Chapter 34 #2
“I told you I miss you,” I say, knowing my cheeks are bright red.
It’s schoolgirlish, to eat something the object of your infatuation eats.
It’s not something a thirty-six-year-old woman has any right doing.
But he looks so delighted with himself, so preening, that it’s almost worth the vulnerability of admitting it.
“Oh, Birdie. If I were there, I’d make you all the waffles you wanted. What were you thinking when you were eating them? What were you doing?”
The thing about Bell is that he truly means every question he asks, no matter how obvious the answer seems, no matter how inconsequential.
And he asks questions all the time. He asks if I’ve enjoyed walking to the river with him, if I like fireworks better at night, what flowering weed I think is pressing through the concrete outside the front door.
When he found out that I haven’t seen any of the famous TV shows of the last ten years, he decided we should get me caught up, and as we watch, he wants to know everything I think, every pet theory, every favorite character, everything that makes me wince or chuckle.
When I told him I didn’t like the house I grew up in, he wanted to know exactly what the unhappiness felt like, if it changed from room to room.
When he learned that my grandparents had built it and loved each other and been happy there—that my own parents had been happy there until my dad died—he’d decided the fault was with the structure itself and made me draw out the floor plans, the angles of the hill.
He wanted to know exactly what I saw from my bedroom window or where in the living room I’d curled up to watch TV.
He wanted to know if I ever felt like the house could have been welcoming, what I would have changed.
Everything, I told him. It was built wrong from the beginning. A cistern that collected all the smallness and shabbiness from the world around it and went rancid.
So that’s Bell. His curiosity is insatiable, his attention absolute. He glows when I confide the smallest thing, and glows even more when I confide it unprompted.
I know it’s invasive—I know it might be sick, it might be sinister, for someone to want so much of the inside of you.
I know that your inner life is supposed to be yours alone.
But my inner life has been such a lightless place for so long, since my dad and grandparents died, and it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to crawl inside me as much as it feels like he’s letting me crawl inside him.
Yes, it’s greedy, but it’s greed for me, and yes, it’s hungry, but it’s hunger for me.
No one has wanted me, no one has bothered themselves about me in so, so long, and slowly I stopped bothering myself about me too.
It was so much easier to let the cold creep in, the unfeeling, to deaden everything that wasn’t the ability to plod ahead like an animal.
And then Bell came back into my life, and he wants me so much that he shakes with it—he shadows me around the house, cajoles me into coming along for the most mundane errands, barely endures the moments when we’re not touching.
How can that feel invasive when there was nothing but emptiness to invade?
How can it feel like darkness when I know what real darkness is and it is the void of touch, of language, of art?
How can it feel wrong when it feels better than anything has felt in my entire life?
I love it. It might destroy me in the end, but I love it.
I tell him all about the waffles, how Lilith chirruped incessantly as I made them, how I made one with butter and then gave her the tiniest smidge off my finger and was left with little bite marks on my knuckle for my kindness.
At some point, as I suspected he would, he asks to see my pussy.
I go to his office for this because I know it gets under his skin when I do, and then I work off everything but my bra and prop the phone on his desk while I sit in his chair.
He unbuckles and pulls out his cock, and while he talks me through everything he wants to see—my swollen clitoris, my fingers inside myself, my arousal glistening in the light from the office’s windows—he strokes himself with steady, patient movements.
He tells me how much he misses me, all the times he’s wished I were with him so he could empty himself in my cunt or my mouth or over my tits.
He tells me he’s ordered more toys for my pretty asshole, that he can’t stop thinking about the night before he left, when he took me while I had a thick plug inside.
He can’t stop thinking about when I’ll be ready enough to take his dick instead.
“God, that blush on your cheeks,” he groans, working himself faster now. “It never goes away, does it? No matter what I do to you. It’s amazing. Can you get yourself off for me right now?”
“I can try,” I say softly. I’ve gotten pretty good at it since he’s helped me learn. “But can I see more of…you…while I do?”
A smug divot appears in his cheek and he tilts his camera down a little. “Want to see more of this cock, Birdie? Want to watch it go off while I’m thinking of you?”
“Yes,” I whisper. It’s the truth, whatever kind of sinner that makes me into.
I can’t pretend I’m bringing myself to a joyless orgasm because the conditions of our deal demand it.
I want to see him masturbate; I want to see his erection hard and straining; I want to see his big, capable hand wrapped tight around it.
It makes me squirm, it makes my cunt heat, and soon I’m wet enough to leave clear slick on the insides of my thighs and on the seat of his chair.
When I finally cry out and come, he mutters, “Thank Christ,” and starts spurting over his fist, thick ribbons of cum that I wish I were there to touch.
It fascinates me to no end, the visible proof of his orgasm, the tangibility of it, and my fascination is usually enough to make him hard all over again.
He makes me show him the chair and the slick spot on it, and I hear the noise of him taking a screenshot as a souvenir.
I’ve agreed to pictures and recordings as long as they’re not shown to anyone else and they’re deleted by the time our deal concludes, and if nothing else, he’s certainly ensured I have equal power over him.
The private folder on my phone has plenty of Bell that he’s sent me, of the two of us or of only himself while he’s been at work.
Sometimes even from times he’s been home but in another room.
“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that you wanted to call me,” he says warmly after we clean up. “That you miss me.”
“I miss you so much,” I confess again, knowing it’s so precarious, this missing him. More precarious than anything else maybe, because I’d resigned myself to staining my soul for his sake, but offering up my heart too?
Waking up alone that first morning he was away and wishing I’d been woken up by a hot tongue between my legs instead, walking past his office and thinking about all the times I’d been on my knees under his desk—all of that is something I understand, even if I’m still not sure what it means.
But to miss him watching me in the studio, sitting with a knee pulled up to his chest as he takes in every stroke of my pencil or strike of my mallet; to miss the sight of him reading on the couch with a toaster waffle in one hand, using his elbow to keep Lilith away; to know he won’t be next to me at Mass on Sunday, singing hymns to that god he’s not friendly with…
I’m an expert in loneliness, its foremost researcher.
I sensed its return the moment Bell kissed me hard on the mouth before he left for the airport, and I wondered if missing him was solely about isolation, about my mammalian wiring throwing up flags of panic as I felt the void of the empty house pressing in.
It’s always more piercing to return to despair when you’ve had a chance to feel anything else.
But I don’t think this keening ache is just about an empty house; I think I could still bear that. It’s something about him, the absence of him. He created a new kind of loneliness when he left, and even the video calls and constant texts don’t feel like enough to fill the breach he’s left behind.
He gets a call from his boss, and we say a quick—if reluctant—goodbye, and then I go back to the studio and my tools. I stand in front of the Lucifer statue for a long moment before reaching up to touch my finger to its outstretched finger and then go back to the piece I’m working on.
I pray as I work. I pray to God for strength, to the Virgin to intercede on my behalf. I tell the Virgin the truth that I can’t avoid facing any longer: that I can survive a deal with the devil, but I absolutely cannot survive falling in love with him.
Did you ask her? comes a text message early the following morning as I’m counting down the register before ending my shift.
I smile, even though adrenaline is still pounding through me. I did, I text back. She said yes.
Of course she did, Bell replies. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with you?