Chapter 47
BIRDIE
“You don’t have to do this,” I say as Bell finishes feeding the half-signed NDAs into the shredder. “I don’t need a…” I search for the right word. “A gesture.”
“It would be a weak gesture if that’s what it was meant to be,” says Bell, “since it’s not like this destroys the concept of an NDA altogether.
But I don’t want them in the house like a spent radioactive rod, making us both sick.
Signing them was an idle reflex, and I wish to God I hadn’t. I’m so sorry, Birdie. Never again.”
I’m standing next to his office chair, and he turns so I can step between his feet and he can put his hands on my waist and look up at me. I can see that he means his apology, his eyes bright and his lips parted as I brush the backs of my knuckles against his cheek.
Bell spent the last hour or so debriefing me on his financial crimes—well, mainly just the trust and its forged signatures—and he walked me through everything that belonged to me and to Busy.
He explained how the two different trusts work and how they could be amended whenever I need.
He showed me the brokerage account, and when I started to protest, he just smiled.
“What?” I asked, frowning.
“You’ve said you’ll be with me as long as I’ll let you, and I’ve made it plain that what I feel for you is probably diagnosable and almost certainly incurable.
Even if I can’t convince you to marry me, a rational outcome to that set of variables would be lifelong cohabitation, which means you’d have access to everything I have anyway.
Why fret about some of it being explicitly in your name? ”
I couldn’t tell him that it was because it would make it easier for him to leave me. For him to say okay, I know this will hurt, but at least you have this as a settlement, as fee for services rendered—a way for him to pay away his guilt after ending things.
Which was a ridiculous way to look at it. I cast around for a more sensible reason.
“Because it’s not the terms we agreed on at the beginning. It’s overpayment. It’s a gift. And gifts create obligations.”
“It’s so,” he started, finding my hand and kissing it, “you’re not trapped with me, pretty bird. I need you to be able to leave without any hesitation, without anything in the way. You can always take the money and run, no matter what I do, no matter how you feel.”
For his peace of mind, he wanted it to be easy for me to leave; for my own, I wanted it to be as hard for him as possible.
“I think we need therapy,” I murmured, half joking.
“I can find someone for us,” he said.
I stared down at him. “You’d really go to therapy with me?”
He kissed my hand again. “You heard the part about me being pathologically in love with you, right? It’s probably not a bad idea.”
I thought about it. I’d had my first family session with Busy earlier that morning, and while I’d been uncomfortable and nervous, it had been easier to talk when someone was there to guide us. Maybe it would be a good idea for me and Bell too.
“Have you ever thought about therapy on your own as well?” he asked. His voice was still agreeable, easy in that enviable Ryan Bell way, but his eyes were observant and the question direct enough that it required an answer.
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“Do you think you will?”
“Yes, but—” I hated asking this. It was needy, and there was a part of me that felt like therapy was a kind of punishment, an atonement for the sin of wanting to die, the sin of despair, and I would be shirking my duties as a Catholic if I lessened my penance in any way.
On the other hand, I suspected that the way I’d been brought up to think about suffering was part of the problem.
“Will you come with me? Not…not into the appointment or anything, but will you drive with me there and wait? I just feel better when you’re around, and the idea of talking to a stranger alone for that long… ”
“Of course. I’m at your disposal.” His eyes twinkled. “For eternity.”
I sighed in relief. I knew it was codependent and fucked up, but Bell settled me, he made me feel safe, and he made the idea of being vulnerable with a stranger easier to contemplate.
I needed the practice, since I had emailed a mental health organization from the breakfast last week, asking if they wanted artists for workshops and events.
I knew it would mean all the same anxieties I’d had while teaching, but there was something alongside the fear too, larger than it, bright enough to chase away the shadows.
I could help people while I still needed help myself.
Such a simple revelation, and yet it took forever for me to have it.
All this time, all this pain and fever and storm, and the remedy was this one unostentatious truth: accepting that I could lean on other people and then allowing them to lean on me too.
It is not good for the man to be alone, God said, looking down at Adam.
And no. It hadn’t been.
Bell’s fingers twitch spasmodically as he hangs on the cross, little flickers that I capture with my phone before switching back to my sketchpad.
