“I can’t tell the cops, oh, sorry, I need a nap,” I said.
“No, but I told you that you needed to eat more. I told you that you were acting more like a lycanthrope than a vampire. All you had to do was go through another drive-up. There are all-night drive-ups.”
I didn’t like his tone. “I didn’t think of it. I just wanted to get to sleep. I was so tired I was nauseous.”
“Or maybe you were nauseous because your energy was bottoming,” Nathaniel said, and he was angry, “but you didn’t think of that did you?”
“No, I didn’t. Happy?”
“No,” he said, “because once Damian’s dead, who do you think you’ll start draining next?” He was so angry that his eyes had darkened, so they were almost purple.
I started to be angry back, because the nightmare had scared me, and endangering Damian again had scared me. I felt stupid that I hadn’t thought to eat, when Nathaniel had explained it to me. I’d just been so tired. Come to think of it, I’d been more tired than I should have been, hadn’t I? I wanted to be angry at him, because it was my fault. I hate it when it’s my fault. I hate being wrong, especially this wrong.
“You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry. I am.”
“You’re not going to argue?” Jason asked.
“Why argue when I’ll lose? I was careless. It’s not just the triumvirate, or the new one, it’s the ardeur. I’ve finally got it conquered, sort of.”
“What does ’sort of mean?” he asked, and came up to sit on the edge of the bed. He was nude. He’d been nude the whole time. I just really hadn’t noticed. I noticed now, and gave him very good eye contact.
“It means that the ardeur doesn’t rise on its own anymore.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” Jason said, he was studying my face like he was puzzled by my expression.
“That’s the good news,” I said, “the bad news is that the ardeur doesn’t rise, but it still needs to be fed. It won’t remind me, it’s time to be fed. That’s what happened with Damian earlier. I hadn’t fed the ardeur in over twelve hours, a lot over, but it hadn’t raised either.”
“So you didn’t feed it,” Nathaniel said, softly.
“Exactly,” I said.
“And you started sucking energy off of Damian,” he said.
I nodded. “He called inside my head, sort of.”
“Then you fed the ardeur,’” Jason said.
I nodded.
“Before you got to the club,” Nathaniel said, and his voice was soft.
“Yes.” I turned and looked at him, and what I saw in his eyes both made me feel bad and pissed me off. He looked hurt, and it wasn’t my fault. But saying it wasn’t my fault that I had to have sex with other men sounded wrong somehow, so I didn’t say it. He had every right to be tired of me fucking everyone but him.
“I did the minimum for a snack, just to tide me over,” I said.
“With who?” he asked, and his eyes were wide and careful.
“Requiem.”
“If you were already feeding off of Damian’s energy, then you needed to have fed the ardeur earlier, right?” Jason said. I think he actually wanted to know, but I think he was also trying to stop a fight before it started. I wasn’t sure we were going to fight, but I wasn’t sure we weren’t, either.
I thought about Jason’s question and finally said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
“You gain energy through the ardeur, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And now you’re the power source for a new triumvirate. Your energy powers Damian especially, and to a lesser extent, Nathaniel?”
“Why a lesser extent for me?” Nathaniel asked.
“You’re alive. You make your own heart beat; Damian doesn’t.”
Nathaniel nodded. “Okay.”
“What’s your point, Jason? I know you have one.”
“Would I have a point?” he said with a grin.
I shook my head. “There’s a very fine mind hiding behind those baby blues. You just don’t let everyone see it, so yeah, you have a point. What is it?”
“Anita is having to eat more often, right?”
We both nodded.
“What if she needs to feed other things more often?”
I think we both took breath to ask what he meant, then we both got it at the same moment. “Oh, shit,” I said.
Nathaniel said, “Oh, God.”
“Before tonight it was every twelve hours, fourteen if I stretched it,” I said. “How much more often could I need to feed?”
Jason spread his hands wide. “How should I know? I’m just pointing it out.”
“It makes sense,” Nathaniel said. “You fed off of Requiem about how long before we fed?”
I thought about it, tried to do the math in my head, and it was harder than normal, because that little flutter of panic was so loud. “Two hours, maybe less.” I shook my head. “No, absolutely, not. I cannot feed the ardeur every two hours.”
“No, but you could keep like snacks in the Jeep and eat every two hours,” Nathaniel said. “Like I said, if you meet one hunger, the other hunger lessens.”
The panic pulled back a little, not much, but a little. “Are you sure that peanuts in the car are going to do it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, but I think so.” He suddenly looked young, and not sure at all.
I hugged him, and he hugged me back. “God, Nathaniel, God, we were already low on daytime feeds. What am I going to do?” I let some of that panic out in my voice.
He squeezed me tighter. “We’ll work something out. I’m sorry, I got mad about Requiem. It’s just…”
“That everyone gets me, and you don’t,” I said.
He nodded. Then drew back enough to smile at me, that wonderful smile. He took my hand and placed it on the side of his neck. I felt the marks of my teeth under my fingertips. “This was good, Anita. This was exactly what I wanted in that moment, exactly.”
I had to smile back at him, but the smile didn’t last. “What time is it?”
