CHAPTER 1
Benjamin Fickler was the first boy I ever killed.
No one called him Benjamin. I’m being formal, out of respect. It was Benny. We were fourteen and I kissed him first. He wasn’t sure he was ready. I could tell. I liked that about him.
My two best friends at the time—their names don’t matter—preferred boys who were the tallest, the loudest, the usual. Benny was on the short side, often smiling like he was open to the possibility that everything might turn out to be a joke.
It was early summer. I asked him to go for a walk with me. My plan was that we would kiss on the blue bridge over the lightly polluted stream in the preserve two blocks down from my house. When we got to the bridge, I stopped, and he had to stop, too, and then I said something subtle like, “Do you want to kiss me?” and he looked slightly terrified, which was more appropriate than I realized at the time.
“I guess,” he said, looking down. “Sure.”
I remember the toothpaste-white of his sneakers. He wasn’t wearing a cool first-kiss outfit, but I didn’t mind.
“Do you want to go first?” I said chivalrously. When he didn’t move, I leaned forward, too nervous to wait, and pressed my tight, uncertain lips to his soft, looser ones. It was shocking to be against his skin, his nose. His breath was on my mouth, the smell of his mom’s favorite laundry detergent rising from his shirt, a pink, overextended scent.
Why am I reliving this?
Because it’s the least I can do.
I’m not in therapy. I tried that at nineteen, when my suspicions were horrifyingly confirmed. I spoke in code of course, because the truth wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity of believable. Thank God I have Grub now. And Dee, even though she doesn’t believe me, either.
It wasn’t the kiss on the bridge that killed Benny. That was just the first drop of poison. The next time, we kept going, pecking wetly, perched like virgin birds on his musty basement couch. Then Benny got sick—his dad couldn’t wake him up one morning. That’s what I heard. They rushed him to the hospital, but it was as though his lungs had simply given up. They said it was maybe a virus. We did a memorial service: the whole school, candles lit, kids crying with our arms around each other; we couldn’t believe Benny was gone. No one had known until then that death—as distant as war, as outer space—could swoop down at any random moment and grab someone our age and carry them off, never to be seen again.
I had no idea that it was my fault. It’s funny—I was worried that maybe I’d gotten the virus from him. Maybe my lungs would quit, too.
Not funny, obviously. Nothing about it is funny.
I didn’t know until college. Until Sam.
By then, I’d also killed a boy named Arlo Wu, who was the captain of the debate team junior year of high school. He was long-haired, sarcastic, and sensitive. A little goofy, like Benny. We got mozzarella sticks at the diner. I invited him over when my mom was at work late, and Dee, my little sister, was at twirling practice. We made out on my bed and put our hands down each other’s pants, and that was the first time I touched a penis.
His heart gave out two days later. A Thursday. Maybe he’d had an undiagnosed heart defect, they said. I went to his funeral, and I’ll never forget his little sister’s face as she watched her parents holding each other and crying in heaving gasps as though Arlo had taken the air with him into that casket.
My hair, always frustratingly thin and limp, seemed thicker in the weeks afterward. It was easier to wake up in the morning, even if I hadn’t gotten much sleep. I felt lit up, buoyant through my sadness. As though every microscopic thing inside me was suddenly going right, even as everything outside me went wrong. You could say I was full of life. As though I’d eaten an extra helping of it.
I am so unlucky, I wrote in my diary.
“You are so unlucky,” Carly (okay, that was the name of one of the best friends) told me. “It’s like every boy you like dies.”
“Don’t say that!” I yelped.
But I didn’t date anyone else in high school. I felt like maybe I’d been in love with Arlo. I learned guitar and wrote some songs about him. Then I went to college, became more of a hippie, and killed Sam (the first boy I had sex with), and I began to wonder.
When I turned nineteen and killed Omar, I knew. I fell apart and dropped out and moved to Sedona where I waited tables at a gimmicky restaurant called The Vortex and tried to find myself in all the ways you’d think, minus sex. I probably took all the same hallucinogenics as my mother, and look where it got her. Years slipped through my fingers.
