“Bellefleur. What are you drinking?”
She giggled at his name. She was dimly aware she’d already had too much to drink, but there was no one here to reprimand her. She told him and he waved for the bartender.
“I didn’t love the wedding,” she said, appalled at her nerve.
“A disappointment,” Bellefleur agreed. “One approaches these events hopefully. But they’re often the marriage to come in microcosm. Youth and adoration curdled in the course of a single evening.”
“They looked happy.” Kristen sipped too quickly from the fresh glass. It was delicious. “But you know they won’t be.”
Bellefleur smiled, not unkindly. “The inescapable question is why a woman as young and beautiful as you should appear so unhappy.”
“I—thank you.” Kristen felt herself blush. “Is it that obvious?”
“Only to me.” He laid a hand on top of hers.
She pulled away. “I’m married.”
“You don’t love Robby.”
“You know my husband?” Kristen felt a sharp shock of fear at his name. She didn’t know this man. The drink tasted metallic, harsh on her tongue.
The planes of his face, pleasant from a distance, shifted into configurations of menace. He leaned in, too close. “The spark between you, if there ever was one, is long curdled. You’re afraid to confide in anyone. A child might help, but you can’t wait that long.”
“Who are you?” Kristen grabbed her bag. She needed to get out of here.
“A devil,” Bellefleur swirled his drink, coils of scarlet twisting within the martini glass, “Of some small and rising prominence. We have business, you and I.”
She barked out a laugh. “What, you’re tempting me? I would never betray my husband.” But she realized that if she didn’t get away from this man, she would. She felt an intangible attraction to him, overwhelming her judgment.
“I work for the Father of Lies, Kristen. I know one when I hear it.”
“Leaving now.” She slid off the stool. “Don’t follow me.”
Kristen marched back the way she’d come, past the oval windows. There was a right turn, then a left, and she should be back at the ballroom. With Robby and her mother and the blond boy and everyone else she’d escaped just minutes before.
Bellefleur stood in her path, scarlet martini glass in hand. “Running from me is much like fleeing yourself, pointless and vaguely embarrassing.”
It was impossible that he could be in front of her, impossible that he knew about her dream baby. Was he really the devil? She’d only had four damn drinks.
Kristen lunged for an emergency exit. She scrambled down a handful of steps, onto the beach. The icy March wind streamed through her hair and dress. Sand sucked at her heels.
Behind her the devil descended the stairs, following, taking his time.
She kicked off her shoes and clambered over the first of the dunes, her heart pounding, cold sand shifting beneath her feet. She lost her balance and fell down the other side. She lay on the beach, her dress torn, staring up at rushing storm clouds and the ghosts of her breath.
“Can you run?” The blond youth from the wedding stood over her, offering his hand. “There isn’t much time.”
She was so cold she could have broken anything on the way down without feeling it. But she took his hand.
He led her across the dark beach to the water’s edge, black waves smashing themselves into silver foam. They turned north and jogged for almost a mile before he signaled her to stop.
Kristen looked back, unable to parse the darkness. “I’m dreaming all this, right?”
“Sorry, no.” The boy was absurdly good looking. His eyes glowed a brilliant cyan blue, bright even on this moonless night. Close up he appeared younger than she’d thought.
His beauty made her angry. “You were staring at me, before. It’s not polite.”
“I’m not polite. I’m an angel.” He graced her with a slight, ironic bow. “Anapostos.”
“Oh come on.”
“You believe he’s a devil.” The youth exuded a quiet, rational calm. And he knew that the older man claimed to be a devil.
Kristen felt her brittle grip on the world shattering. “I believe he knows more about me than seems possible and I’m terrified of him. And that your name is possibly sillier than his.”
“I won’t let him take your soul.”
It silenced her for a moment. She drew in a deep breath. “That’s what he wants?’
“He’s tempting you. If you give in your soul becomes his.”
Kristen felt a chill beyond the wind. She had always believed in the devil. It was easier than believing in God. But she never imagined she’d meet him. “Why me?”
