Chapter 14
BIRDIE
“A deal?” I stare up at him, barely able to think past the woozy déjà vu of it all. The purr of his voice. The smell of freshly sawn wood. Him in front of me, radiating an intensity that makes it hard to breathe.
His mouth dents in at the corners. He’s enjoying this.
“A deal, Birdie Cooper.”
A deal for what? He doesn’t want to date me.
He made that much clear. He laughed when I said it.
Once, that might have raked me open and dumped coals inside, but after the last seven years, it only registers as a dull ache.
Of course he doesn’t want to date me; of course that’s ridiculous.
No one has wanted to date me for thirty-six years.
Why would the first person be Ryan Bell, handsome and friendly and bright?
No. Think.
He’s been searching for me since that evening at Evelyn, and it was very clear what he wanted then: sex. Sex with me, although I don’t understand why. It can’t be hard for him to find prettier women, younger women, women who don’t smell like sawdust and the shampoo from the bottom shelf.
I used to be so good at praying in these kinds of moments, at offering up my fear or misery, but the place where I used to keep my prayers—nestled against my soul, warm and ready—is vacant now. Voided space. I want to pray, but there’s nothing there.
“Is it…that you want to have sex with me? Is that what the deal is for?”
Bell beams at me. “Correct, Ms. Cooper. That’s exactly what I want.”
“Then no. No, thank you.” I suck in a breath, having rushed the words past my lips. “You can go now.”
His smile falls into a perfect, magazine-worthy pout, his hair a gold spill of silk over his forehead when he looks down at the ground.
All of him like the living definition of crestfallen.
Then he looks back up through his lashes, a sly glint to his gaze.
“You haven’t even heard the terms of my deal yet. I promise it’s more than fair.”
I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Because you care about sex before marriage?”
I give a quiet huff. As if that matters when no one aside from Bell has ever even wanted to kiss me. “No one is going to marry me.”
He tosses his head to flick his hair to the side. I love his curls, but his hair is beautiful like this too. I can see how long it is, how close to white, like he’s been spending hours in the sun. “Then what can it be? You don’t think you’d like having sex?”
I do think I’d like sex. I dream about it often, and sometimes when I’m awake, my mind drifts back to my old studio, to Bell’s fingers in my mouth, to being shoved against the chalkboard.
I’ll feel that wet, wretched ache between my thighs, the symptom of a perverse and forlorn craving for something more than sex, something worse maybe.
I try not to let myself think about it too much.
“I don’t want to have sex with you,” I explain, the certain words made uncertain by the quaking in my voice.
“The last time you touched me, I lost my job, my life’s work, my only friend.
I was left with nothing, and I don’t blame you for going on to have everything, but you can’t blame me for trying to keep what little I’ve scraped together since then. ”
“And what have you scraped together, Birdie?” he asks with tender concern.
“The house at the bottom of the hill is a ruin, and the one at the top isn’t much better.
Your car is a rust-eaten quilt, and you’re wearing the same pair of tennis shoes you were seven years ago when I first met you.
You’re making dressers and kitchen chairs instead of saints.
You’re the statue now, darling. You’ve exchanged the living heart in your chest for one of wood. ”
I dip my chin to my chest so he can’t see the reflexive tremble there. I don’t want him to see that his words hurt because they shouldn’t hurt—they’re only the truth. They’re only objective facts…even the part about the wooden heart in my chest.
“I’m getting by,” I say. My voice is tight but it stays steady for four whole syllables, which I’m sadly proud of.
“But is your sister getting by?”
My head snaps up, and I stare at him, wordless. His expression is all innocent curiosity.
“That new place she’s in, the supportive housing.
Most people have SSI or Medicaid to help with the monthly fee, but she doesn’t, not yet at least. And you’ve only just started with the applications, the appointments, the documentation.
Hard to pull together a case when all you’ve got are scattered ER visits, hard to work toward any eligibility when she’s been dodging a diagnosis and medication for years. ”
My lips are parted but not to speak. I have no idea how he knows this. No idea why.
“But they’ve been kind to your sister at this place.
