Page 67 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
g, and meanwhile my face is flaming so hot under the mask that I think it might catch on fire despite the antioxidant-laden slime. “Delphine . . .”
“Did I ever tell you how Auden and I started dating?” she asks softly, before I can say anything else. Before I can apologize for making her fiancé come from spanking my bare ass. Or apologize for wanting her fiancé so badly that it haunts every dream I have.
“No.”
“I was raped when I was at Cambridge,” she says matter-of-factly. “My second year.”
“Oh my God. Delphine. God, I’m so fucking sorry.”
She squeezes my hand again, not in reassurance or acceptance, but like she just wants to feel close, like she wants to hold on to someone while she talks. “They’d dragged me out of Audra Bishop’s summer party, and only one of them managed to—managed to do it before they got caught—but they kept hitting me to stop me from screaming, and I—”
She breaks off and takes a breath. I tighten my fingers through hers, and she tucks our clasped hands to her belly. “Auden was at the party, and he noticed I was missing. He came out and found them in the garden, and he yanked them off me. He fought them all, you know, so viciously. Beat two or three of them to fuck and back, and then sent the rest running.”
“Jesus.”
“He saved my life.” She sighs. “Of all the things I don’t know sometimes, I do know that.”
“He saved your life,” I repeat, feeling the weight of that. The undeniable fate of it. How could there be anything but a happy ending for them when that was their beginning? “So then you two started dating?”
I can feel her shake her head next to me. “It took a while. I couldn’t do anything at first. Most of the boys from that night were arrested—and they’d all been sent down of course, all except one who the police couldn’t prove was there. Just this one boy, and we didn’t even go to the same college, but the idea that I might run into him, that I might see him—it was paralyzing. I couldn’t even walk to class alone. I couldn’t study in the library by myself. I ordered food in so I wouldn’t have to leave my room after nighttime fell. And then the trial began and it was so fucking terrible . . .”
Another breath.
“Auden gave me anything I needed, then, you know? He walked me to class, he studied with me. He went to all the legal bits he could. He’d sleep on the floor of my room when I was terrified someone might break in, and he drove me home whenever I needed to just be away. I wouldn’t have finished if it weren’t for him. Well, and Rebecca, but that’s a different story. Anyway, when we graduated, it felt natural that we should keep it up. And then when he proposed a year later, that felt natural too.”
“Of course it did,” I say. “Oh Delphine. I can’t even imagine. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” she says quietly. “Sometimes I forget, you know? Sometimes I’m still just Delphine Dansey, and I’m the same girl who likes silly television and lipstick and lots of champagne. And then other times, it feels like it’s touched everything in my life. Left smudges everywhere. Smudges and dirt.”
“Both can be true.”
“That’s what my therapist says too,” Delphine responds. “She likes the word seasons a lot. You know, ‘there’s a season for this, there’s a season for that,’ that kind of thing. A season for smudges and a season for normal. A season for same and a season for different. And I wonder . . .”
“Wonder what?”
The mask peels off my face and I open my eyes to see Delphine propped on an elbow, looking down at me. “I think I’m about to start a different season now,” she says. And then she drops a light kiss onto my lips. Nothing lingering, nothing deep.
Just a soft, face-masky brush of her mouth over mine.
“I think you’re about to start a new season too, Proserpina Markham.”
“I’m not starting anything—”
She puts a finger over my lips, and then smiles. “Tomorrow night. You’ll see.”
I blink up at her. “I still think you should be the bride,” I say against her fingertip.
Her smile grows sad. “I don’t think I’m ready yet.”
“We are still talking about the ceremony, right? Not real life?”
She lifts her finger and slides off my bed. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? It’s all real life.”
And then she tosses our face masks into the trash, and leaves.
Chapter 20
I’m as sleepless tonight as I am normally sleepy, which is how I end up climbing the steps to the south tower with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and my phone flashlight lighting the way.
