“Yeah, you do,” he said, suddenly calm. “That’s why you’re still human. You’re hanging onto your family for dear life.”
“And how long does that last?” I panted. “When do I stop giving a shit about other people and start sucking bong, twenty-four-seven?”
He said calmly, “If you’re alone? At about sixty years.”
“You are being so annoying!”
“C’mon, Yoni.” He came over and sat on the bed again, quite close to me this time. He picked up my fist off the coverlet and uncurled my clawed fingers, flattening them out. “Why do you want to marry me?” He swung my hand slowly against his face. Slap.
“You jerk!” I snatched my hand away and smacked him for real. “Because I’m pregnant!”
That stopped him absolutely cold.
He stopped looking patient and condescending and kind. His eyes googled out. His jaw dropped.
“Wh—?” No further sound came out of him.
In spite of myself, I settled down, too. “Gosh, that was hard to say. Yeah. I think so.”
“How—?” His mouth wouldn’t close.
“You were the one who kept bragging how sex demons don’t take anything but pictures or leave anything but footprints.”
I loved it that he was so flabbergasted. His head kept shaking. “Buh—buh—”
“Okay, I admit it. I poked a hole in that condom with my fingernails. And—” Oh boy, this was hard. “I used my power, the mana. I thought really hard about getting pregnant when I was with you. I made it happen. Just like any dumb girl forcing some guy into fatherhood who—who maybe doesn’t want it.” I heaved a giant sigh. “I really need to know how you feel about this. I know I rushed the marriage thing, but—I want my baby to be legitimate. You don’t know what it’s like being a celebrity child in this culture.”
“Oh, don’t I?” He scooted around until we sat side by side. “Try being the second son of a holy emperor who has sixty wives and ninety-one concubines and your grandmother is only one of the concubines.”
“All right!” I threw up my hands. “You win! You’ll always top me! I admit it! Are you happy?”
He cracked a smile, and I felt a whole lot better.
I held his hand. That was nice.
I said more calmly, “Now, what about this baby thing?” That word ripped my skin off, but the words were coming easier now. “You know I’m wild to have a baby. And I know you probably aren’t, or you would have some.”
He looked at me, like, Do I have to explain this again? and I held up my free hand.
“I know, I know,” I said. “They might die before you do.”
He said tightly, “They always do. They all did.”
I didn’t dare suggest that because we were both immortal, it might make a difference, that maybe we could fix that for our kids somehow. I had a feeling eternal life wasn’t that easy to get. Besides, according to him, eternal life was probably not necessarily the nicest gift to give your kid.
Instead I said, “I’m taking a chance, too. What if we can’t stand each other? Aphrodite or no Aphrodite, you don’t have to stay if we make each other crazy.”
He turned his big hand palm-up. “So why get married in the first place?”
I said in a hard voice, “So the press won’t make my baby a bastard. Divorce blows over. ‘Love child’ is harder to live down.” I joggled his elbow. “C’mon. If I can take a chance on you being a pain in the ass to live with, can you take a chance on me?” I swallowed. “What if I don’t pass all my goddess tests?”
His eyes turned dark.
“You know me, Baz. Miss Two-hundred-and-twenty-five Beats Per Minute Heart Rate? I really don’t want to die. I’m begging you to help me hold on to that thought.” I pulled out my last big gun, hoping it wasn’t going to blow up in my face. “She thought you could work it.”
He was silent a while. “Now She’s a pain in the ass.”
“I’m not Her.”
He stared in front of himself for a long, long minute.
Then he said, deadpan, “I’ve gotten used to brand new socks every day.”
I made an air-checkmark with a forefinger. “We’ll put a line item in the budget. I’m still gonna work out four times a week.”
He waved a paw. “Knock yourself out. Uh, only don’t.” He gave me a nice smile, but he turned away, as if he didn’t want me to see him thinking.
I peered at his face through his veil of dreadlocks.
“A baby, huh?” He stared down at his knees. I saw his face soften.
I hoped he could keep it together, because if he cried, I was going to fall apart like day-old corn bread.
