Incubus Dreams (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 12)

"Did I?"

She nodded. "Yes, you did."

"Everyone noticed Nathaniel and me, before I did, even Richard."

"What?"

I shook my head. "I do not want to talk about Richard, other than to say I met his new girlfriend, Clair."

"Jesus, when?"

I shook my head, because there was no way to tell the story without sharing more than Ronnie wanted to know about vampires. The very fact that she got angry when I talked about the vampires in my life made it almost impossible to share my life with her. How did I explain what had happened between Richard and me today without including the ardeur, Jean-Claude, Damian, and Damian's old master? And if I did share it all, then she'd give me another lecture about how Jean-Claude was ruining my life, or had ulterior motives. I wouldn't even be able to argue about the ulterior motives. Jean-Claude was what Jean-Claude was; I'd made peace with that a while back.

I finally said some of what I was thinking out loud. I'd learned lately that truth is really the only way for relationships to survive, let alone grow. I wanted to be friends with Ronnie again, really friends, if it was still possible. "Most of what happened today revolves around vampire stuff, Ronnie. If I can't talk to you about vampires, then I can't even begin to tell you what happened."

"Jean-Claude fucking up your life some more."

I shook my head. "I don't think Jean-Claude could have planned some of this in his wildest imagination. Besides, he's pissed that Damian got to me first."

She frowned. "First, you mean he's upset that you and Damian are lovers?"

"I'm not sure we're lovers, so much as we had sex. I haven't decided about the rest."

"You've always treated intercourse like it's a commitment, Anita. I never understood that. It's just sex, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good, but it's just sex, not a vow of honor."

I shrugged. "We agreed to disagree on that topic a long time ago."

"Yeah, we did. You've been monogamous as long as I've known you. One date and that's it until you either don't want to date him anymore, or you've decided that he didn't deserve the one date he got. Until Jean-Claude came into your life, you were the most straitlaced person I knew. I mean I didn't think I slept around until I had you to compare me to. You made everybody else seem like sluts to your nun."

That sounded sort of bitter, too. "I didn't know you felt that way," I said.

"It never bothered me, in fact you probably saved me from some bad decisions. I'd think, okay, what would Anita say, and I'd wait a while and see if a guy was more than just cute."

"Gee, I've never been the angel on someone's shoulder before."

She shrugged. "I'm not mad about your moral values as opposed to my moral values. I just don't understand how I ended up headed for a life of monotonous monogamy, and you ended up with a harem. It just seems wrong."

On that we could agree. "Wait a minute, monogamous maybe, but you told me Louie was the best sex you'd ever had."

"No, the best sex I ever had was that guy..."

I finished the story for her, "With the really big tonker, who knew how to use it. He was gorgeous, blond curly hair, big blue eyes, shoulders..."

She laughed. "I take it I've told this story too often."

"It was a one-night stand, and he vanished before you woke up the next day. You tried to find him, and he'd lied about who he was, so you couldn't find him. No sex is good enough to overcome that."

"Spoken like someone who's never had a one-night stand in her life," Ronnie said.

My turn to shrug. "Can't say that I have."

"If you've never had one, then you don't know what you've been missing."

I let it go; we'd learned years ago that we had philosophical differences about men, sex, and relationships. "Fine, have it your way, but Louie is the best repeatable sex that you've ever had."

She seemed to think about that for a moment, then nodded. "I'll agree to that. Yes, he is the best steady sex I've ever had."

"How are you going to feel without it?" I asked.

"Horny," she said, and laughed, but when I didn't laugh with her, she looked sad. "Jesus, Anita, don't go all serious on me. I need one friend who just tells me that marriage isn't for me and that it's okay to dump him when he starts giving ultimatums."

"If you aren't in love with Louie, then dump him, but I wouldn't be your friend if I didn't ask, is it that you don't love him, or your fear is too great to allow you to love anybody?"

She frowned up at me. "Great, then I'll die alone and old with a bunch of cats and guns."

"What I meant was, maybe therapy isn't a bad idea."

She looked at me in amazement. "You're giving me the you-need-therapy talk? I thought you hated all those therapists that stand by the graveside and ask people what they're feeling, as their long-dead, abusive parent rises from the grave. God, what a nightmare."

"There are good therapists out there, Ronnie. I just don't get to meet many on the job."

"Have you gone to see a therapist behind my back?"

I thought about that, then said, "I finally realized that what I was going to Marianne for was only partially to learn how to control my psychic abilities. People in New York go to see their witches instead of their therapists. I've just decided to be ahead of the crowd."

"Who do you know in New York?"

"Another animator, and vampire executioner. She said that going to a therapist who was a witch meant she didn't have to spend time explaining magic or psychic stuff to them, because they already knew it. She'd had some of the same problems I'd had over the years with going to my priest or a regular therapist. I mean, my dad took me to one when I was in my early teens. The therapist tried to help me with my latent issues with my mother's death and my dad's remarriage, but he wouldn't believe that I could raise the dead by accident. He kept trying to tell me that I was doing it on purpose to get back at Judith and my father."

"You never told me that," she said.

"It was after the therapist told my dad that I was 'evil' that he contacted Grandma Flores and got some help that at least understood what I was going through."

"So you knew when you started with Marianne it was therapy?"

"No, of course not, I'd never have done it that way."

She smiled. "That's the Anita I've come to love and know."

I smiled back. "Even now it makes me grumpy to admit it out loud, and you're the only person I've told, though I think Micah suspects. I'm getting easier to live with, something has to be responsible."

"It's really helped?" she asked.

I nodded.

"You think I should go down to Tennessee?"

