He propped himself up on his arms and looked down at me with that smile that said I was being silly. I understood in that moment that I’d been wrong to think of him as a child. That one look let me know that in his own way, he’d been as careful of me as I’d been of him. That he thought of me as sheltered, innocent. That in many ways, I was a child in the face of his experience. It was one of those moments when a relationship changes, when the way you look at the world suddenly expands or explodes, and the world that was, isn’t the one that is there a heartbeat later.
We stared at each other, and I don’t know if it showed on my face, or if it just occurred to him, too, or what, but he hesitated and smiled down at me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
The question seemed so ridiculous that I laughed. “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve almost killed Damian twice. I thought controlling the ardeur would make things easier, and it hasn’t. I had intercourse with Byron, Byron, of all people. I almost raised the entire cemetery tonight. I could feel it, like some army of the dead just waiting for me to wake it. I could feel it, Nathaniel, feel the power of it.” I was crying and hadn’t meant to be. “So much went wrong today.”
He kissed my tears as they slipped from my eyes, gently, so gently. “Let’s make something go right.” He kissed me, and the salt of my tears lay on his lips.
“But . . .”
He kissed me again, a little more forcibly. “Anita, please stop talking.”
I frowned up at him. “Why?”
“So we can fuck,” he said.
I opened my mouth, and don’t know what I would have said, because he spoke first, “Make love to me,” and he leaned over me, “consumate me,” I thought he was going to kiss me, but his lips moved lower, and he kissed the front of my neck, then moved a little lower, “screw me,” and he kissed the mound of my breast through the T-shirt, “suck me.” He raised the short shirt up, spilling my breasts free. I started to protest, but the look in his eyes, on his face, stopped me. He put his lips over my nipple, just below the bandage that covered Jean-Claude’s bite. He licked a long solid line over my breast and rolled his eyes to meet mine. “Fuck me.”
I’d like to say that I had something equally salacious to say, or something sauve, but for the life of me, the only thing I could think to say, was, “Okay.” It wasn’t sauve and debonair, but when you love someone, you don’t always have to be sauve and debonair, sometimes you can just be yourself, and okay said at the right moment is sweeter than any poetry and can mean more to someone than all the pillow talk in the world.
50
THE T-SHIRT AND undies went in the first rush of hands, but I’d never tried to touch him when it wasn’t a metaphysical necessity. I’d never just turned to Nathaniel because I wanted him. It wasn’t that I didn’t find him attractive. God knows I did, but I hadn’t realized until those first few moments how much I’d come to rely on the ardeur. I’d thought of it as only a curse, but I appreciated for the first time that it greased the wheels for me. It got me over the embarrassment, the awkwardness, the good-girls-don’t-do-this attitude. Without the ardeur, it was just me, and the inside of my head was ugly.
Nathaniel noticed, because he notices everything. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. “What’s wrong?”
I wasn’t sure how to say it, and that must have shown on my face, because he said, “Just say it, Anita, whatever it is.”
I looked up at him and fought the urge to gaze down the length of his body. I had to close my eyes, and finally said, “Without the ardeur, it’s just me. It’s just me, and I’m . . .” I sat up. “I’m not comfortable.”
“With me?”
I started to nod, then stopped, and said the real truth. “With myself.”
He moved forward on the bed so that he rested his face against the small of my back. He was so warm. “What does that mean, exactly?”
How did I explain something to someone else, that I didn’t really understand myself? “I don’t know if I can explain it,” I said.
The bathroom door opened, and we both looked up. Jason was there with a towel around his waist. He wasn’t wet, but he was wearing a towel. I’d been around the shapeshifters long enough to think that was odd.
“I can’t stand it,” he said, “I just can’t stand it.”
“What?” I said.
“You’re going to fuck this up.”
I looked at him, and it wasn’t a friendly look.
