“Carrot and stick,” Beth said. It was a riot watching Beth eat. She looked like the kind of girl who ate two pieces of celery for lunch and complained of being full. But here she was, wading into ribs and biscuits, with a big paper bib hiding her from her chin to her knees to keep sauce off her pretty blue skin-tight dress. “You show them solid paperwork that promises them a specific dollar amount in bequests, safely tied up in a trust. And then you spend a fortune on the party. They connect the dots for themselves.”
“I’m not good with dots,” Cricket admitted.
Beth spelled it out. “The message is, ‘Be grateful that your inheritance is locked in, because the old bat is apparently in a mood to spend some of it before she dies. And she must feel like she’s dying soon, because she’s never spent any money before. So it won’t be long now.’”
Cricket put her fork down. “That’s nasty.”
“Sorry.” Beth looked genuinely sorry. “I move—I used to move in circles where that conversation happened every day. You shouldn’t have to listen to it.”
“Oh, honey.” Cricket gave her a look. “I’m ninety-eight and I used to live with old richies. I just—” She broke off, realizing anew how very odd it was, not having the second floor hang over her head anymore. That volcano thing. Sometimes she thought the family part was the worst, if you could get past the way bits of you stopped working or dropped off. “I guess I just didn’t think about it much. It wasn’t personal for me. Although lately I’m starting to notice how much effort I’ve been putting into not thinking about it.”
She stared out the window of the barbecue joint at the young people walking by, the boys with their bushy, rabbi-like beards and ridiculous hair-knobs on the tops of their heads, the girls with their hands full of shopping bags, and skateboarders who looked old enough to have babies of their own. So dangerous. It looked like fun.
Everything she had done for the last third of her life had had a big fence in front of it with a sign: Aren’t you a little old for that? What that really meant was, Your husbands died, your kids are all dead, you’re gonna die soon. Maybe even, Why aren’t you dead yet? Cricket had resisted, tooth and nail. The break-dancing thing two years ago had frankly hurt like stink afterward, but it had been worth the pain. Especially when she went viral and scandalized everyone. If you couldn’t be a role model, you had to settle for being a horrible example.
When she looked up, Beth was gnawing savagely at a sparerib, but her gaze was still on Cricket.
“I feel bad,” she admitted. What was it about Beth that made her want to justify herself? The other succubi didn’t give a hoot what other people thought. Beth did.
And darnit, Cricket admitted, I do too. At least, about what some people thought.
She felt awful now, as she’d known she would if she ever faced up to all those texts and messages, all the great-grandkids who were worrying maybe more than Sharon, though they were sweeter about it.
Beth just raised her eyebrows. Tactful.
“They love me. They really do. They don’t neglect me. But...they don’t live with me. Not that some didn’t offer, when Sharon ganged up on me two years ago and made me stop living alone.”
“You didn’t want to live with them,” Beth said. She didn’t seem to be judging.
Cricket felt bad about that too, all over again. “This is the hard part. Because I don’t like to live alone. But I’m used to living with a husband. Everyone else, they’re just...they’re not the same. That’s lame,” she scolded herself. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“I think I understand,” Beth said. “My family got tired of me. They didn’t love me the way yours does.”
“They do love me. But I’m like a museum piece. They want to make sure I’m safe and well-cared for until they come see me again. I’ve been benched for the rest of forever. I may be old but I don’t feel like a museum piece.”
Cricket remembered trying to look grown up and coming out looking nine. Jee disapproved, but Amanda had said, It’s who you are. Like that was okay.
“They rest their elbows on my head and they take me places like I’m nine. I’m not an active player anymore. That’s a big deal,” she admitted. She had always been a player to be reckoned with, even though she hadn’t used her muscle very often. Apparently that respect mattered most to her only after she’d lost it.
“Do you ever feel old?” Beth said drily.
