She thought about her aunt’s eternal exasperation at having this chatterbox niece foisted on her, the way her aunt couldn’t help being kind even when she didn’t want to be. She thought about her sons, their shortened lives, and their marriages, mostly bad. She thought about Alban, the husband who taught her to engage fully, love fiercely, wrestle passionately, live gaily. It seemed that every emotion she had ever felt about him or with him came up at once. She let the sun stab her through with spears of fire and explain it all with unthinkable light. Her lungs filled with steam. Tears spilled over her eyelids and sizzled on her cheeks, tears not of regret, but more like the tears of babies overwhelmed by the world and sensation and, at the end of every waking, by the comfort of a mother’s breast, and fullness, and sleep.
When she woke again, night had fallen. She got to her feet and walked up the dune and into the old wooden A-frame cottage. She had cocoa. Someone played a guitar.
Her sense of purpose returned as she sat, cocoa mug in hand, on a big bench circling the fireplace. Other people sat on the bench, staring at the flames, drinking their own cocoa, or singing, or listening.
I told Amanda this story, Cricket remembered. I wonder if she’s here tonight.
But as she looked around at the faces, dearly and falsely familiar the way faces on a Greyhound Bus can get, she didn’t see Amanda’s.
No, she wouldn’t be here. Amanda had her own plan.
Or no plan at all. That was how she’d ended up in the Regional Office.
She put her cocoa down on the edge of the fireplace. When she looked down again, the cocoa mug had vanished.
She thought about that for two long breaths. So. This is like a dream, then. How would this work? You thought something up and it happened. She touched the arm of the figure sitting next to her and asked, Where’s the phone?
They pointed. She went to a corner and found a phone with its mouthpiece on a stem, and a heavy little ear trumpet on a wire. She picked it up. “Hello, central?” Her voice was hoarse from disuse. She cleared her throat. “Give me Ish Qbybbl in the second circle of the Regional Office.”
Distant clickings and voices flickered over the wire. Someone said, “Dante two, two six six six,” and someone farther away said, “Oh, yeah, them,” and then some beeps and boops as if the phone had suddenly become much more electronificated. Then a voice, so Jersey that it made her homesick for her Uncle Dan, said querulously, “What?”
“It’s me, Cricket Immerzang from the sluts on Ravenswood. I know you got a back door. Go open it. I’m coming to visit.”
AMANDA
I dumped my load of vending-machine Ding-Dongs, Little Debbie Swiss Cakes, Fritos, Pumpkin-Spice Oreos, and Twinkies on my desk. Probably nine thousand calories. Not enough. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been back at my workstation in the Fifth Circle of the Regional Office, but clearly my appetite was still up in the field. With revulsion and also a raging hunger, I tore open the packets one by one and bolted down the junk food as fast as I could rip cellophane.
“Oh, yeah, hey,” said a wimpy voice, as the last Little Debbie went down. Ish Qbybbl turned up at my elbow.
I swigged hot cats’ pee. “You’re too late,” I said as well as I could with my tongue sticking to the back of my throat. “I ate ’em all.”
He smiled weakly. “I guess you didn’t bring a picnic lunch this time.”
“Nope.” I sat in my broken desk chair and swiveled to put my back to him.
“It’s okay if you go back to working for Fifth Circle,” he ventured. When I didn’t reply, he added, “People wash out of field work all the time.”
I refused to rise to the bait. He had probably come to complain about the paperless paperwork involved in transferring me from Lust into Heresy.
He cleared his throat. “Look, something I ought to tell you.”
“Don’t!” I blurted.
If Ish were to ask any questions, or offer me sympathy, I would explode in a cloud of tears and shrapnel. I laid my left foot on my right thigh, hunching over the tattoo of my Infernal Identification Number. Sheesh, log-in had gotten even more complicated in the last three months. “Surprise me.”
He cleared his throat again. “Okeedoke.” He sighed and went away.
I buckled down to not feeling anything.
That wasn’t going too well.
