for our purposes we're going with the interpretation that Nny does experience attraction to some people or ideas and he Does Not Like This
Ain't Nobody Gonna Love Me Like the Devil Do
Nny hits the oriental rug on the office floor spine-first and feels every rib in his chest shatter like ice on a trampoline.
The devil looks up from his desk, round gold specs perched on the boney ridge of his not-nose, and gives Nny a dour look. Nny wheezes and wriggles his toes uncomfortably as every little shard of loose bone in his chest cavity knits itself back together like a timelapse of autumn in reverse.
"That was quick," the devil says.
You're telling him. He didn't even make it all the way to the reception desk before St. Peter reeled back and walloped the Eject button, which was hurtful and uncalled for. Nny pokes the now-solid mass of his own chest, testing the bones. "What the fuck am I doing down here? Last I checked, I was just buying underwear at the Wall-to-Wallmart. I haven't even tried to kill myself yet this month. I'm in the middle of a road trip."
The devil rests his cavernous cheek on the tip of one boney finger. It's kind of delicate, in a condescending way. He flips through something on his desk, cursory, like he'd already read it at least once before Nny's arrival. "Your friend terminated her custodial duties early," he said. "I gather they had to flush the whole cell and reboot elsewhere. It will only take a little while for reality to reorganize itself."
"Friend?" Nny says, running through the short list of friends he has. Most of them are dead. One of them is in his trunk. "The gas station attendant in Reno is a waste lock?"
"No, you addled buffoon. Your friend Devi. The artist." The devil leans back, flicks his fingers, and in the ripple of light across moving water, becomes the figure of a hard, beautiful woman. Nny loses his breath.
God she was beautiful, more even than he remembered, with her widow's peak and her swept back hair and her nose—she called it the Delacruz nose, he remembers all at once, she told him that—
Nny launches himself across the floor, sweeping up the antique pen from the inkwell and driving it deep between the third and fourth ribs to where the unbeating heart of the abomination lay before him.
"Don't you fucking dare!" he howls, wrenching the pen free with a splurt of blood that drips like ink from the nib.
The devil, expressionless, touches his pale fingers to the curve of his breast and seals up the hole in the purple tanktop. He catches Nny's fist mid-stab as Nny goes in for another shot at that filthy dead thing hiding underneath his friend's stolen body. The grip is like stone. Nny wriggles against it, trying to get free and finish what he started.
Devi's face looks him up and down, a bare smirk on the familiar lips. The eyes aren't quite Devi's eyes—too hollow and heavy, the green all washed out to grey. After a moment, the tap of a couple fingers on Nny's thigh makes him aware of something he'd been too busy to notice previously. With his knee planted in the office chair, he's very nearly sitting on the devil's lap.
"Don't touch me!" Nny snarls, and throws his whole weight into trying to pry his wrist free, forgetting the pen entirely in his efforts. The devil just keeps smirking at him. Nny plants a boot in the back of the chair and pushes.
"Heaven help us," the devil says, in his own voice, "it's like having a rabid raccoon loose in the house."
He lets go, all at once, and Nny tumbles back into the hollow under the desk with a whump that knocks his head hard against the wood panel. One eye squinted shut against the ringing in his ears, Nny glares up past the bottom of the desk drawer.
"Oh relax," the devil says, and crosses his legs. Devi's boot buckles catch the light. "I was just trying to jog your memory. Your brain is swiss cheese at this point, and I don't have time to play twenty questions with you."
"What are you so busy with?" Nny demands.
The devil sighs, and all at once Devi's hard lean shape twists into something else, something skeletal and inhuman, something eldritch and elegant. "I don't think you even begin to grasp the extent of my responsibilities," he says, "the business I conduct, the endeavors I oversee—why just today I received the news that this whole blasted waste lock system was about to hard reboot with hardly a zzzzzzzzzzzz "
Nny watches his fingers as they flick through the air, gesticulating grandly, the tapering talon ends of each nail, shining beetle black and liquid white where the light touches them. Human fingers are stubby and soft and pink, but these are something else entirely. The knuckles almost resemble segments, clean and insectoid, something that could grasp and hold with all the clean disinterest of the bug become the collector.
The basso profundo roll of that voice echoes in the newly healed cage of Nny's chest, like the drumbeat of a song you can feel through the walls of a club. He wonders what those horns feel like. He's never touched real horns before.
He jolts at the snap of the devil's fingers, whacking his head into the desk panel again.
"I really do not have time for all of that," the devil says, looking pointedly down at him.
"All of what?" Nny says, "You were just monologuing at me! I wasn't even doing anything!"
The look that the devil gives him—the whole slow pan down his person, the arching of a brow-bone—makes Nny feel like a bug on a pin, guilty and squirming.
"I know what you were thinking, you little weirdo," the devil says.
"Weirdo!" Nny snarls, lurching to his feet only to knock his head again on the bottom of the drawer. He clutches the new lump on his forehead, eyes watering. "I hate that! I hate that word! It's not even a real word! You just added an O to the end of an adjective! I'm not gonna sit here and take this shit from you!"
"I'm sure you won't," the devil says. He adjusts the tip of his high collar with one graceful finger. What the fuck, why are they so pretty?
Nny levers himself up from the floor. "I'll teach you to read my mind!" he says, patting blindly across the table top for something with a pointy end.
