6
WE GOT DRESSED, put our weapons in place, and were going hand in hand down the hallway with Claudia and Benito trailing us. I tried to get them to stay and shower, but they insisted on escorting us to the bedroom. Rafael took it as business as normal, so I stopped arguing about it. He was their king, and that trumped anything I could say or do.
Rafael and I moved well together; there was none of that awkwardness you have with some people that you date where walking hand in hand is a challenge in rhythm, as if your internal music doesn’t match, and yet it didn’t feel romantic. Again, I found it jarring that I could be this physically comfortable with a lover and not be in love with them. It hurt that tiny wistful part of me that had believed most sincerely in that white-dress, one-great-love-of-your-life ideal. I’d accepted that I had more than one love of my life, but apparently part of me was still holding on to the thought that some things only came when you were in all-caps LOVE. Another illusion shattered.
Rafael swung my hand in his, which was something he did when he thought I was thinking too hard about something besides being with him. I knew that he would say something now, because that was what the hand swing meant.
“Do you have a preference on which of the empty guest rooms we use?” he asked.
In my head I thought, A room I’ve never been in with anyone else, but that seemed less than diplomatic, so I said, “Two of them have showers now. I think one of those.”
“I thought you wanted us in a bed tonight,” he said, smiling down at me.
I smiled back and said, “I do, but now we can clean up afterward without having to kick anyone out of the main showers.”
He raised my hand and brushed it lightly with his lips as we walked; he did it smoothly with no broken motion. “You are always so concerned that others are not inconvenienced. You will be a queen soon, Anita, you must embrace it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think the official title is going to change me all that much.”
“If you were my queen, I would want to dress you as befits my lady and shower you with gifts.”
I laughed then. “Jean-Claude is lucky he’s getting me into the bespoke designer wedding gown. He knows not to push his luck on dressing me fancy every day.”
“You think the wedding will change nothing?” he asked.
“It better not,” I said, and there was an edge of threat in my voice that I didn’t try to hide.
“I wish you better luck than I have had with such things.”
I looked up at him then, studying his face. I don’t know what I would have said next, because I felt the energy coming down the hallway toward us. Happy, wonderful energy of two of the loves of my life.
Micah and Nathaniel came walking up the hallway, hand in hand, and suddenly it was like the sun had risen in my chest so that it was hard to breathe. My reaction felt over the top, ridiculous. I’d never been one of those people who let myself get carried away, until Jean-Claude and these two walked into my life and stayed. Micah was my height, the only man I’d ever dated who was as short as me. Nathaniel was taller at five foot nine. He’d grown three inches taller and suitably broader through the shoulders since I met him. His auburn hair had also been down to his ankles; now it fell just past his shoulders, shining and perfectly straight. Micah’s hair was the same length, but his dark brown hair was so curly that it was inches longer when it was wet. I didn’t usually think of Micah as the more delicate of the two men, maybe because I was usually beside them and didn’t see them together from a distance that often.
Micah was built like a swimmer with that upside-down V of shoulders down to narrow waist and hips. He could spend as much time as Nathaniel did in the weight room, but he didn’t muscle up like our shared man did. They were both strong, but in T-shirt, jeans, and boots Micah could hide it, Nathaniel couldn’t. Nathaniel was the male equivalent of an old-fashioned pinup, lush and masculine, but with a face that was closer to beautiful; before he’d filled out with more muscle and extra growth, he’d been beautifully androgynous, and now he was still beautiful, but even from the back with the long hair he was finally and completely male. Micah on the other hand still treaded that androgynous line, and he sort of hated it. We were both over thirty, so there wasn’t going to be a growth spurt for him or me.
Rafael squeezed my hand, which made me look at him. I had a second of wondering if I’d dropped a polyamorous ball by ogling my men this way, but he smiled. “Go to them. It does my heart good to see all of you so happy together, gives me hope that I’ll find my own crazy happy someday.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I left him with Benito and Claudia and almost ran toward them. We’d been together five years now, and I still wanted to be as close as possible to them every time I saw them. I didn’t run to them, but I might have power-walked, and I was in their arms, because it was their arms. We’d been a threesome from the beginning, never just a couple. We put our faces together before we kissed, forehead to forehead for Micah and me, and Nathaniel bending over us so that we touched, our arms interlocked in a circle of just us. Then Micah kissed my cheek, which made me move so that he could kiss me on the mouth. It was a good kiss, soft and complete but still okay for public consumption. We could have kissed like that standing on the sidewalk and not offended anyone. I drew back from the kiss to stare into his chartreuse eyes, green and gold at the same time the way a cat’s could be, because they were the eyes of his leopard trapped forever in his human face. Too long in animal form and sometimes you don’t come back all the way. It was why he needed glasses, because leopards don’t see distance that well; if it’s too far to hunt or attack, then it’s far more important to see up-close movement. The sunglasses he still wore to hide his eyes in public were prescription, and I’d never known. It had explained why he’d worn them inside so often.
I looked at him almost eye to eye, though my boots were more combat/police, so his club boots gave him a couple of extra inches of height. He didn’t wear them to be taller, he wore them because Nathaniel had picked them out for him. Left to his own devices Micah was running shoes and nice dress shoes. We both had things in our closets that our third had bought for us.
Nathaniel used our joined hands to turn me toward him as if there was music in his head I couldn’t hear, and it was the beginning of a dance. Micah let go of both of us and stepped back to give him room to do what he was going to do, because just that one dancelike move said he had something planned that was less tame than Micah’s kiss.
From a distance Nathaniel’s eyes looked deep violet blue, but up close you realized they were just violet. He had to put blue on his driver’s license because purple wasn’t a choice. His normal color was a paler lavender; the eye color alone let me know his mood was up. He put one hand at the small of my back and the other in my hand and he literally started to waltz. I had a moment of awkwardness that I almost always did when I danced, but I stopped trying to shield so hard at the connection between us and suddenly I could dance, because Nathaniel could dance.