Page 8 of Succubus

“Right away!” Joel says, quick and distracted. His eyes flick up to mine again, and he pushes the alluring glasses, turns away, goes over to Ella.

It’s not as though men are always attracted to me.

Thank God. Really. Because imagine if they were.

In case you’re wondering (you are): I’m just below average height, blotchy of (pale) skin, thin in a way that might be boyish except for my thighs. My brown hair—a wispy, unmotivated kind of straight—has long since given up; I keep it in a sloppy low knot. I’m a woman who can go invisibly through the world. I look a little older than I am, a bit more tired than I should. The danger of me is all hidden, all private. But I like the quiet of my face, which has never struck me as unattractive so much as unassuming. People often feel comfortable with me, want to tell me about themselves. Other women aren’t threatened; men can interact with me without the shimmer of flirtatious tension that constantly hangs around Dee in a sticky web, irritating her.

This is all to say that I don’t expect Joel Tav to react to me. I certainly don’t expect him to imagine tearing off my PARK PICKUP! CLEANING UP MOTHER NATURE’S BACKYARD T-shirt as we fall together into the couch’s waiting arms.

Still, there is something here—a shiver, a beat. Out of all the men, somehow this catastrophically beguiling one is interested in me. Or faintly interested. Or maybe just lonely.

Why would a man this lovely ever have cause to be lonely?

Then again, he is adopting a cat.

Mr. Button has ventured the slightest bit forth; Joel is petting him. A minute later, he’s in his lap, and I’m watching the cat push his triangular little head up into Joel’s wide palm as Joel talks to Ella, and I try not to study his competent fingers, to compulsively imagine them on my skin, petting me instead.

Grub didn’t have any more to tell me about the angel theory (or at least, any more that didn’t sound copy-pasted from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer wiki), but “angelic” seems like a decent description of Joel, if there’s room in the definition for rampaging sexual magnetism.

He looks up. “Not a cat person?”

“No.” I cross my arms. “I am. So, yes. Yes, a cat person.” Smooth, T. With those conversational skills you might have ended up celibate either way. “I actually love cats,” I hear myself mutter.

Now his hand rests on Mr. Button’s raised rump, that slightly inappropriate spot cats are always sluttily trying to get you to pet. My legs bring me forward to the edge of the rug—a border to another country.

“We should head out in a few minutes, Els,” I say, my voice brittle. “Mr. Button seems good.”

She shoots an accusatory, alarmed look my way. “What if he misses me?”

“Come check on him!” says Joel. And then, at Ella’s urging, we’re setting that up. We’ll visit the cat next Monday. Joel enters my number into his phone, and I’m pleased with myself for remembering it. My head is a beehive with a thousand happy, lethal bees buzzing.

On our way out, I see a photo of Adam and Joel on the top of a bookshelf. They’re in sunglasses, grinning. Adam is smaller, with darker hair, wavy instead of curly—there’s something fine-tuned about him that Joel doesn’t have. He’s probably the more conventionally attractive one. My stomach wrings itself out. Have I somehow actually managed to forget their connection over the course of this nonsensical visit? The mental image of Adam comes back to me, as visceral as a slap: boyish smile, fashionable in his brown sweater, a humble confidence in his narrow shoulders.

My hands tremble on the steering wheel as I pull away from the curb, Ella telling me in a small voice from the back that Mr. Button will probably be very sad at first.

I think I left this out before: Adam did get sick.

After the fifth time I slept with him, he fell into a coma. I assumed he had died, and my old self-hatred opened under me like a trapdoor. Dee was scared for me, and I was scared for myself. But there was Ella, this tender storm of a child with an Eeyore bent. Ella, who often cried as a toddler for barnyard animals in baby stories if they were alone on the page, because what if they were afraid and missing their mama. There she was after a long afternoon at the park, her sweaty head on my chest, her knee pinning my thigh, as though even her sleeping body wanted to keep me with her.

So I stayed.

I didn’t do my due diligence. I didn’t know that Adam was alive another year after the coma and apparently upright enough to walk in front of a truck.

After I learned about his death, I liked to imagine a timeline like this for him:

1. sex with succubus (me)

2. brief coma

3. completely fine again, living full life

4. died in accident totally unrelated to original sex with succubus

When I finally told Grub the basics of my DP, and he nicknamed me Lorelei, he was annoyed that I hadn’t been more “systematic” in investigating Adam. I wouldn’t tell him much—I didn’t want him investigating Adam, either. I couldn’t face it. Now I have the strange, paranoid sense that I’m being punished. Or about to be.

When we get home from Joel’s, I’m unsettled, tense.

“Hi, Piggie,” Ella is saying to her favorite front garden sculpture. “You look comfortable.” The stone pig, rolling on her back in a patch of bright green sedum, does.