Chapter 19
BIRDIE
He’s not in the bedroom when I creep from the bathroom a long time later, flushed and scrubbed and smelling like the fancy leave-in conditioner I found waiting in the drawer he said was mine.
I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.
The painkillers have started to wear off, and my shoulder hurts, and my calf hurts, and even with the duct tape still wrapped around it, it thrums like an exposed nerve.
It reminds me that I’m slightly damaged goods at the moment, although maybe he won’t notice, surely he doesn’t need my calf for... the things he wants to do.
I want to go straight to bed, but it’s his bed, and what if he didn’t really mean what he said about wanting me to sleep? What if it’s a test of some kind, and I fail and then there’s no money for Busy, or he decides that he’ll tack an extra day on to the year to make up for today?
Hoping Bell’s offer was made in good faith, I’ve already dressed in my pajamas—another tank top and a pair of sweatpants Paxico bought at Walmart and then gruffly informed me didn’t fit him.
I don’t normally wear pajamas in summer—by May, I’m already sleeping naked in the farmhouse—but Bell’s converted warehouse is air-conditioned enough to lift goose bumps on my arms.
I can’t just get into Bell’s bed, though.
It feels like I’m doing something foolish, reaching for the eaves of a gingerbread house to snap off a bite.
I can’t help but worry that the minute I let myself relax, I’ll be punished for it.
Paxico would say that’s the Catholicism talking, but I think it might be the capitalism, because at least you can eventually pay your way out of Purgatory.
There’s no paying my way out of this life with a job at Buddy’s Gas Mart.
I creep downstairs on bare feet as quietly as I can, not really sure what I need to see to feel reassured that I can sleep but needing something regardless.
The stairs are open to one side—the side facing the living area and the courtyard—which is empty.
When I get to the foot of the stairs, I still don’t hear him.
I move slowly around the corner until I finally catch sight of him in his office.
Broad shoulders, bright hair. His back is to me as he sits with his feet propped on his desk, and I can just barely catch the iPad in his lap, the glimpse of a white tablet pencil as he lifts it between strokes.
I wonder what he’s drawing, if it’s for work or pleasure.
There was no other student in that class who was as rawly gifted at drawing, and drawing with anything: charcoal, ink, colored pencils, even sidewalk chalk for a fundraiser once.
He instinctively understood lines, proportions, depth, and he could see the tiny details that rendered something real—the irregularity of a feather on a wing, the sagging crater of a smallpox vaccination scar.
Any fine arts major would have committed a mortal sin to have a talent like that, and there he was, an architecture major instead, a semester away from forsaking the charcoal for CAD.
Before Bell perceives me staring at him like a ghost, I go back upstairs.
I take another handful of ibuprofen, plug in my phone, and lie down.
I texted Busy earlier to tell her I would try to visit on Monday, but I haven’t gotten a response yet.
That’s not unusual, and the staff over at the cluster housing do a thrice-daily wellness check when they deliver medications, so I know I’ll hear if anything is amiss.
I make sure the ringer is on—it always is, unless I’m at Mass—and then lift the corner of Bell’s duvet.
It feels expensive, and the sheets, when I touch them, feel expensive too, soft and cool and finely woven. The pillowcases are silk.
I keep to the very edge as I lie down on the bed and cover myself up.
It’s been made dark in here—some technology inside the window glass itself rather than curtains or blinds—and it’s a little chilly, and the bed is so soft.
I try to pray as my eyes close, but I don’t know what to pray for.
To avoid temptation? I’ve embraced it; I’m in its bed.
To have my trespasses forgiven? When I plan to trespass again every day for the next year?
No, I can’t think of a single prayer to pray. Even offering up my suffering for the sake of salvation of others feels wrong right now. A sacrifice that wouldn’t please God, smoke that would refuse to rise to Heaven and coil listlessly on the ground instead.
I fall asleep with nothing to say to God or his saints, my leg and shoulder throbbing, breathing in the faint incense-and-pepper scent of my new employer.
I wake like someone swimming to the surface of a pond, the world growing clearer and brighter by degrees, and I become aware of all the aches and throbs in my back and shoulder, of the pulsing in my calf. I become aware of Bell sitting on the edge of the bed next to me, stroking my ankle.
It’s morning, I think. The next day. There’s a tray on the table next to me, coffee and fruit and a thick slice of toast with butter and jam on top.
Steam is coming from the coffee cup, so the tray hasn’t been here long, which means Bell hasn’t either.
And even though he’s barefoot, he’s dressed for the day—black trousers and a black sweater vest with nothing underneath.
Heat rushes to my cheeks when I consider that he probably slept next to me and I had no idea. He was in this same room, feet away, getting dressed. What if he slept naked? What if I touched him while I was sleeping?
No, no, I don’t think I did. The edge of the sheet is twisted around my leg, and there’s no sign that I ever scooted closer to the middle, even in sleep.
The window glass has been lightened, either by Bell or by some automatic process. He sits in a square of golden sunlight, his head bent as he considers his fingers moving along my ankle.
