Chapter 21
BIRDIE
Bell texts both Buddy and Busy from my phone pretending to be me and explaining that my injury means I’m staying home for the week, which would normally be an unbearable ethical breach if my head were clear, but it’s not clear, and all I can feel is a dull kind of gratitude as Bell tucks me into bed, kisses my forehead, and dims the glass so his bedroom is dark enough for sleep.
He’s not getting his money’s worth, I’m able to think, but he doesn’t seem bothered by it as he settles next to me atop the covers with his iPad. Aside from the dark intensity of his worry, he doesn’t seem impatient or frustrated that I’m useless for sex.
I fall asleep to the soft tapping of his tablet pencil on the screen.
I wake up to fingertips along my cheekbone, warm and possessive.
It’s dark. I’m coaxed to sit up and open my mouth for the first of my oral antibiotics and a dose of pain medicine they sent me home with.
A glass of cold water is put to my lips to help.
I swallow, allow myself to be laid down and tucked back in, and spin dizzyingly back into sleep.
Bell smells so good. His bed is so soft.
When I stir the next day, I have the sense of having slept for a long time—a humiliatingly long time.
I swing my legs out of bed and go to the bathroom, instinctively babying my right leg a little as I brush my teeth and then get dressed.
I flinch when I lift my leg to step into my jeans and the fresh stitches pull at my skin, but I don’t let myself pause; I still hurry to get dressed. I’ve wasted enough time as it is.
It’s a Monday, so I’m not sure what to expect when I go downstairs, but I’m also not surprised to see Bell in his home office either.
He’s wearing a T-shirt that looks expensive even from a distance and high-waisted trousers, belted and showing off his narrow waist. As I walk closer to the office—quietly, shyly—I notice he’s not wearing shoes, his bare feet strong and lovely looking on the wood floor.
And his hair…he’s washed it. That crown of curls is back, framing his face in gold, a halo to complement those handsome features and to contrast with those pale, intense eyes.
The same eyes that lift to meet mine now through the glass of his office wall.
I have no idea what emotion is held inside them, but every nerve ending in my body is humming with awareness as he looks at me.
The awareness is the bone-deep, eons-old prey response to a predator—it is wariness; it is fear—but the fear doesn’t come alone.
The humming along my skin doesn’t limit itself only to the parts of my body that would be useful in a dangerous situation.
He stands up and I take a breath.
I chose this, and I will see it through. For Busy.
If only I could feel less afraid. If only he didn’t look so…so…tormented as he walks toward me. It would keep the lines between us clearer.
He comes out of his office and meets me.
The converted space is big enough that it takes several heartbeats.
Even armored with those heartbeats, I jump when he reaches out to touch my face.
But he’s only pressing the backs of his fingers to my forehead, replacing them with the inside of his wrist, checking for a fever.
The scent of him is casually seductive—barely there, a whisper of incense and pepper—gone and then back again as he moves.
His eyes move to my nose, and I realize that I’ve been rather obviously trying to breathe him in. The curled corners of his mouth curl up a bit more, but he doesn’t remark on it. Instead, he squats and examines my calf.
“Is it sore?” he asks, lifting my foot to balance it on his thigh while he pushes up the leg of my jeans.
“It hurts a little, but it’s bearable,” I tell him.
He narrows his eyes up at me. “Your definition of bearable is too irreparably fucked for me to trust, Birdie.”
It’s like being slapped. I don’t have much, I’m not worth much, but this is one thing I can own—I have tried so hard to bear what the Lord has given me to carry. “Because I don’t like to make my discomfort the problem of people around me?”
Presumably satisfied there isn’t a crimson fringe of infection reaching out from under the bandage, Bell rearranges my jeans and sets my foot back down on the floor with care. He stands up again, and it is so easy to forget how tall he is until he’s right in front of me.
“Your discomfort will always be a problem for me, whether you try to hide it or not.” He puts his hands on my shoulders.
They’re big and warm in the cool air of the warehouse, and the wary thrumming in my nerves seems to gather underneath his palms, little eddies of alertness under his fingertips. “I want to fix it for you.”
“I thought you wanted to hurt me,” I say quietly. “Isn’t that what you said two days ago in the barn?”
