Maybe you do.”
We’re both soaked now, fully wet. Our eyelashes spiky, our hair going slick and clinging to our cheeks.
“We can’t solve us,” I tell him through the rain. “We can’t force our way to some different truth. There’s no place we can go where we can hide from our DNA, no imaginary time we can wait for when we’ll magically have different fathers.” I close my eyes for a minute, just so that I don’t have to see him so wet and tragic-looking standing there in the rain. “We can’t run from this.”
“So don’t run,” he whispers. “Don’t run away again.”
“And what happens if I stay? We suffer? Forever?”
“It’s better than suffering apart. Forever.”
I wish I knew he was right. I wish I could say this experiment—this all the parts of love save for one—could work with enough practice, could work in the right conditions, if only we tried hard enough. I wish I could say with certainty that what happened this morning won’t happen again.
But I can’t. And he can’t either.
When I don’t answer him, Auden drags in a deep, rainy breath and scrubs his hands over his face and hair. “Okay,” he says, resigned. “Okay. Inside.”
And so inside we go, jogging through the trees and up the path to the lawn and then to the house. The rain is so thick now that we can barely see what’s in front of us; by the time we burst through the south door into the mudroom with Sir James, we’re sopping and breathless, our clothes sticking to our bodies. Auden’s thin shirt and pale shorts are practically indecent now, and he catches me staring at the corrugations of his stomach, at the visible curve of his cock through the wet fabric.
I expect him to look defiant or maybe even vindicated. I expect smugness, arrogance, maybe even reserve.
I don’t expect sadness. And when I meet his gaze and see that he’s about to cry, that his chin is quivering, that he’s swallowing over and over again—
“Auden,” I say, not really sure what I could possibly say next.
Don’t be sad? It’ll be okay? It’ll get better?
No. None of those things are right, none of them are true.
“I fucked up,” he says, looking away. It puts his face in profile and I can see the magnificent cut of his jaw, the working of his throat as he fights to keep his emotions at bay. “I broke my word. I said no more, and that was a promise to you, and I’ve failed to keep it.”
“No, Auden. I was there too.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not enough. I know you, Saint, I heard you when you said you’d hate yourself for loving me. And still I let it happen. I really am no better than our father. Selfish to the last—”
My mouth is open to argue—regrets and sins aside, the responsibility is mine—but then a massive thud reverberates through the house, the sound of something huge slamming against stone.
Auden and I exchange instantaneous, wide-eyed glances, and then we’re both darting out of the mudroom and down to corridor to the main hall, where the noise seemed to come from. Sir James bounds ahead, barking wildly, and between the three of us, I know we’re leaving water everywhere.
“What in the bloody he—”
