Chapter 36
I hear his quick intake of breath. He looks momentarily confounded.
I am failing. My failure is overt, yelling into the microphone.
This, whatever this is, is the opposite of killing him.
I have full access to his body; I have full access to his mind.
And the only thing that’s breaking is my own resolve.
I’m willing to compromise everything precious and right just to stand here beside a parking lot with the man who killed Grub. In a light drizzle.
But he saved Ella.
He was willing to fight one of his own kind to stop her from killing me. Even though he had summoned her to kill me.
“I want to hate you,” I hear myself say in a rush. “I’m trying to just . . . to just have sex with you!”
Oh God, someone is walking by—an elderly man in an overcoat and fedora who glances sharply over.
I lower my voice. “To kill you.” (Because that’s so much better.) “And the truth is, I haven’t gotten to have any sex for so long.
While you were with your beautiful fiancée”—I’m absolutely certain she was beautiful—“I was alone. I’m always alone.
I thought I’d always be alone. I know this isn’t . . . it isn’t right. But— ”
Oh sweet Jesus, T.
I look at the synagogue.
Oh Jewish God. Whichever God is listening. Make me stop talking.
But what kind of God listens to the prayers of a succubus? I’m still talking: “It’s your magic angel dust. Who knows if you’re even a little bit appealing without that!”
Joel laughs in surprise, a somewhat negative laugh.
“You’re probably not!” I declare. “You’re probably . . . probably . . .” My brain fails to produce a critical word for him. “Boring,” I conclude limply.
He’s staring at me, bemused and silent, letting me talk and talk.
“No, you’re probably not,” I decide. “You’re too perfect to be boring. Perfect. Perfect!” I have lost control. “It’s ridiculous! Even the fucking cello! Why couldn’t it be, like, a trombone?”
He laughs again. “Tempest— ”
I hold up both hands. “No! Don’t say anything.
Don’t say my stupid name. Oh God.” I bury my face in my hands, then pull them away.
My face doesn’t deserve such protection.
Not when it keeps talking like this. “I know what you’ll say.
‘Is this another one of your games?’ No.
It’s not. It’s just me, humiliating myself.
It’s just me, ruining everything. If this can even be ruined!
What even is this? It’s my curse. It’s just my curse. And even with it, you don’t like me.”
You don’t like me? I have regressed to early childhood.
I spend too much time with a seven-year-old.
I don’t have a real job. “You want me. You have to want me. Because I’m a monster.
But you’ll never like me. You’ll never forgive me.
And I shouldn’t forgive you! I don’t. I don’t forgive you!
” I’m standing too close, I take a wild step back from him.
“Wait.” His hand closes around my arm. “Just wait a second.”
I transmogrify. I am in a Greek myth—I can’t remember which one because I didn’t read the damn thread Grub sent me—and he has turned me into a tree.
“Of course you don’t forgive me,” he says. “And I don’t forgive you.”
“Right,” I agree, swamped with misery, drowning from the roots up.
Some women are afraid they might poop in front of other adults while they’re giving birth.
Some women apologize for yelling during labor.
I always try to make them comfortable enough to break the social code.
But right now I am very clear on why that code exists.
It’s to prevent us from coughing up the frantic interior of our thoughts in a parking lot.
I try to twitch out of Joel’s grasp as my excited skin turns to a flock of tiny birds under his fingers, fluttering toward flight.
“Your timing is terrible,” he says. “Look at where we are. The day it is.”
I nod, agreeing and agreeing. It begins to rain more earnestly, a drop hurrying down one lens of his glasses.
The evening smells strongly of wet leaves, pine sap, decay.
Mist drifts, nearly invisible, where the colder water breaks against the warm face of the asphalt.
Individual raindrops are strung into beaded curtains, glittering gold around each utilitarian lamp.
Joel’s hair attempts to curl more tightly, is flattened by the rain, curls back again.
“I can’t resist you,” he says, and now his grip is iron, and I am being pulled against him.
His other hand commandeers the back of my head, which gives itself over instantly, and he tips my face up to his.
“You taste so fucking good.” The shock of the harsh word in his gentle voice makes me shiver.
Even though I have heard him harsh, heard him raging and hateful.
But this Joel—this is the Joel I fell in love with, before everything.
“You smell so good,” he says, and he bends forward, his mouth grazing my ear as he breathes in.
