Page 70 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
A horrible, awful feeling sneaks up through my heels, it crawls up my stomach and chest and balls up in my throat. The kneeling and the hair pulling and the secrets . . .
I whisper, “Tell me you didn’t talk about hurting me because you wanted to prove something to yourself. Or to Delphine.”
“What does it matter?” he asks. “It doesn’t make any difference either way.”
There’s so much ugly embarrassment inside me that I think I might split open with it, like a dress with a cheap zipper. “It always makes a difference,” I say quietly. My chin is starting to tremble now. It’s doing the thing, as Delphine would say. “It makes the difference between us sharing and you using. I thought we shared. But instead—”
“But instead I used you,” Auden interrupts. “Yes, yes, I get it. Well, I did tell you that you deserved better, didn’t I?”
I grip the blanket harder around myself, staring at him like I’m seeing him for the first time. “Everything I said and did, I did it out of complete honesty.”
“Oh, is that right,” he says scornfully.
“Except one thing,” I continue, so furious and itchy with humiliation that I can’t even look at him. “I said I knew who you were. And now I realize that I have no fucking idea.”
That seems to break something in him.
“I was telling the truth too, Proserpina,” he says. “Yes, maybe I’m gutted. Maybe I’m raw and angry and sad as fuck. That doesn’t mean I lied.”
“It means,” I say, going to the stairs, “that everything we did tonight was about you and about how you feel. I don’t kneel for selfish men, Auden.”
“But you’ll kneel for an engaged one?”
“Fuck you,” I spit.
“Maybe tomorrow,” he says coolly.
Oh my God. I narrow my eyes. “You’re a bastard.”
He stares at me a moment, mouth tight, his tall, powerful body strained with rage and pain. “If only that were true,” he says finally, turning away from me.
“If only that were fucking true.”
Chapter 21
“Dad?”
I wince at the sunlight as I sit up in bed with my phone pressed to my ear. Pale and wintery as the day is, I’m still exhausted and bleary from fractured sleep and too many dreams. And from too many waking moments when I re-lived what happened between Auden and me and then had to scream into the pillow.
“Poe,” my dad says, the p sound a little clumsy, the oe sound a little choked off.
I pull my phone away from my ear and squint at the time. It’s late morning here, which means it’s late back home. Or very fucking early, depending on your perspective.
“Dad, are you drunk?”
I hear the sound of my father getting out of his favorite leather chair—a combination of human grunts and leather squeaks. “Just had a little,” he says. Slurs, more like. “Just enough to get to sleep.”
“It’s got to be like four a.m. there,” I say. “You should already be asleep.”
“Wanted to call,” he mumbles. “Wanted to tell you.”
Which is when the last of the sleep-fog burns off and I remember the text I’d sent last week.
“Is it about Mom’s family?” I ask eagerly. “The Kernstows?”
“Should’ve known you’d find out,” he tells me. “Such a smart girl. She was always so proud of you, you know. She’d hang up your report cards in her office at the university. Bragged about you skipping grades to anyone who would listen.”
This is the most he’s talked about my mother since she left, and I don’t want him ever to stop, but I’m also dying to know about my ancestors. “Dad. Mom’s family. I asked you about them, remember?”
