“Then you admit you’re Beth Saunders.”
“I do not.”
He made a sour face. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those abused housewives who stand by their man, right or wrong.”
“I do not! He’s not—he never was my man. I only thought he was,” she blurted. Boy, some rules would really come in handy right now. “I’m—no, I’m not a hooker.” She felt weird for denying it, suddenly. “My—I know some women who might be—might teach me—but,” she gulped, “I don’t think I’m ready for it.”
“You wanted to fuck me up against the wall just now,” he said mildly, as if saying, Nice day if it don’t rain.
This was fair. It was probably too late for her to object to his language. Nevertheless, the old Beth inside was haughtily insulted. She said foolishly, “I know. I’m a little taken aback myself. I apologize for that.”
He made a face. “Now, don’t apologize.”
“Why not? It was unconscionable behavior.”
“Now you’re talking like Beth Saunders.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing!”
“Well, a little tactless in the circumstances. Number one, an apology means, now that you’ve taken a good look at me, you don’t want to fuck me up against a wall anymore. To a guy my age, that’s unkind.” She felt a rush of shame at her faux pas, but he seemed to be laughing at her behind his eyes.
Beth remembered that she was fifty. Then she remembered that she looked twenty. Then she blushed. Then she felt like bursting into tears. She managed to force the feelings down by tipping her head back and looking at him from under her lowered eyelids.
“Number two.” His eyes crinkled and then he did smile at her. “Number two, I get the feeling you haven’t had a lot of fun in recent years. True or false?”
She had to look away. “One of—this girl I know says that everyone is entitled to have fun. As if that comes with air to breathe.” She thought of Farrah and stiffened. Then it occurred to her Farrah might not be having all that much fun right now, in spite of having bagged Blake. “There’s such a thing as having fun at some innocent person’s expense.”
“You think that’s what whores do?” Doyle said, squinting at her. “Darlin’, they’re working.”
“You seem to know a lot about them,” she sniffed.
“Well, I meet a lot of them in my work. They’re just regular people. They don’t seem like Beth Saunders’s kind of people, maybe,” he said, sending her a sidelong look, “but they’re not as angry or self-loathing as you seem to be.”
Beth was shocked into silence.
“I think you’re probably a really nice woman in there somewhere,” he said kindly. At this her heart leaped: her old self was still perceptible, even under the glossy fakery of her slutty young body! Then he went on, “Somewhere under all the hypocrisy and trying to act like a cranky, phony, middle-aged socialite, you’re really a happy, vibrant young girl on the edge of an extraordinary life.”
Speechless with rage, she scrambled to her feet. “Goodbye, Detective,” she snapped.
“I was hoping you would agree to—“
“Nothing!” she snapped.
“—Helping me out. If we can find Blake Saunders, we may have the man who murdered his wife. And if his wife isn’t dead, hurray, my job just got one corpse lighter. If we find him and he isn’t dead, then we can prove nobody murdered him. Not his ex-wife, not his old girlfriend, not his daughter, not his new girlfriend.”
Beth stuck her neck out like an angry goose. “I am not his new girlfriend,” she hissed.
“So he gave you his credit card out of charity. Because you’re such a flop as a hooker.” He smiled disarmingly. “We can talk about it next time, when you aren’t so touchy.”
She realized he was deliberately being offensive, “You will never see me again,” she hissed.
“Oh, I think I will.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, clambered to her feet, and flounced out. In the corridor she realized her left sandal strap was unbuckled, her capri pants were unzipped, and her hair was mussed.
The first room she found around the next corner in the corridor was the broom closet with the R2D2 wet-vac. She righted herself in front of the dirty mirror over the sink, furiously muttering all the things she could have said to enlighten Detective Inappropriate Doyle about the flaws in his own character and moral frame of reference.
Then she stomped up to the deck above, where she joined a horde of tourists who hung over the railing, taking pictures of the Chicago skyline. She didn’t see Doyle in the crowd. Nor did she spot him getting off the ship an hour later when they docked, nor following her to the cab stand, nor trailing her cab to the Lair.
