She dropped her beauty blender and reached behind her, unclasping the necklace I’d never seen her without. It was a simple gold chain with a single cross looped onto the bottom. In the middle was a modest square diamond that was taken from her grandmother’s wedding ring after she died. Caramel had the necklace made so she could carry her whole world with her wherever she went.
If ever my humanity slipped too far away, just one look at Caramel would bring it crashing back.
“You can tell me, you know,” I said gently, even though I felt anything other than.
She met my level stare and mumbled a trembling lie. “There’s nothing to tell, Ivy.”
I stared for a moment longer before nodding. “Okay.” We didn’t speak as I slipped out of the lingerie, changed into sweats, and packed the rest of my shit into a duffle bag. I smiled to placate her, though, and said “Well since you’re here, I’m off to serenade Jesus and binge watch Pretty Woman. Maybe eat Funyuns until I throw up,” I shrugged and winked, heart warming slightly at the sight of her smile and sound of her tinkling, half-hearted laugh. It told me she was relieved I’d dropped the subject. “The night is young and full of horrors. Never know what kind of trouble is to be had!” Like murder.
I slung the duffle over my shoulder and stumbled sideways from the weight.
“Careful!” She screeched and reached out to my rescue. “Goodness gracious you’re so clumsy sometimes. And I’m pretty sure the saying is ‘the night is dark and full of terrors’, not ‘young and full of horrors’.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.” A blast of cold air blew in when I opened the back exit. Caramel screeched and covered her scantily clothed body.
“Shut the door!”
“I’ll see you bitches tomorrow.”
With that, I slipped out into the dark. Steam rose from the ground in aneery display, and I half expected a shadow figure to step out from behind the industrial sized dumpster.
Snowflakes tickled my nose, lights from the city streets reflecting in their translucency in a peaceful display as I walked through the crowded streets of St. Louis. Though I tried not to let my mind wander, it didn’t listen.
When I’d woken to Lucifer sitting at my bedside, I didn’t know what to think.
I still didn’t.
We’d always been players in this lusty, cat and mouse game, but it had never amounted to anything. Lucifer Morningstar was the original sin; the picture of lust, and greed, and everything else that made humanity capable of becoming the filth of the Earth.
In spite of that, though, Lucifer was not filth.
Even as he’d made me drop my towel and crawl to his feet….. He’d neither touched me nor forced me to touch him in return. There were no weaponized words as Joe’s gift dangled from his fingers. He hadn’t read me the note and slapped me for any infraction his jury and judge condemned me for.
Jesus fuck, and then there was Joe.
“Do you think he’s different?”Lucifer’s haunting question floated through my mind.
The truth was, I did think Joe was different. He knew I was a stripper and rather than treating me like a sex-loaned Barbie, he protected me, walked me home, and was a gentleman the whole way. Still, it didn’t dampen the warning bells that rang in my mind around all men.
Well, every man except for Lucifer.
And the way he’d held me tonight…
“Devil save me,” I whispered into the frosty breeze. “I mean he should be the one setting off my stupid alarms, right? The goddamn biblical devil? What would be left of a man after living for billions of years? Would he even be a man at all?”
A lady in a brown parka scooted as far over on the sidewalk as she could before passing me. Had I said all of that outloud?
Oops.
For the first time, I caught myself legitimately wondering if it was normal for Lucifer to collect debts himself.
He’d been a constant presence in my afterlife. Whether it was collection night or not, I always felt him near.
And then there was the way that Jesus seemed so bonded to him. Jesus, a cat I trusted more than any other living being—
“Fuck!” I groaned and stopped, wiping a hand across my eyes. “Jesus. Fucking, Jesus!”
Food. The cat needed food and I was supposed to stop by the twenty-four hour market on my way home. The market that was, most unfortunately, three blocks back.
