Chapter 38
BELL
The elevator opens into a smart but small lounge at the top of the skyscraper, a two-story space tucked into the architectural lantern that comprises the pinnacle of the building.
It’s meant for the residents of the apartments below, but no one else is here tonight, and the vintage light fixtures are dark, the only light coming from outside the tall windows.
I pocket the access card I borrowed from a friend and guide Birdie out of the elevator and to the door in the corner, which takes us outside.
We’re thirty-two stories up and there’s a constant breeze up here, but it’s August and warm enough that the breeze doesn’t feel unfriendly.
The skyscraper is lit in pink, and with the lights of downtown around us too, Birdie looks absolutely unearthly, her eyes glowing violet, her hair turned an ethereal shade of crimson, like the inside of a pomegranate.
I let go of her hand and simply watch her as she approaches a glass railing set between the dramatic stone finials that girdle the terrace.
The terrace wraps around the lounge, a wide balcony on all four sides, but I don’t nudge Birdie along for a better view or a more private stretch of railing away from the door.
It’s already plenty private, and her face as she stares out into the city is too awestruck to risk pulling her away, even in search of more awe.
I lean against one of the finials—scalloped limestone taller than I am—and watch her look this way and that, eyes shining, mouth parted.
“I’ve never been this high up before,” she confesses, too enraptured to be shy about it, her gaze now fixed on the river of traffic below us.
I believe her. It’s not like Tonganoxie is on the moon—it’s less than an hour away—but nothing about Birdie’s life would have led her up into the sky.
Even before I came to ruin everything, she lived on the ground.
She carved where her wood was. She only traveled to see the transepts and sanctuaries where her art would live.
I’m fascinated by her inexperience, by how guileless it is, by how it stays innocent even after repeated initiations into all the vices I’m so familiar with.
Sex and greed and sloth, and she remains incorruptible through it all; she is kept pure, untarnished, gleaming like gold even after decades in the dirt.
And how? How can she have held on to that through hunger and loneliness and the grinding exhaustion of surviving because she had no other choice?
How can she have this heart of starlight and clear water and then go carve the broken bodies of thieves and the god they’ve just met?
How can she be so sweetly and girlishly impressed with a balcony on a mid-level skyscraper in a mid-level city and also be the same person who carved a saint digging out their own heart, who rendered the fingers crushing blood vessels and atria so perfectly that the viewer can almost hear the squelching?
The innocence in her is limned in darkness, and yet it hasn’t eaten her, hasn’t stained her.
I think I can keep it that way forever maybe. Give that darkness an outlet, a playground, but otherwise keep her so well-fed and well-rested that it can’t speak to her otherwise, can’t cross the threshold without an invitation.
Birdie turns her head to smile at me over her shoulder.
“I can almost see our house,” she says, pointing, and a dark, primal satisfaction fills me, simmers in my veins.
I might as well be wreathed in smoke like Beelzebub himself, but it’s not brimstone or unquenchable fire that clouds around me but the unconscionable and bone-gnawing obsession I have for this woman.
Our house.
Fuck, but I love the way that sounds.
I shift off the finial and stroll toward her, giving her one of those smiles I know will make her blush.
And she does blush, bless her.
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say those words,” I murmur, coming up behind her and planting my hands on the railing on either side of hers. “Our house. I like hearing that a lot, pretty bird.”
She shivers as I duck to kiss her jaw, but it’s a good shiver because her cheeks are raised in a small smile and her lashes are trembling in the way they do when she’s shyly excited.
“I like saying them,” she admits in a near whisper.
Despite the smile, there’s something forlorn in her voice, and I think I know what it is.
It’s that the words have an expiration date, a ticking clock buried inside them.
The waiting teeth of our transaction ready to chew us apart at the open of next summer—or so she believes.
I thought I was being so clever when I dreamed up this deal, and now I’m tormenting the both of us. It’s so fucking stupid, and I open my mouth to say something—I don’t know what, just that it’ll probably be horribly unwise—but she speaks before I get the chance.
“Are you angry with me?” she asks. She faces forward again, asking the question into the sparkling city night.
