Page 25 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
He could tell her that they did get married once, after all, and why not play husband and wife for a couple hours and drive back the cold and the dark? Why not pretend Auden was there too, pretend each other’s hands were his hands, and each other’s mouths were his mouth?
In the end, he tells her none of these things. He sees her inside and mumbles something in noncommittal agreement when she talks about calling him. He listens to his better nature; he keeps his distance. Even when she wheels abruptly around and pulls him into a hug, he manages to keep himself from pressing close, from putting his lips against the wind-tangled silk of her hair.
After all, he knows things she doesn’t know.
He knows the things the village knows.
She can’t be his.
When he gets home twenty minutes later, he stands in his dead mother’s living room and takes in the carcass of his life. His mother’s burned out saints’ candles that he feels would be cowardly to throw away, even though they gouge a hole in his heart every time he looks at them. A mostly empty sketchbook. A secondhand guitar that’s never been played. An old laptop he bought for writing two years ago, the case covered with a film of indifferent dust.
All the relics of a boy who wanted to create, who wanted to be different and interesting and chosen. Who wanted to be the lord of the manor like the flop-haired boy with hazel eyes and too much money.
And instead, all St. Sebastian has to show for his life is an unfinished degree, the scattered remains of abandoned hobbies, no friends, no pets, no lovers—and a lip ring.
He’s alone, and he deserves it.
Becket is not a monk, but he abides by his own little monastic rules. He likes the structured focus of ordered days, the quiet asceticism of plain meals, the undeniable rewards of regular prayer. Auden teases him about his daily penances, and Becket can’t find the words to explain that these practices are to protect him, to keep him from going too far, to make sure that he does eat and he does sleep.
Zeal, his confessor had once told him, is a curse as much as it’s a blessing. Don’t let it consume you like a fire; keep the flames of it small.
And so the zeal must be dampened. Smothered. He prays at regular intervals to keep himself from lying face down on the floor in ecstatic devotion for hours. He eats plain meals so he won’t be tempted to forgo every nourishment except the Host itself. He punishes his body gently with running and exercise so that he won’t be tempted to punish it with whips and hair shirts and other unsanctioned mortifications.
His zeal is a secret, almost like a sin itself, and it’s only through his gritted teeth that he manages to keep it at bay.
It eases, however, around his friends. Delphine and Rebecca and Auden, Poe now too, if he can count her as a friend, and he hopes he can. It eases around St. Sebastian, whom he leaves the church unlocked for, whose lip ring glints as he bows his head and murmurs empty prayers.
Yes, around them, the zeal dims, and he feels like a different version of himself, the version he might have been if the zeal had never found him. He can be naughty and fun, smart and lively. He can feel comfortable with the desires that burden him, the desires that overwhelm him when they walk hand in hand with the fervor of his faith. With his friends, he eats and drinks and keeps late hours, with them he is only a human and not a saint.
But he’s not with them tonight, and so there’s only been a plain meal of unbuttered bread and broth. He’s done push-ups and sit-ups until his muscles shake with exhaustion. He’s prayed the Rosary, the Chaplet, his various devotions, and spent time in silent, contemplative meditation with his Lord.
At nine, he finishes his prayers, checks the side door of the church to make sure it’s unlocked in case St. Sebastian wants to come in. St. Sebastian, the unbeliever, who still comes in and prays and kneels and sighs. Who sits and stares at the tabernacle as if he expects God himself to crawl out and apologize to him.
Becket the priest reads for thirty more minutes in bed, a book of Celtic mythology he ordered online last week. It’s a secret fascination of his. He tells himself it’s purely academic.
When he goes to sleep, the zeal comes for him in his dreams. It shows him dying kings, dying gods, rain pattering on the summer-spread leaves of Thornchapel’s forest.
And Proserpina in the middle of it all, haloed and radiant. Waiting.
There’s an old warehouse in Peckham, and in that warehouse is a trendy flat, and in that flat there’s a woman in bed asleep. She’s on her stomach, naked and without a cover, and her bottom is a thing of beauty. Bruises, red and purple like Valentine’s Day flowers, have turned her backside into a postmodern canvas of torment and affection. The arnica gel on her skin shines in the glow from the window.
Rebecca watches tonight’s submissive sleep for a moment, then slides out of bed to walk to the windows and stare down at the empty street below. It’s wet from an earlier burst of rain. An indeterminate clump of litter has caught against the curb, and there’s a fresh spray of graffiti on the building opposite that she hasn’t noticed before.
It looks cold.
She loves her flat, wedged as it is between a car mechanic’s and an art gallery. She loves the little neighborhood it nestles in—she loves the impossibly hip restaurants and speakeasies cropping up between the African food shops and the tattoo parlors and the upstairs churches.
The inside of her home is both a hymn to natural light and an adoration of the city at night—the walls are more glass than brick, and from almost any place in the flat, Rebecca can look up and see the sky. She can access the fresh air and the wind and the rain, something she likes to do often when she’s folded into the city’s fussy
, concrete arms.
She accesses them now, stepping out onto the balcony Auden designed for her when he helped her renovate the flat. It was his first project out of school, and though it feels like a million years ago, it was only three.
Only three years for her to know what forever feels like.
She knows why that is, but she’s not going to admit it to herself, at least not tonight. Just like she’s not going to examine why she took a curvy blond sub to bed either, not when she’s tried so hard to stay away from the blondes, not when she’s made sure any white girl she plays with has red or brown or pink or blue hair.
She can tell herself the truth about this at least: the idea of white-gold hair brushing against her thighs is like a kick to the chest. She thinks of it and then she can’t breathe.
