Page 10 of Devil

My stomach swooped. My cheeks burned.

“We both know you aren’t going to the department mixer,” he said gently. “If you were going, you’d already be there. You would have been there ten minutes before it started. Even I’m not there because I don’t need to give the alumni yet another tour of the fine arts facilities and then show them where the donation envelopes are. And neither do you.”

“I—” He was correct on all counts, including his rather cynical take on how the mixers functioned. But it wasn’t at all how I imagined him thinking about events like these; he always seemed like such an earnest and amiable participant in all of it. “You’re so good at it” was how I finished, pointlessly. But I couldn’t wrap my head around that, how he could be so effortlessly good at things like networking and facilities tours and also sound so privately bored by them.

I was about to renew my lie—God, I’m so sorry—just to escape, but then Bell walked over to a chair I’d built for the sole purpose of looking at statues from pew height. He dropped his satchel on the seat and then braced his hands on the back. When he looked up at me, that smile was still on his face and his fingers drummed idly on the wooden back.

“Did you like my pomegranates, Birdie?”

5

BIRDIE

I stared at him.His smile widened, revealing the edges of his straight, white teeth, and then his eyes dropped down to the pomegranate still clutched in my hand.

“I thought you might,” he said. “May I?”

He was reaching for the pomegranate. I was incapable of movement or even independent thought, and he moved slowly to take the fruit from me since I wasn’t offering it. He wandered across the space to my workbench as I stared down at my empty hand.

Bell.

The pomegranates had come from Bell.

I didn’t understand.

It made no sense—and not in awhat could have motivated himway but in athis authentically has no logic to itway. He’d given no sign it was him all semester, and it wasn’t as if we’d had a particularly close bond as student and teacher, and who would noticemeof all people? Who would give gifts tome?

Maybe he felt bad. That had to have been it.

He saw me struggling with even the most basic social interactions, and he’d wanted to encourage me because he was friendly and nice like that. A small gift to hearten me when I was obviously failing at what should have been an easy job.

The simplicity of it was comforting, but I couldn’t feel relieved, not when he was still here, using one of my knives to cut the top off the fruit and score its flesh for easy tearing. Distantly, I noted that he cleaned the blade with a rag from the bench, and I was grateful for it, that there wouldn’t be sticky juice on my knife after he left.

His stride was as easy as his smile, and he held the fruit out as he approached.

“I wouldn’t want to be the reason you’re not able to eat it today,” he said.

I needed to speak. I had to speak. I could not be rendered speechless by the strong hand holding the pomegranate, by a semester’s worth of juicy, red seeds. But I had no way to process this, process the fondcluckhe made when I didn’t take the fruit, process the way he stopped in front of me with the fruit between us. Like an offering. A gift.

“It’s okay, Birdie.” His voice was soothing now, like I was the young one and he the elder, like I was the kitten that had darted under my desk when it was supposed to be our live drawing subject in February and was only coaxed out at last by Bell’s deep voice and gentle hands. It had slept in his hoodie the rest of the class.

And now those gentle hands were pressing into the pomegranate, thumbs digging into the middle, tendons flexing, fingers unsettlingly strong, easily parting the fruit but not truly separating it. Just opening it up so that he could fish a few seeds from the inside.

“I’ll help you,” he told me, and then those fingers were at my mouth.

I stared at him, my heart flinging itself against my ribs, my breathing shallow, feeling like I was in one of those unchaste dreams I was so ashamed of.

“Open,” he said, and for the first time, I heard something beyond friendliness in his voice, something arrogant and chilling, and maybe it was the surprise that made me obey and part my lips.

Or maybe it was because I wanted to.

He pushed the seeds past my lips and teeth and onto my tongue. The pad of his first finger dragged along the inside of my lower lip as he slowly pulled his finger free, and the ball of his throat lifted and then dropped.

“Chew,” he said, and I did. The juice burst tart and bright on my tongue. His eyes were everywhere: my lips, my jaw, my throat. “Swallow,” he said, and I swallowed.

He swallowed too, watching me.

Looking back, I can’t be upset with myself about this. Even knowing what came next, what else could I have done? Spat the seeds onto the floor? Held them in my mouth like a stubborn dog? But it was a threshold, opening and swallowing for him, and I crossed it with some willingness, and he noticed. Oh, he noticed.