Jason

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Nathaniel's deeper voice said something like, "Give them a few minutes to recover."

  Yes, that. I voted that. Jason's hand patted me again, and I fought to turn my head enough to look at him, but I had so much of my own hair spilled across my face that it was just a shine of his blond hair, and the glow of the lamp on the other side of the bed, so that the world seemed edged with light and I couldn't tell if it was really how the room looked, or if it was still the shiny afterglow; sometimes it made halos of light around everything, even things that didn't actually have a light shining out of them. Yay, great sex!

  I kept waiting for Nathaniel to move closer and touch me, take his turn, but he didn't. When I could move I'd look around and see what was wrong.

  "That was incredibly hot, and if I didn't love Jason enough to marry him, I'd just want to climb all over both of you and join in, but . . . I think . . . I think I'm intimidated."

  I began to get a clue why Nathaniel hadn't joined us, because he could see J.J. and I couldn't. We could have great sex later; emotional hand-holding sometimes had to be done ASAP, or there was no sex later. That made me fight to turn my head more and raise a clumsy hand to push my hair out of my face so I could see better. The room was all shiny golden light, but I still had trouble focusing beyond the top of Jason's head to J.J., where she sat on the far side of the bed. Nathaniel was nestled in the pillows above us.

  Jason found his voice first. "Why? You are great in bed, J.J., and we have amazing sex together."

  "I love making love to you, Jason, but it's never like this."

  "It is so hot between us," Jason said.

  She nodded. "But it's not . . . it's not." She made a vague gesture in our direction.

  "Do you understand what Jason meant about rough now?" Nathaniel asked.

  She looked at him. "Yes," but her eyes were too wide, and her face too unhappy. This could all go so terribly pear-shaped and blow up the happiness they shared. It was always a danger to show this much of the rest of your life to someone who didn't want to be a part of it; if they freaked out on you, then your two halves of happiness could become one half of happy and another half of serious sad.

  I raised my head up enough to say, "Nothing we did takes away from the lovemaking that you and Jason share."

  "If this is the kind of sex he wants, I'll never be able to do it."

  "I don't want this rough all the time," Jason said. "Most of the time lovemaking is what I want." He sat up, drawing his knees in and wrapping his arms around them. He knew he was in trouble.

  "Do you and Anita make love?"

  I wanted to say, Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

  "Mostly we do this, and I share Anita with Nathaniel, or Jean-Claude. I enjoy sharing with another guy."

  "Nathaniel was very good at oral; you both need shirts that say, Oral skills approved by lesbians!" and she grinned.

  Something tight in my chest eased; if she was making jokes, we could work this out.

  Jason crawled over the bed toward her. "I love you."

  "I love you, too." Her face went serious again.

  Jason wrapped her in a hug and kissed her, trying to put more body English into it, but she stopped, and pushed him away enough to study his face. "I get why you want to keep Anita, just for the oral sex alone. She's amazing at it, and I do not like going down on boys that much."

  I wanted to ask, Why not?, and then thought, Why not? "Why don't you like going down on boys?" I asked.

  "I like breathing, and my gag reflex is a lot more than yours."

  "I used to have more gag reflex."

  "How'd you get past it?"

  "Practice," I said, and I couldn't help but smile and then look down when I realized I was blushing.

  "Lots," Nathaniel said, moving toward me.

  "And lots," Jason said.

  "Of practice," Nathaniel and Jason said together, and then they laughed that masculine laughter that was usually about girls and sometimes at the girl's expense, but not always. Sometimes it was just a shared buddy happiness that just happened to involve sex.

  I let my hair hide my face while I finished blushing. God, would I ever not blush?

  "You're blushing," J.J. said. "I wouldn't think this would embarrass you."

  "I'm not embarrassed about loving oral sex, but lying here naked in front of Jason's lady love after just fucking our brains out is a little beyond even my usual limits."

  "Really?" J.J. asked.