"I wasn't reading your mind," the devil says.
Nny pauses with his hand on some kind of glass statue. "You weren't?"
"No," the devil says, "I didn't need to. It's obvious from your face. Your tongue was actually poking out."
Nny crosses his eyes. He is unable to successfully glare at his tongue, the treacherous piece of shit.
The devil lifts two fingers and pulls them down through the air, as if he's marking some invisible screen. The luminous face of a clock unfurls beneath his touch. "Well," he says, "I suppose I have five minutes to spare. This is too rare of an opportunity to pass up."
Nny stops trying to twist his tongue free of his mouth. "Wha' is?" he says.
The devil reaches past him and pries the glass statue from his hand, and as he leans in Nny gets the full scenic view of the clavicle between the devil's collar, the deep V and the winged arch, and he can't remember the last time something so much bigger than himself was this close, he freezes under the sheer disorientation—
"You know, I can manipulate minds as well as read them," the devil says, as he slides the paperweight out of reach, "but I suppose that wouldn't be very sporting of me. What do you think?"
"What?" Nny says, unable to look away from that inhuman clavicle.
"No," the devil says, after a moment, "I can see you're very protective of your mind. Well who wouldn't be, after what you've been through. Why don't you take a seat."
Without really thinking about it, Nny takes a seat on the top of the desk. The devil searches for something in his expression or his limbs, carefully analytical, and Nny realizes he's feeling-off. He's never been this aware of his body, the pressure of his legs on the wood, the exact cast of dim light coming in through the vignette window. All the raging anxious backdrop of his thoughts is silent beneath the gentle hum of sensation arriving, clear and undistorted.
"What is it you're crusading after," the devil says, "all this emotionless insect stuff? You don't really think you can cease to be a feeling being by willing it, do you?"
"Why not?" Nny says, weirdly peaceful—the storm of anxious fidgeting his brain usually spends half its effort on all gone suddenly quiet. He's only half listening, mentally poking at himself to see if the noise will start back up again under pressure.
"Humans," the devil sighs. "Ever arrogant, ever ungrateful."
The devil presses one knife-point nail into the thin fabric of Nny's chest, right over the heart, and heat blooms there. Not just heat, but something—something unfamiliar, something that demands his attention like an animal winding against his legs.
"Do you know what insects do?" the devil says, dipping down, so that he is almost nose to nonexistent nose with Nny.
The curl of his horns is hard to look away from. There's something so aesthetically satisfying about them, their weight and arc.
"Insects live their lives in fear, my boy," the devil says. "Insects eat, flee, and if they manage to keep that up for long enough, insects mate and die."
The talon tips of the devil's nails walk down Nny's stomach, each stab of pressure blooming hot, almost burning. Is that pleasure? Is that what that sensation is? Nny distrusts it. He tries to draw back, but for some reason his useless body doesn't respond to command.
"Would you like that?" the devil says. "To live without free will, to fuck and die in a gutter, to return to the mindless pursuit of satisfaction your ancestors dared to imagine themselves better than?"
One of the talons halts at Nny's belt, taps the buckle thoughtfully, and then the devil slides his cool, sinuous fingers against the skin, down past the belt, tight against the body. Nny is present in his body but he can't move it, he can feel every fucking thing but he can't do anything about it. Every nerve down the soft meat of his stomach gluts itself in pleasure, every base neuron revels in it.
The weak and animal part of him, the dumb flesh, wakes against his thigh. He chokes on a noise of fury, unable to open his mouth and let it out.
"The world is perfect," the devil tells him, "in all of its hunger and violence. Things like you, who carelessly misunderstand it-who dare to think themselves above it-are the slime across the canvas of a Rembrant."
The maddening thing is that all the devil is touching is the soft skin stretched over Nny's pelvis, just skin like any other skin, but his body almost glows with hunger. He's three mile island, he's Chernobyl, he's radioactive with the waste material that is this hunger. He is small and he wants to be smaller, to be overpowered and held still with those fucking beautiful monstrous fingers.
"What will you do next?" the devil says. "You can tear off the pieces that betray you, but you can't tear out the part that wants to be betrayed. If you want, if you were born to want, your wanting will never cease."
Nny strains. He's breathing hard through his clenched teeth, and if he could tear himself open and gut himself of this pleasure he would do it with his own nails, drag free the whole apparatus. He doesn't want to feel this, to feel anything-
The devil leans in close, the sharp jut of a cheekbone brushing Nny's ear. All down the length of his neck where the hair is standing on end, his flesh screams, begging like a two dollar harlot for anything, for everything. Damn the part of him that swell and aches, urgent against his thigh.
"Free will is wasted on a thing like you," the devil says, and withdraws his fingers from the taut pane of skin. The nerves he leaves there go cold and whine with desire.
An alarm chimes, somewhere beyond the office, and the devil looks past him for a moment. "Well," he says. "That was faster than I expected."
Reality shudders, doubles, tears out from under him. The over-warm dimness of the office is spun away, leaving only Nny and the void, and the crawling of his phantom flesh as he hurtles down towards the body that waits for him, presumably where he left it in the clothing department of a Wall-to-Wallmart. Nothingness swallows him.
Even in the formless void, the screaming hunger remains.