“Yeah, stripping made her feel good and bad all at the same time.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“She graduated, found a job, found religion, and is now married with two kids and an attitude so holy that you can’t have a conversation with her without her trying to convert you.”
“They say that no one is as holy as a reformed sinner.”
“Stripping isn’t a sin, Anita. Being naked isn’t a sin, it’s the way God sends us into the world, how bad can it be?”
I shrugged.
“Sex isn’t a sin either, Anita.”
“Intellectually I know that, Ronnie, but part of me just can’t shake my grandmother’s voice. Sex was evil, men that wanted to touch you were evil, your body was dirty. It was all bad, and the nuns didn’t help change that attitude.”
“I guess once a Catholic always a Catholic,” she said.
I sighed. “I guess.” Truthfully, I thought a lot of the damage had been my grandmother’s doing, and my stepmother, Judith, who made every touch some sort of favor. Physical touch was not a big thing in my family after my mother died.
“You feel guilty about Nathaniel, why?”
“I’m supposed to take care of him, Ronnie, not screw him.”
“Anita, you can take care of someone and still have sex with them, married couples do it every day.”
I sighed again. “I don’t know why he weirds me out, but he does.”
“You want him.”
I covered my face with my hands and almost yelled, “Yes, yes, I want him.” And just saying it out loud like that made me cringe inside. “He started life with me on the I’ll-take-care-of-him list, not the future boyfriend list.”
“Don’t you and your boyfriends take care of each other?”
I thought about that. “I guess so. I mean, I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Why are you so busy trying to find reasons to talk yourself out of Nathaniel?”
I frowned at her. “Jason told me that it’s because Nathaniel won’t be aggressive enough. That if a man’s just a little commanding, I feel like the choice isn’t all mine, and the guilt isn’t all mine either. Nathaniel’s sort of forcing me to make the move, to be in charge, to be . . .”
“The one to blame,” she offered.
“Maybe.”
“Anita, I am terrified of spending the rest of my life with one man. I mean, what if a body like Nathaniel’s comes walking up to me the day after I say yes to Louie? I’m going to turn it down?”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what being in love means, doesn’t it?”
“Spoken by the girl who’s sleeping with more men than I’ve dated in the last three years.”
“I was raised that marriage would make everything that was dirty okay. Suddenly, all those feelings were legal, holy. Part of me has trouble letting that go.”
“Letting what go?” she asked.
“That I’m never going to get married. That I’m never going to do anything to make how I feel about Jean-Claude, or Micah, or Nathaniel, or Asher, or, hell, Damian, okay. That no matter what happens, I am going to be living in sin.”
“You mean that you’d like to be in love with just one man and do the marriage thing?”
“I used to think so. Now . . .” I sat down at the table. “Oh, Ronnie, I don’t know. I can’t see being with just one person anymore. My life wouldn’t work with just one of them in it.”
“And that bothers you,” she said.
“Yes, it does.”
“Why?”
“Because this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”
“Anita, ‘supposed to be’ is for children. Grown-ups know that it’s what you make of it.”
“My life is working, Ronnie. Nathaniel is like my wife, and Micah is the other husband. He works for the coalition and helps me take care of the leopards and all the other shapeshifters. It’s partnership the way I always thought marriage could be, but never seems to be.”
“And where does Jean-Claude fit into this little domestic scene?”
“Wherever he wants, I guess. He runs his business and polices his territory, and we date.”
“You, him, and Asher date?”
“Sometimes.”
She shook her head. “And Damian?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She looked down at her hands on the tabletop. “I guess we’ve both been having some interesting personal choices to make.” She looked at me and frowned—a little frown. “Why is it that your choices seem so much more fun than mine?”
I smiled. “You have issues with commitment, marriage, and being tied to just one man. I have issues that anything short of that monogamous setup means your a slut. We’re both being set up to deal with our issues.”
“You do sound like you’ve been to therapy.”
“Glad to hear it shows,” I said.
“So you’re saying that we’ve fallen into the love lives we have so that we can face our demons and slay them?”
“Or realize that what we thought were monsters aren’t that much different from us.”
“You really did think that vampires were walking corpses once, didn’t you?”
“Down to my toes.”
“That must make it really hard to be in love with one of them.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
She took my hands in hers. “I’m sorry I’ve been pissy about Jean-Claude. I’ll try to do better.”
I smiled and squeezed her hands. “Apology accepted.”
“I’m thirty, and I’ve never been this happy with anyone. I’ll talk to Louie about giving me a little space and maybe finding a premarriage counselor.”
“Can I say I’m happy to hear that, without you accusing me of wanting you to marry him?”
She smiled and had the grace to look embarrassed. “Yeah, and sorry about that, too.”
“It’s alright, Ronnie, we all have our hangups.”
“Trust you to find a witch for a counselor, but if you can do therapy, I guess it’s not too late for the rest of us.”
“I was talking to Marianne for months before I realized what it was.”
“You’re saying that you went to therapy by accident.”
I shrugged, squeezed her hands, and got up. Please, God, let some of the coffee still be warm.