And then Dee got married and pregnant right away, and he cheated on her, and they got divorced, and he vanished just like her father and also my father. She had Ella (a C-section performed by a brusque, irritated OB), and I came back to visit and slept on the couch in her crappy upper upper Upper East Side apartment. Dee got her tech job and worked her butt off, and Ella hated preschool, and Mom moved in full time to do childcare, which she was unsurprisingly bad at. So when Dee and Mom moved to New Jersey to a creaky house in an upscale town with a fancy university and Ella started kindergarten, I moved in with them.
I met Adam at an outdoor concert in town, where I was sitting on a bench only half listening, trying to study for my first exam in the doula training program I’d signed up for. I had sworn off men long before then, of course. I’m not a monster.
I am a monster.
But I have never wanted to be one.
I promised myself that I wouldn’t continue the conversation after he sat down next to me. But something about him felt different, felt inexplicably unbreakable. And it had been so long. So long that maybe it wasn’t true anymore—this terrible thing that had never been possible to begin with. Maybe it had never been true. Just an incredibly strange run of the worst luck.
After I went home with him, terrified and shaking, to his nearly empty faculty apartment, Adam didn’t get sick. I held my breath all week, frantic with guilt, tripping on hope. It was finals; he was grading and the new text-to-speech software he was trying out kept glitching. He didn’t get sick when we reunited, and I was flattered that he—obvious genius that he was—wanted to be with me. Once, I’d been academically promising, had been called smart, but that felt like a different lifetime.
Maybe it was because he was blind, I thought. Maybe there was something in the curse that required me to be seen. Or I’d aged out. Somewhere around thirty the curse might have run its course. Or I’d broken it with my impressive willpower. I hadn’t done more than flirt with a man in ten years.
That’s a whole decade, by the way.
I had atoned.
Oh, Adam.
Adam Tav.
He was out of my league. He was my last chance at salvation.
* * *
“Titi,” says Ella from the back seat. “Can we hear the one where Aladdin is running away from the guards again?”
I hit Back on the touchscreen so we can hear the song for the fortieth time. “Almost there. Look, sumac! Very red, right? Do you remember if it’s a native or nonnative species?” It’s mid-September and we’ve been trying to observe which plants and trees are changing color.
“No,” says Ella. “Do you think they’ll have those gluten-free cinnamon muffins again?”
“I love those,” I say. “But your mom said we need to do less sugar.”
“How about only a little bit less?” she suggests optimistically. We crack up.
Ella is seven and a half. She is not, in fact, an optimist. Typically, she assumes things will turn out to be scary. Her official diagnosis is childhood anxiety disorder. Dee thinks she probably has ADHD, too. And there are some sensory issues. The kid will not wear socks. Ever. That was one of the reasons school didn’t work for her. Not even the expensive private one Dee put her in after a year of torture at the cute public school down the street.
Now it’s mostly just Ella and me during the day, plus some playdates with kids from Blossom and Twig, our homeschool group. When I’m filling out the “Parent or Guardian” section of all the kid-related forms, there isn’t a checkable box for me. No pediatrician’s office has ever suggested:
homeschool auntminorly employed expert in breathing techniques during laborspontaneous editor of children’s chapter books, specializing in real-time removal of any hint of “meanness”murderer (but who would ever believe it?)demon, maybesuccubus (that’s probably the best term for it, though it’s not, in fact, a term for anything real—except me)Speaking of which, at thirty-three years old I’m responsibly celibate again. And I read a lot of romance. Mostly contemporary happily-ever-afters, but also, let’s be real, jacked blue aliens and the tiny human women who love them. A steely-jawed fae warlord with the biggest sword in the Kingdom of Shadow, the literal God of Death (also jacked) kidnapping some twenty-year-old with a spunky attitude and a talent for multiple orgasms. The kind of stuff I can’t leave lying around, in case the kid whose education I’m responsible for decides at some point to actually start reading.
I keep meaning to get back into meditation, but then I keep not getting around to it. I’m no longer in immediate danger of being swallowed by the hungry dark of my despair, but I’ll never be completely free of it, either. How could I be?
