Chapter 18
I cross the space between us quickly, before he has time to react. He tries to back up, but there’s nowhere to go. He’s up against the door.
“Tempest, don’t touch me!” he says urgently. He drops the clipboard with my chart on it and it slaps the floor, the sound a gunshot. His hands are up.
I put my hands on his chest.
Air rushes into my lungs.
Ah. He feels so good. Even through the stiff fabric of the white coat.
I can feel his warmth, the weight of him, his substance.
The first time I’ve touched him.
It’s radiating through me.
I didn’t expect it to be quite this strong. I don’t know what I expected. How could I even expect anything?
They have some weird power over us, says Grub’s secret message in my mind. Unfair advantage. And Dick Face, telling me to act first and fast.
I can’t hesitate.
He’s pressing himself against the door, hands still up like I’ve got a gun on him. Or possibly an illegal hunting knife.
I grab his face.
Exactly as I have wanted to since I met him. Or maybe a little more aggressively.
I lunge up on my tiptoes and smash my mouth into his.
It’s only a second: chaos, raw color, the specific realness of the skin of his lips.
The shock of him against me. My brain short-circuits pathetically for a second, and I am only aware that I am kissing him, finally. Instead of why. His warm mouth—
He wrenches away, turning his head. “No, wait! Please!”
“Are you begging for your life?” My mouth is an inch from his. I like how my voice comes out in a cape and a mask, disguised and revealing nothing.
“I can’t— ” he gasps, “I can’t touch you. Don’t make me touch you!” He’s afraid. He’s very afraid. But it’s not for himself.
I lurch back. “That’s how you do it.” My mind flips back to Kelly, my favorite nurse, saying, It’s like he has the magic touch. She was right, as good nurses usually are.
He doesn’t move.
“That’s how you heal, too. It’s the . . . opposite. When you touch one of us.”
He nods ever so slightly.
“But you won’t touch me.”
He stares at me. There is anguish, confusion, fear in his eyes. He closes them as though willing me to vanish, wishing the whole ridiculous scene away. He opens his eyes again, and now he looks more resolved, angrier.
“I don’t know where my father is,” I say. “So it’s just you and me.”
His gaze slips to my throat, my breasts; I feel it like a warm touch on my skin. “This is what you do? You just take your clothes off?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Why am I even talking?
This is it—this is the moment when I have to act. He has hesitated, he can’t quite bring himself to hurt me. But he will. He will work up to it. He wants to work up to it. He’s already told me he wants to kill me. He’s been very clear.
Think of Grub, I yell at myself.
Think of Grub, who didn’t get to live.
Don’t fall for anything.
“You’re trying to sleep with me to kill me.” His words are slow. “You don’t want me, you just want me to die.”
I look directly into his eyes. For a second, I remember him looking at me across the restaurant table, the coconuts between us. That unfettered honesty, that openness in his face.
No. Don’t think of that.
I can’t let myself think of that.
I reach up and painstakingly remove his glasses. He seems paralyzed, hypnotized.
Maybe there is something to the eye contact after all. If only I understood my own damn curse. My own power.
I hold out my hand, open my fingers, and drop his glasses.
They hit the floor, and he flinches as they clatter.
His face is naked now, exposed under the sterile fluorescent light, younger looking, the sweet, easy shape of his nose more evident.
His pupils dilate, he can’t look away. Like the server in the South Beach bar.
Like the cook and the thug. His lips part.
“I want you . . .” I whisper, “to die.”
And I can feel it, a surge within me, an eager uncoiling. Dick Face was right. I can use it. I can command it.
It wants this.
I want this.
Too much, really. In a way I refuse to examine for even a second.
It’s old desire, I tell myself. Misplaced, disoriented.
It’s slow and ignorant desire—still stuck on the way his eyes met mine when I was singing, the way his arm almost grazed mine in the kitchen and I would have given anything just to brush my fingers against his fingers.
My hands are on his chest again, I find the button of the white coat. I undo it, my fingers surprisingly confident. Then my hands are under his shirt and I am touching his skin. And—fuck—I have to close my eyes hard for a moment. There is an onslaught, I’m being lifted by a wave, I’m borne forward.
“No,” he says, but it’s feeble.
I move swiftly and my mouth is on his throat; I’m licking him like I will bite him next. I am starving, I am unstoppable.
It’s never been like this.
I’ve had sex so few times, but I know how different this is. I can’t help knowing, even though I am trying not to. And then I want it to be my hatred that makes it different; I want it to be the curse and only the curse.
I yank his face down to mine. I am kissing him ferociously, my tongue in his mouth, trying to consume the rich cinnamon warmth of his taste. I push myself against him.
“Fuck you,” he moans into my mouth, and I eat his words.
Not what I imagined he might say when I fantasized about him all those times, before I knew who—what—he was. But then, I’d gotten everything wrong.
“Yes!” I agree. I don’t even know myself by now.
And his hands drop onto me.
His fingers spread across my shoulder blades, his palms magnets pinning me against him, securing me in place.
My heart hitches.
Something pours into me.
My death.
I gasp.
“My turn,” he growls.
I feel it unspool through my blood, out to every microscopic capillary. Something flares in me in response. Inside my cells, a battle begins, metastasizes in a frenzy. I feel my darkness balloon, out of control; I feel my muscles soften, my lungs—tissue paper—heaving to fill.
I think of Benny.
His lungs stopped working.
The thing I did to him taking over his body.
Oh, I understand it. I understand it.
This is how they died, my half siblings. Their own power turned against them.
I can tell.
It feels as though my body is trying to eject the curse. But the curse is too powerful, it is fighting back, it is going to kill me rather than surrender my body.
He is healing the curse.
Except it can’t be healed.
