Page 48 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“Thank you for telling me,” I manage finally. It seems like the thing to say right now, even though the last thing I want to do is thank him. “I’m sorry,” I add, because it also seems like the thing to say.
“Poe, it’s me who’s sorry. I deserve every feeling that you have, because I’ve been holding onto this for months, using the excuse of not wanting to hurt you to avoid doing something difficult. And the difficult thing happened anyway, as it always does.”
I couldn’t keep your mother safe from that place, but I can still protect you. Leave.
My father’s plea comes back to me as we finally resume our walk back to the house.
I’ll have to tell Dad, I think numbly. He needs to know he was right.
And what then? Becket will tell the police, but they can’t arrest a dead man. I suppose there will be more interviews, a detailed but inconclusive report—all the facts, none of the reasons.
What the Guests have done time out of mind.
What if the reasons are easy to find? What if my father was right, and this is about the chapel and Samhain and Kernstows and Guests after all?
“Poe,” Becket says, and I look up at him. And then all my anger, all my sadness, and all my desolation—all my numbness and all my pain and all of the ten thousand gradations of feeling that live in between—they swell up inside me, they crest and rise like a terrible, murky wall—
Becket kisses my forehead, not like a friend, not even like a lover, but like a priest. Like a priest saying You are still a child of God, like a priest passing on God’s love and blessing. And then the terrible wall breaks, it rushes down, like a wave upon some inner shore I didn’t know I had until this moment, and I’m free of it, I’m washed clean.
Becket pulls me into his arms for real and crushes me to his chest while I cry. It’s not a full sob fest, not like the night Auden and Rebecca flogged me, but it’s a slow, almost easy kind of crying. The tears slide out with no effort at all, and it feels so good to rub my face against Becket’s chest, so good to have his arms around me while I cry, and I think I could stand here forever. Right here in the middle of St. Petroc’s with the rain streaming down the stained glass and with its priest murmuring sweet things into my hair.
I turn my face up into his collared neck, and his scent is so lovely that I want to run my nose everywhere just to get more of it. It’s paper and incense and maybe some kind of expensive shaving oil—the smell of a philosopher and a man—and without thinking, I rise to my tiptoes to bury my nose in the space right about his collar and breathe him in. He doesn’t smell of winter or Thornchapel, like Saint and Auden, and I have a sharp moment when
I wish it were them holding me.
We should try to restrain ourselves as much as possible, Auden said. But god, it feels so good just to be held. To have strong arms and a strong throat and a delicious scent chase away everything that feels bad.
I can tell the moment Becket realizes what I’m doing, the moment he feels me change from crying to curious. His hands immediately tighten on my back as if to drag me even harder against him, and then they relax nearly just as quickly, keeping me still at a careful, friendly distance. A priestly distance.
There’s no excuse for what happens next, really. Not the grief, not the two weeks too busy for kink or touch. Not even Becket’s scent, as sensual and evocative as it is. No, I should know better, I should care for my friend better, because they aren’t my vows. It isn’t my collar. I have no say in how and when he sets them aside. And even if Saint and Auden and I decided it was okay, even if we decided that nothing that happens between the six of us is cheating, do I really want to do this?
But I lean up even further and crush my mouth to Becket’s anyway.
He tastes as good as he smells—better even, because his mouth tastes like incense smells: spicy and rich and smoky—and I wrap my arms tight around his neck to get more of it.
He’s frozen at first, still and tight as if he’s completely stunned, and it’s only the fast heave of his chest against mine that tells me he’s feeling the power of this moment too. Although whether it’s anger or lust or fear, I don’t know.
Don’t be a sex monster. Stop this madness right now.
With a sharp inhale of regret, I pull away. “Becket, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
Becket unfreezes in an instant, sliding his hands up into the damp waves of my hair, his blue eyes burning all over my face. “No,” he grinds out. “You should.”
And then he kisses me back.
I knew Becket was no virgin; he’d told us all as much back before Imbolc. But it’s still a complete shock to have him part my lips so confidently just now, to feel him taste me like he’s an epicure sampling a rare delicacy. To have him walk me back, back, back, even while he plunders my mouth, so that we’re in the small transept where the candles are burning and where we won’t be seen right away if someone walks in. His kissing is expert, his hands in my hair are beyond experienced, especially after they move from my hair to trace along the hollows of my throat and the sensitive places behind my ears, and it’s clear he knows how to handle a lover’s body, how to make skin and lips sing with need.
I whimper into his mouth, and he pulls back to study my face, his own face so lovely and sculpted and intense, like I normally only see it when he’s saying Mass. Whatever he sees has that intensity growing, a hunger glassing his eyes while his pulse pounds even harder at the base of his throat.
“Turn around,” he says in a low voice that rolls through every secret place I have. “Hands on the wall.”
“Becket,” I breathe.
He looks at me like I’m the communion on his altar, the thing waiting to be made holy flesh. “Turn around,” he says again. “And you will see what comes of kissing a man marked by God.”
“Christ,” I whisper, knowing with twenty-two years of Catholicism under my belt that every single part of this is wrong, and still turning around anyway. I brace my hands flat on the stone wall next to the bay of candles, wondering how many candles I should light after this.
Becket steps close behind me, his shiny priest shoes crowding against my hiking boots. He carefully moves my hair off my neck and to the side; he ghosts his lips over the back of my neck until I’m shivering and shuddering and breathing hard, until my head has fallen between my shoulders and there’s only his perfect shoes and the dance of the candles at the edge of my vision.
