Chapter 26
BELL
She’s nearly asleep the final time I fuck her.
She doesn’t come this round, but she laces her arms around my neck as I comfort myself with her warm body, and when she tentatively runs her fingers through my hair, I lose it.
I’m strung as tight as a bowstring as I use that sweet, hot pussy to bring myself off, and when I finally blow, I groan like I’m pleading with God in Gethsemane.
By the time I walk back to the bed after tossing the condom in the trash, she’s fast asleep. I stare at the flushed cunt still visible between her thighs, desire surging through me, but I’m at last too spent to respond.
I stretch out next to her, tuck an arm around her waist, and follow her into sleep, more content than I can ever remember being.
I wake before her, the final rosy-purple glow of evening coming through the windows. I prop myself on an elbow and watch her for a long time, the music of her slow, deep breathing filling the bedroom, a music I want to hear every night for the rest of my life.
I trace the line of her jaw, delicate and fine, and circle over the flushed apple of one cheek, then down to her throat.
She has the covers pulled up to her chest, and I toy with the edge of the sheet, wanting so badly to fold it down and stroke all over her breasts and stomach, kiss her navel, fantasize about stretch marks.
But I’ll ask for the privilege of touching her while she’s not awake.
God knows I’ve already taken plenty without asking, and while I’m not strictly sorry about it, giving her the choice to sleep unfondled feels like a concession I can offer.
I do check her calf again before I leave the room, turning on the lights and arranging the sheets above her knee to get a good look at it. It took a year off my goddamn life finding the sheets covered in blood that morning, and then when the doctor told us that it was infected…
My fingers spasm on her leg, and I pull my hand away before I hurt her. It’s not her fault; she didn’t have anyone to help her; she didn’t know I’d been looking for her for seven years and that I would literally burn down the world to keep her unharmed. She didn’t know. She didn’t know.
And yet the fury and terror build in me again as I force myself away from her to go downstairs. That she was bleeding in my house, that infection was trying to claw its way to her heart in my own goddamn bed—
It takes me several minutes to calm down, to wrap my fingers around the reins of control that I normally hold without much effort at all.
I learned at a very young age that the way I feel anger or fear or covetousness was the way that got me pulled into a school counselor’s office; it was the way that made adults murmur things when they thought I couldn’t hear.
Oppositional defiant disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
Pathological demand avoidance. It made my parents—always in love, always acting as a harmonious unit—argue in low, tense voices after bedtime.
Maybe it was the day Lizzy died. Maybe he was always like this.
Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe we need to get him… seen.
I was nine the day of the storm, the day ambulances and patrol cars swept up to the house and bathed the rainy gloom with red and blue lights.
The day I saw people running to our detached garage and followed them out of boyish curiosity, having no idea that my only sister was lying cold on the garage floor with a rope around her neck, the once-happy family we’d been lying cold beside her.
By the time I was eleven, I knew that I had to start pretending I was a different kind of boy, the kind everyone wanted me to be—friendly and maybe a troublemaker but the same kind of troublemaker that Sean and Aiden had been, the kind my parents were already used to.
By the time I was twenty-two, it barely took any work at all. Everyone saw what they wanted to see—dimples, goodness, talent.
Truthfully, I have no idea if the thing that’s wrong with me had always been there or if it was born the day Lizzy died or if there’s a third option, something between the two. A latent serpent in me that only needed the right breach in my soul to slither through.
It doesn’t matter that the serpent is inside me. Every year, my mask sits lighter and lighter on my face, and it’s a mask that almost no one can see the edges of. Only a bare handful of people over the years, Sean and Birdie and—once—a dangerous man in London.
I don’t want to wear it around Birdie at all, honestly, but there’s no sense in making my worst impulses her problem either.
And by the time I’ve assembled a light dinner of berries, crudités, cheese, and crackers for us, I’ve fully calmed.
I add my favorite snack—frozen waffles cooked in the toaster and spread with peanut butter and honey, cut into wedges with a pizza wheel—and then climb up the stairs.
