Page 24 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
I can’t answer him, because his obscene words—and in that voice, like he’s seconds away from throwing me on the floor and rutting into me however he wants—send me careening into bliss. The burst below my navel is bright and sweet and wonderful, and I ride it easily, my eyes open and my fingers clutched tight in his hair.
“Sweet saint,” he murmurs lovingly. “I’d give up everything for this, for you.”
Even in the haze of my orgasm, I know that’s not true. Even if I’d allow him to give up anything at all—which I wouldn’t—I know he could never give up serving God. Should never. Being a priest is too deeply rooted in him to weed out now; those roots are threaded through his nerves and veins and bones.
Becket pulls out of me, leaving me squeezing around nothing, and sets me back on my feet. There’s no time for words, for him explaining what he needs, and so he spins me around to face the shelves and uses a foot to kick my legs together. Before I realize what he’s up to, he’s sliding his slick cock between my thighs from behind, fucking my pressed-together thighs like he would a mouth or pussy.
Every surge sends the dusky tip of him emerging from the f
ront of my legs, and on every stroke, the top of his shaft glides along my wet seam, making everything slicker and slicker. It peeks out a final time—huge and taut and near-painful-looking with how swollen he is—and with a moan that’s deep and rich and musical, he erupts. Thick jets of seed spatter against the shelves and run down my thighs; his hands—suddenly more forceful than they’ve been all day—press into my soft thighs and yank me back, over and over and over, so he can fuck every last drop right out of himself.
Semen runs down the front of my leg, and his breath is warm and fast on my neck as the last few shudders rack his frame.
He gradually goes still.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
His hands become gentle and careful on my legs, stroking up once or twice before he smooths my skirt down over them. He pulls back as he slides free from my thighs, and it isn’t until he makes a low noise in his throat that I realize it’s because he wants to watch. Both the act of him pulling through my flesh and also the inevitable ruffle of my skirt back over my exposed bottom, which is no doubt bearing the fast-fading reddish marks of his hands.
“I’m okay,” I reassure him, and turn to give him a hug. He’s warm—so warm—even through his shirt, and his heart is still beating fast. “Are you?”
I want to say something more—maybe about how he should try to stop loving me or about how I could attempt to love him like he wants me to—but both of those things would be wrong, and so all I can do is repeat what I said earlier. “Anytime you need me—anytime you need to show me how you feel . . .”
His lips find my hair.
“I know,” he says quietly. “I know.”
Chapter Six
Proserpina
After Becket leaves, I can’t concentrate. I decide to leave my work for later and go find Auden before he drives to London.
I stop at a window on the way up to his office and watch the bustle and swarm of the maze’s destruction. Workers crawl over its carcass, and emerging from the mud and stubble of removed hedges is the statueless plinth next to the fountain. There’re a few people standing next to it, waving in a small crane-looking thing, which I assume is to remove the heavy masonry of the fountain. For the first time in a hundred and fifty years, the secret stairs will be exposed.
I wonder how Estamond would feel about that.
Rebecca is there too, in a camel-colored trench coat with her iPad tucked into the crook of her elbow, a slender, still fixture in the midst of all the chaos. Occasionally workers come up to her and she bends her head to listen—one time she pulls up something on her iPad to show them and then points to where the thing shall be done—but otherwise she doesn’t move. She is the axis the work rotates on; she is the order, the intelligence, the will that reshapes the earth. But as I finally step away from the window, I see her turn and glance back at the house.
She’s looking at her bedroom window, where even now from down the hall and up the stairs, I can hear Delphine talking about backlinks and follower benchmarks to someone on the phone.
Outside, Rebecca twists her head away, as if irritated with herself—but I notice she looks at the house one more time before she shakes her head and then strides determinedly to the other side of the maze.
Auden’s new studio and office takes up a huge swath of the renovated third floor. Like in the bedrooms, he’s kept the old beams and he’s floored the entire story with planks of pale, buttery wood. Windows are everywhere—windows which had been removed, taken apart, cleaned, repaired or replaced as needed, and then releaded and reinstalled. I know it must have been an enormous expense, but for all his en-suiting and rewiring, Auden has kept the parts of the house with the most flair and the best history, and the leaded windows were some of those parts. And now even on a cloudy day, the studio glows with light, the latticed shapes of it tracing back and forth over the floor like a grid.
On the far end of the massive room—past the rows and rows of bookshelves and the two drafting tables and the sprawling model table already covered with tiny shrubs and piles of baby-sized bricks and neat stacks of balsa wood—Auden sits at a desk with his head thrown back against his chair and one arm dangling by his side. That hand flexes now and again, and once or twice it balls in some powerful emotion, but the rest of him is utterly still—a study of Brideshead Revisited-esque tweed and mussed hair.
I suddenly have the awful premonition that he’s angry with me—one that’s not eased when he says, in a flat, emotionless voice, “Come here, Proserpina.”
Is he upset about Becket? Or maybe that I didn’t come up the very moment Becket left the house? Is he upset that I didn’t refuse Becket or personally ask permission to play?
Come to think of it . . . am I upset about these things? Should I be?
I get to Auden and I don’t wait for him to turn around, I don’t wait for him to speak. I just drop to my knees next to his chair and press my face against his leg.
“How was your time with Becket?” he asks, his dangling hand coming up to toy with my hair.
I don’t know how to answer that, other than honestly. “Good,” I say. “And also . . . not.”
