Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 8-2

And that isn’t even the worst part. That isn’t even the dangerous part.

You know what you felt when she said it.

I clear my throat, even though there’s no reason to. Auden keeps fussing with his sleeves, his hair tumbling onto his forehead as he refuses to meet my gaze. But the thinness to his mouth and the shadows under his eyes are obvious no matter how much he makes his hair fall over his face.

“Guest, you look like s**t,” I tell him. “And you never drop by unless you’re hungry or bored. And I’ve seen your desk—you’ve got too much work needing doing to be bored.”

“Maybe I’m hungry then,” he mumbles, still plucking at the tattersall stretched around the firm lines of his forearm.

“Auden.”

He sighs, scowls down at his sleeve, and then throws his arm to the side, as if the sight of his sleeve offends him. “I may have done something wrong.”

It’s my experience that the less one says, the more one’s interlocutor ends up sharing, so I say nothing. And sure enough, Auden gets to his feet and starts pacing, speaking in short, agitated bursts as he walks.

“I learned something. More than a month ago. About someone else. And I didn’t tell him at first, because I—I—” He stabs a hand through his hair and then wheels around to face me. “Do you have any gin in here or what?”

Wordlessly, I point to a credenza that separates the living space from the home office space. Auden walks over and disappears from view, the clanking of bottles and glasses the only indicator of his continued presence. Finally, he emerges with everything he wants and he strides over to the kitchen, where he starts hunting for limes.

I fold my arms and watch him puttering around, muttering to himself and savaging innocent limes, until finally he walks back over to me, a dark look on his face and a drink in each hand.

I accept the drink, watching him over the rim of my glass as he starts pacing again.

“So the thing is,” he starts, and then stops. “Well, okay. The way I see it—”

He stops again. I tip it to my lips and then wince, because it’s practically all gin.

Although it is a really decent gin.

I take another sip.

Auden takes a drink too, long, gulping swallows until the entire thing is gone and he’s holding an empty glass in front of my rain-streaked window. After a long moment, he says, without any warning at all, “St. Sebastian is my brother.”

If I still had any gin in my mouth, I would be spraying it all over the front of my Stella McCartney romper. “What?”

He looks over his shoulder. “Did I finally find something that can flap the unflappable Rebecca Quartey?”

“I’m not flapping!” I protest, and then realize my free hand is doing exactly that: flapping at him. I tuck it under my thigh. “I’m just . . . processing. That’s all. He’s your brother?”

Auden nods, looks down at this empty glass, and then goes back to the kitchen for more gin. “Half-brother.”

“I don’t know if that’s any better.”

Auden doesn’t bother with ice or tonic water this time and comes back in with a glass of room-temperature gin and a mangled lime wedge clouding up the center. “How can it not be better? We didn’t grow up together, we didn’t share a mother or a life or anything—”

“You’re still related.”

“But what does that even mean? We’re not breeding stock, Bex.”

“It means something, Auden, because if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be here drinking all my Bombay Sapphire and moping at the rain. What did Saint say when you told him?”

Auden frowns down at his glass. “Well, I didn’t tell him so much as he sort of . . . found out. On his own.”

The hand comes out from underneath my thigh to flap at him—sternly this time. “Are you telling me that I didn’t tell him at first actually meant I didn’t tell him at all? You knew he was your brother and you didn’t think he needed to know? Auden Isaac Guest!”

Auden takes a drink, and then says, in a voice that’s trying not to be defensive and failing, “I was trying to determine the best approach. I didn’t want him to react . . . badly.”

“But he still found out, and I’m supposing, based on your expression, he reacted badly anyway.”

Auden’s shoulders slump. “Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have lied to him—”

“It wasn’t lying!”

“—about his own bloody DNA, no matter what it meant for the two of you. And you definitely should have told him before Beltane and all that antler nonsense.”

If it’s possible, his shoulders slump even more. “But then he wouldn’t have been mine.”

I set my glass on the table and stand up, walking over to where he stands in front of the window. The flat is all steel angles and wood planes—brick and glass everywhere else—and the space is filled with the ceaseless, echoing drum of the rain and the practically ceaseless sluice of Delphine’s shower.

And still, over all that, I hear the broken sound my friend makes as he exhales.

“Have you talked to him?” I ask gently. “Since he found out?”

“Yesterday. He—he’s angry.”

“You can fix angry.”

He takes in a long breath, staring at the rain. “Maybe. But I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me. And I don’t think—well, it’s just that he doesn’t see it the way I do.”

“And how do you see it?”

Auden closes his eyes. “That it doesn’t matter.”

