Page 84 of Succubus

“He was just a boy,” he says. “Your . . . brother. James.” He takes another shuddering breath, and then I can tell he’s crying even though his face is turned away. “I always touched them first. She told me to do that, when she was telling me everything and I thought she was delusional. Good thing I listened anyway. It’s the only way to protect myself. He was facing the other way. He was . . . tall. I didn’t realize. I put my hand on his shoulder. He turned around. It was too late. He looked so young. I couldn’t tell, online.” His hands are over his face again.

My hand on his back freezes, falls away. Grub was tall. I never really saw him standing up. Maybe briefly, and I got the impression that he was tallish; he was so skinny and his arms seemed long. But I never got to see him in person. Joel got to see him in person and I didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry. Everything is so— Nothing is right. It’s a disaster. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I remember Adam all at once smiling toward me on the bench, when we met, when he asked me what I was reading that could possibly be more interesting than a Simon & Garfunkel cover band featuring several tambourines. I knew immediately that he was blind—his cane was folded by his hand—and was impressed that he’d been able to tell I was reading. I wondered if he knew how attractive he was. This man I killed. This entire person I shut out of the world.

“Me, either,” I say without meaning to. And then I can’t prevent it: I slide my arms around Joel and press myself against his back. He stiffens, takes a couple quick breaths, and I feel his rib cage open, close slightly, open. It isn’t enough. I slip upright, down the short steps so that I’m in front of him. Then I push myself between his knees, wrap my arms around him, and tuck my face down into his hair. For a long moment, he doesn’t move at all. Then, incrementally, he relaxes, and his head falls against my chest. His arms come up around me and we are holding each other close.

I’m crying quietly into his hair. Of course I’m crying. Even now, with my curse beating in my ears, with it simmering in my voice. Actually, I realize, it’s the first time I’ve cried in a while. I guess I’m still myself.

His arms tighten around me, squeezing a sigh from my chest. I feel myself begin to dissolve, pieces of my suffering shearing off, ice slabs melting in the liquid dark. I feel myself absorbing into him, and it is exactly what I thought it would be when I first stood in his house and glanced at his chest and imagined with my whole soul what it would feel like to put my head there.

He pulls me down onto his lap, and now my head is nestled into his shoulder, and he is surrounding me completely, and I am unable to think beyond this. I never want to think about anything again.

“You hate me,” he says as though reminding me, his voice rumbling seismically in my ear where I’m pressed to him.

“No.” I betray myself without hesitation. “You hate me.”

“I’m trying.”

But I know that right now he’s failing just like I am, and I remember him whispering my name when we were tangled together on his couch. I remember the way he watched me leave, his fingers lifting as though his hand wanted to reach for me against the will of its owner. He’d wanted me to stay longer at those little Monday playdates, too. To stay with him in his yard, in his house, in his life before he knew who— what—I was. What I am.

For a stretchy moment, here in the most elastic part of the night, reality hangs at the trembling midpoint between two bigger things: I want him to fail. I want to fail, too.

I don’t feel the shift consciously, it is more atmospheric: a drift in the air, a drop in the pressure. But then my knee twinges, the tendons tweak. Even that seems normal for a minute, until there is a familiar sensation of inflammation in my throat, its walls thickening painfully. Something is wrong with me. Again.

I am weakening.

I can tell Joel senses the change, because suddenly he moves, depositing me on the walkway in front of him as he stands up. I wobble, find my balance, something whirring, humming scratchily inside my ears. Fear leaks into the pit of my stomach, pools there in a small puddle.

He shakes his head as though to knock his thoughts back into order. He says, “I didn’t realize you could do that, too.” I know he means the accessing of his mind. The spell has been broken, I can’t hold it.

“Me, either,” I admit. “Until just recently.”

“Convenient for you.” The vulnerability in his voice has been vacuumed up. He looms over me for a few moments, as dark as the house behind him. “You haven’t changed anything. I know what I have to do.” He turns.

“You said you weren’t sure,” I remind him. “That was the truth. You’re conflicted; you know it’s not right.” I can already feel what his response will be; it’s written in the lines of his body.

“I didn’t say that,” he snaps without turning back to me. “It is right. I feel conflicted because I’m human. You wouldn’t understand.” He walks up the steps and I hurry after him, the strength seeping out of my muscles. “Do you think it’s always the truth?” he says without looking at me. “What people say when you’re doing that thing to them. Maybe it’s just whatever you want them to say.”

This was true of Dick Face. I remember that suddenly. The people in the bar didn’t really want to be vegetarian, they just wanted to please him.

But what I wanted from Joel was the truth. Or at least, I think I wanted that.

What is happening? My heart feels skittish, likely to panic and bolt without warning.

“You liked me,” I hear myself say, and there’s desperation in it. “You said you really liked me—before. I’m the same person now.”

He pauses with his hand on the door. “No,” he says. “You were never that person. It was all a lie.”

“It wasn’t! It was the truth. Just not—all the truth.” I’m on the stoop with him now, reaching out, as though I can pull him back through time. Words rush out of me: “I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone. Adam was the first man I had touched in more than a decade, and it was only because he seemed different, because I thought the curse was over. When it seemed like I’d killed him, the—first time—I wanted to die, too.”

He seems unable to move for a moment, his face blank, and I keep going: “And then I was okay, finally. Not that I can ever fully be okay. I don’t deserve it. But then I saw you.” I feel sicker all at once, my strength bleeding out of me as though through a terrible gaping wound. I stagger, reach for him. “Joel— ”

He’s moving, pushing the door open. Always this door, it’s always the boundary, the border.

“Don’t follow me.” I saw the conflict in his face, though, I saw him hesitate.