“Fine, I’ll go through a drive-up. I’ll eat a burger, you can have your salad. Will that make you happy?” I turned on the engine and started pulling out of the parking space.
“No, but it’ll get us both to work tonight.” He sounded sad.
I glanced at him as I maneuvered may way through the parked cars.
“Don’t be sad.”
“I’m not sad,” he said, but he sounded it.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that you reached for me. There wasn’t a metaphysical emergency. Theardeur hadn’t risen, yet. The beast was nowhere in sight. Blood lust wasn’t anywhere, and I had to say, stop. But theardeur will rise tonight, Anita, and having sex with it not being fed yet is just inviting trouble.” He leaned his head against the window. His shoulders were rounded, as if he’d hunched in upon himself.
“You’re right about the schedule and theardeur and needing to eat, Nathaniel. I don’t know what came over me just now.”
He turned to look at me, and we were in the bright halogen lights of the street, so I could see his face clearly. He looked almost in pain. “Couldn’t it just have been that you wanted to touch me, is that so wrong?”
I sighed and concentrated on the road, because I had to. But also, it gave me time to think. I turned us back the way we’d started, but this time I knew we’d go through the drive-up at McDonald’s. Honest.
I finally did the only thing I could think of to take that miserable look off his face. I touched his thigh, because it was the only part of him I could reach easily. He’d pulled so far away in his seat that I couldn’t reach anything else without straining. I was driving, and that had to take priority over offering comfort, even when it was my fault for saying stupid things. I touched his leg, gently, tentatively. I wasn’t always good at touching when sex wasn’t involved. I was trying to get better at it, but the learning curve seemed to rise and fall depending on my mood, or someone else’s.
He touched my hand with his fingers. I held my hand up to him, eyes still on the road. He laid his hand in mine.
“I’m sorry, Nathaniel. I’m sorry that I’m such an ass sometimes.”
He squeezed my hand, and when I glanced at him, he was smiling at me. That one smile was worth a lot more than hand-holding to me. “It’s alright,” he said.
“I notice you don’t disagree that I’m being an ass.”
He laughed. “You don’t like it when I lie.”
I stared at him for a second, mouth open, then I went back to staring at traffic. “I can’t believe you said that.”
He was laughing so hard that our hands jiggled up and down on his leg. “Neither can I,” he said.
But I didn’t get mad. When you’ve been an ass to someone you care about, you should just admit it, move on, and try not to do it again.
33
There is almost no parking on The Landing. The streets are narrow, and most of them are cobblestoned. It’s very quaint, but the streets were originally planned for horses, not cars, and it shows. There is no employee parking at Guilty Pleasures, because there isn’t room. So I had to park the Jeep down a ways, and we got to walk, but Nathaniel touched my arm before I got too close to the bloodred neon sign and the front entrance. He took me down an alley that I hadn’t even known was there. I mean, I knew it was there, but not where it went. I’d never really thought that there must be a performers’ entrance just like for Circus of the Damned.
The alley was an alley, which meant it was narrow, cramped, not as clean as you’d like, not as well lit as you’d prefer, and made my claustrophobia complain. Not badly, but enough to let me know that any alley that I could touch both sides of was too damn narrow for comfort.
I’d meant to simply drop Nathaniel at the club and run to my next appointment, but a call on my cell phone had taken a lot of the angst out of my schedule. My second appointment for the night, now my first, had to cancel. Mary said that the lawyer had told her that he had to tend to the needs of another client unexpectedly. Translation: He needed to bail someone out. It didn’t have to be that, but it probably was. I’d gotten better at translating lawyer over the years, though no better at legal jargon. Jargon is meant to be as unclear as possible, and it’s good at its job.
So suddenly my first appointment of the night was at nine o’clock, and I had time to escort Nathaniel inside and talk to Jean-Claude. God knows there was enough to talk about. So that’s how I came to be threading my way down an alley, following Nathaniel’s broad shoulders.
His shoulders almost brushed the walls. I don’t think Dolph would have fit at all.
Nathaniel hesitated, and I couldn’t see around him, but just his posture let me know something was wrong. Women’s voices, high and excited, called, “Brandon, Brandon!”
He waved, then turned sideways so I could see past his chest.
There was a handful of women near the steps leading up to a door with a bright light over it.
I leaned in to him and whispered, sort of, “Why do I think you’re Brandon, and are they supposed to be here?”
He whispered back, smiling and waving at the women, who were beginning to come down the steps, as if trying to decide whether to come meet him. “My stage name, and no. Security is supposed to keep this area clear.” He started to walk toward them.
I grabbed his arm. “Shouldn’t we go back the way we came?”
“They probably just want an autograph or to touch me. It’ll probably be okay.”
“Probably,” I said.
He patted my hand. “If I tell you I’m sure that they won’t get bad weird, then I’d be lying, but probably they don’t mean any harm.”
“I’d feel better if we went back,” I said.
“No,” he said, and he sounded very firm. “These are my fans, Anita, and this is my job. I’m going to smile and talk to them, and you can pretend to be my bodyguard, or pretend to be security, but it’s bad business for you to be my girlfriend. It hurts the illusion.”
“The illusion?” I made it a question.
He smiled. “That they can have me.”
I gave him the long blink, the one that means I’ve just received more information than I wanted and don’t know what to do with it.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll be security.” There, I was cool. I could handle this. Sure, I could.
He let me go in front, because that’s what I’d do if I were security. He didn’t try to argue, since he could wave and smile and call to them over my head. I fought to keep my face blank and not cranky, but I think I failed.
There were four of them: two blondes, one brunette, and one with hair as black as mine. Though I could tell hers came out of a bottle, because it was too solid, all-over black, no highlights. Black hair isn’t supposed to look like you’ve poured ink on your head. But again, maybe that was just me being cranky.
Nathaniel, alias Brandon, chatted the women up like a pro. The two blondes were regulars, apparently, on a first-name basis. “We were so excited when we got the E-mail that you were going to be here tonight,” one gushed. She kept touching his arm while she talked.
They’d brought a friend, the one with black hair, who was new, but had seen his pictures on the club’s Web site. I hadn’t known that Guilty Pleasures had a Web site. Of course, I didn’t own a computer, so what did it matter to me?
Raven-hair said in a voice that was breathy with nervousness, “Your pictures were amazing.” She looked at him with little covert glances, as if she was afraid to stare at him head-on. One of the blondes got an honest-to-God autograph book out for Raven-hair, who was quote, too shy to do it herself, unquote.
The brunette wasn’t joining in the squeal fest. She was looking at me, and it wasn’t a friendly look. “Who’s she?” she asked.
I was standing beside the door at the top of the steps, hands loose at my sides, trying to look bodyguardish, and probably failing.
My little blue and black skirt outfit, complete with high heeled boots, didn’t look much like security detail.