Chapter 39
BIRDIE
He loves me.
And even now, a month after he informed me that he loved me like he was being crucified with it, I have trouble believing it.
Logically, I know I should believe it, there’s no reason not to.
He tells me he loves me like he’s worried I’ll forget if he doesn’t.
I wake to him moving over me, breathing “I love you” in the dark; he says it as I kneel between his feet and warm his cock with my mouth; he groans the words as he pushes me against a wall the minute he gets home, one big hand in my hair and his other hand already at his fly.
He says it when he brings me waffles, when he watches me work in the studio, as we’re falling asleep, and as we’re waking up with Lilith purring like a car engine on his pillow.
He texts it; he writes it on notes he leaves around the warehouse and tucked under my tools in the studio; he traces it on my arm when we watch TV with my head in his lap.
He says it in every kind of voice—tender, amused, hoarsely desperate—and with every possible light in his eyes too.
He says, “I love you,” and I’ll feel so cherished and safe, and then he’ll say it again a little while later, and hearing it will feel like he already has his teeth on my neck, like there are already handprints on my bottom and I’m on the verge of one of those rending, shaming orgasms he gives me.
I don’t say it as often as he does. Not because I don’t feel it—if anything, I feel it too much, too intensely, know quite well it is destroying me—but because every time I say it aloud, a small and dismal part of me wonders if I’ll end up thinking of that very moment at some point in the future, if I’ll be teeming with embarrassment and keen regret as I do.
I wonder if I’m planting the seeds of my own heartbreak, participating in this, accepting it as real, and then I’ll have no one left to blame but myself when it turns out that Bell was lying to me, that he only fancied himself in love with me, or that he did love me but still wanted things to end when our year was up.
Or perhaps he’ll meet someone new, someone who isn’t miserable in all but the narrowest social situations, someone without baggage.
Someone his age or maybe even a little bit younger, someone without the stray silver in their hair or the faint lines around their eyes, someone who has nothing but promise and potential at their feet.
Eating the forbidden fruit of his love feels like danger enough, but enjoying it? Savoring it?
It would be daring God to choke me with the largest bite.
So. Logically, there is no reason to doubt Bell, to doubt that he loves me exactly as he says he does, but fear is a powerful thing, and even though I’ve papered it over with endurance and exhaustion, fear is almost all I am. The struts, the hinges, the mortises, the tenons.
I’m afraid it can’t be real. My life has held nothing good for so long, and how can it be him? How can Ryan Bell love me? It makes no more sense now than his attention did in class seven years ago, no more sense than gold bothering itself over tin. I can’t understand it.
And then there is our deal, the remaining eight months.
If he loves me the way he claims, the way his hands grasp and seek on my body, the way his insatiable kisses feel, then surely he would want to change it, right? He’d want it to last longer, or perhaps he’d want to call it off altogether, want us to try dating like other people do.
I should want this too—and I do, I’m certain I do—but the thought of moving out of his house and living at the farm again, of trying to date him normally with multiple dates and get-to-know-you moments, of being apart from him for hours or days at a time—
The truth is a digging splinter, and I can’t ignore it any longer: I like our deal.
I like my days here, in this brick cloister of art and sex. I like being used for his pleasure; I like being forced into my own. I like being transgressed.
And if I ask him about our arrangement, if I ask if anything should change because we’ve fallen in love, he might hear it as me asking to be let out of the deal, and I don’t want that.
I don’t like having Busy’s future contingent on anything, naturally, but otherwise, this is paradise, where I am kissed and petted and given kittens to love and wood to carve.
I’ve made the opposite journey of Adam and Eve—I’ve left the bitter, toiling world and found myself in Eden, in love with the serpent and twisting the fruit off the branch every chance I get, treating each new day like a fresh chance to fall.
Sunflower season comes, and I still don’t know what to do about my carving of Christ on the cross. I find myself adding detail after detail to the penitent criminal simply because I’m not ready to accept that I still have no idea what to do with the next block of wood.
After spending yet another day feathering creases on the criminal’s toes, I shyly suggest a date to Bell, the sunflower fields near my family farm.
His face lights up, stretching into one of those foudroyant grins, enormous and scintillating.
I’m wrapped into a strong embrace, his face in my hair and then nuzzling down and kissing at my jaw.
“The only thing I want in this world is to see sunflowers with you,” he says with an intensity that makes me think he’s telling the absolute truth, so we go the very next evening.
It’s a weekday and the crowds have thinned to almost nothing—a few stragglers and a couple of photographers doing what look like engagement shoots—and by the time we are done poking around the shop and start wandering through the fields, we have it to ourselves.
Acres and acres of sunflowers tilted toward the westerly sun, half belted by trees so green it seems impossible that autumn is reaching with its orange and yellow fingers.
