Incubus Dreams

27

Micah's kiss was still warm on my lips when Ronnie rang the doorbell. Having had no sleep last night was finally catching up with Micah, so he'd gone to bed. Besides, Ronnie wouldn't want an audience.

She was eyeing the door as I dragged it open. "What happened here?"

I tried to think of a short version, couldn't come up with one, and said, "Let's get coffee first."

Her eyebrows went up, but it was all I could see of her eyes behind the dark sunglasses. She shrugged. She was wearing the brown leather jacket that had become her latest favorite coat. She had it zipped up more than halfway and a cable-knit sweater peeked out from under it.

I hid my frown. It had to be seventy outside. I eased the door back into its frame. "Is it cold outside, or am I missing something?"

Her shoulders hunched. "I've been cold since I left the wedding last night. I just can't seem to get warm."

I did not remark that most shapeshifters have a slightly higher body temperature than we mere humans, and that maybe the warmth she was missing went by the name of Louie. I didn't say it, because it would have been too obvious, and too cruel.

She walked through the darkened living room, to the opened curtains of the kitchen beyond. When I'd been sure that Damian was down for the day, I'd opened the drapes. She hesitated just inside the kitchen. "Where is everybody?"

"Micah had to get some sleep. Gregory and Nathaniel are upstairs working on an outfit for work. Something about some straps breaking."

She sat in the chair that Richard had been in, so she could keep an eye on most of the doors, and still look outside at the view. Or maybe it had been an accident, and I was projecting why. I doubted Richard had thought about safety considerations when he chose the seat. But again, maybe I wasn't being fair. Oh, well.

She kept the dark glasses on, though it wasn't that bright anymore. Her blond hair was straight, but thick, and looked like she'd combed it, but nothing else, so the ends didn't do the curl up that she liked. She almost never went out without more done to it than this. In fact, she sat hunched at the table, over the coffee mug, like a hangover victim.

"You ready for biscuits?" I asked.

"Does he actually cook?"

I almost said, If you were around more, you'd know, but I was good. "Yeah, he cooks. He does the grocery shopping, most of the menu planning, and most of the housework."

"My, isn't he a regular domestic goddess." Her voice was ugly when she said it.

I'd be nice because she was hurting, but that would only cover so much, then she'd piss me off, and I really didn't want to fight with Ronnie this morning. "I needed a wife," I said, and managed to keep my voice neutral.

"Don't we all," she said, and there was no malice now. She took the tiniest sip of coffee. "I don't think I could eat right now."

I took a much bigger sip of coffee, and said, "Okay, do you have a plan for how this talk will go?"

She looked up at me, still wearing the glasses so I couldn't see her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"You wanted to talk, I assume about Louie and what happened last night, right?"

"Yeah."

"Then talk," I said.

"It's not that simple," she said.

"Okay, then can I ask a question?"

"Depends on the question," she said.

I took a big breath and plunged into the deep end. "Why did you say no to Louie's proposal?"

"Oh, not you, too."

"What?" I asked.

"Don't tell me you expected me to just say yes?"

I wanted her to take off the glasses so I could see her eyes, see what she was thinking. "Actually, yeah."

"Why, for God's sake?"

"Because I've never seen you happier for longer with anyone," I said.

She pushed her coffee away, as if she was angry at it, too. "Happy the way things are, Anita. Why does he have to go and change everything?"

"You spend more nights at each other's places together than alone, right?"

She just nodded.

"He said he offered to move in together first, why not try it?"

"Because I want my stuff. I love Louie, but I hate how he's taken over my closet, my medicine cabinet. He's taken two of the dresser drawers over for his clothes."

"The bastard," I said.

"It's not funny," she said.

"No, I know. Did you tell him you didn't like him moving his stuff in?"

"I tried."

"Do you want him gone, poof, out of your life?"

