Page 9 of Devil

“The residency gives me a buffer, even if it’s not large, and I take some other work, like small pieces of furniture, to make up for what I might otherwise lose. But yes, I’m okay losing work. I might not be a priest or a nun or an anchoress, but I see this as a vocation too. This is my calling, so why would I denature that by making art that’s someone else’s to make?”

I’d been lulled into a flimsy kind of courage by him looking at the carvings more often than he looked at me, by his direct questions that were easy to answer, so when he looked at me again, his eyes intense and searching, I wasn’t ready. My face burned, and I moved my eyes down as quickly as I could, terrified that I’d said something ridiculous. Why else would he be looking at me like that? Why was he looking at me at all?

And why—why—did his looking feel like it did? Like the air around us had been turned to glass? Like the moment was a plucked string on a harp, thrumming still?

I was strange and broken because of course he felt none of this and was just a normal, friendly young man, and when he spoke again, his voice was still easy and informal and relaxed. “What’s this going to be?”

He was holding up the cloth covering a block of basswood. A fully carved hand emerged from the otherwise untouched surface, the first finger slightly outstretched, like it was indicating something. Summoning someone.

“It’s supposed to be an angel,” I said, trying to just be like everyone else in the world who can have a regular conversation without panicking that they were screwing up somehow. “It’s hard to find American linden—basswood—in the size I need, and I usually have to laminate pieces together to get a block I can carve from. But this came from my house, actually, a tree that blew over during a storm eight years ago. It felt like God wanted me to have it, and when I had it taken to the mill to get it cleaned up, the wood was so pure and unknotted inside that it felt like an angel was all it could be.”

“You wouldn’t save this pure, God-given wood for a statue of Jesus? Or Mary?” he asked, finally letting the cloth drop.

“They were human,” I replied softly. “I like the wood to show their humanity, so I don’t mind impure materials.”

“Why stop after the hand? I feel like an angel would be the easiest to carve because it can be anything.”

“That’s less freeing than you might think.”

“Have you already had someone sit for sketches? That’s part of your process, right? Using a live model?”

I nodded. Somehow I’d shuffled closer to the wall of the studio, a rabbit pressing close to the side of its cage. “It helps me make them real. But I haven’t found someone to be the angel yet, and I thought maybe I could get started anyway, but I was wrong. I’d rather wait for the right model than waste a tree I climbed on as a child, and…well, I’m not sure I even know what this wood wants to be anyway. Look at the inside of the hand.”

Bell squatted and peered up. “Oh.”

The wood—which had seemed to be miraculously unblemished when we’d readied it at the mill—had hidden inside itself a secret knot. Tight and hard and coffee brown. I almost never started a project without a sketch, this was the only time, and it felt like God had been tweaking my nose for my hubris. Here was an angel’s hand, elegant from every angle save for underneath, where it looked like the angel had scraped up a handful of shadows to fling at the world.

“I have to think about it longer,” I added unnecessarily.

“It would be a strange hand for an angel,” Bell agreed as he stood again. He reached up and ruffled his curls as he took another look around the studio. The hem of his shirt lifted around one of his hips as he did, revealing a thin wedge of firm, suntanned skin. The groove of an iliac furrow. The gone-in-an-instant glint of gold hair.

A peculiar awareness trickled from the place below my ribs and down into my belly.

No.

I couldn’t?—

God, please, no. Don’t let that be real.

I ducked my head, feeling queasy shame rise with the fresh embarrassment. He was twenty-two, and I would be thirty within the year. He wasmy student. I could not—I could not be aware of him like that. It was one thing to notice his beauty, the breadth of his shoulders, his hair. I carved human likenesses—it was more or less my job to notice those things—but to feellust?—

A sin. It was a sin.

Lust was an infrequent iniquity of mine, but when it did curl itself into my life, it was always in a shocking way. The dreams that woke me up with hard, wet pulses between my legs, dreams with more than two people, dreams about strangers, dreams about other women, dreams where I was used like an object…dreams that made me afraid something was wrong with me.

And then there’d been the party. Something Kaitlyn had dragged me to, a raucous melee at a frat house where my shyness had the perverse effect of gathering people’s attention around me. At some point, a girl was dared to give me a lap dance, a dare that was supposed to cheer me up or loosen me up or induct me into the wonders of the house party or something else equally unlikely. A drunk Kaitlyn had goaded me into putting my hands on the girl’s hips as she sat in my lap, and the girl had winked at me as she started throwing herself forward, grinding into me to the cheers of the partygoers. For one of the very few times in my life, the awareness of other people had faded away and my only thoughts were of her hips in my hands, the stretch of the denim over her backside, the shimmery gel on her cheeks and chest. Intrusive fantasies had exploded and piled like popcorn in my mind. I could have leaned forward and pressed my face against her breasts; I could have slid my hand behind the button of her jeans and down into her panties; I could have woven my fingers into her hair and pulled her face down to mine. Just like in my unconfessed dreams, there had been no right or wrong in that moment—nothing but possibilities and a squeezing, imperial ache beneath my belly button that demanded a satisfaction I had no idea how to deliver. It had only been after the party, as I’d driven a puking Kaitlyn home, that the burning in my body had finally smoldered, turned to ash, and cooled into bitter shame.

And now here it was again, that imperial ache, and for astudent, a boy seven years younger than me. Twenty-two and still paying the extra fees on car insurance. Twenty-two and with every girl on campus making eyes at him, every girl who was happy and young and normal, who wasn’t reclusive and awkward and dull and too old to notice someone like Bell.

It was wrong,andit was pitiable.

He had to go, or I had to go; someone had to go. I couldn’t—I couldn’t handle what it felt like to be perceived by him, and I certainly couldn’t handle this new…responsiveness.

“I forgot that I’m supposed to be”—I searched my mind for anything, any lie, hoping God would count a lie as the lesser sin—“at the department mixer.”

I’d drifted to the far wall and the old chalkboard that had been mounted decades ago for some unknowable campus reason. And Bell had somehow drifted with me. He was only four or five feet away now, which was too close. He was far too close.

He smiled at me. It wasn’t the largest smile I’d seen from him, but his dimples were deep and his eyes sparkled.