Dimly I remembered Cricket babbling about her great-grandson’s curiosity phase. Had she said that being gay was his phase, or was it screwing a girl that was the phase? What had she been trying to tell me?
My brain fuzzed out in a hormone fog. I was still wrapping my head around what just happened.
The air was full of chaotic thoughts. I’d spent my life not feeling my body. Soldiers don’t feel. Soldiers do. Dad would never tolerate me being girly. He was probably spinning in his grave over all the makeup I wore on the job these days. I’d never dated back then. I’d just assumed I didn’t care about sex.
Then I’d come to this team. From the first day, little orgasms punctuated my work day like sneezes, brief and forgettable. They couldn’t make much of an impact, not when Lair life was a storm of the senses: amazing food, intoxicating booze and weed, the smells of my teammates’ perfumes, and drama, drama, drama. Pog’s cooking had a bigger effect on me than sex with the marks. Sex was work. Food was pleasure.
And then Cricket came along and made me notice that everything else was pleasure, too.
Sometimes that was great. Meals, bike rides, the woods, the lake, even just sitting in the hot tub on the roof and watching clouds play tag with the stars. When Cricket was around, it was okay to feel. I felt more, but I didn’t panic. I enjoyed it.
Other times, feeling more was no fun. I’d had to go downstairs to hide in the garage, just to inhale some petrochemical fumes for a change.
And recently, I’d noticed that I lived in a house full of beautiful women, women I knew and cared about, and we had no secrets. I couldn’t stop noticing everything. It was getting so that I wanted to scream, Put some clothes on! when Pog or Beth or Jee wandered through the kitchen half naked. Jee and Reg always smelled like they’d been fucking for hours. Usually, they had. That, combined with their gooey looks—I’d been able to ignore it when it started. Then it irritated me, as if they were nonstop bragging about their relationship.
Now? Now I wondered if I had been looking goo-goo-faced like that at Cricket. I wanted to, now. I wanted to stare into her eyes and lose myself. I wanted to hold her hand in public.
I was totally not equipped for this kind of thing.
Knowing Cricket, I could picture her grinning that nine-year-old’s grin, as if to say, I know, right?
This would completely destroy my street cred.
Hah, what street cred? The others probably thought I was a robot. I’d actually overheard remarks. I could have told them, Army, not robot. But it was only my army-brat training that kept me poker-faced and in control when, half the time, I wanted to act like a puppy rolling in a dead salmon.
This was what happened to demons in the field. Ish had made me take the online tutorial before I checked my gear out of the Special Forces commissary and reported to Pog at the Lair.
The work environment in the Regional Office is carefully designed to minimize distraction. Translation, they make it as boring as possible and they help you stay numb.
Field operatives are at high risk for reconversion. Stay alert to signs that your mission-consciousness levels may be eroding. Translation, demons go native in the field. You won’t notice this happening until it’s too late.
It was too late for me.
I panicked.
How could I go back to the Lair, feeling like this? Even now, the sound of her breathing, so close, was a drug, lulling me into a kitten-like state of sacked-out bliss.
Before, whenever she was in the room, I’d noticed her first. I’d always known how she felt.
Now that this had happened, I would get like Reg, goony-eyed whenever she was in the room, only half-alive when she wasn’t. Oh, who was I kidding? I’d been feeling like that since we won the tournament. Now that this had happened, I realized how long it had been going on. I felt like my nerves were sticking a foot out of my body.
Cricket had suggested today that we could dial back our demon senses. That idea should have occurred to me first.
Now I didn’t want to dial it back. Would I stop hearing her heartbeat, louder than the others? How could I willingly stop feeling like I wanted to merge with her, to inhale her and feel her breathing me in?
How could I feel all those things and still stay poker-faced in a houseful of randy exhibitionists?
For that matter, would I still be able to let some mild-mannered dork stick his johnson into me, three times a month?