“Don’t glare at me.” He came to stand at the end of the bed, hands on hips. “I’ve told you that I’d give almost anything to have someone look at me the way Nathaniel looks at you.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“But nothing,” he said, “I thought you were growing, changing, but what you just said blames it all on the ardeur. You didn’t do any of it. Not your fault. If you fuck everything that moves while under the sway of the ardeur, you’re still blameless.”
I started to argue with him, but couldn’t think how to do it. I finally said, “I sort of agree with what you said, what of it?”
“God, Anita, it’s not about blame. You act like it’s a sin.”
Something must have shown on my face, because he made a sound in his throat that was part growl, and part exasperation. I had to look away from the expression in his eyes, the anger in them. “I was taught that it was a sin.”
“They also taught you that Santa Claus was real, and you don’t believe that anymore, do you?”
I crossed my arms across my body, which lost some of its intended sullenness, because I was naked, and it’s never easy to be sullen when you’re nude. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He went down on his knees by the bed. “It means, look at him.”
I looked stubbornly at Jason, and not at Nathaniel.
“Turn around and look at him, or I’ll turn you around.”
“You’ll try,” I said.
“Fine, you want to wrestle, we can wrestle, but wouldn’t it be less embarrassing, and less childish, if you just turned around?”
I took a deep breath, let it out slow, and turned around.
Nathaniel was lying there on his stomach, propped up on his elbows. His face was what you noticed first. Those amazing lavender eyes with the remants of the eye makeup still there, making them look darker, larger, as if they needed any help to be amazing. His eyes held such patience, a calm surety that I’d fix this. That it would be alright. I didn’t like anyone looking at me like that, because life had taught me that it usually wasn’t alright. That I couldn’t save everyone. That I couldn’t fix anything. His lips held a slight smile. There was no anxiety in him. No fear that I’d run. He looked at me with the calm face of a saint staring into the face of God. Secure in his faith, safe in his knowledge, trusting in a way that I had lost so long ago. How could he look at me like that? Didn’t he know better? He’d lived with me for four months. Didn’t he know by now that I was screwed six ways to Sunday, and he shouldn’t depend on me?
He ducked his head, almost a bashful movement, but it drew my gaze across the sweep of his shoulder, down the curve of his back. I’d only allowed myself to touch him below the waist once. When the ardeur was very new. I’d covered his back and buttocks with bites, and he’d loved it, and I had fed, and I’d never let myself touch him that much again, until the last two days. That first time had been about feeding, and I hadn’t taken time to really see him, really enjoy him, because I’d looked at it as an evil necessity. Looking at him now, I felt guilty for ever thinking of him like that. He deserved better.
I’d made him put clothes on for months, at least shorts, even in bed. But he was entirely too comfortable nude for me not to have caught glimpses of him. Even last night, at the club, I hadn’t really let myself look at him, not really. Because if I’d allowed myself to linger on his body, I’d have lingered on the part that seemed to fascinate me most, and, no, it wasn’t what you think. His back had a slight sway to it, a curve that spilled to a lovely ass, but
at the farthest line of his back, before it became not his back, were dimples. Maybe dimple wasn’t the right word for them, but I had no other word to use. I stared at him now, let my eyes linger, rather than glance and look hurriedly away. I let myself see not that he was nude, but see his body.
I reached out to him and let myself do something that I’d wanted to do for months. I traced my hand down the curve of his back and came to rest just there, just at the end of his back, before the swell of his ass.
He shivered just a little under the touch of my hand, even though all I had done was lay my hand flat against his skin. Let the weight of my hand rest between those two dimples so low on his body. It was as if when the clay had been wet, God had placed his thumbs just above the swell of Nathaniel’s rump, as an extra sweetness, like the idea that a dimple near the mouth is the kiss of an angel before the baby is born, so those dimples on his body were like some extra grace.
