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By Root 1591 0

the bathroom I take my shoes off, remove my jacket and tie—enough. She calls to say she’s ready, and I open the door. She’s lying on the bed, in a provocative position that still allows her to see me. She’s taken off her dress: smooth, stocking-clad thighs and a waterfall of pure corn-silk hair, blue eyes like ice diamonds that I can fall into and drown. My heart is pounding as if I’ve run a marathon, or I’m about to have a heart attack. She’s smiling at me, hungry, needy; I take a step forwards. My back is clammy with cold sweat and my crotch feels like a steel bar, painfully erect. I need her like I’ve never needed a woman before. Another step. Another. She smiles and kneels on the carpet in front of me, opening her mouth to take me in. I dread her touch, even though I blindly crave it. Tap-dancing on the third rail, I think fuzzily, trying to force my paralyzed ribs to take a racking breath of air as she reaches out to touch me.

“Uh—uh!”

I open my eyes. It’s dark in the hotel room, my heart’s hammering, and I’m lying in a puddle of cold sweat with an erection like a lump of wood and a ghastly sense of horror squatting on my chest. “Uh!” All I can do is grunt feebly. I flail for a bit, then shove the clammy sheet away from me. I’m erect—and it’s not like waking from an erotic dream, it’s more like someone’s using a farmyard device to milk me. “Ugh.” I begin to sit up, meaning to go to the bathroom and towel my back off, and right then I come.

It’s weird, and wonderful, like no orgasm I’ve ever had before. It seems to go on and on forever, scratching the unscratchable itch inside me with an intensity that rapidly becomes unbearable. There’s something about it that feels terminal—not repeatable, an endpoint in someone’s life. When it begins to subside I whimper slightly and reach for my crotch. Surprise: I’m still erect—and my skin is dry.

That wasn’t me, I realize, disturbed. That was Ramona—I clutch my prick protectively.

Distant laughter. ★★Go on, jerk yourself off.★★ There’s a warm glow of satisfaction in her stomach. ★★You know you really want to, don’t you?★★ she thinks, licking her lips and sending me the taste of semen. Then I feel her reach over and pull the sheets up over the dead businessman’s face.

I manage to reach the bathroom and lift the toilet lid before I throw up. My stomach knots and tries to climb my throat. Every guy I’ve ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later, she said, and now I know why. She’s right about one thing: despite the sudden gag reflex I’m still sprouting a woody. Despite everything, despite the dread, despite the almost furtive guilt I feel, I really enjoyed whatever it is Ramona just did. And now I feel inexplicably guilty on account of Mo, because I wasn’t looking for an adventure on the side—and I feel really dirty as well, because I found it exciting.

The overspill from what Ramona was doing turned me on in my sleep, but the reason I’m throwing up now is that what she was doing wasn’t sex: she was feeding on the guy’s mind, and he died, and it gave her an orgasm, and I got off on it. I want to scrub my brains out with a wire brush, and I want to crawl into a deep hole in the ground, and I want to do it all over again . . . because I’m entangled with her, I hope, but the alternative is worse: there are some things I don’t want to find out about myself, and a secret taste for hot, kinky demon sex is one of them.

I really hope Mo finds out that this entanglement thing is reversible. Because if it isn’t, the next time she and I go to bed together—

Let’s not think about that right now.

I SPEND AN UNEASY NIGHT TOSSING AND TURNING between damp sheets despite the dream catcher screensaver I leave running on my tablet PC. By dawn I’ve just about worried myself into a mild nervous breakdown: if it’s not trying to avoid thinking about invisible pink elephants (subtype: man-eaters), it’s what Angleton’s got in mind for me in Saint Martin. I don’t even know where the place is on a map. Meanwhile, the committee meeting is another unwelcome distraction. How am I supposed