“Doesn’t that mean he’s like food?”
“Sometimes,” I said, and I tried to tell her with my eyes that she should be careful.
“I don’t take my steak to bed with me, Anita. I don’t read bedtime stories to my milkshake.”
I’d told Ronnie just enough of my personal arrangements for her to throw them back into my face and belittle them. Great. “Ronnie, you need to be very careful what you say right now. Very careful.”
“You’re insulted, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I came to you with very personal stuff, back when it bothered me that Nathaniel was sharing the bed with Micah and me, and I told you we were reading to each other. That wasn’t a complaint.”
“Has something changed between you and Nathaniel? Last I heard, he was food, and one of your leopards, but that was all.”
“Yeah, things have changed.”
“You have two men living with you?”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“Two men, two lovers?”
I took a deep breath, and just said, “Yes.”
“Then how can you encourage me to say yes to Louie?”
“I didn’t encourage you. I just asked which you value more, Louie, or your privacy. It’s him that’s made it a choice, not me.”
“But you didn’t have to choose.”
“Not yet,” I said.
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
“It means that I never underestimate the power of the men in my life to complicate things. So far, so good.”
“So far, so good. How can you let that be enough? Don’t you want a guarantee that they aren’t going to cut your heart out and stomp on it?”
“I’d love a guarantee, but it doesn’t work that way. You’ve just got to take the plunge and hope for the best.”
“Marry him, you mean.”
“Ronnie, the only one here obsessed with marriage is you. You, and maybe Louie. I’ve got no plans in that direction.”
“So what, you just keep living with both of them?”
“For now, yes.” I sipped coffee and tried not to let my eyes be as unfriendly as I felt.
“But what about later?”
“Later will take care of itself,” I said.
“That’s not enough for me, Anita. I want to know that I’m making the right decision.”
“I don’t think you ever know, Ronnie. Most of the people I know that are absolutely certain they’re right, are the most wrong people I know.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“That means, marry him or don’t marry him, but don’t take your issues out on my relationships.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means don’t ever call my boyfriends weird again.”
“And you don’t think that living with two men is a little unusual?”
“It works for us, Ronnie.”
“And how does Jean-Claude feel about you sleeping with Micah and Nathaniel?”
“He’s okay with it.”
She frowned. “So you’re, what, sleeping with”-and she started counting fingers-“three men?”
“Hmm, four, hmm, nope, five.”
“Five? Jean-Claude, Nathaniel, Micah, and who?”
“Asher and Damian,” I said, and my face was nicely empty when I said it.
Her face wasn’t. She was left openmouthed, astonished, apparently so shocked, she was speechless. If she hadn’t been picking at me, I’d have broken it to her gently, or not at all. Ronnie had started by not being able to handle me dating a vampire, then hadn’t been able to handle my being comfortable cohabitating with a man, and less able to handle me living with two men and enjoying it, two extra vampires to hate, well, that was nothing.
“Let me get this straight, you are fucking all of them?”
I knew she meant, was I having intercourse with all of them?
Technically, no, but since it was only Nathaniel who was on the “no” list after today, I said, “Yes.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Asher happened after you’d made it very clear you hated me dating Jean-Claude, because he’s a vampire, so I stopped talking to you about vampires as boyfriends.”
“And Nathaniel moved from food to sex when?”
“Recently.”
“And Damian, I mean, Damian wasn’t even on the radar.”
“It’s been a busy day.”
She goggled at me again. “Are you serious, just today?”
I nodded, and almost enjoyed her astonishment.
“All this has been happening, and you didn’t tell me.”
“You haven’t wanted to hear it. You just get mad about Jean-Claude, and I think you hated hearing how much I enjoyed the very things with Micah that you were hating with Louie. You said yourself that it made it hard to talk to me, because I seemed so happy with the things that were driving you crazy.”
She let out a long, long breath. “I’m sorry, I’ve cut you out of so much.”
“I’ve missed us talking,” I said.
“We talked,” she said, “but we both started editing ourselves to each other. You can’t stay friends like that.” She looked sad.
“No,” I said, “you can’t. You don’t have to tell each other everything, but you can’t hold back this much.”
“I still don’t trust Jean-Claude, and you’re the one that taught me that vampires are just dead guys, no matter how cute they are.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“I haven’t,” she said.
“So no talking about the vampires in my life.”
“That still leaves you with two men to talk about.”
“Not if you compare one of them to steaks and milkshakes.”
“Look, last time you talked about Nathaniel it was to complain that you were so uncomfortable around him. You talked about Nathaniel the way I felt about Louie, then about the time I thought we had common complaints, you started to change. You started getting all soft when you talked about Nathaniel, too.”
“Did I?”
She nodded. “Yes, you did.”
“Everyone noticed Nathaniel and me, before I did, even Richard.”
“What?”
I shook my head. “I do not want to talk about Richard, other than to say I met his new girlfriend, Clair.”
“Jesus, when?”
I shook my head, because there was no way to tell the story without sharing more than Ronnie wanted to know about vampires. The very fact that she got angry when I talked about the vampires in my life made it almost impossible to share my life with her. How did I explain what had happened between Richard and me today without including theardeur, Jean-Claude, Damian, and Damian’s old master?
And if I did share it all, then she’d give me another lecture about how Jean-Claude was ruining my life, or had ulterior motives. I wouldn’t even be able to argue about the ulterior motives. Jean-Claude was what Jean-Claude was; I’d made peace with that a while back.
I finally said some of what I was thinking out loud. I’d learned lately that truth is really the only way for relationships to survive, let alone grow. I wanted to be friends with Ronnie again, really friends, if it was still possible. “Most of what happened today revolves around vampire stuff, Ronnie. If I can’t talk to you about vampires, then I can’t even begin to tell you what happened.”
“Jean-Claude fucking up your life some more.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think Jean-Claude could have planned some of this in his wildest imagination. Besides, he’s pissed that Damian got to me first.”
She frowned. “First, you mean he’s upset that you and Damian are lovers?”
“I’m not sure we’re lovers, so much as we had sex. I haven’t decided about the rest.”
“You’ve always treated intercourse like it’s a commitment, Anita.
I never understood that. It’s just sex, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so good, but it’s just sex, not a vow of honor.”
I shrugged. “We agreed to disagree on that topic a long time ago.”
“Yeah, we did. You’ve been monogamous as long as I’ve known you.
One date and that’s it until you either don’t want to date him anymore, or you’ve decided that he didn’t deserve the one date he got.
Until Jean-Claude came into your life, you were the most straitlaced person I knew. I mean I didn’t think I slept around until I had you to compare me to. You made everybody else seem like sluts to your nun.”