  I nodded, and finally looked full at her. Her face was very serious over Jason's shoulder; the back of his body perfectly nude was wrapped in her arms, but it was as if the nudity meant nothing to her, or even really the sex. If the sex wasn't bothering her, what was?

  "What's wrong, J.J.?" I asked; once I wouldn't have, but I knew that if this was going to work we had to talk about it, all of it.

  "I think I'm trying to process that I'll never be able to meet all of Jason's needs."

  "But he'll never be able to meet all of yours," Nathaniel said.

  "That's different; he's a boy and I love women."

  "Why is it different?" I asked.

  She looked at me. "Because I could physically meet his needs that you meet, but he couldn't meet my needs with Freda, he doesn't have the right parts."

  "It's not just boy and girl parts," Jason said. "It's different people meet different needs."

  "It's a lot more than just preferred genitalia," Nathaniel said.

  "What do you mean?" she asked.

  "I'm probably the most truly bisexual person in this bed, so for me it's really not just the genitalia, but each person in my life meets different needs that no single person, or even two individual people, could meet," Nathaniel said.

  "Examples," she said.

  Jason settled behind her so that he was cradling her in her blue silk nightie. It meant they were both mostly covered, and Nathaniel still had his silk shorts on, which meant I was the only truly nude person in the bed; how did this happen? I was suddenly cold, or modest, or both, and I got up enough to slip under the sheet.

  Nathaniel scooted down to slip under the sheets, too, so he could wrap me in his arms, so we were almost mirroring how Jason and J.J. were cuddling, except we were lower in the bed and propped against the pillows while they were sitting up more.

  Nathaniel held me in the warmth of his arms and the solidness of his body as he said, "Jason is my best friend, Anita is the woman I love most in the world, Micah is the man, Jean-Claude is our master and him taking blood as foreplay with all of us in the bed is amazing, Asher is my dominant for bondage and sometimes for rough sex, Cynric is the little brother I never had, Nicky is brother and friend and I'm learning to really enjoy co-topping Anita with him, Dev is completely comfortable with his bisexuality, and that's nice just to have someone else who feels the same way, and I'll leave out everyone who doesn't have some sexual connotation for me, but there are friends and family who I'll never get naked with that are important to me and help make my life work."

  "How is your little brother a sexual connotation?" she asked.

  I fought the urge not to squirm, because I had issues with Cynric. Sin was what he wanted to be called, not Rick. He was nineteen now and a senior, but I still had trouble with the age difference between him and me. I would miss him if he left my life, but he still hit all sorts of issues for me. I gave my best blank cop face and let Nathaniel talk. We were shoveling J.J.'s issues right now, not mine.

  He hugged me tighter, as if he felt that small body movement and understood it all. "I like watching Cynric have sex with Anita, and I enjoy sharing her with him, just the three of us, or sometimes with other people joining in."

  "One of my biggest fantasies is sharing Jason with another woman, but I have a sister and I can't imagine sharing Jason with her," J.J. said.

  "Maybe if Cynric and I had been raised together from childhood it would be different, but he was seventeen when we met, and he's a younger brother for me, but I've never thought of him a
s anything but an adult, younger than me, but still a person and not a kid."

  She nodded. "That makes sense, I guess, so he's family of choice, not of blood?"

  "Yes," Nathaniel said, laying a soft kiss against my cheek. I caught a faint hint of J.J.'s scent; it wasn't bad, just different, just not me. His face was still shining from going down on both of us. I wrapped his arms closer around me and let the surety of him help me feel better about so many things.

  "If Freda weren't so insanely jealous of Jason, things would be so great. How did you find so many people that aren't jealous?"

  "Jean-Claude has a reputation; if you want to be in his inner circle, you'd better not be the jealous type," Nathaniel said.

  "Jean-Claude is amazing, and he seems to override your sexual preferences, as if everyone should want him," she said.

  "It's part of his charm," I said.

  "It's more than that; Jean-Claude is all about sex and sensuality, and just like Jason doesn't like men, but would do Jean-Claude, I don't like men much, but yeah, I see the appeal."

  "Most people see the appeal of Jean-Claude," I said.

