Page 87 of Devil

He’s right.Within minutes of chatting up each of the two council members he’s chosen, they’re dazzle-eyed and hanging off his every word. And while I was initially terrified that any introduction would lead to scrutiny and attention, Bell easily steers the conversation away from me and our relationship back to the city itself, to the gala’s purpose—something about an initiative to incubate women-owned businesses—and eventually to the potential shelter.

If I tell them that you’re the one who sculpted the Lucifer in front of city hall, they’ll be lined up to the mobile bar upstairs to talk to you, he told me on our way to the event.

I shook my head before he even finished speaking.No, thank you.

Okay, little bird. But there’s only so long that you can keep your light under a bushel. People should know what a genius you are.

You can tell them I’m an artist, I said reluctantly, though even that much made me panic. I wasn’t sure why, since it would take more than a cursory Google search to come across the ombudsman report, and Bell’s name was redacted throughout to protect his privacy. ButBirdie Cooper, Artistin the right conversational circles in Kansas City…there could be someone who remembered the story of the woman who was caught with her student.

And then the shame I’d feel if they remembered, and the helpless anger at being made to feel the shame at all, and then the despair, that I was still so weak and so unable to trust in God that I couldn’t face even the possibility of public censure without terror…

I told Bell all this without him coaxing me to, and he was so pleased that I shared my feelings with him that he reached over to find my hand and draw it fondly to his mouth, kissing it from fingertips to wrist.

And when you feel anger, he asked,are you angry with me too? Since I’m the reason for the shame to begin with?

The way he asked, with genuine curiosity, made it easier to confess.

Sometimes, I said.

He nodded, and there was something sad in it, I thought, but I couldn’t have said exactly what. His mouth stayed soft and his eyes clear and focused on the road ahead. But it was there nonetheless, in the set of his shoulders, in the way he pulled my hand back to his mouth for another lingering kiss.

But I should have trusted Bell more when it comes to these sorts of things, because whenever he confides my artistic profession to a guest, he does it with enough boyfriendly pride to make me blush and also enough cultured ambiguity that whomever we’re speaking to would feel provincial asking more questions. I feel some anxiety knowing that Bell’s mysterious introductions might stoke curiosity rather than smother it dead, but maybe I’ll be gone before the consequences catch up with me. After nine more months, I’ll have disappeared from Bell’s life and his world of galas and happy family dinners, and it won’t matter what anyone thinks of me. I’ll once again be a gas station clerk in the middle of nowhere, trying my hardest to live without bothering anybody, without needing anyone at all.

I trail beside him for over an hour, fingers pressed tight to the stem of my champagne flute so I don’t smudge the top, trying my best to listen and nod and smile when appropriate. Whenever I think it doesn’t look desperate or unnatural, I find a way to seek out the solid, warm strength of Bell for comfort. I curl my faintly trembling fingers around his bicep or press my shoulder against his or search out his hand to hold.

He loves me seeking affection from him and he doesn’t hide it, a smile on his lips every time I touch him, his eyes finding my face with such open lust and adoration that it makes me blush all over again. Sometimes he’ll even interrupt what he’s saying just to drop a kiss onto my hair or my cheek. It earns us chuckles andawws from whomever he’s talking to. One of the city council members he’s chatting up makes a nostalgic remark about young love, which jars me a little. I’m hardly young—although maybe I seem that way to the older council member—but hearing the wordlovemakes me heartsick for reasons I can’t bear to contemplate for any longer than it takes to forget them.

Whenever it becomes too much, when I feel too looked at, when it abruptly seems louder, even though I know it’s not actually any louder than it was before, and I can’t filter all the different layers of sound into coherence—the music, the clanking, the distant chatter, words being spoken to Bell and me—I press my shoulder against Bell’s body and let my breathing drift down to the steady hum at the base of my spine.

For anyone else, it might be humiliating and miserable to have something jammed in their bottom while they pretend to be calm, but my anxiety has always felt like the worst kind of exposure, has always stripped my sense of self down to nothing but anatomy anyway. Heart rate, respiration, sweat. Churning guts and singed nerve endings. The buzzing doesn’t add to my biological distress simply because there’s no way to add to it; my biology is already as distressed as it can be without me curling up on the floor and screaming into the travertine tile. But bizarrely, the presence of the toy gradually, by degrees, begins to calm me. It’s a locus for the distress, something I can actually perceive, and it feels like…like Bell. Like his attention, like his presence, like how it felt to have him hold me on the hospital bed and murmur in my ear.

Let me be the worst thing that happens to you this year.

It’s meditative almost. A kind of prayer, except the beads aren’t being held by my fingers.

“You’re doing so well. I’m so proud of you” comes Bell’s pleased voice near my ear. We’re about to approach another clump of guests, but he’s leading us slowly there so he can more easily nuzzle my jaw as we walk.

“I’m awkward,” I protest, although it’s a fainter protest than it would have been an hour ago. Having him next to me the entire time, having the rumbling, internal reminder that only he is allowed to be the worst thing to happen to me, has been so much more pacifying than I’d anticipated. I suppose this is what people use emotional support animals for, but instead of a dog, I have an angel-faced sociopath.

“No, Birdie,” he says with another fond nuzzle. “You never got to hang around these types before you left Evelyn, so you don’t know them like I do. They think you’re quiet because you’re mysterious and artsy. They’re eating it up.”

Perhaps that’s the difference between being anxious and then being anxious in a designer gown while hanging on the arm of a handsome and magnetic bachelor. With the trappings of wealth and with the interest of someone like Ryan Bell, the fear doesn’t look like fear at all but cultivated reserve. Indifference.

We reach the group, and Bell introduces me, ingratiates himself into the conversation with such smiling masculine charm that he has them rapt and eager to please in minutes, and I’m almost—well, okay, I’m not havingfunbut I’m almost not unhappy. Almost okay.

Slivers of enjoyment slip through the tension—the incense-like scent of the man beside me, the warmth of his hand on the skin left exposed by the gown’s plunging back. The buzzing reminder of where I’m tender and how he made me that way.

I’m able to appreciate how elegant and vigorous he looks in his perfectly fitted tuxedo, how it sets off his shoulders and strains politely around his biceps and thighs. I’m even able to shyly appreciate the feeling of being dolled up, the swish of the dress’s hem on the floor, the way Bell’s eyes keep finding me and burning a path from my pinned-up curls to my heels and back again.

And then I see her.

It takes a minute, like it usually does with someone you haven’t seen in a long time, that flicker of recognition finally igniting into full clarity, and then it takes another minute to convince myself that the expensive, sophisticated-looking woman across the room really is Kaitlyn Masterson.

37

BIRDIE

Her hair isa glossy chestnut color, and she’s in a fitted one-shouldered gown that shows off her lean frame while also making sure the viewer’s impression is of money and good taste rather than her body itself. She’s wearing a cross at the base of her neck—delicate, studded with glittering gems, diamonds maybe—small enough that it doesn’t compete with the structured fabric bow at one shoulder. No scapular, no wedding ring.