She shook her head. "No, but I want my apartment back, the way it was. I don't like coming home and finding that he's rearranged everything in my cabinets so it's easier to find. If I want to dig through every cabinet to find tomato paste, then it was my choice. He didn't even ask, I just came home one night, and he'd organized everything in the kitchen. I couldn't find anything." She must have sounded pouty even to herself, because she jerked off the glasses and gave the full force of those pain-filled gray eyes. "You think I'm being silly, don't you?"

"No, he should have probably asked you before rearranging everything." The fact that Nathaniel had not only rearranged everything in my kitchen, but also thrown out the non-matching stuff was probably best kept to myself.

"I love dating Louie, but I don't want to marry anybody."

"Okay."

"Just okay, you're not going to try talking me into it?"

"Hey, I'm not headed for wedded bliss either, who am I to force you into it?"

She looked at me, as if searching my face for a lie. She was pale and hollow-eyed, as if she hadn't gotten much more sleep than Micah. "But you've let Micah move in with you."

I nodded and drank coffee. "Yes."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why did you want him to move in with you? I thought you liked your independence as much as I do."

"I'm still independent, Ronnie. Micah moving in didn't change that."

"He doesn't try to order you around?"

I just looked at her.

"I'm sorry, Anita, but my dad was such a bastard to my mother. I've seen pictures of her on stage in college. She wanted so much, but he wouldn't have a wife that worked. She had to be the perfect little homemaker. She hated it, and she hated him."

"You aren't your mother," I said, "and Louie isn't your father." Sometimes in these heart-to-heart talks you have to state the obvious.

"You weren't there, Anita, you didn't see it. She fell into a bottle, and he never noticed, because on the outside she was perfect. She never got roaring drunk, or falling down drunk. It was just like she needed this constant buzz to see her through the day, and the night. A functioning alcoholic is what they call it."

I didn't know what to say to that. We'd both told each other our sad stories years ago. She knew all about my mother's death, my father marrying the ice princess stepmother, and my perfect stepsister. We'd shared our bitterness toward our families long ago. I knew all this, so why tell it again? Because something about the proposal had brought it up.

"You told me months ago that Louie is nothing like your dad."

"Yeah, but he still wants to own me."

"Own you," I said, "what does that mean, own you?"

"We date, we have great sex, we enjoy each other's company, why does he have to move in, or make me marry him?" There was something like real fear in her face.

I touched her hand where it lay clenched on the tabletop. "Ronnie, he can't make you marry him."

"But if I don't agree to something, he'll leave. We either move forward, or he's gone. That's him trying to force me to marry him."

I felt like I wasn't qualified for this talk, because her logic wasn't bad, but it wasn't like that. I knew Louie, and he'd have been horrified that she saw his proposal and his need to finalize things as ownership. I was almost a hundred-percent certain he didn't mean it that way. I squeezed her hand and tried to think of what to say that would help things instead of hurt. Nothing came to mind.

"I don't know what to say, Ronnie, except that I don't believe Louie meant to hurt you like this. He loves you, and thought you loved him, and when people love each other, they tend to want to get married."

She took her hand back. "How do I know this is love? I mean the love, like till-death-do-you-part love?"

Finally something I could answer. "You don't."

"What do you mean, you don't? Isn't there supposed to be a test, or a sign, or something? I thought if I ever fell in love that this panic wouldn't be here. That I would be totally sure and unafraid, but I'm not. I'm terrified. Doesn't that mean that Louie isn't the one? That it would be a terrible mistake? Aren't you supposed to be sure?"

Now I knew I was unqualified for this conversation. I needed like a pinch hitter to offer better advice than I had. "I don't know."

"Were you sure when you let Micah move in, sure that it was the right thing to do?"

I thought about it, then shrugged. "It wasn't like that. He moved in almost before we'd dated, I..." How do you put into words things that you only feel, things that have no words attached to them? "I don't know why I didn't panic when he moved in, it just happened. One day I walk into the bathroom, and there's a razor and a shaving kit. Then, when the clean clothes got put away, his T-shirts got mixed in with mine, and since they're the same size, we left it that way. I've never dated anyone before who can wear the same clothes I can, it's kind of neat to wear his jeans sometimes, or his shirt, especially if it smells like his cologne."