My shoulder and back ache as I pull into the Trader Joe’s parking lot. The longer I go without having sex/committing involuntary manslaughter, the worse I feel: my body aging ahead of itself, a weakness like anemia slackening my muscles. I park, facing the cluttered highway with its infinite, interchangeable gas stations and gray strip malls. Personal injury lawyers smile smarmily from their billboards, promising NO WIN, NO FEE. I’ve lived in prettier places, but my soul was roadkill then. I was flattened by the grotesque power lurking inside me, and for a long time I couldn’t even masturbate without hating myself.
Everything is better now.
My phone is ringing. It’s always on when I have a client near her due date.
“Crap,” I say. “Sweetie, that’s Izzy.” (My high-risk client—two days before her scheduled induction, but she never calls.) “I don’t think we have time for the muffins today after all. I’m sorry.”
“Does that mean you were going to get them?” Ella says sadly.
* * *
Eight hours later, I am at the hospital watching Izzy—Isobel Lopez—have a seizure. Her blood pressure spiked almost immediately after she delivered the placenta, and the baby has been whisked away to the NICU. This is now an emergency.
And that is when I see him.
CHAPTER 2
For the record: Birth isn’t usually an emergency. That’s just TV. TV is also always teaching a lesson to the woman who wants to “do everything the natural way.” She starts out with a playlist of soothing cello music, practicing her mantras, and ends up screaming, “Give me the fucking drugs!” as soon as the first contraction hits. But I’ve attended plenty of births where the playlist stays on, and the mantras get chanted, and everything is (painful but) fine. This is not one of those births.
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.
DR. JOEL TAV, says the embroidered name, floating in blithe navy cursive on an expanse of white coat. I can see it now. Adam told me once that his older brother was a doctor. He doesn’t really look like Adam. But just enough.
Izzy gives a weak nod, hardly noticing him.
“Do you have anything for me, Tempest?” she’s asking. That’s my name, unfortunately. (I don’t suffer entirely alone; Mom named her other daughter Chickadee.)
“I have some drops. They’ll help.” An herbal blend with pulsatilla that’s supposed to be calming. I feel him pass by me like a planet as I reach for my little bag. Gravity dimples in his direction. By the time I straighten, he’s gone. My heart is back, and it’s making a racket.
Adam never mentioned his brother’s first name. We didn’t know each other that well or that long. He didn’t say his brother lived here, either. Would he have said that? I don’t even pretend to myself, though, that this is somehow someone else.
“Why’d they bring that new doctor in?” I ask Kelly, my favorite nurse, when I can step out for a minute after Antonio arrives.
“It’s crazy,” she whispers. “He just consults here, he’s in private practice. A pediatrician or something—can you believe that?—but when he comes in they put him on some intense cases. He never loses a patient. I’ve seen it a couple times now. It’s like he has the magic touch.” She leans closer, spearminty, lots of eye makeup. “And not bad-looking, right?” She winks.
I laugh and shrug, tremblingly nauseous, playing it extremely cool.
A doctor with a magic touch.
Who is Adam’s brother.
My brain, a cesspool of badly spelled conspiracy theories, is working furiously. There is something here, a reason. An explanation for why Adam didn’t die right after I slept with him. I’ve been wondering about it for three years now.
Three years of regaining my footing, of trying, yet again, to accept the blank of my loveless future. Three years of stumbling under the weight of what I’ve done, dragged forward by the slenderest hope. Sometimes I haven’t been able to think about anything else. Sometimes I’ve practically chanted through my day: I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him!
I’m sorry; I don’t mean to be misleading here. Adam did die.
He died two years ago, when he walked into traffic on Harrison Street. A full year after I slept with him. He stepped in front of a truck. I overheard someone talking about it at the library. “They need to make this town more disability accessible,” she said. But I had a feeling then that I haven’t been able to shake since. I had a feeling it was still, somehow, my fault.
* * *
I’m on the Discord server dpow badasses, which Grub started from our subreddit r/freaksofnatureforrealz, and which is the only place in the world I’ve ever gotten actual information about my curse. Well, not mine, really. I haven’t come across any other succubi, at least not ones who are, you know, for realz. But there are other things: dark powers, we call them. Like in a low-budget movie. “Dpow,” we say, or “DP,” or sometimes “Dow.” And by we, I mean a small collection of internet weirdos, half of whom are probably lying or think this is all an elaborate role-playing game that may at any moment finally graduate to foam swords and wizardly robes.