“So you went to therapy by accident. You became the lover of the Master of the City, kicking and screaming that you wouldn’t do it. Now you’ve fallen into one, or is it two ménage à trois, when your goal in life was monogamous marriage.”
The French press was cold, but the coffeemaker was not. Yeah. “That about sums it up,” I said.
“And my goal was to never tie myself down to any one person and never to marry. Now here we are, each getting what the other one thought she wanted.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I didn’t try. I’d never gotten the impression that God had a sadistic sense of irony, but someone sure did. Was there an angel in charge of relationships? If so, that particular winged messenger of diety had a lot to answer for. I got that tiny pulse in my head that I sometimes got when I prayed. It was more feeling than words. Be happy, just be happy. Easy to say, so very hard to do.
28
AT 3:00 THAT afternoon, I was at work, right on time. Neither sex, vampires, shapeshifters, nor metaphysical meltdowns will deter this animator from her appointed rounds. At least not today.
I was sitting in Bert Vaughn’s office. He’d been the boss at Animator’s Inc. once, but recently we’d had a sort of palace coup. He was still office and business manager, but he was more like our agent than our boss. It hadn’t lost him any money, so he was happy, but it had meant that most of the animators here were like partners in a law firm. Once you made partner, you almost had to kill someone to lose your job, well, kill someone and get caught. So Bert wasn’t the boss anymore. Which meant he didn’t get to treat us like the hired help. He hadn’t liked that part, but it was either a
gree to our terms, or we all walked, and since he can’t raise the dead, that would pretty much put him out of business. Especially if we opened another firm in direct competition with him. So we had a new power structure, and we hadn’t worked all the kinks out of it yet.
Bert’s office was now a warm yellow with orange undertones. It was cozier than the pale blue cubicle it had once been, but not by much. The entire office had gotten a face-lift, along with buying out the offices next door, so that most of the animators at Animator’s Inc. no longer had to share their office space. Since most of our time was spent out in the field, or cemetery as it were, I thought the new offices were a waste of money, but I’d been outvoted. Charles, Jamison, and Manny had wanted bigger offices. Larry and I had been fine sharing, but Bert voted with the other three, so they’d taken out a wall and voilà, we were suddenly twice as big. The reason that most of the offices had gone to warmer tones, earth tones, comforting tones of yellows, browns, tans, ecru, was that Bert was dating an interior designer. Her name was Lana, and, though I thought she was far too good for him, she irritated me. She constantly went around talking about the science of color and how with a business like ours we needed to make people feel loved and cared for.
I’d told her that it wasn’t my job to love my clients. That I wasn’t in that business. She’d taken it wrong and hadn’t really liked me since. That was fine, as long as she stayed the hell away from my office.
Mary, our daytime secretary, had asked me to wait in Mr. Vaughn’s office as soon as I hit the door. Not a good sign. To my knowledge I hadn’t done anything wrong at work, so I had no clue what the meeting was about. Once it would have bugged me, but not now; I was used to not knowing things.
Bert came in, and shut the door behind him. Shutting the door was not a good sign either. Bert is 6' 4", and played football in college. He’d started to gain that past-forty, nearing-fifty extra around the middle, but Lana had put him on a diet and an exercise program. He looked better than he had for most of the time I’d known him. She’d even persuaded him that tanning cocoa brown every summer was not healthy for anyone. So he looked pale, but healthy. It also meant that his hair hadn’t gone that white-blond that it used to in the summer. His hair was actually a pale yellow, with a little white creeping in, but the white was so close to the way his hair used to look with his tan, that it had taken me days to figure out it was his way of going gray.
I was sitting in one of the two dark brown, nicely upholstered client chairs that had been another of Lana’s ideas. They were more comfortable than the straight-backs he’d had before. My legs were politely crossed, my hands folded in my lap. I was the epitome of ladylike.
“That skirt is too short for business hours, Anita,” he said as he rounded his big desk and eased into a chair even bigger and browner and more leathery than the one I was sitting in.
I slumped down in the chair and put my boots up on his desk, with my ankles crossed. The movement raised my skirt up high enough to flash every last inch of the lace tops of my thigh-high hose. I was a little short for the movement to be comfortable, but I doubted Bert could tell I was uncomfortable. I looked at him around the heels of my knee-high black boots.
“The skirt is also black. We all agreed that we don’t wear black to work. It’s too depressing.”
“No, you think it’s too depressing. Besides the skirt has flowers embroidered on the side by the slit. Blue, green, and turquoise, which matches exactly the shade of turquoise of the jacket, and the blue of the top, it’s like an outfit,” I said. I was also wearing a gold chain with an antique locket on the end of it. It had two tiny paintings, one in either side of it. They were tiny oil paintings of Jean-Claude and Asher. The locket had once belonged to Julianna, and was more than three hundred years old. It was handwrought gold, heavy and solid, and very antique-looking. Tiny sapphires traced its edges, with one larger one in the middle. I’d thought it looked great with the outfit. Apparently not.