"God, you love him," she said in despair, almost a wail.

I shrugged and drank coffee, because talking was making it worse. "Maybe," I said.

She shook her head. "No, no, your face goes all soft when you talk about him. You love him." She crossed her arms over her chest and looked at me like I'd betrayed her somehow.

"Look, Micah moved in gradually, but I didn't feel crowded the way you did with Louie. I like having his things in the bathroom. I like having a his and her side of the closet. Seeing his stuff with my stuff gives me a full cupboard feeling."

"A what?" she asked.

"Getting a T-shirt out and realizing that it's one I bought for him because it brings out the green in his eyes gives me that I've got my favorite foods in the cupboard and it's a winter night, and I don't have to go out in it feeling. I've got everything I need at home."

She looked at me in soft horror.

Hearing myself say it out loud was a little frightening, but mostly it was thrilling. Because I'd answered my question, in trying to answer hers, I'd answered my own. I was smiling, even as she looked at me in shock. I couldn't help the smile, I was feeling better than I'd felt in days. But another thought occurred to me. I wasn't smiling when I said, "Remember how you couldn't understand why I didn't just jump at Richard when he asked me to marry him?"

"I didn't say marry him, I just said dump the vampire and keep the werewolf."

That made me smile. "I remember coming home, and Richard had used his key to get in to cook me dinner without asking, and I hated it. I felt all grumpy and like my privacy had been invaded."

She nodded. "That's it, it's like putting on a new sweater that's just the right color and fits perfectly, but the next time you wear it, you realize it's scratchy, and unless you wear a shirt under it, it itches you. It's a great sweater, but you need a little distance between it and your skin."

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."

"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?"

"Unless you have a problem with Louie being furry once a month, yeah they're mundane."

She frowned, and dragged her coffee cup back toward her. "Not really, I mean I've seen the whole show, and I don't do animals. He's okay with that, because most nonshifters draw the line at doing their significant others in animal form. You know it can be transferred via sex in animal form, if the sex is rough and you get some fluid in an abrasion." She said it like a lecture, or a warning, without thinking about it.

"I did know that."

"Oh, sorry, you're the preternatural expert, not me." Again, that trace of bitterness. When had she first gotten mad at me? How far back did it go?

"No, really, Ronnie, it's good to share information when you know someone else is dating the lunarly challenged."

She looked up then. "Did you just say 'lunarly challenged'?"

I nodded. "The latest PC phrase."

"Since when have you been PC?"

"Since I heard the phrase and thought it was funny as hell." I was still leaning against the cabinet, because there was way more anger in her toward me than I understood. The vampire thing I could sort of understand, but her problems with me letting men into my life, that seemed harder to work around.

"Lunarly challenged, I'll have to tell Louie. He'll get a kick out of it." The moment she said it, her face fell, and the weight of it all came crashing down on her. "Oh, shit, Anita, what am I going to do?"

"I don't know." I came back to sit at the table and patted her hand. If it had been Catherine, she'd probably be clinging to me for support, but Ronnie had my issues on closeness, so we didn't hug as much. Alright, Ronnie had my old issues on closeness, except about sex. I'd never understood why if you don't want someone hugging you for comfort that you'd be okay with fucking them, but that was just me.

"I don't want him just gone from my life, but I'm not ready to get married. I may never be ready to get married." She looked at me, and there was such anguish in her eyes. "He wants children. He said, one of the reasons he's happy that I'm not a shapeshifter is so we could have children. Anita, I don't want children."

I squeezed her hand and didn't know what to say.

"I'm a private detective, and I'm thirty. If we got married we'd have to start thinking about kids right away. I'm not ready."

"Do you want kids, ever?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I grew out of wanting two kids and a white picket fence about five years ago. I don't think I ever really wanted it, but it's what you're supposed to want, you know."

"I know."

She looked at me with her serious, sad eyes and asked, "Do you want kids?"

