Page 65 of Succubus

But you can remember . . . I’m embarrassing myself. I am also embarrassed at being embarrassed. I don’t want to care what he thinks of me.

I can. And it disgusts me.

Oh.

I hesitated to kill you because of Ella. I know the harm it will cause her. She doesn’t deserve that. But I regret my hesitation. Evil has to be rooted out.

I think of the way he looked away from my face, tried to hold his body off my body.

You sound like a video game, I write, typing angrily. Evil has to be rooted out? Who even says that??

Don’t come over, he writes.

I jump up, glance in the mirror, barely seeing myself, yank my hair out of its bun and shake it loose. I am wearing the same pants as last night: the black sweats that I bought two pairs of from Target because they’re so comfortable. I wrap my loose Navajo-pattern jacket around myself and creep out of the house.

I don’t trip over the new fairy. I walk briskly down the sidewalk and cut through the park, dipping through the shadows under the big trees, leaves sliding and breaking underfoot.

It smells like Halloween. I walk through strands of spider silk and brush them away without pausing. My socks are wet at the backs of my slippers.

I knock on his door, louder tonight.

“I told you not to come over!” he yells.

“Open the door!” I call back.

“I’m not going to open the door.” He’s right on the other side of it now. The rough grain of his voice sounds like something I can run my fingertips over.

I put my hands on the dark surface of the door and it feels warm, somehow still steeped in the sun. I lean forward.

“Open it.”

“No.”

“Open it.” I hit the door’s face with my palm.

“You’re acting like a child,” he says.

Which is funny and ridiculous, considering what I’m here for. I almost laugh.

I pound on the door with both fists. My heart pounds, too. I feel deliciously unhinged: a fairy-tale villain, a pirate king swaggering on the deck of a tossing ship, capable of anything. Is this what Dick Face feels, all the time? Spewing his power on whoever is in front of him, just letting it spill unfettered into the world. What is he even like when he’s not—what’s his word, the one that always sounds like it’s someone else’s?—fallow.

“Someone’s going to call the police,” Joel says.

“Unless you let me in.” I’m actually laughing now.

How am I laughing?

I’m high on my own vitality. I feel like singing. I can tell my voice will be at its fullest, limber even though I haven’t warmed it up. “But there’s a side to you, that I never knew, never knew. . . .” I sing softly. Adele was trying to warn me the whole time! It was right there! I sing louder, leaning into it, closing my eyes. I sound amazing—better than Adele. “Right, Joel?” I say musingly. “You did turn out to have another side.”

“Why won’t you just die,” he says from a few inches away, and the door abruptly seems thin as cardboard between us.

“I’m going to start yelling,” I tell him. “I’m going to yell that I’m your dealer—that I’m your ex-wife and I just got out of prison! That I’m your— ”

He yanks the door open, furious and disheveled—a rumpled, stressed-out lion, his hair a mane.

I smile.

We have sex against the door.