Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [269]
I clutched the cold towel and tried to say out loud something that made sense. “I’m not”—change that—“Byron was emergency food. Once upon a time, I thought you and I were going to be it for each other. When you dumped me, it broke me up. Touching you is still not like touching other people for me.”
“I feel the same way. You know I do,” he said.
“I know you want me, but I also know that you’ll be ashamed later. When Jean-Claude isn’t there to calm your fears, you’ll start to drown in them again.” I laughed. “God, for the first time I understand what Asher was saying about me and the ardeur. I don’t want this to be a good time now, then we go back to cutting each other up. I couldn’t bear it.” There, that was the truth. I had a glimmer for the first time why some people do casual sex with people they don’t care about. If you don’t care, and it goes horribly wrong, it’s not that important.
“I don’t want us to keep cutting each other up, either, Anita. I really don’t.” He rolled to the edge of the bed and stood up. The dozen or more candles painted his upper body in shadow and light. I missed the thick fall of his hair around his shoulders, but it was still Richard. Still the man who had come closest to making me try for the picket fence, and the two-point-five kids. “You still need at least one more daytime feed.”
The topic change was too quick for me. I pressed myself against the door, so that the doorknob was in reach. If I had to run for it, I wanted to hit the door, not the wall. “Yes, though I found out that I can feed on human form, then feed again on the animal form, and it’s like two different feeds.”
Jean-Claude crawled closer to the end of the bed, the robe more framing his body like lingerie than hiding anything. “So in effect, you now have four daytime feeds, yes?”
“Sort of, right now Nathaniel and I are estimating I need to feed the ardeur about every six hours, or I start draining Damian’s life energy. Since I can’t feed on the same person everyday, that still leaves me short.”
“It may leave us, as you say, short, at night even. You’d fought to push your feedings to every twelve hours.”
“I don’t know, Jean-Claude, but I seem to need to feed more often.”
“You are the energy for your new trimuverate. It takes energy to maintain it.”
Richard turned and looked at the other man. “Are you saying that Anita and I drain energy from you?” He turned back to me before he got his answer, and the look on his face said he wasn’t happy with the show Jean-Claude was putting on.
“Not precisely, but in a way, oui. All power comes with a price, Richard, and that price can be high.”
“I think until I understand how to distribute the power among the three of us, that it’s every six hours. I hadn’t thought about the fact that only you and Asher feed me at night. Shit.” I said the last with feeling.
“You have Damian now,” Richard said. “Won’t three be enough?”
I looked at him, tried to see jealousy, or anger, but he seemed to have offered it as simply a fact. “I don’t know, maybe.”
“I trust ma petite to control what she can,” Jean-Claude said, nearly from the end of the bed, the robe sliding over his upper body until almost everything above the still-tied sash was naked to light. There was something about the way his body caught the flames, shining and pale, almost unreal, as if he were some kind of living work of art, that you would touch and he would fade, too beautiful to be real.
Richard snapped his fingers, and the sharp noise brought my attention back to him. He was frowning. “Are you actually turning me down?”
This was too hard a question for me. I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see either of them. “Not exactly, but I need to know what to expect, Richard. I need to know what this changes.”
“Every third day or so, I come to your house, and you feed the ardeur.”
I opened my eyes then. “Just a little sex, and that’s it.”
“What do you want from me, Anita?”
I pushed away from the door, because now I was getting angry.