"No," I said, "my life doesn't have that kind of room."

"No, if you had a different job, would you want to be a mother?"

"Once upon a time I thought I'd get married and have a kid or two, but that was before."

"Before what, Jean-Claude?"

"No, before I became a vampire executioner, and a federal marshal. Before I realized that I'm probably never going to get married. My life works for me right now, but it wouldn't work for a child."

"Why, because you don't have a husband?"

"No, because people try to kill me on a semiregular basis."

"Speaking of violence, what happened to your door?" she asked.

"Gregory broke it down because I wasn't answering the phone and he heard screams."

"Why did he hear screams?"

"Without mentioning vampires, I can't tell you the story."

She sighed. "I thought Jean-Claude was a passing thing, your one big fling. You know, he's the bad guy that you have this great sex with, then you wise up and move on." She looked at me, and she really looked at me, searching my face. "He's not a fling for you, is he?"

"No," I said.

She took in a lot of air, then let it out slowly. "I'm not saying I want or could handle all the details, but tell me enough so I know what happened to your door."

Even edited down, the story took a while. We were just past the point where Richard dumped me royally, when Nathaniel and Gregory came into the room.

Ronnie had her face all set for massive sympathy, and was actually reaching out to offer a hug, when she saw them. Her face froze, and her arms just stopped moving, as if she was suddenly a statue in that kid's game.

Nathaniel was nearly naked, wearing only a leather thong and a whole bunch of straps across his upper body. So many straps that for a moment it gave the illusion that he was bound in some way. He padded into the room, looking totally comfortable in his nearly nothing bondage gear. That might have been what stopped Ronnie in her tracks, or then again, it might have been Gregory. He was still in leopardman form, and still totally nude. He wasn't happy to be nude anymore, but he was still naked except for his very natural fur coat.

From the look on her face, I wasn't sure Ronnie had really seen that much of Louie in ratman form, or if she had, he'd been more discrete than Gregory was being. He had three straps in his clawed hands and was looking at the rivet on the end of one of them as he glided through the door.

"Hi, Ronnie," Nathaniel said, as if she wasn't staring at him open-mouthed. "Anita, have you seen my punch?"

"Your what? "I asked.

"It's a punch for reattaching leather rivets. I forgot that two of the straps came loose last time I wore this."

"I don't even know what a leather punch looks like," I said. I sipped coffee and watched both the men, and Ronnie's face. She was trying to recover her cool, but the effort was visible and near painful to watch.

"Sort of like a big stapler, with one of those round things on the top." He knelt down to open up the tool drawer. This flashed the back of his body to us, and there was a lot of back to flash. The thin black stripe that was all that covered his ass didn't exactly cover anything as much as it emphasized what was there.

If I hadn't had Ronnie's reaction to watch, I'd have been more distracted myself, but I was enjoying her total failure to hide what she was thinking. There'd been a time when Ronnie had been the more sophisticated of the two of us, and I'd been the one who blushed all the time. She wasn't blushing, she'd actually paled, but the shoe was very firmly on the other foot. She hadn't been around much, so she hadn't seen Nathaniel in maybe six months. Her reaction told me that it wasn't just me who'd noticed the shoulders and the extra muscle development. To someone who hadn't seen him in half a year, the changes must have been even more impressive.

"What makes you think a piece of sewing equipment would be in the kitchen?" I asked, and my voice held that first hint of amusement that I was trying to hide from Ronnie. It was kind of nice not to be the one who was embarrassed for a change.

Nathaniel moved from drawer to drawer, talking without turning around, his hair still up in its high, springy ponytail. "Zane borrowed it to fix his leather jacket and never put it back. You know how Zane is, he doesn't think. He's got to stop borrowing my stuff, if he can't put things back where they belong."

Zane was one of my wereleopards, and he tried to play dominant, but he really wasn't. And Nathaniel was right, Zane never seemed to put anything back where it was supposed to go. "I don't think you'll ever teach him to put things back," I said.

