There too was Farrah, crying, looking fatter, cheaper, and dumber than in real life. Beth felt a twinge of shame for thinking Farrah looked fat, now that she herself was skinny. It embarrassed her that looking good made her think these arrogant things.
The newscaster, who looked so much like Pog it was uncanny, said that Blake Saunders’ ex-wife had disappeared. Copious bloodstains of her blood type had just been found in an apartment Saunders owned under the name Blake Shanley. Saunders had been detained for questioning in her disappearance, but he had been released and was not currently available for comment. The ex-wife had been despondent since the divorce. Since leaving her home Beth Saunders had had no known address. The missing woman’s daughter would not comment either. Video: Darleen showing the camera her palm.
A rugged-looking police detective told a reporter on location that normally they didn’t pursue missing persons calls in this kind of situation. What kind of situation? Beth wondered testily. Divorce? But, the cop said, the discovery of the blood put it on the front burner. Forthcoming DNA tests might help.
He didn’t say anything about the naked pictures they had left in the Doral apartment. Beth would have bet a million dollars that Farrah had dashed over there after their meeting in the restaurant, and found them, along with the wadded-up towels soaked in her blood and thrust into the garbage can, the bad words they’d lipsticked onto the wallpaper, and the empty champagne bottles.
Which was why Farrah had called in the police in the first place.
“The cops have those pictures,” Jee said, echoing Beth’s thought.
“I was pretty careful to focus away from your faces,” Pog said.
“How careful?” Jee said.
Pog shrugged. “You wore masks, remember?”
Oh no. What if my mask slipped? How could I have let Pog take those pictures? How could I have posed for those pictures? What will the police think of me? What does Darleen think?
Beth’s tummy roiled.
Pog
I got up and patted Beth on the head. “Don’t fret, kid. Hey, where’s Reg?”
“Getting his IIDN tattooed,” Amanda said. “I told him Jee would write it on his thigh with a blunt steak knife if he didn’t.”
On cue, someone tapped on the door. “It’s me,” Reg’s voice said.
“Enter,” Jee called.
Reg had worn his tight jeans to the tattoo parlor. In consequence he was walking a little bowlegged. The dumbass.
Jee noticed the walk. “What’s the matter with you?”
“The tattoo is on the inside of his thigh,” I reminded her. That had been a mean touch. Jee was good at mean. The rest of us put the ink on the soles of our feet.
“Put on some running shorts,” Amanda suggested, “so it doesn’t chafe.”
Reg bolted for the door, stopped, turned, and looked at Jee.
“Go, go,” she said, waving him out.
By the time he came back wearing basketball shorts, Amanda had put ESPN on. Reg curled up on a dog bed over by the window. The dog bed was new since this morning. It must have been Amanda’s idea. I wondered if she was going soft on our manager.
“I think it’s pretty certain Farrah squealed,” Jee said, as we watched the Little League finals, senior girls division.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
“Fuck!” Amanda yelled at the screen as a batter popped a fly that got away.
“We probably left fingerprints all over that place,” Beth said, wolfing down a mix of caramel corn and cheese corn we’d picked up at Field’s.
“We would have, only we don’t have any,” I said.
Beth licked her fingertips and inspected them. “Gosh. I never noticed!”
“And she does it again!” Amanda yelled with disgust and incredulity.
“The tests show that the blood on those towels is my type!” Beth said. “Have you tried this? It’s delicious.” She passed the tin.
Jee chomped some and showed her teeth, covered in cheesy popcorn powder. “Yup. Blake honey has some explaining to do.”
Amanda howled, “What’s the matter with that pitcher?”
“It’s the coach,” Reg said from his dog bed. “He told her to throw to the inside.”
Jee scowled. “Who asked you?”
“You know this how?” Amanda said, sending Reg a curious glance.
Reg said, “She been throwing low and outside, whole game. Five minutes ago she went to the dugout to talk to Coach. She comes back and throws two pop flies in a row. She’s no good at throwing inside but she done it anyway. Look at her face. She’s about to flip Coach the bird and do it her way.”