Her relief should have been unspeakable.
In the Lair, in the kitchen, Jee and Amanda looked up from their video game and chorused, “How’d it go?”
She stomped past them into her room. There she threw herself on the bed, jammed the pillow over her head, and screamed into the mattress.
Pog
I was servicing the drywall guy in the bathroom when I heard Beth’s bedroom door slam. “Make sure you show up here tomorrow,” I said, patting the drywall guy on the butt and pulling up my sweats.
“Yes, Pog,” the drywall guy said docilely.
I went into the kitchen, where Jee was drinking frozen margaritas with Amanda and playing Grand Theft Auto.
“Beth’s back?” I’d been getting worried.
“Pog, that girl is just out of control.” Jee told me how Beth had been cornered at Bloomie’s by that cop, and then sheared off to “handle” him on the Pier. “Like Beth has ever handled anything.”
I said, “Don’t judge. She raised two kids and that moron Blake all those years.”
“Like the Junior League left her with sooo many job skills,” Jee added.
I poured the last of the pitcher into my glass and pointed to the Margaritaville machine, and Reg got up off his dog bed and started loading its parts into the dishwasher. “Okay, what did she say to piss you off this time?”
Jee hunched her shoulder. “Same shit. A hot young thing stole her husband, she’s become a hot young thing, so now she’s a whore and a skank and a contemptible asshole. And so, of course, are we.”
“It does get old,” I admitted. “Did she actually schtupp that cop?”
Reg started the dishwasher and retired to his dog bed.
“Since she’s crying herself to sleep right now, I’d say so,” Amanda said, emerging from her concentration on Grand Theft Auto.
“Oh, jeez,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to play den mother to our soggy rookie right now.
“Far as I’m concerned, she can fuck herself,” Jee said crossly.
I looked at Amanda.
She didn’t glance up from her thumb wars. “Reg,” she said, and he lifted his head from his cushion like a fucking labrador retriever. “Make yourself useful.”
“You want me to schtupp her, mistress?”
“Use your judgement,” Amanda said. “But if she kicks your nutsack up into your throat, I’m gonna assume you did something to deserve it.”
“Understood, mistress,” Reg said in an oily, obsequious whisper.
“And less of the Peter Lorre,” Jee said. “It’s creepy.”
“And Jee’s your mistress, not me,” Amanda added. “I’ll settle for you doing what you’re told.”
“Okay,” Reg chirped, and slithered out of the kitchen.
I looked at the others. “Really?”
Amanda shrugged. “It can’t work worse than the advice we’ve been giving her. And if he sexually harasses her like he’s wanted to since he got here, at least her worst expectations will be fulfilled, and then maybe she’ll quit, and we’ll be rid of her.”
I had to admit, it looked like a win from where I sat.
Beth
Beth lay on her bed feeling sorry for herself. Voices came faintly down the hall, muffled by doors, distance, and the special
effects of the video game. She put five minutes into resenting her roommates with every inch of her new, sexy, young body. Doyle is right. I do hate myself, she thought. I hate everybody and everything. A sob broke from her throat.
“Aw, c’mon, it ain’t that bad,” came a voice next to the bed.
She convulsed like a hooked fish. “Reg! What are you doing in my room? Get out of here!” He was standing very close.
He shook his head. “No can do. I been ordered to make myself useful.”
She gaped in outrage. “They told you to—oh!”
“But if you kick my nutsack up into my throat, I’ll probably deserve it,” he added hopefully.
Beth scrambled into a sitting position on her bed, holding her pillow in front of her fully-clad body like a life-vest. “Do you want me to hit you?” These creatures degraded everyone they came in contact with.
He blushed. Beth smelled a familiar male odor wafting off.
“Oh, Reg.” She shook her head.
“I been a total failure with women as an alpha male. But Jee says I could be a good sub someday.”
