Chapter 11
Sweat tickled my cleavage as it rolled down into my sequined lingerie. I’d just come off stage and settled into my vanity chair to de-cake my face after a sub-par dance. It was hard to dance when I could still smell the embers of hell-fire that clung to Lucifer’s shirt when he held me.
The dark circles under my eyes had deepened, made worse by my semi-permanent grimace.
“The stage hands are still collecting your bills, Ivy.” Nova said behind me, her eyebrows dancing in the reflection.
I wiped the feelings off my face and replaced them with the three essential S’s for strippers: sexy, sly, and sassy.
“It’s not me,” I argued. “There are a lot of big spenders out there tonight. They were really digging the ‘come hither’ finger tonight.”
“Ew,” came a voice sweet as sugar from the back entrance.
I turned to see Caramel hanging up her coat.
What the fuck?
“Carm?” I asked, my stare following her every move until she sat on the bench beside me.
She didn’t look at me, though. Rather, it almost seemed like she was making an effort to avoid me. She fluffed her hair to create those signature messy curls before pulling makeup out of her bag.
“Uhm, Earth to Caramel,” I said, waving my hand in front of her face. “Why are you here?”
“I work here, Ives,” she answered while applying bright red lipstick.
“Don’t play dumb with me, Carm.” I turned to face her fully. “What happened to your hot date?”
She paused, only for a second, but I caught it. Something wasn’t right. The protectiveness I felt for her, for all of them, put tension on the demonic rubber band where my soul used to be, and it was waiting for the word to snap.
“Ended sooner than I thought.” Carm leaned closer to the mirror and focused too hard on perfecting her eyeliner wing. “Passion waits for no man, Ives. He was on me before we made it home, and all those biscuits my momma made rounded me out in all the right places.”
“Are you telling me he nutted so fast that it ended your date early?” I said skeptically.
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Not every man is built for a marathon. I take it as a compliment.”
“I can’t believe the twins left us hanging tonight,” Nova groaned off to the side. “Maybe they got a man or two who lasted too long.”
“Yeah,” Sapphire huffed a small laugh in agreement. “They probably ran off with Joe flirting with them the other night and double tapped the barrel too hard.” Darcy threw a suggestive eyebrow waggle our way.
“Oh come on,” I said, still keeping one leery eye on Caramel. “Are you telling me that two twenty-year-olds got dicked down hard enough to be out of commission for a whole day? Two days?” Honestly, I’d lost track of time.
“They probably just got in over their heads with stripping and never came back.”
“Probably,” Carm agreed.
Then I saw it.
An angry patch of discoloration hid beneath an orange patch of foundation on her neck, and it was not the nice round shape of some dumbass sucking the life out of her.
No. I knew those marks intimately because I could still remember staring at their twins on my own skin from strong hands wrapped around my neck while Callen forced himself on me.
Rage slithered through my veins like snakes ready to strike. “What happened, Carm?”
“Nothing,” she shook her head and smiled dismissively. “Just a little rash I don’t want to show. You know how unflattering those lights can be out there sometimes.”
She dropped her beauty blender and reached behind her, unclasping the necklace I’d never seen her without.
It was a simple gold chain with a single cross looped onto the bottom.
In the middle was a modest square diamond that was taken from her grandmother’s wedding ring after she died.
Caramel had the necklace made so she could carry her whole world with her wherever she went.
If ever my humanity slipped too far away, just one look at Caramel would bring it crashing back.
“You can tell me, you know,” I said gently, even though I felt anything other than.
She met my level stare and mumbled a trembling lie. “There’s nothing to tell, Ivy.”
I stared for a moment longer before nodding.
“Okay.” We didn’t speak as I slipped out of the lingerie, changed into sweats, and packed the rest of my shit into a duffle bag.
I smiled to placate her, though, and said “Well since you’re here, I’m off to serenade Jesus and binge watch Pretty Woman.
Maybe eat Funyuns until I throw up,” I shrugged and winked, heart warming slightly at the sight of her smile and sound of her tinkling, half-hearted laugh.
It told me she was relieved I’d dropped the subject.
“The night is young and full of horrors. Never know what kind of trouble is to be had!” Like murder.
I slung the duffle over my shoulder and stumbled sideways from the weight.
