Page 88 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to tell them to me now?”
They pulled into the driveway. Something dark speckled the render covering the front of their house—algae or mold or something—and the neighbor’s bin had fallen over, spilling rubbish everywhere. Home sweet home.
“If I told you, I think you would stop loving me,” his mother said quietly.
It was such a strange thing to say tha
t St. Sebastian had no real reply. “Mamá.”
“Inside, mijo. You need to rest.” And she used that tone, that voice that meant there’d be no pushing her on this. So he steeled himself for the pain and carefully got out of the car, each movement like an arrow in his side, and went into the house.
It wasn’t until that first day home, when he tried to call Thornchapel from his mother’s phone, that he realized he didn’t know what to say.
His body was Auden’s canvas still, and he resented every shower, every brush of clothing, every hour of his skin dying and renewing itself, which would take these traces of Auden away from him. He was supposed to have belt marks, rope marks, bruises on his arse from Auden’s palm . . .
Billy and Lee had stolen that away from him, and so now he only had this sketch of Thornchapel with its mysterious letter M over his heart. Well that, and the deep bruise on his lip.
But even though his body was marked like a surveyor’s map—Sharpied strokes like property lines, squiggles like rivers and streams, his whole body a landscape for Auden to learn and then conquer for his own—St. Sebastian’s thoughts were blank.
What could he say that could possibly be worth what Auden had done that day? What words could ever weigh against those steps he’d run toward the road? He could call and say I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for hours into the phone and it still wouldn’t make a difference; it would only be a drop in the ocean of what he owed to Auden. It would be an insult to the magnitude of his sin and what he imagined must be the magnitude of Auden’s anger.
The problem was that St. Sebastian was angry too, if he was being honest. He was so angry at Auden for not listening, angry with Billy, angry with Lee, angry with the world for being shaped the way it was.
And he was terrified that if he dialed Auden’s number and Auden picked up, what wouldn’t come out of St. Sebastian’s mouth was hours of apologies, but instead tearful, bitter, aching rage, directed not just at Auden, not just at himself, but at everyone and everything and everywhere. Every single molecule of the universe that had arranged itself so that it was even possible for bones to be broken and brains to be bruised for the crime of wanting another boy.
No, he couldn’t let Auden hear all that. St. Sebastian didn’t even want to hear it and it was coming from inside himself.
So he put down the phone and told himself he’d try again the next day.
But the next day came and St. Sebastian had the same problem. The only words crowding his mouth were angry—violent even—or so guilt-laden that they sank like lead back down into his throat. He was boiling over, he was freezing at the same time, the result was hot shards of himself pointed outwards at everyone, and then he hated himself for that too. He hated that he couldn’t remember what it felt like to lay on a bed of crushed lavender while Auden devoured his mouth. He hated that he couldn’t remember what it felt like to know—with primal, elemental urgency—that he was on the edge of something new and wonderful, that he was plunging into a wild dream. He hated that he couldn’t remember what magic felt like.
The only thing he still loved was Auden. And he couldn’t even figure out what to say to him.
He put the phone down and decided to try again the next day.
By the end of the week, he’d written emails upon emails that went unsent. He tried to write a letter by hand, and then burned it with a lighter while listening to very sad music, and then he wrote another letter—which he then burned listening to angry music instead. He thought about messaging Auden on Twitter or Facebook—but he didn’t have accounts on any of those things and he didn’t know what he thought he’d be able to say in a short DM that he couldn’t even express in a two-thousand-word email.
Finally he gave up, caved to what he’d known he should do all along. He waited until his mother drove into the next town over for groceries and snuck out of the house to walk to Thornchapel.
The walk felt longer than it ever had in his life, each footfall sending a jolt of pain through his ribs and head, each step taunting him with the memories of those six cursed steps he’d taken outside the graveyard.
He welcomed it, welcomed the pain so clean and so honest when right now nothing about him felt clean or honest. The pain made sense; he deserved it; he deserved more.
Love sometimes meant hell to pay and all that.
There was something else dogging his walk though, and he was too miserable not to be honest with himself.
He was afraid.
After sixteen years of carelessly rambling around Thorncombe and the high hills and pitched valleys, he was afraid. His own home frightened him, the very folds and nooks of the valley that he loved had turned sinister, pooled full of shadow and threat. Yes, the village had always been a place where scorn seemed to simmer under the surface, yes, he sometimes hated it here, but the combe itself—the valley and the river and the moors and the forest and the thorn chapel—that had always been his.
No longer.
They could be hiding anywhere, they could be watching and waiting and planning just around the next kink in the road. He’d heard the police had brought Billy and Lee and the others in to question them, but that was all he’d heard, and he was too pessimistically built to hope they’d actually been punished, he was certain they were free once again, and full of amplified malice that he’d survived and blown the whistle on them. Even thinking about it made him cringe, and he had to walk with his hands shoved in his pockets to stop them from shaking and stop himself from wheeling at every innocent summer sound as he walked down the hedge-lined lane.
But they’d chased him away from Auden once and he’d be goddamned if they did it again. He’d walk through the terror, through the pain, to get to his magic boy, no matter what the cost.