“Not really.” Was that so bad? Cricket was afraid to ask. Instead she said, “Your family gets tired of you, and frankly, you get tired of your family.” Shock waves rushed over her skin as she heard herself say it out loud. “And what are you gonna do? Get married at ninety-eight?” She cackled, remembering Sharon’s horrified tone, Who is he? “I kept getting married to stay interested. You raise a family, you move on.”
Beth looked slightly appalled. “But your kids?”
“It’s fine while they’re babies. I like being married. Grandma, meh. But what else does a nice Jewish girl do? Madame Curie I never was. So I raised another family. Third time around, thank goodness we were both too old.”
She smiled to herself. Number three, Irving, had been a ton of fun, right up to the very end.
Beth swigged beer, moistened a wad of paper napkins with more beer, and then daintily wiped away the sauce smeared all over her mouth. “Would you like to discover radium, for a change?”
Cricket looked Beth over, trying to remember that this fresh-faced little girl was really fifty, mother of two grown kids, with a shitty ex-husband and a lifetime of doing the right thing behind her. Now she was schtupping whoever for money, dressing cheap, and having coffee with a homicide detective on the side.
Cricket knew that her own life could be condensed like that—and then wadded up and thrown away. She’d had people do it to her face ever since she, too, was fifty. She’d done it herself, in the dead of night, staring at the ceiling of her plushy Loriston Home bedroom, asking the night, Who am I? What have I done with my life, really? Who gives a rat’s heinie?
Her friends at the Home handled it by thinking about the past. Cricket had never been good at that. She always looked forward.
When you wouldn’t think about the past, and the future ended up at the second floor of the Loriston Home, you fell back on staying fiercely in the present and being darned grateful for it.
Exhausting.
And now things were different. She was young now like Beth was young. Looked young. Felt young, doggone it, no aches, no hip that only sort-of worked, no iffy tummy. Her feet felt fine and she wasn’t even wearing old-lady shoes. She looked at the table covered with greasy, indigestion-inspiring plates. She’d eaten half of that stuff and she felt fine.
“I wanna take a bike ride,” Cricket decided.
AMANDA
Normally this was my day for mechanical maintenance. I’d work on the cars, try to keep that compressor running on Beth’s fridge, check the thermostat performance on the old sauna where I dry weed, and, if I had time, continue overhauling the disassembled Victory bike that the male sex demons had left behind.
Instead, today I Googled maps of bike trails.
“How about the lakefront? It’s close,” I said to Cricket, who hung over my shoulder.
“Wow. What a lot of bike paths!”
“It’s liable to be cooler and windier. Are you okay with maybe having to fight a headwind?”
“We have choices?” She might as well have said, I have choices? Ninety-eight, and she still doubted if she had choices. At some point, early in her long life, somebody had seriously short-changed my little old roomie.
I said firmly, “You pick.”
She leaned past me to point at the laptop screen. “How about this forest preserve out by the Skokie Lagoons?” She always smelled like baby powder.
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s a pretty hilly course. You up to it?”
“Hey, I’m a sex demon now. I can grow more muscles.” Her bravado dipped. “I can, can’t
I?”
“Sure. And then you can overuse them and they’ll ache until you figure out how to make ’em feel better. You have to learn how to do all that sooner or later,” I said, because her face was falling. “We can hit the hot tub when we get home.”
“We have a hot tub?” She grinned joyously.
That grin made me want to grin back. Instead I looked at the map. We would have to ride through miles of city streets to get to the Lagoons trail. But Cricket wanted it.
I intended to encourage her to ask for what she wanted.
“We’ll throw the bikes in the van so we can start at a pretty spot.”
We parked the van at a forest preserve in Morton Grove. It was a great day for a ride. Away from the lake, the breeze died. There were enough clouds to keep the sun from beating us up, but not so many we didn’t get some glorious light. Cricket was dolled up in spandex like a neon night club. I noticed she looked even younger than usual. I took the lead at first, setting an easy ten-mile-an-hour pace. She got the hang of the gear shift right away. I could hear her switching back and forth between sprockets. The only sound she made was an occasional Oo! as the gears clacked.
