Chapter 5
BIRDIE
I stared at him. His smile widened, revealing the edges of his straight, white teeth, and then his eyes dropped down to the pomegranate still clutched in my hand.
“I thought you might,” he said. “May I?”
He was reaching for the pomegranate. I was incapable of movement or even independent thought, and he moved slowly to take the fruit from me since I wasn’t offering it. He wandered across the space to my workbench as I stared down at my empty hand.
Bell.
The pomegranates had come from Bell.
I didn’t understand.
It made no sense—and not in a what could have motivated him way but in a this authentically has no logic to it way.
He’d given no sign it was him all semester, and it wasn’t as if we’d had a particularly close bond as student and teacher, and who would notice me of all people? Who would give gifts to me?
Maybe he felt bad. That had to have been it.
He saw me struggling with even the most basic social interactions, and he’d wanted to encourage me because he was friendly and nice like that. A small gift to hearten me when I was obviously failing at what should have been an easy job.
The simplicity of it was comforting, but I couldn’t feel relieved, not when he was still here, using one of my knives to cut the top off the fruit and score its flesh for easy tearing.
Distantly, I noted that he cleaned the blade with a rag from the bench, and I was grateful for it, that there wouldn’t be sticky juice on my knife after he left.
His stride was as easy as his smile, and he held the fruit out as he approached.
“I wouldn’t want to be the reason you’re not able to eat it today,” he said.
I needed to speak. I had to speak. I could not be rendered speechless by the strong hand holding the pomegranate, by a semester’s worth of juicy, red seeds.
But I had no way to process this, process the fond cluck he made when I didn’t take the fruit, process the way he stopped in front of me with the fruit between us. Like an offering. A gift.
“It’s okay, Birdie.” His voice was soothing now, like I was the young one and he the elder, like I was the kitten that had darted under my desk when it was supposed to be our live drawing subject in February and was only coaxed out at last by Bell’s deep voice and gentle hands.
It had slept in his hoodie the rest of the class.
And now those gentle hands were pressing into the pomegranate, thumbs digging into the middle, tendons flexing, fingers unsettlingly strong, easily parting the fruit but not truly separating it. Just opening it up so that he could fish a few seeds from the inside.
“I’ll help you,” he told me, and then those fingers were at my mouth.
I stared at him, my heart flinging itself against my ribs, my breathing shallow, feeling like I was in one of those unchaste dreams I was so ashamed of.
“Open,” he said, and for the first time, I heard something beyond friendliness in his voice, something arrogant and chilling, and maybe it was the surprise that made me obey and part my lips.
Or maybe it was because I wanted to.
He pushed the seeds past my lips and teeth and onto my tongue. The pad of his first finger dragged along the inside of my lower lip as he slowly pulled his finger free, and the ball of his throat lifted and then dropped.
“Chew,” he said, and I did. The juice burst tart and bright on my tongue. His eyes were everywhere: my lips, my jaw, my throat. “Swallow,” he said, and I swallowed.
He swallowed too, watching me.
Looking back, I can’t be upset with myself about this.
Even knowing what came next, what else could I have done?
Spat the seeds onto the floor? Held them in my mouth like a stubborn dog?
But it was a threshold, opening and swallowing for him, and I crossed it with some willingness, and he noticed. Oh, he noticed.
Three more seeds on his fingertips. “Do you know why I left you the fruit?” he asked in a low voice.
I shook my head.
“I liked watching you eat it. Open.”
I opened, accepted the seeds. He left his fingertips in my mouth so when I pressed my lips together, his fingers were briefly enclosed.
His dark gold eyelashes fluttered.
I chewed and swallowed after he pulled his hand away.
“I didn’t know you were watching me. How could you be watching me?
” Two whispered questions in one sentence, because I had no idea how he’d been able to see me eat them inside an empty classroom.
And also how could he want to observe me?
I had nothing to map this onto—no experience, no idea of a world where someone like Ryan Bell would want to watch me eat fruit.
“It wasn’t hard,” he informed me, “because you’re too naive to imagine all the ways someone could watch you. You’d look around once or twice and get to eating.” His breath caught on the last word, like he was savoring a deeply erotic memory.
