Page 56 of Succubus

“But you won’t touch me.”

He stares at me. There is anguish, confusion, fear in his eyes. He closes them as though willing me to vanish, wishing the whole ridiculous scene away. He opens his eyes again, and now he looks more resolved, angrier.

“I don’t know where my father is,” I say. “So it’s just you and me.”

His gaze slips to my throat, my breasts; I feel it like a warm touch on my skin. “This is what you do? You just take your clothes off?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Why am I even talking?

This is it—this is the moment when I have to act. He has hesitated, he can’t quite bring himself to hurt me. But he will. He will work up to it. He wants to work up to it. He’s already told me he wants to kill me. He’s been very clear.

Think of Grub, I yell at myself.

Think of Grub, who didn’t get to live.

Don’t fall for anything.

“You’re trying to sleep with me to kill me.” His words are slow. “You don’t want me, you just want me to die.”

I look directly into his eyes. For a second, I remember him looking at me across the restaurant table, the coconuts between us. That unfettered honesty, that openness in his face.

No. Don’t think of that.

I can’t let myself think of that.

I reach up and painstakingly remove his glasses. He seems paralyzed, hypnotized.

Maybe there is something to the eye contact after all. If only I understood my own damn curse. My own power.

I hold out my hand, open my fingers, and drop his glasses. They hit the floor, and he flinches as they clatter. His face is naked now, exposed under the sterile fluorescent light, younger looking, the sweet, easy shape of his nose more evident. His pupils dilate, he can’t look away. Like the server in the South Beach bar. Like the cook and the thug. His lips part.

“I want you . . .” I whisper, “to die.”

And I can feel it, a surge within me, an eager uncoiling. Dick Face was right. I can use it. I can command it.

It wants this.

I want this.

Too much, really. In a way I refuse to examine for even a second. It’s old desire, I tell myself. Misplaced, disoriented. It’s slow and ignorant desire—still stuck on the way his eyes met mine when I was singing, the way his arm almost grazed mine in the kitchen and I would have given anything just to brush my fingers against his fingers.

My hands are on his chest again, I find the button of the white coat. I undo it, my fingers surprisingly confident. Then my hands are under his shirt and I am touching his skin. And—fuck—I have to close my eyes hard for a moment. There is an onslaught, I’m being lifted by a wave, I’m borne forward.

“No,” he says, but it’s feeble.

I move swiftly and my mouth is on his throat; I’m licking him like I will bite him next. I am starving, I am unstoppable.

It’s never been like this.

I’ve had sex so few times, but I know how different this is. I can’t help knowing, even though I am trying not to. And then I want it to be my hatred that makes it different; I want it to be the curse and only the curse.

I yank his face down to mine. I am kissing him ferociously, my tongue in his mouth, trying to consume the rich cinnamon warmth of his taste. I push myself against him.

“Fuck you,” he moans into my mouth, and I eat his words.

Not what I imagined he might say when I fantasized about him all those times, before I knew who—what—he was. But then, I’d gotten everything wrong.