Page 3 of Succubus

A lot of people are coming into the room, and I get swept back toward the door in a riptide. I stand there, watching this sweet woman whose lentil soup I have eaten, her mouth contorting as she convulses. The doctor is bent over her, and people are giving him space like he’s important. I don’t recognize him from the back; I’m pretty sure I know all the OBs, definitely the head of labor and delivery, and she’s already here, but she’s standing aside for some reason.

You might ask if I’m punishing myself with all this childbirth stuff. Am I atoning?

Yes, I am.

A little on the nose: helping bring life into the world after taking other life out of it.

But it turns out this is also something I’m good at, something I would’ve been good at, I think, even without the guilt of my lethal past as a motivator. I care a lot about every single one of my clients. I really need Izzy to be okay.

The new doctor turns for a second, talking to someone next to him, and his eyes click on mine. He immediately looks away again.

But it’s too late.

Something has happened.

Not something little and explainable.

It’s more like that meteorite. The famous one that ended the dinosaurs. I have been hit with a giant, world-wrecking thing and gone instantly extinct. In my place stands the fossilized record of me, a monument to my own uselessness, because I have never seen anyone like this man.

He is—the word glorious is not an exaggeration—glorious.

Enthralling would work, too, if anyone uses that outside of descriptions of blue alien abs in erotic fiction.

He seems to glow. Is he emitting actual rays of light?

I squint. No, that’s just the glare from the setting sun hitting a few windshields in the parking lot outside.

Normal to tallish, maybe six feet? Let’s say six foot one. Stocky build, meaty shoulders under the white coat, heavy-looking hands that seem deft, full of surprises. A boyishness to his face, round glasses, warm eyes of indistinguishable and irrelevant color, curly milk-and-coffee brown hair. An unmistakable look of kindness; it’s obvious that he stops to pet strangers’ dogs and sometimes crouches down to talk to little children.

Have I just, in the space of a second, pictured us having sex in at least four different positions? What is happening to me?

I can’t manage to drag my eyes off his face.

“We don’t need it,” one of the nurses is saying. “She’s stable.”

A few minutes later, Izzy looks at me with her mouth back in place, hair sick-wet. “Am I okay?” she asks. Antonio, her quiet husband, is with the baby in the NICU; he doesn’t even know this is happening.

“You’re okay.” I’m holding her hand, a little guiltily, in both of mine. “You’re okay.”

“I need to see Oscar.” Her rambunctious, fairy-faced three-year-old. And then, as though remembering what she’s here for: “I need to see the baby.”

“You will,” I say. “Very soon.”

He’s talking to the head of labor and delivery, his voice warm, midrange. He hasn’t raised it this whole time, even in the middle of the chaos. Even giving orders. I can already tell that I’ll go on to think about that—the soft-spoken in-commandness—a lot. I will probably imagine his voice saying specific scandalous things.

Don’t look up, I tell myself very sternly. Stay focused. This isn’t about you.

I look up. He’s looking at me.

There is something distantly familiar about him.

He looks away, clears his throat. “I’ll be back around to check on you, Ms. Lopez,” he says to Izzy. “I’m Doctor Tav. We didn’t get to meet properly.”

My stomach lunges upward, eats my heart in a single gulp.

Tav.

Not a common last name, but one that is carved in brutal strokes into the flesh of my memory.