Beth scowled. “That’s horrible!”
“No, it’s not. It’s comforting. I don’t hafta make decisions. I don’t even hafta make money, ’cause Jee lets me use her credit card, even though I’ll get a salary.”
“You will?”
“Forty pieces a silver a month,” he said proudly. “Plus, Jee takes care of me. She loves me. She makes sure nothing bad happens to me.”
Beth opened her mouth to explain to him just exactly how grossly Jee was taking advantage of him when she recognized the argument she’d used, back when Darleen got radicalized in high school and tried to shame her out of her homemaker role. He doesn’t compensate you. He pats you like a dog, Darleen had sneered. At least a succubus pulled down thirty pieces of silver—
She squinted. “Forty?”
“Half-pay,” he said. “Because I don’t do any field work.”
Half-pay? It was still ten pieces more than the sluts got. Oh, right. Technically he was their supervisor.
Maybe Jee had had the right idea in subjugating Reg after all.
“What did they tell you to do in here?” she said suspiciously.
“Make myself useful.” Reg sat down on the bed. He bounced a little. “Nice.”
She remembered he was eating his meals on a dog bed in the kitchen and felt sorry for him. “Reg, why do you hang out on that thing in the kitchen when you have your own room?”
“You kidding? All the action is where you bitches are.”
“Don’t call women bitches, Reg.”
“What I call ’em ain’t as bad as what you think about yourself.”
In one movement Beth threw her pillow against the wall, leaned forward, and slapped Reg hard across the face.
He just sat there and smiled.
He liked it.
Oh, God. Now I’ll have to either punch him until he’s down or yell for help.
She wasn’t in the mood to yell for help today. Not even to get Reg off her bed.
He settled himself more comfortably, half-reclining on his elbow. “See, we got a ethos here.”
“I’ve observed that.” Go away!
“We’re soldiers in the battle of the sexes.”
“Wait, you want women to win against men?” That was a rich idea. Reg fighting for feminism.
He made a pshaw face. “Ain’t no winners or losers in any fight the Regional Office has with the Home Office. Way I see it, grunts is grunts. Ours not to reason why.”
“This doesn’t sound like Jee’s philosophy.”
“Naw, it’s what Amanda says.”
Beth thought of the constant shocks of this week, jerking back and forth between feeling like herself and feeling young and frisky, seeing Doyle with fifty-year-wise eyes and feeling him, smelling him, tasting him with a teenager’s senses. Doyle said he thought she might really be Beth Saunders. And sometimes he thought she might be—what had he said? A happy, vibrant young girl on the edge of an extraordinary life.
“This really ain’t a bad life,” Reg coaxed.
“It’s wrong,” she said mechanically.
She felt a light touch on her big toe. Reg was already drawing his hand back when she looked at him.
“Not for them it ain’t.”
Jee had turned tricks as a child, inconceivable. And then she was wafted away to this life. “No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“So why’s it wrong for you?” Reg said reasonably.
“Because I had a better life, once. Quite recently. My husband didn’t love me, but he—” She stopped. He what? “He supported me and my children very well. For a long time.”
“And the kids? They love you?”
She swallowed. “In their way. They’re like Blake—they always think they know better than I do. They think I’m dumb. I went to Northwestern, you know. Before I married.” And now Jeff couldn’t stay on the phone long enough to learn that she was homeless. And Darleen was too busy to have her mother live with her, as if Beth were eighty and chairbound, not a healthy fifty. “I just feel so angry. And so dirty. And I feel angry because I feel dirty. You understand, I didn’t do anything wrong. I lost my home, my family, my place in the world, all because Blake couldn’t keep it in his pants. So why do I feel guilty, and he doesn’t even blink?”
The rage gushed out of her. It was all true, and she felt used, and she was furious with herself for having let herself be used.
“Atsa way, girlfriend. Let it out.”
“Oh, what do you know about it?” she said crossly, dashing away a tear with her fingertips.
“You don’t look dirty to me,” he said.
