“So if it had been nighttime and Craig was on duty, you’d have put on more clothes?” I asked.
“Yes,” they said.
I let it go at that, because I’d learned to.
Micah and Jason were at either end of the circular booth, putting Nathaniel and me in the center, but it was easy for any of us who wanted to sit as close as we wanted until the food came, and then we’d need more elbow room. But until then, Micah and I held hands, but that’s too passive a word. We played our fingers up and down on each other’s. We made small circles on each other’s hands. I drew my nails lightly down the back of his hand, which made him close his eyes, lips parting. He returned the favor by drawing his nails down the inside of my wrist, and that made me have to fight off a visible shudder. “Okay, point taken, I’ll back down.” My voice was breathy.
“You guys are so much fun,” Jason said.
“Yes, they are,” Nathaniel said, and some tone in his voice made me look at him, and I was suddenly very aware that I was staring into his face from inches away. Micah and I were still holding hands, but I was left wondering if I’d somehow neglected Nathaniel. I opened my mouth to ask something that blunt, when he said, “You and Micah always have to touch each other more than just a hug and a kiss. Until you do there’s this tension between you; always.”
“Do I apologize for that?” I asked, and my voice was still breathy.
“No,” he said, voice low, “you’re the same way with me.” His hand found my skirt and began to slide down my thigh until his fingers touched hose. He slid his hand over my hose, to the inner thigh. My free hand grabbed his hand, and my other hand flexed in Micah’s, who grabbed back, and the pressure of his hand both helped me think and made me think about both of them, in a way that wasn’t helpful at all.
My pulse was suddenly in my throat and it wasn’t because I was afraid. Mary had said she’d take a long lunch, and that suddenly didn’t seem like a bad idea. I frowned, and tried to think a little better than that.
Nathaniel leaned in and whispered against my face, breath so warm, “Too much?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“I don’t think this is going to make her laugh,” Micah said.
I shook my head.
Nathaniel backed up enough so he wasn’t breathing his words directly on my skin. “I’m not jealous of you and Micah, because you still react as if me touching you is new.”
I turned and looked at him, frowning at little. “Are you insinuating that other people have gotten tired of you touching them?”
“Now you’ve gone and made her think,” Jason said. “Thinking will not make her smile.”
I gave him an unfriendly look.
He held his hands up, as if to say,
Nathaniel said, “I’m saying that other people have wanted me for a night, or a few days a week, or a month, but you never seem to grow tired of me.”
I just looked at him. “They were crazy.”
He smiled, not the sexy smile, but the big, bright, happy smile. The one I hadn’t even known he had in him until we’d been together for months. It made him look even younger than twenty-one, and I had the feeling that maybe that smile was what he might have been if he hadn’t lost his family and been on the streets before age ten.
Jason leaned around Nathaniel and said, “I’m remembering why I don’t go to lunch with all of you.”
“Why?” I asked.
He gave us all a look.
“I think Jason feels left out,” Micah said.
It was one of those moments that Miss Manners didn’t cover. I had sex with Jason, but he was my friend, not my boyfriend. There was a difference. So if your guy friend and sometimes lover feels left out when you’re cuddling your boyfriends at lunch, do you owe him a cuddle?
“I’m closer,” Nathaniel said, “but I think he’d rather have the kiss from you.”
Jason, being Jason, then put his arm around Nathaniel and said, “It’s nothing personal, dude, but she’s not a dude.” He did a drawling movie-dude voice to go with the line.
It made us all smile, and I leaned past Nathaniel to give Jason a quick kiss. It was almost as if now that we had the touching out of the way we could talk.
We’d found out on the walk over that the dance class that they were taking was going well, but the routine that they were trying to teach some of the other dancers from Jean-Claude’s clubs had hit a snag.
“You said you’d explain the problem you’re having teaching the dancers,” I said.
“I can’t convince some of the women from the Circus and Danse Macabre that I’m their teacher, not just a cute guy,” Jason said.
“They don’t respect you?” Micah asked.
“They hit on me,” he said.
Micah and I exchanged a glance, then both looked back at him. “And that’s a problem for you, how?” I asked.
He grinned. “Okay, I love to flirt, but not when I’m teaching. I can’t play favorites, and I can’t use the class as a dating pool, because that would be playing favorites. I’m trying to get these women to work harder than they’re used to, and they’re trying to flirt in part to get out of the hard work.”
Nathaniel explained, “Most of the human women come from a stripper background, and most strip clubs aren’t like Guilty Pleasures, Anita. They don’t really want you to dance at most clubs, just move a little and take your clothes off. Jason is asking them to dance, really dance.”
“Dancing is hard work,” he said, “and some of these women have used their beauty to avoid hard work all their lives.”
“You keep saying
“We are, but most of them came from Guilty Pleasures, and Jean-Claude always made us put on a real show there. The other wereanimals aren’t arguing about it, either.”
“They know if they don’t do what they’re told, it will get back to the head of their animal group,” Micah said.
Jason smiled at him. “Yeah, Caleb is sooo not happy that you made him move from waiter at Guilty Pleasures to dancer, O Leopard King.”
Micah gave a small frown. “I didn’t make him change jobs; I gave him a choice of jobs that would make him more money, because he was complaining he needed more money. I’m his Nimir-Raj; I helped him brainstorm some alternate jobs. He thought stripping was the lesser evil.”
“We got tired of him bitching,” I said.
Jason grinned. “He does like to bitch, O Leopard Queen.”
I was queen to Micah’s king, but I was still technically human and didn’t change shapes. Blood tests had proved I carried several different kinds of lycanthropy inside me, but I stayed human. The lycanthropy virus protected its host from all disease, which should have meant that I couldn’t catch a second kind once I caught the first, but my body seemed able to collect them. I was one of about forty people worldwide who had managed to be carriers of multi-strains but not shapeshift. We’d been the inspiration for the lycanthropy vaccine that had begun to be used worldwide. My bit for medical science. With every new animal, there was the potential that I could call that animal to me like a vampire. I was really trying not to do that again.
I turned to Nathaniel. “You recognized Bennington ’s wife, didn’t you?”
He nodded, face serious. “She was a fur-fucker.”
“A what?” I asked.
Jason explained, “They’re like badge bunnies for cops, or group ies for bands. They just want to fuck us because we turn furry once a month.”
Nathaniel said, “She had money so she got private dances, but she was like most of the fur-fuckers. She seemed to think that we were animals and wouldn’t be able to resist our baser urges, as if because we have a beast inside us we can’t say no, or don’t have the right to say no.”
