Page 58 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
St. Sebastian didn’t think he could ever feel lonely again. Not while he could remember what Auden looked like, looking at him like that.
Auden got to his feet with the unconscious grace that St. Sebastian hated and loved, a grace like Auden alone existed in one of those sad-piano-soundtrack movies with gardens and waistcoats and things, like Auden alone inhabited a world of beauty where even the most mundane movements and activities must be beauty, they must. Beauty was a law there just like gravity, just like conservation of momentum, like heat and motion and time.
It simultaneously made St. Sebastian aware of his own lack of sophistication, grace, and beauty—and also reminded him that for some reason, Auden didn’t perceive that lack, didn’t see him as any less worthy of lust and admiration.
Auden looked at St. Sebastian like St. Sebastian was the most beautiful thing in the world . . . right before he hurt him, of course.
It was that friction, right there, that kindled a fire in St. Sebastian’s chest. He knew the vocabulary for everything: kink and submissive and Dominant and aftercare, clamp and collar and pegging, bastinado and single tail whip and quirts and ring-gags and metamours and on and on and on. But what he hadn’t learned was the word for how it felt to have Auden look down at him like he wanted to eat him alive. What it felt like to have Auden’s art all over his skin and what it felt like to hear Auden say things like I always see you. I couldn’t bear it if you ran away from me.
It made his chest ache and his throat ache.
What was the word for that?
And why hadn’t he found it anywhere on the internet?
Auden threw St. Sebastian’s shirt at him—not before taking one final moment to rake St. Sebastian over with a look so suddenly feral and proprietary that St. Sebastian almost begged him not to wait for Thornchapel and for the privacy of his room. He wanted Auden to kiss him now, to do all those filthy, mean things to him now, waiting would kill him and he didn’t mind grass stains on his back or mud on his knees if it meant being able to belong to Auden immediately.
But before he could say anything, Auden’s posture changed, straightened in a way St. Sebastian thought of as Auden’s in public posture, which screamed unearned wealth and indifference and entitlement—it was a mirror to the posture Auden had with St. Sebastian alone, which was still mildly disdainful, but suffused with a playfulness and a perceptiveness that erased the sting of the former.
“Put on your shirt,” Auden said. It was the kind of command that couldn’t and shouldn’t be disobeyed; for all the hundreds of reasons why it might be a bad idea to take off a shirt, it was rarely a bad idea to put one back on.
So St. Sebastian put on his shirt and stood up and that’s when he saw.
It was the clump of smoking scowlers St. Sebastian had managed so successfully to avoid, and they were here now, in the graveyard, seven of them with their pallid skin mottled and red-splotched from the heat—and maybe alcohol already—and their voices rising with the shove-y, swaggering rumpus of boys about to make trouble. Two boys, St. Sebastian had noticed from observation at school, seemed to be in a near-constant contest for alpha status, and the five others split and merged and split again around those two as they walked up the slope, moving and lagging at random intervals like they were demonstrating Brownian motion on human scale, all of them reacting to the molecules that were the two vying leaders, Billy and Lee.
Lee walked in the middle of the band, his steps slow and unhurried and bored, like he’d been dragged into a scene he was obviously too cool for. Billy was in front, as always, twitchy and edgy and laughing and loud, performing recklessness, performing a brittle, near-hysterical bravado that wound the others boy up, all the boys except for Lee, who stayed bored and cold no matter what.
Of the two, Lee was the most dangerous.
Not that St. Sebastian was interested in testing either of them.
“We need to go,” he told Auden as Auden watched the boys come toward them. “We need to get out of here.”
Auden shot him a look that said I will own Thornchapel one day and no one makes me leave, and St. Sebastian knew they were doomed. Instinctively he knew it, instinctively he knew that Billy and Lee and the others would hate a spoiled posh boy as much as they hated the poor, half-Mexican one, and instinctively he knew that they’d already metabolized the fact that St. Sebastian had been shirtless when they entered the graveyard.
It wasn’t as if St. Sebastian thought that if they were less of what they were, that if God had tweezers and could pluck away just Auden’s poshness or just the Americanized vowels of St. Sebastian’s voice or just the queerness or just the poverty or any of it, that they’d still escape danger.
It’s just that being all of what they were made this so fucking inevitable that St. Sebastian couldn’t stand it.
“Auden,” St. Sebastian tried again, as Billy was about to step into earshot. “We have to run.”
Auden frowned at him, like he couldn’t understand at all why St. Sebastian was nervous. “Why?”
At that moment, St. Sebastian could have screamed, screamed at this perfect boy who’d never been anything other than rich and white and adored, who’d never lived anywhere other than one of the most global and diverse cities in the world, who’d only come to the country to visit his ancestral seat and have servants make him picnics while he swam in his indoor pool and drank in the garden. He could have screamed at this boy who had never ever had to move, had never had to choose between pride and safety, who’d never had to tailor the definition of dignity around the reality of survival.
But there was no time to scream these thing
s, and the urge to scream was dampened immediately with wary fear as they were officially approached. Billy stepped up to them, swinging a half-empty two-liter of cider from his hand. “Martinez,” he drawled, coming to a stop a few feet away but still swinging his bottle. “Who’s your friend?”
“I’m Auden,” Auden said, in the most Auden-like way possible, all public school accent and imperious, condescending expression.
“Oh, did you hear that, lads?” Billy said, banging his cider bottle faster and harder against his thigh. “He’s AHHHH-dn!”
This was greeted by howls of laughter and mimicry, and St. Sebastian seized his chance through the noise.
“There’s a way down to the village,” he whispered quickly, urgently. “Over the far wall by the church. If we make it to the road, we’re safe.”
Auden just looked determined. “We don’t have to make it anywhere.”
