Page 3 of On the Menu

“Well, it’s common, not universal,” he muttered. Well, he could try again. “The night is young, Cara Cat. What would you like to do?”

“Huh?”

“Do you want to sit in this hole-in-the-wall roadhouse and eat burgers while Bruce-the-Oaf makes passes at women way out of his league, or do you want to do something else?”

“Well... Really, I... I’d like to go for a walk around town, but Pine Ridge always does trick-or-treating earlier in the day. There’s the Night Market, but I think on Halloween night, town is pretty dead.”

Technically, that makes two of us, Stray thought, but he just nodded. “And you don’t want to walk around an empty town with a strange man on Halloween night?”

Cara ate one of the stale pretzels from the little basket on the table. “It sounds like a dumb way to die,” she said with a bitter little laugh.

Ooh. That was like whiskey sours. Bitter and burning, and his nostrils flared at the scent of her sarcasm and wit, of the tastes they conjured up.

He wanted more. More of every flavor of her—except the sad ones. “What if you and I walked around the town tomorrow? In the bright, sunny November daylight?”

Cara’s eyes lit up in surprise. “Like... holding hands, wearing sweaters, drinking pumpkin spice lattes?”

“I don’t own a sweater,” he had to admit.

“That’s okay. You can borrow one from me.”

“I don’t think we’re the same size.” He looked her up and down, breathing in deeply when her happiness and surprise grew and mingled and swept him under like a warm wave at the seaside.

Cara giggled. “Oh, believe me, I have a collection. I’m thirty-six, like I said. I have too many exes to count at this point.

“None of them had the... Stamina?” he dropped the word like it was going to unlock something between her legs, eyes smoky and silver as he gazed at her.

“I would use the term staying power, but no. Stamina wasn’t much of a thing, either.” She blushed.

“Hm.” He could fix that. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.

“I like this side of town. I like the campus on the weekends. It’s empty. I’m a non-traditional student, so I’m here three days a week, after work. I’m studying accounting.”

He was clad in warmth and brown, and she wore plaid. He had some pointless spiced coffee in his hand, but he had Cara on his arm. Every sip of the stupid liquid he had to drink as part of the charade got sweeter the more Cara talked about returning to Pine Ridge after her divorce five years ago, and about her job as an insurance adjuster, and how she was finally going back to school to get a better career.

“You’re a fighter.” He liked that. He remembered once, a long time ago, he’d been a fighter, too. Back when things hadn’t only been about survival, and there had been people to fight for.

Cara made him remember so much—and so much was painful.

That’s why incubi like to forget, he realized.

Then Cara laughed when two squirrels ran across their path, doing some furry rodent parkour across the campus benches and rubbish bins, and her happiness flooded his mouth to the point that he had to drink the pumpkin spice coffee to disguise his drooling.

“You make me glad to remember things. About my youth. About the woman my mother was. She was a fighter, too,” he said, and the hurt and the happy made the empty, broken soul inside of him start to fill.

“Oh. She’s gone?”

“She is.”

“Would you like to tell me about her?”

“I... I would, actually. She was a grand lady—and she had beautiful blue-green eyes, the second most beautiful pair I’ve ever seen.”

Cara blushed again and leaned against his arm. “What was her name?”

“Helen. Helen Joan.”

“Pretty name.”