Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #16 - Blood Noir (19 page)

He propped himself up on one elbow, his other hand playing lightly over my bare stomach. If I’d been just a little less metaphysically powerful I’d have had some really serious scars for him to play with, but the weretiger that had tried to gut me hadn’t left any mark at all.

“You’ve gone all serious on me,” Jason said.

“I was just thinking that if I were a little less powerful, there’d be scars for you to play with on my stomach.”

He touched my face. “Don’t think about what we’ve lost, Anita. Think about what we have.”

I smiled at him, because he wanted me to. “You mean don’t think about the fight that would have gotten me the scars, and don’t think about who died to save me.”

His face went soft, serious, tender. “Now you’ve done it.”

I opened my mouth, and he touched a finger to my lips. He shook his head. “If you keep this up, you’re going to have to help me get back in the mood.”

I smiled with his finger still against my mouth. He moved, so I could say, “You still look in the mood to me.”

“Girls have such an unfair advantage,” he said, “you just look down and there we are.”

“I like that about boys,” I said.

He gave a soft laugh. “I’ve noticed.”

He leaned into me again, showing that he was still erect, but not quite so hard. “My mood’s gone a little soft, so no serious thinking. I want you thinking only about now, about me.”

I searched his face. His body was happy, but his mood was more serious than normal. I guess I should have expected that, but Jason was my cheerful lay. The sex, at least, was uncomplicated. The pillow talk afterward could get downright therapy-deep, but the sex, never.

“That’s a serious face again,” he chided.

“I was doing what you asked, thinking about you.”

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“Why so serious then?” he asked, frowning a little.

I slid my hand through the short silk of his hair, just at the base of his neck, ran my hands up through the utter softness of it, and drew him down toward me at the same time. “You have the softest hair of anyone I’ve ever touched.”

“Softer than Nathaniel’s?”

“Yes,” I said. I tried to bring him down for a kiss.

“Fibber,” he said, and pushed against my hand so he didn’t come closer.

“Fibber?” I said.

“I’ve had sex with the two of you, remember. His hair is like fur on the skin.”

“Yeah, but it’s not as purely soft. It’s a different texture than yours.”

“Jean-Claude’s hair is soft.”

I frowned at him. “Yes, but not as soft as yours. Curly hair is never as soft as straight hair can be.”

“Asher’s hair is like foam.”

I frowned harder, and took back my hand, so I was just looking up at him. “I give you one compliment and you have to pick at it?”

“I’m sorry, but I just suddenly didn’t believe you.”

“I don’t lie during sex, Jason. I don’t say things I don’t mean, and I don’t fake anything.”

He lowered his face, so I had only his profile. It was a nice profile. “I’m sorry, Anita, this isn’t your issue, it’s mine.” He looked at me, and his eyes had begun to fade back to his normal, paler blue.

“What issue?” I asked.

“You’ve met my folks now. I’ve spent my life not being the person anyone wanted in their life. My dad wanted a different son, Anita. Do you know what it feels like to know that your dad is always wanting some other kind of son?”

“Not the son part,” I said.

His eyes intensified, getting that look of interest he got. “Did your dad want you to be a boy, or something?”

I smiled. “No, he was happy with me. I was still his hunting buddy, and we did all sorts of the guy stuff together.”

“Your stepmother, Judith,” he said.

“You are a little too smart sometimes.”

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“Sorry.”

“They married when I was ten, and from the moment she came I was not good enough. Not blond enough, not girly enough, not nice enough, not cooperative enough, not the daughter she wanted.”

“She’s got a girl your age, right?”

“Yeah, Adriana. She’s the perfect daughter for Judith.”

“What’s she do?”

“She’s a lawyer, engaged to another lawyer.”

“Wow, a lawyer, and engaged to be married before thirty. Hard to compete with that,” Jason said.

“I figured out somewhere in my midteens that I couldn’t compete, so I stopped trying. You acted out your way, I had my own version.”