I take his drink from him and have a sip out of habit, forgetting that it’s all warm, limey gin. “Ugh,” I say, and then I set the glass far away from him, coming back and patting him on the shoulder.

“You need to tell him you’re sorry.”

He sighs. “Yes.”

“And you need to let him go.”

“What?” Auden turns a betrayed look on me. “No! Absolutely not!”

“Auden, the two of you are related by blood. You share a father. There’s no happy ending here, and honestly, maybe there never should have been one to begin with. You have too much history between the two of you, and too much pain, and now there’s this on top of it all? You may not think it matters, but you certainly can’t make it not matter to him. It should matter.”

“But why?” he asks, pained. “Why? When we love each other? You didn’t see him by the river this weekend, Bex, you didn’t see the way he looked up at me after I caught him. Like he wanted to be in those bluebells forever. Like he wanted to stitch his soul to mine, and I can’t—”

He breaks off, a ragged breath shuddering through his body, and I pat him again on the shoulder. We stand there for a moment, and I keep my eyes fixed on the rain as I feel his shoulder hitch and stutter beneath my palm, like he’s swallowing down noises he can’t bear to let out. I know I should hug him, but I’m not a hugger—and anyway, I sense he doesn’t want it. The only embraces he wants right now are from St. Sebastian. Or Proserpina.

Speaking of . . . “What did Poe say? You didn’t hide this from her too?”

“No. I told her. Today actually, before I left. I wanted so badly to bring her here with me to London, I need her so much, and I know she would’ve come if I asked, and yet—”

“You knew St. Sebastian needed her more,” I finish for him.

Auden nods miserably.

He’s right. And it’s the same thing I would have done if I had two subs and found myself in a similar bind. “How does Poe feel about the . . . you know . . . brother thing?”

“She wasn’t exactly chuffed that I hadn’t told St. Sebastian about it—she excoriated me quite thoroughly, in fact. And now she has to overlook that she’s in love with two of Ralph Guest’s sons, when it was already hard enough being in love with only one. But the actual consanguinity doesn’t seem to bother her.” Auden’s lips tilt up in a weak smile. “She said she thinks it’s rather titillating.”

“De gustibus non est disputandum,” I murmur.

Auden lets out a laugh as weak as his smile as he turns to search for his glass. “Quite right.”

“Auden, what do you want?” I ask as he walks over to the coffee table and retrieves his drink. “I mean, truly. What is it that you want from this?”

“Him,” Auden says without hesitation, simply and firmly and also with enough despair to raise goosebumps on my arms. “I want him.”

We stare at each other for a long moment, and it’s not the boy I grew up with looking at me. It’s Auden of Thornchapel, the Guest heir, the wild god.

It’s a king, and I don’t know how to feel about a king standing in my living room holding warm gin when kings are supposed to stay in the woods. Safely inside our little Thornchapel games.

But even kings need advisors, and so I give him my honest advice. “Maybe you know what you want,” I say. “But do you know what you’re willing to lose in order to get it?”

Auden’s lips part as he looks at me. And then he slowly shakes his head. “I don’t—I don’t think I do. Should I?”

“Yes. And be prepared to lose him anyway. Brothers, Auden. Brothers! And you lied to him about it?”

“It wasn’t lying—oh, hello, Pickles.”

Delphine has opened the door to the bathroom, letting out a cloud of steam and the animated chatter of her favorite podcast—something about romance novels and blooding?—and she emerges from the steam in a silk robe that clings to every soft curve of her. It’s short enough that when she turns to close the door, I can see the delectable curves of her arse.

“Just grabbing some turmeric and beet juice before I do my oil cleanser,” she says, and Auden and I both nod, as if this is a sentence that has any real meaning for us. She digs in her bag for a moment, pulls out a trendily packaged bottle of orange liquid, and then disappears back into the bathroom, like a busty phantom of self-care. But not before she loops by to drop a kiss on my cheek, which I intercept with a hand on the nape of her neck and a kiss of my own, right on her lips. Quick, hard, and ruthless, like I like. She’s pink-cheeked and bashful as she walks back into the bathroom and closes the door.

After her podcast starts up again, Auden turns to me and says, “Something’s changed between you two.”

I finish my drink and start walking toward the kitchen. “Yes.”

“Is this more than just kink?”

“More how? And don’t think I don’t know you’re trying to change the subject.”

He turns and looks at me, taking a long, insolent drink as he waits for me to answer my own question. Which I refuse to do. He may be my best friend, but Delphine is my business.

Mostly.

“You hated each other,” he says after it’s clear that I am not going to answer. “For years. All those awkward parties, Bex, do you remember? All those parties when you and Delphine would have to be in the same room and so you’d bicker nonstop?”

