Page 51 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
I step into my waiting car, settling in for the drive back to my flat, trying to think of the whispering trees at Thornchapel, trying to think of Delphine’s smile, her honest eyes. But my anticipation is brittle, it’s flattened just like the river in my site plan, and all I can think of are my mother’s words, her clinginess and her loneliness. Her own guilt and the guilt she induces in other people.
This is what happens.
This is how people can hurt someone they think they love.
Chapter Twelve
Delphine
The club is called Justine’s, and it’s a meander of richly furnished rooms set into the heart of St. James—leather and wood and books, fireplaces, and small nooks for statues, and rugs so plush my feet sink into them as I stand. The light comes from the fires and sconces and the occasional chandelier; there always seem to be piano notes drifting from some distant room, punctuated with equally musical moans and cries.
Paintings hang from picture rails mounted on jewel-toned walls. Large oil works, small watercolors, portraits and landscapes and slyly erotic scenes, rendered so subtly that one hardly notices the cocks and cunts until one is staring directly at them. In the lobby, a gilt-framed painting stretches nearly from the floor to the ceiling: Cupid wrapped in silk ties and sulking while someone reaches to untie him.
Hope Comforting Love in Bondage, it’s called.
When I walk into the lobby today, I’m greeted by a young man in an impeccably tailored three-piece suit, the leather waistcoat underneath his jacket the only nod to the club’s true nature. He’s fat, with a full face and full body, and even though I wasn’t feeling self-conscious or nervous, I feel something inside my chest ease a little.
It eases even more as I see a woman my size walk through the far doorway and into a hallway. A naked man crawls behind her on hands and knees, his head down and his erect cock bobbing as he goes.
“Mistress Rebecca sends her apologies that she isn’t able to meet you here herself,” the concierge says. He has a puckish face, with an upturned nose and sparkling blue eyes, and a spray of freckles across his cheeks. But despite the Peter Pan look, his bearing is nothing but stillness and grace. “She aske
d me to show you to your room.”
“Yes, of course,” I say with a beam and follow him as he leads me into a hallway. He pulls back the cage on an old-fashioned lift, and then together we go up to the second floor, where I’m led to a room furnished like a study—bookshelves, a desk, a small fireplace with a statue of Pan fucking a goat on the top. The walls are painted in a dark garnet, and there’s a big window teasing a view of St. James’ Park—a glimpse of bright, new green in a world of gray.
But it’s not a study, not truly. A study wouldn’t have racks of paddles and crops set between the bookshelves, a study wouldn’t have a sensible wood floor for easy cleaning. A study wouldn’t have a bed set into the far corner with cuffs already dangling from the bedposts.
A study wouldn’t have leather lingerie waiting for me on the primly made bed.
“She expects you to dress and wait next to the desk. Kneeling, of course. Do you need help dressing?”
I go to the bed and study the lingerie. When I was a teenager, I used to hate the sight of my clothes laid flat because they always looked so much bigger than I thought they would be. I don’t feel that way nearly as often now, but there is a brief moment—an instant, nothing more—when I think: no.
When I think: anything but this.
Because this isn’t truly lingerie, not really. I’ve modeled for plus-size lingerie brands before; I’ve worn my own lingerie to take cute, flirty Insta pictures in. Lace, mesh, silk, cotton so fine one can peek nipples and navels through it—all of that is workable. All of that I can do, and I have done, and I know how to angle my body and twist myself just right for the desired effects.
But the outfit Rebecca’s chosen—it’s nothing but straps. Leather straps, which means there’s no give, no stretch, no forgiveness. It will press into my flesh. It will show all the places where I’m soft. There will be no twisting, no angles, no way to hide that my body is a fat body, and I don’t want to hide that my body is a fat body, because it is and I’m proud of it, but—
But—
I don’t know. I don’t like how this is making me feel. This is worse than being naked somehow, this is having a lover say, here, dress up in this slutty thing I found, and having to show one’s lover that one can’t, that one only looks good in slutty clothes with planning and good angles and maybe a couple passes through Adobe Lightroom.
This is having to explain to a lover that one’s body won’t look as good as the lover imagines it will, and that feels an awful lot like saying, my body doesn’t look good at all. I know that’s not true—at least I think? I think I know that? But it feels true.
It feels brutally and humiliatingly true.
When I look up at the concierge, he says—in an offhanded sort of way, like of course it’s not meant to soothe me, it’s just an observation—“A mistress would be very pleased to see her pet wearing the things she chooses.”
I swallow, looking back at it. It’s like a snake on the bed. I’d been smiling earlier, and now I can’t remember what a smile feels like on my lips. “I don’t know if it will fit.”
“Why don’t we see?”
“I—” The idea of trying it on and then knowing for sure that it’s as bad as I’m imagining . . . it’s unbearable.
But before I can say no, before I can run back down the hall and take the lift to freedom, the concierge comes up to me and gently unhooks my bag from my shoulder.
“I’ll assist,” he says, and then he’s helping me out of my jacket with quiet grace.
