Page 67 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
He gets to his feet and helps me up, and together we dust off all the bits of harvest detritus from our tuxedos. He keeps his touch impersonal, and quick, but I’m so, so aware of him as he brushes off the back of my trousers, the sides of my thighs. Not an hour ago, he would have used this as an excuse to maul me. To get me hard. Now it is nothing more than what one friend would do for another. Platonic solicitude.
It feels strange. Nearly as wrong as anything else, but maybe I’ll get used to it.
We slide out of the small barley tomb and emerge into a gallery that’s still as vacant and empty as ever.
“I suppose we should get back,” I say, turning to find Auden staring at my mouth like he wants to eat it.
“One last kiss,” he says, lifting his eyes to mine. There’s no power in them now, no arrogance. Only pure, young longing. “Please, St. Sebastian. I want . . . I want to kiss you one last time.”
He’s not even finished before I’m in his arms, slotting my lips against his, opening for him as I always do. His tongue is hot, silky, and he strokes my tongue expertly with it, exploring every corner of a mouth that no longer belongs to him. He drinks his fill of me, one hand in my hair and the other at the small of my back, and for a single perfect instant, everything is how it is supposed to be. We’re how we’re supposed to be.
He gives my tongue a lingering caress with his, and then he nips at my bottom lip, sucking it and the piercing into his mouth. When he pulls away, he takes my heart with him.
He looks at me with swollen lips and glittering eyes. Without his bowtie, I can see his pulse thrumming like mad in his throat. “Shall we?” he asks, gesturing toward the door.
And, convincing myself that this is the right thing, that this is the only thing to be done, the only way we can have most of everything and only a little nothing, I swallow and nod.
“Ready when you are.”
Part II
Midsummer
Midsummer
St. Sebastian
He doesn’t remember precisely how he came to be in a car with Auden and Poe driving down I-70, but he would never dream of complaining about it. The windows are down, the radio is blaring something loud and fun, and Poe’s hair is everywhere—a storm of hair, dark and silky—as she drives and sings and eventually goads Auden into singing too.
His voice is terrible, hers too, and St. Sebastian leans his head against the backseat window and smiles as he listens to them. Outside, stretches of Kansas flash by—green fields, greener pastures, broken by lines of stunted, prairie-hardy trees and shallow creeks with cows crowding the edges. This isn’t home—this isn’t sunlight glinting off glass and waving off asphalt, this isn’t a sidewalk ready to scald bare feet, paletas dripping onto your hands if you don’t eat them fast enough, the splash of a pool, the smell of chlorine, the hot sand of Burger’s Lake—all of that is Texas and Texas’s alone.
But it reminds him of home. The heat, the sun, the tar-ribboned interstate. The cows in their fields too, standing up to their bellies in muddy ponds or crowding under the shade of the one tree big enough to cast a shadow.
Prairie. It’s the prairie in summer, and even though St. Sebastian doesn’t think of the prairie as his home, even though his version of the prairie is made of mega highways and air conditioners humming like giant metal bees, he still feels himself breathe easier here.
It’s the Vitamin D, Poe will tell him later, once they’ve finished their drive from the airport and settled into her father’s living room with cold beers and panting dogs sprawled between them. No way are we getting enough at Thornchapel.
Maybe it is. Maybe he’s been craving the sun and the heat, the slow-rolling summer that bakes and bakes and bakes, doing its little chemistries inside his cells and making him stronger. Or maybe it’s the open sky, so far away and such a sweet blue that it’s impossible to believe in clouds and storms and wind, even when Poe points out trees snapped like sticks from a tornado last year. Or maybe it’s the open road, straight and wide and mostly empty, a runway to a horizon so distant that it feels like a movie set, a backdrop, a painting propped against the real horizon somewhere closer by.
Whatever it is, he’s still smiling as they roll into Lawrence—another car with Delphine, Rebecca, and Becket behind them—driving through a cozy downtown of brick storefronts and winding to the foot of a big hill.
Above them, there’s the University of Kansas, perched on the hilltop, glimpses of bright limestone and red roofs. Here at the base of the hill are narrow streets of old Italianate houses, fussy Victorian Baroques, low-slung Craftsmans, all jostling among mature oaks and maples and sweet gums, with dogwoods and crabapple trees squatting between. When they park and start spilling out of their cars, stretching and scratching themselves, Delphine twirls a slow circle in the middle of the shady street.
“I thought there’d be cowboys here,” she says.
“Just drunk college kids and hippies, mostly,” Poe says, popping open the trunk of the car. “Well, and the professors aren’t drunk or hippies. Usually. Daddy!” This last she directs to a tall, thin man who’s just emerged from the two-story house in front of them. She skips right into his arms and they hug for a long moment.
Saint looks over to see Auden staring at the fatherly embrace, an almost-puzzled knit to his brow, and he thinks that for all of Auden’s gifts—the money and the house and the education fit for a prince—Auden’s never felt the affectionate embrace of a father happy to see his son.
Even Saint had that, for a little while at least.
David Markham finally releases Poe, although he keeps her close as he greets the rest of them, his eyes lingering on each and every one of their faces—especially Rebecca’s. Rebecca notices and clears her throat.
“Ah, yes,” David says, blushing a little above his beard. He has light, brownish hair and blueish eyes behind trendy glasses, and there’s so little of him in Poe—except for those easily pinked cheeks and the button of his nose. And then in the way he talks, which is precise and somehow also tangential and meandering at the same time, as if his mind has so many rooms crammed full of so many thoughts that he has mentally sprint between them all in order to communicate. “Welcome to the house, come on in—let me show you where you’re staying, there’s plenty of room and I’m a deep sleeper as Poe can tell you, so no need to keep quiet when you’re coming in or out. I’m teaching a summer course, so I’ll be gone most of today and tomorrow, but the day of the funeral of course, I’ll be home, and the day after—it’s Intro to Religious Studies, I could teach it in my sleep, normally they give it to a lecturer, but I wanted to stay busy this summer, there’s never enough work it seems, with the house so quiet, although I could get another dog, I suppose. Are you thirsty?”
They all look at each other, then back to David.
“Very,” Auden says politely, and they go inside.
