Page 113 of Devil

“I trust you,” I say, kissing her hair and then resting my cheek on her head. “I’m trusting you with Birdie Cooper. But you have to take care of her because she’s my entire world.”

I don’t love the time apart, but I have an errand to run with my own rental, and I have a few things I want to get ready while she’s away. When she comes back, I’ve showered off the sweat, and I’m answering a few emails in my office. She’s pensive, but she comes right away to sit on my lap.

“She wants to do family therapy,” Birdie says after a minute without any prompting.

I kiss her shoulder. “Do you want to?”

“I don’t know. We tried it once, years ago. It was ugly. She was angry, and I was angry too, only I didn’t know it, so instead I was silent. We went three times, and then she skipped town again, and that was that.” She finds the hand I have tucked around her thigh and idly runs her fingers over mine. “It might be different. She’s doing better. I think she’d stick it out this time.”

“And you know you’re angry now,” I add.

A little closed-lipped smile. “That too.”

On Wednesday,I ask if she’d like to spend some time in the studio.

“I don’t know…” She’s on the couch, reading a horror novel I’d picked for her because I thought she’d like the religion and mushrooms. She’s been taking to horror far faster than I would have suspected. Then again, she has carved saints in all kinds of contortions and torments, has outlined flayed skin and shaded the underside of plucked eyeballs. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

“You haven’t worked in there for almost a week,” I say, coming up and squatting in front of her.

“I can’t work,” she says, closing the book. “I’m stuck, remember? I have no idea how to start the last piece.”

I take the book from her and set it aside. “But I have an idea for you.” I stand up and then pull her to her feet. “Come.”

She comes, but reluctantly. I can tell that she thinks this is a waste of time, that she’s resisting coming in here and facing this statue that might as well be the rest of her life—unformed, waiting for the first kiss of a cutting edge…waiting for a choice.

She stops just inside the door as we walk inside and I prop it open so Lilith can go back and forth on her mysterious little cat errands.

“Ry,” she says after a minute. “What is that?”

I move behind her and wrap my arms around her middle, leaning forward a little to kiss her jaw. “You really don’t know? Even the Protestants know this one.”

Birdie sighs and I smile against her jaw.

“Iknowit’s a cross,” she says. “I just want to know what it’s doing in my studio.”

Mystudio. I love it when she says stuff like that. Like she knows it’s hers, like she plans to keep it.

“I told you I have an idea. I think you should try having a live model again, like you used to do.”

“But I don’t know anyone who could mod—oh.” She tilts her chin up a little, not in protest but to examine the cross, to imagine someone on it.

This is much better than an outright refusal, which is what I thought I’d be facing.

“You could be meaner to me than most of your models,” I purr into her ear. “You can pose me and twist me. Make me arch my back or strain my thighs. I’d be a very obedient god for you.”

“I don’t know if I believe that.”

“Why don’t we try it and see?”

She pulls forward, breaking out of my arms, and walks over to the cross. Her nose is crinkled—not because she dislikes the idea, I think, but because she’s considering it.

“It was a prop in a theater production a while back,” I explain as she nudges at the base of the cross and it rolls a little. “The wheels lock. It’s lightweight enough that you could move it around on your own. I felt like it would be a good investment in case you make more carvings like these in the future.”

She stretches up to tug at a leather strap hanging from one side of the patibulum. There’s a matching one on the other side and then another around the vertical beam, near the wedge-shaped piece of wood where the feet should go.

“Kinky, right?”

I’m given a raised eyebrow for that. I grin back.