“Like what?” He lay down on his stomach, with his arms cradling his head, his face alive with attention. He wanted the sex, yes, but he wanted to learn more.

“I became the ultimate tomboy. I refused to wear a dress. I refused to play the game with Judith.”

“Did you do the whole black T-shirt and gloom?”

“Was I Goth?”

He nodded, head still cradled on his arms.

“Yeah, I guess so, but not really because it pleased me, more because it didn’t please her. I found the most offensive T-shirts I could get away with, and most of them came in black. But my friends in high school were the nice girls, not the death poetry writing crowd. I found them…tiresome.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d had real death in my life, and I thought most of them were pretenders.”

“You don’t have much patience with pretending, do you?”

“No.”

“But you could always tell yourself that Judith is the wicked stepmother.”

“Yeah, but Grandma Blake, who raised me for the two years before my father found Judith, well, that’s a different problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

“Remember, I saw ghosts in elementary school; by my early teens I’d accidentally started raising roadkill. I raised my dead spaniel from the grave at fourteen. My dad took me to see my mother’s file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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mother, Grandma Flores, so I could learn to control it. But Grandma Blake didn’t want me to learn to control it. She was convinced that if we prayed hard enough, the evil would just go away.”

Jason looked at me, eyes a little wide. “She really believes that, even now?”

“I think so. I know she prays for my soul. I know she believes that raising the dead is evil. I know she believes that sleeping with vampires is a mortal sin.”

“How does she feel about shapeshifters?”

“Oh, you’re damned, too.”

“Does she know you’re living with two of them?”

“Nope.”

He grinned at me. “Saving the news for a moment when it will bother her the most?”

“No, I plan to never tell my family.”

He looked at me. “You’re never going home for the holidays and taking anyone with you?”

I sighed. “Who would I take?”

He seemed to think about that. “The vampires are out, I guess.”

I nodded.

“Wait, you don’t want to go back home for the holidays, so living with two shapeshifters means you don’t have to go back, because your family would never understand.”

I thought about what he’d said for a few seconds. “Maybe, but Nathaniel and Micah aren’t an excuse to not visit my family. I love them, and I’ve finally got a domestic arrangement that suits me.”

He nodded. “I’ve known you longer than either of them, and I’ve never seen you this relaxed, or this happy.”

I smiled. “All right, now that we’ve analyzed me, is it your turn?”

He actually looked a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

“If I didn’t want to talk about it, I’d have just said no.”

“True, why did you confess so much?”

“Because I’ve seen your family, and I thought you’d earned the right to know a little more about mine.”

“You did it to try to make me feel better,” he said.

“Maybe. Did it work?”

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I watched the thoughts trace over his face, and then he nodded. “Yes, it did. I guess I needed to know that I’m not the only one who’s the stranger at every holiday meal.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that sums it up. Everyone else goes home for nostalgia, and happy memories. I end up feeling like I never fit in with the family as a child, and being older hasn’t changed that. When I was little I thought I’d been left by gypsies, or switched at the hospital, except I had my mother’s pictures to look at. I look too much like her not to be her daughter.”

“She was from Mexico, right?”

“Her family was, she was first-generation American.”

“You don’t look very Hispanic.”

I smiled. “The skin color is my father’s, but the hair, eyes, and bone structure are more my mom’s. My father’s cheekbones have given me less of that nice high, ethnic line, but I am the ghost at the banquet, Jason. The older I got, the more I reminded Dad of the wife he lost, and Judith of the woman she replaced.”

“Is that your issue, or theirs?”

“A little of both, I think. Remember, my mother was Dad’s first love, maybe his first lover, I don’t know, but a lot of firsts. That’s a lot of baggage to overcome. Then you have that whole dyingyoung-and-tragically thing, it tends to put a romantic haze around everything.”

“Hard for Judith to compete with a dead saint?” he said.

“Something like that.”

