He nodded, and his hair slid across his lap again, as if the braid were moving closer to me. “Yes.”
I thought about it, and it seemed utterly logical. “Okay, say you’re right, what do I do? I’m still running late tonight. I’m usually running late.”
“Tonight we go through a drive-up. You get something easy to eat behind the wheel, and I get a salad.”
I frowned at him. “A salad, why? Most drive-up salads suck.”
“I have to eat before I go on tonight.”
“So you’ll be able to control your beast better,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But why a salad? I thought you needed protein.”
“If you were going to take off all your clothes in front of strangers, you’d get a salad, too.”
“One burger a few hours before you go on won’t make you gain weight.”
“No, but it might make me bloat.”
“I thought only girls did that.”
“Nope.”
“So you’re eating a salad so you’ll look good tonight,” I said.
He nodded, and his hair slithered over the edge of his leg and across the gear shift. I had this horrible urge to touch that heavy band of hair. A little voice in my head said, Why not? After what we’d done this afternoon, what’s a little hair touching. Logical, but logic didn’t have much to do with how I acted around Nathaniel.
I clasped my hands together in my lap to keep from touching him, then felt silly. What the hell was I doing anymore? I reached out to that heavy curl of hair and pet it, like it was more intimate to him than it was. The hair was soft and warm. I petted his hair while I talked. “The beast isn’t conflicted about anything, is it?”
“No,” he said, and his voice was both loud and soft in the quiet dark.
I began to pull his braid, gently up from around his body where the end had slid. “It’s not just the hunger for flesh and blood that you fight, is it?”
“No,” he said.
I got to the end of his braid and spilled it into my hands. “I thought that the hunger was the beast. That desire to chase and feed; I thought that was all of it.”
“And now?” he asked.
I stroked the tip of his braid across my palm, and just that made me shiver. My voice was shaky when I said, “Richard always talked about his beast like it was all his baser impulses, you know, lust, sloth, the traditional sins, but to sin implies a knowledge of good and evil. There was no good or evil, there was nothing like normal thought. I hadn’t really understood how all my thoughts are based on things. I’m always thinking about how one thing affects another. The consequences of your actions.” I lifted more of his braid in my arms, and it was like holding a snake, a soft, thick serpent. I gathered his hair into my arms and let myself cuddle it against my body. I was about at the limit for the seat belt, and I wanted to be closer to him. The seat belt stayed.
I hugged an armful of his braid to my chest as I said, “I stopped thinking about the Browns’ grief, their dead son. It wasn’t that I chose to ignore it. I wasn’t being callous, it just never entered my mind. It was just that they hurt me, and I got mad, but mad translated directly to food. If I killed them and ate them, then they couldn’t hurt me anymore, and I was hungry.” I met his eyes on that last word.
Some trick of reflected light made his eyes shine for a moment, like the eyes of a cat in a flashlight’s beam. He turned his head, and it was gone, his eyes lost in shadow again. The turn of his head tugged on his hair, and I had a second to decide whether I would let it go, or keep it. I kept it, and it put a strain down the line of his hair, a strain like pulling on a rope, and knowing it was tied tight.
His voice was a little breathy when he said, “You’re always hungry when you first change shape, especially if you’re new at it.”
“How do you keep from tearing into the crowd at the club?” I asked, and my voice was a little shaky, too.
He leaned back away from me, and it made the pull on his hair tighter, harder. “By channeling the hunger into sex instead of food.
You don’t eat your mate. If you can fuck it, it’s not food.” His voice was lower, not deeper exactly, but lower.
“So how did I not eat anybody? I wasn’t thinking about sex with the Browns.”
“At first you are just the hunger, but after a few full moons, you can think, but you don’t think like a person. You think like your animal. A few more full moons after that and you can choose to think like yourself in animal form.”
“Choose?” I said, and began to pull him toward me, using his braid like a rope, but this rope was attached to his skull, and he didn’t come easily. He began to pull against me, and I knew that it had to hurt just a little.
His voice was low and soft. “Some people enjoy the purity of the animal. Like you said, no conflicts, no inner struggles. Just decide what you want and do it.”
“Undo your seat belt,” I said.
He undid his seat belt.
I pulled him to me with his hair tangled around my arms, like you’d coil a rope or a strings of lights. “Does anyone use the animal for a patsy, you know, crime? A lot of what keeps some people good is their conscience. The beast doesn’t have one of those.”
He was close enough to kiss, his face lower than mine, because of his braid holding him just a little to one side. “The animal is very practical,” he whispered. “It’s why so few people use their animal form when they commit murder. I don’t mean accidental kills, because they don’t have the control, but deliberate murder.”
I leaned over him. “Example.”
“Say, your uncle will leave you a fortune but he needs to be dead so you can inherit it. Unless your beast is hungry, it won’t kill your uncle for money, because the beast doesn’t understand money.”
I leaned close enough to almost kiss him. “What does the beast understand?”
He spoke with his lips almost against mine. “It will kill someone you truly fear, or someone who’s hurt you, especially physically. The beast understands being hit, being injured.”
I almost asked if he’d hunted down the man who beat him and his brother, but I didn’t. I’d seen his memories. If someone had done that to me, what would I have done? Bad things, most likely. And I didn’t want to fill the car with hurt and bad memories. I’d had enough of those.
I laid a kiss on his mouth, and he pressed me back against my seat. I found that still being seat-belted, I couldn’t move well. My arms were tangled in his braid so that it felt like I was being bound.
I had a moment of panic, then I relaxed into it. Nathaniel would not hurt me, and it was my own fault about the hair being where it was. He hadn’t wrapped me up, I’d done that.
He drew back just enough to talk, his lips brushing mine. “What about your clients?”
I drew my head back as far as I could, which wasn’t far, and said, “I’m not offering to fuck you here and now.”
“You’re not?”
That made me mad, though I wasn’t exactly sure why. “No, I’m not.”
I started trying to untangle myself from his hair.
He drew back with a smile that showed for an instant in the lights. “I want to encourage you to touch me. God knows I do, but if you do too much with theardeur not fed, and neither of us fed, then the night is over. You’ll be pissed with yourself, and me, and I don’t want that.”
I got most of me free from his braid, except for the part that was caught on the back of the Browning. If it hadn’t been a gun, I’d have jerked, but even with the safety on, I didn’t trust it enough.
Stupider accidents have gotten people shot. Neither Zerbrowski nor Edward would ever let me live it down. So I took a deep breath and forced myself to carefully untwine Nathaniel’s hair from my gun.
Nathaniel had buckled himself back into his seat. “I would love to repeat this some time and place where we didn’t have to stop.”
I was still trying to get his hair off my gun. The fact that he was in his seat but his hair wasn’t told you just how long his braid was. “You had your chance,” I said, and I sounded mad.
“Don’t be grumpy at me,” he said, “I wasn’t the one who pulled you into my lap.”
I had the last of his hair free of my gun. I started to fling the end of his braid back at him, but stopped myself. He was right. Right about who started it. Right about how mad I would have been if theardeur had risen before I got my work done. He was right. When people are right, you shouldn’t get pissed at them. Or that was the new theory.