“I remember it quite well, Sir Guest. As well as I remember you wrestling St. Sebastian in front of your house because you hated him so much.”

His eyes darken. Another drink. “Point taken.”

The look on his face is almost enough to make me feel bad for bringing up St. Sebastian again. “Look, Delphine and I don’t hate each other now,” I say, although even as I say it, the words feel flimsy. Disingenuous.

She said she loves you.

“You don’t hate each other now,” he echoes. “Is that all? Is that the only reason she’s here getting kissed like that?”

I look at the window across from me, at the woman reflected there. Tailored clothes, lifted chin, perfect flat behind her. Everything as it should be. No chirpy blond tarts who cover sinks in lipsticks and bottles of micellar water. No shoulders hunched against unravelling feelings.

No vulnerability, no tremulous smiles, no declarations of love.

I answer how the woman in the reflection would answer. “She needs a Domme. I’d like a sub. It suits.”

“Does it? You’ve always talked about how spoiled you’ve found her, and how irritating it was.”

I’m irritated now, actually, although I can’t exactly explain why. It makes my voice sharp when I answer, “Well, it wasn’t until this year I realized I could be the one to f**k it out of her.”

Auden knows me too well to let me get away with saying something like that. I watch as his reflection sets its drink down and crosses its arms. “Bex. Seriously. Is everything okay between you two?”

I love you.

Like it was nothing at all, easy as breathing.

I love you.

I make to pull my hair down out of its bun and then realize I’m doing it to fidget. And I don’t fidget. “Everything’s fine.”

He still doesn’t drop the subject. “I care about Delphine, you know,” he tells me. “Very much.”

“Is this the talk where you warn me, one man to another, to treat your ex-girlfriend well?”

Auden frowns. “No warnings. I don’t think you need them, despite how you’re acting right now.”

I bristle a little at that, turning to glare at him. “And how am I acting?”

Unfortunately, Auden also knows me too well to be properly terrified of the Quartey Stare. “Like a rake,” he says.

It’s so far away from what I was expecting him to say that I nearly laugh. “A rake?”

He’s giving me his crooked smile now, and dammit, he’s too adorable to keep bristling at. “An inveterate rake, even. A new submissive every night before this, and now you’re having one move in but it’s only about the s*x, no feelings. It is very rakish, you have to admit.”

I part my lips to speak—and then I realize I have no idea what I want to say. I am a rake, I guess. I’ve certainly been acting like one with Delphine.

“I have to say this, even though I know you will anyway,” Auden says, “but please take care of her. She’s not as . . . confident . . . as she seems sometimes.”

Of course she isn’t. No human could be. No person is entirely self-assured, entirely positive, entirely poised all the time. And yet, Delphine makes everyone believe it. She makes everyone believe that she wakes up with clear skin, bouncy hair, all the answers. She makes even cynics believe that she can turn any obstacle into a caption-worthy learning moment.

She makes lovers believe she can say I love you and be perfectly content not hearing it said back.

She’s new to all this, I remind myself. You’re the Domme. It’s your job to teach her. It would have been crueler to let her believe she really loves you when you know better. When you know it was just the scene making her feel that way.

Then why is guilt dripping like sticky tar down my throat? Making it impossible to speak?

No.

No, I don’t do guilt. Guilt is an indulgence—an excuse to avoid action because it feels like some sort of penance. But it’s not, it’s the ignis fatuus of penance. It changes nothing and leads one nowhere.

I imagine swallowing all that guilt down, all the uncertainty—along with that breathless, brilliant, idiotic something—I felt when Delphine whispered those words. I push it all away until I’m myself again, and there’s no guilt.

Or worse . . . hope.

“I know,” I finally say. “I know.”

“I wish,” Auden says, and then stops, and then starts again. “I wish we were home right now. All six of us.”

“Yeah,” I say, suddenly feeling it too. Missing the way the rain echoes through the library, the pop of the burning logs even when it’s too warm for a fire. The huffs of Sir James Frazer, and Delphine curled up in an armchair, and Becket arguing with me about something. Missing the rustling press of the trees from all sides, except to the south, where the grounds slope up past the river into louring, windy moorland.

Missing the way Delphine and I can spend hours f*****g in a giant bed, half drunk and giddy with knowing there’s nowhere to be in the morning, except outside on the grounds I love anyway.

She said she loves you, and for a minute, you wanted to say it back.

“Want some more gin?” Auden asks abruptly.

God. Yes, please.

“Make it a double,” I say, and then decide to go help him so he doesn’t forget the ice.