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"I've changed my mind."
"I haven't," she said.
"So no talking about the vampires in my life."
"That still leaves you with two men to talk about."
"Not if you compare one of them to steaks and milkshakes."
"Look, last time you talked about Nathaniel it was to complain that you were so uncomfortable around him. You talked about Nathaniel the way I felt about Louie, then about the time I thought we had common complaints, you started to change. You started getting all soft when you talked about Nathaniel, too."
"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 f**king 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'?"
