SUPPLICANT

A sizzling novella, previously featured in the limited-time Naughty Brits anthology

Sneak peek!

by Sierra Simone

Prologue

Four Years Ago

He’s late.

(James Church Cason is never late.)

He’s stuck in traffic.  He’s lost.  Something happened.

(Nothing keeps Church from what he wants.  Ever.)

He loves me.  He wouldn’t do this to me.

(But do I know that?  Beyond a shadow of a doubt?  Do I really know him well enough to say?)

He’s not coming.

And on that point, I’m forced to finally face the truth.

He’s not coming.

“Would you like to try him again?” the woman next to me asks kindly, nodding down at the phone in my hand.  She’s a stranger—someone employed by the church to facilitate wedding ceremonies—and her warmth and concern are blistering.  I’m blistered with it.  My face is hot, my eyes are seared with unshed tears, my voice is burnt and dry when I speak. 

“No, thank you,” I rasp.  “I think—I think it won’t do much good.  I’m so sorry, but do you have any water?”

I hate the tenderness in her eyes when she nods, because it brings me that much closer to breaking, and I can’t break.  I won’t.  Not yet and not here.  I look over at my little brother, twelve and fidgeting in his tuxedo, his blue eyes wide with worry.  I offer him a wobbly smile.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say, reaching out to squeeze his hand.  “At least no boring ceremony to sit through, hey?”

He looks like he’s about to cry, and that also brings me closer to the brink, so I look away.  Through the cracked door that separates the narthex from the nave.

There’s only a smattering of people inside—fifteen, maybe, in a church that could seat five hundred.  They’re all here for me—fellow volunteers at the museum and friends from college.  No family other than Jax, because our mother died a few years back and our father is a piece of shit who’d rather get stoned than do anything else.

No one is here for Church.  No one.  There’s no sight of his parents, his brother, the niece who was supposed to be the flower girl, the sister who was supposed to do a reading.  No friends.  No other sharply dressed professors or sun-drenched archaeologist types.

Stupid, Charley.  You’ve been stupid.

The vicar clears his throat and begins making his way down the aisle to me, to the great interest of the worried guests, and when he slips in through the door, he takes my hand.

“My dear,” he starts, and he doesn’t have to finish.  He’s been waiting up by the altar for almost an hour.  I know what he’s going to say.

“Yes,” I say.  “I should—I need to go.”

“Of course,” he says, just as kindly as the event planner had.  “I’ll tell the guests.  Something vague, naturally.”

Well, he could hardly be specific, could he?  Since even I don’t know why my wedding is missing its groom.

“Thank you,” I say.  My eyes are burning something fierce, and I know I only have minutes before I disintegrate.  “Is there a side door I can—”

The event planner returns with a cup of water and an expression of supreme discomfort.  “Ms. Tenpenny,” she starts, using the water as an excuse not to meet my gaze, “there is a driver out front—your fiancé’s driver.” 

There’s a collective wince as we all think the same thing.  Is someone still your fiancé after they leave you at the altar?

“Er, Mr. Cason’s driver, I mean,” she hurriedly revises.  “He says Mr. Cason sent him to give you a ride to your home.”

Church sent his driver.

On our wedding day.

To take me back to my place.

“Oh, did he?” I say.  Softly. 

A blunt, iron ball of anger sinks through all the hurt, through all the embarrassment and vulnerability, sinks right into the pit of my stomach.  My anger will anchor me to the earth, it will keep me from floating away, and so I hold on to it with eager hands.  Because Church doesn’t get to have this.  He doesn’t get to have helping me, he doesn’t get to have a gesture, no matter how pitifully small it is.  He doesn’t get to feel good about a single damn part of today, he doesn’t get the satisfaction of looking back on the day he left a bride alone to be humiliated and heartbroken and think but at least I took care of her.

No.

He doesn’t get that.  Especially when it’s coupled with waving his family’s obscene wealth in my face at the same time.

I take a drink of the water the planner brought and then hand it back to her.  I take Jax’s hand in mine and meet the vicar’s concerned stare.  “So is there a side door?”

***

It turns out that I used the last of my pride on turning down the driver.  I gathered my things into a holdall and left the church without bothering to change, which meant shoving my fluffy white skirt and petticoats through the narrow turnstiles at the Tube station, and having my little brother hold the train of my gown on the escalator so it wouldn’t catch at the bottom.  And then we rode the Tube home in silence, me trying not to cry and Jax practically vibrating with confused adolescent worry. 

He was going to walk me down the aisle. 

Now he’s helping me jam my wedding dress in and out of Tube-car doors and turnstiles. 

Of course he’s worried.

What comes next?  I have no idea.  All my plans for the last few months started and ended with Church, with the dark-haired god in suits so crisp they made the rest of the world seem soft. Compared to those sapphire eyes and that hungry mouth, nothing else seemed to matter: not my terrible, barely there dad, not my little brother growing increasingly lost and uninterested in school, not the bills piling up on our kitchen table.  With Church, I’d been able to pretend that everything would be okay, because how wouldn’t it be okay in the arms of a man like him?