  She nodded, and settled more comfortably back against Jason, as if some tension had gone out of her. I wasn't sure why she was relaxing, but we seemed to be winning, so I'd take it.

  "Everyone told me that when I found the right person I'd be happy being monogamous, but you're telling me that that didn't work for you guys either."

  "Nope," I said.

  "No," Nathaniel said.

  Jason kissed her cheek. "I've tried just one woman at a time, but it never worked for long."

  "I've been with Freda for two years."

  "Have you been monogamous?" I asked.

  She shook her head. "I never wanted that, and I made it clear that I might never be okay with just one-on-one. I've continued to date, but less and less, because she made it such a pain. It just wasn't worth the jealousy and fights, until I met Jason again." And she turned in his arms so she could look back over her shoulder at him. They shared the kind of smile that Hollywood tells us we all should be looking for, and it made me happy to see it.

  "Glad to know I'm worth fighting for," Jason said, and kissed her.

  She kissed him back, and then said, "If I'd known about polyamory in high school, we might have kept dating, but everyone tells you to choose."

  "You told me you were a lesbian; I respected that, but it meant dating each other was done."

  "I thought I had to choose one sex to date, one person to love until death do we part, and it never worked for me."

  "Or me," he said.

  "I think Freda is monogamous and just pretended not to be until we moved in together."

  "Do you still love Freda?" Nathaniel asked.

  She didn't answer right away. "I don't know, I thought I did, before she was so ugly about Jason. I mean he's a man, Freda doesn't have the same parts, so I thought she'd be less jealous than she was of other women, but it's worse."

  "Was it worse at first, or only after you got serious about Jason?" Nathaniel asked.

  She thought about that, and finally said, "Actually, from the beginning, she seemed to feel like I was betraying the lesbian sisterhood. I'd always told her I was bisexual, but I think she thought it was just something you say to be hot, or edgy. I'm not just gay, I'm bi, you know?"

  I felt Nathaniel nod at the same time I did. He said, "It's hot for women to be bi, but it's not for men."

  I hugged his arms tight against me. "It is incredibly hot when men are bisexual!"

  He laughed, hugged me, and snuggled over me until we could kiss. "You think so, but most women are weirded out by it, and gay men think you're just afraid of admitting that you're gay, and straight men think you are gay, and after their virtue."

  Jason nodded. "I'm not really bi, at all, but because I'm Jean-Claude's pomme de sang, everyone thinks I am."

  "His apple of blood," J.J. said. "You're his main blood donor."

  "Actually pomme de sang is more than that, it's almost like a mistress in the old-fashioned sense of keeping them in style," I said.

  She nodded, face serious again. "Jean-Claude would need a new pomme de sang if Jason moves to New York."

  "I was Anita's pomme de sang once, but when I became her boyfriend she didn't get a new one," Nathaniel said.

  "But you're still in her bed so she can feed on you. Jason will be too far away for Jean-Claude to feed on him."

  "One problem at a time," Jason said. "First, do you understand what I meant by rough now?"

  "Yes," she said, and hugged him around herself. She was back to looking unhappy again.

  "And you're okay with me having rough with Anita?"

  "Okay, not entirely, but will I make you give her up? No. Honestly, if we all agreed to gentler sex for me, I'd love to have my fantasy come true with Anita and you."

  I stiffened a little, and Nathaniel helped me hide my face by bending over me and turning me around so we could have a longer and more passionate kiss. I could taste J.J. on his lips, in his mouth, mingling with the taste of my own body. It made me start to pull away, but it wasn't a bad taste, just . . . I'd never kissed him before when he tasted of another woman. Apparently, my issues with women in certain areas had shown on my face, even before I tasted J.J. I appreciated the help at hiding it, but he gazed down at me as I drew back, a question on his face. J.J. was being a good sport; I needed to be one, too, so I kissed him back deeply, passionately. I worked my issue, instead of letting it spoil things. J.J. was truly being a good sport about being shoved outside her comfort zone. It was just that her sportiness only required her to watch, not participate; my sportiness might be more, um, hands-on, and I was already one woman over my comfort limit, and it wasn't J.J.

