Page 64 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
They’re still inches apart, St. Sebastian’s hand still trapped against Auden’s chest. St. Sebastian realizes, in a distant sort of way, that he’s hard. That he’s ready for anything—a fight, a fuck, yelling, screaming, kissing, biting—anything so long as it happens here and now with Auden Guest.
But none of those things happen.
Instead, Auden breaks away with a sigh but without another word; he releases St. Sebastian’s hand and steps back. “Don’t,” St. Sebastian says. He’s not ready for this to be over, not yet, he’d rather spend the entire night fighting if it means Auden stays.
Auden gives him a look from under his eyelashes as he turns—a look impossible to interpret—and then he leaves the library without saying goodbye.
And watching his wide shoulders move through the library door, St. Sebastian wishes he’d counted the seconds earlier, any of them, even just one, just to have one minute longer with him.
St. Sebastian assumes, in a very levelheaded and not at all miserable way, that their fight means the end of . . . well, the end of something, the end of whatever it was the three of them were going to try to build. This is it, this is the final (and also unneeded) proof that he and Auden are irrevocably broken, that no amount of lust can knit together what was splintered apart. Not just splintered but poisoned, and not just poisoned but killed.
Some things can’t be mended.
That weekend, Augie needs help on a lonely, muddy site near Two Bridges, and he goes gratefully, knowing it means he’ll have an excuse to avoid Thornchapel that weekend, an excuse to avoid Auden and to avoid telling Poe the truth—that no matter how much he loves her, he’ll never be able to do the impossible and make Auden forgive him. That he’s not even sure if he wants to, because it will mean forgiving Auden in return, and he’s not sure if he can, if it’s possible to grow forgiveness in a place so thoroughly scorched clean of life.
And anyway, as adept as he is with Augie’s accounts, as naturally inclined toward books and words and dusty stories, he’s also good with his hands, he’s also soothed by the work, ordered and planned, framed and grooved, demanding nothing of him but his time and his sweat. He’s so good at it that Augie—as he does every time St. Sebastian helps on a site—makes noises about how he’d love to expand the business with a new team, about how when he retires, he’d love to know someone like St. Sebastian is there to take over the business, because St. Sebastian is so good at every part of it and all of Augie’s sons are either in the big smoke or only barely interested in the work of building and fixing houses.
St. Sebastian always demurs, smiling and making agreeing noises like he’s truly considering it, but the truth is that after a lifetime of existing on the fringes of everything—this town, his father’s family, England, America—it’s impossible to trust someone begging him to come into the heart of the fold. It feels like a trick or a mirage, some kind of elaborate lure, like the minute he agrees, four walls will spring up out of nowhere and trap him in a box and he’ll be cramped and alone and mocked from the outside. Declared foolish for thinking he could ever be part of any family or any circle, because he doesn’t belong anywhere.
He feels this way about the others at Thornchapel too, like any day now they’ll turn and tell him that they all despise him, that this was all a long ploy to humiliate him. That they were waiting for him to expose his aching and vulnerable need for love and friendship, and now that he has, they can laugh at him and scorn him and cast him off.
He’s very glum by the end of the weekend, so morose and convinced of his own unlikability that he doesn’t even answer Poe’s phone calls and texts except once to tell her he’s too tired from working at the job site to see her or come to the house. He skips dinner to take a long walk up to the moors and then down a narrow, unmarked path to the thorn chapel, where he wanders around until the sky is black and he’s so tired his bones hurt.
He trudges home and he stares at his mother’s office, knowing that tonight of all nights he’s not brave enough to wade in and start packing away the existence of the only person he was ever sure truly loved him, and then he goes upstairs to sleep. He doesn’t indulge his needs, not tonight, he just lies there with the covers kicked to his feet and throbs into the empty air, the discomfort comforting somehow.
And then that Monday, after going into Augie’s workshop in the early hours of the morning to update invoices and send out orders for Thornchapel’s renovation (trying not to stare overlong at the wiring and plumbing schedules annotated with Auden’s neat, decisive hand), he goes to the library and begins his shift, trying to remember the satisfaction and pride he sometimes feels at this life he’s carved out for himself, this life that hasn’t asked anything of anyone else. There’s a dignity in this, he reminds himself. There’s a quiet kind of worth. He may be alone, he may always be alone, but he is surviving and he is surviving in the one place in the world he wants to be, which is near Thornchapel.
Maybe no one else, no other place, has chosen him, but he can choose himself. He can choose here.
And just as he thinks he finally believes all this again, Auden walks through the door.
It’s just as shocking as last time, to see Auden here, and St. Sebastian, who’s been trying to diagnose why one of
the public computers won’t turn on, stands up and stares at him wordlessly, having in no way internally prepared himself for the possibility that Auden might come back again, that Auden might seek him out, that things are not as bleak as St. Sebastian convinced himself they were.
The day is clear and cold outside, and so Auden is dressed like a winter fashion spread in a thick, wheat-colored sweater and long wool coat, looking so delicious and so rich and so very, very Auden that St. Sebastian’s throat aches.
Auden surveys the room—empty, save for St. Sebastian—and then walks toward him and the recalcitrant computer.
“How can I help?” Auden says, as if last Monday never happened and they were starting fresh, trying this whole thing again from scratch. “Is it not working properly?”
“It won’t turn on,” St. Sebastian says, too blank with surprise to do anything but answer the question.
Auden nods, once, and then strips off his coat and folds it neatly over the chair. It’s nothing really, something polite people do in public every day, and yet the sight of Auden disrobing with such purpose, draping his coat over the chair with such care, has St. Sebastian flushing.
Auden comes over and gracefully kneels under the long table that houses the library’s six public computers, and begins working, power-cycling and switch-flipping and finally performing the right series of checks and button-presses to make the screen light up again.
“There we are,” Auden says, standing up and smoothing his trousers. “What next?”
Still blank and uncertain, St. Sebastian stammers, “There’s more to shelve, I guess?”
Auden nods again, like of course there’s more shelving, of course he wants to do it. Of course he wants to stay here and do whatever it is he thinks he’s accomplishing with St. Sebastian even if it makes no sense and will probably hurt both of them again.
Of course.
For an hour, they shelve together, shoulder to shoulder, in near-complete silence. No one comes in that evening, and so it’s just them moving around each other, occasionally brushing fingers when they reach for books at the same time. After an hour of it, St. Sebastian thinks he might go mad if something doesn’t change, if something doesn’t cut the tension twisting tighter and tighter inside his chest.
After the hour is up, Auden goes to find his coat and starts to pull it on.