Beth noticed suddenly that Reg was quite young, only four or five years out of high school. “Why do you put up with this?”
“You kidding? This is the biggest thing ever happened to me. I spent my whole life looking at women from a hunnert feet away and no touching. Now I live with you guys. And Jee—” He blushed. “Let’s just say, I get benefits.”
“She hits you.” I just hit you. Hot shame flooded Beth.
“It ain’t meanness,” he said. “It’s just correction. Because I don’t listen so good. It’s not because I’m a bad person. She told me specifically, because I’ve heard the bad-person thing so much, I don’t know the difference. She says one day I’ll be getting so many benefits I won’t know which way is up.”
“And she’ll stop hitting you?” Beth said skeptically.
“Well, only if I don’t want it.” Reg blushed again.
“You want it!”
He shrugged. “We can’t help how we’re wired.” With a shy smile he said, “You got a fast right. Pow. Right on the kisser.”
She swallowed. She’d brought her kids up never, ever to hit.
Reg urged, “Don’t hate on yourself. Try and just let yourself like what you like. You’re gonna like it anyway. May as well like yourself for liking it.” He smiled at her. “You gonna cry any more?”
Good question. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Supposed to be good for your pores.” He got up, stood fidgeting a moment, then bent quickly and kissed her foot. Then he dashed out, his ears crimson.
Pog
“She any better now?” I said when Reg slithered back into the kitchen. I was working on beers now, because there’s no touching Amanda at Grand Theft Auto unless you’re semi-sober.
“I think so,” he said modestly. He came over to me, gathered up the empty beer bottles Amanda and I had been accumulating, carried them to the window, dropped them one by one down the chute, came back, and curled up on his dog bed with a little sigh. Whatever Beth did to him in there, it had made him happier than a pig in shit.
Beth
Next morning Beth got up feeling much better. When she looked in the mirror she realized her face and body had reverted to fifty-year-old Beth Saunders. With a smile she set about changing it back to her new succubus form. She was getti
ng better at manipulating her appearance. And this new face felt more comfortable. She liked being free of middle-aged stiffness, and she loved looking young again. Someday the person she was in her dreams would be this smooth, perfect girl, and she’d never see Beth Saunders in the mirror again.
That thought made her feel so weird, she rushed through her makeup and threw on a bathrobe. She was starving.
She smelled pancakes, which meant Pog was up and cooking. She also smelled sawdust, caulk, tile adhesive, fresh nails, and sweaty cargo shorts, indicating that the plumbers were already in and at work. And a hint of expensive perfume, hinting that Jee was up.
Beth had a bone to pick with Jee. Jee seemed to think that becoming her personal slave was a step up for Reg. The sick thing was, Reg seemed to think it, too. After a week of leaning on Jee and being rescued by her, Beth felt she knew the tough, angry Indonesian girl better. Surely someone who had suffered what Jee had suffered ought to know right from wrong on this issue.
But when she got into the kitchen, having extorted the ten minutes in the bathroom she needed from the plumber, who was only too willing to give her anything she wanted since she had, well, incentivized him the other day, she found not Pog manning the spatula, but Reg.
She sat down at the table with her teammates. “These are really good,” she found herself saying after her first bite of blueberry pancakes, maple syrup, butter, and whipped cream. “I didn’t know you could cook, Reg.”
“I couldn’t, but I can now. Pog is teaching me,” Reg said proudly, pointing at Pog with his spatula. “Nice bathrobe, sweet cheeks,” he added, as if remembering belatedly why he had to be abused regularly by the Revenge Queen.
“Mind your mouth,” Jee said, sailing into the kitchen and appropriating a stack of pancakes and clipping him on the back of the head all at the same time.
Beth wanted to comment on this. She thought it through, then realized that she couldn’t think how to start the discussion. When he had first walked into the lair, Reg had grabbed her breast. Today he was apparently insanely proud of making really good blueberry pancakes. It was hard for Beth to know how to object to the change.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 18