Page 34 of Succubus

I make a small sound. “I should— ”

His lips move. “I’ll go,” he says. “But I wanted to say: One day, if you feel like telling me, I’d love to learn your story.”

Maybe I nod. It’s hard to tell what my head is doing.

He leaves.

No, Joel, I think. That’s exactly what you can never know. You can never know my story.

“What the hell,” says Dee five minutes later, grabbing my elbow. Mom and Ella are in the long line for the popular small-batch ice cream place in Palmer Square, Ella agonizing over which flavor to get, especially when she considers sprinkles. Dee hauls me behind a nearby potted tree. “I thought he was old! With the cat and the cello and being home on Mondays—I thought he was some lonely old man in a rocker.”

I think for an odd moment of Dick Face. A lonely old man in a cluttered penthouse.

I take a breath, scan Dee’s expression for evidence that she is also helplessly attracted to Joel. Her lipstick is pinkish plum—a shade that looks effortless on her.

“Oh my God, there’s kids everywhere,” says one whitesweatered twentysomething to another as they walk by. “At Yale there were, like, no children. I forgot children existed.”

“Yeah, it’s nice all these families come out,” says the other, like it’s the families who are just passing through this town.

“He’s exactly your type,” Dee says.

I’m surprised. “I have a type?”

“Friendly but quiet, smart—like a dad?”

It seems like she doesn’t necessarily find Joel irresistible. I try to picture him through her eyes, through anyone else’s eyes. As usual, I fail.

“He’s not a dad!”

“I said like a dad. He’s into you.” She looks at me: a surgeon who has sliced a patient wide open and is now peering inside.

I blink too many times.

“Don’t play dumb. I saw him looking at you. You guys are having all those playdates.” Dee isn’t mean so much as she doesn’t have time for subtlety. But then she slows down, and I can tell she’s about to be careful. Which is bad.

“Do you think . . .” she starts, “he might be a good person to . . .” She sees my expression and stops.

Dee didn’t believe me when I told her the truth all those years ago, at my lowest point, but in her defense, she never told me I needed to be committed to a psychiatric facility, either. She listened all the way through. And then she suggested that maybe I was overreacting, that maybe I’ve just been very unlucky with men. She doesn’t think it’s possible that I have been killing them.

Because it isn’t possible. Except for it being true.

Her listening saved me. The trade-off is that I don’t mention demonic curses to her these days, and we both pretend I have recovered from my delusions. I haven’t told her what Dick Face said, only that he was gross and drunk.

But now I see the hope in her eyes. And I feel like I just got airlifted to a tiny island in the middle of the ocean, because that is how alone I am right now.

I bite my lip and squint. A neatly clipped hedge of burning bush blazes and blurs at the edge of the grassy square across the street, God refusing to speak through it and offer me any advice at all. It has been so hard, knowing Joel exists. Knowing it doesn’t matter that I want him so very much, so much more than any man I’ve ever wanted. It doesn’t matter that he is perfect to me, that I would hack off one of my own toes with a cleaver if it meant I could run my hand up his arm, from his elbow to his shoulder. No, a toe isn’t a big enough sacrifice. A foot? That would be a lot harder to hack off.

Anyway.

I will never touch him, not even once on his arm. I will never lean my rushing head against the bank of his chest and rest. I will never kiss him, never taste his warm mouth, not even for a second. I’m torturing myself. That’s all this has been.

There is no hope. Not even the tiny germ of hope there was a few days ago, before I met Dick Face, when I could still imagine there might be an answer. The germ that once kept Grub and me going has been Cloroxed into oblivion.

And Dee acting like it’s possible, even just her eyes acting that way for a few moments, is too much.

My heart may break. Like Joel’s bad-tempered former cat pushing a glass off the counter, it will shatter with a bang on the tiles. A swipe of the paw, the split second in between, and then it won’t be a glass anymore, only shards and chunks and fragments, all of them dangerously sharp.

“Oh, girl.” Dee hauls me into a bear hug. “Shit. I hate this.”