I’m sitting on the full ladder today, the pad resting on the top of my knee as I try to capture the movement in the drawing, the sprung tension of the curled fingers.
“Hoped…you’d be recording sexier things…by now,” he pants.
He’s getting too tired to look over at me, his head hanging down. No matter how many times I tell him he can rest on his heels whenever he needs to, he’s refused on the grounds that he wants to push his muscles to exhaustion so I can carve them properly.
He wants me to see the balled calves, the splayed toes, the corded tendons coming up from his knees.
His abdomen is already defined, but the effort of breathing has etched the lines deeper, coaxed new ones to the surface along his ribs, feathering down and around from his back.
The light through the studio windows picks up the swells of his deltoids, the stretched curves of his biceps, the strained extensor muscles of his forearms.
Shadows gather in the hollows of his armpits and under his biceps, where the leather straps holding him to the cross dig into his upper arms and wrists.
Shadows dance under his fingers where they bend and twitch in place, and darkness drips from his chin to his chest, hangs off those gilded eyelashes onto his cheeks.
The sun is making a radiant crown out of his curls, and with every heavy breath, the crown glimmers anew as his head lifts and drops.
“Maybe if you’re good,” I murmur in response to his earlier complaint.
That earns me a flickering, tired smile.
After I finish with the hand, I have one more sketch I’d like to get before I’m done, a quick study of his neck.
I get down, scoot the ladder closer to the vertical pole of the cross, and drop a quick kiss on the top of Bell’s foot.
He lets out a low grunt, and when I look up at him, I see that the erection that’s been coming and going for the last hour is stirring again, growing long against his leg.
When he offered to climb up here naked today, I did give it some thought, imagining how I would one day confess having lusted for someone strapped to a cross.
But I was already going to lust for someone on a cross today, whether or not he was wearing trunks, and what sexual sins haven’t I committed with Bell already anyway?
I said yes, and we both pretended it was so I could better sketch the upper thigh muscles, the curve of his buttocks, the hard edges of his hips.
We both politely ignored his erection while I worked.
It’s hard to ignore it now, though, brought on as it was by a mere kiss to his foot, and my mouth is dry as I climb up the rungs to get high enough to see his neck.
My hand shakes as I set the sketchpad on a rung of the ladder and flip to a new page.
I take my pencil out of the artist’s apron I’m wearing and then, possessed by—by I don’t know what—what he might do in my place maybe—I reach out and touch the metal cap of the pencil to the far wing of his collarbone.
Slowly, I trace it to the notch at the base of his throat.
He shudders, head still hanging down, his eyes closing.
I move the top of the pencil up, just below his Adam’s apple, and then drag it over the bobbing knot up and up and then toward me, ending at the tip of his chin. And then to that beauty mark above his mouth, proof that God must exist because nature would never have known to add such a flourish.
With deliberate patience—as if I were drawing him for real—I run the pencil along the line of his bottom lip, where the sun-gilded skin changes into peach-pink softness, petal-like almost.
I’m just below him, enough to see when his lips part, to enjoy the tiny movements of his jaw and eyelids.
I trace his upper lip next, from sharp edge to sharp edge, over the strong peaks in the middle, and then I trace the outline of both lips, taking care to capture the little upward flicks at the corners, the promise of that good-natured smile, which only for me turns fiendish, sacrilegious, mean.
I set the pencil cap against the plumpest part of his bottom lip and press until he shivers.
He opens his eyes and lifts his head enough so he can look at me. “Birdie.”
I move the pencil down, down his throat and then down his chest, going slower once I reach his sternum, going even slower than that when I reach his sweat-slick stomach.
The already-tense muscles jump at the contact, flexing underneath the metal cap, and when I get to his navel and circle it, he sucks in a shallow, miserable breath.
His erection jerks, full and thick and seeking, and I draw the pencil down and down, a bare centimeter at a time, fascinated by the spirited reaction each movement earns me.
By the time the pencil reaches the root of him, Bell is pulling at his restraints, pushing against the block he stands on, his back arching, ribs jerking.
“Birdie,” he whispers breathlessly. “Birdie.”