Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 6

Chapter Six

ProserpinaAfter Becket leaves, I can’t concentrate. I decide to leave my work for later and go find Auden before he drives to London.

I stop at a window on the way up to his office and watch the bustle and swarm of the maze’s destruction. Workers crawl over its carcass, and emerging from the mud and stubble of removed hedges is the statueless plinth next to the fountain. There’re a few people standing next to it, waving in a small crane-looking thing, which I assume is to remove the heavy masonry of the fountain. For the first time in a hundred and fifty years, the secret stairs will be exposed.

I wonder how Estamond would feel about that.

Rebecca is there too, in a camel-colored trench coat with her iPad tucked into the crook of her elbow, a slender, still fixture in the midst of all the chaos. Occasionally workers come up to her and she bends her head to listen—one time she pulls up something on her iPad to show them and then points to where the thing shall be done—but otherwise she doesn’t move. She is the axis the work rotates on; she is the order, the intelligence, the will that reshapes the earth. But as I finally step away from the window, I see her turn and glance back at the house.

She’s looking at her bedroom window, where even now from down the hall and up the stairs, I can hear Delphine talking about backlinks and follower benchmarks to someone on the phone.

Outside, Rebecca twists her head away, as if irritated with herself—but I notice she looks at the house one more time before she shakes her head and then strides determinedly to the other side of the maze.

Auden’s new studio and office takes up a huge swath of the renovated third floor. Like in the bedrooms, he’s kept the old beams and he’s floored the entire story with planks of pale, buttery wood. Windows are everywhere—windows which had been removed, taken apart, cleaned, repaired or replaced as needed, and then releaded and reinstalled. I know it must have been an enormous expense, but for all his en-suiting and rewiring, Auden has kept the parts of the house with the most flair and the best history, and the leaded windows were some of those parts. And now even on a cloudy day, the studio glows with light, the latticed shapes of it tracing back and forth over the floor like a grid.

On the far end of the massive room—past the rows and rows of bookshelves and the two drafting tables and the sprawling model table already covered with tiny shrubs and piles of baby-sized bricks and neat stacks of balsa wood—Auden sits at a desk with his head thrown back against his chair and one arm dangling by his side. That hand flexes now and again, and once or twice it balls in some powerful emotion, but the rest of him is utterly still—a study of Brideshead Revisited-esque tweed and mussed hair.

I suddenly have the awful premonition that he’s angry with me—one that’s not eased when he says, in a flat, emotionless voice, “Come here, Proserpina.”

Is he upset about Becket? Or maybe that I didn’t come up the very moment Becket left the house? Is he upset that I didn’t refuse Becket or personally ask permission to play?

Come to think of it . . . am I upset about these things? Should I be?

I get to Auden and I don’t wait for him to turn around, I don’t wait for him to speak. I just drop to my knees next to his chair and press my face against his leg.

“How was your time with Becket?” he asks, his dangling hand coming up to toy with my hair.

I don’t know how to answer that, other than honestly. “Good,” I say. “And also . . . not.”

“Why was that?”

I want to bury my face against Auden’s thigh forever. “He feels very strongly about me.”

“Ah,” says Auden. He tugs at my hair so that I have to look up at him. His eyes are soft.

“So you know then,” he says. Gently.

It takes a second for his words and their unspoken meaning to sink in. “You knew Becket loved me.” I try not to sound accusatory, I really do, but it’s hard. “You know how he felt.”

“Loves and feels,” Auden corrects, and then with an effortlessness that belies the strength of his lean frame, he hauls me easily onto his lap and pushes an impatient hand up my skirt. “It’s very much a present emotion for him, I believe.”

I try to look at him, but it’s impossible from this angle. “You’re not jealous—ohhh, oh, oh—” Auden’s clever fingers have found the heart of me, and they delve easily inside. I’m still wet and open from Becket, and there’s nothing stopping Auden from adding a second finger after a moment, and then a third.

I twist and groan on his lap, the stretch almost too much and still not enough, and so I try to f**k myself on his fingers, bracing my hands on the armrests for leverage. I know it must look beyond undignified, me with my legs splayed and my dress up to my waist and my mouth dropped into an O of surprised, submissive pleasure, but I don’t care. And given the hard male arousal underneath me, I don’t think Auden cares either.

“Of course I’m jealous,” Auden says, nipping at my earlobe as he f***s me with his hand. “Some days, I want to lock you away like fine china. I want you on a leash so I can keep you curled at my feet wherever I go, and I want you kept in a faraway tower where only I can have you. Because I’m selfish and mean, and I want your bright eyes and sweet body just for me. But I don’t really need to be jealous, do I?”