I looked behind me to make sure she was coping, and when I looked ahead again, I saw a big buck deer standing smack across the middle of the trail about thirty feet away. I hit the brakes. I braced myself for a crash, but Cricket slid to a halt beside me, brake shoes squeaking.
The buck stood there, not even glancing our way, slowly lowering his head as if to sniff the asphalt. His big black eyes closed and opened. His long brown ears twitched lazily, left, right, left, so that we could see the white fur inside. He chewed something. As far as he was concerned, he owned this trail. He was taller with his antlers, but if I’d stood beside him, his shoulder wouldn’t have come to my bra strap, and his loin was as slim as his chest was deep. He looked built for running.
I waited. Cricket was silent. After a bit the buck walked off the trail. Once into the underbrush, he gave a hop. Within seconds, he had ghosted away among the trees. I glanced at Cricket. She was watching the buck disappear.
I put my foot back on the pedal. We rolled off.
At the tail end of summer on a weekday afternoon, we had the trail to ourselves. We wound along the twisty trail through woods for a mile, then charged the bottom of the steep Lake Street overpass bridge in high gear. My body was loving the exercise. I could hear Cricket’s gears snicking smoothly behind me up the hill. When she crested the bridge, she was puffing, but her legs were moving fast, the way they should on a grade. I didn’t offer any advice. She seemed to be doing fine.
After Lake Street the trail leveled and straightened out. I upped the pace. We flew through dense shade in the forested parts and then burst out into fragrant open meadows full of smells of roasting grass, dried Queen Anne’s lace, deer pellets, and a far-off tang of skunk like the smell of Starbuck’s in the wind.
I let my demon senses out a notch. Now I smelled the expressway somewhere off to our right and heard the tires rushing endlessly like surf. We passed the high school where fifty boys were practicing soccer in dull uniforms and bright-colored shoes. Their heads turned to watch us pass. I smelled their arousal in their sweat. Boom, there was this month’s quota and a big bonus. I smiled to think that Cricket would soon get her first pay.
We roared down through the underpass under the expressway and up into another long set of quiet trails, moderately shaded, lined with raspberry canes and trees festooned with grapevine and poison ivy. The lagoons turned up on our right, then a boat launch area, and a big lawn where, on weekends, boaters would picnic after they landed. The water gleamed darkly, full of mud and water weeds.
Right now a handful of Canada geese stood on the lawn, nibbling grass or blocking the trail. A big guardian goose honked at us. Its voice broke like a schoolboy’s. Cricket honked back at it. That surprised a laugh out of me. The goose walked majestically off the trail, wiggling its butt in offense, herding its gaggle ahead of it, leaving behind little segments of green goose shit for our tires to squish.
We crossed Tower Road and entered the hilly bit.
Cricket did fine on the hilly bit. Evidently she knew enough to keep her legs moving fast and light, no matter how many times she had to gear down. I dropped behind her to watch. Immediately she sped up, as if I’d been holding her back, which made me smile. Competitive. I could use that on the team. She charged up every hill and then accelerated down it, until we were cracking twenty miles per hour. I let Cricket get a dozen yards ahead of me. She’d earned that.
Suddenly she braked, swerved, and stopped dead. Good thing I’d hung back. I slowed and paused next to her, panting and sweating, while she got off her bike, nocked her kickstand, and crept carefully forward.
I got off to look.
A baby snake was lying on the asphalt. Its green and gold striping glittered in the sun. While I wondered what she expected me to do about it, she picked up the snake with her bare fingers and dropped it gently into the weeds beside the path. As she straightened, a movement above caught my eye. We both glanced up in time to see the sky darken suddenly: two great blue herons, seeming as big as airplanes, soared lazily a few feet over our heads and coasted down toward the silent, smooth lagoon. They landed with a ripple in the shallows. A moment later they were just grey sticks.
We got back on our bikes.
The trees got taller: cottonwood, maple, oak, and legions of dead ash trees killed by the emerald ash borer. The trail stayed hilly. We looped around toward Tower Road and soon turned south into the hilly forest-preserve trail again. The cottonwoods gave out as we came to more grassy picnic grounds, and the open water was available to fishermen.
