Me and the Devil: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

curiosity in her eyes as I passed.
    The awful cold and winds seemed not only to have rid the streets of people but also to have rid the sky of clouds. The moon had waned to a delicate falcated sliver, and stars were visible. As a child I had seen many stars in these night skies, but now it was rare to see one. Tens of billions of planets, suns, and moons in the Milky Way, and we had disconnected ourselves from them all.
    Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.
    I flicked my cigarette butt at a parked car and saw the wind take it, red embers flying and vanishing.
    I wish I may, I wish I might.
    “So, Melissa, tell me. Can you control the tides by crossing and uncrossing your legs?”
    She looked at me awkwardly.
    “Do you like to drink strong drink, go mad, and dance with the apparition of freedom?”
    She seemed about to say something but giggled instead.
    “Do you like to watch old men masturbate and know that they too once were young?”
    “Who
are
you?”
    “I was asking myself that just the other day.”
    “Leslie says you write books.”
    “I used to.”
    “What do you do now?”
    “I’m retired. I enjoy the fruits of my past labors and contemplate the pains of hell. What about you?”
    “I’m a student. I go to school.”
    “What do you study?”
    “History.”
    “How do you plan to make a living off that?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t think about money much.”
    “I guess that’s good. It doesn’t think much about you either.”
    “That’s pretty much the way I look at it.”
    Her voice was pleasant. She wasn’t really drunk, though she was getting there. She was wearing pants, but they were quite close-fitting, and her thighs looked good in them. Her skin was beautiful. Her lips were full. Her dark hair was not all that long, and she wore it in a ponytail, which made her look even younger. Its end formed a sweet, lush curl that filliped amid the down at the nape of her neck with her every slight movement. She raised her knees to rest against the bar. It was a beautiful sight.
    So strange to be like this, sober in a bar as midnight struck. Strange and exhilarating too.
    She seemed as beguiled by me as I was by her. I did not know, and did not care, how much of her apparent beguilement could be attributed to the alcohol’s warm, rising effect on her. The redlipstick she wore set off the whiteness of her teeth. I was lucky to have been mindful to put my teeth in before I came out.
    When she laughed I glimpsed the tip of her tongue dancing on the pearly white crenulations of those teeth, and I felt a twitch and a throb in the vein that runs down the length of my cock. In that instant, it was all I could do to keep from placing her hand to it. The nails of her fingers were the same color as her lips, and touching her hand under the pretext of making a point of something I was saying, I felt how soft and smooth those pale fingers were. The unseen parts of her body would be even more so.
    Her laughter and my laughter became shared laughter. Her talk and my talk became shared talk. Truth be told, I was starting to like her. If only I were younger, I thought. Much younger. But I was not.
    I had the basic facts of her, as far as she had chosen to give them to me. Age nineteen. Born in Minnesota; this cold did not bother her. An only child. Father a medical researcher, but not a vassal of the pharmaceutical racket; and, no, she herself had never really thought of pursuing science.
    She had come here tonight after walking out on a date with “this guy I met.”
    Why had she gone out with him to begin with?
    “Because he was cute.”
    What was she doing wasting her time talking to me?
    “Maybe because you’re not cute. And you’re not telling me how much money you’re going to make and how to pronounce the dessert or how a single mother you heard about had her child taken away from her because she ate so many poppy seed rolls that she tested positive for opiates.”
    When I told her that I