“You—you don’t?” I manage to say.

I can feel his smile curving against my neck. I know this smile. It’s probably the same smile his ancestors wore when they began ranging and ravaging their way into Dumnonia. “It’s my fingers you’re currently screwing this curvy little body down onto, and this weekend, it will be my bruises you wear. It’s me who claimed you by the fire, and it’s me you love. You’re mine, little bride, and you have been since you were a girl.”

His words are like his fingers—pressing and probing into secret parts of me. My head drops back onto his shoulder. “I have been yours since then,” I whisper. “Saint’s too.”

For just the briefest second—too brief for me to react—Auden’s breath catches behind me. And then he’s back to exploring my p***y, and when he speaks again, he doesn’t mention Saint.

“You’re wet,” he says. His voice is low and dark and cool. “You’re wet from Becket.”

“Yes,” I say. “Are you—are you very angry with me?”

“Am I angry that my little slut acted like a little slut when I wanted her to?” The hand not working me open slides up my thigh and brushes over a streak of dried semen. “He didn’t come inside you?”

He sounds disappointed, like he’d loaned out a prized sports car to a friend and they came back having driven under the speed limit the entire time.

“I only just started the birth control,” I say. “I’m supposed to be extra careful the first week, and—”

He gives me a little nuzzle—nothing but gentle affection, as if he doesn’t have three fingers jammed inside me and didn’t just call me a slut. “I forgot about that. I’m glad you were safe then.”

My heart swells until I think it might pop like an overblown balloon. I knew before Thornchapel that I needed love like this, that I needed it rough and tender and mean and sweet, all jumbled together like a wild garden. But now . . . now I know it like I know nothing else. I need Auden, I need Saint, and I need love to be like this.

I don’t know why.

I was the little girl who tied ropes to her wrists just to feel the scratches and itches of it while she played. Maybe I was made for a raw, scratchy love from the very beginning. Or maybe I grew into it the same way that certain flowers push through the brambles to bloom.

Who can say?

“Becket took it on the chin,” I add.

Auden traces a fingertip up my thigh. “By the looks of it, I’d say he took it between your legs.”

I laugh, which sends me clenching around his fingers—and we both make noises at the same time, mine a gasp of surprised pleasure and his a hoarse kind of growl.

“I need to f**k you,” he says on an exhale, pulling free of my body and banding an arm around my waist. He lifts me up just enough to reach into his pocket to retrieve a condom and unbutton his pants, and then I’m perched on his knees while he prepares himself. I can’t resist sneaking a look over my shoulder, catching a glimpse of expensive fabric rucked up the firm planes of his stomach and the taut, swollen head of him already glistening with latex.

“Come here,” he growls, even though I’m arguably already here, and then I’m hauled squealing and laughing to where he wants me. And once I’m facing him and straddling him, he uses his fist to angle his organ upward and then orders me to sink down.

“Slowly,” he cautions. He fists my skirt in one of his elegant artist’s hands, lifting it to my hip so that everything below my waist is exposed to him. “I want to watch.”

I obey his will and lower myself onto his sheathed c**k as he leans back and studies the sight like he’s going to paint it one day. It nearly kills me to go slow—my orgasm with Becket has done nothing but made me hornier it turns out, and I’m craving the rough bite that a fast ride would give me—but I know disregarding a direct request from Auden will have me ass up over his lap and spanked until I can’t breathe. And then he’ll punish me for real and refuse to let me come. Which will kill me at this point. So slow it is.

Auden watches me work with a composed expression, his gaze unreadable and distant. Only the trembling of his hands where they grab my hips gives away his eagerness—at least until I’m fully seated against him, my c**t flush against the abdominal muscle right above his c**k and his desire spreading me wide, wide open.

Then the trembling is all over—his thighs and his belly and his breathing, and his eyelids flutter, as if he wants to close them but can’t stop looking at the place we’re joined.

“I’d give up everything I own for this cunt,” he says. And then a wicked smile cuts across his face. “If it weren’t already mine, that is.”

His words are more effective than a thumb on my c**t; I drop my chin to my chest and remind myself to breathe as my belly hollows at his coolly obscene observations. It’s so close to what Becket said earlier—I’d give up everything for this, for you—but it might as well be miles apart in meaning.

Becket wants to belong to me. But I already belong to the filthy architect-prince with the lazy smile and the forest-colored eyes.

And when Auden flicks those eyes up to me, I see the full force of his shameless want, of his crude hunger—all of it underpinned by another hunger—the same I saw twelve years ago when he kissed me for the first time. A hunger for my very heart.

And oh, how I want it to be eaten.

