Page 10 of Succubus

I can never let myself see him again. It’s too dangerous.

Except that Grub told me to investigate. And I should probably do that.

Right?

Yeah.

I should.

CHAPTER 4

It’s Monday again. I hesitate, standing on his stoop, about to knock. Like on our block, the houses here are small and evenly spaced, in tasteful shades of cream, yellow, and gray, with occasional green shutters or a daring orange front door. Joel’s door is forest green.

Don’t do this.

Ella looks at me. Her pink leggings are full of holes; she wears them almost every day because she likes their particular texture. She reaches out and knocks.

He opens the door, and I’m assaulted all over again by the sweetness of his face, the suggestive curl of his hair, the doctorly line of his glasses. I don’t know what to say, but he’s talking to Ella anyway, holding the door for us, ushering us inside like we’re friends.

He and Ella certainly are. Minutes later, she’s petting a very contented Mr. Button while chatting with Joel about her upcoming violin recital, which will be her second but is even scarier than the first because now she knows how scary recitals are. They’re humming together; he knows the piece she’s working on. Now he’s sitting down and lifting the cello to show her how the piece sounds on it.

Ella grins in surprise. “It’s like a violin in the dark.”

True. The silly minuet that even Mozart probably forgot immediately after writing thrums with husky, molten gold depth. I thrum, too. Ella is humming again with furrowbrowed concentration.

Mr. Button has fallen happily asleep, draped like a furry towel over an arm of the couch, and Ella is asking Joel, “Want to play a game that Titi and me made up?”

“Sure,” he agrees unwisely without any information. “If your aunt plays, too.” He glances at me, smiling. It’s such an easy smile, like his face wants to fall back into that expression when he relaxes. My lecherous gaze moves of its own accord to his crotch.

“I sing my song that I made up, about a heart-shaped rock that I really found, and you have to play along,” Ella explains. “If you want to. Titi plays along on piano. Or she sings along, but it has to be different notes from me.”

“Harmony,” I mumble automatically, as Ella adds, “Called harmony.”

I’ve ended up in one of the living room chairs, and it seems to cup itself around me, gathering me in, the fabric warm. But I can’t relax because I’m forcing myself to remember Adam, and also because Ella is clutching my knee, whispering urgently, “I can’t do it. I’m going to forget the part where the stone falls in the stream,” and now I have to sing, too.

I can feel Joel listening closely. “There’s this Adele song you should do,” he says, and I laugh. Adele is usually who people think of when I sing, but I didn’t expect Mr. Juilliard to spend much time on sad-mom ballads.

He grins. “I’m not ashamed. It’s great music.”

I say, “ ‘Someone Like You.’ ”

He looks politely confused.

“That’s the song.”

His expression clears. “No, another one. . . .”

I take a guess: “I let it fall, my heart . . . and as it fell, you rose to claim it.” The opening of Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain.” A song I love. Immediately, he’s playing under me, something yearning in the midnight sound of the long, low notes. I try to remember if the original song has cello. It should. I google the lyrics quickly on my phone. Don’t show off, I warn myself. My singing voice is by far my best feature.

“It was dark. . . .” I keep singing. I am showing off.

“Yeah,” he says slowly, smiling right at me. “Exactly.”

Don’t look at him, I tell myself strictly. Don’t look while you’re singing.

You have a life now, I remind myself. You may not be able to have a relationship, but you have a business. You have friends.

Every Thursday, Alice, a lawyer turned stay-at-home mom, stops by for our standing coffee date and to tell me the plot of the latest thriller she’s reading. The last one was about a woman in a cabin by a lake who is actually dead for most of the book.