  I broke from the kiss, and was able to say with a normal voice, "I'm flattered."

  "But part of why I'm here is that you already have a female lover and you're not very happy about it," J.J. said.

  I turned enough in Nathaniel's arms to look at her. "Yeah."

  "I've met Jade, she's beautiful."

  "I've never argued that," I said.

  "Besides you sharing memories of sex with women from the men in your life, which I admit is weird since you don't have those parts, what else bothers you about Jade?"

  "I'd never thought of women as potential lovers before and suddenly I'm supposed to be the main lover of one; wouldn't that weird anyone out?"

  J.J. nodded. "I'll give you that, but I can't help you with that. Is there anything specific that you're puzzled by? Anything about sex with another woman that you want to know from someone who's dated a lot of women?"

  "A lot, huh?" Jason said.

  She turned and gave him a big, mischievous smile. "You and I have exchanged our numbers; you know exactly how many women."

  He laughed. "I knew we had a chance when your number was bigger than mine."

  Knowing something about Jason's number of lovers, I was impressed, and a little . . . well, it's not everyone who hits triple digits for lovers. Once I would have been judgmental; now I was puzzled. Even with everyone I'd had in my life I was still under thirty lovers. I just couldn't imagine liking that many people that much.

  Nathaniel held me close and whispered, "What do you want to know, Anita?"

  I turned enough to look at him. "What do you mean?"

  "What puzzles you the most about sex with another girl?"

  I thought about it; hell, I'd been thinking about it. "One, the oral sex, it's so different in some ways, and Jade's still working through her issues with men so she won't let anyone but me and Domino go down on her, and I know I'm not doing it as well as I could, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

  "Does she orgasm?" J.J. asked.

  I fought free of a moment of embarrassment. "Eventually."

  Nathaniel said, "Luckily Jade is fast clitorally."

  "Jade let you watch?"

  "Anita asked for some help with the oral, and hoped that I could gi
ve pointers through watching, and Jade agreed to it."

  "And what did you learn?" J.J. asked.

  "That Jade is one of those women who won't give feedback. I told Anita to ask, does this feel good, does that, but Jade won't give directions."

  "Oh, God, I hate women like that," J.J. said.

  "It's because her ex-master took all directions as criticism of his performance, and punished her for it," I said.

  J.J.'s eyes went wide. "Well, that would teach anyone to keep their opinion to themselves."

  "I understand where it comes from, why she doesn't help me, but it's like flying blind. I thought having the same parts would help, and it does a little. I can hear her breathing change, watch the little involuntary body movements, but I still think that if I could see someone else do it, and ask questions, maybe even trade off during so I could see actual demonstration, it would work much better."

  "You are going at this in a very practical manner, Anita. I think I'm impressed, except are you treating it as a chore, not a pleasure?"

  I fought not to squirm. "I go down on her because I know how much I love it, and she just started letting Domino try oral on her. She hasn't talked about it yet, but I suspect her old master didn't enjoy giving oral sex, so he made it unpleasant for her, like he made a lot of things unpleasant for her."

  "Do you enjoy doing it?"

  I sighed. "Not really; I don't get the high off it that I get from going down on men. Hell, I can orgasm sometimes from giving oral sex."

  J.J. gave me wide eyes again. "Really?"

  I nodded. "Really."

  "Well, damn, I've heard that's possible, but I've never met anyone who could do it."

  I fought not to be embarrassed again.

  "Don't be embarrassed, Anita; it's great, amazing, no wonder you enjoy it so much."

  "I enjoyed it before I started orgasming from it," I said, as if I wanted it clear it wasn't just about me having a happy. I don't know why, but somehow I felt defensive.

  J.J. smiled as if she realized I was being defensive. "I feel the same way about going down on women, except I don't have an orgasm from it; be awesome if I did."

  Jason laughed. "You'd never do anything else if you orgasmed from it."