Page 104 of Devil

I started moving toward the studio—the battered leather bag I’d used since college was in there, my sort of purse with my keys and wallet inside. I had clothes at the farm, so I didn’t need to pack, and while it would hurt to leave Lilith here, she was much better off in a warehouse full of toys than she would be inside the farmhouse, where there were too many holes and gaps for a kitten to slip through, and into a world of hawks and coyotes.

He followed me silently, and when I stopped at the studio door to grab my bag, I saw that his silence wasn’t because he didn’t have anything to say. He was fightingnotto charm me, not to cajole me and use all the smiling, purring weapons that worked so well on me. He was fighting the other side of him too, the side only I seemed to know, the Ryan Bell who would pin me to the floor and fuck the leaving right out of me if he let himself.

His eyes burned and his hands were flexed at his sides, his jaw tensed.

“I want to beg you not to go,” he said. His voice trembled. All of him was trembling. “I want to beg you to talk to me. I want to drag you to bed and get inside you and beg so hard, Birdie.”

His wanting me—it always felt like a spear of fire into my belly, like thorns around my heart, brutally arousing and undoubtedly fatal, and I was forever weak to it, but never more so than in that moment. I stopped moving and looked at him, then sucked in a deep breath.

“I want that too,” I admitted.

“Then why leave?” He stepped closer, different emotions flickering through him like light through a cut gem. Hurt.Lust.Anger.Longing.“Is it the forgery? The NDA? The videos? I’ll repent of anything you like, darling. I’ll lash myself bloody like a medieval saint. I’ll crawl until my hands and knees leave red smears as I go. Only let me.Pleaselet me.”

I knew he believed it. He’d believe it right until he pulled those half-signed NDAs out of the lockbox and handed them to me. And I knew I would believe it too, of course I would, because who wouldn’t want to believe it? Who wouldn’t want to delude themselves for him?

“I can’t,” I whispered, looking away. I couldn’t handle looking at him right now, not while he was burning like a fallen star. “You were the one who told me: Everyone is just playing a part. It’s all make-believe. You’ll get sick of me, and a part of you already knows it, that this was never meant to last. And I thought…I thought I could bear it, but I don’t think I can. So please, if you still believe you love me, then honor what you said you’d do that very first day in the barn and let me go.”

He still trembled. He still burned. And I knew he was keeping something roaring and inhuman trapped inside his chest and that it was taking everything he had not to let it out.

I wasn’t afraid of it. He wouldn’t hurt me physically, at least not beyond what I liked anyway. No, instead he’d just convince me to hurt myself over and over again, every single day, lacerating myself with love while I waited for the inevitable.

“You were right about love too. It is a crucifixion. I’m nailed to my love for you, and I nailed myself there, and I’ll have to hang there while you forsake me anyway.”

“I won’t forsake you—that’s not possible. Birdie, please,” he said hoarsely, but I couldn’t be there a moment longer. I couldn’t stay for the serpent to coax me into another bite.

I left the warehouse, the city—him.

And I drove back to a place that hadn’t been a home since I was sixteen.

That night,I open the windows in my room and lie in bed, listening to the wind bluster and bellow outside, tickling at the trees before puffing up and wrenching at them instead. The farmhouse creaks and pops, already swollen with the humidity gathering up before the storm, the screen door on the barn side of the house rattling in its cheap metal frame.

I can’t sleep, and it’s not the noise, or at least not the noise of the window and the wood. It’s the noise inside me, the high, keening note of grief that I refuse to feel. It’s the empty space next to me in bed. It’s the empty space in my chest. It’s the untouched block of wood still in Bell’s warehouse; it’s the unanswered text I sent Busy; it’s the to-do list for taking up my old life that rattles in my mind like that screen door downstairs.

It’s the loneliness that waits—waits for me. It waited for my mother too, I think, an absence that began to feel like a presence, a thing that began to feel undying and infinite. It would last your whole life. It would wait for you anywhere.

I spent the summer being cuddled to sleep, being followed around, pouted at, and petted. I spent dinners surrounded by shouting and casually affectionate kids, listening to the Bell brothers tease each other relentlessly, showing Caro how to draw hands and then feet and then eyes.

I spent the summerun-lonely, and if there had been a part of me that thought maybe I could store it up, all the touches and warmth and quiet happiness at frozen waffles or sunlight pooling in a wicked dimple—weeks of plenty to feed me through years of famine—that part dies now in the creaking, sighing night.

There was never enough plenty to store up for this. The loneliness waits anyway, the very last crop to be grown on Cooper land.

I getthe call about Busy at ten in the morning, which is only a few hours after I finally manage to fall asleep, but I’m immediately wide-awake, digging for clean clothes in the back of my closet and finding an old toothbrush. I’m on the road in ten minutes, and in forty, I’m at the inpatient facility, leaving my bag in a cubby and signing a paper log.

I’m brought to the common area, which is a good sign, but I’m still panicking, twisting my hands as I wait on a love seat made of blue vinyl. The TV is playing one of the shows I’ve been watching with Bell—a medical drama with hyper-competent and world-weary doctors. I watched the most recent episode with his fingers inside me, idly stroking and stretching me until I was sopping wet.

I look down at my lap, my cheeks burning with the memory while a commiserate emptiness gapes in my chest.

But it’s better to be empty. Empty is good. If you’re already empty, then the loneliness might not find you as fast, might leave you alone, like a bird of prey ignoring a motionless vole in the weeds.

Busy is wearing rubber slides with the customary nonslip socks when she comes in, but she’s also wearing an old band T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, clothes I know she must have brought from home. Her hair is up in a messy bun, and while she looks a little tired, she’s not wan or shaky or vacant. She smiles as she plops next to me, working a slide off her foot so she can pull her leg up on the love seat.

“It was nice of you to come,” she says. “I really wanted to see you today.”

I stare at her. And stare.

Her nose scrunches as she notices me staring, and both of our noses are scrunched, I realize. Like the mirror game we used to play as girls but so much sadder.

But maybe I’m the only one who feels sad because she pokes me in the thigh. “What is it, Bird? You’re making me wonder if I have food on my face.”