The though of leaving the Lair set my heart thrashing. Where will I go? How will I earn a living? I’ve saved a lot of my Regional Office salary, but it won’t keep me forever, will it? How can I be around women anywhere, if I feel like this? This led me to adding up my savings and wondering how far I could run.
The very idea made me sick.
I didn’t want to run.
I wanted to stay right here. Trapped in this crazy feeling with this crazy little woman with the giant heart.
Tears of panic squeezed out of my eyes. I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it. Don’t wake her. Let her sleep through until morning for once.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when she spoke.
“Are you okay?”
My chest clutched up. “I thought you were asleep.” After all that sex, my demon senses were dialed way up. Even in the dark, I could see her smile at me. I started to calm down.
“You okay?” she repeated. Pesky woman.
I admitted, “I’m scared out of my mind, if you must know.” I looked closer at her in the starlight. She looked so happy. “Aren’t you?”
She smiled broader. “Meh. There’s worse things to worry about.”
I lay my head back with a thump. Under the blanket, under the tent floor, the impact of my head crushed some old dried pine needles and puffed their scent into the world. The brief intensity of it made me cringe.
“I can’t think of many,” I admitted. She started to sit up and I tightened my arm around her. “Don’t. Don’t let go. I’m freaking out here. You’re the only thing holding me still.” That owl hooted again, sending ripples of spooky over my neck and shoulders. I said, over the hissing of panic in my ears, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not thinking. I’m happy.” If Cricket said it, it was true.
I wanted to ask her how she felt about me, but the thought terrified me. Then I’d have to say how I felt, and what if I did it wrong? What if I hurt her? What about tomorrow, when I would have to show our team a face I could no longer control? If I could control myself, I might hurt her, but if I couldn’t control myself, I was afraid I’d fall to the floor, foaming at the mouth, stroking out at all the emotion, emotion, emotion battering me in waves.
She snuggled up tighter. “Settle down. I can hear your brain grinding like a cement mixer.”
I laughed shakily. I squeezed my eyes shut. In the fragrant darkness, her skin was smooth and cool on mine. My hand moved by itself, stroking her smooth back. I could feel all her fingers on me—I could count each one. I thought of how she’d turned into a fluffy puppy and frolicked mindlessly and joyously on the beach for hours. I thought of how she’d somehow got me to turn myself into a puppy, and then she cuddled me, and it was the best thing in the whole world.
It was pretty good now. If I could just stop thinking.
But I couldn’t.
“What if I had been Reg?” I blurted. “That day when you rang our doorbell?”
“Mm?” She turned in my arm and burrowed her nose into my armpit and sniffed hard, just like a puppy stuffing its nose into a dead fish. “You smell nice.”
“No, really. You had just been yanked out of that retirement home, and thrown out of a car into a tree, and dumped on our doorstep without so much as a credit card or a toothbrush. You would have imprinted on anybody who answered that door.”
“I only love kind people.”
My heart stopped dead in my chest. Heat spread through me. I had no idea what to say.
She moved her lips close to my cheek. “You are the kindest pers
on there,” she whispered.
I swallowed. I croaked, “Actually, I think you are.” Tears stung my eyes. Why couldn’t I talk?
Her lips moved. I think she was smiling. “I love you too.”
With that, I relaxed. Tears gushed out of me. I ignored them. I put all my attention into holding her close, kissing her, pressing my forehead to hers as if to crush the stupid thoughts away and just be happy, the way she was.
If I immersed myself in her touch, the slide of our skins, the little sounds she made, the scents that steamed up from our bodies, then I couldn’t think about anything else.
That kept us busy until dawn. She fell asleep, and then I did.
But when I woke, my brain was already working again.
From what I knew of her, she had spent her life jumping off of burning boats into new worlds. Her parents sent her to the States, and she plunged into her aunt’s family. They married her off at seventeen, and she plunged into motherhood and domesticity. Her husband died, and she drifted, apparently hating widowhood, until she found the second guy, what was his name? Lucien. And married again, immersing herself in his young family, making herself indispensable to them. And again, with Irving, until he too died. She’d been so miserable at the Loriston Home that when Delilah came calling, she’d said yes, just got into her car and abandoned all her past lives. And when I answered the door, she decided to fall in love with me.