Has anyone heard of a healing thing? I ask.
That’s not dp bro, comes the instant response from NazgulFarts27 (Grub) who is almost never offline. I should’ve just chatted him separately, but I want to cast a broad net.
I know but.
Yeah tho, he says. maybe got smthng on that.
One of your theories or something real?
What even is reality, he responds instantly.
I roll my eyes and wait. The truth is, it’s all theories. As far as I can tell, Grub, me, and about ten others are the only people in the world with an actual dark power—an inexplicable negative (in my case, deadly) effect on other people. Grub’s the one who figured out the definition of DPs, and he did it mostly in the middle of the night, strung out on caffeine, sugar, and misery. Understandably—his power is terrible. The other Dows that we know of are, in Grub’s words, “kinda suck-ass.” By which he means they aren’t trying to be decent people, the way Grub and I are. On the contrary, they’re leaning into the dark. Which is disappointing.
FT? he asks a second later and then video calls me. Grub is desperate. I’m his only friend; he’s starved for interaction.
“Hey, kid,” I say, picking up.
He’s wearing black eyeliner, and his long hair is even greasier and stringier than last time, which was yesterday. There is a new pimple forming next to his nose. “Hey, Lorelei,” he drawls. That’s his name for me—not Gilmore Girls, Marvel Comics. Unlike the minor seductress character, who was obviously drawn by a man, I am not incredibly sexy.
You’d think I would be, right? Or maybe, like, at least a B cup?
No, that’s Dee. She’s the one people are like, “You should be a plus-size model” to. (Because they never remember you can just say “model.”)
“Tell me,” I say to Grub. “And don’t eat that.” He’s scooping Nutella out of a Costco-sized jar with a soup spoon, black-painted nails flashing. The nails and eyeliner come and go depending on how much of his sadness he feels like displaying. “When’s the last time you ate something green, Grub?”
“Jelly beans. Mom.” His wide-set eyes and elfish pointed chin make his smirk more mischievous than arrogant.
I sigh. “Come on, kid. Take care of yourself.”
“For fucking what?” he says without vitriol. I know he likes being babied. He’s only a baby, after all. Sixteen years old. Zombie-walking through school, locking himself in the basement the rest of the time. Grub calls himself one of the Nazgûl, Tolkien’s undead riders who sow terror and pain wherever they go, because his DP is that he causes everyone he cares about to become depressed. His mom developed severe postpartum depression after his birth, and he ended up a ward of the state until age five, when she reclaimed him. She’s been struggling ever since, so he tries his best to avoid her. We’ve been friends since he was ten, though only through our phones.
“For me,” I say. “For when we figure out how to break the curse.”
“On it,” he says, knee-jerk sarcastic. He is on it. “Why do you want to know about healing? Did you deep dive on that Greek myths thread I sent you?”
“I heard about a doctor around here who’s healing people who were supposed to die.”
I can almost hear the lighter sparking in his brain. He brightens. “Probably just hyperbole.”
“Probably. But I’m trying to Sherlock a little myself.” His term.
“Nice.” He gives a quick, rare smile, showing charmingly crooked teeth. And then, “The healing thing could be an angel.”
“Did you just say ‘an angel’?”
“Yeah. I read something somewhere. Can’t fucking remember because it was at like four AM like three years ago.” He’s annoyed at himself anyway. “Some super old guy was talking about it, and one of the pagans wrote it down.” He calls all the New Age, Wicca, astrology people “pagans.” As far as we can tell, none of them actually have any magic.
“He said these soldiers in his unit or whatever were healed by this angel. I mean, who knows what they’re really called, people say angel for everything. But this one nurse had some kind of magic touch, and even the ones who were supposed to die got better—like, someone’s brain was coming out of their skull.” He smirks at this thought. “But it couldn’t have been, like, a lot of their brain. Like, if you lost your whole face or your intestines were physically out of your body with your shit coming out of them because they ripped—”
“Thanks, Grub.” I cut him off. There are a lot of things on the internet. Every other person has been touched by either an angel or a pedophile.
He shrugs. No problem.
