Laurell Hamilton: Flirt

My pulse was suddenly in my throat and it wasn’t because I was afraid. Mary had said she’d take a long lunch, and that suddenly didn’t seem like a bad idea. I frowned, and tried to think a little better than that.

Nathaniel leaned in and whispered against my face, breath so warm, “Too much?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“I don’t think this is going to make her laugh,” Micah said.

I shook my head.

Nathaniel backed up enough so he wasn’t breathing his words directly on my skin. “I’m not jealous of you and Micah, because you still react as if me touching you is new.”

I turned and looked at him, frowning at little. “Are you insinuating that other people have gotten tired of you touching them?”

“Now you’ve gone and made her think,” Jason said. “Thinking will not make her smile.”

I gave him an unfriendly look.

He held his hands up, as if to say, Don’t shoot the messenger . “You know I’m right.”

Nathaniel said, “I’m saying that other people have wanted me for a night, or a few days a week, or a month, but you never seem to grow tired of me.”

I just looked at him. “They were crazy.”

He smiled, not the sexy smile, but the big, bright, happy smile. The one I hadn’t even known he had in him until we’d been together for months. It made him look even younger than twenty-one, and I had the feeling that maybe that smile was what he might have been if he hadn’t lost his family and been on the streets before age ten.

Jason leaned around Nathaniel and said, “I’m remembering why I don’t go to lunch with all of you.”

“Why?” I asked.

He gave us all a look.

“I think Jason feels left out,” Micah said.

It was one of those moments that Miss Manners didn’t cover. I had sex with Jason, but he was my friend, not my boyfriend. There was a difference. So if your guy friend and sometimes lover feels left out when you’re cuddling your boyfriends at lunch, do you owe him a cuddle?

“I’m closer,” Nathaniel said, “but I think he’d rather have the kiss from you.”

Jason, being Jason, then put his arm around Nathaniel and said, “It’s nothing personal, dude, but she’s not a dude.” He did a drawling movie-dude voice to go with the line.

It made us all smile, and I leaned past Nathaniel to give Jason a quick kiss. It was almost as if now that we had the touching out of the way we could talk.

We’d found out on the walk over that the dance class that they were taking was going well, but the routine that they were trying to teach some of the other dancers from Jean-Claude’s clubs had hit a snag.

“You said you’d explain the problem you’re having teaching the dancers,” I said.

“I can’t convince some of the women from the Circus and Danse Macabre that I’m their teacher, not just a cute guy,” Jason said.

“They don’t respect you?” Micah asked.

“They hit on me,” he said.

Micah and I exchanged a glance, then both looked back at him. “And that’s a problem for you, how?” I asked.

He grinned. “Okay, I love to flirt, but not when I’m teaching. I can’t play favorites, and I can’t use the class as a dating pool, because that would be playing favorites. I’m trying to get these women to work harder than they’re used to, and they’re trying to flirt in part to get out of the hard work.”

Nathaniel explained, “Most of the human women come from a stripper background, and most strip clubs aren’t like Guilty Pleasures, Anita. They don’t really want you to dance at most clubs, just move a little and take your clothes off. Jason is asking them to dance, really dance.”

“Dancing is hard work,” he said, “and some of these women have used their beauty to avoid hard work all their lives.”

“You keep saying women ,” Micah said. “I thought you were training up some of the male dancers, too.”

“We are, but most of them came from Guilty Pleasures, and Jean-Claude always made us put on a real show there. The other wereanimals aren’t arguing about it, either.”

“They know if they don’t do what they’re told, it will get back to the head of their animal group,” Micah said.

Jason smiled at him. “Yeah, Caleb is sooo not happy that you made him move from waiter at Guilty Pleasures to dancer, O Leopard King.”

Micah gave a small frown. “I didn’t make him change jobs; I gave him a choice of jobs that would make him more money, because he was complaining he needed more money. I’m his Nimir-Raj; I helped him brainstorm some alternate jobs. He thought stripping was the lesser evil.”

“We got tired of him bitching,” I said.

Jason grinned. “He does like to bitch, O Leopard Queen.”

I was queen to Micah’s king, but I was still technically human and didn’t change shapes. Blood tests had proved I carried several different kinds of lycanthropy inside me, but I stayed human. The lycanthropy virus protected its host from all disease, which should have meant that I couldn’t catch a second kind once I caught the first, but my body seemed able to collect them. I was one of about forty people worldwide who had managed to be carriers of multi-strains but not shapeshift. We’d been the inspiration for the lycanthropy vaccine that had begun to be used worldwide. My bit for medical science. With every new animal, there was the potential that I could call that animal to me like a vampire. I was really trying not to do that again.

I turned to Nathaniel. “You recognized Bennington ’s wife, didn’t you?”

He nodded, face serious. “She was a fur-fucker.”

“A what?” I asked.

Jason explained, “They’re like badge bunnies for cops, or group ies for bands. They just want to fuck us because we turn furry once a month.”

Nathaniel said, “She had money so she got private dances, but she was like most of the fur-fuckers. She seemed to think that we were animals and wouldn’t be able to resist our baser urges, as if because we have a beast inside us we can’t say no, or don’t have the right to say no.”

Jason frowned. “I used to do it after work, never for money, but just because a woman was hot, and she wanted me. But after a while it was as if they’d fuck the tiger in the zoo if it wouldn’t eat them, and they didn’t think of me as much different from that.”

I hugged Nathaniel with one arm and put my other arm past to draw Jason into the hug. “I’m sorry that people are so stupid.”

Micah leaned in at my back, and we did our best to do a group hug in the booth, which didn’t quite work, but still got the job done. Nathaniel and Jason were smiling when we pulled back, and that was the goal.

“Did anyone at the club cross the line with the wife?” I asked.

Nathaniel shook his head. “Jean-Claude’s really strict about that, so no. There are a few dancers and bouncers that will do the fur-fuckers, but she wanted one of us to do it in the private dance area right then. That was her fantasy and she wasn’t settling for fucking one of us later in a hotel room, or so she informed Graham, after he offered to meet her after work.”

Graham was a werewolf and a bouncer, not a dancer, but he was cute enough.

“A blow to his ego,” I said.

“Not as bad a hit as the fact that you keep refusing him,” Jason said, and he grinned, knowing it was a sore point with me.

I frowned at him, and then got back on point. “Did she get kicked out?”

Nathaniel nodded. “Security had to escort her outside, because she wouldn’t take no from us, and she just kept trying to up the price as if we were whores.”

I leaned my face in against his, not sure what to say, because when I’d first met him he had been a prostitute. He’d been a high-priced one catering to an elite clientele, but in the end there had been too many clients who wanted him because a wereanimal could take a lot of damage and still survive. It was too much rough trade, even for someone who enjoyed pain the way Nathaniel did.