Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [93]
I sipped coffee out of my penguin mug, and watched him play Suzy Homemaker. I waited to be irritated, but I wasn’t. In fact, I was somewhere in the middle of amused, proud, and pleased. He was so cute when he did this.
Richard tensed whenever Nathaniel got close to him, as if he’d have moved back if it hadn’t hurt. He didn’t take coffee, because he didn’t drink coffee. Nathaniel offered to fix tea, but Richard said he didn’t want any.
Richard looked at me. “Jason never does this for Jean-Claude.”
“Does what?” I asked.
“Play hostess.”
“Nathaniel isn’t playing,” I said. “He’s the closest thing we’ve got to a hostess. It’s not really my gig.”
Richard looked down at the floor as if looking for inspiration, or counting to ten. Since I hadn’t done anything to piss him off in the last five minutes, I wasn’t sure where all the tension was coming from. He looked at me with those solid brown eyes, and I still missed his hair. The sad remnants of curls were beginning to grace his head, but it wasn’t even close to what he’d had before he got mad at himself and butchered his own hair. “He acts like your wife.”
Nathaniel moved back to the coffeemaker, and since I was still leaning nearly in front of it, that put him beside me. He was very careful not to meet my eyes, almost as if he were afraid where the conversation would go.
“And that seems to bother you, why?”
“You’re not sleeping with him.”
“Yeah, I am, almost every damn night.”
“Fine, you want to split hairs, we can do that. You aren’t fucking him.”
I shook my head. “You always were a sweet-talker when you got pissed.”
“I’m not pissed, I’m trying to understand.”
“Understand what?” I asked.
Micah wasn’t watching Nathaniel or Richard, he was watching me. His chartreuse eyes were very serious, as if he were afraid of what I was going to do. I tried to give him a reassuring smile, that I wasn’t going to blow this, but I’m not really good at reassuring smiles. So his eyes went from serious to a little worried.
“You and Nathaniel and Micah.”
What I wanted to say was, Why do you need to understand it? But I was trying to be nice, or nicer. “What’s to understand, Richard?”
Nathaniel began to pile his hair up into a high, tight ponytail. It was a style women wore more than men, that high, bouncy ponytail that moves when you walk. But his hair was long enough that, to keep it out of the way for cooking, he had to either braid it or do the bouncy ponytail. Once he figured out that I actually thought the bouncy ponytail thing was cute, he’d started doing it more. He washed his hands and went for the fridge.
“How can you watch him like that, when you aren’t fucking him?” Richard asked.
By the time I looked fully at him, I knew my face wasn’t friendly. “If you want to play rough, we can, Richard, but you won’t like it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Fine,” I said, “we’ll play it your way. Why don’t you watch Clair the way I watch Nathaniel, if you’ve fucked her?”
His face darkened. “Don’t talk about Clair like that.”
“Then don’t talk about Nathaniel,” I said.
Nathaniel seemed to be blissfully unaware of us. He got the big marble board out of the cabinet and put it down beside the sink. The marble was only used for one thing—baking of some sort. He moved to the fridge, getting out the dough that he’d made yesterday before we had to get ready for the wedding. Apparently, we were still going to have homemade biscuits, as planned.
“What is he doing?” Richard asked.
“I think he’s making biscuits,” Micah said.
Nathaniel nodded, making the long fall of auburn hair bounce like it was on a string. “Who’s having biscuits, so I’ll know how many to make?” He turned peaceful eyes to the kitchen, as if we weren’t fighting. Of course, I’d seen what his memory of “fighting” entailed, so maybe by his childhood