The camera caught the teenaged pitcher biting her lip. While we watched, her expression turned mulish. Next minute, she pitched a low ball. The batter swung and struck. The umpire signaled, batter out! The inning changed over.
Amanda turned a surprised face toward Reg. “Come over here. Bring your dog bed.” She glanced at Jee. “You don’t mind?”
Jee got a testy look and opened her mouth, looked from Reg to Amanda, then shook her head as if knocking a fly out of her ear. “Fine.”
That was the beginning of the weirdest part of the day.
And this is me saying it.
One by one, we wandered out of the kitchen to shuck our going-to-mess-Blake-over clothes and put on some lying-around-drinking-and-watching-ESPN shorts. By the second pitcher of mojitos we were all pretty mellow. Amanda and Reg got into a big argument about softball that segued into basketball.
I kept an eye on Jee, waiting for her to get jealous of Amanda interfering with her Reg-training program. Didn’t happen.
Instead Amanda turned off ESPN, which was unheard-of, and we all ended up going downstairs onto her freshly-repainted basketball deck.
“Look, it don’t matter if it’s pro ball or a friendly two-on-two,” Reg argued on the stairs. “The teamwork principles apply.”
“Only if your people have the skill base,” Amanda insisted.
“Ain’t necessary,” he said.
“Okay, you two—” Amanda pointed to me and Beth. “Get a ball and get over here.” Beth fished a basketball out of the fifty-five-gallon drum by the front door. “Now here’s what I’m talking about,” Amanda said to Reg. Then she got technical.
She made me and Beth do some slo-mo dribbling around under the basket, barefoot.
Then Reg got technical. Play speeded up.
We played for three or four minutes. Beth focused completely for the first time since I met her. I had a hell of a time keeping the ball away from her. And once she got hold of it, well, goodbye. It was fun.
I think it was watching Beth play keep-away with me that made Jee want to work up a sweat.
When we stopped for beer, our coaches got into it again. They worked out a set of plays for us. We started again, this time with Jee and Amanda playing against me and Beth.
I’ve never been the team sports kind, unless double-teaming a mark with Jee counted.
Jee and Amanda played with natural teamwork and furious concentration. They crushed us repeatedly...for a while. That got my blood up.
Then, and this was where it got weirder, Reg fell into coaching just us two, me and Beth, while Amanda and Jee went into a huddle on their end of the court.
Reg as coach was a revelation. He didn’t say a word about our tits the whole time. He didn’t grope. He was dead serious and respectful and he could teach us a play in fifty seconds flat. He made sense. I was flabbergasted.
I was also surprised at how quickly Beth picked up on the plays. She looked flushed and involved, the first time I’d seen that. It made her look younger. Which may sound dumb, since she had a standard-issue succubus twenty-two-year-old face and body. But even when she was dating up her ex and thinking about screwing him, she’d been, I dunno, a little removed. Asleep.
She wasn’t asleep now. She learned basketball plays fast.
We started scoring against Jee and Amanda.
Reg starte
d chaining plays together, telling us during breaks how to run them. Then he would just signal to us from the edge of the court.
We forgot about the clock. We played all afternoon.
Amanda loved it.
Jee was having fun—she’s never happy unless she’s fighting somebody.
Beth looked happy.
Reg was like a pig in shit.
I didn’t hate it myself, which was the weirdest thing of all.
Beth
When four sweaty-yet-girly succubi play basketball together, the post-game scrimmage for first shower can get ugly.
As new girl, Beth should have held back and let the other three duke it out. She knew that.
Today she felt different.
She felt sticky, for one thing, and sick of the smell of her own sweat. But mostly she was full of energy. Her legs felt springy. She danced on dirty bare feet up the stairs behind Jee and Amanda. It was such a pleasure to breathe, she wanted to sing.
