Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [59]
I nodded.
“Wait, you don’t want to go back home for the holidays, so living with two shapeshifters means you don’t have to go back, because your family would never understand.”
I thought about what he’d said for a few seconds. “Maybe, but Nathaniel and Micah aren’t an excuse to not visit my family. I love them, and I’ve finally got a domestic arrangement that suits me.”
He nodded. “I’ve known you longer than either of them, and I’ve never seen you this relaxed, or this happy.”
I smiled. “All right, now that we’ve analyzed me, is it your turn?”
He actually looked a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”
“If I didn’t want to talk about it, I’d have just said no.”
“True, why did you confess so much?”
“Because I’ve seen your family, and I thought you’d earned the right to know a little more about mine.”
“You did it to try to make me feel better,” he said.
“Maybe. Did it work?”
I watched the thoughts trace over his face, and then he nodded. “Yes, it did. I guess I needed to know that I’m not the only one who’s the stranger at every holiday meal.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that sums it up. Everyone else goes home for nostalgia, and happy memories. I end up feeling like I never fit in with the family as a child, and being older hasn’t changed that. When I was little I thought I’d been left by gypsies, or switched at the hospital, except I had my mother’s pictures to look at. I look too much like her not to be her daughter.”
“She was from Mexico, right?”
“Her family was, she was first-generation American.”
“You don’t look very Hispanic.”
I smiled. “The skin color is my father’s, but the hair, eyes, and bone structure are more my mom’s. My father’s cheekbones have given me less of that nice high, ethnic line, but I am the ghost at the banquet, Jason. The older I got, the more I reminded Dad of the wife he lost, and Judith of the woman she replaced.”
“Is that your issue, or theirs?”
“A little of both, I think. Remember, my mother was Dad’s first love, maybe his first lover, I don’t know, but a lot of firsts. That’s a lot of baggage to overcome. Then you have that whole dying-young-and-tragically thing, it tends to put a romantic haze around everything.”
“Hard for Judith to compete with a dead saint?” he said.
“Something like that.”
“Are you projecting, or do you know for certain that wicked stepmom felt this way?”
“I don’t know, Jason. I know that’s how I feel, and how they seemed to feel, but I was a kid, and now I can’t see them clearly. There’s too much baggage in the way.”
“I hear that,” he said, and his face was back to being all serious, and unhappy. “I wanted to drown in the sex and not think, but here we are doing the whole therapy thing that you hate.”
I touched his shoulder. “You’ve earned some talk.”
“Why, because my father’s a bastard and dying?”
“Yeah, and you’re my friend, and I’m supposed to be here to give you what you need. If you need talk more than sex, then we can do that.”
“You need to feed the ardeur,” he said.
“Yeah, but if worse comes to worst, I can just release the ardeur and it will take away all our doubts.”
“The ardeur is great, and it can take the place of a lot of foreplay, but it’s not what I want right now.”
“What do you want, then?” I asked.
He looked at me, and his face was that serious, almost stranger’s face, as if the things he’d seen today had changed him. Or maybe the things that had happened today had allowed him to show me a part of himself he’d kept hidden. Or maybe the stroll down my own tortured memory lane was just making everything seem more serious. I couldn’t tell anymore, and I didn’t have Nathaniel or Micah here to help me work it out. The only other man who could usually help me see through the maze of confusion was lying beside me on the bed, lost in his own problems.
“I want you,” he said, simply.
I frowned at him.
He gave a gentle smile that left his eyes untouched. “To that question in your eyes, I’ll clarify.”
“You know me that well?”
“In bed, yes. You stop trying to control your face once the clothes come off. Dressed, you’re almost as hard