I feel a small flush of guilt that I can’t match the same surge of desire for Becket’s unselfish decency as I can for the person currently leaning forward to bite at my breasts through my dress. Although I don’t think it has anything to do with Becket or decency, and everything to do with Auden. And with Saint.

If Becket were all I knew, he would be the most mesmerizing light I’d ever seen. But he’s not all I know. I’d met two bitter and beautiful boys in this house and tumbled into a new life. A life that was all stars and shadows, glimmers and gloom. And I was done for.

“Make yourself come on me,” Auden says. “While I listen to every single thing Becket did to you.”

So I tell him. I tell him about the kisses and the hard thigh between my legs for me to rock against. I tell him how Becket teased me with his c**k until I begged for it, and how I came after he talked about coming inside me, even though we both knew he wouldn’t do it, not after I asked him not to. I tell him how Becket ended up finishing and making a mess on the bookshelf.

“The wooden part,” I clarify, my breathing coming in short bursts. “I never would have let him—on the books—biological debris—”

“Good. Biological debris on the books was my chief concern,” he says in a grave tone.

I almost think he’s serious until I see the faint dip of a suppressed dimple, a quivering crenel that he tries and fails to hide, and then he’s grinning up at me. I swat at him, and he catches my hand, laughing.

“You’re a good librarian, Proserpina, even if you do need to be f****d twice a day to keep you happy enough to work.”

His voice is teasing, happy, but his words give life to one of my real fears, now blown to full life since everything that happened on Beltane. “Auden,” I say, hips slowing. “I mean, sir. Maybe…maybe I should look for another job. I don’t know that I should be your employee now that we’re actually together; I don’t want you to feel obligated—”

Auden claps his hand over my mouth, eyes narrowed. “No,” he says firmly. “You can quit because you’re bored or because another position sounds more fulfilling or because you don’t want to be here anymore. You quit because you can’t stand the sight of me or my house. But you don’t quit because you think I feel obligated to pay you. I pay you because you’re good at what you do, because you came personally recommended, and because in the four months you’ve been here, you’ve done incredible work. I’ll write anything into a contract you’d like, but you don’t get to leave just because you think you should.”

I try to speak against Auden’s palm, and he sighs but loosens it anyway so the words can come out. “I feel like I’m taking advantage of you. I’ve spent the day sleeping and playing instead of working.”

“I know you have narcolepsy. And I wanted you to play. Do you really think,” he asks, pushing his hips up so I feel him deep, deep in my belly, “I’d rather you be scanning books than doing this?”

“But—”

“My god, you are stubborn,” he replies. Another sigh. “Can’t you just pretend that we’re opening a very twee and painfully overpriced shop on a high street somewhere? Or an apple orchard where we charge schoolchildren to come and visit? People in love own businesses and work together all the time.”

“But we’re not working together,” I say, unable to let this go. “I’m working for you.”

“Okay, we’re going back to the hand,” Auden says. And sure enough, the hand comes up to cover my mouth again. “You’re not in my library right now, you’re on my lap, and that means different rules, so shhhh. I love you and you belong to me, and once I’m finished using you, we will slide back into real life and make sure the terms of your employment make you comfortable. But in the meantime, please understand this: I. Trust. You. Inherently, explicitly, completely. I trust you with my house, with my old books, with my money, and now with my St. Sebastian. I trust you with everything, and I inflexibly and pertinaciously believe that our respective work is made better by us being kinky and playful and in love. Now, you still haven’t come, and that was the only command I gave you, which means I’m very close to bending you over my desk and f*****g you that way so I can spank you as I do it. Can we be very done with this now?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, ducking and burying my face into his wonderful-smelling neck. The shift in angles rubs me both inside and outside in just the right way, and the next words come out husky. “Thank you.”

“Thank me by doing as you’re told,” he says, just as huskily, but he turns his head enough to kiss my cheek. Lingering and warm. “I haven’t got all day, little one. I’ve got to get to London at some point, you know.”

“I know,” I say, sitting up so I can properly f**k him some more. And also so he can see my little pout—which is mostly to be cute, but it’s also a genuine thing, because when he’s gone, the whole house feels like it’s made of yearning. Even the trees outside seem restless when Auden is away.

“Little brides miss their lords when they’re gone, hmm?” Auden says, leaning back again and hiking up my skirt so he can watch as I f**k him.

“Everyone misses you,” I whisper, watching his face as he watches my cunt. His eyes are hooded, a faint flush on his cheeks, and every now and again he pulls his lower lip between his teeth, as if he’s biting me in his mind. “Thornchapel misses you.”

Four months ago, he would have scoffed or spat at that. He would’ve had some bitter, careless response, made some obscure or tenebrous pronouncements about Thornchapel’s future or his own, and then changed the subject. But not today. Not after Beltane.