I can’t help adding, “But I guess a lot of people wish healing stuff was real.”
He shrugs again. “Yeah. The story was just, like, more specific than you’d think. Not the usual religious stuff or whatever. No God in it.”
“If you thought it might be real, why didn’t you say something?” I ask. “If it was, it’d be the only good power we’ve heard of.”
A third shrug, this time just one bony shoulder, a lazy poke at the air. Shrugging is this kid’s native language. “I didn’t believe in it. You gotta track this doctor down.”
I blanch. “I mean, I don’t actually know who it is.”
“You just said you’re gonna Sherlock more. You literally just said that.” His eyes narrow. “Also, are you lying?”
I’m a bad liar. I’m bad at all forms of normal manipulation. I either kill you or I’m very unimposing to be around.
“I have to go, Grub. Dee’s working late and my mom’s … date is coming over any minute.”
I glance at the time, and at that moment Mom calls, “Barry is here!” in the singsong, half-an-octave-higher voice she switches into the second a man is nearby. Especially a man she’s sleeping with. Which is basically every man her age she meets and a few inappropriately younger ones.
“Damn it.”
“Is it the plumber?” Grub wants to know. “That dude was lit—with the truck that had the giant picture of the toilet on the side?”
“I shouldn’t have told you anything,” I say. “Love you.”
“Hey, wait! Lorelei! Be careful when you go out. I told you—”
“I know, I know. The banker.” An evil banker. (I can’t help thinking of Ella’s vaguely socialist folktales-from-around-the-world podcast.) Grub’s been obsessed with this news story about a private equity gazillionaire who died a few months ago. He’s convinced the guy was Dpow and got killed by the “demon hunter” he’s been steadily inventing over the course of his ongoing “investigation” into the “murders” of various high-profile potential fellow cursees. I try to discourage this type of thinking, since it’s obviously bad for him.
“He was right in your area.”
“The city is over an hour away, Grub.”
“People were like ‘I felt like I would do anything he asked me to.’ Like he was hypnotizing them. Creepy shit. Our kind of shit.”
“You already told me.”
“You keep ignoring me, though,” he whines.
Mom calls, “Baby!”
“Love you,” I say again, more firmly. I hang up on Grub and rush down to the common floor of our house to rescue Ella.
We have about ten minutes before Mom is having loud sex on the third floor in her private suite that is not nearly private enough. This is the problem with old houses. They don’t put in enough subflooring. Or toxic insulation, or whatever useful genome-damaging materials will mute the sound of your mother yelling the plumber’s name while you are attempting to accept the reality that you will never have sex again yourself. Ever. For your whole life. Until you die alone, probably while masturbating to badly written werewolf erotica. Probably at the part where it’s describing how the alpha werewolf’s giant penis is like a dog’s penis with that weird knot on it. Which would be the worst part for someone to read over your corpse’s shoulder.
“Hey, little one.” I tug Ella’s ponytail. “Playground run?” It’s almost dark.
“It’ll be empty!” She’s delighted. “I don’t like those boys who go there.”
She doesn’t, as a rule, like any boys. They are often unpredictable.
“Hello there, Tempe!” tries Barry, his hand low on Mom’s back, his goatee freshly shaped.
Mom giggles, fluffing her already fluffy blond bangs. “Barry,” she purrs, “you know her name!”
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t, but I don’t wait around to find out. We are out the door, racing down the front steps of our little peaked-roof brown house that sits at the top of a slight hill. A trumpet vine grows rampant up the posts and across the top of the overhang of the wooden porch; echinacea is still blooming in two happy thickets on either side of the steps. Ella and I vault over a few of the fairy and animal sculptures that populate our miniature garden and land, laughing, on the sidewalk. The warm last-breath-of-summer day is trailing off into an anticipatory lavender twilight, and lights glow in our neighbors’ sleepy houses.
Neither of us is in good shape, so we don’t run for very long. The playground is only a few blocks away, and for all of them I am thinking, What does it actually mean to be an angel? I have about fifty more questions for Grub, and I bet he doesn’t have answers to any of them.
