As me and Melissa sat down for lunch I watched her eyes sweep over the rest of the room. I was positive she made eye-contact with three different people, and she smiled at two of them. I had no doubt that before lunch was over she'd have a date set up for tonight. And maybe a second one for tomorrow too.

And as I watched her, I could almost hear Lily's words from the other night replaying in my head.

It all came down to confidence, and Melissa had loads of it. She was a hot sexy supernatural babe, she could sleep with pretty much anybody she wanted, and she knew it. She was part succubus, and even though her powers weren't very strong and were limited to sex stuff, they were still powers. If she wanted to, she could walk up to a thoroughly committed monogamous het couple and get either of them to sleep with her. Or both if she felt like it.

She could spend every night of the week sleeping with the hottest, sexiest, smartest, most desirable people around if she wanted. But instead, she preferred to sleep with me.

Same with Susan. Sue didn't have the whole busty-blonde-bimbo thing going on, but she was just as hot and sexy in her own way. She was still learning her way as a part-succubus, she didn't quite have the same level of confidence that Melissa had, but she was getting there.

And just like Melissa, Sue could sleep with anybody she wanted, but most of the time she wanted to be with me.

That wasn't due to their contracts either, they were only obligated to sleep with me once a month. The rest of the time we were together was because that's what they wanted. Because they liked me.

I talked with Lily on Wednesday night, after I told Melissa how the mind-reading intuition thing was messing me up. Lily explained my problem boiled down to confidence, or more specifically, a lack of confidence.

She said the reason it upset me to know my prof thought I was a screw-up was because I still felt like that myself. Like I was scared of the world discovering I was a D-student with no real ambition or aspirations, limited knowledge, poor creativity, and all those other negative things that had been written on my report cards over the last twelve years of school.

Heck at age eighteen I got killed crossing the street because I didn't look both ways and wasn't paying attention. That's the sort of thing that happens to five-year-olds, not eighteen-year-olds about to finish high-school. I blamed myself for getting killed, despite the fact that it was really because a guy was too busy checking his phone to look where he was going.

Lily said the reason I was upset to find out that other prof hated me was because I genuinely liked almost everyone and I wanted to be liked. I was a nice person and wanted to be nice to people, and finding out someone didn't like me left me feeling like I'd failed them somehow.

She told me the reason I was so scared to find out my mom was secretly disappointed in me or upset with my choices or whatever, was because I already suspected she felt that way and I was afraid of finding out I was right.

And finally, Lily explained that all these things were because I lacked self-confidence. She said once I understood that I wasn't a screw-up, that my value and importance as a person didn't depend on what other people thought of me, then other people's opinions wouldn't upset me anymore.

Lily said once I had that confidence and believed in myself, other people's impressions of me wouldn't bother me any more than other people's sexual fantasies bothered Melissa. She said I'd realize those were reflections of them and their own inadequacies, rather than insight into myself. Because nobody else could see or know me better than me.

She also explained I probably grew up with a lot of self-doubt and low self-esteem because of the dysphoria I was dealing with, without even really being aware of it. Like when something's wrong all your life it's hard to notice it's there, it becomes part of your background, your baseline. Meanwhile she said I would have had this sense of something being wrong with me but not knowing what, so it was probably easy for me to believe the negative stuff other people said about me.

The only thing she wouldn't do was tell me what good or positive stuff I had or did that I should be proud of, what stuff should make me feel better about myself. She said that had to come from me. She said if that stuff came from someone else, I'd find some way to discredit it or deflect it or whatever, so it wouldn't count.

So the past two days I'd been avoiding looking too closely at anybody else so I wouldn't be distracted by their opinions of me, and instead tried to focus on myself and on watching Melissa.

I was trying to figure out what there was for me to be proud of in myself, what sorts of things I could feel good and confident about. And I was sort of studying Melissa, to try and understand how her confidence helped her.

Me and Melissa were both quiet as we started eating our lunch. She was still sort of looking around the room, maybe she was looking for more potential hook-ups for tonight or the weekend.

I thought again about my very small list of things to be proud of. I kept adding to the list but then I kept striking stuff off it again. Like almost everything I put on the list I turned around and removed because I decided I couldn't take credit for it.

Every physical attribute, from being cute to being strong to seeing in the dark, all that wasn't really anything I could claim for myself. It was because of Lily, or because of random chance or whatever.

So at the moment I only really had two things on my list.

I was nice. Well, so were a lot of other people so it wasn't really that special. And being nice wasn't even seen as a positive quality half the time. People took advantage of nice folks.

The other one was way more esoteric, but it was something nobody else could say. I knew the true names of three real demons. And granted one of them was dead and another was imprisoned in a brooch and locked in a vault, and the third one was trapped inside me, but still. I was pretty sure there wasn't another person alive who knew the true names of three demons. And in the case of Verothilas, I kind of figured out her true name myself. With a lot of help from Melissa and Lily of course.

