Page 70 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
In five weeks, he’s learned this: with Poe he is complete, and without Auden he is not. He doesn’t know how both things can be true at once, but they are.
In the here and now, Auden gives Poe a break. He goes up to the cross to kiss her cheek, her sweat-misted forehead, he gives her a drink of water and murmurs things in her ear until she nods, her eyelids fluttering. And then he leaves her for a moment, coming up to St. Sebastian with the kind of direct steps that says Auden knew where he was all along.
“Emily says we can fuck here,” Auden says. He’s a little breathless from the flogging himself, his color high and his eyes sparkling.
“And so you’re going to fuck her.”
Hunger is all over him. “Yes.”
“You don’t need anyone’s permission but hers,” Saint says. He says it as placidly as he can, even though he’s not feeling placid about it at all.
“I’m not here to ask permission,” Auden clarifies, in the sort of amused tone that says permission, how adorable of you. “I’m here to ask if you want to join me.”
Saint flicks his eyes over to his former lover, his former king. “Auden.”
“It’s inevitable, St. Sebastian, and you know that as well as I do.”
“I don’t know that,” Saint says. “I don’t know that at all.”
“It’s not us together, stubborn boy. It’s us with her. Surely that’s allowed.”
If it was truly allowed, then why hadn’t they done it yet? Saint wants to ask. Because they’ve jumped right into everything else that’s allowed—living together and eating together and arguing about books together. But this is toeing the line, and Auden knows it. Saint can tell by that autocratic bearing, that lifted chin. The insolence stamped all over his features, a testament to ancestors who took every green field and fluffy flock they wanted to take and damn the consequences.
“Can you truly tell me if brothers don’t do this?” Auden asks.
It’s a game they’ve been playing, one they’ve played since the day after the gala when Saint moved into the house—not into Auden’s bedroom as had once been the plan, but into the bedroom next door.
Auden had walked in and looked at the haphazard heaps of clothes and things that Saint had brought from the semi, and said, in a voice so quiet and raw that Saint had nearly died, “I want to hold you right now.”
Saint had croaked back, “Then hold me. Brothers hug, you know.”
A week later, they’d been watching Poe and Becket stroll around the walled garden while Sir James Frazer tried to eat butterflies. “Do brothers hold hands sometimes?” Auden asked.
“Brothers hold hands,” Saint decided, and they’d laced their fingers together in the sun and watched the flowers and the dog and the smitten priest and they’d said nothing, but Saint had felt the imprint of Auden’s fingers and the heat of his palm for hours and hours afterward.
So many other things to learn. Did brothers share whisky glasses? Slices of cake? Did brothers sit next to each other on the couch? Hip to hip? Head on the other’s shoulder? What if they’d had something to drink by that point? What if the world was floating and sweetly spinning and there was also a hand on an ankle, a knee, a thigh? Was that allowed? Did brothers do that?
And when the woman they loved came to bed already well-pleasured by the other, did brothers savor the slickness inside her, did they hunt for bites and chafes left by the other, did they imagine another set of hands, another set of firm thighs and powerful arms to surround her with? Did they sometimes whisper things into their woman’s ear to pass on to the other—make sure to bite him back, swallow him deep, show him your throat. Make him come so hard I hear it.
Did brothers do that?
And now Auden is pushing them even further.
Saint looks at the woman shivering on the cross, her back red and angry, her panties unable to contain the full, ripe curve of her bottom. He knows if he cupped the heat between those cheeks, he’d find her wet and open. He would nudge in and she’d be tight enough to curl his toes.
“I know you want to,” Auden whispers. “You could go first. I wouldn’t touch.”
“You’d watch though,” Saint says. It’s the line they haven’t really stepped across yet. There’s been kissing Poe in front of each other, some playful petting maybe, but actually seeing each other mate . . .
“Yes,” Auden answers. “I’d watch.”
They look at each other. They both want it. Saint knows Auden is hard—was hard from the moment he started fingering the falls of the flogger—and Saint is too hard to deny himself anything.
“Maybe brothers watch,” Saint says. Hoarsely.
“And take turns.”
“And take turns,” Saint echoes.