CHAPTER 3
Let me see how short I can make this story: Ella begged for a year, Dee gave in a month ago, and we got an (older, shelter) cat. Dee sneezed like she was training for the sneezing Olympics, Mom tried the usual homeopathy and burning herbs and smearing oils, Dee got incredibly stressed/guilty, Ella got incredibly sad, I posted on Nextdoor to see if we could find Mr. Button (that’s what Ella named the cat, after a character in a book she hadn’t even liked since she was five) a new and extremely loving home, and Dr. Joel Tav said yes, he’s looking for a cat. Now Ella and I are pulling up in front of his house—mere blocks from us, has he been here all along?—with the cat crying in the carrier and Ella crying next to the cat. I am trying to use a calming, authoritative voice as I run around in frantic circles in my head.
This isn’t a coincidence, by the way. Not entirely.
I was going to give Mr. Button to my client Kristen, who runs an animal rescue. And then I searched online for Adam’s mesmerizing brother and saw he’d responded recently to a cat adoption post. I put up my own and messaged him. It fell so easily into place, like it wanted to happen.
But now that it’s happening, it feels reckless, kamikaze, a gun fired into a dark room.
His house is tidily square, pale gray with white trim, a mossy brick path up to the stoop, and a sinuous Japanese maple by the short driveway. He isn’t going to recognize me, I reassure myself.
I’m wrestling the cat carrier out of the back seat when I feel him behind me. No, I probably heard the door or his footsteps or something normal. I turn, knocking the carrier against the side of the car. I wince. “Sorry, sorry,” I say to Mr. Button.
Ella gasps. “Is he okay, Titi?”
“Yes! He’s totally fine!” I’m defensive.
He recognizes me. I can tell. Without his white coat, I am seeing too much at once: thick freckled arms, more muscled than expected, the sun catching in curling golden hairs, a hint of sturdy collarbone where the neck of his old T-shirt wilts obligingly, the implication through thin fabric of a chest someone could fall on without making a dent.
Did he just get back from a run? He seems glowy, energized.
I’m having some sort of severe physiological reaction—like an allergy, except the opposite. I need to get closer, I need to get it into my system.
This is unbelievably, offensively stupid. I can withstand the presence of an attractive man. I am in my thirties. I have looked, unflinching, into dozens of wide-open birthing vaginas.
“Are you Tempest?” He says my name like it isn’t a joke.
I mean to say, “My mom has bad taste—call me T.” But instead I default to a nerdy, self-serious “Yes.”
“I’m Joel,” he says, and redirects to Ella, asking her name, too.
Joel, I whisper in my head. And then, softer, like a pervert, Doctor Tav. His glasses are a beautiful tortoiseshell with gold flecks that call up the gold flecks in his eyes, which I can now tell are hazel.
Ella clamps her mouth closed, determined to dislike this potential purloiner of brief, beloved pets. But now Joel is crouching down in front of the carrier to peer in at Mr. Button, saying, “Hey, buddy.” And to Ella: “Would you say he’s a snuggler?”
A grudging nod. He’s still talking: “I had a snuggly cat once. She was gray with a white spot. You know what she liked to do?”
Ella wants to know but she doesn’t want to answer.
“She liked to knock things off the counter! Especially fragile glass things.”
“Why?” Ella is forgetting herself already. This damn seductive man.
“She wanted to see them break. Can you believe that? Glass everywhere. I always had to wear shoes inside.”
“We’re supposed to take off shoes in our house.”
“Exactly,” he agrees ruefully. “Can I get this?” He removes the carrier from my grasp, and I wish with savage futility that our skin had brushed. “Maybe we should bring him inside so we can see if he’s okay with the place.”
“He might not be,” warns Ella. “He’s gotten acclimated to our house already.” She heard us using that word a lot in the beginning.
“True,” agrees Joel as I say, “I think Mr. Button is very adaptable, sweetie.”
He says, “Maybe we can all hang out for a minute and see how Mr. Button feels. Let him decide.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Come on in.” He walks carefully so as not to jostle the carrier. His body has a certain excess—it isn’t strictly necessary for him to be this large or strong seeming—and his shoulders apologize for it in their slight rounding. “I’m really glad you and your mom are looking out for this little guy.”
Copyright © 2026 by Kate Fox.