I supposed he was right that I hadn’t considered the ways someone could hide, shift the old movable panels between the art classrooms or angle themselves outside the windows in exactly the right way. “I just…I don’t think I understand. Why?”
His expression grew pitying. “Sweet Birdie,” he murmured. More seeds were pressed to my lips, and he didn’t have to instruct me this time. I opened and ate as obediently and automatically as if I were at the front of the communion line.
What was I doing?
I caught his wrist as he dipped his hand in the broken pomegranate for more seeds.
If I’d been thinking clearly, I might have guessed that he’d be irritated, angry with me for stopping him.
But instead, he seemed delighted. A boyish grin broke across his face and a dancing light moved inside his pale eyes.
I couldn’t handle that grin and dropped my gaze down to where my hand circled his wrist—or did its best to.
His skin was so warm, and his wrist was strong in my hand, and the hair on his arms was slightly thicker than I’d first thought.
I realized that Bell was the first new person I’d touched in years. Kaitlyn and I sat alone at Mass, so I didn’t even shake hands with anyone other than her during the sign of peace. And for touch in general, there was the occasional hug from Kaitlyn, the even rarer hug from Busy, and that was it.
His wrist was so warm.
“This is the first time you’ve touched me, you know,” he said, and when I dared a glance up at him, he was smiling indulgently down at me.
“What’s happening?” I asked in a whisper. “Why are you doing this? Feeding me?”
Even the reply felt indulgent, like he was humoring my questions out of affection. “Because I want to.”
“But why?”
“Because I’ve been thinking about putting my fingers in your mouth since the first time I saw you.”
It was such a raw admission. My heart was speeding, my hand shaking where I had it wrapped around his wrist, and I’d never—I’d never thought about what he’d just said.
It had never occurred to me that was something a person would want to do, but the idea of it, the memory of Bell’s throat working as his fingertips slid against my tongue—
My skin suddenly felt translucent, as if Bell would be able to see that I was glowing like a furnace inside.
Since the first time I saw you. For months then? He’d been thinking this for months?
I closed my eyes and shook my head.
He sounded amused when he spoke. “You don’t believe me?”
It wasn’t a matter of belief at all. There was simply not a world where he noticed me, thought about me, wanted to touch me. He was like a statue brought to life, and I was a woman who might as well be a statue.
I shook my head again. Of course, I didn’t believe him, but saying that was futile. He already knew, surely. I opened my eyes but kept my gaze on the floor as I let go of his wrist.
“Why are you afraid to look at me?” he asked.
I remember wishing I had more time to think of a lie—or to protest that I wasn’t afraid, which would have also been a lie—but I’m a slow thinker.
I’m not stupid, or at least I like to think I’m not stupid, but my thoughts unfurl like flowers and creep like roots.
Cautious and organic. When you act out your thoughts with a chisel and a rubber mallet, you have to take your time thinking them because you have to be right.
I could only tell him the truth. “You’re too much,” I answered quietly, my eyes still cast down. His tennis shoes on the 150-year-old planks of the coach house were surreal. “Looking at you is too much.”
“I’m too much,” he echoed disbelievingly, like I had some nerve. “I’m too much?”
I looked up at him, startled.
“Birdie, I can’t get you out of my fucking head.
” He looked feverish as he spoke, the words practically burning the air as they left his mouth.
“I’m haunted by your throat, your eyes, your hands.
The only thing I want to do is watch you work.
The only thing I want to smell is sawdust and your shampoo.
” He laughed at whatever he saw in my face then.
“Yes, I know the smell of your shampoo,” he said, the laughter curving the edges of his words.
But I heard something else too—that chilling intensity from earlier.
He stepped so close that our shoes bumped. My back was flat against the blackboard now, and he leaned in to press his nose into my hair.
“Apples,” he murmured, satisfied. “God, little bird. What you do to me.” His nose moved down, finding my jaw and then my neck.
I could feel his inhale, a shift of air.
“I’m bedeviled by you,” he whispered. And then something utterly shocking happened: he pressed his lips against my neck.
I jolted—the unfamiliar sensation had sizzled through every nerve ending I possessed—and the pomegranate fell to the floor with a wet thud. His now-free hand was on my neck, and then it was in my hair, and then it was cupping my head, holding me in place while his open mouth moved on my neck.