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She looked back at me. “How can you be dating him and Nathaniel at the same time?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

If looks could have hurt me, that one would have. “That’s not an answer, that’s an evasion.”

I sighed. “Look, Jessica, I don’t owe you an answer to that particuliar question. Who I date, and why, or how, is none of your business.”

Her hazel eyes got dark, almost solid brown. I realized it was her eyes’ version of going black with rage. “I thought I’d go down and see Nathaniel without you there. I thought maybe if you weren’t there to interfere . . .” She looked away then, stared out at the parked cars and the gawkers being kept back by the uniforms. Stared at them as if she were really seeing them, which I doubted. It was just somewhere for her eyes to go, while she talked.

“But you were there. Oh, my God, were you there.” Her voice broke, not with tears, but with emotion. I didn’t understand this depth of emotion from her.

“You’re acting like I stole Nathaniel from you. You never dated him. Hell, when you met him, he was already living with me.”

She looked at me then, and it was unnerving to see the anger, because I didn’t understand it. “But I didn’t know that. You let me believe that he was just your friend. He let me believe it.”

“Nathaniel likes to be nice to people.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Look, Arnet, sometimes Nathaniel flirts without really meaning to. I think it’s like an occupational hazard.”

“You mean because he’s a stripper.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“I didn’t know what he did for a living until the wedding reception. I should have known he was some kind of hustler.”

That pissed me off. “He isn’t a hustler.”

“The hell he’s not. I’ve got a friend in juvie. He was picked up for prostitution twice before he hit fifteen. Male prostitution,” she said the last like it made it all somehow worse.

I hadn’t actually known he’d been picked up for it, but I didn’t give her that. “I know what Nathaniel was doing before he got off the streets.” Which was sort of true and sort of not true, but not completely a lie.

“Did you save him? Did you see him and take him home? Are you his sugar mama?”

“Sugar mama. You made that up. That’s not really a word.”

She had the grace to look embarrassed. I almost got a smile out of her, but she fought it off. “Whatever you want to call it. Are you? Is he your . . .”

I didn’t help her. If she was going to say it, I wanted her to say it. “My what?” I asked, and my voice was a few octaves lower, cold, clear. It was a voice that, if you knew me, you might worry when you heard it.

If Arnet was worried, it didn’t show. “Gigolo,” she said. She threw the word in my face like it was something solid and hurtful, as if she’d thrown a fist at me.

I laughed, and she didn’t like it.

“What’s so damned funny? I saw you on stage with him, Blake. I saw what you did to him. You and that vampire of yours.”

I gave her wide eyes then, because I finally thought I had a glimmer of why she was so pissed at me. “Are you under the impression that I whisked Nathaniel off the streets as a child and made him my boy-whore?”

She looked away then. “When you say it like that, it sounds stupid.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She turned back to me, still angry. “I saw what you did to him last night. You chained him up. You hurt him. You humiliated him in front of all those people.”

It was my turn to look off into the distance, because I was trying to think how to explain without explaining too much. I was also wondering if I even owed Jessica Arnet an explanation. If we didn’t need to work together, and I hadn’t been afraid she’d share what she’d seen with the rest of RPIT, I might not have explained anything, but we did work together, and I didn’t want her version getting around the squad room. Not that my version was going to be that much better if it got spread around. At their core, most policemen are closet, or not so closet, conservatives.

How do you explain color to the blind? How to explain that pain can be pleasure to