A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(44)

He leans his forehead against mine, his eyes closing. “Can you understand now?”

Defeated, I nod.

What is my lust compared with his future? What are kisses when he needs neighbors?

“Yes, Saint,” I whisper as he lifts his head away from mine. “I see now.”

He stares down at me, and for a moment, I imagine I see something else in his face—guilt, maybe? A certain evasiveness?—but then it’s gone, and he leans in to give me a cautious, chaste kiss on the cheek.

“I hope we can be friends,” he says in a quiet voice. “I hope there’s at least that.”

I don’t like the way the words feel leaving my lips, but I say them anyway. “We’ll be friends, Saint, and that will be enough.”

He lets out a breath, as if he doesn’t like hearing the words any more than I like saying them, but before either of us can say anything else to disrupt our new balance, Becket comes into the room with Saint’s coat in his arms.

“I think the party's over,” Becket says, walking toward us and extending the coat, which Saint takes with a nod. “Auden spent about ten minutes glaring at the fire and then stalked upstairs, and then Rebecca decided she’d had enough too. It’s just Delphine in there now.”

“I’ll go help her clean up,” I say. “Goodbye, Saint. Becket.”

Saint doesn’t look at me as he reaches for the door. “Good night, Proserpina.”

Becket gives me an apologetic sort of kiss on the cheek, as if wanting to make up for Saint’s curtness, and then he follows Saint into the cold, leaving me alone in the hall.

When I get back to the library, Delphine has almost everything picked up, and we work together in companionable silence until the room is back to rights. Together we cover up the remaining logs in the fireplace and turn out the lights.

My mind is on Saint the entire time. I don't cry, I don't breathe a word of anything to Delphine, but I feel it huge and hulking inside my chest, like some awful tree with burrowing roots and crowding, scratching branches.

It scratches rejection and disappointment everywhere inside me.

I try to ignore it.

After we're done and we’re walking up the stairs, Delphine says, completely out of nowhere, “Did you like it when Rebecca spanked you?”

Surprised—and a little grateful to have something to think about that's not Saint—I shoot a glance over at her. “Didn’t it look like I was enjoying it?”

“Well,” she says, a little self-consciously, “I could see your . . . you know. And it was wet.”

I nudge her shoulder with my own. “Are you embarrassed to say the word pussy?”

“No!” she protests. But then she glances over at me and amends, “Maybe a little.”

“Yes, Delphine, my pussy was wet. Yes, I enjoyed the spanking very much.”

She thinks about this. “But you also cried. And screamed.”

We are to my bedroom door now, and I stop and look at her for real. She doesn’t look as puzzled as she sounds—she looks thoughtful.

And she looks very, very interested in my reply.

“There are as many different reasons to enjoy kink as there are people who enjoy it,” I say. “But for me there’s something fundamentally beautiful about pain and pleasure mixing together, because that’s real life, right? Being alive means the harsh is mixed in with the good, and every time I get to choose the harsh for myself, it loses its sting. Every time I taste the bitter and survive, I’m all the stronger to enjoy the sweet.”

“What about the parts that aren’t about the pain? The parts that are about—” and I can’t tell in the dark hallway, but I think she blushes “—about doing what someone says?”

Mmm. Those are my favorite parts. “It’s like being loved,” I say. “Like loving.”

“But Rebecca doesn’t love you,” Delphine says sharply. “She hardly knows you.”

“I didn’t say she loved me. I said it’s like being loved, it's like—”

I break off, not wanting her to misunderstand. After four years of BDSM, you’d think I’d be better at explaining why I do it in the first place.

I start again. “Maybe it is love in a way. You don’t have to know a person’s favorite movie to show them that they’re human and beautiful and sacred. You don’t have to know their middle name to prove to them that they’re worth cherishing and spoiling, even if it’s only for an hour. Or for thirty-five swats and a kiss. And taking the time to prove to someone that they’re worthwhile and enough . . . isn’t that love? Isn’t that what love is for?”

I say this, and I try not to think about what it means that Auden and I shared the bitter and the sweet together. I try not to think about the kiss I’ll never get to repeat with Saint, because showing him love right now means not making love.

Delphine tilts her head, her mouth pulled to the side. “You make getting spanked sound like going to church.”

“It is when I do it,” I say.

She looks down the hallway, I assume at the door she shares with Auden, and when she turns back to me, all her curiosity is gone, replaced by something tired and sad.

“Thank you for explaining it to me,” she says. “Good night.”