Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 4-1

Chapter Four

St. SebastianThe light has shifted in my mother’s office, casting a framed picture of Richard Davey into shadow and throwing warm squares of sunlight onto the paper-covered floor. I kick away a metal box that I always trip over in here and then slide onto the floor, sifting idly through nearby papers with unseeing eyes.

My mind is full of Auden. Of the sun gleaming along his bare chest and the tines of his antlers as he chased me through the forest. Of him pinning me to the soft, bluebell-covered earth and kissing me until I couldn’t breathe.

Anything I want from you is mine.

He knew. Even then he knew, which of course he did. He was desperate afterwards, wild with something that wasn’t the forest, but was all Auden instead.

Nothing tears us apart again.

Never again, because I won’t survive it.

Swear it to me.

And I did. I did swear, because what would ever compare to belonging to Auden Guest? What force of history or nature could ever match the force of him? The tousled-haired, asymmetrical-smiled, public-schooled, artsy, cruel, elegant magic that was Auden Guest?

Nothing would or could, and so I swore never to leave him, but how could I have known? How could I have guessed this, of all things? And now I’m alone in my dead mother’s office, too numb to be as furious with her as she deserves, too shocked to start fixing the things I need to fix. There’s nothing but this crushing weight on my chest. Nothing but the acute knowledge that nothing will ever be good again.

That I can never be Auden’s again.

I feel—I feel wrong. I feel dizzy and floaty and infected with something that’s so much worse than loneliness that I don’t even know the name for it.

From my mother’s office down the hall, I hear the front door click and swing open. No knock. No calling through the mail slot. No hesitation.

Truth be told, I only have five friends in this world, and only two of them wouldn’t bother to knock. But before I can wonder if it’s Proserpina or Auden, Auden’s voice fills the house like a low, silver mist of clipped consonants and relaxed vowels. I hate it, I hate that voice right now, and for once it’s not because it’s a reminder of a way I’ll never be, but because it’s so horribly, heartbreakingly happy.

Auden sounds happy.

“I thought I’d help you come pack your things—if that is what you’re doing here; Poe thought maybe Augie called you in.” Footsteps move through the hall, a graceful but powerful-sounding gait. Without my permission, my mind conjures up images of Auden’s thighs: the way they reveal themselves in the occasional pull and stretch of his tailored trousers; how they look naked—long and athletic and dusted with brown hair, the kind of hair that feels rough on your cheek when you rub your face against it.

“Also my firm is having a party in two weeks, and I’m bringing you and Poe as my dates,” Auden goes on. He’s coming closer to the door to the office and I should stand up, but I can’t. I can’t. I want to touch my brother’s naked thighs, and the memory of rubbing my face against them has desire twisting hot and knotty in my belly, and I can’t stand up.

“Don’t worry about the tuxedo either,” he says, very close now, almost walking past the office without seeing me because there’re no lights on and it’s silent and I’m on the floor. “I’m having one done up for you, and I’m quite serious about you being a date, I’m keen to show you off, you know—”

His sentence breaks off as he catches sight of me sitting on the floor. His brow furrows with worry as he steps inside the office. “St. Sebastian?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”

I look up at his face, cast in the glowing light of a May afternoon. Wind blows through the tree next to the window, sending a pattern of leaf-shaped shadows dancing over his high cheekbones and sculpted jaw. He looks like magic now; he looks like a wild god even in tailored trousers and the brogues he considers his casual brogues—as if there’s any discernible difference between any of his fancy leather shoes.

His glasses are tucked in the collar of his long-sleeved henley—a shirt I’m sure is one of those deceptively ordinary bits of clothing that actually cost hundreds of pounds—and they hang there with just enough weight to pull down the collar and reveal the full glory of his throat, which is a throat I could spend forever kissing. It could be the throat in an anatomy textbook, in an art reference book, that’s how perfectly molded and shaped it is, and when he swallows—as he’s doing now, looking down at me—I can see the elegant strength of its inner workings, this confluence of air and blood moving inside him.

I drop my eyes.

I can’t look at his magic face or his artful throat. They’re no longer mine to look at. He’s no longer mine to look at, because he’s no longer mine at all. He is nothing to me but forbidden now, he can never be anything more than one of the deepest and oldest sins.

And he lied to me.

He lied to me.

To get what he wanted, because God forbid Auden Guest not get what he wants.

He squats down, trousers perfectly hugging every part of his hips and ass and thighs, a gorgeous watch on his gorgeous wrist, and he has everything I never had, money and grace and a world-class education, he has Thornchapel and the easy confidence that comes with knowing exactly who you are and where you’re from.

“St. Sebastian,” he repeats, reaching out to tug at my lip piercing with his thumb. And I hate him so much right now. Not because he lied to me—although I hate him for that too—but because his eyes are so open, so honest and so clear. And his voice, that cool patrician voice, is warm. Warm for me.

A thought comes, as horrible as it is penetratingly possible:

What if this is a lie too?