I kissed, ever so gently, each of those smooth hollows, like tiny shallow cups in his skin. Each mark was the size of my lips, as if they were meant for me to kiss them. I laid my head in the curve of his back, rested my cheek on those marks of grace, so that my face was slightly uptilted with the swell of his body, leading my eyes down the curve of his rump and his distant legs and feet, but for the moment I was content where I was.
I used his body as my pillow, and just as my mouth fit to those kissable dimples, so my head fit neatly in the curve of his body, as if I were meant to rest there. Nathaniel’s breath went out in a long sigh, and his body seemed to settle into the bed, as if some tension that I hadn’t even seen had run out of him and left him able to rest.
I trailed my hand across the curve of his ass, and he made a small sound for me. I trailed my fingers lower, tracing the line of his thigh. It wasn’t that his legs were off-limits in the way that other areas had been, but I realized that I’d divided his body along a line at his waist, like some boundary in a war. Above the line was us, below the line was forbidden. His thigh was lush and smooth-skinned, and firm with muscle.
I brought my hand back up his leg and allowed my fingers to trace circles on his derriere. Those small movements drew small, quick, sounds from him, almost sounds of protest.
I asked, and my voice was as lazy and soft as my touch, “You’re almost making pain noises, does it hurt?”
“No,” he said, and his voice showed a strain that his body didn’t even hint at. “It’s just that I’ve wanted you to touch me for so long. It feels . . . amazing to have your head resting on me, your hands on me. God, it feels so good.”
I let my hand trace, very delicately, along the crack of his ass, so that if there had been any little hairs I could have played with them, but he was smooth, utterly smooth. It made me wonder if other things were as smooth.
I brushed my fingers down the line of his ass again, tracing the separation between the cheeks, until I found that first line of warm flesh that was neither ass nor more, but a line of soft, silken skin.
I put a finger on either side of that skin, the softest of pinches, and slid my fingers up and down. Nathaniel writhed under the touch. His hands struggling against the sheets as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them.
I raised my head from his back and kissed my way up his cheeks until I could lay my head one side of him, like a pillow. I caressed my hand down his thigh again, and this time I made circles behind his knees, and kept going, until my fingertips could play with his ankles.
He laughed and struggled against the bed again, like he had when I touched much more traditionally intimate places. There are so many more erotic areas on the body than the small list that most people make. I raised up from the pillow of his body, so that I could pay more attention to his ankles, drawing my nails lightly across that apparently sensitive skin. He writhed for me, his upper body coming off the bed, and his breath shaking out in something between a sigh and a laugh. I sat up so I could run my fingers across the bottoms of his feet, and he sighed, “Oh, God.” I touched the front of his feet, very lightly, and he kicked his feet, as if it were almost too much. Not everyone’s feet are that sensitive for foreplay, but when someone’s feet are, they really are.
I gazed up the line of his body, while he lay gasping against the sheets. I’d barely started. So many choices. I bent over his ankles and licked along the round bone, tracing the skin with my tongue, in thick, wet, circles.
He made protesting noises and started to kick his feet, but I grabbed his foot with both my hands and held him against my mouth. He made a sound that was almost a scream and gazed down at me, along the length of his body. There was something in his eyes that was wild, and tender, and amazed.
I bit down on that shallow flesh, not hard, just a graze of teeth, but it rolled his eyes into his head and folded his shoulders onto the bed, as if he’d swooned.
I moved back up the bed, so that I could lay my head, not on one cheek, but across that part of his body, so that it was indeed my pillow. The feel of his cheeks spreading under the side of my face made me close my eyes, and have to relearn how to breathe for a moment. I spilled my hand down the line of his body, until I found that silken skin again. But this time I used it like a line to trace to something else. I found what I wanted, and the skin was so soft, softer than anything else I’d touched on his body. His testicles were trapped underneath his body, thick, and round, and delicate. Only part of them were trapped where I could touch them, and the combination of his body weight and the excitement had made them swell, so that the skin wasn’t as loose as it would have been otherwise. I’d wanted to play with all that fragile loose skin, but it was already pressed tight around him. To pull on it now might be more pain than pleasure. No matter what Nathaniel liked in that area, I wasn’t ready for it.
