Page 62 of Succubus

I let my hand drift downward and the tension in his muscles ratchets up in instantaneous response. I can start the whole process again. I don’t like how much I want to.

For a second, he leans into my touch, then his hand closes over my wrist and he forcibly removes me from him.

“Leave,” he growls.

He bends down, whisks the clothes from the floor, shoves them at me.

Now Mr. Button is padding down the stairs. I appreciate his timing, it could’ve been much worse. He produces an inquisitive and croaking meow, nuzzles my shin. He’s an affectionate cat. A snuggler.

He heads over to Joel, moseying, rubs against his foot. Joel ignores him.

I pull on my underwear. Joel looks away.

“This is yours,” I say, untangling his pale shirt from my dark pants. I resist the urge to press it quickly to my face and breathe in his concentrated scent. Which would be especially absurd because he is standing right in front of me. But he won’t let me press my face into him, that’s perfectly clear.

I shouldn’t want to.

I don’t want to.

He snatches the shirt from me, holds it against his chest. “Faster,” he orders. “Go.”

I don’t have to respect this. I can stay. I can make him look at me. I can break his will.

But I yank my shirt on, my sweater, my pants. I shove my feet into the slippers, and step outside as he nearly pushes me onto the stoop. I spin to look at him where he stands in the doorway, and there is something so pained in his face, something being drawn and quartered, being dragged to death. One hand has drifted ever so slightly upward as though it might have, in another life, reached for me. And then the door thunks shut, seals its lips. The moon has retreated farther into the reaches of the sky, everything is blackish metallic and strange.

I can feel him on the other side of the door. I can hear him moving; he makes a short, anguished sound. He’s pacing, agitated. Something thuds—his arm or his head against a wall? I hold still as a chrysalis.

Minutes later, I hear him leave the entryway, go into the living room. It’s quiet for a moment, and then the deep, rich voice of the cello calls into the night. A dark, primal sound— rage and keening sadness in it.

He plays demandingly, the music rough and running, trying to force an answer from the silence around it. There is aggression under it, even the gentler parts, pulling at the soft air, carding it like tufts of wool.

I am held hostage, listening. And then I rescue myself. I need to leave. Something is turning in my stomach, at my center, viscera reshaping, my body attempting to remake itself from the inside out.

I can’t let it.

I break into a jog—I would run, but I never run. I should, though. I should run away and never come back.

* * *

Let me tell you about my brother, I text Joel, even though he’s probably still playing cello. He was good and kind. He was funny. He loved LOTR and Greek mythology and basically every nerdy fantasy story ever.

No response.

Standing in the middle of my bedroom, on a blank spot between pieces of furniture, under the clunky fan, I describe Grub, starting at the beginning. His tragic, lonely life. The way he was tortured by his curse. How we met—him pretending to be a college student even though he was just a little boy. He said he was majoring in “science.”

The fort he built with Nate, when they were friends, how he convinced Nate to alternate times with him in the same patch of woods so they’d both add pieces onto the structure, working together but apart. He came up with so many creative ways for them to stay friends before Nate got depressed and started starving himself.

The girl he had a crush on, for whom he once wrote and illustrated an anonymous online graphic novel. It was about a wizard who had been cursed at birth and a warrior princess.

I can’t stop.

I write and write about Grub. I am crying.

I want to write a letter to Grub’s mother, but I know it won’t make sense to her. I don’t know what to do.

I swore to myself I would kill the monster who killed him.

I want to go back over there right now. I’m turned on, remembering. Maybe I never stopped being turned on. Maybe there isn’t an off anymore.