Jesus.  What a fool I’ve been.

Not for the first time, I wish I had friends.  Real friends, not just a handful of people who know my name and vaguely wish me well. 

I won’t think of how wild those blue eyes would look when they lit on me, as if the mere sight of me turned him into an animal.  My angry god, I’d whisper in his ear, leaning in close so he could feel my lips brush against his skin.  My temple.  My Church.  And then I’d be seized and dragged to the nearest appropriate place for fucking.  Sometimes even not that appropriate, because he could never wait.

You are my church, he’d growl in response as he pinned me against the first convenient surface and took me.  His voice would be smoky and carnal. You are all I see.  All I pray.

Unholy obsession.  Hard sex.  When he proposed, it felt like a fairy tale.

How could I have been so stupid?  Men like him don’t marry the girls they fuck in corners.

But then why did he buy me a ring?  A dress?  Why did he call me Charlotte Cason, as if I were already his wife?

The flat’s door is hanging open when we reach it, and I’m jerked out of my thoughts so fast I nearly lose my breath.  Dust swirls in the weak light coming in through the kitchen window, and from here I can detect the stale beer-and-cigarettes smell that suffuses our home.  Our life.  Our nasty, tattered life.

How did I ever think I could be Mrs. Cason?

“Charley?” Jax asks uncertainly.

Jax.  You have to focus for your brother.

“Wait here, buddy,” I tell him, handing him my phone.  “Call 999 if I’m not back out in just a minute, okay?”

He nods, scared, and it’s for his sake, all for him, that I muster up a wobbly smile and then push through the opened door, my wedding dress brushing against the old, stained carpet as I do.

“Dad?” I call out, expecting to see him asleep on the sofa or perhaps stumbling out of the back bedroom, stoned and bleary.

There’s only silence.

I check the kitchen and the bathroom, then mine and Jax’s room, and then his room.  There’s no one here.  “It’s okay, kiddo,” I call out, and then turn back to look at Dad’s room again, noticing for the first time what’s missing.

His clothes.  His phone charger.

The keys to the only car we have.

Dread claws its way up to my spine—dread just as terrible and carnivorous as standing in a church waiting for a groom who will never come—and I go back into my room and lift up my mattress. 

My meager savings—scraped together from working at a cafe near my school and stuffed into a worn envelope—are gone.  I don’t need to look at my banking app to know that my account—shared with my dad—is cleaned out too.  The shared account was the very reason I’d needed to stuff money under the bed, in case there came a month when we needed extra to cover rent or food because Dad had spent everything else on booze or bets or worse.  It happened regularly enough that I never could build up a healthy reserve, but still, I’d managed to put enough under the mattress to supplement my tuition fees for next semester.

And now there won’t be enough.  Not for school, and maybe not for rent either, and oh God.  I haven’t just lost Church today, I think maybe . . .

Maybe I’ve lost everything. 

Not just a future with him, but a future at all.

What am I going to do?

Focus.  Focus for Jax.

“Is Dad gone?” Jax asks, his voice too solemn for such a sweet boy.  “He…left?”

It’s too much.  I nod, my chin quavering and my throat aching, and then I sink onto my bed.  The white skirts of my wedding dress rustle and fluff around me. 

“Do you want a hug?” Jax asks, looking like he needs it more than me.

Openly crying now, I open my arms and draw my little brother into the world’s longest, teariest hug, no longer able to stop the sobs from tearing through my body.

Tomorrow. 

Tomorrow, I will be brave.  Tomorrow, I will focus.

I’ll unenroll from UCL, I’ll quit volunteering at the British Museum because a resume for a career that needs a graduate degree to get started is now the least of my worries.

I’ll get a job, or two or three.  I’ll find us a cheaper flat and buy us good food and make sure Jax is on time to school every day.  I’ll be the sister and guardian Jax deserves.

And I will never, ever forgive Church Cason.

But all of that is tomorrow, and right now it’s today, and so I weep.  I clutch my brother close and I let every single moment of agony rip through my chest and out of my throat.  I give in to every horrible, self-hating thought I have, I curse myself for being stupid and poor and plain, and I curse Church for being perfect and cruel and wealthy enough to send a driver when he couldn’t be bothered to show up himself.  I cry until I’m lightheaded and swollen-eyed and exhausted.  I cry a thousand tears for every second I stood alone waiting for Church and for every pound note my asshole father stole from me and for every class I won’t get to take.

Tomorrow, I’ll be furious.  Tomorrow, I’ll become the icy warrior I’ll need to survive.

But today, when I cry, I cry for a broken heart. 

And for a man with dark, dark blue eyes and a voice like smoke and sin.

Coming March 2021

more books by sierra simone that you may enjoy in the meantime!