My back hurt from this crappy chair. I was already hungry, even after nine empty kilocalories. I couldn’t concentrate on the screen. It blew my mind that I had ever been able to stay focused on this incredibly boring work. Plus, I was getting a headache from squinting at the beehive monitor, which was cracked right across the middle. Already, I had to pee.
A week or two passed, or maybe only a couple of hours. It’s hard to tell in the Regional Office. They do that on purpose—warp time.
I finally gave up and went to pee, which meant taking three elevators and walking a couple of miles of beige corridors to the nearest women’s bathroom, because male demons can’t or won’t aim. I had to fill a bucket at the sink to pour into the toilet, too, because it wouldn’t flush. The joint was falling apart.
Like me.
The walk back to my desk was the worst. Without my complicated-yet-stupid work in front of me, I couldn’t control my emotions. I marched through the limitless bowels of four different Circles of the Regional Office, the skin on my face tight with pain from trying not to cry. Every time I remembered to take a breath, I felt a hot squeeze in my chest, and an ice cube in my belly, and I wanted to beat the dirty beige walls with my fists. My heart seemed to seize up like an engine with sugar in the gas tank, tight, hot, motionless.
I couldn’t be a good little soldier anymore.
Something my mom said when I was really young was, It’s not about what you want. That summed the Army up nicely for anyone who had married into it or been born into it. Or anyone, really.
While my parents were alive, I was okay with that. There was no forgetting that rule. For years afterward, I’d been able to deal with the Regional Office for the same reason. It was never about what I wanted.
Now I wanted something. I wanted Cricket. And I didn’t know if she wanted me.
I sat down at my desk again, realizing that I wouldn’t ever again try to use that broken terminal. Screw it. What were they gonna do? Put a green sheet in my file?
That didn’t feel any better.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Cricket, having three marriages, twenty-four/seven gratification, someone who would hold you while you opened an artery and let your love gush all over them. Someone you could trust to notice you were there. No wonder she’d remarried. She wanted struggle. Engagement. Passion. A friend.
The husbands weren’t up to it. One by one, they’d crapped out. Not Cricket, the woman who forgot to plan to die.
Me? I was the walking dead. No, I had once been the walking dead. Now, so help me, I was alive. I wanted something.
On the edge of hearing, I noticed distant murmurs down the hall.
“She says, surprise me.”
“Oh, I can do that.”
“Well, do it quick.” Ish said again. “And get out of here quick.”
The heart I’d forgotten I had started thumping.
“Nice place you got here.”
I jumped out of my chair, smacked my knee on the too-short desk, swore, and spun around, hopping on one leg and nursing my knee.
Cricket stood there, looking a hundred years old and under five feet high.
“What the—”
She grinned at me. “Siddown, cookie, you’ll hurt yourself.”
I sat. The loose wheel on my desk chair fell off.
Cricket disappeared around the cubicle wall, and my mouth dried up, and an instant later she came back towing a chair from the next-door cubicle. That one was wooden, and one leg was markedly shorter than the others, otherwise I’d have stolen it weeks ago. She gave it a dirty look.
“I know this chair can work better
than this.” She planted it on the floor, and lo, the legs were all the same length.
“Whoa,” I blurted. Cricket was fixing reality again. Or what passed for it here.
Her nose wrinkled. “This whole joint smells like a cat box.”
I pointed at my mug, by way of explanation. “What’s with the disguise?” I said, unable to express any of the feelings in my heart.
“It ain’t a disguise and you know it. I’m taking the gloves off. No more Bubbe Nice Guy.”
“You’re not my Bubbe.”
She smiled, and I could see the crazy nine-year-old for an instant. “No,” she said softly. “I’m not.”
Silence hung between us. She dug into the front pocket of a ghastly fleece sweatsuit with baby elephants romping all over it and pulled out a handful of something. I smelled it even before she crushed it in her hand and threw it at my feet. The smell of sun-roasted pine needles filled the air. My self-control shattered.
“No fair,” I whimpered.
She leaned forward. “I’m not here to play fair.”