Towards the end of our lunch break Melissa excused herself. I watched her strut over to a table where a handful of jocks were sitting around talking and laughing. She sashayed over to them, put on her ditzy sexy bimbo act, then five minutes later she strutted back to our table with her hips swaying and boobs jiggling, then sat back down and announced with a grin "I'm all set for tonight."

I smiled and asked, "Which one?"

"The tall blond on the left," she replied. Then with a smirk she added, "Too bad you're not into guys, the small one with brown hair's totally into you."

I blushed, and despite myself I glanced over at the guys' table again.

The one with brown hair was the shortest guy at the table. He was actually still looking at me and our eyes met for a moment. He quickly turned away and I knew he was trying not to blush.

I also knew he found me fascinating and desperately wanted to get to know me better, but was way too shy to even approach me. And I knew he wasn't actually a jock, he was just friends with one of them. I was left with the impression of a shy sensitive soft-spoken guy who tended to just tag along with whatever his friends wanted to do.

I quickly looked away as well, as I felt my cheeks getting brighter. I mumbled "Yeah, it's too bad..."

Melissa was still watching me, and after a moment she said "You know, it's ok to be friends with guys even if you're not looking for sex with them? If you want, go talk to him. Meet up for coffee or something."

That just made me blush brighter, I grimaced "Wouldn't that be like teasing or something? Like if he's looking for sex or romance or whatever, wouldn't that be kind of cruel to make him think he has a chance?"

Her smile faded and she leaned forward then whispered, "I don't know that my sex-sense works well enough to be sure Mara? But I know he's not interested in sex with me. All I get from him are cuddle-vibes, and the only thing about me he finds interesting is that I'm friends with you."

She added, "I'm not telling you what to do, and I know you're not into dudes. I'm just saying, it doesn't have to be about sex, right? And I get that's a weird thing for a half-succubus to say."

I nodded slowly as I sat back and thought about that. Then I realized the guy and his friends were all on their way out, and in a spur of the moment decision I got up and intercepted them.

I ignored the three tall dude-bros and focused on the shorter guy with the messy brown hair as I said, "Hi! My name's Mara. I was wondering if maybe you'd like to meet up for coffee some time? Like say, tomorrow afternoon?"

The guy looked stunned, his cheeks went pink, and for a second he just stared at me like a deer caught in the headlights. Then he nodded and stammered "I'd uh, yeah, love to. Uh, nice to meet you Mara. I'm uh, Ethan."

The three jocks were grinning at each other and I had no doubt they'd be high-fiving Ethan as soon as they were all out of sight, but fortunately they kept their mouths shut for now. Ethan had to get to class so we didn't have any more time to talk, but we quickly exchanged phone numbers and agreed to meet at a nearby coffee place tomorrow afternoon at four.

Then he hurried off while his buddies all started talking to him.

Meanwhile Melissa was on her feet and she put an arm around my shoulders as she said, "You go, girl! Good job!"

My heart was racing a mile a minute, but I realized I was smiling. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, but I just made a date with a guy. And I felt kind of good about it?

I mentally added that to my list, now I had three things I could be proud about. At least until the date turned into a disaster and I screwed it up, but that would be tomorrow-me's problem. Right now today-me had to get to class with Melissa.

Friday afternoon was drama, and I was still riding that little high from lunch so I decided whatever happened in class I'd do my very best not to be a class clown. I wanted to show the prof I could really act if I tried.

When we all got settled in class the teacher handed out a script and announced we'd be doing a 'table read' of a short one-scene play.

A table read was like acting but only half-way. We'd read our parts and do the emotions and maybe hand gestures, like we'd try to bring our characters to life, but we'd be doing it sitting around the table with the script in front of us. So we weren't memorizing lines, there were no props or set, we weren't walking or running or doing any full-body performance stuff.

The script was something from a fellow student, she was taking creative writing as well as drama. We all had a minute to gloss through it, then the we'd get to request which roles we wanted to play. I opened it to the second page and saw one of the roles was 'the devil' and immediately knew I had to play that part. It was written for a guy but I didn't care.

I begged and pleaded and swore I'd be good, and in the end I was given the role as long as I promised not to turn it into yet another comedy.

And ninety minutes later as the class was wrapping up, I added a fourth thing to my list. I could act, if I wanted to. The prof told me he was impressed and asked why I hadn't done anything like that before.

And the girl who wrote the script told me I even had her sold on the part. She said if she ever developed the scene into a full play, she was going to rewrite that character because I convinced her that demons don't have to be big creepy dudes to be scary.

I grinned and told her, "Demons don't have to be scary to be demons either. Some demons can be cute and cuddly. But that's maybe something for a different play."

She gave me a quizzical look, and I suddenly got the feeling I could probably score another date if I asked her out. But I didn't want to overdo it so I just congratulated her on the stuff she'd written so far, then me and Melissa excused ourselves and headed for home.

PurpleCatGirl

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