He looked away, embarrassed for her.
She realized that she knew why. “Because I’ve been weak.”
“It draws him. I can protect you.”
“All I have to do is say no?” Kristen said this like it was no big deal, as if she could. As if she hadn’t spent the past three months stepping into temptation’s path entirely without the devil’s assistance.
“He’s remarkably persuasive. But I carry grace on my wings, even here on earth. As long as I stay near you I can block his vision.”
“You don’t have wings.” She tried to imagine bringing this honeyed angel home to Robby. “And you can’t be with me all the time.”
“The devil has plenty of souls to harvest. He plucks the low-hanging fruit. If you prove too difficult he’ll move on. Stay with me, hidden till morning, and then you’ll be safe.”
“A fine plan.” Bellefleur strode across the sand, his bright suit muted by the darkness. “But predicated on my not finding you, say, now.”
Anapostos stepped in front of Kristen, but the devil’s stare seemed to pass clean through him.
“Don’t look at him.” The youth’s voice diminished even as he spoke, lost in the furious wind.
“Kristen.” Bellefleur brushed him aside. “I’m here to give you what you want.”
Kristen realized she did want him, not for herself or the moment, but for the certainty. This was the longing she’d been wrestling with for weeks. She wished for the certainty of sin, an end to her absurd flirtations and embarrassing retreats.
This weakness had called the devil down on her. She hadn’t intended to be a bad wife, but how else could her marriage have proven such a disaster? Even to fall must be better than this endless, exhausting trying.
The devil took her hand. His touch, hot as a coal, warmed her everywhere. She fell into his arms, the fire of his body enveloping her.
It was only the feel of him against her cheek that allowed her to escape. When Robby had first affected his beard, just after the honeymoon, she’d put her foot down. She could not stand beards.
She twisted out of the devil’s arms and into the icy water. The wind-whipped waves embraced her, their implacable cold blasting away all the feeling that had never made her anything but uncomfortable.
Kristen woke as he laid her on the bed. She was surrounded by warm, white light. At first she thought herself dead, heaven won by her final sacrifice.
“You’re still shivering.” The angel wrapped a white towel around her.
She was soaked. Her teeth chattered. She looked past him.
“My hotel. It was closer.” He was wet as well, but warm to the touch.
“You pulled me out?”
“Take off your dress.”
“You saved my life.”
“Not if you don’t get these wet things off.”
She couldn’t feel her shaking fingers. “Zipper. In the back.”
Anapostos had stripped off his sopping shirt. Thick scars, ugly and fresh, cut across both shoulder blades.
“Your wings?”
“The price paid for my coming.” He gently slid her dress around her shoulders, off her hips. “I don’t regret it.”
“I don’t understand why you saved me. If I drowned, still faithful
—he couldn’t take my soul. Isn’t that why you were sent here?”
“I wasn’t sent here.” Anapostos looked away. “Angels observe, but we’re forbidden to interfere in the lives of mortals. Every day I peer into the hearts of hundreds of men and women. I feel what they feel. But I’ve been doing this for hundreds of years. I can feel for mortals, but their pains and longings no longer touch me.”
Anapostos turned back to face her, blue eyes blazing. “Until you, Kristen. Your despairing heart. Your beautiful prayers. You brought me back to life. When I saw the devil coming for you, I had to act.”
“But I’m horrible. I’ve ruined my marriage. I don’t know what I want and can’t control what I do.”
“Kristen, you are a good person. And you are so special.”
She leaned forward and kissed him. He hesitated only a moment before responding in kind. Then his hands were everywhere.
Kristen opened her eyes to sunlight. The storm had moved off and golden light filled the white room. Her head ached.
The angel lay beneath the sheets, still asleep. Kristen ran her fingertips along his flank, pleased anew by his shape, even as the night returned to her in full.
