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Thornchapel was right. Proserpina and Saint Sebastian fighting over the flower crown in front of him felt right. It was only him that felt wrong.
A kiss that was almost a bruise, almost a bite, and how he wanted both—he wanted kissing and bruising and holding and biting. And he wanted to shelter them from the rain and force them to kneel in the mud too, and he didn’t know what it meant or why it was happening or even why they were letting him yank them close.
Thornchapel waited. And in a clearing in the woods, in a church ruined by thorns and time, something stirred. Something called all six of them by name.
Everything is possible. Those were the last words my mother ever spoke to me, and I planted them in my heart like seeds and made them grow. Everything is possible.
Three stories of cold stone and glass should in no way feel as inviting and as enchanting as they do, and yet I feel utterly invited. Utterly enchanted.
Like you come to a place, and instead of planting a flag and saying mine, the place plants something in you. The place claims you, it knows your name and the crooked corners of your heart,
Thornchapel knows my name and the crooked corners of my heart, and it wants me to make promises that I’m going to keep.”
And tomorrow he’ll have to go to Thornchapel and see Poe and maybe see Saint Sebastian again and have to pretend he’s not unraveling. Pretend he isn’t growing a tree of thorns inside his chest and that those thorns don’t have names. Delphine. Rebecca. Becket. Saint Sebastian. Proserpina. His thorns, his regrets. His hurts.
This bad boy with eyes like winter trees who’d rather talk about death than friendship.
“I hate him because he deserves it. I hate him because once upon a time, I gave him a piece of my heart.” He closes his eyes, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “And then he fed it to the wolves.”
I hate that at Thornchapel, I’m both not myself and more myself than I’ve ever been.
I want him to be mine. Or I want to deny him the right to ever call me his. I want to heal him and I want to hurt him. All because of one broken kiss.
He may not believe in anything, but if he could, it would be there in that place and it would be with them, and it seems right somehow to try. Like doing anything else might actually tear him apart.
everything he’s kept locked up inside of him is just spilling out now, tearing free of him, and it won’t be long before his tattered hungers make themselves known…
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.”
“I’m poison to certain people, Poe. Auden learned that the hard way. I’m not going to do the same to you.”
“I’m afraid of you letting me hurt you,” says Auden. “Why?” “Because then I’ll want to do it for the rest of my life.”
It was as if Rebecca was thinking, If you get hurt, it’ll be by my hand and nothing else. Rebecca probably wasn’t really thinking that. But Delphine thinks she would like it if she had been.
How fucking miserly is he? How callow? That he feels owed somehow for all the years he’s held back?
He wants both of them so much he thinks he might be entirely made up of want, he thinks all his thorns are finally puncturing through his skin and out into the real world and everyone will see and they’ll know.
His darkness and his light and all the twines and ravels of his depraved, thorny heart.
He could make Saint feel once, just fucking once, how much it hurts to want him.
Rebecca smiles at that, but her smile looks troubled, the smile of someone who’s just now realizing they might be in danger and they’re not sure how to make themselves safe again.
It feels like he’s been pried open, like the air is blowing across his pulpy, beating heart, and like the slightest touch on that exposed organ will kill him.
He’s still being ripped apart from the inside by the same thorns, but it’s as if they’ve finally found a place to take root. A place to anchor themselves.
