Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [107]
“For now, yes.” I sipped coffee and tried not to let my eyes be as unfriendly as I felt.
“But what about later?”
“Later will take care of itself,” I said.
“That’s not enough for me, Anita. I want to know that I’m making the right decision.”
“I don’t think you ever know, Ronnie. Most of the people I know that are absolutely certain they’re right, are the most wrong people I know.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“That means, marry him or don’t marry him, but don’t take your issues out on my relationships.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means don’t ever call my boyfriends weird again.”
“And you don’t think that living with two men is a little unusual?”
“It works for us, Ronnie.”
“And how does Jean-Claude feel about you sleeping with Micah and Nathaniel?”
“He’s okay with it.”
She frowned. “So you’re, what, sleeping with”—and she started counting fingers—“three men?”
“Hmm, four, hmm, nope, five.”
“Five? Jean-Claude, Nathaniel, Micah, and who?”
“Asher and Damian,” I said, and my face was nicely empty when I said it.
Her face wasn’t. She was left openmouthed, astonished, apparently so shocked, she was speechless. If she hadn’t been picking at me, I’d have broken it to her gently, or not at all. Ronnie had started by not being able to handle me dating a vampire, then hadn’t been able to handle my being comfortable cohabitating with a man, and less able to handle me living with two men and enjoying it, two extra vampires to hate, well, that was nothing.
“Let me get this straight, you are fucking all of them?”
I knew she meant, was I having intercourse with all of them? Technically, no, but since it was only Nathaniel who was on the “no” list after today, I said, “Yes.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Asher happened after you’d made it very clear you hated me dating Jean-Claude, because he’s a vampire, so I stopped talking to you about vampires as boyfriends.”
“And Nathaniel moved from food to sex when?”
“Recently.”
“And Damian, I mean, Damian wasn’t even on the radar.”
“It’s been a busy day.”
She goggled at me again. “Are you serious, just today?”
I nodded, and almost enjoyed her astonishment.
“All this has been happening, and you didn’t tell me.”
“You haven’t wanted to hear it. You just get mad about Jean-Claude, and I think you hated hearing how much I enjoyed the very things with Micah that you were hating with Louie. You said yourself that it made it hard to talk to me, because I seemed so happy with the things that were driving you crazy.”
She let out a long, long breath. “I’m sorry, I’ve cut you out of so much.”
“I’ve missed us talking,” I said.
“We talked,” she said, “but we both started editing ourselves to each other. You can’t stay friends like that.” She looked sad.
“No,” I said, “you can’t. You don’t have to tell each other everything, but you can’t hold back this much.”
“I still don’t trust Jean-Claude, and you’re the one that taught me that vampires are just dead guys, no matter how cute they are.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“I haven’t,” she said.
“So no talking about the vampires in my life.”
“That still leaves you with two men to talk about.”
“Not if you compare one of them to steaks and milkshakes.”
“Look, last time you talked about Nathaniel it was to complain that you were so uncomfortable around him. You talked about Nathaniel the way I felt about Louie, then about the time I thought we had common complaints, you started to change. You started getting all soft when you talked about Nathaniel, too.”
“Did I?”
She nodded. “Yes, you did.”
“Everyone noticed Nathaniel and me, before I did, even Richard.”
“What?”
I shook my head. “I do not want to talk about Richard, other than to say I met his new girlfriend, Clair.”
“Jesus, when?”
I shook my head, because there was no way to tell the story without sharing more than Ronnie wanted to know about vampires. The very fact that she got angry when I talked about the vampires in my life made it almost impossible to share my life with her. How did I explain what had happened between Richard and me today without