Page 44 of Devil

“The statue. You told me at Evelyn that it was going to be an angel. What changed your mind?”

She doesn’t answer right away, but I keep stroking her palm, letting my hand underneath warm hers, and finally she says, “The knot.”

“One defect in the wood, and it’s automatically satanic?” I ask a little wryly.

She doesn’t laugh, not really, but she does breathe a little through her nose, a small whisper of a ghost of a memory of a laugh. “No, almost anything will have a defect in it if you cut deep enough, and some defects are hints, really. About what the wood wants to be.”

“Was the spot on its hand a hint?”

She sighs. Her hair, curlier than I’ve seen it after her shower yesterday, moves silkily against my jaw. I smell apples and I want to take a bite out of her.

“Yes. The way I felt like it was supposed to be carved—like the angel was summoning someone…it looked like it was trying to hide something inside its fingers, like it wasn’t being honest with whomever it was summoning.”

“So you thought he needed to look like me?” I murmur into her ear, amused.

“Your honesty is also a kind of deceit.” Her voice is no longer tearful but it’s quiet. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who’s like that. Who makes the truth feel like a lie and a lie feel better than the truth.”

I start caressing her fingers, pausing on each fingertip to swirl around the roughened pad and then back down to the palm again. I love the calluses on her hands, the phantom furrows of splinters that have been dealt with, the short fingernails, the strength hidden inside those slender fingers. When I cast a glance up at the monitors without moving my head, I see that her blood pressure reading has slid down. Not by much but enough to stop flashing.

“That was probably unkind of me,” she says, probably feeling self-conscious because I haven’t replied yet. “I’m sorry.”

“Now, now, sweet bird,” I murmur between kisses against the shell of her ear. “Don’t go polluting your own honesty with deceit. You meant it, you believe it. And you don’t have to be afraid that I’m angry about it because I’m not. I think you’re quite right. I feel complimented by it, actually.”

“I can’t believe I told you about the Haldol…about the statue.” She shakes her head slowly. “I’ve never told anyone those things. I’ve barely even told God. Why you? When you’re?—”

She pauses, and I nip at her earlobe. “When I’m your devil, pretty bird?”

A noise in her chest.

“Maybe it’s precisely because I’m your devil,” I say to her. “I won’t make you be righteous for me because I don’t want your righteousness, and you don’t care what I think anyway because I’m the villain who’s using your good heart to acquire the wicked desires of my own.”

“My good heart,” she breathes out. “Yes, so good when I was willing to let a nurse scribble down words likeagitationandfailed de-escalationso everyone felt better about giving my mom or my sister a shot in the ass just to get them to…stop.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard her swear before. It’s shocking…and hot. I add it to the list of things I want to make her do for me, then focus on the matter at hand.

I take Birdie’s chin between my fingertips and gently turn her head to the side. Not too much—there’s no way she could twist enough to look me in the face like this—but enough that I can watch her as I speak. “I’ll make you a promise, and this promise is as honest as they come. I will not let anyone harm you while you’re here. Furthermore, I can promise thatyouwon’t harm anyone while you’re here. How can you? When none of it was your choice to begin with? And when it’s only us in here today?”

“I don’t know…” Her voice is quiet. Still miserable but not as bad as before. “I can tell myself that, I can think it over and over again, but it’s like I can’t make my body relax.”

I slide my hand up to her chest, intentionally not grazing a breast—even though the braless curve is right there.Buuuutcopping a feel through a hospital gown is an experience I’d hoped to save for a more cheerful occasion. Labor and delivery maybe. Something to do with breast milk.

Instead, I flatten my palm over her heart. It’s still beating too fast, but the way she melts into me, like the smallest shred of human touch is enough to lay her flat, makes me want to wrap her up and squeeze her and fuck her and never ever let her go.

“Let me be the worst thing that happens to you today,” I say softly, my other hand brushing her curls away from her face. “Let me be the worst thing that happens to you every day for the next three hundred and sixty-four days. Let me be that, and I’ll destroy anything else that even tries.”

She doesn’t speak for a few minutes until she finally lets out a long breath. Her heart is thumping more steadily under my palm now. “Okay. You can be the worst thing.”

The doctor comesin about twenty minutes later, elbowing past the curtain as she rubs her hands together. Traces of white sterilizing foam quickly disappear between her fingers.

“So sorry about that wait, Mary,” the doctor says as she comes to sit on the rolling stool next to the bed. “I’m Dr. Curtis, and I hear we’ve got something going on with your leg today? It looks like we had some high blood pressure earlier—very common in the emergency department, by the way—but it seems like we’re doing better now.” Dr. Curtis eyes me, looking vaguely entertained. “Can’t say I’ve seen this treatment for high blood pressure before, but it seems to be effective.”

A nurse rolls in a medical cart and leaves it in the corner of the room before she gets a pair of gloves for the doctor.

“You’ll need to—” the nurse starts to say to me, but Dr. Curtis waves a lenient hand before reaching for the gloves.

“He can stay as long as Mary’s okay with it. It won’t bother me and it might be comforting while we’re poking around.”

“I’d like him to stay,” Birdie says quietly—but firmly.