He turned back to me. A big, short sigh huffed out of him. “That was a pretty good fight. I’d give it an eight.”
I felt for my edges. He was inside, and everything was good.
“Only an eight?” I said.
“Yeah, ’bout that. I think we sound married already.”
I sniffled and leaned over to wipe a tear off his chin. “Didn’t you promise me some R&R?”
He reached for me then, and I finally, finally relaxed.
BAZ
I thought we’d start with something safe and slow. We stroked and sniffed and slowly shed our clothes.
“What’s this?” she said, grabbing my foot and looking at the sole. “What a dumb place to put a tattoo.” Her pretty little titties were perked up.
I lay back on my elbows. “That’s my Infernal Identification Number.”
“Your—what?”
“The Regional Office assigned everybody an IIDN when we went paperless in the eighties. Eighty-eight digits. Ridiculous. Most of us tattooed it on our foot so we wouldn’t have to memorize it.”
“Nowadays you would have a QR code,” she said, tracing the rows and rows of teeny numbers. “Or a chip.” That tickled.
I shook my foot. “You would be so good for the organization. Oh, shit,” I added. “That reminds me. I suppose I have to tell my supervisor I’m quitting.”
“Your supervisor at the theater?” Her hand slid up my leg.
“My supervisor at the Regional Office.” I pointed down. “I haven’t had an active account for a long time—I fiddled the computer during the conversion—but he does know where I live.”
“Baz, if you quit, won’t those, um, people get mad?”
“Relax, baby.” I put up fingers. “One, I don’t exist in their records. Since my last roomie left, we’ve been filing all our reports at Veek’s ghost account, and I suppose that’s gonna go phut if he runs off with this French chick. I’ll have to find another way to supplement my income.” She tickled the foot again and I jerked it away. “Two, they can’t damn their way out of a wet paper bag these days. And, hello, three, I’m not dead yet.”
“So relaxed,” she mocked, but then she frowned again. “I can’t see the Regional Office saying, ‘Oh, you want to retire? No problem!’ They’ll be pissier than my Uncle Chester.”
“I was around before they incorporated. I outrank ’em all.”
“So? Won’t that matter?”
“Only if I ever want my job back. Or if they ever figure out I did something to their computers and want me to fix it,” I said, grinning. “Say, all this talk isn’t getting us laid.”
She rolled her eyes. “So why tell your supervisor?”
“I’ve known the guy for close on seven hundred years.”
Her jaw dropped. “You like him! A demon supervisor!”
“He’s no worse than any other schmuck.”
“Well, I’m not taking any chances,” she said. She tapped the number on my foot. “This thing proves you’re a registered sex demon?”
“Was. My file got deleted.”
She got that bossy look. “C’mere.” She took my foot in both hands and turned it sole-up.
“Ow! Hey!” I had to flip over on my stomach or let her sprain my ankle.
“Stay like that for a minute.” She crawled to the end of the bed and took hold of my foot
again.
“If you tickle me again, I’m gonna kick.” I twisted so I could look over my shoulder. “What are you trying to do?”
“Never mind.”
I shut my eyes. Yoni’s hot little hands squeezed my foot. I sighed and turned my face to the bed.
“I changed my mind. You can watch,” she said. “This should entertain you.”
So I twisted my neck so I could watch.
First, she slid out of her post-show sweatpants and threw them in the corner on top of my pile of dirty sweat socks.
Then she knelt over my foot. She lowered herself over it until her ying-yang touched it.
Then she closed her eyes and—made love to my foot.
Actually.
I was stunned. Not because it turned me on, because frankly everything about this woman turned me on, but because no woman had ever done that to me. You’d think by now I’d seen everything.
She opened her eyes, rocking slowly back and forth over my instep. “Shut your mouth, Baz, a fly’s gonna get in. Haven’t you ever met a foot fetishist?”
I hitched up the jaw. “Yeah. Guys. No women.”
