“I can’t tell Livingston he’s wrong about the extra manpower being a problem later in court,” he said.
“Neither can I.”
“We’re your bodyguards,” Nicky said. “We’re not much use if we aren’t with you.”
“I gave my word,” Olaf said.
“His word really is good,” I said.
“It really is,” Edward said.
Nicky and the others didn’t like it much, but in the end, they agreed, so the three of us left them at the motel. They couldn’t even finish the discussion about edge play, because we took Olaf with us, and without him there was no reason to have the talk. Edward and I rode together so I didn’t even have to finish the talk with Olaf. Yay! I did have to ask Edward one question on the quick drive to the restaurant though.
“You know I’m never going to have sex for real with Olaf, right?”
“That was the original plan.”
“I do not like the way you just said that.”
“I’ve never seen him try this hard with anyone. I honestly thought he’d bail on the whole bondage conversation.”
“So did I.”
He glanced at me. “Olaf is being so damn reasonable that we may run out of reasons to say no.”
“It’s not we that he wants to fuck. It’s me.”
“True.”
“True? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“What do you want me to say, Anita?”
“One minute you tell me to kill Olaf or you will, and the next, you make it sound like you’d sign off on me having sex with him. What the hell, Edward?”
“I’m sorry, Anita, but the big guy just keeps surprising me. I thought I knew who Olaf was, what he was, and that there wasn’t enough human being left inside the monster to have a relationship with anyone, let alone my best friend.”
“You’ll miss him when we have to kill him,” I said, and it sounded like an accusation.
“Won’t you?”
I shook my head, and then I thought about it. “I’ll miss him in a fight, but I won’t miss the constant state of threat I feel because he’s out there. If there was a way to have the useful parts without the scary-as-fuck parts, it would be different, but it doesn’t work that way.”
“Maybe it’s the scary parts that make him useful,” Edward said quietly.
“I know it is, and that’s what makes it all so fucking awful. He’s helped us on multiple serial killer cases, but you and I both know where his expertise comes from. It’s like using the medical notes from the Nazi concentration camps to save lives today. Is the help worth what it cost? Can you take help from the devil without losing your soul in the process?”
“I’m an atheist. You know that.”
“Don’t even get me started on the fact that you don’t have enough faith to make a holy object glow in the face of a vampire. The fact that you’ve survived this long without it just proves that God loves you, no matter how you feel about Him.”
He pulled into the packed parking lot of the Sugar Creek Restaurant and Bakery.
“Is this place always packed?” I said.
He started searching for a parking place without answering me. I guess I didn’t really need an answer.
“I thought I could come up with enough rules or things Olaf would hate that he would just drop the idea of sex with you,” Edward said, “but he keeps surprising me.”