Amanda took her by the wrist and sat her down at the table. “You don’t get it yet.” She put a fresh cold beer into Beth’s hand. “You are in control. So you did him today. This is your privilege. Did he ask for it?”
“Not at all!” Beth said. “Oh no. Oh, dear. No! I just did it.” Plainly, PC-sludge was filling her up, turning her bright red.
I tried to interrupt the guilt attack. “Did he try to fight you off?”
“Nnno. He was definitely fucking me back.”
“They almost never say no, if you have a rudimentary care to time and place,” I said. “This is a guy thing. They like sex.”
“But I don’t want him to expect—” Beth began, just as Jee danced in.
“That guy? He won’t be a problem.” Jee looked a little too pleased with herself for someone who regarded Reg as a chore. “The more aggressive you are, the less likely they are to be aggressive. So unless you’re trolling for alphas, you can drop the demure bullshit.”
“Alphas?” Beth stopped in the act of swigging beer. “Drop?”
“The little lady act. The white gloves. Knees and ankles together.”
“Jee, don’t confuse her. Let the kid have her epiphany,” I said. “And siddown and eat.”
Amanda had already built herself a sloppy joe with layers of chorizo joe, onion, and cheddar. She bit, and joe dripped down her forearm to her elbow.
I assembled one and ate it standing. Damn, I was a good cook. The joe was juicy and spicy and cheesy and the bun was just strong enough to hold it without being too thick. I made another and sat. This really was a plate meal. Good thing Beth was gonna do the dishes.
Beth, apparently taking Jee’s advice about the white glove lady act, started her own sloppy joe. “Isn’t Reg going to eat?”
“He ate already,” Jee said smugly.
Beth opened her mouth, looked thoughtful, blushed, looked at Jee, blushed some more, lifted her sloppy joe to her open mouth, and then put it down. I laughed silently. She said, “Really? You’re starving him?”
“What?” Jee demanded. “He doesn’t need to eat as much as we do.”
“Actually, he does,” I said.
“He was good today,” Amanda said.
“That’s mean,” Beth said. “Feed him.”
“All right, all right!” Jee raised her face and howled, “Reg! Get in here!”
Reg pattered in.
Jee got up and made him three sloppy joes, piled them on a plate, and put it on his dog bed.
Beth gave her a look.
Jee sighed and dragged the dog bed up close to the table.
I slipped a six of Sol to the floor.
So Reg got to celebrate Beth’s broken cherry, too.
Beth
Beth spent the evening in her room, sitting up in bed while the rest of Team Succubus sat in the kitchen, critiquing a late showing of Thelma and Louise. She wanted to think. Sitting in the same room with Reg was distracting her.
Just thinking about Jee doing what Beth thought she’d been doing with Reg was distracting. Because it made Beth think of things she hadn’t done with the plumber. Things Blake had never liked. She wondered if the plumber liked those things. She wondered if she was losing her mind.
It was like being sixteen all over again. Her awareness of her body had expanded to fill most of her attention. Doing the dishes had been the most amazingly sensual act Beth could remember in recent history, after eating Pog’s sloppy joes, after barefoot basketball with her roommates, after sex with the plumber. More than that, her emotions were heightened. While Reg repulsed her, she felt sympathy for him in his enslavement to Jee. At the same time, Jee fascinated her. She felt kinship with the girl, though she deplored her poor impulse control. Jee was just plain watchable.
A memory came unbidden of Darleen at age three, watching Jeff in his cradle. Babies fascinate babies.
Had she become a child again? Her body was surely too big for that, yet it distracted her completely. Tonight she adored its new perfection but, even more, she felt drunk on its senses.
She got up and pawed through the row of shopping bags lined up against her bedroom wall until she found the pedicure kit she’d bought in Lord & Taylor. To the raucous sounds her roommates made down the hall, she laid her kit out on top of a stack of shoe boxes, set her heel on the bed, and worked over her toenails one by one.
Even that was a thrill. She was now so limber that she could, for the first time since she was twenty, fold herself up and do her own toenails. The smell of fresh nail polish, pleasurably sharp, filled her head.