“Well, you’re not meeting one now. Ouch, my back is tired. Unless—” She tipped forward and landed on the coverlet with one hand on either side of me. Then she lowered herself all over me. Her breasts touched the backs of my thighs. Her hands slid up between me and the lynx-fur coverlet and wrapped around my dick, and I gasped.
“Yoni!”
“Just checking to see if you like this.”
She was slippery lying on me, slippery and hot and sweaty. She slid down and squatted back on my heel. Now her mana began to flow. She started rubbing back and forth over my heel and moaning. That made me even harder. Her hands twisted on my dick. As sex went, it was awkward and goofy, but the mana made it wonderful. She could talk me into anything in bed, if it felt like this. Then she switched to rotating on my heel, breathing harder, pressing down, wow she was hot down there, and her mouth was hot and wet on the small of my back, and her hands squeezed my dick, and her thighs trembled on either side of my foot—holy shit, she was gonna come—Yoni!—her fingers squeezed my dick in little bursts—“Yoni!”—and I went off with a bang.
She lay on me like a dead weight, shuddering.
“I’ve messed the bed,” I informed her, my face smashed against the fur.
The mana faded. It was getting so I could feel it and not get a boner for, oh, thirty or forty seconds now.
Languidly she rolled off me. I looked. Her smile turned smug. Her hair stuck to her neck. She was sweaty all over and she smelled delicious.
“Come up here so I can do this the right way,” I growled.
She curled herself into a ball, groaned, then stretched backward, then got up and inspected my foot. A little sigh escaped her.
I said, “You are way kinkier than I expected, babe.”
“Look!” She sounded pleased.
Reluctantly I stretched and sat up.
She grabbed my foot. “Look,” she repeated.
I looked. “My foot smells great. Thank you.” Then I realized my eighty-eight-digit IIDN tattoo was gone. I nearly sprained my back trying to look closer.
Not a trace left.
“Now that’s what I call doing it the right way,” she purred. She met my eyes with a mischievous smile. “I could have tried fixing it by laying on hands, but I wanted to be a sex goddess about it.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I gaped and nodded like a bobble-head. “Yeah. Yeah, uh-huh. I can see that. Yup.” I couldn’t even see red marks, which I would if the tattoo had been removed in the ordinary way.
“Don’t look so surprised. I’ve brought you gold, emeralds, fur blankets, and a ridiculous number of roses.”
I pulled her into my arms. She smelled like shampoo and sexy woman. “With my help. And you intended to bring only that last batch of roses. The rest were accidents.”
She pulled back far enough to give me a look of mock-outrage. “Hey! I’m trying to take control of my magic. You could be a little more supportive.”
“I’m supporting, I’m supporting! Thirty-three years I’ve had that tattoo. Truly, this is the power of the pussy.”
She snuggled up against me. “Nice. I can look forward to hearing all the dirty talk you’ve stored up since Mesopotamia.”
“You can look forward,” I said, sniffing her hair and her neck and her mouth and the skin between her breasts and her armpit and her neck and her ear, “to hearing everything I can think of telling you. The second-best thing to having a friend who’s known you all your life is having a friend who knows only your version of your whole life.”
YONI
We did not have a celebrity wedding.
This offended Cousin Joe the most, of anyone in the family, but only because he had been planning on selling invitations to the press. But I made him meet with me and the tax attorney who would be handling my business while I was out on maternity leave. The attorney read out the list of financial penalties that would come down on Joe if he tried to capitalize on our relationship in fifty-two listed ways and “all other conceivable means of gaining payment or favor through his connection with his cousin Yoni.” Joe looked pretty limp after that. He might still go bad on blow, but he wouldn’t take my company, my reputation, or our family with him.
I think Aunt Maybellyne and Uncle Chester were relieved that I was taking a break. I was twenty-seven and in top condition. They were in their early fifties. All this running around after me wasn’t good for them.
Cousin Verlette actually said so. She herself, she said, was planning an extended Caribbean cruise, followed by eighteen months of concentrated loafing.
That was pretty much my plan, too.
Our plan.