“Careful!” She screeched and reached out to my rescue. “Goodness gracious you’re so clumsy sometimes. And I’m pretty sure the saying is ‘the night is dark and full of terrors’, not ‘young and full of horrors’.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.” A blast of cold air blew in when I opened the back exit. Caramel screeched and covered her scantily clothed body.
“Shut the door!”
“I’ll see you bitches tomorrow.”
With that, I slipped out into the dark. Steam rose from the ground in an eery display, and I half expected a shadow figure to step out from behind the industrial sized dumpster.
Snowflakes tickled my nose, lights from the city streets reflecting in their translucency in a peaceful display as I walked through the crowded streets of St. Louis. Though I tried not to let my mind wander, it didn’t listen.
When I’d woken to Lucifer sitting at my bedside, I didn’t know what to think.
I still didn’t.
We’d always been players in this lusty, cat and mouse game, but it had never amounted to anything. Lucifer Morningstar was the original sin; the picture of lust, and greed, and everything else that made humanity capable of becoming the filth of the Earth.
In spite of that, though, Lucifer was not filth.
Even as he’d made me drop my towel and crawl to his feet….. He’d neither touched me nor forced me to touch him in return. There were no weaponized words as Joe’s gift dangled from his fingers. He hadn’t read me the note and slapped me for any infraction his jury and judge condemned me for.
Jesus fuck, and then there was Joe.
“Do you think he’s different?” Lucifer’s haunting question floated through my mind.
The truth was, I did think Joe was different. He knew I was a stripper and rather than treating me like a sex-loaned Barbie, he protected me, walked me home, and was a gentleman the whole way. Still, it didn’t dampen the warning bells that rang in my mind around all men.
Well, every man except for Lucifer.
And the way he’d held me tonight…
“Devil save me,” I whispered into the frosty breeze. “I mean he should be the one setting off my stupid alarms, right? The goddamn biblical devil? What would be left of a man after living for billions of years? Would he even be a man at all?”
A lady in a brown parka scooted as far over on the sidewalk as she could before passing me. Had I said all of that outloud?
Oops.
For the first time, I caught myself legitimately wondering if it was normal for Lucifer to collect debts himself.
He’d been a constant presence in my afterlife. Whether it was collection night or not, I always felt him near.
And then there was the way that Jesus seemed so bonded to him. Jesus, a cat I trusted more than any other living being—
“Fuck!” I groaned and stopped, wiping a hand across my eyes. “Jesus. Fucking, Jesus!”
Food. The cat needed food and I was supposed to stop by the twenty-four hour market on my way home. The market that was, most unfortunately, three blocks back.
With a solid eyeroll and deep, steadying breath, I turned around and backtracked. There was no way I could show my face in that apartment empty handed. Anyone who thought the devil’s idea of punishment was bad had obviously never been chased down the street by a hungry, one hundred pound cat.
I jogged the last bit and stepped through the automatic door. Lofi music played over the stereo in a relaxing flow of happy chords. I walked head down through the aisles and only wanted to die a little bit, trying to silently breathe so no one could hear how close to my second-death I was.
”Luci, if you can hear me, I want you to know that I think it’s absolute bullshit that I’m supernaturally strong and could likely run for hours but still feel like I’m going to die at the end.” Then, to myself, I whispered, “Gotta lay off the ramen.”
The pet food aisle was looking a little too bare for comfort. All of the rich people shit was taken, leaving behind dried up kibble and synthetic fish powder. All of which were not Jesus approved.
“Fucking, Jesus,” I grumbled for the umpteenth time that night and stomped to the refrigerated meat section. I needed something that said, ‘I’m sorry I’m late getting home, your highness’ and not ‘I forgot about your food so I hope this makes up for it.’
“Come here often?”
I startled and whipped around, surprised to find–
“Batman?”
Those same warning bells prickled the back of my neck.
“I’m sorry,” he said with his hands up. A genuine, boyish grin lit up his features. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Your presence didn’t scare me.” I straightened the non-existent wrinkles from my sweatshirt and cleared my throat to buy myself some time for composure. “It was your pathetic attempt at a pickup line.”
“Ouch.”
What the hell was he doing here?
Perhaps he’s following you, came an icy whisper.
I shoved the devil’s suggestion aside and shook off the antsy feeling in my gut. Joe’s clean, woodsy smell wafted my way.
I turned to face him fully, crossed my arms and popped out my hip. “Next time, try something… more.”
“More?” he laughed, the sound light and jovial. “Can you give me some pointers?”