Delilah looked sultry and sophisticated and...kind. I wouldn’t have expected that.
She also knew a lot about me. Some of that she could have learned from my permanent record (Mom’s weapon of choice) and some just by watching me schlump in and out of school, holding my books to my chest and being alternately bullied and ignored. But she also knew what my stepfather did the night of my seventeenth birthday. I never told anyone that. It was dark in my room, for Pete’s sake.
Also, her business card had flames on it that actually flickered up off the card, and little wisps of smoke came up from the flames. So far, this is not technologically possible with anything thinner than three thirty-seconds of an inch. The card sat and smoked, lying next to our lattes and the contract written on a single sheet of thick white paper.
“Why are you recruiting me? I’m hopelessly nonsexy,” I said, stating the obvious.
“Don’t worry about that. Your new body will be plenty sexy.”
“New?” I was appalled. “I’m just getting used to this miserable thing.” I looked down at my boobs. “They’re huge already.”
“So give it smaller boobs.” Delilah seemed to be taking this slowly for my benefit, but I didn’t feel talked-down-to.
“Give it?”
She said, “You get complete control of the design. And if you don’t like the design, you can change it.”
I absorbed this idea. “Wow.” I added, “This would go over so much bigger with Daisy Rawson and her crowd. They would get plastic surgery if they could. They’d be getting botox.”
“And they’d still look like themselves. You can look like anything you want.”
I thought of my ideal, my gym teacher, Miss Waroo, who has an Asian cast to her eyes and cheekbones, and moves like a greyhound. If it weren’t for her, PE would always be hell.
Then an objection occurred to me. “But my mom wouldn’t recognize me.” I felt weird, imagining it. “She wouldn’t let me live with her anymore.”
“We pay very well. We also provide you with a new identity, living quarters with the succubus team, and a food and clothing fund.”
I blinked. This was it, the offer of my dreams. Money, a job, adulthood, escape from my home and stepfather, escape from my last year of imprisonment in this horrible school with all the people who had known me and despised me all my life.
Then I thought about Civics class and Ms. Waroo and my hope of getting into the University of Chicago.
I was somewhat embarrassed to admit, “I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I’m only nineteen. I mean, I’m of age, but—”
“Of course you are. That’s why I’m able to recruit you.”
“Hell has scruples?”
She shrugged. “The contract’s not valid with a minor. Your parents would have to cosign.”
This made sense to me. I’d waited two years for driver’s ed because of the parental cosign requirement, long after everyone else was earning tickets and rear-ending each other in the grandma car. “Do I get a driver’s license?”
“You get a car and a driver’s license, with a photo to match your new appearance.”
This was bait indeed.
I tried to fantasize living with a succubus team in their quarters and couldn’t.
I tried to imagine leaving my mother with that jerk. In spite of her willful blindness to his predatory behavior and her general cluelessness, maybe because of her cluelessness, I felt I couldn’t do it.
Who knew what evil he’d get up to if he didn’t have me around to victimize any more?
“I’m sorry.” I felt like an idiot. “I must seem like the kind of dope who doesn’t know what she wants.”
Delilah rolled her eyes. “You just turned nineteen. I think you get to change your mind.”
I pushed the contract with one finger. “Not if I sign this. I’ve read the literature,” I said, sounding very adult to myself.
“We can’t keep you if you don’t want to stay. If you last longer than six hundred and sixty-six years, you can be vested, and then we’re stuck with you. But for now you’re a trainee. And after a year you’re an independent contractor.”
“What?”
“Practically nobody is permanent staff anymore. Employee benefits,” she said crisply. “They are, excuse me, hell on the bottom line.”
I knew about independent contractors. My mom is lucky to be a full-time school district employee. Both our junior high schools are serviced by the same counselor, who is an independent contractor, and who has to drive back and forth twice a day to keep all her office hours, and she doesn’t even get overtime or dental.
“What makes you think I want to be a succubus?” I said, beginning to look at the proposition as an actual job offer. There wasn’t much research on succubi in my education. “I don’t want to give guys blowies in their sleep.”
Delilah leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees. “Okay. If you were a sex demon, what would you like to do?”
I looked around the coffee shop. It was late morning, my study hour, which I’d cut because I don’t have the cojones to cut a real class. Nobody was in here except the ugly-sweater ladies and a mom or two.
By now I had pretty much relaxed with Delilah. I think it was when she said that about employee benefits. It was just a job, they had paperwork to fill out, and the system sucked, but you worked around it. I got it.
Now I felt free to think about the offer.
What would I do with a new body?
How would I design a new body?
Well, for one thing, I would be taller. No-brainer there. If I added ten inches, I’d be just about the right weight. Move it around a little—okay, a lot. Fix my woolly hair. Maybe I’d like Chinese hair—thick and straight, takes a perm, takes color, but basically it looks groomed, whether I groom or not. Lighten my skin up. I realized, gosh, I could be white. Really white, not almost-as-good, and no darker patches on my neck and thighs, I could look like Daisy, I could wear a bathing suit in public, and even dare to get into the sun without tanning unevenly—
At that point I stopped cold.
