Page 62 of Devil Inside

My hands are already on the window, fingers digging into the loose crevasse between the frame, and pulling up. The window scrapes open. All that warped wood. It’s murder in the winter, when the cold seeps through, but right now all I can feel is heat. The humidity lingering outside oozes in and it’s like Lilith has exhaled all over me.

“May I come in?” she asks.

“What’s stopping you?”

“I’m trying to be polite,” she says. Is that a smile budding up from her lips?

She has been waiting for an invitation. How cordial. “Why start now?”

“Because you seem, I don’t know... afraid.”

She’s not wrong. “Do you get that often?”

“Not as much as we’d like,” she says, “if we’re being completely honest.”

“Honesty tends to be the best policy.”

“Is it now?”

“So I’m told.”

“Most people don’t know any better. If they did, perhaps they would be afraid.”

“Should I be afraid?” I ask. “Of you?”

“Probably. Are you?”

I can’t tell if I’m frightened or turned on. Maybe both.

There’s my pulse.

I feel my heartbeat. That steady pound resonating throughmy chest. It’s growing. Amplifying itself. A marching band in my rib cage. When was the last time I felt like this?

The last time I was with Lilith. Always her.

“Maybe I am afraid,” I say. “But that’s not stopping me from wanting this.”

“This.”

“You,” I clarify.

Silence from Lilith. We’re staring each other down, taking one another in, daring the other to make the first move. “So,” I start. “Who are you this time? Who are younow?”

“Still me.” Something in the way she says it tells me she means it. It’s the truth.

Do I trust her? Should I? “Still you,” I repeat. “And who’s that?”

“Who do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I say. “Not anymore.”

“Perhaps it’s better to simply...feel.”

“That’s your advice? Feel my way through all this? Put common sense to rest?”

“Why not? Let yourself go. Live a little. Live alot.”

“That’s a pretty tall order,” I say.