As long as she can pay, she can stay. And she needs to stay, doesn’t she?
She needs the staff there to keep her on track with her medicine, to drive her to therapy, to keep the booze and pills and bad men from walking through the front door of her apartment.
You’ve seen glimmers of the real her since she moved in, but you’re terrified that those glimmers will slide through your fingers and slip into the dark if she stops getting help…
if she gets kicked out for the simple reason that she can’t afford it.
And for the first time in your lives, she wants the help.
This could work, couldn’t it? It is working. All you have to do is pay for it.”
Something drips off my chin, and I realize I’m crying. God, how? How can the truth hurt so much to hear?
“So the real question is: How much are you making right now? With your furniture? With whatever job you’ve managed to find around this shithole?
Is it enough to cover her housing fee? What about the doctors and therapists until she can get Medicaid?
Which can’t happen until she’s on Social Security?
And then what? It’s two years after that for Medicare?
If everything goes right. If you can keep her there and get all the documentation and keep her compliant on her medication long enough to prove that she still won’t be able to hold down a job even with treatment. ”
“Stop,” I whisper. “Stop it.”
He catches my chin and makes me look up at him. He is so exquisite that it hurts. His thick, straight brows, his carved jaw. That finely wrought mouth. Those eyes, the color of sea ice against the dark. “Birdie, I can help you.”
“Help me?” I’m trying to twist my head out of his grip, and he doesn’t let me.
“Well,” he amends, his fingers digging into my jaw, “I’m willing to make a trade.”
I stop struggling. I stare at him, breathing hard.
The horror, when it comes, doesn’t come because of the horrible thing he’s proposing.
It comes because I already know I can’t say no.
The horror is turned back on me like a knife because I already knew he had a badness inside him, but it turns out that I have a badness too.
A weakness. A despair, even though despair is a sin, because my ability to hope has withered like Jonah’s gourd.
It’s bled out from between my ribs, blood and water, and now there’s nothing left.
I’ve been ready for my wrappings and my tomb for so long.
I have no hope that things will get better—or even stay the same. Things always get worse, always, always, but they can’t this time because this has to work for Busy. It simply has to, so I’m trapped. I know it. He knows it.
He smiles again. “Have you ever heard the term free use?”
I shake my head slowly. I’m still crying.
“You’d be at my disposal,” he says. “Whenever I need relief.” When I don’t respond, he clarifies in an affectionate tone. “Fucking, Birdie. Your hand, your mouth, your cunt, whatever I want. Whenever I want.”
I don’t know what I feel at that. I should feel shocked, but I’m already stunned by him knowing so much about Busy. I should feel repulsed, but instead, the frantic twist inside me is beyond desire or repulsion. Some elemental force that exists outside language or category—survival maybe.
Free use. It’s what it sounds like, I guess.
I close my eyes, my lashes wet on my cheeks, and ask, “And what am I supposed to get in exchange?”
“In exchange, your sister’s housing and medical bills will be taken care of. Completely. Forever. So long as she doesn’t end up staying in a private center in the Swiss Alps, you’ll never have to worry about affording housing or treatment for her again.”
That makes me open my eyes to look at him. His smile has faded, replaced with an expression so serious that it feels like an unspoken warning. He lets go of my jaw, but his stare is just as brutal as his fingers.
“I mean it, Birdie. She’ll be paid for and for the duration of her life. The trust is already funded and ready to make monthly distributions.”
“And you know how much everything costs?”
“When I apply myself, I’m a very good student. Remember?”
“That’s got to be… That’s so much money.
” There were rumors when he was at Evelyn that two of his brothers were millionaires, but one brother had used that money to start a nonprofit, and the other had given it all away upon joining a monastery, so I don’t think the money came from them. “I thought you were an architect?”
“I am.”
“Then how can you afford to even think about something like this?”
“I’m also very good at being an architect,” he says without a hint of arrogance—or humility. “And not bad at renovating commercial properties on the side. Money is not a concern, and the trust will be solvent for the next sixty years. More if it’s managed well.”
Managed. With the offhanded casualness of someone with enough money that he can outsource its care.