I slipped my body over his legs and pushed them farther apart, so that I lay between them. I laid my mouth against the inside of his thigh, but stopped before I could decide whether I was going to kiss him, lick him, or bite him. I stopped because I could see Jason over the slope of Nathaniel’s thigh.
Truth was, I’d forgotten he was there. Was that a bad thing to say, or a good thing? Did it mean I was getting more comfortable with myself, or that I was falling into the pit of whoredom? Whatever, but I was suddenly frozen, gazing over Nathaniel’s body into those pale, blue eyes. It was what I saw in them, that made me freeze. Lust would have been embarrassing, but logical. But that wasn’t what I saw. Jason watched us with something in his face that was close to sorrow, and his eyes held a longing, a sense of loss. I didn’t know what to do with that look, so I stopped, and raised my face up from Nathaniel’s body.
Jason realized I saw him, and he ducked his head. When he looked back, he had his face under control. He almost pulled the joke off, when he said, “Don’t stop on my account. I’m enjoying the show.” His voice was fine, but his eyes, the lightness never quite reached his eyes.
“Liar,” I said.
He gave me an unhappy smile. “I thought you were too busy to notice me. I should know that without the ardeur you pay better attention.”
“What’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Jason said, “I’m not pining for you, Anita, or Nathaniel for that matter. But I am pining for someone to take that much time and attention with me.”
I frowned at him.
“You can have sex, and it can be good, but I’d give almost anything to have someone touch me the way you touch Nathaniel. We’ll probably have sex later, and it will be great, but you won’t look at me like that.”
I sighed. “I think I remember us having this conversation before. You want to be consumed by love, and my goal in life is never to be consumed at all.”
“Ironic, isn’t it,” he said, “I want just once for someone to look at me the way you look at Nathaniel, and you’ve been scared to death of it. You keep saying that the ardeur is a curse, but if the ardeur had never come along, you wouldn’t have Na
thaniel, or Micah. I’m not even a hundred percent sure you’d be double dating with Asher and Jean-Claude.”
I laid my arms across Nathaniel’s cheeks and rested my face on my arms and looked at Jason. I looked at him and tried to hear what he was saying. “Maybe, about Asher, I mean. Once you’ve crossed enough lines, one more doesn’t seem that big a deal.”
“Exactly,” Jason said.
“So the ardeur is what, a blessing?”
“Look at what you’re propped up on, and tell me it isn’t? I heard you earlier, Anita. If the ardeur hadn’t come to you, you’d still be stuck where you had been. You’d still be fighting what you want, and what you think you’re supposed to want.”
I looked at him, while I rested against Nathaniel’s body. Nathaniel had propped himself up on his elbows and was looking at Jason. We both seemed utterly comfortable with him there. Was that wrong? It didn’t feel wrong.
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t, well, I could, but I would have sounded silly. If the ardeur hadn’t come, where would I be? I thought, I’d still be with Richard, but as soon as I thought, I knew better. Richard had used the ardeur as another excuse to run from me, but he hadn’t liked any of my life. He hadn’t liked the police work, the zombie raising, my comfort with the vampires and shapeshifters. Strangely, the thing he’d liked less was that I seemed willing to accept him and his beast. I’d seen too far into his head in that one moment in my own bathroom. Damian had said it best; Richard loved his shame more than he loved anything else.
So, where would I be without the ardeur? No Micah, no Nathaniel, no Asher. My life still nothing but murder cases, zombie raisings, and vampire slayings. Hell, without the ardeur would I have stayed with Jean-Claude, or would I have found another reason to run from him, too? Maybe. It sounded like something I’d do.
I looked at Jason and settled more solidly against Nathaniel’s body. He sighed, and laid his head down on the bed.
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15 Page 104
