Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

DelphineHarcourt + Trask’s annual gala is in the courtyard of Somerset House, a Neoclassical venue and arts center on the Strand—and also a place I know Auden personally likes very much. He used to drag me here in the winter, when the courtyard is turned into an ice skating rink, and we’d skate until our cheeks hurt from laughing and our ears hurt with the cold.

Theoretically the gala is for charity, but in the years since I’ve been going, it’s mainly a chance for the beau monde to show off new frocks and lovers, and I’m no exception. I’ve spent all spring figuring out which dress I want to wear—not to mention the last month or so picking out a dress for Rebecca, since she was planning on wearing something she already had, and that was simply not going to work for me.

And so here we are a few hours later, crammed into a car while Rebecca scowls at her phone and I perch on the edge of my seat so as not to wrinkle my gown (a sculpted off-the-shoulder dress in a vibrant red, which hugs every curve and then pleats artfully at my feet).

My lips are painted in the always-dashing Ruby Woo, and my hair is pulled back at one side with a long, diamond-studded clip I borrowed from my mother. It hangs down in sleek waves, and I’ve caught Rebecca’s eyes lingering on it more than once, like she’s imagining what it would look like wrapped around her fist.

God, I wish she’d do it. Pull my hair. Dirty my dress. Smear my lipstick.

Anything other than the cold reserve that’s settled over her since our time at the club.

Idiot that I am, I keep trying to make small talk. “My parents will be there, you know.”

“Mm,” she says, not lifting her eyes from her phone.

“And it’s the first event we’re doing . . . together. It might get noticed.”

I’m lying. It will get noticed. Enough so that my manager emailed over a publicity kit to Rebecca in anticipation of tonight—specific sound bites she was to give if the press called the next day, the emails and phone numbers of people she was to refer media inquiries to.

We have a solid social media strategy in place: a scheduled post tomorrow morning with a picture of us snuggled together on a library sofa at Thornchapel. Then a gradual integration of her into my stories, and then my manager will start lining up interviews, depending on the interest and available outlets. Because so many fat-friendly brands are also queer friendly, my team feels like my relationship with Rebecca won’t impact my existing business relationships, so most of our plan has focused on wider public perception, safety, and preparation for bullying, trolling, and worse.

“Rebecca? Are you sure you’re still okay with it?”

“With what?” she asks distractedly.

“We’re going to this event together. It might work its way into the press. It will definitely be on social media.”

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 ceaselessly 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 p***y and a bite mark across her cheek.

Looking dazed, she goes, and he smiles after her. The smile of the Thorn King.

And I think I’m jealous of Poe Markham. Not because she gets to be bitten and bidden by Auden, but because he looks at her with unguarded love and appetite. Because she knows he loves her more than anything.

“Sir Guest,” Rebecca greets him, and he moves his forest eyes over to us.

“Quartey. Delly.” He kisses Rebecca’s cheek and then kisses mine. His lips on my cheek are firm and warm, and when he pulls back, his eyes are fond and sad all at once.

I think of the way he bit Poe’s cheek. I think of how he watched her as she walked away. And I think of how it felt to watch Rebecca slip away from me this afternoon. How it felt to welcome her inside my body, to have the most urgent and unfiltered s*x we’ve ever had, and then to look over and see a stranger in her place.

What if I’d stayed with him?

It’s a stray thought, one that can be batted away like a moth, one that can be wiped away with a thumb like bleeding lipstick. I’m not in love with him, because I’m in love with someone else.

I just wish I’d known how much it hurt to love someone for real. I wish I’d known how much it hurts to be the one waiting.

I should have been kinder to him. But I look over at him now, talking seriously with Rebecca, his eyes flicking over to Poe in a way that betrays where his real attention lies, and I think maybe I was kind after all. I know Auden would’ve never cheated, never strayed, but if we’d stayed engaged, maybe he would’ve burned, like St. Paul talks about in the Bible.

Auden would’ve married the wrong person, and oh, how he would have burned for it.

And me? Without Rebecca, I never would have caught on fire at all.

“Why is the priest here?” Rebecca is asking Auden. “Doesn’t he have a flock to tend to?”

Auden takes Rebecca’s glass and helps himself to a drink. She flicks him on the cheek for it, and he just laughs before he answers her. “He’s on the board of the DevonSafe foundation, which helps shelter domestic violence victims. Harcourt + Trask is currently designing three secure shelters for the foundation, as a pro bono contribution, and they’re the beneficiary of this year’s gala, so naturally we invited the board to come.”

We turn and watch as Becket sees Poe and takes her hand to kiss it. The gesture is gallant—more Virginia money than Virgin Mary—looking all the stranger because he’s wearing his priest’s clothes. They’re flawless and crisp and a black so Cimmerian that I know he’ll look stunning in every picture taken tonight—but they’re a priest’s clothes nonetheless. His collar flashes snow-white at his throat, and when his black jacket parts, I can see the corner of a small Bible poking from his pocket.

Becket offers his arm, and there’s a lost kind of smile on his mouth when Poe accepts his offer and tucks her hand into his elbow. Together they start walking toward us, Becket’s head bent solicitously over Poe’s so he can listen to whatever she’s saying.

“Guest,” Rebecca says. “I think your priest is in love with your submissive.”

I look over at Auden, not sure what I expect to see. One of his crooked smiles maybe, his first line of defense when it comes to showing his real emotions, or perhaps a dismissive laugh, or maybe one of his smirks, as crooked as a smile but curling with bitterness at the edges.

But he only looks thoughtful, and maybe a little sad. “I know,” he says. “I know.”

Becket stands out among the crowd—a pillar of blue-eyed flame clad in coal—and I can see how much attention he’s drawing as he walks toward us. I can see the swiveling heads, the darting eyes, the ensuing whispers. Did you see that? Did you see him?

The perils of being a handsome priest, I suppose, but I’m more concerned about the way he’s looking at Poe while everyone else is looking at him.

“He needs to be careful,” I say. “A fit priest is bound to make waves. But a fit priest looking swoony over a woman like Poe is going to make trouble for him.”

Auden nods, and for the first time tonight, he looks concerned. Because there is no mistaking the look on Becket’s face as he strolls next to Poe, and if we can see it, other people can too.

I scan the side of the courtyard we’re standing in, making sure I don’t see any cell phones out and taking pictures, making sure I don’t see any of the worst gossips circulating through the tuxedoed horde, and that’s when I see him from across the fountain, looking lost and angry—and rather romantic standing alone like that, with his hands in his tuxedo pockets and with the jets of the fountain walling him off from the rest of us, like he’s been imprisoned behind towers of warped glass.

His hair falls dramatically into his face, and his lip piercing glints in the fading twilight of the city. Sigh. I wish he’d let me style him too.

“I thought Saint wasn’t supposed to come tonight,” I say.