Page 115 of Devil

I knew white was a good choice for the trunks.

“I think it might be a workplace safety issue, Birdie.Anda moral issue. You’re obligated to take care of your neighbor when you see them in need. Good Samaritan and all that.”

I see her shoulders lift with an inhale and then set in a straight, determined line. She’s still blushing when she looks at me, but she’s able to start sketching for real now, the long, narrow ovals and whispers of lines that will eventually become my body.

I let up on flirting so she can work, happy just to watch her. The tuck of her lower lip between her teeth, the impatient way she brushes loose curls away from her face, only for them to tumble right back to where they were. The smudge of graphite that appears on her cheek. The way she tilts her head, and the adorable lines that bracket the bridge of her nose when she concentrates.

Eventually, she moves her chair, first one side, and then the other, only about ten minutes for each of those sketches.

Then she stands up. “Do you need a break? Water? A snack?”

It’s only been an hour, and I’ve been on my heels the entire time. My arms are aching a little from being spread for so long, but since they’re bound in place, the effort is minimal. “I’m fine, darling.”

She nods. She moves the chair in front of me again. “Okay,” she says softly. “You can suffer now.”

The effect of moving my weight forward is immediate but bearable at first. There’s a deep stretch in my arms and shoulders, and the pressure on my ankles, calves, and thighs is demanding, but I’m able to endure it, knowing that a body in anguish is what Birdie needs.

“Perfect,” she breathes, and I would gloat a little about the praise if it weren’t so much work just to keep myself upright. “You look perfect.”

After perhaps thirty minutes, I can feel the sweat at my hairline, threatening to slide down my neck and between my shoulder blades. A sheen of it over my chest and stomach, in the pockets of my knees and the folds where my thighs meet my body. It’s an effort now to hold myself up with my legs alone, and I find myself sinking occasionally, letting the restraints around my arms carry the bulk of my weight. Another thirty minutes, and I’m doing it with almost every breath, sinking down as I exhale and pushing myself up to inhale, using the leather restraint around my ankles to push up, even though each time I do, I can feel the lines of a deep tissue bruise forming even with the padding.

I don’t shift back on my heels, not even for a short break. It’s not that I think it would interrupt her sketching so materially that it can’t be done or even that I feel a need to hurt for her, but it’s that I want her to have this, all of it, everything she needs. The sweating, the trembling. The taut muscles that begin to flicker as fatigue creeps in.

A passion.

She’s so lost in mapping the torment that it’s not until she finishes that she seems to remember that the torment isn’t only on the page.

“Oh God, Ry,” she blurts, jumping to her feet.

I’m already easing back onto my heels and flinching as blood floods into my toes.

She quickly drags the stepladder over and unbuckles the restraint around my ankles and then climbs up to unbuckle the ones around my arms.

“Birdie, I’m okay,” I reassure her. My voice is hoarse from the exertion and the effort it took to breathe earlier. “Really.”

“You shouldn’t have stayed like that,” she frets as she moves to the restraint on my other arm. “You should have taken breaks.”

It hurts so fucking bad to force my arms down, the muscles in my shoulders screaming. “I could have anytime I wanted to. I chose not to.”

An unhappy pout appears on her mouth—one I doubt she even knows is there. “But why?”

“For the verisimilitude. Et cetera.”

She’s nearly level with me while she’s up on her stepladder, and when our eyes meet, I can see everything in her face—concern and tenderness and that forever ache she carries around inside her.

When she speaks, her voice is soft. “I don’t want you to actually hang on a cross for me, Ry.”

“Maybe not,” I agree. “But you deserve it.”

The next dayis the small studies—hands, feet, ribs, everything else. Nothing is too mundane for her to record in her sketchpad; at one point, she’s standing next to the cross and sketching the backs of my knees.

She catches me looking down at her with amusement. “What?” she asks, looking a little puzzled.

“Will anyone see the back of God’s knees, you think?”

“You never know,” she says matter-of-factly, going back to her sketching. “And more importantly, what if there’s something about the backs of his knees that makes me think differently about something else? How I’ll do his thighs or his loincloth or even the expression on his face? It’s the ordinary that seems so extraordinary, but only once it’s transferred somewhere new.”

I love these wonderful capsules of thought, softly pronounced but sincere. I used to dream of something exactly like this, something more than having her all to myself, something better, a future where her trust and happiness and creativity overflowed into infinity, and there would be as many people as she wanted around that infinity, but only I would get to have it constantly, casually, in the thousands of in-between moments that make up a life.