Page 33 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
And me too, if I’m honest. I would very much like for her to be in trouble.
But we have a guest—literally a Guest, looking more woeful than anyone tucking a satisfied cock away has a right to—and we also have the rest of the night. The week. The year.
Maybe longer.
She said she loves you.
Delphine gets her bag and scampers off as Auden tugs his jumper off and drops it onto the floor. He’s wearing a white and gray tattersall shirt underneath, and he rolls up the sleeves to the elbow, exposing finely muscled forearms. He has the look of someone concentrating on a very small, very unimportant task so that he doesn’t have to think about anything else.
And as I rearrange my knickers and romper and force myself not to watch the reflected glint of Delphine’s hair as she gathers her things and disappears into the bathroom, I think I know how he feels.
She said she loves you.
And that isn’t even the worst part. That isn’t even the dangerous part.
You know what you felt when she said it.
I clear my throat, even though there’s no reason to. Auden keeps fussing with his sleeves, his hair tumbling onto his forehead as he refuses to meet my gaze. But the thinness to his mouth and the shadows under his eyes are obvious no matter how much he makes his hair fall over his face.
“Guest, you look like shit,” I tell him. “And you never drop by unless you’re hungry or bored. And I’ve seen your desk—you’ve got too much work needing doing to be bored.”
“Maybe I’m hungry then,” he mumbles, still plucking at the tattersall stretched around the firm lines of his forearm.
“Auden.”
He sighs, scowls down at his sleeve, and then throws his arm to the side, as if the sight of his sleeve offends him. “I may have done something wrong.”
It’s my experience that the less one says, the more one’s interlocutor ends up sharing, so I say nothing. And sure enough, Auden gets to his feet and starts pacing, speaking in short, agitated bursts as he walks.
“I learned something. More than a month ago. About someone else. And I didn’t tell him at first, because I—I—” He stabs a hand through his hair and then wheels around to face me. “Do you have any gin in here or what?”
Wordlessly, I point to a credenza that separates the living space from the home office space. Auden walks over and disappears from view, the clanking of bottles and glasses the only indicator of his continued presence. Finally, he emerges with everything he wants and he strides over to the kitchen, where he starts hunting for limes.
I fold my arms and watch him puttering around, muttering to himself and savaging innocent limes, until finally he walks back over to me, a dark look on his face and a drink in each hand.
I accept the drink, watching him over the rim of my glass as he starts pacing again.
“So the thing is,” he starts, and then stops. “Well, okay. The way I see it—”
He stops again. I tip it to my lips and then wince, because it’s practically all gin.
Although it is a really decent gin.
I take another sip.
Auden takes a drink too, long, gulping swallows until the entire thing is gone and he’s holding an empty glass in front of my rain-streaked window. After a long moment, he says, without any warning at all, “St. Sebastian is my brother.”
If I still had any gin in my mouth, I would be spraying it all over the front of my Stella McCartney romper. “What?”
He looks over his shoulder. “Did I finally find something that can flap the unflappable Rebecca Quartey?”
“I’m not flapping!” I protest, and then realize my free hand is doing exactly that: flapping at him. I tuck it under my thigh. “I’m just . . . processing. That’s all. He’s your brother?”
Auden nods, looks down at this empty glass, and then goes back to the kitchen for more gin. “Half-brother.”
“I don’t know if that’s any better.”
Auden doesn’t bother with ice or tonic water this time and comes back in with a glass of room-temperature gin and a mangled lime wedge clouding up the center. “How can it not be better? We didn’t grow up together, we didn’t share a mother or a life or anything—”
