Page 47 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
It’s a crime and a sin and a stain I’ll never be free of, what I’ve done with Auden Guest. What, even now, I ache to do with Auden Guest.
“You what, St. Sebastian?” Ana María asks carefully. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I mumble. “Nothing happened.”
Silence hangs between us then. I stare at Richard Davey’s picture, still rubbing at my chest.
My body aches the tiniest bit, and I remember what it felt like to have the wild god over me, inside me, feral and cruel and snarling with the need to fuck. My cock thickens at the memory…at the thought of it happening again.
It can never, ever happen again.
“You’re too smart a boy to let yourself get hurt,” my cousin tells me, repeating what she said earlier. “Tell me I’m right, St. Sebastian. Please.”
“You’re right,” I say automatically, but I don’t know if I believe it. I don’t know if it’s true.
Because I am very, very hurt right now, and there’s a miserable, traitorous part of me that wants to go find the source of my pain and be wrecked all over again. And when I end my call with Ana María and see a text from Auden—
Come back to me.
—I very nearly cave and go find him. I want to so badly, in fact, that I leave my phone in the kitchen and go early to the library, determined to stay so busy that I’ll forget all about him and how much I long to crawl back to his feet.
Chapter Eleven
Rebecca
The day of the gala, I’m sitting in my office with a fine-point marker in my hand and my desk covered with site plans for the Severn riverfront revitalization. I’m supposed to be making revisions so my junior architect can start rendering the plan in Photoshop, but I’ve done nothing but stare at the slopes and bends and loops, my mind playing strange tricks on me.
Somehow the slopes have become generous curves. And the bends have become arches, sinuous and beckoning. And the loops are sliding, silky hair, catching on itself as it drapes over a pillow.
The river—flattened in the CAD drawing to a few squiggly depth indicators—becomes palpable wetness against my fingertips. It becomes the slick, gin-soaked kisses I stole from Delphine last night. The fevered moment when she took my hand and pushed a single fingertip inside of her. Not deep, not any deeper than the first knuckle, but my god, I could have been inside her past my wrist for how good it felt. Her eyes had shone up at me, brimming with so much trust I wondered if I could drown in it, and I could hear the memory of her words, a memory I kept curling my thoughts around—I love you.
And the inside of her, a place I had traced countless times, licked and lapped at—it was softer than I ever could have imagined, tighter too. And wetter—the kind of wet that has me wet just remembering it, squirming just from looking at a fucking CAD drawing, Jesus Christ.
I toss the marker down and stand up, pacing over to the window and scowling. The place between my legs aches now, aches enough that if I press my thighs together, pleasure sizzles up from my clit to shower sparks in my belly.
I lean my forehead against the cool glass and try not to feel miserable. I hate this, I think. I hate having the order of my thoughts rifled through, I hate the misbehavior of my body. Always, always, there had been a line drawn between work and sex. Work was the gift, and sex was the thing that kept me going when it felt like the gift would break me. Fucking was for the body and work was for the mind.
Except now my mind is invaded.
Even now I can imagine I smell her—although I know that can’t be true—but still. A smell like the scent she favors—berries and violets, ripe and delicate all at once.
When I remember it, my belly hollows. I feel like my chest has been cracked open and my heart is beating out in the open air and everyone can see the ugly ordinariness of it. The thin skin of it, the greedy blue veins, the way it skips and speeds up for someone who will invariably rend it in two. Everyone will see the sloppy, idiotic organ and say yes, she was a genius, but a fool for all that.
I roll my forehead against the glass, imagining my chest suturing itself back together, imagining a plate of armor over it, imagining all of me encased in concrete like a radioactive tomb. Heart, thoughts, cunt—all of it suffocated with necessity and focus.
You’re just worked up because you know what you’re going to do this afternoon, I reassure myself. It’s just the anticipation any Domme would feel. You have your own sub now and it’s normal to be excited.
There. That?
?s it. We’re going back to the club this afternoon, and it’s going to be unbearably sexy, and anyone in my place would be just as distracted. Maybe even more so. If I were Auden, I’d already have tossed off in the staff loo, so there’s that at least.
Our first visit to the club went well enough, I suppose. I decided that we’d go in a voyeuristic capacity only; I wanted Delphine to acquaint herself with the space without being preoccupied with the possibility of performance. I wanted to ease her into it all, the way I hadn’t eased her in our first night together in London; I wanted to keep her heart safe.
And if a consequence of that was keeping my own heart safe, could I be blamed?
At any rate, I’d forgotten that Delphine was a performer. That performance intoxicated her, that she found a heady meaning in it. That she craved being watched and witnessed. The entire time we’d been there, safely ensconced in a plush leather booth as we watched scene after scene on the main stage, she’d been enraptured, captivated, practically twitching to leap up onto the stage herself and fling herself at the feet of strangers as a willing victim.
It had pleased me—she would thrive there, she would love it—but there had been a small snake of jealousy moving through my guts too. Was she so willing to have another person top her? Was I just a . . . I don’t even know, some kind of shortcut to what she needed? Was her loyalty to domination in general and not to me?