What if the warmth, the honesty, the way he kissed me and held me last night—what if it’s all some kind of awful trick, the biggest deception of all? What if he only wanted me as a prerequisite to having Poe? What if he blames me for Ralph’s sins, for being living proof that his father was a shitty and disloyal man? What if I was always, always right, and there was never a world where Auden Guest could love a poor, sullen boy like me?

I push his hand away from my mouth, even though my lip twinges a little at the loss, and I scramble to my feet, feeling an ugly, sick twisting everywhere in my body. Everywhere that isn’t pulled tight with yearning, that is.

And in my belly, the two mingle together until I can’t pick them apart.

He straightens up too, pressing his hands to the wall on either side of my shoulders so fast that I can’t dodge away, and he crowds into me, his brogues trapping my boots inside them. His perfect mouth hovers just over mine.

“If you ever slap my hand away from your god forsaken mouth again,” he says slowly, “I’ll shove you to your knees and f**k that mouth until you cry. Am I understood?”

I hate how my body reacts to that; I hate how my body kicks to life at his cruelty.

“f**k you,” I say.

Confusion filters through his forest-colored eyes at that, and for a moment he looks baffled and very, very young. But then of course, because he’s Auden, he decides that everything must be the way he wants it, and the confusion is replaced by hubris once more.

“Oh, is this the game we’re playing right now?” Auden asks, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He moves his nose along the line of my jaw, breathing me in. “I’ll play, St. Sebastian. I’ll play any game you like.”

I manage to wedge a hand between us and trap it against his chest. I mean to shove him away, but I can feel the beat of his heart under my palm and the smooth, warm curve of bone and muscle that protects it. I can smell the woody, floral smell of him, and I can feel his interest pushing insistently into my pelvis.

Auden presses into me even more, his erection grinding unerringly against my own, and the bite of zippers and buttons and seams in between only makes it better. I can’t help but shudder.

“You want me to fight you for it?” murmurs Auden, licking a warm trail down my neck. He gives me a quick, sharp bite, and I give him back a reluctant groan.

“You want me to chase you again? Because I’ll do it, you know I will. And when I catch you, we can play another game.”

“Like rich boy, poor boy?”

I don’t know why I say it, I don’t know why I’m provoking him when I should push him away, but here I am, digging at our old wounds as if we don’t have a brand new one that can never, ever heal. Maybe I’m trying to remind myself that Auden was always a spoiled prince, that beneath that noble face was always an ignoble rapaciousness, and we have too much between us ever to overcome. Betrayal and money and blood.

He gives a low snarl against my throat, and his hands come up to find my wrists, gripping them so tightly that I can feel the imprint of every single finger. “I’ve already told you that you’d regret playing that particular game with me,” he says, and he ducks down to bite my collarbone through my shirt—hard enough that I make an embarrassing squeak that’s half pain, half delight.

How can he do this to me? He shouldn’t be able to do this to me.

He shouldn’t be able to make me hard and desperate and so bitterly enamored—he’s a liar and he’s selfish and it’s so, so wrong now. In fact, it’s always been wrong. From the very beginning, it’s been wrong. That kiss in the thorn chapel when we were children, the grinding, fumbling embraces of that one teenage summer . . . yesterday, in the woods, with crushed bluebells damp under my back as the wild god claimed me as his own . . .

From the moment we met, we were a wickedness. A sin and a tragedy.

Auden lifts his face from where he’s bitten me, and I get a glimpse of cheekbones and long lashes before his mouth is full and lush on mine, demanding everything he’s ever demanded from me: my soul, my body, my future, and my past.

Everything. He’s demanding everything, and right now he’s kissing me like even everything won’t be enough.

“We can play so many other games, St. Sebastian,” he says as he pants into my mouth. “We can play enemies again if you want. Lovers. Sluts. Husbands.”

Husbands.

The word sinks through me like a stone through water, its meanings rippling out with cold, rhythmic pain.

We can only ever play husbands. Because we can never be husbands.

Siblings can’t marry.

And he knows that.

Fury fills me, and shame, infecting me everywhere. “What about brothers?” I say against his lips. “Do you know that game, Auden?”

Auden goes completely still against me, his lips still molded over mine, his exhales becoming my inhales as we stay there panting and rigid. It’s as if I’ve stopped time, as if I’ve turned the amber-colored light in the room into amber itself and we’re both suspended in it. Choking on it.

I feel him take a deep breath. The shuddering, slow kind. “St. Sebastian,” he says.

I try to yank my wrists free, but he doesn’t let me, and he doesn’t pull away. Our mouths are still touching and so are our clothed c***s. I can feel the heave of his tight stomach against mine.

I finally manage to turn my head to the side, rolling it against the wall and hating how much I miss the feel of his kiss.

“St. Sebastian,” he says again. A bit wildly.

“How long did you know, Auden? I know it must have been before Beltane, but how much longer before? Before Imbolc? Before Proserpina came? Before Christmas even?”

“No,” he says quickly, “no, not then, not before Imbloc, nothing like that.”

“But you did know before Beltane.” Before you caught me and claimed me. Before you made me swear never to leave you.