Page 58 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
For the last two weeks, I’d avoided Thornchapel when he was there, I’d dodged his texts and his calls. When he didn’t show up at the library or at one of Augie’s worksites, I was foolish enough to feel some kind of relief. Not because I didn’t ache for him, but because I ached for him too much. Too much to pretend I was okay in front of other people.
But he didn’t come, and I thought—well, I thought maybe he was finally giving me what I asked for. Maybe he was giving me space. Maybe he’d decided I was right, maybe he’d finally concluded that we could never be together, and he was already moving on with Poe.
I tried not to hate that possibility too much, I really did.
The evenings were longer, stretching toward summer, and so many nights I found myself up on Reavy Hill again, staring down into the forest and tracing the outlines of Thornchapel with my eyes. I roamed through the woods and spent hours in the chapel, plucking wildflowers out by their stems and tracing thorns with the pad of my thumb.
I stared at the altar, at the perpetually damp stone, set among bluebells and soft shoots of new grass. It had been a grave after all; the new grass was a testament to what had been discovered and dug up, and anyway, there was just something about it. Something that wasn’t quite alive, but wasn’t quite unalive either.
Convivificat.
I would stare at the altar and try not to think of Auden. I would think of Poe’s door, of her mother’s foreword about human sacrifice. I would think about Lammas, I would think about Samhain coming after it. I would think about the summer solstice and whether I should go with Poe to her mother’s funeral, even though money was tight and Auden would be there. I would think about Ralph and my mother, and wonder what they did in these woods.
I would wonder if the trees would reach for me when I left too.
So the days passed, lonely and ephemeral save for the time I spent with Poe, and I almost believed it was over. Auden had stopped texting and calling, and he hadn’t come after me, and this was the end. This was actually the end of us, and it turns out that it was no one’s fault but a dead man’s.
I tried not to feel disappointed. I tried not to imagine Auden striding after me in the thorn chapel and pushing me into the spring grass as he crawled over me. I tried not to imagine him pinning me to a wall with a forearm on my neck as he unfastened his pants and stepped between my legs. I tried not to imagine his hand over my mouth so that I couldn’t say the words that would make him go.
This was sickness and I was sick with it. I wanted him to burn our boundaries to ashes and rule over me anyway. I wanted him to take me and make me. I wanted Beltane, I wanted sides heaving and skin slick as I ran from the god in the forest, I wanted the same thing Auden told me he wanted the day after—forever.
I wanted him.
But then I’d think of my mother or Ana María or our friends. I’d think of the inside of St. Petroc’s Church—hushed and holy—and I’d think about what I believed. What I had to believe. Being sick doesn’t excuse shit.
And then the tuxedo came.
It came like a dress in some kind of romcom, zipped into a garment bag and hung in my bedroom, a box of gleaming dress shoes underneath it. For a moment after I walked in, damp and smelling of flowers from the chapel, I couldn’t actually discern what it was. I’d never worn anything that needed a garment bag, I’d never even worn clothes that needed dry cleaning. But when I pulled the zipper down to expose a Hugo Boss tuxedo, with a gala invitation pinned neatly to its collar, I felt a corrupt thrill run through me.
This was from Auden.
I couldn’t help it, I tried the tuxedo on. And the shoes. The fit was faultless—the hem of the pants shivering on the laces of my shoe, the shoulders perfectly trim, the sleeves tailored right to the bones of my wrists.
I normally hated anything more formal than a T-shirt and jeans, I really did. But this . . .
I felt like Cinderella. Like bi boy Cinderella, and what if I went to the ball? Just to see him, nothing more? What could it hurt?
If I was Cinderella, then Becket was my fairy godmother. After he dropped off Sir James at Abby’s house, he helped me arrange last minute transportation, since there wasn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell that I was driving in London, and he offered his hotel room for the night—both to get ready in and to crash in after the gala. He helped me dress, he fastened my cufflinks for me, he loaned me a pair of dress socks when he saw the holey boot socks I’d brought to wear with the dress shoes.
And now here I am. Regretting everything.
Becket’s gone ahead to find our friends, but I’ve hung back, feeling useless and stupid among all these elegant people. Men saunter by, clearly at ease in their ten-thousand-pound suits, and women mince next to them in spindly heels, moving with the practiced concentration of ballet dancers. Words of money drift through the air like cigar smoke. Horse breeding, vacations in the Seychelles, real-estate investment in Croatia. Did we see what the Japanese stock market did this morning? Have we seen the latest symphony performance—Bartók again, how quotidian? Have we heard what happened to the Foxhill-Spencer’s au pair—scandalous really, but what else does one expect from an au pair?
I hate it, and I hate this courtyard, which is a coffin of stone, with the stony twilight sky as its lid, and I hate this city, and I hate these people.
I hate myself most of all for coming.
I turn, thinking I’ll leave, I’ll stop playing Cinderella and I’ll go back to Becket’s hotel, but then that’s when I see him through the watery bars of the fountain. I see him and then I falter.
He looks like a prince.
I’m used to him looking like the lord of the manor. I’m even familiar with him as my wild god—a being of hungry eyes and even hungrier appetites—running down prey through the trees to slake his needs.
But this—this right here is almost too much. Him in the immaculate tuxedo, him tall and lean and narrow-hipped, him with a watch glinting on his wrist and a glass of clear liquor in his hand. Everything about him so clearly and painfully belongs—everything about him is so clearly and painfully Guest.
He was born to inherit this world, he doesn’t need our forest games and our lanterns in the night. Thornchapel is his and this world of money and boredom is also his, and everything that he could ever want is already his, will be his the moment he bothers to reach for it.
He’s a prince and I’m a pauper. Rich boy, poor boy. And though we issued from the same bitter loins, though we are joined by our very essence, it is him who has the world at his fingertips and it is me who has a designated hook in the staff room of the local library.