"You could wear it without these three straps," Gregory said. "Most people wouldn't notice." He touched one of the straps on Nathaniel's back, gave it a little flick. "I mean there must be over a dozen of them."

"I'll notice," Nathaniel said, and he kept opening drawers. "If you were Zane, where would you put a punch?" I think he was asking it of no one in particular.

Ronnie had managed to stop gaping. She'd closed her mouth and was trying to look like it was no big deal that two nudish wereleopards were wandering around my kitchen. She watched them covertly out of the corners of her eyes. I don't know if it was because she was embarrassed or because I'd called one of them my boyfriend. Girlfriend rule number one, you don't lust after your best bud's boyfriend.

I got up to help them look. Nathaniel had said it looked like a stapler. Even I could recognize a stapler, so I started opening drawers, too.

Nathaniel found it in the drawer that was supposed to hold only big spoons and oversized Cookware. "Why here?" he asked.

"It does look like a really big stapler, maybe that's why." I offered it up as the best idea I had.

Nathaniel was shaking his head, making his hair dance around his shoulders, in a way it never did except in that very high, tight ponytail. "Whatever the reason, he is not allowed in my stuff anymore."

"Sounds fair," I said. I was looking at all the straps. "You look pretty secured into that outfit, how do you strip out of it?"

He smiled at me. "Are you trying to get me out of my clothes?" He made it sound like teasing, but underneath was something that wasn't teasing at all. I wished I hadn't said it, because he wanted me to want him so badly. I didn't know how this game worked, and I'd never been good at flirting, not really.

I ended up blushing, which I hated. "No," I said, and it sounded whiny even to me.

He could have said a half-dozen things that would have made it worse, but he had mercy on me. "You get it off the same way you get it on." He slid his left arm through the front of all those straps, then raised his arm up his chest, along side his neck, and did something with his shoulder that I couldn't see from where I was standing. The straps just peeled down, and suddenly he was nude from the waist up, with the straps hanging around him like the petals of a black leather flower. "The straps come off completely, but it takes time to reattach them, so you'll have to come tonight if you want to see the whole show." He smiled gently, to take some of the sting out of my embarrassment. I wasn't sure why I was embarrassed, unless it was because Ronnie was there, or I was worried about having to come across soon. Who knew, pick one.

"Your shoulder," Ronnie said, in a strained voice, "didn't that hurt what you did to your shoulder?"

He shook his head, sending all that shining auburn hair flying. "No, I'm double-jointed."

Ronnie was having trouble with her face, like the expression that was wanting to come there wasn't one she was willing to have. "How double-jointed are you?"

"Ronnie," I said.

She shrugged and gave me a look like, Sue me, I couldn't help it. "Well, you won't tell me. You just told me today that he's moved from food to boyfriend."

"Ronnie," I said again, a little more urgently.

She made a face. "Sorry, sorry, I'm not myself today. I'm babbling more, like you usually do."

"Oh, thanks a lot," I said.

"You do babble when you're nervous or horny," Gregory said.

"Stop helping me, Gregory."

He shrugged, which looked odd on the leopardman shoulders, not bad, just odd. "Sorry."

"Do you want me to answer her question?" Nathaniel asked, in a careful voice.

"Answer the question, don't answer the question, I don't care."

He cocked his head to one side, the expression on his face clearly said that he knew that wasn't true. He was right, I'd have preferred him to not answer the question. He'd given me the opportunity to be his master and tell him not to answer, but I'd blown it. I'd abdicated the throne he seemed to want me to take, and if you're not in charge, you can't control what happens.

He walked over toward Ronnie, and he made sure he swayed that luscious ass at me as he moved. Sometimes I wondered if Nathaniel knew how beautiful he was, then he'd do something that let me know he knew exactly what he looked like. Like now.

Heat crept up my face just watching him walk, and I finally decided why the embarrassment. I'd promised to mark him, but what he wanted was intercourse, and watching him move across the room like an ad for a wet dream made me all squirmy and uncomfortable, like being a teenager again and having "those feelings" for the first time, and having no one to talk to about them, because good girls weren't supposed to have feelings like that.

