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“Now isn’t that the girl line,” I said.

“Not if you’re the girl, and I’m the boy.”

I felt my face going all serious and unhappy. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“What?” he asked.

“Richard’s right, I don’t know how to be in love. I’m not good at it.”

“You’re great at everything but admitting it,” he said. He wiggled himself in even tighter against me, so that I could feel that he was getting happy to be there.

“You’re trying to distract me.”

“No, I’m trying to keep you from getting angry.”

“Angry about what?” I asked, and my hands were sliding down his back as I said it. It was hard to be this close to him and not have my hands wander.

“Just angry. You get angry whenever you’re uncomfortable, and what happened in the kitchen is going to hit a lot of buttons for you.”

My hands slid past his belt, to touch the top of his jeans. I’d once thought you had to be in love to be able to touch someone like this. It had been a nice thought, I’d liked it, and it had made me feel safe. My hands traveled down the rough fabric of his new jeans, but underneath was the solid swell of his ass. He had a good ass, round and tight, smaller than I liked, but definitely there. I’d told him he needed some ass just to balance out the front of him. Truthfully, Nathaniel had a rounder, fuller ass, more like a woman’s, tight and firm, but round. I liked men with booty. My least favorite thing was a man who had severe white-man’s ass, where the jeans just bagged over the butt. I wanted something to hold on to, something to sink my teeth into. When I said I liked meat on my men I didn’t just mean one thing.

I’d buried my head against his chest, my hands cupping his ass. He rocked himself against me, just a little. Was this love? Was the fact that I could touch every part of him and he could touch every part of me love? Or was it just lust?

I raised my face up enough to touch the skin of his neck, so warm, so sweet. I’d been raised that you only loved one person at a time. If I loved Jean-Claude, I couldn’t love Micah. If I loved Micah, I couldn’t love anyone else. The only person I was really able to say I love you to without hesitating was, strangely, Asher. I was beginning to suspect that was because Jean-Claude loved him, had loved him for centuries, when they weren’t hating each other. In Jean-Claude’s arms channeling feelings back and forth for him and Asher, then I could say love and mean it. But here and now without Jean-Claude to push me, the word stuck in my throat like it would choke me to death.

Sometimes I thought I loved Micah, but that’s not the way a person wants to hear love declared. Sometimes is worse than not.

I put one hand in the middle of his ass, so that one finger could rub back and forth even through the jeans, but my other hand slid up his back, got tangled for a moment in the thick curls of his ponytail, then touched the warmth of his neck. I knew who was inside my head, even as I put a hand in Micah’s hair and pulled his head to one side, so his neck stretched long and clean. Because we were almost the same height, his neck was just in the right position for me to lick along the meat of it. So warm, so incredibly warm. I wrapped my mouth around his neck, felt the pulse of his blood under his skin, and set teeth into that warmth.

Micah cried out, but not in pain. He ground himself against me tighter, giving me more of his neck, like an eager woman would press against a man. I set my teeth into his skin and fought the urge to bite down, to draw blood. Jean-Claude filled my head with images. Images of him and Asher, and Julianna, Asher’s long-dead human servant. There was sex, but there was more laughter, more games of chess, and her doing needlework by the fire. There was more holding than fucking. Images of him and me, and Asher, but also of Micah. Micah’s neck under his fangs, while I watched them both. Jean-Claude coming to find both of us asleep in his big bed, curled on the silk sheets, Micah’s brown curls lying so close to my black curls that he could not tell where one ended and the other