He thought about it for a second and then made a little waffling motion with his head. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” I asked.
“I completed my assignment and then I ditched the cell phone and walked away. It was the only number she had for me, so if anything happened, she had no way to contact me. She didn’t know my real name, background, nothing. The person she dated for six months didn’t exist.”
“Not once you left,” I said.
He shook his head. “No, Anita, that person never existed. I was undercover as a social, charming extrovert with lots of friends, with a new party, or show, or something almost every night.”
“You hate going to parties and shit,” I said.
“Yeah, but socializing was the best way to gather information and to move around without arousing suspicion. The more friends I made, the closer I got to the inner circle I wanted to break into, so I could get close to my target.”
“So you didn’t just lie to the girl, you lied to every friend you made,” Nathaniel said.
“If you want to call it that, yeah.”
“What else do you call it?” he asked.
“Work.”
“You scare me sometimes,” Dino said, “just so you know.”
“I know,” Nicky said.
We all looked at him and he gave perfect blank face back.
“But you also give me hope,” Dino said.
Nicky narrowed his eyes at him then. “I give you hope?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“If you can fall in love and make a family for yourself, then I have to have a shot at it, because I’m way more charming than you are.”
Nicky grinned. “You haven’t seen me try to be charming.”
“Yeah, I have,” Dino said.
“No, you haven’t,” Nicky said with a smile.
“Yeah, I have.”
“No, you really haven’t.”
Dino frowned at him.
“Anita knew what I was from the moment she met me; so did Nathaniel and Micah, Jean-Claude, all of them. I never had to pretend that I was someone else, something else. I didn’t even have to pretend I was this big, tough crazy guy who would do anything, so don’t mess with me.”
“So even that was pretend,” I said.
“People don’t fuck with you as much when they think you’re crazy. It scares them more than calm.”
“When I met you, I thought you enjoyed the violence, or the threat of it,” I said.
“Only in the bedroom. When I’m working, I’m working. It’s not personal.”
“Oh, come on, sometimes it feels good to hit someone as hard as you want, no holding back,” Dino said.
Nicky grinned suddenly, but it was more a baring of teeth, closer to a snarl as if his lion were peeking out. “Okay, yeah, just the physicality of it, yeah.”
“Yeah,” Dino said, and gave a low, very male chuckle.
Nicky joined him with his own version of it.
Nathaniel and I looked at each other. “You understand this moment of male bonding?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Nope, I’ve spent most of my life not understanding the ‘hit ’em as hard as you can’ kind of guy. Whatever it means to be a man, I’m not that kind.”
“But you don’t have a problem with me being that kind of man,” Nicky said.
“No,” Nathaniel said.
“I make a lot of guys nervous.”
“And me being bisexual makes a lot of guys nervous.”
Nicky grinned. “I’m secure.”
Nathaniel grinned back. “Me, too.”
Nicky raised his fist and Nathaniel bumped it softly.
Dino shook his head. “You guys are just fun to see and I like it, but I don’t think I’m that secure.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I’m not as pretty as either of these two. Nicky beats me in the gym, and from what I hear the two of them are both great in bed. They both cook, and we won’t even get into Jean-Claude and Micah. One is the prettiest man I’ve ever seen, and the other one is, well, Micah. He’s this tiny guy, but he walks into a room like he owns it, and like everyone should know that.”
“Anita does the same thing,” Nicky said.
“Yeah, she makes us all feel a little less like ‘the man.’”
“Not me,” Nicky said.
“Me, either,” Nathaniel said.
“We’re all pretty secure,” I said.
Nathaniel’s phone rang, and it was his ring tone for Micah. “Hey, baby,” he said, and then something Micah said made his face go serious, and he walked a little away from us.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He shook his head and spoke to Micah. “Okay, but I’m not sure how it’s going to go on our end.”
“Nathaniel, what’s wrong?” I asked.
He turned with a face as serious as any I’d seen, which sort of scared me. “Is Micah all right, is everyone all right?”
“There’s a . . . mixer set up for you to meet the weretigers.”
“A mixer, what the hell does that mean?”
“It means there wasn’t time to plan a formal dinner, or a cocktail party, but they’re putting something together so that all the weretigers Jean-Claude and Micah like for us, and who are interested in the position, can be in one place at one time, and we can interact with them.”