The memory of our day in the woods hit me from every direction, invading me through that smell of pine needles. I couldn’t speak.
Cricket said, “You keep saying you’re taking advantage of me. Well, you’re wrong. I’m taking advantage of somebody less than a third my age. You got a lot of living to do, cookie, before you’re in my league.” She eyed me, but I was mute, my head filling with the smell of her body, the memory of birdsong in the forest, the feeling of my bones turning to water. “Now I got something else to say.”
I waited, paralyzed, weak with longing.
“You were right. I have a lot of experience jumping out of burning boats into a better life. You said that like it’s a bad thing. But you’re missing something here. Two somethings. One, I always jumped into a better life. Every time. I learned, see? I liked every one of my husbands better than the guy before him. I was good at picking ’em.”
She sat back and watched me.
I got it. I was supposed to think that she thought I was better than all her husbands. A smile loosened my frozen face.
“So taking care of me is easier than taking care of them?” I said.
“Number two,” she said, stabbing at me with two fingers, “I don’t think marriage is a chore. I like it. I like the sex, the fighting, the closeness. I was very close with all my husbands. I don’t say I didn’t drive them crazy. We both know better.” She grinned. “But I liked it. And they loved it.”
“Cricket,” I said around a big lump in my throat. “I w—” Throat too tight. I coughed. “I w—”
“C’mon, say it. Say it out loud. You want something.”
I could have been scareder, I guess, but the Regional Office damps everything down. Otherwise I could never have choked out, “I want—everything.” I swallowed. “But what if this is just a phase?”
She looked taken aback. “Where do you get language like that?”
“You said it. You said your great-grandson was gay and he took up with women and his friends were furious because it was just a phase.”
“My great-grandson thought he was gay until he fell for a woman, and then he became a woman. No. I guess that’s not how you say it. He decided he’d always been a woman. Gay was second-best. Now she’s a woman and I guess she’s still gay, because she only does it with other women. Faegele, how do you say, the gay-boy thing was the phase.”
I stared at her in shock. “You never mentioned this great-grandchild.”
“Dummy, it’s Lauren. She was Lawrence, back when she lived with Sharon and they drove each other crazy. Not in a good way,” Cricket added. “I paid for her transition. That’s another thing Sharon’s never forgiven me for.” She sniffed again. “There it is. Cat piss. How can you stand it?”
I regrouped. She could smell the cats’ pee, but I could smell her. I calculated that I had about ten more minutes of talk in me before I surrendered, wriggling like a puppy at her feet.
“My turn,” I said. I tried to stiffen my spine. Hopeless.
Cricket sat up straight and made a zip-lip gesture across her mouth.
“I came here because I thought I could think better here.”
She sent me a that’s bullshit look.
I broke down. “Okay, I came here so I could stop feeling. You don’t understand what it’s like to leave the Regional Office after a long spell, go back into the field. They warn us that we’ll go native, throw our lanyard and keycard away. They’re afraid we’ll be blinded by the intensity of the sensory overload. And they’re right. If I hadn’t been brought up Army, I’d have lost it months ago. I was just getting a grip on myself. And then you moved in.”
Ouch, that came out wrong. I rushed on, “What I mean is, it’s like this. You people who live in the field twenty-four/seven, you get used to all the information battering your senses. You learn how to—to prioritize it. Like, you can ignore how good the Chicken Shack smells as you drive by, and you pay attention to your driving instead. I did it myself, when I lived with my folks. Then I got into the Regional Office, where everything is aimed at numbing you.”
Cricket burst out, “Oh, honey!”
I rushed out, “You get numb here. It was great. I needed that. I wanted it. But I wanted my all-girl softball team, too, and when Ish opened up the Lair to succubi, I jumped at it. But I wasn’t ready. Nothing prepares you for how everything smells and tastes and the noise and the people and the emotions.” I felt myself going hot and red. “I was brought up to be a good little soldier. I didn’t have emotions back then. I thought I could handle it,” I finished, ashamed of myself.
