Unsoul'd Read Free Page A

two days! I don't 'ever' do or not do anything!"
    The devil folded his arms over his chest and sulked. He sat that way for a while, as I puttered around the house, trying to scrape together breakfast from the devil's rejects. Fruitless. (Literally -- he had eaten my blueberries.) I had no choice but to leave the house to buy more food.
    "Will you be all right by yourself?" I asked, incredulous that I was leaving the devil alone in my apartment.
    "I was all right by myself in a lake of fire for millennia ."
    I took that as an affirmative and headed to the store. When I returned, the devil was gone and there was a message from Fi that she was on her way over.
    For reasons I understand, but won't get into, I immediately set to straightening the apartment, then stopped midway through when I realized I hadn't showered, shaved, or even brushed my teeth in close to thirty-six hours. I scrubbed my teeth and took a quick shower that barely dampened my skin before I hopped out and dried off. By the time the buzzer sounded, I had managed to struggle into a pair of jeans and a clean-enough t-shirt.
    "Oh, there it is," Fi said, breezing in, as though there were anywhere else for the package to be. "Great, great, great!" She started tugging at the package flaps, then resorted to using her keys to score the tape.
    "Hi, Fi."
    "Hey. Hang on." She tapped her Bluetooth earpiece. "Hi, Max. No, no. Fifteen? Hell, no! Go to twenty and see what they say. OK, laters." She tapped the piece again and smiled up at me. "How are you, Randall? So you won't believe what's in here. One of my clients sent me a link to this article called 'Rise of the Little Blue Dress' and it was all about how blue is this season's black, which is cool because blue really, really works for me, you know? It's the eyes."
    Fi had frighteningly beautiful blue eyes.
    "So," she went on, "I read the article and they showed what's-her-name, the girl from the TV show, the one you liked, her, they showed her in this gorgeous blue dress and I was like, 'OK, I have to have that, like, yesterday,' so I ordered it right away. Didn't even think about it, which is crazy because you should see my credit card statement. It's ridic. Anyway, this is it." She held up a blue shimmer that looked barely large enough to qualify as a dishrag. "Do you mind if I try it on?"
    A flash of her naked body staggered me. She was wearing a hoodie and baggy jeans, but I knew that body well enough that she couldn't hide it from my imagination.
    "Sure," I said a bit hoarsely. "Try it on."
    She disappeared into the bedroom and I stood there with the empty box and packing material, frozen in my own apartment, wanting to follow her in, wanting not to want to follow her in...
    A moment later, she removed the choice for me by emerging covered from mid-hip to bust in what can best be described as royal blue metallic liquid. In the unlikely event that I had forgotten the curve and slope of her in the past six months, I now had a live, three-dimensional refresher course.
    "What do you think?" she asked. "Not bad?"
    Even when we were together, even in the days when I loved her with all my (still un-mortaged) soul, I recognized and despised the way Fi constantly fished for compliments, as though desperate for recognition, approbation, validation. Fi was gorgeous. She knew it. She didn't need to hear it.
    Yet she did. "It looks nice," I told her, compromising between the truth and my desire to say nothing at all.
    "It does, doesn't it?" she asked, turning so that I could see the back.
    And her back. Which stunned me anew, not for the welcome sight of Fi's plump yet sleek derriere, but rather for the blossom of color and shape inscribed from shoulder blade to shoulder blade along the smooth, taut expanse of her naked back. The huge back tattoo showed an angel -- or a demon, I couldn't quite tell -- in mid-flight, stretching from right to left. A female form, with flowing silver hair, and exaggerated anatomy clothed in what