He flicked his head and sent all that hair spilling over Ronnie, and away, like a curtain that she'd walked through, except she was sitting still. It looked as if he'd slapped her instead of teased. He stood up very straight, very tall, beside her chair and clasped his hands behind his back. "To answer your question, I," he began to raise his arms backward, "am," his arms went to the middle of his back, and kept on moving upward, "very," until his straining clasped fingers were even with his shoulder blades, "very," his arms rotated all the way up so they pointed at the ceiling, "double-jointed." Then he slowly put his arms back down, but it wasn't Ronnie he was looking at when he finished.

I didn't blush, I paled. I felt trapped. Trapped by what? That was the ten-thousand-dollar question. Even to myself, I wasn't sure I had an answer.

They left to repair Nathaniel's costume. The silence in the kitchen after they left was deep, long, and uncomfortable. At least for me. I didn't look at Ronnie, because I was trying to think of something to say. I shouldn't have worried, she found just the right thing to say. "Damn, Anita, I mean, damn."

I did look at her then. "What's that supposed to mean?" My voice was a little shaky to come off as indignation, but it was worth the effort.

Ronnie had a look in her eyes that I didn't like. It was way too discerning. We'd been best friends for years, just because we'd drifted apart didn't mean she still couldn't read me. "You haven't had sex with him yet." She sounded sure, and amazed.

"What makes you say that?"

"Oh, come, Anita, you're never quite this uncomfortable once that bridge has been crossed. For you, intercourse is permission to have a relationship, until that happens, you never really relax around them."

I was blushing again, arms crossed over my stomach, leaning against the island, using my hair to try to hide the blush, and failing. "So you've always known every time I made love to someone?"

"Most of the time, yeah, except with Jean-Claude. He messed up your radar and mine."

I glanced up then. "How so?"

"You stayed uncomfortable around him even after the two of you were having sex together. I think it's one of the reasons I didn't like him. I guess I thought if you were that conflicted, then it wouldn't last."

I shrugged. "I don't remember being uncomfortable around him afterward."

She just looked at me.

I had the decency to squirm. "Okay, maybe I was. But it's not true that I stop being uncomfortable after having sex just once. It takes a few sessions, a little 'monotonous monogamy' for me to truly relax."

She smiled. "Point taken. The best sex is after you've learned a few things about each other." She looked at me, very serious again. "You really haven't had sex with him, have you?"

I shook my head.

"Why not?" she asked.

I looked at her.

"Anita, after the little show he just put on, I'd do him."

I looked at her harder.

"You say he's been sleeping in your bed, with you and Micah, right?"

I nodded.

"For how long?"

"About four months," I said.

"Four months of climbing between your sheets, and you haven't fucked him?"

"Pick a different word, okay? If we're going to have this talk, pick a different word."

"Sorry, okay, you haven't made love to him, that better?"

I nodded.

"Why haven't you made love to him? He obviously wants you to."

I shrugged.

"No, I want an answer on this one. Has Jean-Claude decided to draw the line at sharing you with this many men?"

"No," I said.

"Micah has a problem with it?"

"No."

"Then why not?"

I sighed. "Because when I first let Nathaniel move in, he was like a wounded puppy, something to take care of and help heal. He was so submissive that he wanted someone to run his life and order him around. I've got enough to do to run my own life, so I sort of demanded he change, become more independent. He did it, he's doing really well."

"He's a lot more confident than the last time I saw him," Ronnie said. "I mean he's almost like a different person."

I shook my head. "He's a stripper, he has to have a certain level of confidence in himself."

She shook her head. "Nope, had a roommate in college that stripped her way through school on the weekends. She had a terrible self-image."

"Then why did she strip?"

"It made her feel like someone wanted her. Her childhood makes yours and mine read like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."

"Ouch," I said.

"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 you're 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 m¨¦nage ¨¤ 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 deity 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.