Page 38 of Devil

I turn my face away, humiliated.

His hand drops to my hip. He’s keeping us pressed together as he thrusts against me. “No, don’t be embarrassed. I need it too. Can’t you feel how bad?”

The crushing pressure is everywhere now, between my thighs, in my belly, up in my chest and throat, and Bell’s mouth is everywhere, the hand wrapping around my hip bossy and large, and the swelling turns hot, blazing, a prelude to combustion, and then I’m giving a long, shuddering cry underneath him, a cry that turns into a gasp and then a sob. So much for keeping myself apart from this, so much for setting my mind on a shelf. My core pulses, my belly contracts—that tender, swollen spot below the seam of my jeans becomes the throbbing center of my universe. Tears are spilling from my eyes to run into my hair when the shameful pleasure finally ends.

His smile over me is dark and knowing.

“Show me your tits, Birdie,” he says, bracing up on his hands and then up a little more. One hand goes to the back of the seat to support himself, and the other drops to the fly of his trousers. “Pull up your shirt. Just like that. Sweet girl.”

I’m still crying a little as I do it, but I don’t know how to feel when my shame is answered by low, hot pulses in that small bundle of nerves between my legs. I don’t know how to feel when he looks at me like he’s looking at me right now, his eyes nearly black with pupil and his sculpted mouth open and his chest heaving.

The tendons and muscles in his forearm and hand flex as he frees his erection with rough, impatient movements and then wraps his fist around it.

There is a Birdie who is horrified at this, at this raft of sins she’s avoided with dutiful care for so long, and then there is the Birdie who pulls down the cups of her bra the moment Bell asks her to, who can’t stop staring at his face as his hand works over his hard flesh.

I like transgression.

I should pray so many rosaries about this—I should go straight to confession. Because I’m terrified that I like transgression too. I’m terrified that I like being transgressed.

“I used to do this with the panties I stole,” he says, his breathing harsh as his arm moves in fast, tight movements. “I’d stroke myself with them. Come on them. Pretend I was making you watch?—”

Bell grunts, and thick liquid stripes across my exposed belly and breasts, rope after rope of it, abruptly warm in the air-conditioned cab. It’s thick enough that it takes a long time to start sliding away from where it lands into a puddle between my breasts and in my navel. His hand slows down but he still gives himself a few indulgent jerks as he surveys my semen-spattered body.

Satisfaction glows in his eyes, and his voice is smug when he says, “I got some in your hair.”

I squeeze my eyes closed, the tears threatening even faster. His ejaculate feels like sin itself on my skin, like the wages of sin—death. And yet I lifted my hips for it. I cried out first and then showed him my breasts after.

A hot mouth comes to suck on a nipple and I startle, and then as he drags his fingers through his cooling orgasm and spreads it across my belly, I start to sob.

“It’s okay to cry, Birdie,” he murmurs. “You’re so pretty when you do.”

17

BIRDIE

Bell liveswhere the Kansas River and Missouri River meet, in a basin of warehouses and old factories. Far up—so far up that it seems like a fairy-tale city, like the spires of Cair Paravel or Minas Tirith—Kansas City glitters atop the steep river bluffs, the version of Kansas City that gets put on postcards and labels stuck to bottles of barbecue sauce. But down here, where Bell expertly navigates his truck through the warren of old stockyards and abandoned railroad buildings and barely used port facilities, this is where Kansas City started. Where Lewis and Clark camped on their way west. Where the money was made in cattle and trade and trains before anyone ever thought of making a town for a town’s sake.

I’ve been to the river bottoms a few times—usually on the hunt for reclaimed lumber—and I never could have imagined this being where Ryan Bell lives. I guess I thought…maybe a sleek penthouse with an imported kitchen and a far view over a forest of concrete and glass? Or one of those infill houses erected on the graves of old bungalows, all skinny and faux mid-century and magazine bait-y? The kind of place I imagined a buzzy young architect would gravitate toward.

But no. We park in front of a low-slung brick building on a street so potholed that the asphalt might as well be gravel at this point. An even lower-slung building of concrete is attached to the north, some graffiti on its walls. Several blocks south, I see a glut of cars; they’re near the antique stores that have worked their way into the river bottoms over the last decade. The cars remind me that it’s a Saturday. Other people are out enjoying a day off, shopping for things they don’t need, thinking idly about where to eat dinner. And I’m being driven to a cage with semen crusting in my hair like sea salt.

Ryan gets out of the truck and comes around my side to open my door.A true gentleman, I think bitterly. A gentleman who didn’t let me try to clean up the mess he made on me, who carefully replaced my bra and tank top as if to hold his ejaculate in place against my skin. The gore of my bra is still wet, and there’s a sticky spot on the front of my tank top with stiff edges where it’s started to dry.

I hide a flinch as he helps me step out of the truck and my torn-up calf takes my weight again, and I force myself to move easily, like someone unhurt, as I drop his hand and step back. I chance a look at his face, and my bitterness is doubled. It’s not fair that God made him so beautiful, so pure looking, in the shape of goodness itself. It’s not fair that he should look like thatandbe talentedandbe successfulandhave the ability to talk someone into selling their body for a year.

He grabs my duffel bag and slings it over his shoulder, locks the truck, and then uses a hand at the small of my back to guide me to a door in the middle of the brick building. It’s newly fitted, I can tell immediately, the wood neatly joined and freshly painted in a pretty green. There’s a transom window above, the glass unwarped and frosted for privacy. The whole building, actually, has a feeling of freshness—the old brick has been carefully repointed, and while some window glass is obviously original, the black metal casings are new.

I still expect something a little pretentious inside, perhaps a little bit of that infill-housing aesthetic, but when he unlocks the door and gestures for me to step inside, I find a space so interesting and layered and organic that I stop in the middle of the doorway just to stare.

He laughs. “Come on, little artist. You can stroke my ego, but after I’ve closed the door and kept some of the air-conditioning in my house.”

Housedoesn’t do it justice, but there’s almost no other word that’s right for it. I allow myself to be nudged in so Bell can shut the door, but I don’t make it very far. Just a few steps and then I’m arrested again, taking everything in with a pleasure I haven’t felt in so, so long—an artist’s pleasure. He hasn’t made this warehouse into a statement piece, into a pastiche or a mimicry of something it never was. He’s only made it more itself.

Transoms in the middles of the windows to let in air before the era of air-conditioning, a height that suggests the windows originally spanned two stories, with graceful, curved tops to support the weight of the brickwork above. The floors too are original, wide floorboards at the far end, where I think offices might have been once upon a time, and brick along the entryway and through the first half. One of the largest windows is behind me, tall and wide and arched—a freight door at one point, perhaps with a ramp for wagons to be rolled in. The sealed brick is worn and uneven, as if it’s been deformed with wheels and cargo over the years.

The ceilings are high, since most of the warehouse is open all the way up to the wooden rafters. Skylights let sunlight puddle on the brick and wood below, although Bell’s used a kind of glass that seems to filter out the worst of the heat. The walls are the same brick as the outside, and they’re made even more personal by the bookshelves mounted between the windows and along the large stretch of interior wall at the far end. Everywhere else, there is art big and small, some of it framed, some of it just stretched canvas.

Bell loves art.I knew it when he was my student, but this…this is more than a bachelor looking to impress coworkers and dates. This is someone who really, truly loves expression. Vision. Color and depth and point of view.