Okay, my father is no rock star or Fulbright scholar, but my skin is about the only part of him I have, until I’m old enough to drink and can find out if I’m also a congenital alcoholic. The rainbow-bracelet-wearing clique won’t admit that I’m entitled to diversity points, or even acknowledge I exist, because I’m such a freak. But it felt icky, imagining a perfect me with Daisy’s perfect Caucasian skin.
Then I had a thought. “Could I go darker? Like, a golden-brown? Beyoncé-brown?”
Delilah shrugged. “Sure. You’ll have to eat,” she warned me.
I looked at her with amusement. “What are you, my mother?”
“No, it’s part of the deal. Most succubi like this part. It’s what makes the body stay nice and thin. You have to eat an average of forty-five-hundred calories a day, or you’ll get fat.”
I stared at her, uncomprehending, for maybe thirty seconds. Then I started to grin. “You really are the devil, aren’t you?”
She grinned back. “Not even close. But test it if you want. Wait here.” She got up, leaving her fancy lizardskin clutch purse on the rickety little table, and went to the counter. Evan Schumberger sold her two scones with butter pats, two double-chocolate muffins, and a lemon square. She brought them back to the table and piled them in front of me.
“If you eat this and wake up with a stomach ache at midnight, you’ll know I’m full of shit. If you eat it, sleep like a baby, and wake up ten pounds lighter and an inch taller, you’ll know it’s for real, and you’re on your way to finishing senior year with some lovely revenge, and freedom at the end of it.”
“I’d have freedom at the end of it anyway,” I muttered, but I was looking at that lemon square.
“You can eat junk food, you can eat fois gras and drink syrupy girly bar drinks, you can eat doorknobs and poison, and all it’ll do is keep you in supermodel shape. Hey,” she added, when I squinted. “
There have to be some perks for working for hell.”
I shrugged and woofed it all down, lemon square, both muffins, and a scone, without butter. Then I used both butter pats on the other scone. It sure felt good to fill myself up.
With food in me I felt a lot less indecisive.
What Delilah’s offer was confronting me with was the basic problem of walking out on my mom and leaving her to the dickhead’s tender mercies. I would be faced with that sooner or later, succubus contract or no succubus contract.
On the other side of that coin, there was the likelihood of them kicking me out because I was obviously not their daughter, who was short, fat, dumpy, muddy-water-colored, poorly-groomed, and unpopular.
Apparently mom’s social worker training hadn’t prepared her for a troubled teen facing this kind of temptation. Oh, honey, I could almost hear her saying, brushing my forehead as if I had the kind of hair you could do that to. You’re just a baby. You’ll be a beautiful swan someday. You’ll grow into it. Mom wouldn’t call me an ugly duckling straight out, because that would be unsupportive.
Then I had an idea. “What if,” I said slowly, “I don’t change overnight? What if I grow into my perfect body?” That could work. I could keep an eye on her, finish the last of fricking high school...and live with my stepfather while I turned beautiful?
I shuddered.
Delilah said, “Are you thinking of your stepfather?”
How did she know? “You’re creepy.”
She shrugged. “It didn’t take telepathy. Although I have that, too.”
“He has trouble keeping his hands off me now. What happens when I get really sexy?” I felt ickies all over, imagining it.
“I’ll tell you what happens. He backs the fuck off.”
I flinched at the F word. “Bull.”
“People like him spend all their time working around the rules. Get sexy, and you change the rules on him.”
I decided I’d have to see that one in action to understand it. “What about succubi? Do they obey the rules?”
“Which rules?” Delilah said calmly. “The code of ethics for federal, state, county, and municipal employees who work with children? No. Federal statutes? Only to be discreet. The laws of physics? If it’s convenient. The rule for meeting their three-temptations-per-month quota? Depends if they like getting paid.”
I realized that, compared to my stepfather, I was an amateur at breaking the rules. I didn’t really want to break the rules. I mean, I didn’t get all sweaty thinking about it, as he clearly did. My mother said I was seeking attention by failing senior year. It might have been true, at that.
Although whose attention I could possibly be seeking, I couldn’t say. Not hers. All I’d get would be psychobabble and some holistic vitamins. But somebody’s attention. Someone I could trust.
Put like that, I realized why Mom was always trying to discourage me from “putting myself forward.” Seeking attention without knowing whose attention you wanted was like walking onto the subway train and yelling, Does anybody want to talk to me?
I ought to have known all this stuff. I’d been my mother’s lab rat for nineteen years.
That made me think of something else. “Now that I’m an adult, how does that change the rules? I mean, I’m still in school,” I said, pathetically hoping that I was still kind of protected from some things, even if my stepfather had figured out all the workarounds.
Delilah shrugged. “Ask your mom. She’s the school guidance counselor. I’m the demon who’s trying to get you to do sex work for hell.”
I got goosebumps. “Fair enough.”
“But I’ll give you this one for free. When you realize how sexy you are, your stepfather will back the fuck off. He’ll be terrified.”
“You said that before. It sounded awesome. But I’m not protected by all those laws now.”
“He’s not afraid of the laws. He’s afraid of sexually confident women. That’s why he preys on you,” Delilah added, rubbing it in. “Among others.”
