A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel, #1)

by Sierra Simone

Proserpina was last because Proserpina was always last. Not because she was disliked or because she was timid, but because she was dreaming on her feet while everyone else was walking.

At Thornchapel, time could slip by unmarked and you could walk places no one had walked in years. Maybe centuries.

Thornchapel. And he had the strangest feeling that as he thought the name of this place, the place thought his own name back to him…

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.

He dreamed and he burned. 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.

Convivificat.

It quickens.

It’s always seemed like a place apart to me, a place alive, like a temple in a myth or a castle in a fairy tale. It just is—it just exists outside any human intervention, a rambling stone sentinel surrounded by trees at the front and sumptuous gardens at the back.

“You’re very easy to talk to, you know.” It’s something I’ve heard all my life, and I’m used to it, even if it sometimes makes me feel a little lonely. The person that everyone talks to but who never gets that comfort in return.

But I’m so susceptible to this kind of touch; I bloom like a rose when I’m handled like a weed,

Maybe it’s because it’s Thornchapel and I love Thornchapel, and when I think about it, the whole house is like this. 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.

I stayed far away from the library, even though it called to me. Even though I felt its presence in the house like a flickering lamp—beckoning me, brightening the shadows, promising secrets.

None of that is really appropriate in this moment, and maybe it’ll never be appropriate. Maybe I’m just being an inveterate sex monster.

It’s like I’ve put down roots without even wanting to,

the kind of roots that happen privately between you and a certain place. 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, and you’ve pledged yourself to it before you’ve even realized what’s happening.

Thornchapel knows my name and the crooked corners of my heart, and it wants me to make promises that I’m going to keep.”

Becket the priest reads for thirty more minutes in bed, a book of Celtic mythology he ordered online last week.

When he goes to sleep, the zeal comes for him in his dreams. It shows him dying kings, dying gods, rain pattering on the summer-spread leaves of Thornchapel’s forest. And Proserpina in the middle of it all, haloed and radiant. Waiting.

Do I just want to have sex with everybody? Is that it? Auden and Saint? Hell, maybe even Delphine and Rebecca and Becket? After years of saying no, I want to say yes to five different people I barely know? What the fuck is wrong with me?

Auden finally speaks, his voice low and tight and furious still. “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.”

“It’s not about selling things. It’s about building a presentation of yourself that you can use for anything. For potential employers or potential lovers or potential friends. It’s a place where you can compile the most salient expressions of yourself—expressions that you choose, you curate—and create a living biography. A testament to your life and the space you deserve to occupy.”

in a moment of shame and epiphany, I realize that if Delphine with her money and whiteness and traditionally feminine beauty has been hurt, then how many others without those things have been hurt even worse?

inside—inside I am seething and roiling with a hunger so acute I think it might kill me.

I wonder if he’s thinking of that summer, of that wedding kiss the three of us shared. Of a kiss that was so much more than just a kiss. It was an omen. An anointing.

“This would be hotter if Becky had his collar on,”

I know that no matter his earlier doubts, he’s caught up in it now; he’s as ensnared as the rest of us at the sight of our priest gently making love to Saint Sebastian’s mouth.

And I can’t tell who can see what, but I do know that it’s a forcefully erotic idea. That if they wanted, my friends could see my cunt. Maybe they could pet it, maybe they could lean down and kiss it to make it feel better.

“My hand hurts, Auden. Maybe you could do the last five?”

I notice that Auden is completely frozen underneath me, not moving at all—except for the hand that’s come to rest on my bottom, that seems to be reflexively soothing the place he just hurt. I also notice a hot, wet feeling against my hip. Auden came. He came from spanking 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.”

taking the time to prove to someone that they’re worthwhile and enough…isn’t that love? Isn’t that what love is for?”

It stirs, was what that strange note said. It quickens. Or as Auden translated it—it revives. It reawakens. As if from sleep, as if from death.

It feels probing, possessive, like he can’t stop himself from doing it—and oh, that shouldn’t be so sexy, but it is. Like I’m watching his good intentions crumble to dust and they’re crumbling because of me.

as always, my gaze goes first to Auden, who’s staring at Saint’s thumb on my shoulder like he wants to bite it off.

Here he is, the pretty lordling of a pretty castle, with all his family and history spread out around him, and he can’t be bothered to take any part in it, can’t be bothered to step up. While I’m here chasing ghosts and maybes for even the tiniest whisper of my own legacy.

And then when Auden said six of us. Not five. Not them minus Saint but them plus Saint… He didn’t even know what he felt then, except that it was almost like panic but sweeter. Honeyed like bourbon and the lies he tells himself at night with his hand on his cock and his mind full of Auden.

Except there are these times…these strange, ephemeral times when he almost feels…something. He doesn’t know what to call it, how to think of it, and he doesn’t even know if he likes it, because whenever that something brushes up against his mind, it’s so dizzying and potent that he feels like he could lose himself in it without a second thought.

He can’t stop this ache, this need, for two people who are not the one person he is supposed to ache for, and it’s killing him. He has to burn it out of himself somehow, dig it out if it won’t be burned, and soon.

And then he kneels in front of Auden, his knees between Auden’s light brown brogues and his hands sliding up the insides of Auden’s thighs.

Saint Sebastian gives Auden one last look—a look Auden can’t even begin to interpret, a look he’s not even sure if he wants to interpret—and then lowers his warm mouth to Auden’s still-thick shaft and gives it one long, lingering pass with his tongue.

What’s so different about it than playing spin the bottle?”

“We’re not all such prudes as all that, are we? It’s just sex.”

“Kinky, ritualistic, muddy sex,”

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

“This is different than Mass,”

“Why?”

“You mean aside from the ritu...

“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.”

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.”

“maybe we do this and we’re better for it. It won’t be a door, but a link. A bond. A knot tying us together.”