Page 93 of Devil

“The pond was where Dad proposed,” Birdie says softly. “He built a trellis there for her, and a wooden swing. He planted cardinal flowers and asters on the banks, and he’d bring home bouquets of them in the summer, tied together with twine.”

And that’s all she says about the pond.

“I didn’t become like you,” she says after she’s gathered her thoughts. “But it was impossible to hope the same as the other people my age, impossible to dream the same. It was like I had to pay a cost for the strength to get through everything terrible that had happened, and the cost I paid was seeing the world the way I used to. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child. When I was sixteen, I had no choice but to put childish things away. I had to burn a part of myself alive to fuel what it took to get Mom and me through those two years after Dad’s death. And it wasn’t until I graduated from college when I realized that I’d burned something I’d wanted to keep. Something soft and—and?—”

I can feel that she’s crying against my chest again, and I can’t hold her any tighter than I am already, but I want to. I want to hold her so tightly that we have to breathe together, like one body, one flesh.

“It’s so hard to forgive God for that,” she breathes. Her shoulders are shaking. “And sometimes I think,How ridiculous. You can forgive him for Grandma and Grandpa, for Dad and for Mom, but not for what it cost to make it through?But there was a Birdie who died too, and there’s no heaven for her, no resurrection of the body or the spirit. She’s just gone, and the person left behind is flattened and lesser, and there will never be a way to see that old Birdie again. Not even in paradise, much less here on earth.”

I stroke her hair away from her face and then reluctantly loosen my other arm. She doesn’t loosen her grip, though, clinging to me like she’s a shipwreck survivor and I’m the wreckage keeping her above the waves. “The Birdie she left behind is exquisite. The Birdie she left behind has my whole heart.”

That does make her let go enough to look up at me.

She doesn’t speak.

“I’ll never know exactly what God demanded from you, but I can say that the person you became isn’t flattened, isn’t lesser, because that person isyou. Curious and intense and unafraid of darkness because there’s a part of you that’s made of light. God still talks to you, but that’s not what makes you fascinating. No, I think God still talks to youbecauseyou’re fascinating, Birdie. Because you’re able to make suffering look as resplendent as love and make love feel as necessary as air.”

And fuck it, I wasn’t going to tell her this for months and months; I was going to wait until we were closer to the end, when I’d be sure I had her heart cradled in my palms, but I can’t hold on to the words anymore. They’re curling out of me like smoke from a censer, hallowed and thick.

“I love you, Birdie Cooper,” I say, and Birdie’s lovely lips part in stunned disbelief. “I love you like I’m being crucified with it. And you don’t have to say anything, and I don’t expect you to say it back to me, certainly not tonight. But I need you to know that thislesserversion of you is the version that has made a devil out of me, seven years ago and also now, and I am haunted by every part of you, captivated and devoted. I love you. I love you.”

She doesn’t say it back. But she pushes herself into my arms and kisses me with a gorgeous, desperate kiss that tastes like tears and champagne and the city at night, high up among the lights, wearing secrets and black satin.

I take her home and fuck her after that, once in the ass, and then I bring her into the shower and fuck her pussy while I have her pinned against the tiled wall. And the whole time, I’m free to tell her the single most essential truth:

I love her.

I love her so fucking much.

And three weeks later, I come downstairs to the desk in my home office and find a small piece of wood about six inches long and three inches tall resting atop my keyboard. In looping script, set among finely chiseled pomegranate halves with spilling seeds and trumpet-shaped blossoms, are carved three fateful words.

Who needs a rosary when you can trace those words with your fingers over and over again?

Who needs prayer when the three most important words in the world are indelibly etched onto your heart?

I love you.

She loves me.

39

BIRDIE

He loves me.

And even now, a month after he informed me that he loved me like he was being crucified with it, I have trouble believing it.

Logically, I know I should believe it, there’s no reason not to. He tells me he loves me like he’s worried I’ll forget if he doesn’t. I wake to him moving over me, breathing “I love you” in the dark; he says it as I kneel between his feet and warm his cock with my mouth; he groans the words as he pushes me against a wall the minute he gets home, one big hand in my hair and his other hand already at his fly.

He says it when he brings me waffles, when he watches me work in the studio, as we’re falling asleep, and as we’re waking up with Lilith purring like a car engine on his pillow. He texts it; he writes it on notes he leaves around the warehouse and tucked under my tools in the studio; he traces it on my arm when we watch TV with my head in his lap. He says it in every kind of voice—tender, amused, hoarsely desperate—and with every possible light in his eyes too. He says, “I love you,” and I’ll feel so cherished and safe, and then he’ll say it again a little while later, and hearing it will feel like he already has his teeth on my neck, like there are already handprints on my bottom and I’m on the verge of one of those rending, shaming orgasms he gives me.

I don’t say it as often as he does. Not because I don’t feel it—if anything, I feel it too much, too intensely, know quite well it is destroying me—but because every time I say it aloud, a small and dismal part of me wonders if I’ll end up thinking of that very moment at some point in the future, if I’ll be teeming with embarrassment and keen regret as I do. I wonder if I’m planting the seeds of my own heartbreak, participating in this, accepting it as real, and then I’ll have no one left to blame but myself when it turns out that Bell was lying to me, that he only fancied himself in love with me, or that he did love me but still wanted things to end when our year was up. Or perhaps he’ll meet someone new, someone who isn’t miserable in all but the narrowest social situations, someone without baggage. Someone his age or maybe even a little bit younger, someone without the stray silver in their hair or the faint lines around their eyes, someone who has nothing but promise and potential at their feet.

Eating the forbidden fruit of his love feels like danger enough, but enjoying it? Savoring it?

It would be daring God to choke me with the largest bite.

So. Logically, there is no reason to doubt Bell, to doubt that he loves me exactly as he says he does, but fear is a powerful thing, and even though I’ve papered it over with endurance and exhaustion, fear is almost all I am. The struts, the hinges, the mortises, the tenons.