A small voice peeped through the fog of confusion: Get up, you sad excuse of a woman. C'mon. Get your ass in gear.
The voice grew louder and more insistent. You have things to do.
Britt closed her eyes tightly and concentrated.
She had long ago perfected the ability to take whatever it was that caused confusion, anger, or sadness and lock it in a box for later examination. Often the cause went away of its own accord. Often the cause looked entirely different in the light of a new day. Either way, this box allowed her to get on with her life when she would otherwise be crippled. Some would call it denial. Britt called it sensible.
With some effort, she stuffed the incubus in the box.
Unfortunately, the residual headache from the night before couldn't be dealt with in the same way. Britt got up, put her hair in a ponytail, and donned her jogging gear. Hangover cure number one: eight ounces of orange juice, four miles of pavement, one shower, and voila: good as new.
The crisp, autumnal air invigorated her. She jogged from her apartment to the university campus where she toiled as a graduate student. She found an easy rhythm as she jogged up and around the various residence buildings and past the sports fields. Her long legs easily ate up distance as she ran around a lake and its parklands. Finally, she sprinted the home stretch.
By the time Britt returned, panting and lathered in sweat, her head was clear. She bent and studied the lock of her front door and could see no sign of tampering. Okay, no obvious break and enter.
She showered, lingering under the punishingly hot stream, allowing her muscles to relax and her stress to drain away. After she dried herself, she examined her new nipple ring more closely. She pulled and twisted it, turned it within the hole, but no break revealed itself. She considered cutting it off, but the notion of hacking at something so close to her tender breast left her cold. Besides, the ring did add a certain something to an otherwise firm and shapely breast. Something a little rebellious. Too bad its twin had nothing. She might have to look into that. Maybe.
Moving from the gleaming ring, she took stock of herself. If her former boyfriends and occasional admirers were to be believed, she was somewhere between pretty and absolutely ravishing. She knew that the earnestness of these assertions depended largely on how motivated they were to get into her pants or how susceptible they thought she was to compliments. Many tried, but seldom did she allow herself to be manipulated. If she went down that road with anyone, she did so with eyes open and with certain expectations.
Britt's might not be ravishing, but she did qualify as pretty. The mirror showed light brown hair that cascaded in damp waves to her shoulders, framing a face with high arching eyebrows, green eyes, fine nose, an expressive mouth with full lips and the straightest teeth orthodontic coverage could buy. Defined cheekbones. Firm jaw. Perhaps she was a little more than pretty.
Regular exercise had ensured that she'd avoided the freshman fifteen as an undergrad. She'd maintained a lean figure through those years, aided as much by poverty as discipline. Recent years had added some attractive volume to the curves men found so appealing.
Perhaps it was no accident that demonboy had sought her out.
Britt donned an oversized t-shirt and nothing else. The incubus sat in his box, occasionally stomping around, but Britt managed to ignore it. With a steaming mug of coffee, she settled onto the sofa and regarded the thick Victorian novel on her lap. She had to make some serious headway with her reading list. Her professors would have little patience for an unprepared graduate student.
The phone rang. The call display showed that it was Mike. She let the call go through to voice mail.
She settled more comfortably on the sofa and opened the book. The Victorians were nothing if not long-winded. She flipped to the back of the book. Over 800 pages. Good God.
Britt eyed her laptop on the dining room table.
She tossed the book aside and started the laptop. She typed "incubus" in the search engine. She disregarded the band of that name and scanned the pertinent sites and articles with increasing disappointment. Incubi, it seemed, were either a convenient myth to explain away rape, incest, and nymphomania or actual living, breathing demons. Her own experience notwithstanding, those that claimed the latter seemed to be card-carrying members of the tin foil hat brigade.
There had to be another explanation.
She closed the computer in disgust and returned to her novel, consigning the whole issue to her box. She hefted the volume and wondered if the Victorians had ever suffered from chafed pussies and mysteriously pierced nipples. If they did, they certainly didn't write about it.
There were minutes, perhaps an hour at a stretch, when Britt completely forgot the incubus. Then she would catch herself in the mirror and discern the thick ring that pressed against the fabric of her t-shirt. Or she would adjust herself on the sofa and feel the tingling rawness between her legs. At those times her mind would turn inexorably to the incubus, their improbable meeting, the heat of his breath on her pussy and the feeling of his tongue on her clit.
The phone rang at six and again half an hour later. Mike both times. Britt picked up the second time.
"Where've you been?" he asked without preamble.
"Home."
"I've been calling you."
"I know."
"Well?"
"I've got to get through Middlemarch."
"Middle what?"
"March. It's a novel."
"Oh."
"You got me drunk last night, by the way."
"Fat lot of good it did me."
Asshole.
"Huh?"
Crap. That had been out loud. "I stubbed my toe."
Britt heard the snap of a beer being uncapped. "Doing anything tonight?"