The short little turquoise jacket also covered the black shoulder holster and the Browning Hi-Power under my left arm. I’d have put on the wrist sheaths, but with the jacket off, the knives showed under the thin material of the top. I could just take off the gun if it got hot enough in the office, but to remove the wrist sheaths, I’d have to strip off the shirt. It didn’t seem worth it. They were in the car, just in case I started to feel insecure.
Bert didn’t have any weapons under his rich, chocolate brown suit, which had been tailored to fit his body. As he’d lost weight, the athletic cut to his suits had emphasized his broad shoulders, which had sort of appeared as his waistline had decreased. His shirt was pale yellow, and his tie was a paler brown, with tiny gold and blue figures on it. All the colors suited him, they even brought a little warmth into his gray eyes.
I slumped down further into the chair, using the padded corner to brace my back and head. The skirt had scooted up far enough that the black silk of my underwear was peeking out, though it probably couldn’t be seen from where Bert was sitting.
“If I tell you the skirt is too short, you’ll wear something even shorter tomorrow, won’t you?”
“Yep.”
“And if I complain about the black . . .”
“I’ve got black dresses,” I said, “I’ve even got short black dresses.”
“Why do I even bother?”
“Arguing with me,” I said.
He nodded.
“I have no idea.”
“At least you’re wearing makeup, I appreciate that.”
“I’ve got a date after work,” I said.
“That brings me to another problem,” he said. He leaned forward and folded his hands on his desk. He was trying for fatherly, but he never quite made it. It came off more as pretentious.
I did straighten up in my chair, because I simply wasn’t comfortable. I straightened the skirt as I sat up. There was enough skirt to smooth down the back of my thighs. My rule for skirts was that it was too short if there was no skirt to smooth over your ass. This skirt passed the test, so I was glad Bert had given up. I really wasn’t comfortable in skirts much shorter than this one. Wearing them just to spite Bert wouldn’t have been as fun as it once would have been.
“And what problem would that be, Bert?”
“Mary tells me that the young man in our waiting room is your boyfriend.”
I nodded. “He is.” Strangely, the ardeur hadn’t risen today at all, not a quiver, not a shake. But we’d all been a little concerned about what might happen if it suddenly sprang to life at work. There was nobody at work that I wanted to have sex with, so that meant I needed someone nearby, just in case. Nathaniel was sitting outside in the warm sienna orange waiting room, looking very decorative in one of the brown leather chairs. He was wearing street clothes—black slacks, a violet business shirt that was almost a match to the one he’d worn to the wedding, and black over-the-ankle boots. He’d braided his hair so it looked as professional as ankle-length hair can, and he was reading back issues of some music magazine that he had a subscription to and had fallen behind on reading. He’d brought a messenger bag full of magazines from home and was prepared to wait until I dropped him off at work, or until he was needed, whichever came first.
“Why is your boyfriend out in our waiting room, when you’re supposed to be working?”
“I’m dropping him at work later,” I said, and my voice was much more neutral than his had managed to be.
“Doesn’t he have a car?”
“We only have two cars at the house, and Micah may need the other one if he gets called into work.”
Bert did the slow blink, and what little warmth he’d managed to get into his gray eyes faded. “I thought the one in the other room was your boyfriend.”
“He is.”
“Doesn’t that mean that you’ve broken up with Micah?”
“Your assumption is your problem, Bert.”
He gave another long blink and leaned back in his chair, looking puzzled.
I’d always puzzled Bert, but just not in the personal departement. “Does Micah know you’re dating . . .”
“Nathaniel,” I said.
“Nathaniel,” Bert said.
“He knows,” I said.
He licked his thin lips and tried a different tact. “Would you think it was professional if Charles or Manny brought their wives into sit in our waiting room?”
I shrugged. “Not my business.”
He sighed and started rubbing his temples. “Anita, your boyfriend cannot sit out there the entire time you’re in the office.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because if I let you start bringing in people, everybody else will want to, and it would be a mess. It would disrupt business.”
I sighed. “I don’t think anyone else will be bringing their sweeties to work,” I said. “Charles’s wife is a full-time registered nurse, she’s a little busy, and Rosita hates Manny’s job. She wouldn’t darken the door. Jamison might bring a girl around, if he thought it would impress her.”
He sighed again. “Anita, you’re being deliberately difficult about this.”
“Me, deliberately difficult, why, Bert, you know me better than that.”
He gave a surprised burst of laughter and sat back in his chair and stopped trying to treat me like a client. He looked instantly more comfortable, and less trustworthy. “Why did you bring your new boyfriend to work?”
“None of your business.”
“It is, if he’s sitting in the waiting room that we all share. It is, if you’re going to let him sit in on clients.”
“He won’t sit in on clients,” I said.
“Then he’s going to be in our waiting room for how long?”
“A few hours,” I said.
“Why?” he asked again.
“I told you, none of your business.”
“It is, if you bring him to work, Anita. I may not be the boss anymore, but we’re also a democracy. You really think that Jamison won’t kick a fuss?”
He had a point. I couldn’t think of a lie that came close to explaining it, so I tried for partial truth. “You know that I’m the human servant to Jean-Claude, Master of the City, right?”
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