Page 70 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
She doesn’t want to be reasonable right now. She wants to wallow. She wants to get to Thornchapel and drink lots of Prosecco and cry in her bed—and then blame Rebecca for it all.
Very mature, the reasonable voice says.
Fuck off, Delphine thinks back.
For a long time while Rebecca works next to her in the car, Delphine lays her head back and pretends to sleep, but really, she’s trying not to cry. She’s trying to keep the tears burning at her eyes from spilling onto her cheeks, not only because they would be embarrassing but also because she had eyelash extensions done this morning and she’s not supposed to get them wet for another eight hours.
But when they get to the house—Delphine having fallen asleep for real after all—Rebecca doesn’t give her the chance to storm off to the kitchen to see if Abby left any Prosecco to chill. Rebecca stops in the hall next to a neat stack of plastic pipes and turns to face Delphine.
“My room,” Rebecca says. “Now.”
“No,” Delphine says, knowing she sounds petulant and not caring. “You can’t make me.”
“Oh, is that so?” Rebecca asks, folding her arms across her chest. One perfect brow is arched at Delphine’s impertinence, and Delphine feels a flicker of excitement, the kind of excitement one might feel at a big storm blowing in. Every cell in her body instantly remembers what it was like to be at Rebecca’s command, to serve Rebecca’s body in the velvet dark of Imbolc. Every nerve ending fires to life at the thought of Rebecca touching her, kissing her, biting her.
No, Delphine chastises herself. Because fuck wallowing, fuck hating herself. She is lush and sexy and she has hundreds of DMs every day from followers who love her body exactly the way it is—or at the very least would boff her.
And Rebecca is one of the few people on this planet who knows exactly why it was so hard for Delphine to trust someone with her body, why Delphine waited so long to have sex, and so she doesn’t get to pick Delphine up and put her down like a secondhand toy.
“Don’t play Domme with me right now,” Delphine goes off. “You don’t get to pretend you want me when you’ve been giving me every sign that I’m unwanted for the last two months. You slept with me and then acted like it never happened, you used me, and all I wanted was you, and if you didn’t want to sleep with me again, all you had to do was tell me so—”
Delphine doesn’t get the last part of her rant out because Rebecca is suddenly there, suddenly close enough to kiss, and then she is kissing, she is licking across the arch of Delphine’s upper lip and then licking inside. She is stroking Delphine’s tongue with her own and molding her lips to the shape of her mouth. She has her hands in Delphine’s hair, twisting and pulling and sending sharp tingles all over her skin, electricity that gathers at Delphine’s nipples and in hot sparks around her clitoris.
“I don’t make decisions lightly, pet,” Rebecca says, pulling back just enough that her eyes can meet Delphine’s. “Not about the things I want. The people I want.”
“You seem to make lots of light decisions at your club,” Delphine points out in a petulant whisper. She tries to pull away, but Rebecca doesn’t let her.
“I haven’t slept with the same person twice in a row since uni,” she says, making sure that Delphine is looking into her eyes, like she wants Delphine to see something important, like she wants Delphine to decode something underneath her words. “Not from the club, not from anywhere. Do you understand what I mean?”
Delphine moistens her lips. “So I’m out of habit?”
Rebecca gives a throaty little laugh, seemingly as much directed at herself as at what Delphine said. “Yes, you could say that. You’re very much out of habit for me.”
The husky way she says it sends shivers everywhere, but then an unpleasant voice wonders, what if she means your body? What if you’re out of habit for her because she’s used to thin bodies?
Delphine should say this. Delphine should ask. Just a few seconds ago, before that kiss, she’d been brave. Her entire job is to be brave, actually, to tell other people to be brave, and here’s her chance now to do it for real. And yet she can’t force the words out. She can’t even think of words, when it comes down to it.
All she can think of is Rebecca’s soft, full mouth. The smell of her skin, floral and almost mossy, like a cool forest in spring. Rebecca’s eyes, which even in the daylight are such a deep brown it’s hard to tell where the iris starts and the pupil begins, and which are currently appraising Delphine with a combination of
hunger and utter determination.
Brave feels an awful lot like petulant right now, like picking a fight, and the thought of that is suddenly horrifying. How can she reveal how insecure and weak she really is in front of this woman who’s surely never felt a moment’s insecurity in her life? Can she bear to see this look of Rebecca’s—which is the look of a woman who very much seems to like what she sees—change into confusion and then to disgust when Delphine starts begging her for assurances? When Delphine reveals the inevitable—that she’s not the plucky, positive guru everyone thinks she is, but miserably and grossly needy?
“Delph,” Rebecca murmurs and then nips at Delphine’s lower lip. “Let me have you. Let me have you right now and I promise I’ll make it so good.”
Oh, who is Delphine fucking kidding? There’s only one answer to this, no matter how desolate she’s been these last seven weeks.
“Yes,” Delphine murmurs back. “Yes, Mistress.”
Chapter 22
Auden
Equinox
* * *
The offices of Harcourt + Trask are in a renovated coach manufactory in Belgravia, and they’re almost too sleek, a too effortless-mix-of-old-brick-and-new-glass, and sometimes Auden finds himself wincing when he walks inside. The two stories of the office have been renovated in such a way that the second floor is not a full floor, but is instead something more like a rectangular gallery above the first, meaning that someone on the first floor can look up through the opening in the second floor and see the exposed Victorian roof supports and the sloped ceiling—all painted a near-painful white. He supposes the intention was to create the illusion of air and light—same with the glassed-in meeting rooms with their modish, brushed steel chairs and tables—and perhaps it would work if it weren’t so aggressively stylish, weren’t so see? see how fashionable we are????
