Chapter 41 #3
“Birdie, I never spoke to Esau about breaking up with you. He wrote what he did because he thinks like a lawyer, and I signed them because I think like a schemer and I forget that not everyone is forever scheming like me. And I’m not,” he says, before I can protest, “accusing you of scheming. It was purely an unconscious thing on my part. It seemed like a good idea to have an NDA in place, so I signed it. It wasn’t until after I set down the pen that I realized how strange it would all look to you—you, Birdie Cooper, who’s taken everyone at their word your entire life.
And it’s why I never gave them to you to sign.
I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea. ”
“The wrong idea,” I breathe. “What could the right idea be?”
“That I love you, Birdie. That I am still learning what I can control and what I can’t because it might hurt you for me to control it.”
I just worry—with everything you were trying to tell me that night—that you’re not okay. That he’s coercing you or financially isolating you.
“Maybe Kaitlyn was right,” I mumble, mostly to myself.
Bell’s attention sharpens. “Excuse me?”
“Kaitlyn Masterson, at the breakfast today. She’s the one who told me about the new record for the farm, about the trust. That’s why I went looking.”
He still has my face tilted to his, so I can see his eyes narrow. “No good deed goes unpunished, I guess,” he says with a caustic laugh.
“What does that mean?”
“I gave her some advice years ago. She followed it and now has everything she’s ever wanted, but this is how she repays me.”
I glare up at him. “She told me the truth. You can’t be angry with her for that.”
“I can’t?” His voice is light again. Deceptively so.
I know how easily he can don that lightness.
“I can’t be angry with her for kicking you out into the cold and showing up again years later to weigh in on how you’re surviving?
I might have been the reason you were in front of the dean and the others, but she was the actual instrument of your firing.
I’ll blame myself as much as I deserve, but I’m not interested in keeping her blameless either. ”
“I know that,” I say, still glaring. “But you know as well as I do that her misdeeds or her motives don’t change anything about what you’ve done.”
A subtle flex of his jaw. A controlled breath. “You’re right,” he says after a moment. “I shouldn’t have done things this way. It’s why I rushed home when I saw you with the box, because I needed to explain.”
“I—” I was about to say that an explanation wouldn’t change anything, but I’ve snagged on his words. “You saw me with the box?” I must have misheard.
He moves his knuckle from my chin to my nose, running it down from between my brows and down to the tip. I was crinkling my nose. He loves it when I do that.
Then he sighs, reaches behind me—not for any of the papers but for the NFC key.
“We might as well do this now,” he says ruefully, taking my hand in his and leading me out of the studio to his office.
He has me sit at his desk, and then he inserts the key into a small port at the back of his computer.
He enters his password to unlock the computer and then immediately brings up some application I’ve never heard of, which requires a login.
The NFC key does its thing, and then I’m looking at a bunch of video feeds…
I’m looking at the back of my head. I spin, searching the bookshelves behind me, and see nothing.
“They’re very discreet,” Bell says. “I obviously didn’t want blinking lights all over the house come nighttime, since I didn’t want you to know about them until later. After I proved myself to you. Thank God I found this system because the camera I used at Evelyn was much, much clunkier.”
I pause. Turn back around to see the backs of our heads, curls the color of copper and winter sunlight. And then my thoughts catch up to his words. “You had a camera at Evelyn?”
“How else do you think I was watching you eat your gifts? I tried peering into your classroom through the wall panels from the classroom next door, but the odds of someone walking in were just too high, and I wasn’t ready to risk it.”
“I see,” I say. Faintly.
“It was just the one, pointed at your desk,” he says, like that’s reassuring somehow. “Just so I could see what you did with the pomegranates.”
“Versus the eight cameras you have in your own home.” I’m feeling more and more numb as the minutes tick by, but my voice comes out steady. A little arch even.
“I don’t like being away from you,” he says simply.
Something occurs to me then with jagged clarity. “All the times you had me masturbate while you were away…oh my God. You could see it. You could see me.”
“I could,” he agrees. “It was so sexy, Birdie. You have no fucking idea. Sometimes I go back and watch them even though you’ll be right next to me asleep, just because they’re so goddamn hot.”
