A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(63)

God.

They’ve never had sex.

“There wasn’t anyone else before you,” Auden says, leaning back against the counter, his eyes on Delphine. “And I meant every promise I made to you about . . .”

He presses his mouth closed, as if deciding that’s too private for the rest of us to hear, and changes course. “So by everyone else’s definitions, I’m a virgin too.”

“Oh Auden,” says Delphine, a sad note in her voice. “I never realized . . . I just assumed that there must have been someone you wanted before we started dating.”

“There was,” Auden says tiredly. “But he didn’t want me back.”

Saint next to me goes very, very still. So still I think I can hear his heart beating like it’s outside of his body.

“I think we should do this,” Becket says abruptly, before Auden can say anything else.

“Why?” Auden asks. “And please try not to forget that you are a Catholic priest when you answer this time.”

“It’s my opinion as a Catholic priest that we’re talking about this in the wrong fashion,” Becket says. “These kinds of things aren’t meant to be dissected in the bright light of day. Rituals are supposed to be acted out and performed. And the explanation for why they’re done is always going to feel flimsy when it’s held up without context and without the actions that imbue them with meaning. The doing of them is the explanation, it is the understanding. They are built to reach inside us and expose the things that words can’t excavate, the longings and the joys that reason and logic can’t puzzle out.

“If we want to consider doing this with any degree of fairness, then we’ll have to set aside logic for the present moment. We’ll have to listen to the parts of ourselves we’re not used to listening to. The little slivers in our hearts that we’ve trained ourselves to ignore—those tender soul-splinters that ache when we hear the wind sighing a certain way or when we see the stars glitter over the sea. Those slivers haven’t forgotten how to hope that there’s something more to this world than we can see or touch.

“We can sit around this table all night and find a thousand reasons why it would be silly or prohibitively difficult to perform a ceremony we have no personal connection to. Or we can decide that we’re willing to approach it the way it’s meant to be approached—not cynically, not ironically, but with fascination and respect. It’s the same I would ask of any non-Catholic coming to Mass.”

“This is different than Mass,” St. Sebastian says.

“Why?” Becket asks.

Saint swivels his head to look at Becket. “You mean aside from the ritualized sex?”

“Well, Mass has ritualized cannibalism, so I’m not sure which is more civilized in your view,” says the priest in a mild tone.

“The cannibalism is symbolic,” Saint argues. “We’re talking about actual, non-symbolic sex.”

“Just because it’s real doesn’t mean it’s not symbolic,” I interject.

“You know what I meant,” Saint replies with a touch of exasperation. “And I want to do the Imbolc ceremony—I do—it’s just that this part is . . . I mean, how? How will we look at each other afterward?”

“I managed to look everyone in the eye after being spanked, didn’t I? You can still look at Becket even though he had his tongue in your mouth.”

Saint’s cheeks darken the slightest bit and he swallows. “That’s different.”

“But why does it have to be?” I ask. “Think about it—if we had a wild night, say, with lots to drink and maybe more kissing, and two of us ended up fooling around in the shadows of the library—why would that be acceptable and normal, but choosing to have sex in advance isn’t?”

“Because it’s not normal,” he says. “No one else is doing this, Poe; there’s not a greeting card you give to the person you’re going to fuck in the mud, there’s not an Imbolc Day sale on Prosecco and chocolate, teenagers aren’t sneaking off to have ‘Celtic goddess role-play’ sex.”

“I believe it’s called aspecting,” Becket observes.

“My point is,” Saint says, talking over the priest, “we don’t have any reference for this—the uniquely Thornchapel way of celebrating Imbolc. We don’t have a script for what comes after. There’s nothing and no one we can look at who’ve done exactly what we’re going to do.”

Unless our parents did it before us . . .

“I didn’t realize you were such a traditionalist,” Becket says.

“I’m not! I’m fucking not at all, but you all don’t get it, you don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to see someone you care about, someone you’d tear out a lung just to talk to, and you can’t. You can’t talk to them because what you’ve done to each other in the past is an iron door without a lock between you.”

Auden doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t have to. He closes his eyes and tugs at his hair as he turns back to the window.

If Saint notices, he doesn’t show it. He finishes, “And I don’t think I can bear it if that happens with us. I’m sorry if that’s too honest, if I sound too desperate, but I don’t want to lose you, I don’t want to lose this.” He looks at all of us, Auden too, even though Auden can’t see him looking. “I just got it back. I don’t want to risk it. I can’t.”