I realized I was grinning so hard my jaws hurt. Well, that could have been the oral sex. I dialed it back to a smile. “Yes. I’m happy.”
I was more than happy. I was thinking that you should never argue with a goddess. First of all it’s a waste of time, and second, she knows best. She had told me I could have this avatar if I wanted. Consolation prize for losing the big fish.
I didn’t want the big fish anymore. But I did want this one. Her fresh fish smell was all over my face. I might never shower again.
“That’s good. I want you to be happy,” she said, and I got a shiver.
“Did you—did you think about making me happy just now? I mean, with the whatever-it-is you use in a concert?”
“The mana,” she said, and dimpled. “Did it work?”
“It did,” I said. I wondered if that cheapened the high. Did I feel less happy because I knew she’d magicked it into me? I didn’t care. I hadn’t been this blissfully content since the first time I tried marijuana.
“Is this how you do sex demon stuff? Make the women happy with magic? Even if the sex is only so-so?”
I scowled. Again with the analysis. This was why I never told women I was a sex demon. “Is that a complaint?”
She slugged me on the arm. “Of course. You ass. It’s my first sex ever, how can I complain?”
I relaxed. “Most magic is ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent whammy. Besides, a man’s got his pride.”
“But can they tell? I sure can’t. I have nothing to compare you to.”
“I get it, I get it! No! I don’t tell them if I whammy them. I figured it would be like looking at the man behind the curtain. Spoil the high. But,” I said, running a hand down her tawny bare length, “it doesn’t seem to bother me to know you’ve put the fix in. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time.”
“Whoa, alert the media. A white guy thinks he might have been wrong.”
I eyed her, smiling at her smile, taking in her relaxed sprawl on the coverlet, watching her stroke the coverlet—hey—
“Nice fur,” she said, petting it.
“Um,” I said.
She moved her leg, studying the coverlet. “It’s huge. Must be more than one pelt.”
“Uh,” I said.
She looked back up at me. “What?”
“I—I don’t have a fur coverlet. I think you—or we—did that.”
Swiftly she sat up. “What?” She scrambled off the bed. I joined her to stand on the funky carpet. Together we looked down at what should have been ten dollars’ worth of cheap poly-cotton sheets, kinda stained.
Instead my big bed was covered, lapping over all four sides, with a thick, creamy blanket of spotted lynx pelts sewn together.
“Nice,” I said, a little dizzy.
We sat back down on the bed. I curled around her and pulled the edge of that fabulous fur over her. Much as I wanted to stick it in her, I realized that some analysis was called for after all.
“Has this happened before?”
She sighed. “Baz, I brought a cockroach back to life. Two months ago, at an arena, I found this roach in the bathroom of my dressing room and I whacked it with my shoe, squish, and then I felt guilty and I pointed at it and it—it unsquished and ran away. That’s not beautiful. It’s scary.”
“I bet the cockroach was happy.”
She fell silent, apparently considering this, or thinking of maybe all the pros and cons of cockroach life, like whether the cockroach had been ready to go, or maybe her shoe had cut it short in its prime. I stifled a laugh.
She said, “Well it scares the shit out of me. And it doesn’t stop happening. And every day something weirder happens. And every day my family seems to withdraw a little bit. They don’t leave me alone,” she said bitterly. “I never get any time to myself.” She looked up. “But I’m still alone.”
I nodded.
“The sick part is, I think they understand all this on some level. They care about me. I love that. I need that. On my cynical days I think they’re just protecting their investment. But they do still love me and they do still treat me like a person most of the time. You’ve been chasing them off for me and I’m grateful for a little stolen time here and there. But when Aunt Maybellyne treats me like a child, or Uncle Chester scolds me, or my cousin yells at me or slaps my ass, they’re still seeing a human being. The day they have too much respect to dis me like that, I—I might kill myself,” she said quietly.
That chilled me. “You can get better love than that.”
“I’m not so sure.” She looked troubled. “I can’t do booze or drugs. I can’t screw around. Everything depends on me. Lately I’ve even wondered if I can die. That terrifies me even more.”
I said awkwardly, “Oh, you can die, if it comforts you to know that.”
“Not really. That’s why—”
“Why you half-kill yourself in your workout.”
She looked at me with wet, grateful eyes. “You do understand.” She said simply, “I want to survive the fear.”
I cupped her face. “Oh, baby.” The poor kid.
She was getting upset. She said, “No matter how big the fear gets, I have to be strong enough. It gets bigger? Fine. I’ll get stronger. Only lately,” she gulped, “lately I’m afraid I am getting stronger. The power doesn’t seem to fade away after a performance. It keeps building.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay, I get it. That’s why I’m here. You can’t stop becoming a goddess. You’re too popular. You’ve worked so many miracles already that your legend can’t die. But you also need to survive becoming a goddess.”
“Why?”
I blinked. “Why do you have to survive?”
“If I’ve done it all already, I can die now, like Whitney and Marilyn and Janis and Amy, and my legend lives on, all those videos and recordings. Right? They’ve had enough of me, haven’t they?” she whispered, pleading. “I don’t have to be twenty-seven hundred years old like you, knocking around the world doing sex demon work because I can’t die?”
With a sigh, I patted her face and then lay back on the lynx pelt blanket. I felt sorrier for her than I’d thought possible, and weirded out beyond belief.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said to the ceiling. “You’ve done everything I did, only better. You’ve laid out in black and white all the fucked-up reasons I’ve ever done anything. Why I tried to rule the world and damn near succeeded. Why I lived in the shadows. Why I came out of the shadows and made a mess of the band and slunk back under my rock again. You understand what scares me about immortality. And unlike me, you look straight at it.” I glanced at her under my eyelashes. “Why survive, you ask? Fuck, I dunno. Because somebody loves you?”
She shot me a sharp look at that. I pretended not to see it. “And because I’m only twenty-seven,” she said.
“A hundred times younger than I am. Neat.”
“You’ve done everything you can think of doing, I imagine.”
“Just about,” I admitted.
“Well, I haven’t.”
I puzzled my way through her train of thought. If she tried to die, I would definitely fail my mission.
I thought I knew what she meant. “So you’d be willing to keep on living, in spite of the pain in the ass of being a goddess, if you could get more out of it. More R&R. Some fun. Time to yourself. In a word, more carrot and less stick?”
Slowly she smiled. Her eyelids drooped. “Stick, carrot, call it what you want,” she said, looking at my lap.