Jason answered, “Ten o’clock.”
Great. Less than two hours of sleep. Out loud I said, “I fed on you at about two in the morning, which means it’s only been eight hours. Eight hours is too soon, Nathaniel.”
He looked at me, and there was a fierceness there, a determination. “Make love to me, Anita. Make love to me, and then you can feed on someone else. But you’re right, I am tired of watching everyone get there before me.” He was on his knees, and he touched my arms, not quite clutching at me, not quite holding me. “Make love to me, and I won’t have a reason to be jealous.”
“I’ll still be having to have sex with other men,” I said. “Why won’t you be jealous?”
“Because I’ll know that you want to make love to me, and you have to have sex with them.”
My head was beginning to hurt. Nathaniel often made me feel out of my depth. I loved him, and wanted him, but, hell, I didn’t know what to say to him. “If it was you in other women’s beds, I’d be jealous, no matter the why.”
He blushed. “Would you really be jealous of me?”
“I wasn’t entirely happy watching you get pawed at the club, so yeah, I think it would bother me.”
“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“That I’m jealous of other women around you?”
He nodded.
“You’ve had girlfriends be jealous of you before,” I said.
He shook his head. “I’ve never had a girlfriend.”
I stared at him. I didn’t know what to say. I knew he wouldn’t lie about it, but I just found it hard to believe. “You’ve been in pornographic movies. You’ve—”
“Been a prostitute,” he finished for me, and his eyes never flinched.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, but…”
“Fucking isn’t dating, Anita. Fucking for money really isn’t dating.”
“But…” I said.
He touched my
lips with his fingers. “Hush,” he said, “you are the first girlfriend I’ve ever had.”
I stared at him with a sort of soft horror growing in my mind. I was his first girlfriend? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. How can you do porn and be a prostitute and not date? Some of the confusion must have shown on my face, because he smiled and touched the side of my face. The bandage had come off and he traced the healing scratches that Barbara Brown had given me.
“I told you, you’re the first person who ever wanted me, for me. Not because of the way I looked and what I could do with my body. You love me without sex. You let me take care of you. You let me organize your kitchen.”
“You cook in it more than I do,” I said.
He smiled, and his eyes were gentle, as if I were the child and he was so much older than I was. “That’s it, Anita. You let me buy the tea set, even though I know you think it’s sort of silly.”
“You like the tea set,” I said.
He nodded. “You do things not because you want them or enjoy them, but because it makes me happy. I’ve had people buy me jewelry, clothes, weekends in great hotels and spas, but no one ever let me buy what I wanted with their money, only what they thought I wanted. Let me remake their schedule. Let me make a place for me in their life.” He cupped my face between his hands. “Maybe girlfriend isn’t the right word, but I think any other word I could think of will make you run away, and I don’t want that.”
My lips were suddenly dry.
“Make love to me,” he whispered and started to lean in for a kiss.
I felt the bed move on the other side. I had to fight the urge not to grab Jason’s arm or something, anything to keep him with us. Anything not to be alone with Nathaniel. Ronnie was right, it wasn’t rational, but I felt like if I consummated our relationship, I had to keep him. She was wrong. It wasn’t sex that was a commitment for me anymore. The ardeur had taken that away from me. But sex with the right person was still a commitment, and the person bending in to kiss me, oh, so gently, was the right one.
I turned out of that kiss, to see Jason going for the bathroom. “I’ll turn the shower on, enjoy.”
“Sorry to kick you out of your own bed,” I said. And I was, for more than one reason.
He grinned, and tried not to, as if he were pretty sure it would get him into trouble. “It’s not like I won’t be back in it.”
I stopped Nathaniel from pressing closer with a hand on his shoulder, and stared at Jason. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He fought to control his face, and failed, and finally looked pleased with himself. “You can’t feed on Nathaniel, it’s too soon. Jean-Claude won’t wake for awhile yet. And if Jean-Claude won’t wake, then Asher is out, too.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “So?”
“If there’s another shapeshifter here that you’d rather feed on than me, I’ll get them for you. Graham is just down the hall.” The look on his face said, plainly, he didn’t expect me to take him up on it.
“You arrogant little—”
“Uh-uh-uh,” he said, “now is that anyway to talk to someone who’s going to let you feed on the very essence of his body?”
I scowled at him, then looked at Nathaniel. His face was utterly peaceful. “And you’re okay with this?”
“Honestly?”
“Yeah, honestly?”
“As long as I’m first, yes.”
“I could stay and help with the foreplay,” Jason said.
Before I could answer, Nathaniel answered, “Not the first time, Jason. I want this to be just the two of us.”
Jason grinned more for me than Nathaniel, because he could see the expression on my face caused by Nathaniel’s casual attitude toward making it a threesome later. “I’m going to go hide in the bathroom now.” He shut the door behind him, and we were left with the bedside lamp.
I looked at him, sort of outraged. “Thanks for volunteering me for a threesome.”
He looked puzzled. “I sleep with you and Micah almost every night.”
“But we’re not having sex all at the same time.”
He looked at me, and the look said that I was protesting too much.
“We don’t,” I said.
