I thought about it and had to agree. "That's pretty good, scratchy, yeah."
"But you didn't feel that way when Micah moved in?" she asked in a voice that had gone soft and small.
I shook my head. "It was very weird. I knew nothing about him, really, but it just... clicked."
"Love at first sight," she said, softly.
"'Marry in haste, repent at leisure,' they say."
"But you didn't marry him," she said, "why not?"
"One, neither of us has asked, and two, I don't think either of us feels the need." There was also the matter of Jean-Claude and Asher, and Nathaniel, but I didn't want to muddy the waters, so I didn't bring them up.
"Then why does Louie want to get married?"
"You'd have to ask him, Ronnie. He did say he'd offered to just live together, but you didn't want that either."
"I like my space," she said.
"Then tell him that," I said.
"I'll lose him if I tell him that."
"Then you've got to decide whether you like your space or him more."
"Just like that," she said.
I nodded. "Just like that."
"You make it sound simple."
"I don't mean to," I said, "but Louie wants the two of you to go to bed together every night and to wake up beside you every morning. That doesn't sound so bad."
She laid her head on her arms, so that all I could see was the back of her head. As far as I could tell, she wasn't crying, but... "Ronnie, did I say something wrong?"
She said something I couldn't understand.
"Sorry, I didn't hear that."
She raised her head enough to say, "I don't want to go to bed every night and wake up every morning with him."
"You want separate bedrooms?" I asked before my brain could tell me it was a stupid question.
"No," she said and sat up, brushing at the tears that had just started. She seemed more angry or impatient than tearful. "What if I meet a cute guy? What if I meet someone I want to sleep with, and it isn't Louie?" The tears were gone. She was just looking at me with that appeal on her face. That, Don't you understand? look.
"You mean, you don't want to be monogamous," I said.
"No, I mean I'm not sure I'm ready to be monogamous."
I wasn't sure what to say to that one, because it wasn't something I'd had to give up. "Most people want to be monogamous, Ronnie. I mean how would you feel if Louie slept with someone else?"
"Relieved," she said, "because then I could be mad and kick his ass out. It'd be over."
"Do you mean that?" I asked, and I tried to see past the pain and confusion, but there was too much of it.
"Yes," she said. "No, oh, hell, Anita, I don't know. I thought we had a good thing going, if I could get him to slow down a little, then he suddenly puts it into high gear."
"How long have you guys been dating?"
"Almost two years," she said.
"You never told me about feeling crowded before," I said.
"How could I? You were drowning in domestic bliss. All the things that I didn't want, you were enjoying."
I remembered that Louie had said maybe Ronnie hadn't distanced herself because I was dating Jean-Claude, but because she had problems with me not having problems with Micah. I'd thought he was wrong, now I wasn't so sure. "I'm always willing to listen, Ronnie."
"I couldn't, Anita. You fuck this guy you've just met, and suddenly he's living with you. I mean, it was everything I hated. Someone moving in, and taking your space, and losing your privacy, and you just lapped it up." Again, there was that feeling in her voice that I'd betrayed her.
"Am I suppose to apologize for being happy?"
"Are you happy, really happy?"
I sighed. "Why do I think you'd be happier if I said no?"
She shook her head. "No, I don't mean it like that, but, Anita," she took my hand, "how can you let all these people in your house, all the time? You're never alone anymore. Don't you miss that?"
I thought about it, then said, "No, I spent my childhood alone in a crowd of family that didn't understand me, or didn't want to understand me. I'm finally with people that don't think I'm the weird one."
"No, because they're weirder."
I took my hand back this time. "That was mean," I said.
"I didn't mean it that way, but isn't Jean-Claude jealous of Micah the way he was of Richard?"
"No," I said, and left it at that, because Ronnie wasn't ready to hear the arrangements among the three of us. She thought we were weird already. If she only knew.
"Why isn't he?"
I just shook my head and got up to get more coffee. She thought my lover was weird, she had always hated Jean-Claude, I wasn't about to share intimacies about them with her. She'd just lost her privileges. And that made me sad. I'd thought this crisis with Louie might help Ronnie and me rebuild our friendship, but it wasn't working out that way. Shit.
I poured coffee and tried to think of something useful to say. I finally realized that if I let her last remarks go, then we'd never be friends again. It was truth or nothing.
I leaned against the cabinet and looked at her. Something must have shown on my face, because she said, "You're mad."