And I don’t need to wear a mask as I come up the stairs and find her stretching sleepily under the covers, looking dozy and warm as her eyes flutter open.
The smile on my face is real and honest, and if I hadn’t just fucked her three times in as many hours, I’d be ready to go.
It gets me so hard to think about her getting all the sleep she needs, to be walking toward her with a heaping tray of food.
She sits up, shyly tucking the sheet to her chest as I put the tray on the bed near her thigh and sit. I had pulled on a pair of pajama pants, and I allow myself a brief, silent preen when her eyes drop to my chest and hips and she blushes.
“I just brought up water,” I say, “but I have all sorts of things downstairs—wine, coffee, juice, anything you want.”
“Water is good,” she says, like she’s a guest trying not to tax her host’s generosity and not like she’s the absolute center of my soul.
She pours herself some using the carafe and one of the small glasses I brought up and then sits back against the headboard, her eyes on the glass now resting in her lap.
She looks bashful and uncertain, troubled.
Which is to be expected after the day she’s had.
“Remember when I told you that free use included your honesty?”
She nods.
“Be honest with me now. You won’t displease me—it won’t jeopardize our deal or any of its conditions. I want to know what you’re thinking. What’s making that little mouth turn down? What’s behind those pretty eyes right now? Are you upset about having lost your virginity?”
Her gaze lifts, and I can see the unfiltered surprise in her eyes. “No, I’m not upset about that.”
I touch her ankle through the sheet, cover the slender joint with my palm. “It would be okay to be. You’ve grown up hearing how sinful premarital sex is. Or maybe you’re disturbed by the things we did after?” I pause, reconsider my words. “By the things I did,” I amend.
Her mouth twitches. There’s the smallest lift to the balls of her cheeks—almost a smile. A real one. “I am disturbed by the things you did—a little—but I don’t mind telling you so. I get the feeling you’re not bothered by being disturbing.”
I give her another wide, real smile, and she blushes anew. “No, Birdie. It doesn’t bother me. The things I want to do to you are so corrupting and unhealthy that it’s in your best interest to remain disturbed. It’ll make it easier for you to leave if you need to.”
Although I sincerely hope she doesn’t. I sincerely hope she lets me disturb her for a very, very long time because I have some theories about Birdie Cooper and what her lonely little heart needs.
And also because I want to.
“Is there something you do mind telling me then?” I prod, letting go of her ankle to push the tray closer to her. “Because I still want to hear it.”
“It’s nothing. Nothing important.” She seems grateful for the excuse of the tray, taking a long time to choose between a strawberry and a raspberry so she doesn’t have to look at me.
“It matters to me. It’s important to me.”
She eats the raspberry, still not looking at my face.
“Birdie.”
The stern tone accomplishes what my encouraging words cannot—she is Catholic after all—and she finally says, quickly and with the heat of embarrassment: “I was wondering why it took you so long.”
There are a fair number of things she could be referring to here, so I prompt carefully, “Why what took me so long, exactly?”
“To come back.” A fast, fortifying breath.
“I was wondering why you left after the hospital, why you stayed away. That’s a whole week and a half out of the year you wanted, and I can’t…
I can’t make sense of it. The only thing I can think of is that you don’t want this as much as you thought you might now that it’s real.
That you were—are—reconsidering this. Me. ”
The embarrassment is all over her now, in her pink cheeks and twisting hands and darting eyes.
Poor Birdie, so ready to be embarrassed over nothing, so ready to be ridiculed or judged for something as utterly understandable as asking a question about sex from the man who’s essentially imprisoned her with it.
I take a minute. It matters to me that she doesn’t think I was indifferent to fucking her, but also I’m not proud of the reason I needed to stay away. I suppose I’m a little embarrassed of it myself.
And that’s why I end up telling her. She’s being so brave with her embarrassment; I can be brave with mine.
Also, I just hate the idea of her thinking I don’t want her. However fucked up my wanting is, it’s very much alive.
“The day after the hospital, when I had you up against the wall—do you remember? You asked if I was going to hurt you.”
“I shouldn’t have,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean it like I wanted you to stop. I just wanted to know.”