“I can’t look at you without touching you.
” His voice is low and hot in my ear. “I want to— ” He pulls back.
“I know it’s your power. I know you’re a succubus.
But I wanted you before you ever tried to use it on me. ”
I wanted you before you ever tried to use it on me, my brain repeats. My brain begins to compose a constitution, a new system of governance based on these foundational words.
“I wanted you because I— ” And here he hesitates as though about to confess something dangerous.
Something much more secret than what he’s already said.
“Because I liked you. Because of the way you are with Ella, with your clients. You’re so .
. . good. Were. Are. God.” He closes his eyes briefly, wincing.
“You’re the opposite of a monster, Tempest. I still can’t—I can’t hate you enough.
” He takes a breath and now I can’t think at all.
I am going to cry and I don’t want to cry; I don’t want to do anything to alter this moment.
“I think that’s why it didn’t work,” he concludes, rushing a little now. “Why you didn’t die.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had never touched a demon I cared about. It might . . . it might not work as well because of that.”
I know he’s wrong—him caring about me won’t save me—but I don’t tell him.
The problem is love, Al said.
Joel can’t hate me enough.
I can’t hate him enough, either.
I don’t know what happens next, what happens now. Or maybe I do know, but I can’t stop, anyway.
“You won’t hurt them, will you?” I ask, my voice shaky, emotional. “The two people you told me about.”
He hesitates. He shakes his head slowly, No. “You made me tell you things.” Not exactly accusing, more a statement. “You broke into my mind.”
“I know.”
The rain puts its back into it, and I shiver but stay where I am. A few people come outside, umbrellas bursting into bloom.
“I walked here,” Joel says. “Would you be able to drive me home?”
He sounds so polite. The way he used to sound, before we were enemies. When we were pretending to be regular people together.
“No problem,” I say, also polite.
Two polite people who are unlikely to have had frenzied (slightly nonconsensual) sex in the backyard.
I remember how to unlock my car. We get in, dripping, uncivilized in our wetness, and I start the engine.
The car shudders anxiously, or maybe it’s sneezing, and the space seems to have shrunk by half since I was last in here.
Joel is sitting much closer to me than I would’ve estimated, the gray ceiling with its odd sequence of splatter stains (they were there when Dee and I bought the car) imposing itself on the top of his head. The car is trying to smush us together.
My music connects automatically, a moaning, writhing track about being seduced to the dark side.
A little too on the nose. I yank the volume down, notice the granola bar wrappers in the cup holder.
I always keep three or four bars in here, in case Ella needs a snack.
Joel doesn’t react to any of this, or at least he doesn’t show it.
Or at least I can’t bring myself to look at him, so I’m not sure whether he’s reacting in some subtle way.
Neither of us speaks as I pull out onto the main road.
Rain slaps the windshield and the wipers whip and creak in a losing effort to catch up, shoving aside the plastered corpses of leaves.
There’s a sheet of lightning, a switch slammed on and off again, as I turn into our neighborhood.
We’re the only ones on the road. Thunder pummels the air, rattles the night.
A few turns and I pull up in front of his house. Well, that was fast.
I swallow.
Should I say something? I can’t think what.
His hand is on the handle of the door. The rain crashes down, torrential now, almost solid. He glances over at me. “Why don’t you come in?”
My mind and body separate, flying in incompatible directions, anarchic with hope and confusion.
“No, I shouldn’t,” I whisper, looking at my hands, pale on the dark wheel. The car is in park. I drop them into my lap, but that looks suggestive of staying, so I put them back again. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
I can feel his eyes on my face.
There is a long pause. Lightning again, ripping clouds apart psychotically. Rain and wind are tearing fistfuls of leaves off the last trees of autumn, stripping them naked.
“Please,” he says very quietly, something jagged in it.
Thunder throws itself at us, tries to roll the car over, tries to shake us into one another, shake us together.
I shudder, look up. His eyes are burning on me in the dark.
I look away. I don’t want to sway him, to hold him under my power. I don’t want that at all.
And then his dark fills mine, and he is right there, and he is kissing me. His hand curves along the side of my head, my ear in his palm, his fingers possessive in my wet hair. His mouth on mine is kind and hungry and commanding, the way I knew it would be, the first time I ever saw him. I knew.