She was also eager to get away from Reg, whose Tourettes-like hail of innuendo had vanished during the basketball game. Suddenly Reg was looking really good to her. When she completed one of his fancy plays, slipped past Jee’s guard, and scored, he’d thumped her on the back and shouted with joy. There was absolutely nothing sexual in his touch.
Yet her whole body had yelled, Hey, this one’s got a penis!
So, as Jee and Amanda argued and shouldered each other down the hall, she slithered past them and bolted into the bathroom.
Since the bathroom wasn’t finished, there was no door—just a sheet of plastic strips keeping in the worst of the drywall and sawdust. Skeleton stud walls lined with plastic marked off the shower, and the water and waste pipes stuck up out of the floor, waiting for her to stub her toe on them.
The last plumber on duty was putting a wrench into a toolbag. He looked up when Beth ran in. She nearly ran him over.
“Done for now,” he said, as Beth swaggered up to him. He was maybe forty and leathery-red in the face. A cloud of end-of-workday male smells came off him, mixed with metal shavings, yesterday’s beer, plumbing adhesive, solvent, and old sewer pipe. “I called Carl. He’s sending over the car—” he began.
Beth stopped his mouth with a full-body kiss. He tasted a little smoky, but not unpleasantly. She felt something heavy fall on her bare foot. It didn’t matter. Lust boiled up in her. She stuck her hands down the back of his jeans, which hung according to union regulations below the level of his butt crack. She tasted his shock. She felt his hands wave in the air by her ears, then hover at her shoulders, then settle on her waist. Huh, manners. He felt paunchy but solid against her. His jeans wouldn’t come off, and suddenly she couldn’t wait to fuck him. Using both hands, she found the back of his belt and tore it between her fingers as if it were a strip of cardboard. His jeans dropped to the floor with a clank.
Beth shoved her joggers down to her knees. The plumber pushed her tank top up. He mauled her breasts, and she liked it, she liked it.
There was no sound except slow, fierce, snorting breaths from Beth and little squeaks of surprise from the plumber.
Beth was pretty surprised, herself. For the first time in years, she felt one hundred percent awake. Her body was awake. Her mind was clear. She wanted something and she was going after it.
She backed him up against one of the two-by-four studs. Dimly she remembered Amanda and her busboy in the alley behind the Barclay. Ah. This was why he had to be up against the wall. She could take him much faster. She gripped the studs on each side of him and jammed herself down on his dick. Her plumber held still while Beth fucked him, yes, fucked, and it was weirdly pleasant and fun and normal and absolutely free of guilt or distaste or regret or just meh. Boy she was sick of meh sex. She rubbed herself against him, twisting with succubus limberness to get at that one... spot... yes.... Suddenly everything in her body made sense, it all came to a point, the universe coiled tighter... tighter... and bang! she exploded.
Somewhere nearby, the plumber was also having a moment of truth. Out of habit Beth waited until he was finished, and then stood up. She was taller than he was, so it was no trouble to unhook herself from his slowly wilting dick. She wiped a bit of drool off her chin.
“The shower still works, right?” she said, shucking her tank top, and stepping out of her shorts and into the tiny sheet-plastic enclosure. Her body still zinged with aftershock. She didn’t wait for an answer.
She stripped and turned the water on full blast, reveling in the wild swings from cold to scalding to warm as she adjusted the temperature. She shut her eyes against the spray, reliving the game, the hollow slap of their bare feet on the plywood, the basketball’s sweet tap-tap-tap, her sweaty shoulder and hip slamming into her roommates, focusing on the movement of the ball, always aware of her partner and the two enemies, sensing the basket even when it was behind her, because that was her goal. God, that had been fun! Beth gulped shower water, found it too warm, dialed it down to icewater again, and drank from the spray.
When she felt clean at last, she turned off the shower and stuck her head through the slit in the plastic wall. “Next!” she yelled.
The plumber was gone.
The doorway was crammed with faces.
Beth stepped out of the plastic, enjoying the stimulating feel of clinking shreds of metal pipe underfoot. “What?”