She was frowning now. “You never said.”
“Of course not,” I growled. “My dad would never let me hear the last of it.”
“I see.” I could hear wheels turning in Cricket’s head.
“So here’s my point. After a couple months at the Lair, I was starting to get used to things. I could deal with the sensations and the emotions, kind of. I was calming down.”
“And then I screwed it up for you.”
“Just listen, will you?” I begged. “Yeah, you knocked me over. I—” Man, this was hard. “I think I’m in love with you. I also think I’m drowning in a sea of hormones—awesome, awesome hormones.” I sucked in air, feeling an emotional rush that made the stale, catbox-stinky atmosphere of Sixth Circle waver and fade. The only real thing was her, looking ancient, smelling as young as springtime. “What worries me is, what if I get used to the hormones, too? And what about you? What if it all fades on you and—and—” I shook my head, unable to speak it.
She reached for my hand, and I guess I looked scared. She stopped. She put her hand on her own knee, closer to me, but not trying to touch me. That was so sweet. I lifted my eyes to hers. If I’d been able to speak I’d have thanked her.
She said slowly, “Well, I suppose that’s possible. But I can tell you from experience that it’s not about why you bond in the first place. It’s about how committed you are once you bond. Get in there! Get intense! Commit! That’s when it gets fun.”
I didn’t totally buy this. “What if we wake up tomorrow and we’re over it? What happens if we find out we’ve adapted, and we don’t feel anything anymore?”
“Oh, you feel something.” She smiled. “That’s when it gets interesting. I’ve been married three times, baby girl. You can’t scare me with that stuff.”
I had to laugh. She was so confident. I supposed she ought to know.
She leaned toward me, and I felt the intensity she talked about. All of Cricket’s attention was a whole lot of attention.
I felt seen. I was someone.
She leaned forward, a cozy let’s make a deal note in her voice. “Okay, suppose it’s maybe just hormones, sensory overload, whatever. And I get it, life at the Lair is hard because of the food and the personalities and the perfume and the nonstop drama coming at you. So. What if we found a way to get away from all the people, the slutting,
the roomies, just you and me, and we go ahead and get lost in the hormones, and see what happens when we come out of it? Don’t call it a honeymoon. Just say vacation.”
I almost passed out when she said honeymoon. I hadn’t realized I wanted to be married. It hadn’t occurred to me that we could. Now my brain was exploding all over again.
Then I thought, Holy shit, did Cricket just propose to me? She was so damn sneaky.
“So we’ll go away and frolic where there’s no people. Just some woods and a river and a nice big lake. Coupla mountains. Coupla months. Then we come back to the Lair. By then, you’ll have had a chance to get used to the hormones and the beautiful world—”
I lost control of my tears at that.
“—Get your focus back, maybe you’ll get a little bored, start hankering for those cinnamon rolls Pog makes—”
“She buys them,” I blurted.
“—And then, when you’ve got a better grip on the field and it doesn’t make you so crazy, we can take stock. No strings until we take stock.”
I was now crying openly. I couldn’t shut my mouth.
“I told you I wasn’t gonna fight fair,” she said after a minute or so of that. “It’s my happiness. I want it. I’ll cheat, and I’ll use all my advantages to get it.”
Feeling hot joy balloon through me, I blew my nose on my tee shirt. “What advantages?” I tried to look her scornfully up and down through my tears. She still only looked four-ten and a hundred years old.
“Sixty extra years of real life in the field, honey. By the way, when do I get to hug you?”
I surged out of my crappy chair and scooped her up.
I think we hugged for two weeks. Or twenty minutes. It was hard to tell.
“When do I get this vacation?” I mumbled into her fluffy hair. She’d grown taller in those two weeks or twenty minutes.
“Real soon, cookie. Just as soon as we go clear out your father’s house.”
“Wait, what?” I would have pulled away to glare at her, but she wouldn’t let go.
She held tighter and growled, “It’s been hanging over your head for ten years. I won’t feel like I got your full attention until you’re officially finished with him.”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 82
