Page 75 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
Rebecca feels like the world has suddenly rolled over on its side. “You what?” she whispers, completely shocked. “You what?”
Delphine just shrugs unhappily. “I couldn’t do it, Rebecca. I was marrying him for all the wrong reasons. Because he’s a good man and one of my best friends and I love him in the way that I’ve always loved him. Because it felt like the thing I should do, even if it wasn’t what I really wanted to do.”
Rebecca can’t stop her thoughts from circling, racing each other faster and faster. Delphine and Auden were supposed to be a constant, a known variable. A stable, unchanging factor in their lives.
“What changed?” Rebecca asks. “What made you realize all this?”
Even in the dusky light, Delphine’s blush is apparent. “Well, if you must know, it was watching you spank Proserpina.”
The place between Re
becca’s legs gives a single, tight throb, and she forces herself to ignore it. “Oh?”
“Yes,” Delphine admits, her face still bright red. “I watched it and felt like—oh, I don’t know how to say it. Like I was waking up. Or like something in maths finally made sense or like I’d finally figured out how to ride a bike. It was something that had always been there, been true, and I just hadn’t put it together yet. I hadn’t seen it.”
“And what hadn’t you seen before that night?” Rebecca asks in a low voice, almost not sure if she wants to know the answer. Not sure if the answer will change something that’s best left unchanged.
“I saw Poe and I realized I wanted to be her,” Delphine says simply.
Rebecca realizes she already knows this.
She’s known this for three years.
But she doesn’t let herself think about that week three years ago right now. She doesn’t ever let herself think about it.
Delphine goes on. “I wanted to have that same expression on my face—the ecstasy, but also the pain and the trust. Ever since it happened everyone has been so good to me, so kind, and sometimes I feel smothered by it. But at the same time, if I’m brave, if I try to be strong, then I still want people to be kind and good to me after. I want to be rewarded and petted, and what I saw that night with Poe was that I can have both. I can be tested, I can be brave, and then afterwards, I’ll still get to be coddled. It seems like the best of both worlds.”
“People shouldn’t want to be consensually hurt so they can feel brave,” Rebecca says.
“Well, Poe told me that there’s as many reasons for doing kinky things as there are people who do them, so there.” Delphine sticks a tongue out at her, and it’s so ridiculous, so adorable, so sweet with her face still stained and shiny with tears and her nose red from the cold, that Rebecca laughs.
She laughs so she doesn’t kiss her.
Then Delphine’s face changes, and she looks down at her hands in her lap. Rebecca has a sudden foreboding that Delphine’s about to ask the obvious question.
Will you hurt me like you did Proserpina? she’ll ask, and what could Rebecca possibly say but yes? For the sake of kink, of course, not because she likes Delphine, not because the idea of Delphine cuffed to her bed makes her want to growl with hunger.
But that’s not what Delphine asks this time. Instead, she asks, “Rebecca, why have we never gotten along?” And then she turns those big, honey-brown eyes up to Rebecca, and Rebecca suddenly thanks Jesus in heaven that Delphine is not actually her sub, because Rebecca would be in so much trouble. That fuck-me mouth, those huge, liquid eyes.
They wouldn’t leave Rebecca’s bed for days.
“I think we’re just incompatible,” Rebecca says. It’s another constant of theirs, another known variable, and so she’s never given it a lot of thought. They simply don’t get along and they never have, and that’s that. It doesn’t bear further examination.
“Incompatible because you’re a genius and I’m just a blond on Instagram?” Delphine doesn’t sound accusatory or defensive, only curious, and something about that makes Rebecca’s chest ache. Like Delphine is so used to being told she’s silly or pointless that she’s accepted it herself.
“You’re not just a blond on Instagram,” Rebecca says. “And my IQ is only part of me, not all of me. No, I only meant that you’re bossy and I’m bossy, and we both like having our own way too much.”
“You could spank it out of me,” Delphine offers with a laugh, standing up.
“Maybe I will,” Rebecca says, and Delphine laughs again, but Rebecca doesn’t. She means it.
She wants it.
But she still doesn’t like Delphine, she’s certain of that—or mostly certain, at least. This incessant craving for her is just an itch, that’s all.
Just one of those itches that you have for three years, and which burrows its way into every thought, feeling, and hunger you have.
Rebecca guides Delphine out of the maze, and Delphine is grateful, because she thinks she only found the center on her own through sheer luck and she probably wouldn’t have found her way back out again. She’s only been through the maze a few times in her life, and only ever with someone else who knew where they were going, so it’s nice to have Rebecca leading the way.
