Page 114 of Devil

“I need to think about it,” she says and turns away, walking back into the warehouse.

I follow her, still smiling, and start cheerfully making us lunch. She glances at me mistrustfully as she settles back onto the couch with her book, as if I know something she doesn’t and I’m deliberately withholding it from her.

I do know something she doesn’t, but she’s the one withholding it from herself. Because I saw the way her eyes changed as she stared up at the cross, the way she moved around it, measuring it in her mind.

Like she could see something the rest of us couldn’t.

The next evening, she goes into the studio without a word. I don’t follow, just continue reviewing the door schedule for the skyscraper renovation. She stays in there for a long time but emerges when I turn off the lights in my office and get ready for bed.

The next morning, I’m making coffee for us both when she comes downstairs in her favorite work clothes, sturdy trousers and a buttoned shirt made of pale linen. Her sleeves are already rolled up to her elbows and her hair is twisted up with two pencils to hold it in place.

She stops in front of me and takes a breath.

“Okay,” she says, bracing her hands on the counter and looking at the studio door. “Okay.”

46

BELL

“Tighter.”

Birdie looks up from where she’s strapped my ankles to the vertical beam with a restraint. “This already feels too tight,” she says with worry, which is sweet.

“It’s not, pretty bird. Go ahead.”

With a wince, she pulls the leather to the next loop and then buckles it. “Are you sure?”

I flex my toes and then shift the weight on my feet from my heels forward. The footrest is rather clever, definitely designed by a props team with a performer in mind, with a flat part at the back for your heels and then a gentle slope down. If you keep your weight on your heels, there’s almost no strain on your legs or shoulders at all, but if you shift forward, then the leather bands around your upper arms and your ankles take the weight, and your body will sag and strain in the familiar posture of crucifixion.

The restraints are padded, and there are two leather loops near my wrists that I can grab, so it’s a decently sustainable position when you’re resting on your heels. Not comfortable maybe, but sustainable.

I forget all about comfort when Birdie climbs off her stepladder and takes several steps back. Her eyes, that clear and farseeing blue—eyes that can see the shape of God and his saints in wood and clay—move over me with an intensity I’ve only ever seen when I’ve got the norepinephrine and dopamine speeding her heart and dilating her blood vessels. She seems to be sketching over me in her mind, running a kind of mental pencil over my calves, knees, and thighs and then up to my hips and stomach and chest. Out to my arms. Over the crown of my head. I’m wearing a pair of low-rise trunks, so she can see almost every length and curve of my legs and hips.

She narrowed her eyes at my innocent offer to get up here naked earlier, correctly guessing my real motives, but judging by the blush that’s staining her cheeks as she finally positions her chair and takes up her sketchbook, the trunks will do the job in a pinch.

“Tell me when you want me to start suffering for you,” I say, knowing it might make her blush even deeper, and I smile when it does. We haven’t done much with the traditional trappings of kink, but maybe we should if this is how flustered she gets seeing me trussed up in leather.

“Let me get the basics first,” she says, trying to look away from me and then realizing she has to look at me to start sketching. I send her a quick wink, and she flushes on her neck and chest too. “This is ridiculous havingyoube Christ,” she says, setting her pencil to the pad, her eyes on the paper as she taps the pencil down to measure where she wants to start.

“I can grow a beard if you’d like.”

“People are going to notice that the Lucifer statue and the Christ statue have the same face.”

“It’ll be a commentary. Aren’t artists supposed to like that?”

“Or people will know that you’re both to me,” she mutters, and she might as well have proposed.

Both to me, her god and her devil, and a heavy, gratified heat ignites in my chest, spills fire down to the base of my spine.

“I’ll be both to you forever, little bird. Just ask and it shall be given unto you.”

I say it with full earnestness, but she must think I’m teasing her because she glances up to give me one of those dry looks I adore so much, but then she sees that I’ve started to get hard.

Those doll eyes get even bigger; her lovely throat works with a quick swallow.

“If I think I might pass out from blood flow issues, I’ll let you know,” I say, and Iamteasing now. “Although I can think of a way you might help me with that…”

“Ry,” she says, tearing her eyes away from the thickening ridge between my hips, glancing back again and then back down to her paper, all while blushing furiously.