“You arrogant little-”
“Uh-uh-uh,” he said, “now is that anyway to talk to someone who’s going to let you feed on the very essence of his body?”
I scowled at him, then looked at Nathaniel. His face was utterly peaceful. “And you’re okay with this?”
“Honestly?”
“Yeah, honestly?”
“As long as I’m first, yes.”
“I could stay and help with the foreplay,” Jason said.
Before I could answer, Nathaniel answered, “Not the first time, Jason. I want this to be just the two of us.”
Jason grinned more for me than Nathaniel, because he could see the expression on my face caused by Nathaniel’s casual attitude toward making it a threesome later. “I’m going to go hide in the bathroom now.” He shut the door behind him, and we were left with the bedside lamp.
I looked at him, sort of outraged. “Thanks for volunteering me for a threesome.”
He looked puzzled. “I sleep with you and Micah almost every night.”
“But we’re not having sex all at the same time.”
He looked at me, and the look said that I was protesting too much.
“We don’t,” I said.
“Anita, you wake up, you need to feed, and whoever you didn’t feed on the day before you touch, but the other man doesn’t always crawl out of bed. I’ve watched you have sex with Micah more than once, and he’s watched you feed off of me.”
The headache was beginning to pulse behind my eye. I was having trouble swallowing, and it had the familiar taste of panic.
“I know that you and Jean-Claude are with Asher together. I know that that’s a true threesome.”
“Not all the time,” I said, and even to me it sounded weak.
He frowned at me. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying being with two men at the same time, Anita.”
My pulse was threatening to choke me. “Yes, there is,” and my voice was breathy.
“Why, why is it wrong?” He leaned into me as if he’d kiss me, but I leaned away, and it was one of those stupid moments, because leaning away put me on the bed, so that I was looking up at him. There was no logic to pulling away from a kiss and putting myself flat on the bed.
Of course, there was no logic to the screaming panic inside my head either.
He propped himself up on his arms and looked down at me with that smile that said I was being silly. I understood in that moment that I’d been wrong to think of him as a child. That one look let me know that in his own way, he’d been as careful of me as I’d been of him.
That he thought of me as sheltered, innocent. That in many ways, I was a child in the face of his experience. It was one of those moments when a relationship changes, when the way you look at the world suddenly expands or explodes, and the world that was, isn’t the one that is there a heartbeat later.
We stared at each other, and I don’t know if it showed on my face, or if it just occurred to him, too, or what, but he hesitated and smiled down at me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
The question seemed so ridiculous that I laughed. “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve almost killed Damian twice. I thought controlling theardeur would make things easier, and it hasn’t. I had intercourse with Byron, Byron, of all people. I almost raised the entire cemetery tonight. I could feel it, like some army of the dead just waiting for me to wake it. I could feel it, Nathaniel, feel the power of it.” I was crying and hadn’t meant to be. “So much went wrong today.”
He kissed my tears as they slipped from my eyes, gently, so gently. “Let’s make something go right.” He kissed me, and the salt of my tears lay on his lips.
“But…”
He kissed me again, a little more forcibly. “Anita, please stop talking.”
I frowned up at him. “Why?”
“So we can fuck,” he said.
I opened my mouth, and don’t know what I would have said, because he spoke first, “Make love to me,” and he leaned over me, “consummate me,” I thought he was going to kiss me, but his lips moved lower, and he kissed the front of my neck, then moved a little lower, “screw me,” and he kissed the mound of my breast through the T-shirt, “suck me.”
He raised the short shirt up, spilling my breasts free. I started to protest, but the look in his eyes, on his face, stopped me. He put his lips over my nipple, just below the bandage that covered Jean-Claude’s bite. He licked a long solid line over my breast and rolled his eyes to meet mine. “Fuck me.”
I’d like to say that I had something equally salacious to say, or something suave, but for the life of me, the only thing I could think to say, was, “Okay.” It wasn’t suave and debonair, but when you love someone, you don’t always have to be suave and debonair, sometimes you can just be yourself, and okay said at the right moment is sweeter than any poetry and can mean more to someone than all the pillow talk in the world.
50
The t-shirt and undies went in the first rash of hands, but I’d never tried to touch him when it wasn’t a metaphysical necessity. I’d never just turned to Nathaniel because I wanted him. It wasn’t that I didn’t find him attractive. God knows I did, but I hadn’t realized until those first few moments how much I’d come to rely on theardeur.
I’d thought of it as only a curse, but I appreciated for the first time that it greased the wheels for me. It got me over the embarrassment, the awkwardness, the good-girls-don’t-do-this attitude.
Without theardeur, it was just me, and the inside of my head was ugly.
Nathaniel noticed, because he notices everything. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. “What’s wrong?”
I wasn’t sure how to say it, and that must have shown on my face, because he said, “Just say it, Anita, whatever it is.”
I looked up at him and fought the urge to gaze down the length of his body. I had to close my eyes, and finally said, “Without theardeur, it’s just me. It’s just me, and I’m…” I sat up. “I’m not comfortable.”
“With me?”
I started to nod, then stopped, and said the real truth. “With myself.”
He moved forward on the bed so that he rested his face against the small of my back. He was so warm. “What does that mean, exactly?”
How did I explain something to someone else, that I didn’t really understand myself? “I don’t know if I can explain it,” I said.
The bathroom door opened, and we both looked up. Jason was there with a towel around his waist. He wasn’t wet, but he was wearing a towel. I’d been around the shapeshifters long enough to think that was odd.
“I can’t stand it,” he said, “I just can’t stand it.”
“What?” I said.
“You’re going to fuck this up.”
I looked at him, and it wasn’t a friendly look.
“Don’t glare at me.” He came to stand at the end of the bed, hands on hips. “I’ve told you that I’d give almost anything to have someone look at me the way Nathaniel looks at you.”
“Yeah, but…”
“But nothing,” he said, “I thought you were growing, changing, but what you just said blames it all on theardeur. You didn’t do any of it. Not your fault. If you fuck everything that moves while under the sway of theardeur, you’re still blameless.”
I started to argue with him, but couldn’t think how to do it. I finally said, “I sort of agree with what you said, what of it?”
“God, Anita, it’s not about blame. You act like it’s a sin.”
Something must have shown on my face, because he made a sound in his throat that was part growl, and part exasperation. I had to look away from the expression in his eyes, the anger in them. “I was taught that it was a sin.”
“They also taught you that Santa Claus was real, and you don’t believe that anymore, do you?”
I crossed my arms across my body, which lost some of its intended sullenness, because I was naked, and it’s never easy to be sullen when you’re nude. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He went down on his knees by the bed. “It means, look at him.”
I looked stubbornly at Jason, and not at Nathaniel.