"I think you should try something closer to home. You don't have the same issues that I do. A therapist isn't going to tell you that you're wrong, or evil, or simply not believe you."

"Are you telling me my problems are mundane?"

"Unless you have a problem with Louie being furry once a month, yeah they're mundane."

She frowned, and dragged her coffee cup back toward her. "Not really, I mean I've seen the whole show, and I don't do animals. He's okay with that, because most nonshifters draw the line at doing their significant others in animal form. You know it can be transferred via sex in animal form, if the sex is rough and you get some fluid in an abrasion." She said it like a lecture, or a warning, without thinking about it.

"I did know that."

"Oh, sorry, you're the preternatural expert, not me." Again, that trace of bitterness. When had she first gotten mad at me? How far back did it go?

"No, really, Ronnie, it's good to share information when you know someone else is dating the lunarly challenged."

She looked up then. "Did you just say 'lunarly challenged'?"

I nodded. "The latest PC phrase."

"Since when have you been PC?"

"Since I heard the phrase and thought it was funny as hell." I was still leaning against the cabinet, because there was way more anger in her toward me than I understood. The vampire thing I could sort of understand, but her problems with me letting men into my life, that seemed harder to work around.

"Lunarly challenged, I'll have to tell Louie. He'll get a kick out of it." The moment she said it, her face fell, and the weight of it all came crashing down on her. "Oh, shit, Anita, what am I going to do?"

"I don't know." I came back to sit at the table and patted her hand. If it had been Catherine, she'd probably be clinging to me for support, but Ronnie had my issues on closeness, so we didn't hug as much. Alright, Ronnie had my old issues on closeness, except about sex. I'd never understood why if you don't want someone hugging you for comfort that you'd be okay with fucking them, but that was just me.

"I don't want him just gone from my life, but I'm not ready to get married. I may never be ready to get married." She looked at me, and there was such anguish in her eyes. "He wants children. He said, one of the reasons he's happy that I'm not a shapeshifter is so we could have children. Anita, I don't want children."

I squeezed her hand and didn't know what to say.

"I'm a private detective, and I'm thirty. If we got married we'd have to start thinking about kids right away. I'm not ready."

"Do you want kids, ever?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I grew out of wanting two kids and a white picket fence about five years ago. I don't think I ever really wanted it, but it's what you're supposed to want, you know."

"I know."

She looked at me with her serious, sad eyes and asked, "Do you want kids?"

"No," I said, "my life doesn't have that kind of room."

"No, if you had a different job, would you want to be a mother?"

"Once upon a time I thought I'd get married and have a kid or two, but that was before."

"Before what, Jean-Claude?"

"No, before I became a vampire executioner, and a federal marshal. Before I realized that I'm probably never going to get married. My life works for me right now, but it wouldn't work for a child."

"Why, because you don't have a husband?"

"No, because people try to kill me on a semiregular basis."

"Speaking of violence, what happened to your door?" she asked.

"Gregory broke it down because I wasn't answering the phone and he heard screams."

"Why did he hear screams?"

"Without mentioning vampires, I can't tell you the story."

She sighed. "I thought Jean-Claude was a passing thing, your one big fling. You know, he's the bad guy that you have this great sex with, then you wise up and move on." She looked at me, and she really looked at me, searching my face. "He's not a fling for you, is he?"

"No," I said.

She took in a lot of air, then let it out slowly. "I'm not saying I want or could handle all the details, but tell me enough so I know what happened to your door."

Even edited down, the story took a while. We were just past the point where Richard dumped me royally, when Nathaniel and Gregory came into the room.

Ronnie had her face all set for massive sympathy, and was actually reaching out to offer a hug, when she saw them. Her face froze, and her arms just stopped moving, as if she was suddenly a statue in that kid's game.

Nathaniel was nearly naked, wearing only a leather thong and a whole bunch of straps across his upper body. So many straps that for a moment it gave the illusion that he was bound in some way. He padded into the room, looking totally comfortable in his nearly nothing bondage gear. That might have been what stopped Ronnie in her tracks, or then again, it might have been Gregory. He was still in leopardman form, and still totally nude. He wasn't happy to be nude anymore, but he was still naked except for his very natural fur coat.

From the look on her face, I wasn't sure Ronnie had really seen that much of Louie in ratman form, or if she had, he'd been more discrete than Gregory was being. He had three straps in his clawed hands and was looking at the rivet on the end of one of them as he glided through the door.

"Hi, Ronnie," Nathaniel said, as if she wasn't staring at him open-mouthed. "Anita, have you seen my punch?"

"Your what? "I asked.

"It's a punch for reattaching leather rivets. I forgot that two of the straps came loose last time I wore this."

"I don't even know what a leather punch looks like," I said. I sipped coffee and watched both the men, and Ronnie's face. She was trying to recover her cool, but the effort was visible and near painful to watch.

"Sort of like a big stapler, with one of those round things on the top." He knelt down to open up the tool drawer. This flashed the back of his body to us, and there was a lot of back to flash. The thin black stripe that was all that covered his ass didn't exactly cover anything as much as it emphasized what was there.

If I hadn't had Ronnie's reaction to watch, I'd have been more distracted myself, but I was enjoying her total failure to hide what she was thinking. There'd been a time when Ronnie had been the more sophisticated of the two of us, and I'd been the one who blushed all the time. She wasn't blushing, she'd actually paled, but the shoe was very firmly on the other foot. She hadn't been around much, so she hadn't seen Nathaniel in maybe six months. Her reaction told me that it wasn't just me who'd noticed the shoulders and the extra muscle development. To someone who hadn't seen him in half a year, the changes must have been even more impressive.