I’ll bet I could put one heel behind my head again. Hadn’t done that since high school.
She had just succeeded in wedging her right ankle behind her head when her fancy new iPhone pinged: a text. She panicked. Her leg jerked. She fell off her bed, knocking over the nail polish bottle. Now she lay on the floor, helpless with her ankle trapped behind her skull, watching a shimmering ribbon of red lacquer drool onto the floor beside her. This room needs carpeting, she thought, and heard the phone ping again.
Suddenly that text was the most important message in the world. Who knew her anymore? Who cared enough to contact her?
Curled up like an armadillo, Beth rolled onto her back, looking for her purse and trying to untwist herself at the same time. She couldn’t. Her heart pounded with panic. Dammit! Now she’d rolled in the nail polish. Ice-cold red lacquer smeared her sweatshirt sleeve and her cheek. It was getting into her hair.
She rolled until she could get up on her hands and her bent left leg—the one she hadn’t put behind her head—and crabbed her way across her bedroom to where her purse lay next to the bed.
Ping!
With another curse she found her phone. Three texts. All from Blake’s cell number!
Can we meet Cult Ctr 4th fl big gllry tmrrw one pm? read the first text.
Darleen gve me numbr, read the second.
Pls Beth I owe you this, read the third.
Beth’s heart hammered. What could he want? Farrah had invited the police to his secret apartment. He would be furious about that. Maybe he regretted dumping Beth, docile and tolerant, for the turbulent red-haired teenager. Did he want to have sex with her, now that she was beautiful?
He didn’t know she was beautiful. He still thought of her as his frumpy ex-wife. To him, she was two people: frumpy old Beth and then the new Beth, the Beth he wanted to two-time Farrah with. He sure wants to fuck the new me.
Poised on her butt with her right foot aimed at the sky, like a cat licking itself, leaning against the bed in this ridiculous position, feeling red nail polish going sticky on her cheek and shoulder, Beth snorted.
Today’s quickie with a total stranger had been the best sex she could remember. Certainly better than any she’d ever had with Blake.
Pls Beth I owe you this. It was irresistible. He did indeed owe her. Oh, how much. She longed to tell him so, to rage in his face the way she hadn’t all during the divorce.
Not that Blake would get that. She didn’t look like herself anymore. What could she do?
You can redesign your body, Delilah had promised. She frowned. With a little effort, maybe she could look like her old self.
She couldn’t let the others know. Jee would mock her unbearably for wanting to see Blake again. Even if only to slap his face. The way she felt today, even slapping Blake might feel indecently good. Probably it would be therapeutic.
Best not to suggest that to Jee, either.
Breathless, Beth texted him back one word: Yes. Then, with her ankle still behind her head and her chin jammed against her chest, she texted Darleen a short, sharp scold for giving Blake her number.
Her achilles tendon was stretched uncomfortably, hurting worse by the minute. Feeling totally foolish, she slipped her phone back in her purse, clicked her purse shut, and awkwardly tossed it up onto the bed over her head. She didn’t want it anywhere near to hand when she broke down and yelled for—
“Help!�
� God, this was embarrassing. “Hey, somebody, help!”
Getting away from the succubi was easier than Beth had anticipated, although not more dignified.
“I just want to do some shopping by myself. Do I have to go everywhere with you now?” she said, anxiety making her squeak.
“She’s got that going-to-meet-Blake look in her eye,” Amanda said dispassionately.
“So what?” Jee said. “She’s a grownup. Let her screw up her life if she wants to.”
Pog just looked at Beth, shook her head and sighed. “Can you take the bus? I’d rather he didn’t see my car.”
“I can take the bus,” Beth said in a strangled voice.
“Call if you need us,” Jee said.
Amanda waved and went back to her video game.
So Beth got away eventually. Her ears were burning, but she did it.
Downtown at the Cultural Center, right away things began to go wrong.
