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He finally turns to face us. His hands are at his sides, and his eyes are downcast, their dark lashes revealing only a small, hooded glimpse of tormented hazel. But it’s not the posture of someone defeated or reluctant; it’s more like the stillness of a prince waiting for the weight of his father’s crown on his head. It’s the restraint of youthful power and deep anguish—a deceptive calm held only through his strength of will while he decides what he’ll do. And we’re all in captivity to it, all of us enthralled and possessed as a muscle ticks in his cheek and his lips press together in
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“Sometimes I wish you were engaged to him like Ralph wanted,” Saint confesses in a hoarse whisper. “And that he were here right now. Seeing us like this.”
“He’d punish us both,” I say, and it comes out like I’m fantasizing because I am fantasizing; I am imagining being thrown over his lap again, being scolded, being fucked into dreamy submission by Auden Guest for the crime of kissing his enemy.
“Are you truly afraid of me?”
“Afraid that I’m going to hurt you?”
“What else?”
“I’m afraid I’ll like it.”
“I’m afraid of the same things you are, Proserpina.”
“I want to hurt you so much that I dream about it sometimes.”
“I’m afraid of you letting me hurt you,”
“Because then I’ll want to do it for the rest of my life.”
“You deserve someone who already knows who they are.”
“I know who you are, Auden Guest,”
“I can know for the bo...
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obsession can often feel like love, especially when pain is involved. Or power.”
But the zeal can’t be denied either, and the zeal is demanding mud under his fingernails and the heat of a fire against his face. The zeal is demanding thorns and blood and worship. Primal, ancient worship.
And you better believe that if I fuck you, it’s going to mean something.”
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.
It’s home and it’s not. It’s old and it’s young, and it’s far and it’s near, and it’s in my body and also dancing along my skin, dancing away too fast for me to grab at it. It’s loving and it’s stern. It’s generous and it’s cruel. It’s every feeling I ever associated with God, but instead of a church of stone and glass, it’s here in the woods, suffusing every particle of air and darkness and damp with burning, bright life.
“I promise to keep the fires burning,”
“I promise to keep the waters clean,”
“I promise to bring the lambs through birth safely and to bring the new shoots from the earth,”
“I promise to bless all of you and be your blessing in turn.”
“How can I serve this goddess right now?”
“I think you mean ‘saint,’”
“I don’t serve saints. And anyway, you’re a goddess.”
“Here’s what I want, Bride of Thornchapel. I want to touch your cunt. I want to slide my hand down your panties and then push my fingers into you. I want to see if you’re wet. I want to know if you get wetter when I’m inside you.”
“I want to touch you as if you were mine.”
“You like them watching? You like them seeing how much you need your cunt played with?”
I have that feeling again, like I’m surrounded by fluttering veils, like God and magic and history are seeping out from underneath those veils and seeping into me, and just by being here, I’m being made holy and anointed. I remember the feeling of cupping a blessing in my palm, but now it’s as if I’m cupping a blessing inside my entire body, and it’s time for me to spill it out, and if I don’t spill it out, I’ll burst with it, I’ll simply burst.
At that moment, there’s no question that I’m a saint, that I’m a goddess, that something in me has awakened, and the rain answers my divinity in kind, abruptly roaring into a windy, fierce downpour as I scream my pleasure up into the night.