His hands move up to my throat. Goose bumps ripple all over my body, and when I swallow, his eyes track the movement. “Yes,” he says. “I did say that. I do want that.”
“Then what’s the difference?”
His eyes flash up to mine, his lovely mouth twisting with scorn.
“What’s the difference between having my handprint on your ass and you being a day away from sepsis?
Between me leaving a bite mark on your thigh and you duct-taping torn skin?
” His hands curl a little, adding pressure to the nape of my neck. “Is that a real question?”
I’m shaken enough to be angry. “Don’t make me sound foolish. Please. I just don’t understand why, if you want to hurt me in your own way, you care if I’m hurting in other ways.”
“Birdie, I only warned you about the hurting because the rest of what I feel doesn’t require an explanation.
The hurting…the pushing…it’s part of this thing inside me when it comes to you because I also want to fuck your mouth and your cunt, I also want to spoil you and dote on you.
I want to ruin you all goddamn year until you’re as bad as I am.
” He stops, breathing hard. He’s come closer since he started speaking, his exhales tickling my mouth, his hands possessive and unrelenting on my neck, not pressing in enough to make me faint but enough to make me aware that he could.
He walks me back three steps into the wall, my back flat against it, and I’m breathing as hard as he is, terrified, panicked, relieved.
This is it, this is what I’ve been dreading since I agreed to his terms, and he’ll force me now; he’ll throw me down and yank my jeans down and shove himself inside me, and then it’ll be over, my sin complete, the bargain fully inked, and I won’t have to be afraid of it anymore.
I can tell he wants to. His hands quake around my neck, and when his mouth slashes over mine, it’s hot and demanding and…
entitled. Like it was at Evelyn, like it was inside his truck.
Like he’s owed me and he’s going to take what he’s owed, and he’ll wage a war on anyone who tries to stymie his will.
His tongue pushes against my lips, and when I don’t open for him fast enough, he reaches up and presses his thumbs to the corners of my mouth to part my lips.
The kiss is invasive, slick, and then he shoves his hips against me, a hard, forceful motion that presses his erection into my stomach.
“I want to be the only thing you’re scared of, the only thing that makes you tremble.
” Another shove. “I want all the suffering in your life to have one cause, one name. And I want you to love it so much that you smile when you so much as whisper my name.”
His voice is dark, vibrating with intention, with a frantic undercurrent of desperation that makes my scalp crawl.
But then why am I reaching up to hold his elbows? Why am I hoping he’ll wrap my legs around his waist and pin me against the wall?
Why is there a part of me that wants to crawl toward the awful future he’s promising?
His kisses get even harder, bruising, panting, and then his hand is moving down, a rough drag over my T-shirt–covered chest to my belly and then to the waistband of my jeans.
He pops the button and unzips me with no trouble, like he does this one-handed all the time.
And then his fingers are in my panties, intent, searching, until they graze against something and I whimper.
He doesn’t linger there, though, his fingers finding the soft furrow and then the opening within. With utter shame, I feel his fingers slide because I’m…I’m slippery there. His head drops forward and then he’s breathing open-mouthed against my neck, his entire body shaking.
His fingers are barely inside me—a quarter of an inch, if that—but when they give a push, maybe another quarter inch, I grab at his T-shirt.
To stop him, to encourage him, I don’t even know.
I just know that everything feels hot and wrong and I don’t want to want it, but I think I want him to make me.
“Is this when you hurt me?”
It takes so much to ask the question, but I have to know. I have to know if it’s coming.
Tension ripples through him—I feel it in his chest against my hands, I feel it in his thighs pressed to mine, I feel it in the fingers that I think want to push deep into my body—and for a shimmering second, I think he’s going to say yes.
I think he’s going to drag me to the floor or toss me over his shoulder and carry me upstairs.
The hard flesh mindlessly grinding against my stomach is so hard that it doesn’t even feel like it can be flesh anymore, and the hand that’s pushed its way into my jeans and is making it impossible to close my legs is a hand that won’t be denied. He won’t be denied.
Bell shoves himself away from me. Literally. Braces his hand against the wall and shoves.
His hand tears out of my pants; my neck is abruptly cold; he’s three or four feet away suddenly, staring at me with eyes gone nearly black. I can see his shoulders move with how hard he’s breathing, and his mouth is open and wet, and two fingers on his right hand…glisten.