The fourth-floor gallery was full of giant paintings made, apparently, by the artist laying a canvas over a naked man and rubbing on it, or on him, with something carrying pigment. The effect was sensuous, but the images themselves were full of smoking anger. Beth was reminded of Jee. Would Jee make art like this? As Beth stared at an immense triptych entitled “Burn— Burning—Burned,” a pleasant-faced, rugged-looking man walked up to her and said, “Mrs. Saunders? I’m Detective Doyle from the Chicago Police Department. May I have a moment of your time?”
Her blood turned to ice. She looked down at the badge he was showing her. She said slowly, “What did you call me?”
“Well, actually, you look about half her age.”
Oh no! She’d meant to rearrange her face before she got here. But she hadn’t dared do it at the Lair. They would have known she was going to see Blake.
“But a reliable witness reports that you contacted Mr. Saunders from his wife’s number.” Detective Doyle smiled pleasantly at Beth, but he reached out and calmly took her purse, a long-strapped mini-clutch, removed her phone, and started poking at it. “The funny thing is—what the heck?” He broke off.
Beth, meanwhile, was snatching at the strap of her purse too late, and glaring around the gallery. Over by the door she spotted Farrah, wearing a vicious grin. The young redhead flitted out, sending Beth a searingly vindictive look as she vanished.
“What kind of phone is this?” Detective Doyle said.
“It’s my phone,” Beth said icily.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” confessed the detective, poking the screen futilely.
Beth took advantage of this moment to hunt through her tiny purse for the calling cards Amanda had made for her. While he puzzled away at the phone, she mastered the card’s contents. “I’m Beth Asucar, and that’s my cell you just snatched. May I have it back now?”
“I can’t even figure out how you get to the contacts,” Detective Doyle confessed. “Miss—Ms. Asucar,” he amended as Beth’s freezing glare met his bemused expression, “Mrs. Saunders has been missing for some days. A witness reported that Mr. Saunders had received a text from a number that was identified as Mrs. Saunders’ number.”
“Wait,” Beth said. “I don’t know your Mrs. Saunders, but I do know a Blake Saunders. He called himself Blake Shanley when I met him,” she added, snarling a little. “The other day I was with him in a bar and this girl comes up to us and starts yelling at him. And then she hit me with her purse. Maybe she was this Mrs. Saunders. She’s the one who told me he was Blake Saunders. That’s when I found out he’d given me a false name.”
“Would you mind if I called you on this phone right now, Ms. Asucar?” Detective Doyle said.
“Yes, I would,” Beth flared. “What is this?”
“You see, Ms. Asucar—maybe we can sit down over on this bench? My knees aren’t what they used to be.” Detective Doyle was messing with her. Beth judged him to be somewhere in his late forties, younger than Blake, with five times Blake’s sex appeal. In fact, as she inspected his weatherbeaten skin and graying temples, he looked much better than he had any right to, for a man who was practically police-harassing her.
“This won’t hurt a bit,” he promised in a lying voice she wanted to trust.
She had a strong idea she should run away. She was wound tight, and her insides were heating up dangerously. But he still had her phone.
“Give me that, please?”
“Sit down, sit down.” He reached out and took her by the elbow and pressed her gently down on the bench and made Krakatoa blow a billion tons of burning magma all over her insides.
Beth sat down with a bump, feeling faint. “My phone?” she said weakly. He was quite old enough to know what he was doing. Although, how could he know that she would, well, have an orgasm just because he touched her elbow?
She found herself looking at his rough, clean-shaven face, his gentle brown eyes, and his firm, mobile lips, and another tiny explosion rocked her underpants. This is why men are so dumb, she thought. They just can’t stop feeling horny. “My phone?”
“In a minute,” he said, shushing her with one hand while he laid her phone on the bench on his far side, out of her reach. He pulled out his own phone, put her card on his knee, and booped away for a moment, apparently calling the number printed on the card. Nothing happened. “That’s funny, ma’am, it’s not ringing.”
“It doesn’t ring for just anybody,” Beth said loftily.
“Your first name is the same as the missing woman’s,” Detective Doyle said absently. “Huh. I’d like to know if it got my call.” He peered at her phone again.