She sat up straight. She was historically a poor drunk, but never like this. She had freaked out on a wedding guest and run out into the storm. She had slept with a pretty college boy with an inspired line of patter who had possibly—probably: she glanced at her dress, soaked and stained, on the floor—fished her out of the surf.
Her marriage was over. She was ruined. Certainty was finally hers. Kristen thought she might sob, but found herself giggling.
She had imagined this moment forever, the dreaded morning after. Waking beside a stranger and realizing she had betrayed her vows, her husband, everything good in the world. She had conjured this shame in excruciating, luxurious detail.
Now, faced with the actuality, she felt none of this. She felt different, but it was a difference completely unlike her melodramatic imaginings. She felt a little sad, and a little older.
The youth’s hip collapsed beneath her touch. The sheet covering him deflated. He was gone, his outline fading from the mattress.
Bellefleur sat by the window, watching her.
The terror of the dark beach came crashing into the bright room. Kristen drew the empty sheet tight about her shoulders. The devil and the angel: it was true. The devil she had believed in all her life had come for her soul, and the God she believed in when convenient was lost to her forever.
“What did you do to him?” Her voice shook.
“You take cream and sugar, I believe?” Bellefleur held a still-steaming Starbucks Grande.
But it wasn’t all true. Kristen realized she knew exactly what had happened to her angel. “He wasn’t real. He was your creature. Like a moron I fell for him.”
“How could you not? Anapostos’ swoon-worthy particulars were entirely predicated on your yearnings.” The devil set the coffee on the dresser. “Trust me, you would have found the real thing less alluring and rather more judgmental.”
“This is how you tempt people?”
“When it suits.”
Of course it was a trick. She had believed an angel would sacrifice his wings for an adulteress? That he would find her good? “It seems awfully elaborate. I mean, I was going to screw up like this no matter what you did. You’d have gotten my soul. Or is this just how you get your kicks?”
“No.” The devil rose from his chair. “These masques are not the elements of my vocation that bring gratification.”
“What happens now? You pull me screaming me down to hell? Do you wait until I die or kill me with a power tool or something?” Kristen wanted to run, but that was how she had come to this sorry bed. As much as she regretted what she’d done, the devil had given her the clarity she wanted. She didn’t love Robby. He probably didn’t love her. This was the mysterious problem with her marriage.
She had married him because she hadn’t known what else to do when he asked her, on his knees, in front of all the people at the beautiful restaurant. Because she couldn’t imagine what she would tell everyone if she refused her boyfriend of three years. And because once she had made this instant, catastrophic decision, she had refused with every fiber of her being to examine it.
She was the furthest thing from special—just one of many millions unwilling to take responsibility for their lives. That it had taken awakening in a stranger’s bed to realize it didn’t reflect well upon her, but it had saved her the tragedy of subjecting a child to whatever her marriage would have become.
“What do you imagine you’ve done, Kristen?” the devil asked. “Your angel was nothing but a dream. Surely even your people don’t rate an evening of robust self-stimulation a shooting offense?”
“What are you saying? I’m not fallen?”
“I’m sure I’m uniquely unqualified to judge.”
She studied the devil. The contours of his face appeared gentler, melancholy. “You’re not here to take my soul.”
“A convenient if somewhat insulting folklore of which I make occasional use.”
“Then what was all this for? This … masque?”
“My people are bringers of knowledge. We attempt to assist those mortals capable of it.” Bellefleur’s lidless stare read the essence of her like a book fallen open at the most crucial page. “Some knowledge cannot be told. It must be experienced.”
The self-knowledge Kristen had sought and fled, from the final moments of her own wedding three years past.
She stood, facing down the devil. “Thanks a bunch for the knowledge. I don’t love my husband. Fine. But I’m not going to just up and leave him. I made a commitment. I married him. That means something where I come from.” She flushed red. Her throat was dry, her voice ragged.
Bellefleur passed her the coffee. It was warm in her hands.
