Page 56 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Rebecca doesn’t lift her eyes from her phone. Given how fast her thumbs are moving, I presume she’s typing an email. “I don’t care about social media.”
I’ve never understood this attitude. At all. “It will care about you,” I tell her. “And the press is ceasele
ssly invasive when it wants to be.”
“I’ll be fine,” Rebecca says. “I saw the publicity kit.” She looks up, and her expression softens a little. “I’m proud to be with you, pet. It’s my honor.”
“I know,” I say. “I just feel rather beastly about it. If I had a different job, we could be a normal enough couple.”
That might be a lie too. My fame came at first because I’m a Dansey, because my family is the kind of wealthy that people love to gossip about, and because all Danseys live to be rich and pretty and admired. A daughter of society showing up on the arm of a world-famous architect—who is a woman—would have always sparked interest. But add in my actual platform, the modeling work, the podcast I’m launching, and it’s beyond inevitable. Our relationship—whatever it actually is—will be public domain and there’s very little I can do about that.
“And your father will be okay with it? They’ll know you work for him, and so his name will come up too.”
“He’ll be okay with it,” she says. And then rubs at her forehead, looking suddenly very tired. “I don’t know about my mother though.”
“Does she not know about me?”
“She does.” And that’s all the answer Rebecca seems willing to give, because she says nothing more until we arrive at Somerset House.
There’s a red carpet going into the event, which is mostly an opportunity for the guests to bask in their single claim to public attention—money—and is also an excellent opportunity for Rebecca and me to debut as a couple. She’s dressed in a white dress, precisely tailored and cupping her small, high breasts perfectly, and also setting off the lean lines of her stomach and hips.
She is patient through all the pictures, even though I can tell she’s uncomfortable being so visible and being expected to perform. I squeeze her hand to let her know I’m here, and she squeezes back. And when she gives me an impromptu kiss at the end of the red carpet, much to the ecstatic scuffle and flash of the photographers, it’s real and warm and earnest. There’s something like apology in her eyes.
“Let’s get some bubbles,” she says and pulls me into the gala itself.
There’s to be dinner later in the clusters of clear tents spread across the courtyard, and of course there will be dancing in the largest tent. They’ve left the ground fountain turned on and people are milling around the water’s edge, shaking hands and waving over servers for more drinks and generally just being rich knobheads. It doesn’t bother me—it’s the devil I know, after all—but Rebecca seems like she wishes she could vanish into the ground and reappear back at her office, where she could at least be getting some work done.
I find her a drink as quickly as possible, guiding her to the side of the fountain where we can watch it splash without being interrupted. As I thought, the sound of water seems to relax her, the fluid geometry of the jets all arrayed in soliderly rows, spurting up in endless, translucent columns. She studies it a moment, and I know her mind is diagnosing the mechanics of it, the logistics, examining how she could do it better, cleaner, more integrated with the landscape and the river only a stone’s throw away.
“Oh, there’s Poe and Auden!” I say excitedly, trying to wave them over and failing. There’re too many people and too much noise for them to hear me.
“Thank God,” mutters Rebecca.
“You and Auden aren’t allowed to escape and have pedantic conversations in the corner, understood? This is his firm’s gala and he needs to mingle, and you need to mingle on behalf of your firm too.”
There’s an amused tilt to her lips now, like she’s watching a baby kitten attack her booted foot and she’s decided to indulge it because it’s so adorable with its tiny claws and teeth. “Oh, is that so?” she says.
“Yes—oh, there’s Becket too. It’s too bad Saint isn’t coming.”
“He’s currently furious with Auden.”
I look over at Rebecca, but she doesn’t elaborate, and anyway, I’m tugging her toward our friends, ready to say hello and also to make sure Poe is dressed exactly the way I styled her.
Proserpina like a curvy doll—with long, dark doll curls and porcelain doll skin and big doll eyes, and honestly, I wish she’d let me dress her more often. She’s in a real rut with all those Modcloth dresses and cardigans, and it’s a shame, because she’s got such a body and such Victorian fairy-tale features, I could have so much fun with her.
She’s in the strapless champagne-colored dress I picked out, her bright green eyes glowing, her hair pulled into a lush updo that shows off the arch of her throat and her square shoulders. And Auden is perfect next to her, as he always is—his tuxedo almost painstakingly fitted to his hale proportions, his hair swept back off his forehead in a way that would make any other man look vain, but on Auden it only looks right. As if the world should see the high, noble lines of his face, the marble-statue features of him.
But even though they look like a picture together, it’s not their clothes or their hair that I notice as we get closer. It’s how Auden leans in to whisper in Poe’s ear, how he holds a small remote in his hand, how she blushes and trembles and holds onto him for balance.
“He’s got a remote vibrator inside of her,” Rebecca says approvingly. “I’d like to do that with you someday.”
I flush with sudden heat. The performer in me likes that idea a lot—being in public, pleasure buzzing through me as I’m helpless to do anything but endure it as silently as I can.
Rebecca traces a line up my neck. “Soon, pet,” she promises, and I can almost imagine that her distance this afternoon was a dream, that it never happened. Maybe she’s not my raw queen again, but I’ll take this—the friendly Domme, the considerate girlfriend. I can live with that.
Auden—in front of everyone, not seeming to care how it might look—wraps his hand around Poe’s throat and then—tenderly, sweetly—bites her cheek. “Go on now,” I hear him say, and I realize he’s sending her off to Becket. With a vibrator in her pussy and a bite mark across her cheek.
Looking dazed, she goes, and he smiles after her. The smile of the Thorn King.