“Anita, you wake up, you need to feed, and whoever you didn’t feed on the day before you touch, but the other man doesn’t always crawl out of bed. I’ve watched you have sex with Micah more than once, and he’s watched you feed off of me.”
The headache was beginning to pulse behind my eye. I was having trouble swallowing, and it had the familiar taste of panic.
“I know that you and Jean-Claude are with Asher together. I know that that’s a true threesome.”
“Not all the time,” I said, and even to me it sounded weak.
He frowned at me. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying being with two men at the same time, Anita.”
My pulse was threatening to choke me. “Yes, there is,” and my voice was breathy.
“Why, why is it wrong?” He leaned into me as if he’d kiss me, but I leaned away, and it was one of those stupid moments, because leaning away put me on the bed, so that I was looking up at him. There was no logic to pulling away from a kiss and putting myself flat on the bed. Of course, there was no logic to the screaming panic inside my head either.
He propped himself up on his arms and looked down at me with that smile that said I was being silly. I understood in that moment that I’d been wrong to think of him as a child. That one look let me know that in his own way, he’d been as careful of me as I’d been of him. That he thought of me as sheltered, innocent. That in many ways, I was a child in the face of his experience. It was one of those moments when a relationship changes, when the way you look at the world suddenly expands or explodes, and the world that was, isn’t the one that is there a heartbeat later.
We stared at each other, and I don’t know if it showed on my face, or if it just occurred to him, too, or what, but he hesitated and smiled down at me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
The question seemed so ridiculous that I laughed. “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve almost killed Damian twice. I thought controlling the ardeur would make things easier, and it hasn’t. I had intercourse with Byron, Byron, of all people. I almost raised the entire cemetery tonight. I could feel it, like some army of the dead just waiting for me to wake it. I could feel it, Nathaniel, feel the power of it.” I was crying and hadn’t meant to be. “So much went wrong today.”
He kissed my tears as they slipped from my eyes, gently, so gently. “Let’s make something go right.” He kissed me, and the salt of my tears lay on his lips.
“But…”
He kissed me again, a little more forcibly. “Anita, please stop talking.”
I frowned up at him. “Why?”
“So we can fuck,” he said.
I opened my mouth, and don’t know what I would have said, because he spoke first, “Make love to me,” and he leaned over me, “consummate me,” I thought he was going to kiss me, but his lips moved lower, and he kissed the front of my neck, then moved a little lower, “screw me,” and he kissed the mound of my breast through the T-shirt, “suck me.” He raised the short shirt up, spilling my breasts free. I started to protest, but the look in his eyes, on his face, stopped me. He put his lips over my nipple, just below the bandage that covered Jean-Claude’s bite. He licked a long solid line over my breast and rolled his eyes to meet mine. “Fuck me.”
I’d like to say that I had something equally salacious to say, or something suave, but for the life of me, the only thing I could think to say, was, “Okay.” It wasn’t suave and debonair, but when you love someone, you don’t always have to be suave and debonair, sometimes you can just be yourself, and okay said at the right moment is sweeter than any poetry and can mean more to someone than all the pillow talk in the world.
50
« ^ »
The t-shirt and undies went in the first rash of hands, but I’d never tried to touch him when i
t wasn’t a metaphysical necessity. I’d never just turned to Nathaniel because I wanted him. It wasn’t that I didn’t find him attractive. God knows I did, but I hadn’t realized until those first few moments how much I’d come to rely on the ardeur. I’d thought of it as only a curse, but I appreciated for the first time that it greased the wheels for me. It got me over the embarrassment, the awkwardness, the good-girls-don’t-do-this attitude. Without the ardeur, it was just me, and the inside of my head was ugly.
Nathaniel noticed, because he notices everything. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. “What’s wrong?”
I wasn’t sure how to say it, and that must have shown on my face, because he said, “Just say it, Anita, whatever it is.”
I looked up at him and fought the urge to gaze down the length of his body. I had to close my eyes, and finally said, “Without the ardeur, it’s just me. It’s just me, and I’m…” I sat up. “I’m not comfortable.”
“With me?”
I started to nod, then stopped, and said the real truth. “With myself.”
He moved forward on the bed so that he rested his face against the small of my back. He was so warm. “What does that mean, exactly?”
How did I explain something to someone else, that I didn’t really understand myself? “I don’t know if I can explain it,” I said.
The bathroom door opened, and we both looked up. Jason was there with a towel around his waist. He wasn’t wet, but he was wearing a towel. I’d been around the shapeshifters long enough to think that was odd.
“I can’t stand it,” he said, “I just can’t stand it.”
“What?” I said.
“You’re going to fuck this up.”
I looked at him, and it wasn’t a friendly look.
“Don’t glare at me.” He came to stand at the end of the bed, hands on hips. “I’ve told you that I’d give almost anything to have someone look at me the way Nathaniel looks at you.”
“Yeah, but…”
“But nothing,” he said, “I thought you were growing, changing, but what you just said blames it all on the ardeur. You didn’t do any of it. Not your fault. If you fuck everything that moves while under the sway of the ardeur, you’re still blameless.”
Anita Blake 12 - Incubus Dreams Page 53