Page 20 of Succubus

He’s introducing his companion—a friendly guy with a gray beard, another doctor, someone he works with. My friends exchange sly smiles, even Molly. How little they know. How little they can ever know.

And then we’re all leaving together; Joel holds the door like a gentleman. This is so strange, this overlap of people. So strange that I even know Joel, and have gone so recently from acceptance of my fate—bizarre backstory but ultimately not an unheard-of outcome: I am single—to this. This gothic pining. This poetic, soul-level longing. (Well, the clitoris and the soul. Those old friends.)

We begin to split apart; his coworker waves goodbye. Alice hugs me, whispering, “Obvious chemistry. Like, very obvious. I’m deeply offended that you didn’t mention him to me!”

“Nothing is happening,” I whisper back. “There was nothing to mention!”

A lie.

“Liar,” she says a little too audibly. She winks and kisses my cheek. “I forgive you. But we’re going to talk.”

I don’t want that. This was unlucky, running into him here.

For a second, I can’t remember where I’ve parked, even though it must be very close. I’m disoriented. That eerie sense of wrongness comes over me, like when I thought for a second that the car was following Ella and me. It seems like everyone has disappeared too quickly, and I am alone in the gray dim of the parking lot under the cold, almost sadistic fluorescent glow of the strip mall signs.

And then Joel is next to me, saying, “Do you have to get back?”

My body erupts in civil war, weapons firing full force, immediately interrupted by his next question. “Did you have one of those coconuts? Let’s go back in. I’ll get you one.”

Again, I notice the way he holds himself, steady but unimposing in spite of his largeness. I love the way his manner hovers at the edge of hesitation, gentle rather than awkward. But then again, calamitously, I love literally everything about him.

“You’re offering to buy me a drink,” I translate. So he can, what, tell me more about the woman he was supposed to marry?

“To apologize for the whole chicken-and-I-can’t-dateanyone thing.” He looks rueful. “I’m a schmuck. In my mind I thought it would be polite somehow—”

“You still can’t date anyone,” I remind him desperately. “But it’s fine. And the chicken was good.”

“At least something was good.”

“You don’t need to apologize.” I swallow.

I see him clock my hesitation. I’m not sure if I like how aware he seems, how tuned in. Don’t change your mind, I beg him inwardly. Don’t tell me you want to date me.

“Just one small coconut,” he says. “A baby.”

“I guess,” I hear myself say. “Since I’m in the baby business.”

He laughs kindly.

Run away, T!

My phone lights up in my bag. Definitely Grub, texting to see how I’m doing now. I ignore it.

And then we’re back in the restaurant and the waiter (the same one) looks uninterested in why, if he even recognizes me. Joel is asking how my day has been, like this was planned, like we meant to meet up all along.

“Good,” I say. “Fine! Good.” I shake my head, unable to remember even a single thing that happened. “Yours?”

We’re sitting a few tables away from where I sat with the moms, next to a family with a toddler who have propped a singing, squeaking iPad on the table. On the other side, two older women talk loudly. But they feel dangerously insignificant. Everyone here does. None of them is making us not alone, and I feel the hum of Joel’s magnetism like the lowest note of the cello. It’s in my blood, my cells, in the deepest parts of me.

His hand rests lightly on the surface of the table and I want—with such physical urgency that my own hand twitches—to run my fingers over the faint ridge of a tendon. I can almost see the warmth of his skin; it is almost a shimmering force field around him. I want to press his hand to my face, to lick the knob of his knuckle, to push his fingers into my mouth and taste his skin.

I try to get control of myself. I’m panicking because I’m exceptionally inexperienced, like a nun with a Pornhub problem. Sometimes women are friends with men. Sometimes they have a coconut or two together—they’ve arrived already, with colorful paper umbrellas and long straws in them—and it’s no big deal.

But then—oh God, I knew it—his thick fingers reach toward mine beside my unused napkin, and for a treacherous moment my fingers open toward his.

I glance up. I can’t remember anyone ever looking at me with such sweet directness.

Oh no, oh no, I think.