I’d opened my mouth to protest, but then I shut it. He might stop preying on me, if Delilah was right, but he wouldn’t stop preying on...other girls?
I felt physically ill, thinking I might not be the only one. Once I was gone, he’d just do it to someone else.
On the other hand, if I followed through on this, went ahead and signed and got my fancy new sexy body gradually, according to Delilah, I would have the satisfaction of watching him get scared of me. Gradually.
Maybe there was something more a succubus could do to mess him over.
If I could just once see him look at me scared, I was certain, the way I looked at him would change. I’d stop being afraid of him.
One thing was for sure. Without the weapon Delilah was promising me, I’d never be able to scare him.
Just thinking about it, I felt an unfurling of something in me, an anger that had never had anywhere to go. Because I couldn’t ever do anything before. Under age. Ugly duckling. Screwup. Fat, short, muddy, unattractive, unwanted. The person I wanted to be—
“The person I want to be,” I said slowly, looking at the contract lying on the table next to my venti caramel macchiato, “could really kick some ass.”
“There you go,” Delilah said. She took a pen out of her handbag.
The first thing I wanted was to get taller. Nobody in my mom’s family is tall, but supposedly my father’s family are all really tall. That Polynesian thing. I’m good with that. I decided I would stay my current sort of tannish brownish yellowish color, but it would smooth out better, and also, I’d gradually grow ten inches by the end of senior year. I also wanted to lose ten pounds immediately. Fifty more pounds to come off over the next two weeks.
Delilah said “No problem,” and poof, my jeans were looser and too short by an inch.
I went home, hitching my jeans up with one hand every few steps. I felt lighter.
My mom didn’t notice, but my stepfather noticed right away.
She went upstairs to change into her square-dancing clothes.
My stepfather watched me load the dishwasher. He didn’t say anything until her footsteps sounded on the second floor, overhead. He didn’t touch—much—anymore. But the remarks.
“Why, Melitta, you’re turning into a young lady finally.”
Here it came again.
I don’t think I flinched. After my zombie flunk-out year, I had pulled myself together and perfected a poker face. Now I loaded the dishwasher, expressionless.
He brought the salad bowl over from the table and put it on the counter beside me. It slid onto the counter like a caress.
The kitchen filled with the stink of his aftershave.
My heart was already pounding. My hands were ice cold. I felt again that anger that I’d felt in the coffeeshop, sitting across from Delilah. There’s a way out. The anger built, like air filling up a balloon.
I looked at the bowl, then I looked back into the dishwasher and slotted in the forks, then the spoons. My hands didn’t shake much.
He was still standing only two feet away. I could feel him watching me. He made a little pleased noise in his throat. Then he went back to the table.
I put the salad bowl in the bottom compartment of the dishwasher. The anger rose higher in me. I heard a hissing in my ears, as if steam was leaking out, as if a little alarm was going off in my head, Red zone, be careful, you could kill somebody with that.
Really?
Man, I hoped so.
When he came back with two of the water glasses, I was shaking for real.
He tried to hand me a glass.
“Put it in the rack,” I said. It came out kind of growly.
He put it on the counter instead. “Melitta,” he said in his creepy-gentle, shrinky voice, and reached that hand slowly across the dishwasher rack toward me. “Can’t we be friends?”
I stood up fast and squared off across the dishwasher. I remembered something I’d asked Delilah for, making my eyes get all red a
nd glowy.
I hadn’t willingly met his eyes in over a year.
I could feel the red glow in my glare. It was getting into my head. My heartbeat slowed to a steady, deep, throbbing thump-thump that went all the way down to my shoes, making me feel taller, helping the anger warm me. I let feelings show in my eyes for the first time, I guess, ever, and looked at him straight on.
Howard Horwitz, age forty-six, height five-nine, weight one-ninety, eyes brown, hair dark brown and receding on top with one stupid lock that he kept long so it fell over one eye, face bland and weaselly and just now a little surprised. Just some guy.
I felt like my anger was making me bigger.
The glass in his other hand must have been tipping. Suddenly he yelped and jumped back and looked down.
Water was spreading over his little paunch and down the lap of his stupid square-dancing pants.
I made a noise in my throat too, a laugh that wanted to come out, but I was too used to silencing myself for him.
Yet the anger filled me up hard with a dark red light.
He looked back up at me, like, Did I give you permission to speak? He used to flash that look on me all the time.
As always, words withered in my throat.
But I kept up my glare.
He didn’t move a muscle. I was thinking, Huh, because I realized it was way more important to him to feel in control of me and our silent conversation than it was to, like, go upstairs and put on some dry pants. I also noticed that I was thinking this. For the first time, I was weighing the power between us, because for the first time I actually had some.
Think about all that later.
I didn’t dare let go of my anger. This was some kind of stand-off. Was he finally backing away? Or was he just testing, flexing, weighing the power the way I was, figuring out his next move? Had I provoked him into another late-night visit, when he would try to regain his position?
At that thought, white hot rage flared higher in me, like a plume of magma shooting up out of a volcano and splashing down.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 38