Above us, at the very top of the building, the lights change from pink to purple and catch on the black satin of her dress.
I chose the dress for her after she spent two miserable hours in the closet staring at gowns, and I immediately knew I’d made the right choice.
Her penny-red hair is set off to perfection by the inky fabric, and the lean, sculptor’s muscles of her shoulders and back are on beguiling display with the plunging back.
The long sleeves highlight her slender wrists and hands, and the demure boatneck shows off her graceful throat, which is a better ornament than any necklace.
She agreed to wear this dress because she thought its austerity would deflect notice when, of course, the inverse is true—the simplicity of it serves to draw the eye to her doll-like features and her big eyes and her startling hair.
I could feel the attention of everyone in the room pulled to her no matter where we were.
Which is perhaps why she’s asking if I’m angry with her.
Because as much as my inborn pride loved having the most arresting person at the gala holding my hand—and with my toy clutched secretly inside her—I have just as much inborn avarice.
A spiteful and possessive greed for Birdie’s attention nipped at my heels the entire evening, and it nearly devoured me whole when I looked up to the mezzanine and saw Jordan Brady’s hand on her back.
When I walked up the stairs and saw her slender fingers on his bicep.
I don’t pretend not to know what she’s talking about. “I was jealous,” I explain, looking down at her as she continues to look out onto the city. “I saw you with Father Brady, and all I could think was that I wanted to… Actually, it doesn’t matter. I was jealous. We can leave it at that.”
No need to index the violent urges and intrusive thoughts that overtook me before I managed to calm down.
Birdie is shaking her head in front of me, a few curls that have escaped the pins dragging over her shoulders as she does. “There’s nothing to be jealous of. Father Brady is a priest.”
A noise leaves me—something between a laugh and a tch sound. It’s as scoffingly impatient as I feel. “Birdie, consider my family. Do you think I count Father Brady’s vows as some sort of unassailable barrier to him wanting you?”
Now it’s her turn to make a noise. She half turns so she can see me if she twists a little, which she does. “You don’t understand,” she says. “People don’t want me, Ry. That’s not a thing that happens.”
Agitation crawls under my skin—lingering jealousy and something like despair, the yawning unhappiness whenever I’m confronted with how little she thinks of herself.
“And how would you know that? You can barely look anyone in the face long enough to say hello, much less see if they want to fuck you.”
They are mean words, and Birdie ducks her head down and to the side, too bruised to care that she’s proving my point for me.
“No, you’re not hiding right now,” I tell her and take her shoulders in my hands.
I turn her fully to me and then press my fingers under her chin so she has to meet my eyes.
Her smile has vanished, and those eyes—still violet up here in the glowing lights—shimmer more than they should.
I feel like there’s an awl puncturing my lungs and my liver over and over again, and I take a long breath.
“I’m sorry, Birdie. If you want to hide from everyone else, I won’t stop you, but I won’t let you hide from this.
People do want you. They have wanted you.
You haven’t seen it because you can’t bring yourself to look, but that doesn’t make it less true. You are desirable and desired.”
“I’m—I—” She closes her eyes a moment, clearly upset, before opening them again. “I don’t think I believe you. You see what you know, what you’re used to, which is adoration that’s simply handed to you. You think it’s the same for everyone because you’ve never known anything different.”
“You don’t want to know anything different,” I argue, all of that agitated despair twisting me back to meanness again.
“Because knowing that people want you might mean you’d be asked to want yourself, and sometimes I think you’d rather die than want yourself, like yourself, even for a single minute. ”
She blinks rapidly, her chin dimpling. She wants so desperately to look away, but I won’t let her. I keep my fingers under her jaw. “You’re punishing me for talking to Father Brady,” she says slowly, as if she’s being careful not to let her voice waver. “You’re being cruel because you’re jealous.”
I reflect. Is that what I’m doing? Maybe.
“It’s cruel, and it’s the truth. If you were to move out of my house tonight, there would be people lined up around the block tomorrow for the mere opportunity to ask for your number. People want you, and just because you’re afraid to notice it doesn’t make it untrue.”