Maybe not even after Imbolc.

Instead, he merely lifts his eyes to mine and nods, like it was something he already knew. And it’s as he’s nodding, as he’s tacitly admitting that the thing which started as a game between bored friends has now become something vividly and frighteningly real—it’s then that I reach my peak, lost in his eyes and the whisper of the waiting forest outside, waiting and rippling with cricket-green leaves for its king.

I move against him harder, faster, urging my climax on and on and on, and it’s so much deeper and stronger and meaner and longer—it’s the kind of orgasm that possesses me, like everything below my belly button is no longer my own, it belongs to the wild world outside, it belongs to the wild god I’m riding. And I forget, I always forget, how much the pure rush of dominance gets him off, how watching someone else obey him is heady delirium, because the moment I finally come, he lets out a soft, tattered sigh. His c**k swells big, so big, that last impossible bigness before the end, and then he releases into the condom with long pulses that make his stomach and thighs flex and tense against me.

He only watches at first, chest heaving as he thickens and starts spending, but after the first few surges, he crushes me to his chest and holds me tight as he f***s his way through the last of it—hard, hammering thrusts that shouldn’t be as powerful as they are given his position, and yet he does it, lifting his hips and me with every single one.

I cry out against his throat, my climax still stuttering on, and he is relentless with me, f*****g until we’re both panting and sweaty and until he’s made sure that I’ve milked him of every last second of pleasure.

When he stops, I stay slumped against his chest a moment, listening to the pounding of his heart beneath his sweater, sighing through all those sweet aftershocks. He cradles me close and kisses my hair, and after a few minutes, he pulls carefully free and perches me on the edge of his desk while he takes care of the condom and sets his clothing to rights. Then he tugs me back into his lap, and I curl up there, feeling small and content.

Auden begins stroking along my back, soothing, possessive strokes, and I close my eyes. “What should I do about Becket?” I murmur.

“Do you love him?” inquires Auden. His voice is neutral, but there is a stillness to him as he asks the question. I have the distinct sense that while Auden didn’t mind loaning me out for pleasure, he’d feel a lot differently loaning me out for love.

“No,” I say honestly. “I don’t.”

My Dominant loosens a little beneath me, his voice more open when he says, “Good. I can share a lot, Proserpina, but I’m not able to—well, the problem is, I’m fundamentally possessive when it comes to you.”

“And Saint,” I add for him.

Auden draws in a breath. He lets it out very carefully. “And St. Sebastian,” he says finally.

“Should I have known? About Becket?”

“I think it’s been growing slowly over time—slowly enough it would have been easy to miss.”

“But you knew.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

Auden sighs. “Becket told me once after Imbolc that he dreams of you—those strange God-dreams of his, you know. He dreams of you in the middle of everything, you in the very heart of the thorn chapel. After that, I began noticing the signs. Long looks. Prolonged quiets after you would kiss him hello on the cheek. I don’t resent him for it, even if I’d fight him bloody and bleeding if he tried to take you away.” He holds me tighter, in what seems like an unconscious reflex.

“The thought of you two playing together—it’s quite sexy to me,” he says, “and more pertinently, I think it is very sexy to you, and nothing gets me off like getting you off. He is one of my closest friends, and I trust him implicitly to cherish and adore you. But I cannot stomach the idea of you being in love with anyone other than me and St. Sebastian. If it happens—if you love someone else—you must tell me. Please. I’ll accept it, but it will gut me, and I deserve to die on my feet. I—”

It’s my turn to clap a hand over his mouth. I squirm in his lap until we’re facing each other, and then I tell him the truth. “You and Saint have ruined me,” I whisper. “More and more, I think it was that day when we were children. There was never any hope after that. It could only ever have been you two.”

Auden blinks, looking bewildered and haughty and relieved all at once, in that way only rich boys are able to pull off, and I remove my hand.

“And I know St. Sebastian feels the same way,” I reassure him. “He’ll never stop loving you.”

“Oh,” Auden says, softly, as if I’ve hit him. “I don’t know about that.”

A story—pages and pages of it—moves through his eyes, the shadows of a hundred hundred thoughts, the sparks of a thousand thousand unanswered prayers, and I am suddenly, acutely aware of how evasive he’s been about St. Sebastian all day. Acutely aware of our silent text thread, of my dark phone, of our missing lover.

“Tell me,” I demand. “Tell me right now.”

Auden closes his conflicted eyes and swallows. And when he starts to speak, his voice is threaded with so much pain it hurts to hear it.

“Twenty-four years ago, my father had another son. Six weeks ago, I learned his name.”