Page 144 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
She shakes her head.
“No.”
“Fuck, Delph. I’m sorry, if I’d known—”
“You couldn’t have known,” she interrupts softly. “I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want to be a bother, and let’s face it, I’m already silly enough as it is, without all that bosh about cherries.”
I cup her face between my hands. “You,” I say firmly, “are not silly at all.”
Something flickers in her eyes—something fragile, followed immediately by pain. She flinches and twists out of my touch, her arms going back around herself.
And all along my heart, fresh lacerations gape open.
“Pet,” I say beseechingly. “Please.”
“We need to talk,” she says hollowly. “Before we do anything else, I have to talk to you.”
I try to take confidence from the fact that she missed me, that she told me ten days ago she was still mine as long as I wanted her to be. And then I say what I know she needs to hear—what she deserves to hear.
“Delph, about that night, about missing the exhibition. I won’t make excuses about the day I’d been having or how much my mother needed me then, because you still deserved better. And I am so, so sorry, you’ll never know how sorry, because the last thing I’ve ever wanted was to hurt you, and my most important job as a Domme is not to let you down and I failed. And I also realized—”
I reach for her hand and press it against my heart. I wait until she drags those big, soft eyes up to mine. “I realized I love you, Delphine Dansey. I was a fool to think I didn’t, and when I think of how dismissive I was, how cruel I was when you tried to tell me how you felt, I could tear myself apart with my bare hands.”
My heart is hammering against her palm, and it looks like her heart is hammering too—underneath the sleek golden waves, her bare shoulders heave up and down, like she’s struggling to breathe.
“I love you,” I say, staring into those Old Hollywood eyes, “and I think maybe I’ve loved you for a long time. Maybe even since you came to stay with me. And I want everything with you—not just kink, not just dates and fun—but love. And even more if you want it—marriage and kids and a second home so the kids can go to some pretentious school I’ll hate—anything for you, Delphine. Everything you want, I’ll give you.”
A welling tear spills out of one of her eyes, followed by another, and then another, streaking so prettily across her cheeks. I lean forward and kiss them.
“I love you,” I say again. “Do you think you can forgive me for that night? Do you think you can love me still?”
The salt taste of her tears is still blooming on my lips when she tears herself away.
“Delph—” I say, but she cuts me off.
“I was with someone else,” she blurts. “That night. You didn’t come and so I played with someone else instead.”
And.
And I’m finally cut to death.
All those gashes on my heart, all those shallow wounds, it’s nothing compared to this, it’s nothing compared to having her words bayonet their way into valves and chambers, feeling her tear off the whole mangled organ from my aorta like fruit from a tree. Every place where I’m soft, where I’m vulnerable—every wall that I’ve let down for her—everything is mutilated, butchered. Hacked into bruised, pulpy nothing.
She cheated on me.
I’ve been in agony for days, loving her, pining after her; I only missed the exhibition because I was trying to help someone else—
And she cheated on me.
“Who?” I manage to ask, although what does it matter? It doesn’t matter.
“Emily Genovese,” she answers, meeting my gaze with one of defiant misery. “She was in town, so I invited her to Justine’s. When you didn’t show, she offered to take me up on the stage.”
Emily Genovese.
Grief—frantic, jealous, painful grief—threatens to swallow me whole.
“What did you let her do to you?” I ask, suddenly and morbidly desperate to know. “Did you go to your parents’ to hide yourself from me? To hide marks I didn’t give you?”
