Page 72 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
Outside, the rain picks up in earnest, coming down with soothing, steady force.
“Poe, I just need you to know that your mother loved you very much. More than anything. More than the world.”
“Then why did she leave?”
This time his silence is almost comforting, and I know if I were there and we were talking face to face, he’d be pulling me into his arms. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I really don’t.”
“Is that the truth?”
An exhale. “Yes.”
“But you do know about her and Ralph,” I push. “You do know if that might have been the reason she came here.”
“I do. And it might have.”
“Were they fucking?”
“Proserpina!” my dad says, shocked.
“I’m twenty-two, I know what fucking is,” I say irritably. “I know you and Mom did it, I know you probably did with other people before you met her, I know she probably did too. I just want to know what happened, and I guess it’s shitty of me to ask you about Mom being unfaithful, but it’s been twelve years and—”
“She wasn’t unfaithful,” Dad cuts in. “It wasn’t . . . that. Wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?”
“It was like this: we loved each other. Sometimes we also loved other people. We never lied to each other about it, and we never chose a new lover over what we had together. That’s what marriage meant to us, and that’s why your mother wasn’t unfaithful, not in the truest sense of the word. She didn’t betray my trust, and she didn’t sneak around. I knew about Ralph because I was there. I knew about Ralph because I loved Ralph too.”
I drop down onto the bed, stunned. “You were in love with Ralph Guest?”
“Was. Past tense. I stopped even before your mom disappeared, because he was greedy. Not even with money, but greedy with people. Greedy with time and sex and feelings. He was jealous and possessive, convinced that your mother belonged to him by some ancient familial right, and it eventually tore us apart, all of us. We were too tangled by then for it to do anything else.”
“You were all together? All the parents?”
“Parents are people too,” Dad says in his professor voice, as if pointing out a remedial fact I should have learned long before I ever set foot in his classroom. “We fall in love just like everyone else. Although I wouldn’t say we all were in love with each other, only that some of us were in love with some others. But we all shared time and affection.”
I’m a very sex-positive girl, but the moment I realize time and affection is a euphemism for all of our parents having sex, I make a face, which thankfully he can’t see.
“But it all went sour,” he goes on. “Ralph had this idea that your mom being a Kernstow meant something, that your mom was another Estamond come back to life or some fucking nonsense. He wanted her to be his, which was patently ridiculous.”
“Right, because she was married to you and he was married to Auden’s mother.”
“It was ridiculous because she would never belong to anyone, not even me. We belonged to her, that was how it worked. That was how it always worked.”
I think of his words earlier, about obsession. About how he used the words pain and power, words that can mean nothing to some people and everything to me.
“Dad, were you and Mom kinky?”
“I can’t talk about this with you,” he chides.
I want to tell him that I’m kinky too, that I understand, that he won’t have to explain roles and terms to me because I already know them all, but I don’t. I don’t tell him. There are limits to what a daughter wants her father to know about her, after all.
“I’m taking that as a yes,” I say. “You were kinky and she was your Domme.”
“I’m not going to answer your questions about this.”
But I’m fitting together parts of the puzzle now, reaching for the picture I keep on my nightstand and looking at it. Looking at my mother trying to put the torc on Ralph’s neck. Like a collar.
“She was Ralph’s Domme then too. Which means Ralph was submissive . . . but how could he have been?” I wonder aloud. “He was so awful to everyone around him. He hit Auden sometimes, I think, and I know he yelled at him so much, he was always angry.”