It was inevitable. It was Stockholm Syndrome. She deserved better. She should moderate her reaction, if that was possible. Give it time.
Around dawn she woke up, went out of the tent and a few yards down the hill, peed, and came back. I told her all these thoughts.
“First of all, cookie,” she said, yawning, and stretching all over in the tiny tent, touching me here, there, and everywhere, “I’m not moderate. I’m known for it. Second.” She turned her full attention to me and I almost lost consciousness in the intensity of her gaze. “Like you said, I’ve been all the way around the block a bunch of times. You think I don’t know how this works? If anybody’s being taken advantage of here, it’s you.”
In a rush, it occurred to me that she was right. I was a basket case already, even before she showed up. Just as the orientation materials predicted, I’d been defeated by the field, by the sheer volume of sensory overload. I hadn’t stood a chance.
On the up side, I was getting used to it. Booze, weed, Pog’s cooking, sex with men, all the everyday details that once bombarded me until I could barely speak—they were fading. Next to the intensity of Cricket talking to me in the dead of night, Cricket trying to drown herself so she could do the tunnel-and-yard-lamp-on-a-stepladder thing, Cricket thrilling over her new body, new clothes, new bike, a fucking pulled-pork sandwich or a dead salmon on the beach...the ordinary world faded to nothing while Cricket was happening.
So maybe this feeling would fade, too.
Now I worried that I didn’t know how I was going to feel tomorrow. I was afraid I’d feel the same. I was also afraid I wouldn’t. For that matter, I was afraid Cricket would feel the same and I wouldn’t, or that Cricket wouldn’t keep feeling the same but I would.
“I can hear those gears grinding again.” She stroked my forehead.
My eyes closed by themselves. As long as she was touching me, I could stop panicking.
She murmured, “My aunt used to say, ‘It’s not your soul, it’s your stomach.’ I can hear Pog and Beth arguing over who makes breakfast. Let’s go eat.”
When we got back to Camp Succubus, Beth was tending the bacon pan and Pog was making batch after batch of corn pone. Reg took a big pone, piping hot and browned from Pog’s cast iron skillet, and sliced it across, slathered the insides with soft butter and maple syrup, piled bacon between the halves, and handed it to Jee. I got the next one. Cricket got the next one. I glance at her, thinking, pork and Jewish, but I’d already seen her murdering pulled pork sandwiches and sausage. She wolfed it, crumbs flying everywhere.
The cooks got theirs next. Everybody ate.
Then Cricket took over the frying pan and we had crepes made from last night’s leftover eggnog mixed with corn meal, then rolled around leftover roasted potatoes and corn cut from the cob. The hot sweet cream and booze flavors mixed with the cold smoky vegetables and nearly made me pass out.
Reg and I lugged two coolers all the way back to the parking lot and filled three dozen empty beer bottles with water from the pump there. The water tasted sulfurous, but it was ice cold.
I felt self-conscious the whole time. Either I avoided looking at Cricket or I watched her obsessively. If the others noticed, I wouldn’t have known. They were spear carriers in our movie, painted on the backdrop of our intensity. I couldn’t stop myself. She moved around the campsite like lightning, burning into my eyeballs, erasing everything else in her brightness.
I was barely conscious enough to realize that Beth and Pog were still fighting. Also, Jee had been bitten by a mosquito on the face and rubbed it in her sleep. Between the drama when she discovered this, and Reg trying to heal it for her and Jee fighting him off, and the Beth-Pog sniping, it was tacitly agreed by all that we would go home today.
Beth rode with us so she wouldn’t have to share the van with Pog for four hours. While we were driving home, Cricket and I said almost nothing. Beyond a few abortive attempts to enlist us in her squabble with Pog, Beth was silent, too.
So I had a lot of time to think. This was not good.
She could pull the age card all she wanted, but Cricket was not immune to getting hurt. I’d seen that in our first few days together.