I was still freaking out about getting pregnant, but I stayed certain about Baz. That was backwards. I’d always wanted kids. The husband part hadn’t really figured into my imagination, especially when all the guys I’d met had turned out to be jerks.
But, just as I’d known would happen, I had to dismantle a huge self-image machine to make room for a baby in my life.
What did I have to do to make room for Baz?
Buy him new socks.
He was such an easy roommate. He didn’t get bent about my emo fits or my pregnant lady secretions, which I had not studied up on sufficiently when I was mooning over dolls that wet themselves in my pretweens. He dealt with my family when I wanted him to, and he backed off when I didn’t. He played a wicked bass. He cooked. It was like I’d put in a request to God for the perfect combination of side man, cabana boy, masseur, pit bull, housekeeper, and love slave.
And friend.
I hadn’t had time for friends until now. Just employees. No wonder my relationships with my family were strained.
Every day, as the wedding approached, I got closer to wanting to hole up in a love nest with my guy and unwrap him. After our last spectacular fight, I had an idea this wouldn’t be all roses.
But there would be roses.
The wedding also freaked me out. My aunt was still in shock, so Verlette stepped up. Aunt Maybellyne fluttered around underfoot, and I let her, because I couldn’t stop thinking, She won’t live much longer, maybe another forty years. Suddenly discovering you may live forever makes a person more tolerant.
I even put up with Sophie calling twice a day, asking if I had heard from Veek. My answer was always the same: “No, cookie, I haven’t heard from him, sorry.” Sophie was fit to be tied. I couldn’t really reassure her. I didn’t know Veek. Usually by the end of our call she had talked herself into trusting him, so that was okay.
I kept saying to Verlette, “Keep it small,” but the list kept growing. The band, my road crew, the people back at my office. That was more or less who I’d had in mind. It was Verlette who invited all our extended family, passing over the ones who only came around when they were broke, and playing favorites with those who treated me like a semi-human.
Baz did add substantially to the guest list. He had six ex-roommates, including two guys he claimed were a fallen angel and an out-of-work demon, and each of those guys came with fifty friends and their friends’ girlfriends—we managed to keep them at the reception only. One of his ex-roomies was Hindu. The Hindu guy’s bride had just come through a monster wedding of her own. I guess all those Bollywood movies don’t lie. She kept suggesting things like elephant rides. Her husband had a small cadre of worshippers in Chicago—apsaras and gandharvas—that Baz insisted should come to the reception. Bang, thirty-eight more names. Nobody was more amazed than I was to learn that Max, my new drummer, was one of them. The week before the wedding, Veek turned up back at the Lair for an hour and introduced us to a woman he said was descended from one of his aunts, and she provided two dozen more names. Then he vanished again, just two hours before Sophie arrived, furious that she’d missed him.
The hoopla for even a “small” wedding made me feel like my ears were packed in cotton wool.
I guess it could have been the pregnancy.
At the bachelorette party I found out why Baz had been so pushy about the roommates, their brides, and especially those apsaras. They were all baby goddesses. I learned a whole bunch of things to try on the wedding night that would never work with a normal bridegroom. I also made some friends. Suddenly being Aphrodite’s avatar didn’t feel so scary.
In fact, all Baz’s ex-roomies had married people I could relate to. One of them, a GQ-perfect gay guy, turned out to belong to this huge Hungarian Jewish family, and three of them were sex demons. Everybody was incredibly warm and accepting.
It looked like I could get coaching on this goddess thing from plenty of people, in addition to my husband.
All things eventually happen, even CD launches and weddings. Uncle Chester gave me away, sniveling and sobbing. I stood up with Baz, wearing the white dress I was retroactively entitled to wear. Baz looked marginally less scruffy in a tux, with his dreads back in a ponytail. I only threw up once that morning. I cried. It was nice.
At the reception, the usual rituals were more spaced out, and reality could seep in.
Four of the Hindu cadre were found in the men’s restroom, performing what they called a “fertility rite.” Since one of them was my drummer, we couldn’t very well boot them out. Baz even let Joe peek through the keyhole for thirty minutes on the pretext of guarding the door while they finished.
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