Chapter 34 #3
I roll my eyes. Bell sees me through a lover’s eyes, I suppose, and extrapolates his own feelings about me to the rest of the world.
But I am still glad Amber said yes to getting coffee later in the week.
I was terrified to ask, which is silly, I know, but in my defense, I haven’t had that kind of friend since Kaitlyn.
My closest friend is probably Paxico, and when Bell had asked about my friends before he left for his trip, and I told him that my old neighbor was essentially it along with seeing Amber at work, he’d looked unhappy.
“We can’t all be popular like you,” I said in what I thought was a sufficiently light and self-deprecating tone, but he still hadn’t met my gaze, his eyes off to the side, his mouth thin.
“Do you like Amber?” he finally asked. “Enough to get coffee with her? Text her sometimes?”
“Of course,” I said, “but we’re both busy, and I—” I paused, not sure if someone like him could understand. “I’m not really friend material, Ry.”
His eyes slid back to mine, his expression genuinely puzzled. “What?”
I didn’t enjoy having to explain it, because I knew it would sound like I was feeling sorry for myself, or worse, like I was fishing for compliments. But I also didn’t want him thinking I was solitary as a preference; there were real reasons for it.
“I’m not fun,” I explained patiently. “I’m not funny. I’m not interesting. I get nervous about things normal people don’t. I’m too serious. I’m too stuck. I don’t have time for anything that isn’t work, and I’m just trying to survive.”
I meant to say that last part patiently too, lightly, but it didn’t come out lightly. It came out thick and uneven, pulled out of some pit inside my chest. It came out like a low, mindless cry from something trapped.
Bell’s lips parted, and the unhappiness shaping his mouth only drew attention to how full his lips were, especially in the middle, something so easy to forget when he was smiling wide enough to stretch lines up and down his cheeks.
His eyes too were unhappy, a sudden winter, a January sky too high up to reach.
I thought I could sense fury—cold fury—and also a kind of surprised grief—but I couldn’t be sure.
When he spoke, his voice was level and uninflected. “I hope you have more time for things that aren’t work now, and that surviving is a little bit easier. As for not being friend material, why don’t you let Amber decide that?”
My own mouth twisted, a million reasons why this sounded awful rearing up inside me. Finally, I said, “I already have a friend, Ry. I have you.”
I thought he’d like that. It seemed like something that would please him ordinarily, but instead, he closed his eyes. I could see the tendons shifting in his neck, like he was feeling a great strain, but it only lasted a few seconds.
He drew a deep breath and opened his eyes. “Birdie, as much as I’d like to claim all of you, I shouldn’t. It’s not…a good thing for me to do. You need someone to talk to who doesn’t give a shit about me, who doesn’t even know me, who will always put you first in their concern.”
I only stared at him, and he sighed, a rueful kind of slant coming to his mouth.
“You have no idea how fucking hard this is,” he said, the words on the edge of an unhappy laugh.
“No idea how much I want to keep every fucking minute of yours to myself. I want to be your best friend and your savior and your worst nightmare, and I am howlingly jealous of every person who gets your attention who isn’t me.
The owner of your gas station, the person in the pew behind us when we give the sign of peace, my own brothers, our cat.
If I could lock you in a tower, I would.
If I could steal you away, I would. If I could make it so you never needed anyone or anything else but me, I would, and I think you still don’t understand how much I mean this.
I don’t think you have any sense of what I would do if I hadn’t been thinking about this for seven years.
If we hadn’t been interrupted at Evelyn and I’d been able to—”
He stopped, his breathing rough, his eyes dark, something wild and inhuman in him. Then he tossed his head like he was trying to shake himself free of a brutal delirium.
I felt like I was still caught in it, fevered by his words.
His jealousy, his desire. I loved how it felt, and it felt right, and what if I wanted him like that?
It had never occurred to me that I had any right to be jealous of Bell’s time, but that’s how I’d felt when he left me alone that first week, wasn’t it?
Desperate for his proximity and attention, wishing I had the power to make him return.
“You should have friends, Birdie,” Bell said after he’d mastered himself again. “You should have a world outside me. Please.”
I agreed, mostly because the effort it took him to suggest something so deeply against his own desires had him trembling almost, pale lipped and sick looking. And because the thrill I’d felt as he confessed the depths of his possessiveness frightened me even as I felt it.
If I felt like this less than two months into our deal, what would I feel like at the end? How would I survive being away from him? Going from him watching me, feeding me, washing me, letting me sleep tucked into his chest to nothing at all?
How would I go from feast to famine? From milk and honey to sackcloth and ashes?
I didn’t know if I’d be able to do it, but the alternative—ending things now before I got more and more lost in him—well…that was no longer any alternative at all.