Page 125 of Succubus

Now, a season later, Joel’s hair is a little longer, the curls as touchably unruly as ever, more gray in them than I remember. He still takes up space in the same way: big and easy, his shoulders rounding the slightest bit. I feel like I haven’t seen him in a year. In five years.

I stand up. I think I have a smear of blood on my pants, from cleanup.

“You’ve met?” says Rahim, somewhere in the background. “At another birth?”

“Yes,” I say, and Joel says the same thing half a second later. He sounds surprised, remembering, as though it can’t really have been that obvious and ordinary an origin story. Strange that it is.

“That’s awesome!” Tamar manages to be enthusiastic toward us even in the middle of her monumental day. Or maybe this is the overflow of her excitement—she wants to gush over everything, she has a surplus of love. “I actually feel like you should know each other. You’re both the nicest people. You should be friends.” There is a sliver of hesitation in her voice before she finishes the sentence. Maybe friends is not quite the word she was thinking. Maybe there is something rising from below the surface of our interaction, a murky leviathan.

Joel clears his throat. “That’s very kind.” He shifts his focus off me. “How’s this little one doing?”

“Amazing!”

“I’ll give you some space,” I mutter. I duck past him, escape the room. Did I feel it—that gravitational tug? Did he seem as radiant, as luminous? I won’t let myself think about it.

“I’ll check back in a couple hours,” I tell Lillian. “I have to . . . um.” I don’t know what I have to do.

“I’m heading out in a few,” she says, “but I’ll let them know. They’re all good here. Isn’t that guy great? He’s like the last doctor in the country who still does house calls. I’ve worked with him before. Heart of gold.”

I grit my teeth. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Lill.”

“Love ya, T.”

“Love you!” I grab my stuff from the dining table, where I left it.

I am out the door, in the gravel driveway, the trees by the road budding in an expectant reddish haze, the forsythia hedge next door a flourish of sunny yellow. His car is next to mine. I open my passenger door to throw my bag in.

“Tempest.” He’s behind me.

I turn around.

He looks flushed, uncertain, his gaze guarded. My heart throws itself into a full-out run, runs with all its might.

He says, “I’ll go right back in.”

“It’s good to see you.” We’re adults after all. I can say that.

“It’s good to see you, too.” His hands are by his sides. “It feels like a long time— ” He seems to cut himself off; there’s a flicker of bright suffering in his eyes.

The connection we had should be gone. We were drawn to one another helplessly, against ourselves, because of the things we never wanted to be, things that aren’t true about us anymore.

“How are you?” he asks quietly.

“Fine,” I say, too fast. “Good. What about— ”

“Yeah,” he says. “But.”

We look at each other.

“The daffodils came up,” he says. “They’re beautiful.”

“Ours, too.” I think of us kneeling side by side in his yard in what feels like a different lifetime, at the beginning of everything, before everything, when I loved him instinctively, like breathing, and when I couldn’t have him at all, and when we planted bulbs together anyway, just out of some reflex toward the future. To put a little bit more color into the world.

Joel closes his eyes for a moment, takes a breath. He opens his eyes again. “That night at the synagogue,” he says, “when you were singing, and I heard you before I saw you—I would know your voice anywhere. I knew then, but I’ve known since the first time you sang: I want to hear it every day, I never want to stop listening to you.”

I feel myself smiling. “I would sing for you every day.”

We move at the same time. His hands are in my hair, my hands are on his chest, that addictively welcoming give over the solid block of his strength. Our mouths collide. The soft sound he makes—raw need—brims at the waterline of my hearing, and I’m already inundated. I am drinking the sun from his lips, his mouth. I’m stunned by my own restraint, after not being able to kiss or touch him for all these stupid, earnest, muddled months.