"Middlemarch."
"What?"
Didn't he listen? "The novel."
"Right. Tomorrow night, maybe?"
"Maybe."
"Great."
"Bye, Mike."
Britt hung up and wondered what she'd seen in him. She'd have to do something soon.
Britt turned off the lights and fell to bed, exhausted. The events of the previous night already felt distant. She reviewed the whole incident as dispassionately as she could. The big question remained: could he be who he claimed to be? Britt possessed an analytical mind, and the notion that she's been entertained by a demon was positively beyond all reason. True, he had entered a locked apartment with no sign of forced entry. It was nothing a skilled criminal couldn't do. He had revealed horns. It was nothing that couldn't be faked by some mean-spirited drama student to fool someone drunk and sleepy and gullible. She'd met the first two conditions. Perhaps she met the third too.
The fact of the ring remained—a thick hoop with no beginning and no end. A piercing that had appeared overnight. A piercing that should have taken weeks to heal, but had left no wound and no discomfort. A hoop that grew warm when she thought of him....
She tossed. The ring was difficult to reconcile.
Would he appear again tonight?
She toyed with the ring.
It was really was impossible that it could have healed so soon.
The ring warmed perceptibly in her fingers. Her other hand snaked down her abdomen.
She wished he would appear....
***
Monday morning. Britt sat in class and tried to pay attention. A fitful sleep, filled with odd visions and lascivious dreams, had left her exhausted and distracted. The professor paced back and forth, lecturing enthusiastically on some Romantic poet. On any other day, Britt would have been carried away by the passion of the words. Instead, her thoughts, spurred by the insistent heat of the ring that impaled her nipple, returned to the passion she had shared with her nocturnal visitor two nights before.
Britt's awareness of the ring had grown from the moment she awoke. It had started with a pleasant warmth, a comforting reminder of a remarkable night. For that memory alone she would cherish the ring always. She thought of him and of what he had given when he could easily have taken. So unlike certain selfish boyfriends. She considered her own inexplicable submission to this stranger and counted herself lucky that it had ended as it had.
She sat in class and realized that she was thinking of him in the past tense. She leaned forward and pressed her tingling breast to her forearm. It came to her that she did want to see him again, if only to determine once and for all who and what he really was. The ring vibrated. Come to think of it, she needed to see him again. She couldn't bear the thought that their meeting had been pure chance, never to be repeated. It left too many unanswered questions, too many possibilities unexplored.
She squirmed on the hard wooden chair, discomfited by the vibration that extended now from the ring to her loins.
She needed to see him again. The thought that such magic, such intensity, could not be repeated was unbearable.
Her body was alive, thrumming to a frequency beyond the ken of others. She wondered absently how her classmates could be indifferent to her growing agitation and arousal.
Britt started when the scraping of chairs announced the end of the lecture. She looked at her notes, gasped, and quickly closed the binder, hoping that no one had seen the page. Doodles filled the page—rings with horns, entwined limbs, sexual organs. The sketches overlapped, one bleeding into another. An orgy.
* * *
Britt numbly followed the students filing out of the lecture hall. A hand grabbed her vice-like around the upper arm and tore her from the chattering exodus.
She whirled at her assailant. "Hey! What are you doing?"
It was demonboy, looking as tired as Britt felt. His grip was tight and there would be a bruise on her arm in the morning. At his touch, the ring shot a wave of heat through her body that nearly buckled her knees.
"I should ask you the same thing," said the incubus tightly, similarly staggered by the searing waves that suddenly enveloped them. "Why are you summoning me now?"
"I'm not. I didn't."
"I felt you."
"I was just thinking of you."
"Don't. It's distracting."
Britt fought to recover her equilibrium. Her heart leapt at seeing him again and at the notion that she could distract an incubus. She took a deep steadying breath and studied him. For a demon, he was certainly a dish. None of that sneering gargoyle hideousness. Hell, he was the type of guy a mother would swoon over. In the light of day, Britt could fully appreciate his ruggedly good looks and his aura of strength. His chiselled features, perfectly proportioned, were crowned by a full head of wavy brown hair. Healthy laugh lines bracketed smoky grey eyes. Firm lips. Strong chin with the hint of dark stubble. His weathered face suggested time spent outdoors with no concern for the elements. If Britt had to guess, she would have pegged his age to be in the mid-thirties. She caught his eye again and noted a depth and knowingness in his gaze and had to admit the possibility that he was older.
He wore a scuffed leather bomber jacket over a tight white t-shirt, jeans, and heavy black boots. In the halls of academia, he was a man among boys, a wolf among sheep. Britt's stomach flipped.
The incubus let go of her arm and leaned against the wall.
"What's wrong?" asked Britt.
The incubus answered with a weariness that was tinged with anger. "Ordinarily, a summons comes at night. Understand? Daytime is when I sleep."
"Like a vampire."
