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By Root 6974 0

going to have a “relationship” with a man, it was a pressure you didn’t deserve, or wouldn’t respond to. He was food, and we were lovers; he was Jean-Claude’s third-in-command. I’d tried to be his friend, but somehow the sex had ruined that. I think without the sex we could have been friends, but with it…with it we were neither friends, nor boyfriend or girlfriend. We were lovers, but…I had no words for what was wrong between us, but I could feel it, like an old ache in a wound you thought had healed.

“You told me you were tired of my ‘constantly quoting poetry’ to you. I’m practicing speaking simply.”

I nodded. “I remember, but…I feel like you’re unhappy with me, and I don’t know why.”

“You have allowed me into your bed. I share the ardeur once more. What could any man desire above that?”

“Love,” Nathaniel said.

Requiem looked past me to the other man. There was a flash of blue fire in the vampire’s eyes: anger, power. Requiem hid it, but I’d seen it. We’d all seen it.

“‘Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’”

“I don’t know who you’re quoting,” Nathaniel said, “but Anita doesn’t love at first sight, or at least she didn’t me.”

“He’s quoting from Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe,” Byron said. The other vampire was counting the money he’d rained down on the couch. He had his back to the other vampire. “And what’s bothering him is that he thinks he’s wonderful, and he can’t understand why you don’t love him.”

“Do not tempt me, Byron. My anger seeks only a target,” Requiem said.

Byron turned with his stacked and counted money in his hand. “I can resist anything but temptation,” he said. He glanced at me. “He hates it when you quote back at him.”

“Your tongue doth overstep your purpose, Byron,” Requiem said, his voice purring low with warning.

“My purpose,” Byron said, his gray eyes flashing with a moment of shining power like quiet lightning. He laid his money on the lacquered coffee table and turned to face the other vampire. “I want that glib and oily art, To speak and purpose not.” He sat in Nathaniel’s lap, putting his legs across my lap.

Nathaniel put an arm around him, almost automatically, and gave me a look. The look said, What’s going on? but since I didn’t know, I had no answers. It was like we’d stepped into a fight I hadn’t known was happening. I had my hands in the air, above Byron’s bare legs. I could ignore the nudity most of the time now, but not when that nudity was sitting in my boyfriend’s lap and had flung itself across my legs. My ability to ignore just wasn’t that good.

“What’s going on?” I asked, my hands finally coming to light on Byron’s bare legs, because I felt stupid keeping my hands in the air. If he’d been more on my lap than Nathaniel’s I might have just dumped him on the floor, but whatever was happening he’d involved Nathaniel, too, and that meant I couldn’t simply act. I had to think, too. Simply reacting was so much easier, not always in the long run, but in the short run, it felt so much better.

“Ask Byron,” Requiem said. “I have no idea why he’s acting like this.”

I patted Byron’s calf and said, “Why are you sitting in our laps?”

Byron wrapped his arms around Nathaniel’s shoulders, cuddling his face next to his. He stared at me, giving me a look out of those gray eyes that made me fight off a shiver. Not a shiver of fear, but one that was all about sex. Nathaniel looked faintly puzzled as their faces pressed next to each other. It was the blatant sex look that made me slide out from under his legs and stand up. “I don’t know what game this is, Byron, but Nathaniel and I don’t want to play.”

Byron slid off Nathaniel’s lap and knelt on the far side of him, so that I could still see the two of them clearly. It was like he was doing serious flirting. Byron flirted, but not seriously, more like it was a casual hobby. There was nothing casual about the look on his face.

He slid his hand along Nathaniel’s neck, then grabbed his braid. Grabbed it, and yanked Nathaniel’s neck backward at a painful angle. Nathaniel’s breath