Page 64 of Devil

“I think you like knowing that you overwhelm me.” I sniffle as more tears slip free.

He laughs and kisses me deeper, his fingers on my chin, his head tilted just so. “Surely that goes without saying. But nothing you feel will ever bother me, Birdie. Even if it’s anger or hate directed at me. I just want to lick every feeling you have, and I wish I could just be inside you. Just bein youandknowyou andhaveyou.”

He’s not talking about penetration, but his voice has gone breathless and he’s quaking with arousal anyway, like it’s unbearably erotic to think of being that close to me. Not just my body but my heart and mind too.

Itisunbearably erotic; my skin is tingling and my belly is clenching and I can feel my pulse between my legs, swelling my clit and making everything flushed and slick.

I remember everything the social workers told Busy. I know this is dangerous; I know that just because Bell is earnest doesn’t mean he’s not manipulative too. But he’s already warned me about that, hasn’t he? Or something very like it. Transgressing, violating, et cetera.

Yes, he’s warned me, and the trouble is that I don’t think I have it in me to care. This—the desire, the happiness, the not-alone-ness—it’s worth any price.

It’s not as if I have a garden to be banished from anyway.

“Birdie,” Bell says softly, his thumb rubbing back and forth over my tear-slicked cheek. “I’m sorry, but I need you to unzip your pants. I can’t wait until we get upstairs.”

28

BIRDIE

I wake to splitting pleasure.

I arch, half dreaming still, everything feeling delicious, and then I’m gathered up in powerful arms and rolled onto my stomach, where I’m pinned to the bed and repenetrated with enough force that I feel like I’m being cleaved like a log. I moan.

“Shh” comes a deep voice. “Just a minute longer.”

Bell moves over me, his hips moving slowly, almost lazily, but he’s so, so deep, and I think he played with me before he started using me because I’m wet enough that he can glide in and out with no trouble.

He’s close, his hard form trembling above me, his exhales coming short and fast, the hands holding me down turning demanding and cruel. He goes taut and hisses, his erection thickening and then jerking inside me. He holds me down the entire time and for a moment or two after.

It feels good, being held down, feeling him succumb to his release. In a bizarre way, it even feels good not to climax myself—or notgoodmaybe but hot. By the time he slides out of me with a reluctant grunt, I’m squirming under him, trying to coax friction from any source possible.

He gets up and I hear movement in the bathroom—he’s getting rid of the condom—and then he comes back in and sits on the edge of the bed. I close my eyes as the frustrated desire claws at me and try to remind myself that this arrangement is for him; I’m his plaything. I’ve agreed to that.

It’s just—it would weirdly be easier if it weren’t so exciting tobehis plaything, if I could lie back and think of wood carving, then get up and go about my day after, no more affected than I’d been after the gynecologist’s exam on Wednesday.

“Roll over for me,” Bell says in a low voice, and I obey, too drowsy and far too aroused to care about how very naked I am, how debauched I must look with my blushing, wet cunt and mussed hair.

Bell’s eyes practically glow as he looks me over, but instead of touching the places where his eyes linger, he takes ahold of my hand and then guides it to my stomach, where he uses my fingers to draw slow, lingering circles.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Like I want to…finish.” Even sleepy, even inflamed past all reason, I still feel clumsy talking about the things we do.

All my life, I thought wickedness must be so effortless for the wicked, and now here I am, a Tamar, a Magdalene, and I can barely speak the wordorgasmaloud.

Bell keeps drawing those circles with my own fingers, patiently, deliberately, but his eyes are fixed on my face. “I’ll give you a turn, pretty bird, since I’m nice like that, but what I really need to know is how you feel about being fucked while you’re unconscious.”

Oh. That.

It was the second thing we talked about the night we had intercourse for the first time, that and me learning how to masturbate, and I remember sitting on this very bed trying to absorb this new depravity of his while also absorbing that he was asking for mypermission. Which was simultaneously a glimmer of something better in him and also something darker too, because if I agreed, if I said,Why, yes, Ry, you can use me to get yourself off while I’m sleeping, then I couldn’t pretend he was the only depraved one in this arrangement, could I? Because he was so explicit and intentional about telling me what he’d like to do while also carving it out from the rest of our free-use activities. He explained that this would never involve drugs, even something over the counter that could make me drowsy, and he’d never do it if I’d had more than a drink or two before I fell asleep. He told me that I could say no and he wouldn’t be angry; he told me I could say no and it would in no way compromise the other terms of our agreement.

Why ask for my consent for this when my consent is taken for granted everywhere else?I’d asked him quietly.

He didn’t look away; he didn’t look ashamed of himself or his perversions. That’s one of the most magnetic things about him, I think, that even when you realize the angel in front of you is only bright because he’s the Morning Star himself, there is such an honesty in his sins, such a generosity in his greed, that you almost feel warmed by it. Clarified by it. You want it for yourself—that lack of shame, that openness. You’re grateful to have it directed at you.

Have you forgotten?he asked gently, smile lines fanning out from his eyes and down his cheeks.Any other time, you can tell me you want to leave.

I couldn’t speak if I were asleep; I wouldn’t be ablechoose. It might be a distinction without a difference in an arrangement where my role was to be a vessel for his lust, his object to use whenever he wanted, but it was a distinction that mattered to him. My ability to speak our little code and detonate this arrangement at any time—that mattered to him.