Page 66 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
He presses his face into my hair. Not to comfort me, but for himself now, as if he can’t bear this. “Will you hate me for loving you?” he asks brokenly.
“I don’t know.”
He pauses. “Will you hate yourself?”
That. That I do have the answer to.
“Yes.”
A long moment. A moment that stretches through us and through the years and years we’ve been tied together and into a past that neither of us were there to see or change. A moment filled with shadows and silhouettes—our father, my mother, our little bride. Our friends. A proud house in the wind-scoured moors, and a ruined chapel in the woods.
“Then no more,” Auden says, and his words are guarded and carefully pronounced. But when I push out of his arms to sit up and look him in the face, his eyes are filled with a raw agony that flays me alive.
“Auden,” I say again, not sure what I’m going to say next, but knowing I have to stop him from looking like that or we’re both going to die. “We—”
He shakes his head, reaches out to touch my mouth again. The place where he first marked me, a prince and pauper wrestling in a cloud of lavender and baby’s breath. “It’s enough now. I love you and Proserpina with a hunger like I could eat the world and not be full. But I love you too much to push you. I love you too much to let you hate yourself.”
I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t have anything that would make him feel better.
Because he would push me and I would hate myself.
He gives me a sad smile, like he knows all this without me having to speak it aloud. “I told Rebecca about our father, and you know what she told me? She told me that I needed to know what I wanted and what I was willing to lose in order to get it.”
“And?” I ask, my voice still hoarse. “What do you want?”
“You, St. Sebastian. I want you. And I don’t mean for sex, even though that’s part of it, I mean that I want your face and your voice and the way you smile when you think no one is looking. I want to talk to you and see you, I want to come home and know you’ll be there. I want to go on walks with you and argue about books with you, and just—do everything with you. Live with you and grow old with you and die with you. That’s what I want. That’s what I will die without and what I refuse to give up now.”
That agony is still in his eyes, sparkling green and brown in our art exhibit sanctuary, but the agony no longer cuts me down. It lures me in, beckoning me to a place of pain we share together.
“Be my brother, St. Sebastian,” he says. “No kissing. No kink. No fucking. But come to the house and live with me. Share my inheritance. Share our bride. Surely that’s—it’s not unheard of, is it? It’s not a sin? Two brothers living together? Loving the same woman?”
My breath is caught in my throat. A knot of hope and pain. “We could be together then.”
“Yes,” Auden says, with what would be eagerness if there wasn’t still so much longing written across those elegant features.
“We could have each other.” I’m almost stunned at the simplicity of it, the near inevitability of it. “It would be the way it was always meant to be between us.”
Auden’s mouth twists a little. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“We could love each other,” I say, ignoring him, something deep green and glossy unfurling inside me. Something born of winter finally seeing the light. “We could have the rest of our lives together.”
“All the parts of love, save for one.”
“And we’d still be a three.”
Auden nods, a tired, kingly finality. “We’d still be a three.”
I feel stupid that I haven’t thought of this before, that I haven’t begged for it or spoken it into being or even imagined that it could be a solution. It’s the answer to everything, it’s balm from Gilead at last. We’ll have each other. We’ll have Poe.
What else could possibly matter?
How hard could it possibly be to resist the car
nal blossoms of our desires when the roots are fed elsewhere? With his attention, with his time—I surely won’t need his cruelty then, nor his crude lusts. I won’t crave them when so much else is being given to me.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. I’ll move in. I’ll be at Thornchapel. I’ll be your . . . your brother. For real now.”
The smile he gives me then. Like the chapel itself—haunting, beautiful, broken and whole all at once. His smile is the center of the world. “Good.”
