A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(85)
She breaks off, and I lean in and kiss her.
I mean to kiss her out of reassurance, out of comfort, but the moment my lips touch hers, I want more, I want the kind of kiss a bride deserves. I dance my tongue against the seam of her lips, and when she finally parts them to let me inside, I find her tongue and show her all the things I want to try with other parts of her body. Things I’ve never done before with anyone, but that I will do tonight as her bride. And she responds in kind, in hunger, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me closer and closer until our bare feet are tangled in the same cold grass and our breasts are mashed together so tight you couldn’t get anything between them if you tried.
When we finally break apart, gasping, I manage to ask the one thing I should have thought of earlier. “Is this going to be okay? With . . . everything . . . ?”
She beams at me. We’re both shorter than everyone else, but share the same height, which means I can see right into her dark honey eyes when she says, “Yes. I’m going to be okay.”
“If you need to stop . . .”
“Then I’ll stop. But I want this, and I think—” she looks around at the fire and the altar and the lanterns and her best friends in the world “—I think this might be the safest and best way.”
“Is there anything I shouldn’t do? Or should do?”
“You’re perfect,” Delphine says. “You’re perfect and tonight is not a night of smudges. I’m not saying there won’t be nights that are, but right now I’m ready and I want this.”
“Okay,” I say, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Then let’s get fake married at the altar. I should probably stop after this one though, so I don’t make it a habit.”
That makes her laugh. “Come along, bride,” she says, pulling me to the altar. “Our thorns await.”
Chapter 25
“By your own vows and your own blessing, you the bride and you the lord of Thornchapel are bound together. For the good of all assembled here, for the good of the earth on which we stand, it’s now time for you to join together and seal your union with promises exceeding words.”
I can barely hear Becket over the sight of my wrist wrapped in thorns.
Rebecca did well finding these—they’re green and bendy enough to loop around our wrists and then cinch tight, but firm enough that the thorns dig unrelentingly into our skin. I feel like my entire heartbeat is in my left hand; I think I can feel Delphine’s heartbeat in hers. Tiny drops of blood weep from pricks and scratches and cuts, and when I meet Delphine’s eyes, her lips are parted and her eyes are glassy and I see the flushed, rapid-breathed expression of a masochist experiencing safe pain for the first time. Pain without fear—or maybe pain with only the good kind of fear, the fear that comes from roller coasters and scary movies and walks through the woods on Imbolc night. Pain with trust and warmth.
I give her a dizzy, giddy smile, thinking about how much I love her, how much I love everyone else here. How alive I feel, how satisfying it is to watch our mingled blood drop in small tears onto the ground, as if we’re feeding the earth together.
Handfasting over, Becket cuts us free of the thorns, and for a minute, Delphine and I don’t let go. We keep our hands clasped, slick with little rivers of blood, cold and hot all at once, aching with pain but also aching with something else, something sweeter.
For a moment, I forget I’m not really a bride, not really St. Brigid, and I forget Delphine isn’t my lord. I forget all the way over to the platform, where the others wait, all while Delphine coaxes me down onto the piles of blankets someone brought in earlier. I forget the cold, forget the mud, because it’s warm here by the bonfire and my hand is hot with pain, and when Delphine kneels in front of me with her erect, pink nipples poking through her hair and her soft pussy glinting gold whenever the fire jumps just right, I’m hot everywhere. My cunt alone feels hot enough to smelt copper, but I’m certain that sparks are going to fly up off my skin when she runs a slow finger up my calf.
“Please,” I say, not really sure what I’m asking for in a specific sense, but knowing I’m ready for it, I’m ready for anything.
“Please, what?” she teases, but she bites her lip right after and she’s nervous, I see it now. And of course she is—it’s her first time having sex and she has an audience and she’s the one expected to take the active role. The masculine role in the ceremony, I would have said until earlier today, when Becket chided me for it.
God isn’t male or female, God is God. So let’s be careful how we bring gender into ritual space, mm?
So says the man who prays to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Becket had smiled then. The official stance of the Church is that all gendered language is allegorical.
I’d groaned then. Fine. But I think it’s sexy, the whole bride and lord thing. Can’t I have it both ways?
You can have it any way you like, as long as you think about it first and it hurts no one else.
There’s no doubt that I like it this way, plush and curvy Delphine raking her eyes over me like I’m a spill of glittering treasure laid in offering at her feet. There’s no doubt that I like the idea of her being the lord, the man, while I’m the incarnated saint she’ll fuck as both duty and ecstasy. All the things that are good about this ceremony gleaned away from the bad, from the binary, as Becket would say. Any of us can be anything. All of us can be all things.