Chapter 15
BELL
A dark, giddy relief uncurls in my body.
“I’m glad,” I say and smile at her. She blushes so much when I smile at her. It’s addicting. I take her hand and pull her close enough that I can cradle her face with my hands. “I’ve been dreaming about this since the first time I saw you.”
Her lips are as soft as I remember. When I brush my mouth over hers, she shivers, and when I let myself taste her, I taste mint and a faint note of rubber—the coating from the painkillers.
I pull back a little just to look at her.
The delicate cheekbones, the dainty nose, the chin with the tiniest impression of a cleft.
Even with so much of her carved away by hunger or stress, the apples of her cheeks are round.
With that exquisitely shaped mouth and those giant eyes framed by such thick lashes, she looks like a doll…
a doll who can carve Saint Catherine of Siena ripping out her own heart and include the carefully rendered sludge of blood, gristle, and crushed arteries around her zealous fingers.
Birdie opens her eyes to look back at me, and they’re still shining from when I made her cry earlier.
I don’t entirely understand the violent surge of desire I feel seeing those unshed tears.
Making her cry and needing to comfort her, hurting her and protecting her from any other hurt in the world—they thrum inside me with a near-fatal intensity, mutually exclusive, identically mandatory, all of it essential to my sanity.
I’ve never felt anything quite like it. Everything outside what I feel for Birdie has always fit neatly inside the categories of kink.
But I sought out kink in the first place because of how Birdie made me feel all those years ago.
She’s both the origin and the end point of my desire; I suppose I can’t be surprised that the way I feel exists outside the lines other people have drawn.
Mine is how I’d describe the way I feel.
Hundreds of jostling, avid, angry stirrings, every variety of obsession, every variety of fascination, and I can use just that one word. Mine.
“It’s time to pack your things,” I whisper down to her.
“The dresser—”
“Show me the lumber you have earmarked for the project, and I’ll pack it into my truck. You’ll have all the tools you need at my place.”
She gnaws on her lip. “I have to call my boss at the gas station. And if I’m not going to be here, I should turn off the utilities—”
“I’ll handle the utilities.” My voice isn’t harsh but it does come out firm. “Go pack. I want you ready to leave in fifteen minutes.”
She blinks up at me a moment, and it’s the stare of someone so used to being alone that the idea of help is bewildering.
I drop my hands to her shoulders. “Birdie. Tell me what lumber to take.”
Her slow nod is another moment in coming, but she does finally tell me, showing me the pieces she’s already prepped and cut and routed.
It’ll all fit in the bed of my hybrid pickup without a problem.
And then she leaves, looking shaken, her hand already searching for her phone, presumably to call her boss.
It would be ridiculous to be jealous of an employer, but I still feel my teeth grinding as I watch her walk out of the barn to the farmhouse with her phone to her ear.
I distract myself by loading up the lumber and by calling the water company and the electric company and arranging for my card to be billed.
I don’t like the idea of nothing being on at her house if she tries to swing by for something on the way home from work.
The thought of her creeping through a cold, dark house, however hypothetical, has me as annoyed as the thought of her working at a gas station at all.
My restlessness only grows as I walk around the barn.
Her nonexistent budget is clear in the piles of salvaged wood, the variety of types and amounts, the lack of blocks big enough to carve her usual work.
There are no carvings here at all actually, and I only find her chisels, gouges, mallets, and knives when I walk over to the farthest corner from the door and peer at the neatly organized shelves.
A spiderweb is strung between her two mallets, and all the hand tools are covered in a fine layer of dust.
It is infuriating. Her brilliant mind, her God-filled hands that can render a crushed aorta out of wood, and she’s making shit people should be buying at IKEA.
I close my eyes. I won’t take it out on her—she’s only done what she’s had to do since Evelyn fired her and burned her reputation, and I recognize that I was to blame.
I couldn’t wait a second longer to have my nose in her hair and my mouth on hers, and for that impatience, she was cursed and I was not.
I did try to stop the curse from spreading, but I was too young to know how, to know what strings to pull to make reports disappear and ombudsmen conveniently forgetful, and by the time I learned, it was too late.
Birdie’s reputation had been stained like an altar cloth spattered with wine.
I don’t feel regret often, but that—
That is a corrosive misery I’ve never been able to wash off.
I use the cheap single-stage dust collector and a broom to clean things up around the barn, turn off the lights, and roll the doors shut.
Birdie emerges from the farmhouse with a duffel bag that looks older than she is, and she turns to lock the back door of the farmhouse, which looks far newer than anything else around here.
I wait for her to come to the truck, and then I take her bag and toss it on the floorboard of the back seat.
In the July sunshine, she is stained glass.
Milk-pale skin, red hair, eyes like windows to the sky.
She’s still wearing that white ribbed tank top and a black bra with fraying straps and jeans that are so out of fashion that they’re in fashion again.
Her hair is in a messy knot, but so many strands have come loose around her face that the knot feels more like a concept than anything functional.
Her shoulders curve inward as I continue to look at her, and her face dips down as her hand comes over to cover her heart.
She did that a lot at Evelyn too, like she was trying to shield herself, hide herself.
But it doesn’t matter how much she tries to avoid notice.
That burning, clarifying essence of her glows through her skin and eyes—even in jeans with her head down, it’s as evident as if she’s been transfigured on a mountaintop.
I remember thinking this the very first time I laid eyes on this woman.
I remember thinking God still talks to her.
“You’re so beautiful,” I tell her, and she ducks her head even lower. I don’t force her to look at me, but I do press my lips to her hair. She freezes as I let my mouth drift lightly over the messy silk, as I bury my nose in her curls and treat myself to a deep inhale. Sawn wood and apple shampoo.
I am burning, burning, burning. My breath is shaking as much as my hands are, and I have to remind myself that I’ve bargained for a whole year, that I’ve already waited longer than I ever would have thought possible.
I adjust myself as I pull away. I can still smell apples.
“Let’s go, little bird.”