“So don’t go thinking I’m going to divorce Robby this afternoon, break my vows, or have some tawdry affair, just because of your stupid knowledge. Whatever else this is it’s my fault, and I’m gonna try to make it right before I just give up.” Kristen was furious, but not with the devil.
“The serpent brings knowledge, nothing more.” Bellefleur rose. “Well, perhaps the occasional coffee. What you do with it is entirely your own affair.” He picked his hat off the dresser and opened the door.
“That’s it?” Kristen wanted to sound angry but her fury was abating, giving way to an unfamiliar contemplation. “Am I supposed to thank you or tip you or something?”
“Traditionally, you’re supposed to hate and fear me.” The devil nodded farewell, a silhouette in the bright morning light. “But the choice is yours.”
Kristen took a sip of coffee, harsh and soothing at once. That, she supposed, was what she had been so afraid of.
A Shot of Fireball
Carrie Laben
Since moving to Montana, Sandy had slept with a classmate who insisted he didn’t do one-night stands and therefore hooked up with her twice before confessing that he really had a crush on Beth from the poetry program. She’d met a guy on OkCupid who talked a good game about keeping things casual until he abruptly broke it off because he couldn’t see a future with anyone who wouldn’t go to church with him. She had a month of once-a-week dates with a Forest Service guy who’d wound up getting transferred to Idaho to monitor the wolverine population out there. That was it. In two years.
She was sitting in the Silver Dollar two hours before close on a Monday night when the thin man walked in. She’d been shooting the shit with Jake and Fluffy all night, and they had, come to think of it, bemoaned the man shortage a bit. Jake was another poet, a guy built like a fire hydrant who wrote about his childhood on the high plains and collected out-of-luck dogs. It was even harder for him to find a guy than it was for Sandy. Fluffy was straight, six foot five, a bearded Viking pool shark/barista whose angle on the problem was that he was deeply, deeply sick of getting hit on at work.
Fluffy spotted
the newcomer, gestured him over. He slid onto the stool across the table from Sandy and grinned; he had strangely white and even teeth, set in a foxlike face only partly disguised by his sideburns. At some point, his wire-framed glasses had been broken across the nose and fixed with a coil of wire.
“I’m going to win the Shake-a-Day,” he said, poured himself a Pabst from their pitcher, and turned back to the bar. Fluffy followed him.
Sandy raised an eyebrow at Jake.
“Caleb,” he said. “The big guy says he plays a mean game of pool.”
Fluffy whooped, a noise like a battle cry.
“Throws a mean die too, it sounds like.”
“I know ‘die’ is right, but it sounds weird.”
“So does ‘throws a mean dice.’ ”
“Throws a mean Yahtzee?”
“It’ll do.”
Then Fluffy was back, bearing four shots, and Caleb was behind him, stuffing his wallet back into the pocket of his jeans. To Sandy, it looked like the jeans might be a bit too tight to accommodate a wallet newly thick with five hundred bucks in twenties, but it worked somehow. Maybe his jeans were bigger on the inside. Now that would be nice.
“Fireball,” Caleb said, but Sandy had already caught the medicinal cinnamon whiff. Everyone in town seemed to be enamored of the stuff, and it was the official shot of celebration and any situation that called for a hearty “fuck yeah!” The Silver Dollar even had a special cooler full of it, because obviously something called Fireball should be served chilled. For herself, Sandy hated it. It gave her heartburn.
Still, she could put up with it so’s not to be a killjoy, especially when it came to a cute stranger. Down the hatch.
“What do you do, friend?”
“I tell lies for a living,” she said, and grinned back. Of course the living wasn’t in the lies, it was in the teaching stipend, but that didn’t sound as good. “A lot of my stories are online. You should Google them.”
They finished the pitcher, and another pitcher, and another—Caleb was splashy with his winnings and insisted on switching to Fat Tire, which almost made up for the Fireball. Though Sandy could never recall the conversation afterwards as precisely as she would have liked, they wound up talking about Robert Anton Wilson somehow. Caleb declared himself the number-one fan of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Then he asked her to dance.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 11