"Do you realize by saying that my lover is weirder than I am, it says you think I'm weird. You don't think your friends are weird, Ronnie."
"I didn't mean it that way."
"Then how did you mean it?"
"I didn't mean it, Anita, I'm sorry, but I am weirded out, I mean, I didn't like Micah coming out of nowhere. And that Nathaniel is living here, cooking and cleaning, what is he, like a maid?"
"He's my pomme de sang ," I said, and my voice was as cold as my face.
"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 the ardeur , 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."
That sounded sort of bitter, too. "I didn't know you felt that way," I said.
"It never bothered me, in fact you probably saved me from some bad decisions. I'd think, okay, what would Anita say, and I'd wait a while and see if a guy was more than just cute."
"Gee, I've never been the angel on someone's shoulder before."
She shrugged. "I'm not mad about your moral values as opposed to my moral values. I just don't understand how I ended up headed for a life of monotonous monogamy, and you ended up with a harem. It just seems wrong."
On that we could agree. "Wait a minute, monogamous maybe, but you told me Louie was the best sex you'd ever had."
"No, the best sex I ever had was that guy..."
I finished the story for her, "With the really big tonker, who knew how to use it. He was gorgeous, blond curly hair, big blue eyes, shoulders..."
She laughed. "I take it I've told this story too often."
"It was a one-night stand, and he vanished before you woke up the next day. You tried to find him, and he'd lied about who he was, so you couldn't find him. No sex is good enough to overcome that."
"Spoken like someone who's never had a one-night stand in her life," Ronnie said.
My turn to shrug. "Can't say that I have."
"If you've never had one, then you don't know what you've been missing."
I let it go; we'd learned years ago that we had philosophical differences about men, sex, and relationships. "Fine, have it your way, but Louie is the best repeatable sex that you've ever had."
She seemed to think about that for a moment, then nodded. "I'll agree to that. Yes, he is the best steady sex I've ever had."
"How are you going to feel without it?" I asked.
"Horny," she said, and laughed, but when I didn't laugh with her, she looked sad. "Jesus, Anita, don't go all serious on me. I need one friend who just tells me that marriage isn't for me and that it's okay to dump him when he starts giving ultimatums."
"If you aren't in love with Louie, then dump him, but I wouldn't be your friend if I didn't ask, is it that you don't love him , or your fear is too great to allow you to love anybody ?"
She frowned up at me. "Great, then I'll die alone and old with a bunch of cats and guns."
<
br /> "What I meant was, maybe therapy isn't a bad idea."
She looked at me in amazement. "You're giving me the you-need-therapy talk? I thought you hated all those therapists that stand by the graveside and ask people what they're feeling, as their long-dead, abusive parent rises from the grave. God, what a nightmare."
"There are good therapists out there, Ronnie. I just don't get to meet many on the job."
"Have you gone to see a therapist behind my back?"
I thought about that, then said, "I finally realized that what I was going to Marianne for was only partially to learn how to control my psychic abilities. People in New York go to see their witches instead of their therapists. I've just decided to be ahead of the crowd."
"Who do you know in New York?"
"Another animator, and vampire executioner. She said that going to a therapist who was a witch meant she didn't have to spend time explaining magic or psychic stuff to them, because they already knew it. She'd had some of the same problems I'd had over the years with going to my priest or a regular therapist. I mean, my dad took me to one when I was in my early teens. The therapist tried to help me with my latent issues with my mother's death and my dad's remarriage, but he wouldn't believe that I could raise the dead by accident. He kept trying to tell me that I was doing it on purpose to get back at Judith and my father."
"You never told me that," she said.
"It was after the therapist told my dad that I was 'evil' that he contacted Grandma Flores and got some help that at least understood what I was going through."
"So you knew when you started with Marianne it was therapy?"
"No, of course not, I'd never have done it that way."
She smiled. "That's the Anita I've come to love and know."
I smiled back. "Even now it makes me grumpy to admit it out loud, and you're the only person I've told, though I think Micah suspects. I'm getting easier to live with, something has to be responsible."
"It's really helped?" she asked.
I nodded.
"You think I should go down to Tennessee?"
"I think you should try something closer to home. You don't have the same issues that I do. A therapist isn't going to tell you that you're wrong, or evil, or simply not believe you."
"Are you telling me my problems are mundane?"
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