And I wasn’t immune, either. If this ended, I was pretty sure I would want to die. And I didn’t know how.
So I guessed this made me a lesbian, huh.
I thought of how my parents had discouraged me from dating, kept me from having friends. Hell, the Army did most of that all by itself. But they had discouraged me from socializing. Had they known this would happen—that I was like this? I’d spent little enough time with women since high school ended. I’d missed high school sports when I’d taken over nursing my mother. And the job Dad got me at the defense contractor was wall-to-wall testosterone, to be charitable. The Regional Office was even worse. No wonder I’d leaped at the chance to join Ish’s all-girl team.
The team had overwhelmed me from day one. The only way I’d managed to keep it together was by playing Daddy’s good little soldier as hard as I could, and retreating to my room when it got to be too much.
Then Cricket invaded my room.
Really, I was the one who imprinted on her. When she gave me those puppy eyes and whispered, I promise I won’t be in the way, I was a goner.
Someone’s phone rang. Cricket reached for hers.
“Hey, Little Squeak. Uh-huh. I did promise, didn’t I? Okay, how about—” She sent a glance my way. “Day after tomorrow? Lunch. Sushi, usual place. I’m buying. Sweetheart, you can’t afford to buy me sushi. I’ve turned into a really expensive date.” She cackled. “Love you too. Bye.” She turned to me as if to say something and her glance rolled toward the back seat and Beth, and she shut up.
Huh. So we were going to have secrets from the team about stuff like lunch with her great-granddaughter?
This was getting complicated. Beth and Pog escalating to Defcon 2 freaked me bad enough, and I was still pretending I wasn’t jumping out of my skin over last night, and this morning, and sitting next to Cricket and breathing the air with her. I could hear her heartbeat. Her pulse beat in her throat, and I thought I heard her swallow.
I remembered her saying something last night, right as it was happening, about her great-grandson being gay, and experimenting with girls or was it guys, and angering his friends.
That gave me something else to think about.
What if this was just an experiment? Something to knock off her bucket list, along with drowning, and rolling in a dead salmon, and the Ren Faire?
I knew I wasn’t experimenting. Dread filled my bone
s as I thought of what Dad would have said. I couldn’t have done this while he was alive.
Now that it had happened, I knew. This was me.
I felt free, like a balloon finally inflated, dancing in the wind on the end of a long, long string.
Lot of bad things can happen to balloons.
What if Cricket let go of my string?
What if she didn’t, but she wanted to? She’d never mentioned regret at having married so often. She didn’t even complain about her aunt basically forcing her to marry at seventeen. She always got an out, it turned out, because her husbands all died eventually.
I wasn’t going to die.
It twisted my guts to think that she might find herself tied to me “for life” with no relief, ever. Because, knowing Cricket, I knew she’d stick with me, whether she wanted to or not. She would talk herself into it, because she was needed.
Black despair came up out of my guts and sacked me. I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt like an iron box.
Beside me in the front seat, Cricket stirred. Her hand crept near mine. I hesitated, then pulled mine out of reach. If she touched me, she’d figure out how I felt.
I dug Daddy’s good little soldier out of her corner in the back of my mind.
In a few minutes I was breathing normally. I felt half-dead again, ugh, how had I stood this so long? But I had it under control.
CRICKET
Amanda was quiet in the car. Too quiet. Cricket had an idea she should be filling the air with chatter, but she couldn’t speak. This was too precious. If everyone stayed quiet, she could pretend they were alone. The delicious secret of her connection to Amanda was even stronger with Beth sulking in the back seat.
But Amanda didn’t smell happy. Have to do something about that when we get home.
When they got home, everyone helped unload the car and the van, and Pog and Beth put the camping gear away, talking in subdued voices, and Reg phoned Greek Islands to warn them we were on our way, and Jee monopolized the bathroom so she could restore herself to perfection, and Amanda announced that she’d have to stay home and tend to her weed harvest, which had done something critical while they were away.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 80