“Are you projecting, or do you know for certain that wicked stepmom felt this way?”

“I don’t know, Jason. I know that’s how I feel, and how they seemed to feel, but I was a kid, and now I can’t see them clearly. There’s too much baggage in the way.”

“I hear that,” he said, and his face was back to being all serious, and unhappy. “I wanted to drown in the sex and not think, but here we are doing the whole therapy thing that you hate.”

I touched his shoulder. “You’ve earned some talk.”

“Why, because my father’s a bastard and dying?”

“Yeah, and you’re my friend, and I’m supposed to be here to give you what you need. If you need talk more than sex, then we can do that.”

“You need to feed the
ardeur
,” he said.

“Yeah, but if worse comes to worst, I can just release the
ardeur
and it will take away all our doubts.”

“The
ardeur
is great, and it can take the place of a lot of foreplay, but it’s not what I want right now.”

“What do you want, then?” I asked.

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He looked at me, and his face was that serious, almost stranger’s face, as if the things he’d seen today had changed him. Or maybe the things that had happened today had allowed him to show me a part of himself he’d kept hidden. Or maybe the stroll down my own tortured memory lane was just making everything seem more serious. I couldn’t tell anymore, and I didn’t have Nathaniel or Micah here to help me work it out. The only other man who could usually help me see through the maze of confusion was lying beside me on the bed, lost in his own problems.

“I want you,” he said, simply.

I frowned at him.

He gave a gentle smile that left his eyes untouched. “To that question in your eyes, I’ll clarify.”

“You know me that well?”

“In bed, yes. You stop trying to control your face once the clothes come off. Dressed, you’re almost as hard to read as Jean-Claude sometimes.”

I thought about that for a second. “I guess I feel like I don’t get naked with people I don’t trust.”

He smiled. “Yeah.”

I settled back against the pillows and said, “So, clarify.”

“I can find women to sleep with, or fuck. I’m a stripper. They’re always trying to give me their numbers, persuade me to go beyond what’s legal. I’m Jean-Claude’s
pomme de sang
; a lot of women want to sleep with me just for that. To get close to the vampires. The whole werewolf thing gets you a different type of groupie.” Then he flashed me that grin that filled his eyes with sparkle for a moment. It made me smile to see it. “And, I get my share of women who don’t know any of that, and probably could be persuaded.”

I waited for him to continue, but had to watch the shine fade from his eyes, and the grin fade. His face was caught between his usual charm and this new, serious side.

“But…,” I finally prompted him.

He took a breath and said, “But only you will tell me the truth. Only you will tell me exactly what you want, or don’t want. You said it yourself, you don’t fake anything here. You don’t protect my ego. Either I’m good, or I’m not. You don’t want to trap me into anything. You don’t have an agenda beyond the pleasure. You aren’t worried about what we’re going to do afterward, or what we did a moment before. You are completely and utterly into the sex, almost from the moment you touch a man. It’s relaxing, you don’t know how relaxing.”

“Doesn’t everyone do it that way?”

He smiled and shook his head. “No, no, they don’t. Most people let their day get in their head and in the way of the sex. A lot of women just can’t turn off their heads long enough to relax to even begin to enjoy themselves.”

“I’ve known some men that way, too,” I said.

He smiled, again. “Me being one of them.”

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“Not usually, but sometimes. You usually save the analyzing for after the sex, as if the sex clears the way for you to have the big heart-to-heart.”

He grinned. “That’s not it. I want the sex more than I want the talking.”

“But not tonight,” I said, softly.

His eyes held onto the humor a little longer, but his face began to slide toward that more serious, older version that I realized was probably going to start peeking through more and more as the years went by. Maybe we were all growing up, even Jason.

“No, not tonight. But I’m done with the talk. I want to touch you, and I want you to touch me. I want to drown in the scent of your skin, the taste of your body. Sex has been my addiction since I was a kid, and it’s still my escape of choice.”