“New girl broke her cherry,” Amanda observed.
“I guess so,” Jee said.
“Wow,” Reg said.
Pog said, “Screw pizza. This calls for something decent for dinner.”
They backed away as Beth wandered past them, dripping the whole way, feeling like a gladiatrix headed for the locker room.
Pog
“What happened to you?” I said when Beth showed up in the kitchen in sweats and flip-flops. Since I’d offered to cook, I’d got to shower next, and I was just pulling split oversize pretzel buns out of the oven where they’d been toasting. Three gallons of chorizo sloppy joes were already cooling in the spaghetti pot, since that was a total tump-a-dump recipe. “And pull out that big tub of sour cream?”
Beth set the table without me asking. Boy, it was nice to have somebody with manners on the team. “I have no idea. I think—I think I woke up.”
“Here, cut some of this cheddar. Woke up, huh? What’s that like?” I put the buns on a paper towel in the middle of the table.
She took the block of eight-year-old cheddar and the knife. “It feels great. Although I started feeling guilty again in my room.”
I groaned.
She waved the knife. “Really, it was only for a minute.”
“Uh-huh.” I got another knife and sliced red onion.
“Big chunks or what?” she said.
“Smallish. Whatever you want. We’ll eat them too fast to notice, probably.”
She sliced cheese thinly.
I snitched a bite. It was a crumbly, sharp, white cheddar with little salty crystals in it.
Beth’s brow creased. She was really getting into slicing that cheese.
I repeated, “What woke you up?”
“Using my body, I guess. Playing basketball. Concentrating on doing something instead of watching everyone else watch me.”
Okay, some progress there. I put the sloppy joe pot on the table and slung a dipper into it. “How was the plumber?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t really about him.” She lifted her face and looked at me with discovery. “I think I see how you can do this work. I mean, I just plain loved it. Not because he was good—well, he wasn’t especially good or bad. He lasted as long as I needed him to. And that wasn’t any time at all,” she marvelled. “It’s this body. I feel so much.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m so glad it was the plumber. Because it could easily have been Reg. I was getting horny when he touched me!” She sounded shocked.
I turned my back to hide my smile, and pulled four sixpacks of cold Sol out of the fridge. “So? Why didn’t you bang Reg?”
/> “Oh, I couldn’t!”
“Why not?” I opened a bottle and put it in front of her.
She drank, apparently thinking. “Because he belongs to Jee.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Well, probably not that,” Beth said. “But she has this plan for him. And he lives here. Even if he lies on a dog bed in the kitchen.”
“Is that the only reason?” I watched her take down a platter and start to arrange the buns on it, and said, “Look, girlie, if you add more dishes to the load, you wash ’em. You’re washing anyway. It’s your turn.”
She primmed her mouth at me and raised her eyebrows, as if to say, And your point? She swigged Sol in a marked manner.
I laughed. New girl was getting uppity finally.
“I guess I mean I think I see why you all sleep with men you don’t know,” she said semi-coherently. “Sleeping with them complicates things.”
“We fuck them. But we sleep alone. It’s a sex demon thing.”
“So did I mess up Amanda’s plan for the contractors by fucking that man?”
“I doubt it. Ask Amanda.”
“Ask Amanda what?” Amanda said, coming in.
I stared at her. “You showered before Jee?”
“Jee is working with Reg in private,” Amanda said. “Ask me what?”
Beth repeated her question.
Amanda laughed. “Oh. No problem. But you should check him off on the incentives sheet.” She pointed. “Inside the freezer door, last fridge on the wall.”
Beth went to the last fridge and opened the freezer door. “This means I get paid now, right?” Only one guy had clocked out late. She scrawled her initials next to his name and shut the freezer.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Plus ol’ Blake at Barclay’s, and all the other times you tempted him.”
“But won’t he… expect something when he comes back?” she said, distress rising in her tone. I could almost see her miserable old-Beth brain rolling over her good mood.
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