Page 36 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
No vulnerability, no tremulous smiles, no declarations of love.
I answer how the woman in the reflection would answer. “She needs a Domme. I’d like a sub. It suits.”
“Does it? You’ve always talked about how spoiled you’ve found her, and how irritating it was.”
I’m irritated now, actually, although I can’t exactly explain why. It makes my voice sharp when I answer, “Well, it wasn’t until this year I realized I could be the one to fuck it out of her.”
Auden knows me too well to let me get away with saying something like that. I watch as his reflection sets its drink down and crosses its arms. “Bex. Seriously. Is everything okay between you two?”
I love you.
Like it was nothing at all, easy as breathing.
I love you.
I make to pull my hair down out of its bun and then realize I’m doing it to fidget. And I don’t fidget. “Everything’s fine.”
He still doesn’t drop the subject. “I care about Delphine, you know,” he tells me. “Very much.”
“Is this the talk where you warn me, one man to another, to treat your ex-girlfriend well?”
Auden frowns. “No warnings. I don’t think you need them, despite how you’re acting right now.”
I bristle a little at that, turning to glare at him. “And how am I acting?”
Unfortunately, Auden also knows me too well to be properly terrified of the Quartey Stare. “Like a rake,” he says.
It’s so far away from what I was expecting him to say that I nearly laugh. “A rake?”
He’s giving me his crooked smile now, and dammit, he’s too adorable to keep bristling at. “An inveterate rake, even. A new submissive every night before this, and now you’re having one move in but it’s only about the sex, no feelings. It is very rakish, you have to admit.”
I part my lips to speak—and then I realize I have no idea what I want to say. I am a rake, I guess. I’ve certainly been acting like one with Delphine.
“I have to say this, even though I know you will anyway,” Auden says, “but please take care of her. She’s not as . . . confident . . . as she seems sometimes.”
Of course she isn’t. No human could be. No person is entirely self-assured, entirely positive, entirely poised all the time. And yet, Delphine makes everyone believe it. She makes everyone believe that she wakes up with clear skin, bouncy hair, all the answers. She makes even cynics believe that she can turn any obstacle into a caption-worthy learning moment.
She makes lovers believe she can say I love you and be perfectly content not hearing it said back.
She’s new to all this, I remind myself. You’re the Domme. It’s your job to teach her. It would have been crueler to let her believe she really loves you when you know better. When you know it was just the scene making her feel that way.
Then why is guilt dripping like sticky tar down my throat? Making it impossible to speak?
No.
No, I don’t do guilt. Guilt is an indulgence—an excuse to avoid action because it feels like some sort of penance. But it’s not, it’s the ignis fatuus of penance. It changes nothing and leads one nowhere.
I imagine swallowing all that guilt down, all the uncertainty—along with that breathless, brilliant, idiotic something—I felt when Delphine whispered those words. I push it all away until I’m myself again, and there’s no guilt.
Or worse . . . hope.
“I know,” I finally say. “I know.”
“I wish,” Auden says, and then stops, and then starts again. “I wish we were home right now. All six of us.”
“Yeah,” I say, suddenly feeling it too. Missing the way the rain echoes through the library, the pop of the burning logs even when it’s too warm for a fire. The huffs of Sir James Frazer, and Delphine curled up in an armchair, and Becket arguing with me about something. Missing the rustling press of the trees from all sides, except to the south, where the grounds slope up past the river into louring, windy moorland.
Missing the way Delphine and I can spend hours fucking in a giant bed, half drunk and giddy with knowing there’s nowhere to be in the morning, except outside on the groun
