Page 28 of Devil

I’m about to pop them into my mouth when I hear an amused voice say, “I think you’re only supposed to take two at a time.”

I turn but even before I see him, my body somehow knows, my body somehow remembers, because my heart is slamming against my ribs before I even see the blue eyes, the beauty mark, the blond hair.

Straightblond hair at the moment, straight like the actor from that show…in a haircut as Old Hollywood as the clothes he’s wearing. I think this is the man Amber saw at the bar yesterday.

And I don’t know how this can be, and I don’t understand why, but that man is Ryan Bell.

12

BELL

She staresat me with those giant, prairie sky eyes as I stroll deeper into her barn, running my fingers lightly over the board she still has half routed on the table.

Seven years.

Seven years, and I don’t know how many thousands of dollars, and she was right here all along. Thirty minutes away from Evelyn, forty minutes away from where I sleep at night. She was right here, in one of the very first places I looked.

And now I’m right here too. I smile at the thought.

She swallows.

“Mr. Bell,” she says, and oh my God, her voice,her fucking voice. Soft and shy and sincere. Hearing it makes my hands shake.

I slide them into my pockets so she can’t see, and I take a step forward. “I think I told you once to call me Ry.”

She takes a deep breath, like I’ve asked her to hand over the deed to the farm. “Ry,” she says softly. It’s nearly a whisper.

I’m getting hard and I’ve only been in the same room with her for about two minutes. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this conversation.

“Why are you here? Are you looking for Busy?”

“Your sister?” I’m genuinely puzzled by this. I mean, yes, I’ve looked for her sister over the years but only to findher.

She drops her eyes as soon as they meet mine. She’s so far beyond shy, so lonely and strange, and my hands are shaking so hard, all of me is shaking. I want her so badly, and now I have her and it’s only the barest fucking shred of decency keeping me from letting her know right now on the ancient floorboards of this fucking barn.

“Someone said you were looking for her at the bar downtown.”

“I was looking for you,” I say. “Red hair, Cooper.They must have assumed I meant your sister.”

Blue eyes dart up to me and then dart back down. “Then why are you looking forme?” she asks.

I dare to move a step closer. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I say. “Since that night. You left before I could find you again.”

A flash of anger at the memory. They’d shuttled me into a dim room to initial some kind of safe student protocol—a gesture to show how Evelyn goes above and beyond to protect its students. Admirable, I suppose, although I was half a second from asking them why I was supposed to give a shit. Did they want a cookie for protecting legal adults while they still passed around predatory priests like a baton at a relay race? Did they want me to be grateful when no one had ever bothered to protect my sister when it mattered?

But I’d allowed myself to be trauma-informedly deposed and handed paper after paper about all the reports I could file, all the resources available to me for counseling and whatever the fuck else, because I thought playing along would get me back to Birdie faster. I thought my cooperation and honest recounting of what had happened would make them see that they’d totally misunderstood. Birdie Cooper was still the same reclusive, pious genius they’d thought she was.I’dbeen the one to follow her, approach her…press her.I’dkissedher.I’dtried to fuckher.

I wasn’t innocent. She was.

But the safe student protocol team didn’t see it that way. They told me that there were too many power dynamics at play for me to have truly consented to kissing her or pocketing her underwear. She was seven years older; she’d been my studio teacher; there was no way that her power over the grade book couldn’t have been a factor. And regardless, with her age and position at the college, it was her responsibility to keep things appropriate.

I’d wanted to laugh at that. They were so intent on the minutiae of consent that they’d cheerfully somersaulted right back into rape culture. It was her fault. She should have stopped me. She should have fought me off, but she didn’t, so now the blame and the consequences would be poured over her like boiling oil while the boy withsuch a bright futurewalked away with some brochures and the personal, heartfelt apology of his dean.

I hated them for it. For this theater of transparency and safety when they did nothing about the frat functions where girls left in the early hours of the morning with smeared mascara and trembling chins, nothing about the econ professor who sometimes insisted on driving his students home to their apartments and then wouldn’t leave, nothing about the deacon who’d been briefly suspended and then reinstated with no explanation as to why.

Of everyone there, I did think Father Alvarez genuinely wanted to keep his students safe and wanted to steer the Church towardreparative justiceor whatever one of the brochures had called it. But even a very good man rarely knows the failings of his own goodness, and Father Alvarez didn’t seem to appreciate that the only sexual sin he was intent on litigating was the sin that had been witnessed by his donors. Everything else that happened was happening offstage, and apparently that was the limit of God’s caring.

When I finally escaped and found Birdiegone, I’d been livid. Livid with the people who’d kept me trapped in a room, yes, but with Birdie most of all, because where did she think she was going without me? After I’d fed her pomegranate seeds and then unraveled her pure little heart with two fingers and some teeth on her neck?