He is killing us by healing us.
I seize his face again between my hands, force my gaze into his.
“You are mine,” I say, not really on purpose.
He closes his eyes, grimacing, resisting, his chest rising in rough swells.
“Mine,” I insist.
His hands slide to my waist, my hips, he grips me hard, holding me against him, or maybe trying to hold me off.
“Give in.” I drag my hands down his chest, over his stomach, plunge them lower.
He groans, turning his head, agonized.
I’ve never had this effect on anyone.
I’ve never needed anything this much.
I am vibrating, a string pulled to its extreme.
“You want to,” I whisper. “You want to.” It is completely obvious how much he wants to.
My heart folds in, gasping, flailing.
And then, in a single instant, he breaks.
He scoops me up, my legs around his waist, as though he barely feels my weight, and now we’re on the exam table and he’s yanking his clothes off and shoving me down at the same time, somehow.
I can feel the strength in his hands, and it’s too much, it must be part of the magic.
He’s already inside me, everything is all at once. My body is greedy, I am a carnivorous plant, I am a predator, I am devouring and devouring.
My hands are on his back, now in his hair, where I submerge them in the dense soft thicket of his curls. My phone is stuck underneath me. My fingers are addicted to everything they touch, my skin is obsessed.
He is wearing a pendant on a thin chain—a simple gold Star of David in a circle that hits me in the face as I curl forward under him. I know this particular star, but the knowledge is distant now, like a flashlight through a forest. It was Adam’s.
I can’t seem to stop moving. I’m trying to kiss him, and he is turning his face, his teeth bared.
I’m hauling on his shoulders, climbing up to him to press our chests together, but he’s too strong, holding himself above me, his arms like pillars I can’t shift.
I run my hands over his thick biceps, his heavy shoulders; I cry out and his hand clamps over my mouth.
I bite it, but it won’t relent. I give up and touch myself—this won’t last long.
Everything is fire, is volcanic, is velvet, frantic, is the dark ocean closing over me.
His hand releases, I throw my head back.
I feel him fighting to maintain a small space between us, but at the last second he turns his head and presses his face into my hair, his urgent sounds muffled.
I lose myself.
I am everywhere.
I no longer exist.
I don’t know how long it goes on, afterward, when no one moves.
We are bound together, the relentless light in the ceiling staring down.
My brain goes flat and blank with a deep, compulsive satisfaction that borders alarmingly on joy.
I want, for a mistaken second, to stay like this.
Maybe permanently. I want nothing else to be true.
“Oh my God,” he says, hoarse, stunned.
He wrenches himself off and out of me, his hair wild, a glory.
I go up on my elbows to look at him, torn paper crinkling primly under me.
He’s already dragging his pants on, snatching his glasses off the floor.
They seem unbroken. He won’t look at me, at his sweat glistening on my stomach and breasts where he finally fell against me.
He pulls his shirt on, the white coat, grabs the clipboard, reconstructing himself, transforming back into a doctor who does not fuck his patients in the exam room.
I can tell he’s just going to leave. I sit all the way up, and his eyes flick toward me, but he won’t look. He opens the door.
“Joel,” I say.
He’s gone.
* * *
As I walk through the waiting room toward the exit, I feel my knees trying to liquefy.
Am I hurt?
Maybe his power is still working in me. Maybe, without any warning, my heart will settle, shut off. Maybe I will die in the car, at home.
But I don’t think so.
I don’t think so at all.
The receptionist calls out to me, and I jerk back guiltily. “Did you get a chance to pay yet, hon?”
I breathe out in relief and go to her window. She’s chewing gum, chatty. “How’s your fall going? I’m already in holiday mode. Did we process your insurance yet?”
The receptionist who checked me in has gone home already.
I take a breath. “Yeah, uh, there was a mistake with the name on my chart—some kind of mix-up.” I would sound worse at this lie if I wasn’t in my current state of mind, which is basically the state of no longer having access to a mind.
I manage to pull my insurance and ID out of my wallet without losing a finger to the knife, which I forgot to refold.
I hand the cards to her, and she takes them and starts typing, unfazed.
“Sorry about that mix-up! Super strange! I hope you’re doing something fun after this! That’ll be sixty-five, please.”
I hand her my credit card, looking over my shoulder like he might, at any moment, come barreling through the door after me.
“Did you have a good appointment with Doctor Tav? Good first time?”
I look up with something in my face that confuses her.
She says: “Didn’t click? Usually patients love him!”
“No, no,” I say numbly. “We, um, clicked.”
And then I think I laugh.
Back in the car, I remember to fold the knife. I try to think things through. It’s very hard to think at all.
My vagina is stunned and swollen, disturbingly pleased with itself, disconcertingly hungry for more. I can still feel his hands on me, the urgent pressure of his touch. The curling hair on his chest and stomach, the warmth of his skin, the way he tasted. I shudder, grit my teeth, snarl at myself.
Adam didn’t react until the fifth time we slept together. He must’ve gotten a little weaker each time, more permeable, more at risk. Even with all my ill intent, Joel was too strong. This time. But I wonder if I have weakened him, too.
I call Dee as soon as I get reception again, which is a block from the office building. “Let’s go home.”
“Yeah, I’m definitely done,” she says, sounding like she’s at her wits’ end. And then, “Did something happen?”
“I got things under control.” I think of how his voice changed, how afraid he was to touch me.
He doesn’t want to kill me. He thinks he should.
But he doesn’t want to. I am picturing the way he looked at me, at his dining table, when his gaze confessed to me against his will.
He’d told me he couldn’t date me and I could tell he wished he could.
I could tell there was more to the story.
“T, what are you talking about?”
“I’ll meet you at home,” I say.