Page 80 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“If my mother and your father hadn’t met, then we wouldn’t have met. And I keep thinking—how could her tragedy have been my happiness? Her end, my beginning?”
No one has a response to that, save for the cicadas, who seem to have a response to everything.
“It’s a question for Becket,” Auden says.
“Or it’s a question without an answer,” she says.
“Or that.”
Becket calls out that he’s going to follow the overgrown trail to see where it will le
ad, and Delphine and Rebecca spread out their blanket on the other side of the fire. Trees, thrumming with the cicadas’ chirr, surround them on all sides except for the east, where the lake ruffles under the last of the sun.
They’re in a spot Poe says almost no one uses, and they’re utterly alone—no people, or cars, or boats anywhere. It’s almost like Thornchapel in a way, and Auden finds himself grateful for tonight. Just to be alone with his friends. With his little bride and his St. Sebastian.
Proserpina takes in a deep breath, and Auden can almost imagine the trees and lake breathing with her, inhaling and expanding and reaching, and then she lets the breath go, and the world sighs with her.
Auden knows that breath, because he’s breathed it himself both at Thornchapel and in the graveyard of St. Brigid’s.
It’s a breath of resignation. It’s a breath for all the breaths her mother can no longer take. It’s a breath at the beginning of a new life she’ll have to start again and again, each time she remembers, each time she forgets. She’s been practicing it for twelve years, and that’s why Auden trusts the look in her eyes when she puts her hand over his and tilts her head at Saint.
“Are you sure?” he murmurs. They talked about what they would do tonight—they talked about it before they left England, actually—but Auden knows how depleting a funeral can be, and anyway, the plan had been to be in her room, with walls and a door. Not in the warm open air.
But he can also read the restlessness building in her, he can see her need for something distracting and Saturnalian and vital. She’s itching for something he can give, and he was born to give her everything.
“I’m sure,” she says firmly, and that’s that.
“St. Sebastian, we have something for you,” Auden says, leaning forward to look at his half-brother.
St. Sebastian looks confused. “Something for me?”
“It’s your birthday today,” Poe reminds him softly. “We didn’t forget, you know.”
St. Sebastian looks like he’s not sure what to say or do—which is fine, because Auden is sure enough for all of them. Auden gets up from where he’s seated and takes the few steps over to St. Sebastian, so that he’s standing right behind where he sits. On the other side of the fire, Delphine and Rebecca are already amorously occupied, and so Auden feels no compunctions about what comes next.
“Lie down,” Auden tells him. “On your back.”
St. Sebastian pulls his lip piercing into his mouth, looking uncertain. “Auden . . . I—”
“Lie. Down.” Auden uses the voice he’s so careful not to use with Saint anymore. The voice that he used on Beltane. The voice he used that summer.
When he uses it, he expects to be obeyed—but if he’s not, he’ll happily fight St. Sebastian into submission. He’ll happily wrestle him down to the blanket and pin him there. Happily.
But St. Sebastian obeys. A flush dusts his cheekbones as he releases his piercing from his teeth and slowly lays himself back so that he’s completely supine. When he’s done, his T-shirt has pulled up from the belted waistband of his jeans just enough to reveal a sliver of stomach. Light bronze and firm, with a narrow trail of hair leading down from his navel.
Auden’s mouth actually waters at the sight of it. Waters. Like he’s seeing a meal he’s been kept away from for months and months and years. He would pay all the money he has, sell off every asset he owns, just to bite that stomach right now.
No. Think of the gallery. The gallery with its fake Maeshowe tomb made of grain. The gallery where he held a sobbing St. Sebastian in his arms—where Auden made St. Sebastian sob because he had been selfish and needy. Because he had been a bad Dom and a bad lover. A bad brother.
Never again, Auden had vowed as he held St. Sebastian’s shuddering frame. Never again. He would die first. Die before he made Saint cry like that again.
St. Sebastian had been martyr enough for a thousand lifetimes, and now it was Auden’s turn.
However, that didn’t mean Auden’s hunger had abated. No, no, not at all. Not the hunger, nor the possessiveness, nor the love. All of it seemed to grow and grow, fed by its own starvation, until Auden’s blood felt like it was made from molten metal and his bones from sharpened swords. Walking hurt, working hurt, existing hurt when St. Sebastian wasn’t completely his.
So he’s been cheating. A little.
It was Poe’s idea at first. After he confessed all this to her, kneeling at her feet as he sometimes did, and letting her be the priestess to his king, she reminded him that she and Emily had been kinky and in love for eighteen months without having sex.
