Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 15-3

But again, I underestimate Auden’s attunement to me, his acute perception. His hands on my body as he puts my tuxedo to rights are solicitous and calming, like he’s coaxing a skittish horse into staying still for him. When he’s done dressing me, he gently turns me around.

“Oh, St. Sebastian,” he says, because I’m already crying, dammit, the shame and the misery of it all is too much. I think I could cry for the rest of my life and still have sorrow yet to spill.

“Come here,” he whispers, and I come, stepping into his arms and clutching his jacket like a child. The minute his arms slide around me—strong and certain and a little bit acquisitive—I cry even harder, as if his comfort doesn’t shore up my walls but rather weakens them, and within seconds, I can barely breathe, I can barely think, all I can do is hold on to him as I cry and cry and cry, as I grieve every single second of a life which seems determined to rip the people I love away from me.

We end up on the ground, I don’t know how. I only know that one moment we’re standing, and then the next I’m in his arms on the floor, sitting between his sturdy thighs and nestled into his chest. He holds me tight, he drops kiss after kiss onto my hair, he croons things so low that I can’t hear them, I can only feel them as they rumble through his chest and throat.

I can’t remember someone ever holding me like this, ever, not even my mother or Richard Davey, even though they must have when I was little. But having Auden hold me and the weight of my unhappiness so easily, like I and it weigh nothing, having him cradling me and tending me like there’s nothing in the world he’d rather do—it’s a gift I cling to greedily. This one thing can be mine right now, this one solace.

I’m not sure how long I cry. Long enough that the breast of his tuxedo jacket is wet and one of my feet has gone numb from having my legs draped over his thigh. Long enough that I feel disoriented when I stop, dizzy from all those juddering, seizing inhales and wild, uncontrolled exhales. But it hasn’t been long enough that Auden’s arms have grown tired. I’m still held as tightly to his chest as ever.

Silence creeps back into our little tomb of grain, filling up the space where my sobs had been. There is only our breathing and Auden’s heart beating steadily against my ear and my occasional sniffles. I feel very small like this, even though I’m not small, even though my legs are as long and muscular as his, even though I fill his arms.

I feel a strange, sad peace. A numb kind of safety.

I wish we never had to leave this room.

I reach up and stroke the line of Auden’s lapel. “Did you get me a tuxedo just so you could f**k me in it at a swanky party?”

“Well, obviously,” he says wryly. Tenderly.

I look up at him. And then I notice his bowtie is gone. “What happened here?” I ask, lifting my hand to stroke the exposed hollow of his throat.

“As I’ve mentioned, you’ve already made use of my handkerchief, and I didn’t want to send you back into the fray still dripping with me.” The corner of his mouth tugs up. “Or rather, I wanted to, but I wasn’t going to.”

“So you used your bowtie?” I ask incredulously. “What happened to not being infrared or whatever?”

“Infra dig,” he corrects, “and in my case, everyone will assume my sartorial transgressions are for the sake of being roguishly fashionable.”

He’s probably not wrong. With his collar open and his throat naked, he’s still the cool, arrogant prince from earlier. Just more rakish now, a little more dangerous. A little more like the wild god he is inside.

“Are you saying I don’t look roguishly fashionable when I transgress?” I ask.

Auden gives a soft laugh and tugs on my lip piercing. “You always look perfect to me, and that’s what matters. Anyway, I think we can both agree there’s a material difference between losing a bowtie and having semen spattered on your trousers.”

We fall quiet again, Auden still using his thumb to toy with my labret. “Tell me why you were crying,” he says.

My voice is tired. Hoarse from the tears.

“You already know why.”

There’s an abrupt stillness to him now. “Do I?”

“Auden.”

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 s*x, 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 f*****g. 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 carnal 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.”

He gets to his feet and helps me up, and together we dust off all the bits of harvest detritus from our tuxedos. He keeps his touch impersonal, and quick, but I’m so, so aware of him as he brushes off the back of my trousers, the sides of my thighs. Not an hour ago, he would have used this as an excuse to maul me. To get me hard. Now it is nothing more than what one friend would do for another. Platonic solicitude.

It feels strange. Nearly as wrong as anything else, but maybe I’ll get used to it.

We slide out of the small barley tomb and emerge into a gallery that’s still as vacant and empty as ever.

“I suppose we should get back,” I say, turning to find Auden staring at my mouth like he wants to eat it.

“One last kiss,” he says, lifting his eyes to mine. There’s no power in them now, no arrogance. Only pure, young longing. “Please, St. Sebastian. I want . . . I want to kiss you one last time.”

He’s not even finished before I’m in his arms, slotting my lips against his, opening for him as I always do. His tongue is hot, silky, and he strokes my tongue expertly with it, exploring every corner of a mouth that no longer belongs to him. He drinks his fill of me, one hand in my hair and the other at the small of my back, and for a single perfect instant, everything is how it is supposed to be. We’re how we’re supposed to be.

He gives my tongue a lingering caress with his, and then he nips at my bottom lip, sucking it and the piercing into his mouth. When he pulls away, he takes my heart with him.

He looks at me with swollen lips and glittering eyes. Without his bowtie, I can see his pulse thrumming like mad in his throat. “Shall we?” he asks, gesturing toward the door.

And, convincing myself that this is the right thing, that this is the only thing to be done, the only way we can have most of everything and only a little nothing, I swallow and nod.

“Ready when you are.”

Part II

Midsummer