I am hit—and it feels like a literal strike—with the sudden realization that Bell is an adult in his prime now.
No longer a young man about to graduate from college, a picture of Achilles in his youth, but fully a man.
His jaw is strong and hard, his cheeks are high and sharp; there are very, very fine creases along his smile lines and at the corners of his eyes.
His body, shown off by that sweater vest, is easily muscled—muscle his body seems to want to carry—with crisp hair on his arms and at the collar of his vest. All of him is harder than he was seven years ago, all the puppyish traces of early manhood gone and replaced with the strength and vigor of an experienced adult.
I’m struck even more when he lifts his chin to look me in the face and his expression is furious.
Oh God, this is exactly what I was afraid of yesterday.
He’s going to retract our deal or he’s going to make good on the worst parts of it, the parts where I might want to say no even if it means risking everything.
And I appreciate in a way I never really have before that he is dangerous.
I still remember how it felt to have my cheek to the chalkboard, how terrified I was that he wouldn’t stop, but this is beyond even that.
His hand could easily wrap around my ankle; both of his hands would have no trouble wrapping around my throat.
The muscles rippling in his shoulders and arms are powerful enough to hold me down.
I’m drowning in his shadow even while he’s sitting down.
He could kill me. Oh God. He could kill me.
“Birdie,” he says tightly, eyes a pale and dazzling blue in the morning light. “Do you know what plans I had for you today?”
I’m breathing fast, the terror like a living thing in my chest sucking all the oxygen away before I can make use of it, and I shake my head on the pillow.
“After a nice breakfast, I was going to take you to Mass, and then after Mass, I was going to bring you back here and slide into that tight cunt so I could get a taste of what I paid for. Do you know what we’re going to do instead?”
Still scared, I shake my head that no, I don’t know what we’re going to do instead.
“We,” he says in a calm voice, all the more frightening for how his eyes blaze, “are going to the emergency room.”
There’s a split second where it sounds almost like a threat, like he’ll send me there, but then he lifts his long artist’s fingers into the sunlight, and they glisten with bright red blood.
I raise up on to my elbows and see that the sheet I’d thought had been twisted around my leg is actually the cinched ankle of my sweatpants pushed up the knee.
A wet stain of blood is under my ankle with rings of dried brown and mostly dried maroon around it.
It’s been bleeding all night, I think. This must be why he’s so angry, these expensive sheets—
I sit up quickly, trying to swing my leg out of the bed and then gasping as pain sloshes up my leg and into my belly like acid.
I’m apologizing through the pain, pleading, terrified, oh God, I don’t want him to hurt me, sorry sorry sorry.
“The duct tape must have come loose in the shower. My leg hasn’t started to heal yet.
I couldn’t get my leg all the way dry before I bandaged it on Friday—”
I’m sitting now, my calf aflame and blood dripping out the bottom of the loosened tape, and I can’t bleed on the wood—it’s good wood—so I stand to limp to the bathroom so I can stand on the tile.
Bell makes a noise of impatient rage and stands, and then I’m swung up into his arms and carried into his bathroom, where he sets me on a teak bench by the shower.
“I’ll pay for the sheets,” I babble, my words all leprechaun gold because there’s no way I can afford whatever he’s got on his bed, but I’ll find a way somehow, especially if he can still pay for Busy and everything else. “I’m so sorry. I know they’re nice, and I didn’t mean to—”
“Fuck the sheets, Birdie!” he yells, which makes me jump, and then he sucks in a breath and drags his hand through his hair.
He closes his eyes a moment and then opens them, squats down in front of me.
When he speaks next, his voice is calm again.
Unsettlingly so. “Why is there duct tape on your leg?”
“I—” Is it not obvious? “My leg is hurt.”
He closes his eyes again and breathes through his nose. He keeps them closed while he says expressionlessly, “I know your leg is hurt. I would like to know why you’ve chosen to put duct tape on an open wound instead of. Getting. Stitches.”
How is this not obvious either? He’s the one riding in to save the day because I don’t have any money. My own irritation finally bubbles up to match his fury, and it gives me courage. “Bell, I can’t afford stitches.”
“Emergency rooms are required to treat—”
“Yes, but they still bill you. They still send collections agencies after you when you can’t pay.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t go to the ER if I broke my arm, but this wasn’t worth the expense.
I’m sorry about your sheets, I will obviously pay to replace them, but you cannot be retroactively mad at me for not predicting you’d show up in my barn a day after I hurt my leg and offer to subsidize my life. ”
He opens his eyes. He’s still livid, but he’s keeping it contained inside himself—barely.
“You will not say one more word about those sheets,” he says and stands up. “Do you need help brushing your teeth or using the restroom before we go to the hospital?”
I bristle. “I don’t need help with anything.”
He gives a low, humorless laugh, shaking his head as he goes to the bathroom door. “You can lie to me if it makes you feel better, pretty bird. But there’s no sense in lying to yourself.”