Page 6 of Succubus

“You already told me.”

“You keep ignoring me, though,” he whines.

Mom calls, “Baby!”

“Love you,” I say again, more firmly. I hang up on Grub and rush down to the common floor of our house to rescue Ella.

We have about ten minutes before Mom is having loud sex on the third floor in her private suite that is not nearly private enough. This is the problem with old houses. They don’t put in enough subflooring. Or toxic insulation, or whatever useful genome-damaging materials will mute the sound of your mother yelling the plumber’s name while you are attempting to accept the reality that you will never have sex again yourself. Ever. For your whole life. Until you die alone, probably while masturbating to badly written werewolf erotica. Probably at the part where it’s describing how the alpha werewolf’s giant penis is like a dog’s penis with that weird knot on it. Which would be the worst part for someone to read over your corpse’s shoulder.

“Hey, little one.” I tug Ella’s ponytail. “Playground run?” It’s almost dark.

“It’ll be empty!” She’s delighted. “I don’t like those boys who go there.”

She doesn’t, as a rule, like any boys. They are often unpredictable.

“Hello there, Tempe!” tries Barry, his hand low on Mom’s back, his goatee freshly shaped.

Mom giggles, fluffing her already fluffy blond bangs. “Barry,” she purrs, “you know her name!”

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t, but I don’t wait around to find out. We are out the door, racing down the front steps of our little peaked-roof brown house that sits at the top of a slight hill. A trumpet vine grows rampant up the posts and across the top of the overhang of the wooden porch; echinacea is still blooming in two happy thickets on either side of the steps. Ella and I vault over a few of the fairy and animal sculptures that populate our miniature garden and land, laughing, on the sidewalk. The warm last-breath-of-summer day is trailing off into an anticipatory lavender twilight, and lights glow in our neighbors’ sleepy houses.

Neither of us is in good shape, so we don’t run for very long. The playground is only a few blocks away, and for all of them I am thinking, What does it actually mean to be an angel? I have about fifty more questions for Grub, and I bet he doesn’t have answers to any of them.

CHAPTER 3

Let me see how short I can make this story: Ella begged for a year, Dee gave in a month ago, and we got an (older, shelter) cat. Dee sneezed like she was training for the sneezing Olympics, Mom tried the usual homeopathy and burning herbs and smearing oils, Dee got incredibly stressed/guilty, Ella got incredibly sad, I posted on Nextdoor to see if we could find Mr. Button (that’s what Ella named the cat, after a character in a book she hadn’t even liked since she was five) a new and extremely loving home, and Dr. Joel Tav said yes, he’s looking for a cat. Now Ella and I are pulling up in front of his house—mere blocks from us, has he been here all along?—with the cat crying in the carrier and Ella crying next to the cat. I am trying to use a calming, authoritative voice as I run around in frantic circles in my head.

This isn’t a coincidence, by the way. Not entirely.

I was going to give Mr. Button to my client Kristen, who runs an animal rescue. And then I searched online for Adam’s mesmerizing brother and saw he’d responded recently to a cat adoption post. I put up my own and messaged him. It fell so easily into place, like it wanted to happen.

But now that it’s happening, it feels reckless, kamikaze, a gun fired into a dark room.

His house is tidily square, pale gray with white trim, a mossy brick path up to the stoop, and a sinuous Japanese maple by the short driveway. He isn’t going to recognize me, I reassure myself.

I’m wrestling the cat carrier out of the back seat when I feel him behind me. No, I probably heard the door or his footsteps or something normal. I turn, knocking the carrier against the side of the car. I wince. “Sorry, sorry,” I say to Mr. Button.

Ella gasps. “Is he okay, Titi?”

“Yes! He’s totally fine!” I’m defensive.

He recognizes me. I can tell. Without his white coat, I am seeing too much at once: thick freckled arms, more muscled than expected, the sun catching in curling golden hairs, a hint of sturdy collarbone where the neck of his old T-shirt wilts obligingly, the implication through thin fabric of a chest someone could fall on without making a dent.

Did he just get back from a run? He seems glowy, energized.

I’m having some sort of severe physiological reaction— like an allergy, except the opposite. I need to get closer, I need to get it into my system.

This is unbelievably, offensively stupid. I can withstand the presence of an attractive man. I am in my thirties. I have looked, unflinching, into dozens of wide-open birthing vaginas.

“Are you Tempest?” He says my name like it isn’t a joke.

I mean to say, “My mom has bad taste—call me T.” But instead I default to a nerdy, self-serious “Yes.”

“I’m Joel,” he says, and redirects to Ella, asking her name, too.

Joel, I whisper in my head. And then, softer, like a pervert, Doctor Tav. His glasses are a beautiful tortoiseshell with gold flecks that call up the gold flecks in his eyes, which I can now tell are hazel.

Ella clamps her mouth closed, determined to dislike this potential purloiner of brief, beloved pets. But now Joel is crouching down in front of the carrier to peer in at Mr. Button, saying, “Hey, buddy.” And to Ella: “Would you say he’s a snuggler?”