Page 112 of Succubus

He sounds so polite. The way he used to sound, before we were enemies. When we were pretending to be regular people together.

“No problem,” I say, also polite.

Two polite people who are unlikely to have had frenzied (slightly nonconsensual) sex in the backyard.

I remember how to unlock my car. We get in, dripping, uncivilized in our wetness, and I start the engine. The car shudders anxiously, or maybe it’s sneezing, and the space seems to have shrunk by half since I was last in here. Joel is sitting much closer to me than I would’ve estimated, the gray ceiling with its odd sequence of splatter stains (they were there when Dee and I bought the car) imposing itself on the top of his head. The car is trying to smush us together.

My music connects automatically, a moaning, writhing track about being seduced to the dark side. A little too on the nose. I yank the volume down, notice the granola bar wrappers in the cup holder. I always keep three or four bars in here, in case Ella needs a snack. Joel doesn’t react to any of this, or at least he doesn’t show it. Or at least I can’t bring myself to look at him, so I’m not sure whether he’s reacting in some subtle way.

Neither of us speaks as I pull out onto the main road. Rain slaps the windshield and the wipers whip and creak in a losing effort to catch up, shoving aside the plastered corpses of leaves. There’s a sheet of lightning, a switch slammed on and off again, as I turn into our neighborhood. We’re the only ones on the road. Thunder pummels the air, rattles the night.

A few turns and I pull up in front of his house. Well, that was fast.

I swallow.

Should I say something? I can’t think what.

His hand is on the handle of the door. The rain crashes down, torrential now, almost solid. He glances over at me. “Why don’t you come in?”

My mind and body separate, flying in incompatible directions, anarchic with hope and confusion.

“No, I shouldn’t,” I whisper, looking at my hands, pale on the dark wheel. The car is in park. I drop them into my lap, but that looks suggestive of staying, so I put them back again. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

I can feel his eyes on my face.

There is a long pause. Lightning again, ripping clouds apart psychotically. Rain and wind are tearing fistfuls of leaves off the last trees of autumn, stripping them naked.

“Please,” he says very quietly, something jagged in it.

Thunder throws itself at us, tries to roll the car over, tries to shake us into one another, shake us together.

I shudder, look up. His eyes are burning on me in the dark.

I look away. I don’t want to sway him, to hold him under my power. I don’t want that at all.

And then his dark fills mine, and he is right there, and he is kissing me. His hand curves along the side of my head, my ear in his palm, his fingers possessive in my wet hair. His mouth on mine is kind and hungry and commanding, the way I knew it would be, the first time I ever saw him. I knew.

He hasn’t kissed me like this before. It’s always fast and hard and guilty, and I always feel him working not to linger.

He lets out his breath in a soft, low sound. “I need— ” he says, his voice fraying.

“Please,” I whisper, forgetting until I’m speaking that he already said this, that I am echoing him.

We run from the car through the violent, freezing rain to the house, and then we’re spilling inside, shrugging off our drenched coats. Mr. Button stretches his sleepy way up from the couch, disentangling from the shadows.

We make it all the way upstairs this time. I get a basic impression of his bedroom in the low light from the hall—the heavy, simple wooden frame of a rumpled, white-blanketed bed; a window with feathery, sodden pine boughs just outside. His hands are steady; he’s better at getting my soaked-through dress off me than I am. We are kissing and kissing. His searching, patient mouth is on my ear, on my throat, on my collarbone, my shoulder, my arm. I am kissing the side of his face, his hair, his wide, warm palm. I investigate his stomach for some sign of the injury. I think I feel a smoother spot, a small scar, but I can’t be sure.

We stand pressed together, wet skin sealing and warming, and he touches me with slow wonder. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know his face, the subtle span of his cheekbones, the gentle bridge of his nose. Even after all our other nights, he still looks exposed, vulnerable without his glasses. I feel like I’m seeing the boy he once was, like I’m seeing a secret. And I feel chosen, remarkable for getting to see it.

Now he is lifting me onto the bed with a sigh—relief, I think. No one is fighting against anything. No more private internal wars. Just the big, delicious expanse of him against me, my skin humming a long, thrilled tone. Home, my skin thinks. This is home.

He is running his hands down my back, up my arms, burying his fingers in my hair, as though he’s trying to inventory every inch of my body, as though he hasn’t been allowed to touch me until now. He has touched me so many times, but each one of them was a defeat. This is different; this is freedom. I hear my trembling breath. He touches my throat, and I arch my neck like an offering. I hear the catch in his breath, feel the skipped beat in his touch, then the tightening of his grip. I feel it light up the branching paths of my nerves, feel it thrumming in the interstitium of my body— the in-between places I have become so adept at closing off. I have been closing and closing myself off.

And suddenly I am crying. It’s washing out of me—this gigantic sadness, this lifetime of sorrow. I am sobbing against his chest. “Joel,” I say. “Joel. Joel.”

He holds my face in his hands. He kisses my cheeks, my eyelids. He kisses my mouth. “Tempest,” he says. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

“I want you to have me,” I try to say. “I want to be yours.” But I’m not sure I form all the words.