Dog day cicadas make an insistent, unending whir—but not so loud that we can’t still hear the bees at work—and it’s the sound I grew up with, the sound of ending summer, the sound of the farm back when things were good, things were safe and happy and I didn’t spend two years trying to brighten a dark and lonely house, only to find my mom in the place where my dad planted flowers for her anyway.
Bell and I drift apart for a bit, him looking back toward the farm with a surveyor’s eye, me taken with the progress of the single bumblebee I’ve seen in a field of mostly small, efficient honeybees.
I’m smiling at a particularly clumsy landing where the bumblebee almost tumbles off a sunflower and look up to catch Bell looking at me from a few rows away with his sunglasses in his hand, his eyes lit with that inhuman obsessiveness I see whenever we’re alone and he doesn’t have to pretend to feel ordinary affection for me.
But there’s something else in his face too, something almost sad, almost languishing, and it makes me ache for something, although I don’t know what.
For this moment not to end maybe, this moment with the gold and ocher sunset gleaming in his hair and on those angelic features, with those eyes like I’m the only thing that exists, with the cicadas and bees and fluttering leaves, Kansas in the final sighs of summer, an angel garbed in high-waisted trousers and confident, smiling sin.
He walks toward me, the sun showing the shape of his shoulders and chest through the fabric of his loose, white shirt, the chain of his pocket watch glinting from a belt loop at his waist. He looks like he’s stepped out of a book where everyone is rich and impossibly interesting and the unremarkable protagonist feels so special in their presence, so chosen, transmuted by their attention—and I feel that way now as he approaches, like he’s turned me into a new Birdie just by looking at me, just by drawing near.
He stops a few steps away, and all of him seems to be taut with something, an intensity I still don’t entirely understand, as if he’s the one suffering, as if I’m the improbable lover here.
“I’m obsessed with you,” he says slowly. “You know that, right?”
“You’ve said as much before,” I respond with a smile.
He takes his lower lip between his teeth, lets them scrape over it as it slides free.
Something about my response wasn’t enough, I think, and he tries again.
“I need you to understand that it’s not separate from the way I love you.
There’s not Boyfriend Ryan and Obsessed Ryan.
It’s not just the sex and then everything else is…
normal. I don’t love you normally, Birdie.
I’d like to think that I don’t love you harmfully at least, but that’s probably not for me to decide.
” He steps closer and reaches for my hand.
He takes it and presses it flat against his chest, over his heart.
It’s beating wildly, hard and fast, as if it’s the first time we’ve ever touched, like it’s the first time he’s told me how he feels.
“It’s been like this since the moment I saw you,” he says in a low voice.
“It’s not going away. It’s not going to change. ”
Then keep me, I want to say. Then keep me forever. Watch me carve and make me crawl and hold me, hold me, until I feel like you’ll never leave.
I don’t say that. I stare up at him, feeling his heart pound against my hand, watching a muscle jump along one side of his jaw, and I let myself believe him. Just for today, I tell myself. Just for today, I can believe this is real, he’s mine, and this isn’t temporary.
“I don’t want it to change,” I whisper. “I love the way you love me. And I love you so much that however you loved me, I’d want it. I’d want it for the rest of my life.”
He burns under the falling sun, blazing eyes and bright hair, and I’m seized, dragged close, kissed with a harshness that has me gasping for air when he moves to my throat.
“How far away is the farm?” he rasps, his exhales short and desperate as his hands find my bottom, my breasts, my hair.
He’s scenting me like an animal might with its mate, breathing me in and nuzzling.
“Less than fifteen minutes,” I pant, and then he’s dragging me back to the truck, buckling me in before getting behind the wheel.
We don’t make it into the farmhouse. He slams the truck into park and gets out.
I’m getting out too when he slams my door closed and then shoves me against it, my face against the window as he tears at my trousers and panties.
He enters me with a single, brutal stroke, his hand in my hair, the other holding my waist in a bruising grip, and I whimper as I realize an orgasm is right there, already right there.
“You’re so wet that this should be easy,” he mutters in my ear. “But it’s a tight fucking fit, Birdie. It’s why I have to go so hard, isn’t it? To get into that pretty little cunt to begin with?”
He does have to work for it, because I’m not only wet, I’m so worked up that my pussy feels swollen with it, and he’s big anyway, and every rough shove of his hips has me moaning, miserable with lust.
“I love you,” he says with each thrust, each stroke where he forces himself deep enough that I’m nearly lifted with it, deep enough that I don’t think a single millimeter is outside my body.
“I love you,” he says with his hand in my hair, my face against the glass.
“I love you,” he says as he releases my waist to rub at my clit with hedonistic greed, as an urgent, lustful fury overtakes us and we crest into something beautiful and doomed and necessary.
“I love you,” he says, and I decide—just for now, with the sun setting over my farm and his cum running down my leg—to believe him.