A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(74)

Certainly not because Rebecca could see from her window seat that Delphine had been wiping her face as she’d been walking toward the maze. That her shoulders were hunched as if she were crying. Certainly not because the idea of Delphine crying irritated Rebecca so much that she literally could not sit still while she thought about it.

So Rebecca went into the maze, deciding she’d take the route to the center first, and then if she didn’t find Delphine along the way, she’d check the little dead-end paths and silent niches where the hedge was carved out to accommodate a bench or two. Fortunately, none of that was necessary, because here’s Delphine, precisely where she should be. In the center of the maze that Rebecca is planning to rip down.

Delphine sits on the ledge of the empty fountain, her feet where the water will be once the weather warms enough and her coat wrapped tightly around her. She’s staring at the statue of Adonis and Aphrodite while tears run in slow, effortless tracks down her face.

She doesn’t wipe them away.

Neither does Rebecca, even though she is close enough to after she sits down on the ledge next to Delphine. Rebecca could so easily steal a tear off Delphine’s cheek and lick it off her finger to taste the salt.

She takes a deep breath and looks away so she won’t be tempted to. So she can stop seeing how beautiful Delphine is when she cries.

Instead she asks, “Is everything okay?”

“I broke up with Auden,” Delphine says with a tiny hiccup as she pushes down a sob. “Last night. I guess it’s just catching up with me today.”

Rebecca feels like the world has suddenly rolled over on its side. “You what?” she whispers, completely shocked. “You what?”

Delphine just shrugs unhappily. “I couldn’t do it, Rebecca. I was marrying him for all the wrong reasons. Because he’s a good man and one of my best friends and I love him in the way that I’ve always loved him. Because it felt like the thing I should do, even if it wasn’t what I really wanted to do.”

Rebecca can’t stop her thoughts from circling, racing each other faster and faster. Delphine and Auden were supposed to be a constant, a known variable. A stable, unchanging factor in their lives.

“What changed?” Rebecca asks. “What made you realize all this?”

Even in the dusky light, Delphine’s blush is apparent. “Well, if you must know, it was watching you spank Proserpina.”

The place between Rebecca’s legs gives a single, tight throb, and she forces herself to ignore it. “Oh?”

“Yes,” Delphine admits, her face still bright red. “I watched it and felt like—oh, I don’t know how to say it. Like I was waking up. Or like something in maths finally made sense or like I’d finally figured out how to ride a bike. It was something that had always been there, been true, and I just hadn’t put it together yet. I hadn’t seen it.”

“And what hadn’t you seen before that night?” Rebecca asks in a low voice, almost not sure if she wants to know the answer. Not sure if the answer will change something that’s best left unchanged.

“I saw Poe and I realized I wanted to be her,” Delphine says simply.

Rebecca realizes she already knows this.

She’s known this for three years.

But she doesn’t let herself think about that week three years ago right now. She doesn’t ever let herself think about it.

Delphine goes on. “I wanted to have that same expression on my face—the ecstasy, but also the pain and the trust. Ever since it happened everyone has been so good to me, so kind, and sometimes I feel smothered by it. But at the same time, if I’m brave, if I try to be strong, then I still want people to be kind and good to me after. I want to be rewarded and petted, and what I saw that night with Poe was that I can have both. I can be tested, I can be brave, and then afterwards, I’ll still get to be coddled. It seems like the best of both worlds.”

“People shouldn’t want to be consensually hurt so they can feel brave,” Rebecca says.

“Well, Poe told me that there’s as many reasons for doing kinky things as there are people who do them, so there.” Delphine sticks a tongue out at her, and it’s so ridiculous, so adorable, so sweet with her face still stained and shiny with tears and her nose red from the cold, that Rebecca laughs.

She laughs so she doesn’t kiss her.

Then Delphine’s face changes, and she looks down at her hands in her lap. Rebecca has a sudden foreboding that Delphine’s about to ask the obvious question.

Will you hurt me like you did Proserpina? she’ll ask, and what could Rebecca possibly say but yes? For the sake of kink, of course, not because she likes Delphine, not because the idea of Delphine cuffed to her bed makes her want to growl with hunger.

But that’s not what Delphine asks this time. Instead, she asks, “Rebecca, why have we never gotten along?” And then she turns those big, honey-brown eyes up to Rebecca, and Rebecca suddenly thanks Jesus in heaven that Delphine is not actually her sub, because Rebecca would be in so much trouble. That fuck-me mouth, those huge, liquid eyes.

They wouldn’t leave Rebecca’s bed for days.

“I think we’re just incompatible,” Rebecca says. It’s another constant of theirs, another known variable, and so she’s never given it a lot of thought. They simply don’t get along and they never have, and that’s that. It doesn’t bear further examination.