“You saved videos of me masturbating?”
Bell gives me a sheepish, aw-shucks sort of smile. “What else was I supposed to do? There’s nothing like them because there’s nothing like you, and I’ve only had the memory of a single hour seven years ago to get me by. You can’t begrudge me this.”
“I…don’t know if I begrudge you or not.”
And I’m being honest—I truly don’t know.
This is a violation of my privacy, absolute creep behavior, a crime…
and also I willingly gave up my will to him and my privacy too.
His obsession feels good to me. Terrifying and upsetting, but good, like a thunderstorm feels good.
Like the first leafy chill of autumn feels good.
“Would you ever have told me?”
“Yes,” he says immediately, firmly. “I always meant to. It just seemed like a better idea to wait until you loved me back. If it’s better to ask for forgiveness, then surely it’s better to ask for forgiveness from someone who loves you.”
“Why wait any longer? I told you I loved you. So many times.” The words are toneless; I feel like every emotion inside me has been put to sleep. Just like it was before he came back into my life.
“Loved? Past tense?” He sounds sad.
“Ry.”
He sighs. “I think I would have told you very soon, but I wanted to be sure. You’ve curled so tightly into yourself over the years that I wanted to give you enough time to properly uncurl, open up. I just wanted to make sure it wouldn’t scare you away, that’s all.”
I think I believe him, that he would have told me, but I guess I have to decide whether that matters. My thoughts keep going in circles, stretched thin, lifeless and gray.
He likes transgressing, and I like being transgressed.
That will always be the flame and smoke between us, the dark and impure truth, and I think even the cameras and the recordings—and oh God, the camera at Evelyn—make a profane kind of sense to me.
It is debasing and desecrating, but it’s in this language that we both speak, that we speak together, so it could also be nice, knowing that even the lonely moments in the warehouse weren’t as lonely as I thought they were.
It could be nice if Bell put a camera in his office at the firm for me so I could see him too.
It could be nice watching his favorite videos together.
Could be. Won’t be.
Because I still can’t believe that there’s not an end point for him in all this, that he’s not planning to pay me off with a brokerage account so I’ll go quietly and then he can move on to a properly mayoral spouse or just on to someone who makes more sense.
Because we might speak the same language when it comes to sex and obsession, but nothing else belongs together.
He’s young and handsome and charismatic, and the interesting things about Birdie Cooper have only ever come with piles of sawdust.
There will be an end point. Even if he doesn’t consciously think there will be. He’s preparing for it, he’s got everything lined up perfectly, and he’s telling himself it’s because it’s all a good idea anyway.
There will be an end point, and I won’t survive it when it comes, and I don’t think I can survive it now, with the little scrap of self I have left.
I’ve already given him too much; I’ve uncoiled like a new seedling, all green and tender, given him every secret and shadow and furled open my fragile hopes and contentments.
I used to have myself even when I had nothing and no one else, and no matter what came my way, I knew I could suffer through it. I could endure because I’d always done it before, because I could depend on myself and because I only belonged to me.
But.
I’ve given him too much, and now there are forged signatures and unforged signatures, and this can’t last—it can’t stand. If I stay any longer, there will be no I left. The I that I kept alive on my own since my father and grandparents died will simply stop existing.
Because there will be an end point for Bell, but there won’t be for me.
All he’s good for is ruin, and he’s ruined me, and this is it—this is all I can handle.
If I stay and fall deeper in love with him, into this depraved love that only we understand, and then he ends things between us… I’ll have nothing left.
Less than nothing. I’ll just be the woman who traded her soul away for rough sex and some chisels.
I stand up, which makes Bell take a step back, surprised.
When I look at him, I see hope and arrogance and longing. I see the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, and now I have to exile myself for the completely understandable sin of loving him too much.
Of being unworthy of even his toxic obsession and, worst of all, knowing it. Knowing it won’t last.
“Ry,” I say, lifting my chin, hoping it’s not too late for whatever’s left of my heart. “I’d like to leave now.”