“Figure it out for yourself,” she snapped.
“I can’t even get it to turn on,” he admitted. “But somebody back at the station can.”
She gasped. “Can you really do that?” Anger built in her. “That rude little redhead smacks me in a bar and suddenly you can confiscate my cell?”
Detective Doyle cast his eyes ceilingward. He looked charming. Not menacing at all. Beth’s pulse thumped in her throat while she waited. “I guess I can’t.” Reluctantly he handed her phone back.
Then he smiled again, terrifyingly likeable. “Please forgive me, Ms. Asucar. This case is going nowhere fast, and there’s a chance Mrs. Saunders has been harmed, maybe murdered. Your friend Saunders-slash-Shanley is implicated. A lot of blood in Mrs. Saunders’ group was found in his apartment. I admit the rude red-head you mention may have had something to do with bringing you to our attention. Well, can you blame her? You’re a very attractive young lady,” he said, twinkling at her as if he were her father.
How dare you? Beth bridled indignantly.
He put both palms up with her phony calling card between his finger and thumb. “Now, don’t take offense. I’m just saying that she may have been jealous of you. Maybe she’s confused. You do have the same first name as the missing woman,” he reminded her.
Beth’s tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She stuffed her phone back into her purse.
“B-blood?” she said, for something to say.
“The DNA test is only ninety percent complete, but it’s looking like a match,” he said. “These tests take forever. Not like on TV,” he grumbled.
“So he—he killed her?” This was the revenge Jee had suggested—to frame Blake for killing his ex-wife. Suddenly it seemed a lot more appealing. Blake had dumped her for a teenager, he’d cheated on her, he’d cheated her and her children of income for years, he’d led a double life, he’d left her penniless and homeless, he’d accused her of murdering herself, and now it looked as though he might be punished for murdering her.
Her face fell and her stomach plunged. No. That wasn’t right. Even her doughy weasel of a husband didn’t deserve that. “He couldn’t have.”
“It was either him or the daughter. The son’s out in Colorado, but the daughter is right here in town,” Detective Doyle said, freezing Beth to solid ice where she sat. “The mother isn’t living with her. So where is she? The daughter is a benef
iciary in the missing woman’s insurance, same as the ex-husband,” he added, as if noticing Beth’s look of horror.
“She wouldn’t,” Beth said fiercely. She had to get out of here before she said something stupider. She had to stay and pump him for everything, so she could protect Darleen.
“You’d be surprised what daughters will do for money.”
“That’s horrible,” she whispered. Darleen. She had to warn her, protect her. And also kick her black and blue for giving Blake my number—that’s how this happened. Darleen must have told Blake she’d been talking to Beth, and from Blake to Farrah was no distant step.
“Will you be seeing more of Mr. Saunders-slash-Shanley?” Detective Doyle said now.
“I thought I was meeting him here,” she confessed. “He texted me. Which you must know, since you met me here,” she realized, turning angry eyes on him. “What is this?”
She realized how stupid she sounded. Good, let him think she was stupid. She felt stupid. No more calls to Darleen. A void opened in her belly as she thought this. Was she being cut off from her children now?
You fool, she thought, Delilah warned you about this. You won’t be recognizable to them. They won’t know you. You’re going to lose them all.
With a swooping, sick feeling, she realized that she had already lost them, long before she turned into a sex demon, broke into Blake’s secret apartment, and left blood and naked pictures behind.
She noticed that Detective Doyle had not mentioned seeing her in the naked pictures. Delayed panic filled her, even as it occurred to her that Pog had spoken the truth when she assured her and Jee that she had aimed the camera away from their masked faces.
Not that Detective Doyle could have any illusions about who was in those pictures. Her fake business card named an apartment three floors upstairs from Blake’s in the Doral.
Beth drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, and opened them.
“May I leave?” she said. “I’ve been a fool, and no, I won’t be seeing Blake any more. But I haven’t killed anyone, Detective.” Yet. She turned hopeful eyes on him.
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