One red kayak slid across the murky water, making a slash of color among the grays and greens. Someday I intended to try that.
We came up on a whole bike club, eleven middle-aged white guys wearing and riding about three thousand dollars’ worth of gear apiece. We smoked them without breaking a sweat. Cricket went first, so I was able to watch the heads turn on the column of bikers as they scoped her ass. And there was our bonus for next month. I grinned.
The trail got hillier yet, the hills longer and steeper. Finally I felt my legs beginning to tire.
Cricket wasn’t giving out at all.
When we crossed the lagoons on the Tower Road bridge, we stopped again, this time to look at a dozen double-crested cormorants, black as vultures but prouder, sunning themselves in a cluster in a big dead ash on the water’s edge. One cormorant dropped off the tree and landed on the lagoon, and then, after swimming around a bit with its chin tilted at the sky, it dove underwater. A long moment later, it surfaced with a little silver fish flipping in its beak. It tossed its head. The fish vanished. The cormorant dove again.
By the time we made it back to the van, my senses were stuffed full of the afternoon.
Cricket hadn’t spoken a word the whole time. Her eyes were shining. She looked so young. I think she even fell asleep on the drive home. She’d been darned good company.
CRICKET
If this was being a sex demon, Cricket was all for it. She stripped off her pretty spandex, now spattered with mud, and showered in the Lair’s luxurious upstairs bathroom. It was by far the fanciest shower she’d ever been in. The shower jets came at her from all directions. There was a blower to dry her skin, and another blower to dry her hair outside the shower. There were multiple potties, and they all had those bidet things, and there were five lighted mirrors for doing makeup.
Cricket praised the bathroom. To her surprise, her voice came out a croak. “Wow, I haven’t said anything for hours.”
Amanda didn’t answer that. Cricket was getting used to her silences. This one sounded ironic. She glanced at her Valkyrie roomie and caught a small smile that turned into a big smile. Their eyes met.
“What? I can be quiet,” Cricket said defensively. Inside she was gloating. She’d got Amanda to smile! Her heart thumped. Amanda smiled at h
er, looking tall and beautiful with her wet blonde hair hanging around her bare shoulders and the smile coming up into her eyes.
Cricket cleared her throat. “Aren’t you hungry? I’m starving. I think I need more water, too. This is why you made us carry all those water bottles, isn’t it? I should have Gretchen put a second water bottle carrier on my bike. Do you think she can raise the seat and handlebars, too? Because I felt myself trying to grow taller when we passed those guys on bikes. Is that a sex demon thing?”
She caught herself on a gasp, took a breath, saw Amanda roll her eyes, and saw also that she was shaking with silent chuckles. That made Cricket laugh, too.
Amanda said, “You can buy a new bike. I’ll fit it for you.”
“You just bought me this one.”
“It’s only money. You’re getting paid next month,” Amanda said. “You’ll be swimming in money soon.”
While they dressed, she explained that when all those schoolboys and bike club guys looked at them, those constituted official “acts of temptation,” which, added together, would earn each of them a really nice bonus.
“But I didn’t even try to make them look at me.”
Her roomie said, “Like that matters? You’re not responsible for what dogs do. We get paid anyway. Let’s eat.”
Dinner was eighteen thick beef filets, which Pog grilled on the gas grill downstairs, and potatoes baked in the microwave, which Reg ferried down from the kitchen so they could eat their steaks hot off the fire. For the potatoes they had grated cheddar cheese, sour cream, butter, bacon bits, and chopped chives. Cricket thought of the low-fat health food she’d been eating at the Loriston Home, and piled it all on her baked potato. There was beer, beer, and more beer—Cricket had never drunk so much beer in her life, since it was about the only thing that had ever made her gain weight. Not a problem now, she guessed. Reg brought gallons of ice cream downstairs from the kitchen freezers. Once again she made a pig of herself on ice cream.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 68
