Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [3]
“I don’t want more coffee.”
“You can never have too much coffee,” I said.
He turned and smiled at me. “You think so, but the rest of us get a little OD’ed on your level of caffeine.”
“What happened, Jason?” I asked.
The smile slipped a little more. He was solemn when he turned to us. He leaned his back against the cabinets, crossed his arms across his chest, and again didn’t quite meet our eyes.
“She wanted me to marry her. Till death do us part and all that. She’s a mermaid, which means she’ll outlive me. She can live for hundreds of years, not immortal like a vampire, but close.”
“You didn’t want to marry her,” I said, softly.
He shook his head. “She’s obsessed with me. She says she loves me, but it doesn’t feel like love. It feels like I’m smothering.”
“She’s not the right one, then.”
He grinned, and it almost reached his eyes. “Look who’s talking about the right one. You can’t pick just one either.”
“That’s different.”
“Why, because you’re a living vampire who feeds off sex, so you have to have a bevy of lovers? The ardeur is like the perfect excuse to never have to say you’re sorry.”
“I’d change it if I could, you know that.”
He came to me then, put his arms around my shoulders, and rested his cheek on the top of my head. “I didn’t mean to make you sad, Anita. God knows I didn’t. Please, don’t tell me you’d change it if you could. You love Nathaniel, and Micah. They love you. You love Jean-Claude and Asher, and they love you. You’re still a little confused about what to do with Damian, but you’ll get there.”
I shook my head and stood up, moving away from him. “Don’t forget Requiem, and London, and sometimes Richard. Oh, wait, and the swan king pops in now and then, no pun intended.” It sounded angry and bitter, and I was glad.
“I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, or to have another woman mad at me tonight. Please, Anita, please, don’t be mad. I’m upset. You have no idea how upset. Please, please, I’m a bastard, but don’t be mad.”
He held his hand out to me. His face pleaded along with his words. I’d never seen his eyes full of quite this kind of pain. The look in his eyes was more than just losing a girlfriend he didn’t want anymore.
I held out my hand, but made him take the step to close our fingers around each other. His eyes glittered in the overhead lights.
I took his hand, held it. His breath came in a soft gasp, and I thought for a second he was going to cry, but he just looked at me. His eyes that had glistened a moment before were almost dead, as if whatever he was feeling he’d locked away somewhere. In a way, to me, that was worse. I went to him, and he wrapped his arms around me as if he were at the edge of a cliff and I were his only handhold. That quiet holding on was so…male. A woman would have cried, or talked more, but for a man, after a certain point this is their pain.
I held him back, tried to tell him it would be all right. I whispered it into his hair, against his cheek. “It’s all right, Jason. It’s all right.”
Nathaniel came up behind him and wrapped his arms around us both. He pressed his cheek against his friend’s hair and said, “We’re here, Jason. We’re here for you.”
Jason just held on wordless, motionless, the strength in his arms, shoulders, pressing against me, but it wasn’t about sex. I’d never been pressed so close to any man and thought only, God, what’s wrong? Either he had loved Perdy and now he was regretting letting her go, or the other shoe hadn’t dropped. What else could be wrong?
We ended up on the floor of the kitchen, simply sitting in a row with our backs to the kitchen island. He still hadn’t said what else was wrong, or that he was desperately in love with Perdy and how could he fix it? I kept waiting for him to share. If he’d been a girl friend I’d have asked by now, but guy friends are different. Sometimes you have to sneak up on them like some sort of wild animal, no wereanimal