Page 85 of The Devil

I kiss her mouth, draw back to glance at her face, then kiss it again. She’s breathless when I pull back enough to undress her. Undress myself. I close my mouth over hers again and walk her into the shower, the glass stall big enough for the two of us, and there, beneath water pelting down on us, I kiss her hard, lips smashed against lips, hands tugging at hair, mine and hers. I draw back only long enough to catch my breath, my heart racing as fast as hers.

My cock is a steel rod between us, and I grip one hip to lift her. She uses that momentum to wrap both legs around my waist and, our eyes wide open, I thrust in to the hilt and hear her grunt as she pulls me to herself, thighs clamped around me, drawing me closer, closer, ever closer.

“Jet. Jet. I…” she says between kisses.

“You what?” I ask, one hand at the back of her head cushioning it from the wall. “You what, baby?”

She draws back and I stop kissing her and look at her. Our faces are inches apart when I kiss her.

“I love you, too. I have loved you for a long time. I want you to know that,” she says.

I smile so wide it hurts my face and as if it were possible, my cock grows even harder and when Amal’s eyes start to roll back and her mouth opens in that way I’m learning it does when she comes, I hold her tight to me and watch her. I watch her beautiful face lost in ecstasy. I look at those perfect lips that just said the best words anyone has ever said to me.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

29

AMAL

Ilove him. I’ve loved him for a long time. I don’t think anyone else ever had a shot.

Wrapping a towel around myself, I walk into the bedroom to get dressed. Sev stopped in to talk to Jet but I asked them to take it to the other room telling them I needed to get dressed anyway. That I’d walk down to his room in a minute.

The real reason, though, is I want to get a look at the diary, and I need to be alone to do it. Because even now, just thinking about it makes my heart race in uneasy anticipation.

The moment I’m back in the bedroom, I see it again, those roses, the vines, the thorns. That small bird.

It’s as if the vines have grown while I’ve been away, creating a prison for me. A beautiful, terrible prison.

I quickly pull on a sweater and a pair of jeans and, barefoot, I carry my purse to the bed and sit down. There, I take out my mother’s diary and open it, shivering a little as if the temperature in the room just dropped by ten degrees.

Tucking my feet under me, I open the notebook and flip through the pages. I’ve read them all a hundred times over. I can recite them by heart. But it’s not the words I’m looking at now. It’s the doodles. I sometimes forget how young my mom was when she had me. Younger than I am now. She wasn’t even nineteen and, in many ways, she was a child. I got the impression from her diary that she’d lived a very sheltered life. An only child, she’d hated her home life. She outright said that. But it was in the year she got pregnant with me that she grew afraid of it.

Afraid in it.

The diary wasn’t in perfect condition when I found it, so I flip through to the page I’m looking for, the one with the clearest drawing of the pattern I recognized. Because the vines don’t simply overlap. There is a structure to what is meant to look chaotic. A shape repeated endlessly taking form in a design that is repeated here now, in my room, all around me.

Encircling me.

Ensnaring me.

Vines and vines and more vines, roses placed one per row, petals pierced and bleeding.

And that bird.

In my mother’s drawing, that bird, too, is bleeding. In my mother’s drawing, that bird’s wings are still mid-flight as it impales itself upon a thorn like a sacrifice.

I look at the headboard. I match the pattern in the diary. There is only one difference here. The bird is not midflight. Or, perhaps once, it was. But now, as I peer closer and touch the polished wood, I see the flaw where the wing is lost, broken off.

In the center of my mother’s drawing there are letters that spell out what I believe is a name. Fairbairn.

I’d been looking for the family Fairbairn of which there are several in Scotland. I’m trying to get the timing right because what makes sense, what my brain finds logical, is that this man, this Fairbairn, was the man responsible for getting her pregnant. I think he must be my father.

Someone knocks and opens the door at the same time, that knock barely a courtesy.