Just hearing him, feeling him inside me like that, felt as if I could finally take a deep breath and let go of some tension that I hadn’t known I was holding. Nathaniel gripped my hand tighter. I knew he felt it, too, because we were touching when it happened. Damian reached from the seat behind me, where he’d been out of direct sunlight in the more enclosed depths of the van, but now he reached into the sunlight from the windows so he could touch my shoulder, and there was that jump of connection from him to me, to Nathaniel, and to Jean-Claude, and then Richard stirred in the bed. I knew he was awake, had a moment of seeing the darkened room through his eyes and Jean-Claude’s so that it was almost dizzying. I was glad I wasn’t driving when it happened. Damian squeezed my shoulder as his other hand found Nathaniel’s arm, and the world steadied again. I could still see the ceiling above the temporary bed and missed the old canopy, could feel my head resting on Jean-Claude’s shoulder and arm while my other arm was across his body and my only view was silk sheets and the white gleam of the vampire’s body. I knew they were both nude, and the moment I thought it, I realized that I had thought it too loudly and that they’d both heard me, and suddenly there was awkwardness in the nudity that hadn’t been there before. Why? Because I hadn’t just thought nude; I’d thought about the possibilities of them in the bed, wrapped in silk, naked. That was all me, and I tried to make that thought loud, too.
Richard started to get up, spilling the sheets down his chest, baring his upper body, opening up the cocoon of warmth his body had made beside Jean-Claude. Then a sense of calm washed over all of us, as in all five of us. The beginnings of unease in Richard quieted. He lay back down in the sheets, finding the warmth his body had made for him overnight. It put him back beside Jean-Claude, who lay very still, waiting for the other man to decide what he was doing. I could feel everyone more clearly in my head in that moment than Jean-Claude. He was very carefully neutral, though I could feel the tension in his body through the connection to Richard.
Nathaniel leaned back toward Damian, who leaned forward, his long hair sliding forward like a veil to cover the sides of his face from the sunlight. His hair wasn’t much of a barrier, but it was better than bare skin in bare light. He’d kept the sunglasses on; they wouldn’t come off until we were in a dark room or night fell. Nathaniel stroked that red hair and then rubbed his cheek along Damian’s face like a cat scent-marking. Damian laughed and leaned his face against the other man’s so that Nathaniel could hold him as much as the seat belts would allow.
I felt Richard’s surprise at the interaction. It was a big change in Damian’s comfort level about touching other men. Richard moved up higher on the pillows so that he was taller than Jean-Claude, but he didn’t move away from him, just moved his arm so that it lay across his chest and not his stomach. It left Jean-Claude’s arm around Richard so that they held each other, though I knew that if Jean-Claude were more certain of his welcome, he’d have held him differently.
Richard said out loud, “Relax, Jean-Claude. Just relax. Cuddle if you want to cuddle, but don’t lie here feeling this tense. It’s not a trap, I promise,” because we’d all heard Jean-Claude’s thought, because it was too loud to hide. “It’s a trap, a girl trap.” Girl traps aren’t about genitalia; they’re about that more feminine habit of saying, Do this or Don’t do that, and punishing the masculine half of the couple for doing what the feminine half asked/told him to do in the first place. There are girl traps and boy stupid, but it’s not always women who set the traps, and it’s not always men who are stupid. We all take turns.
Jean-Claude relaxed slowly, inch by cautious inch. The way that Richard was lying across his arm, it was more comfortable and natural for him to curl his arm around the other man’s back and turn a little into Richard. They were only an inch apart in height, but the way Richard had fixed himself on the bed made him seem much taller, except that I could feel where everyone’s legs were, and it was an illusion. An illusion of dominance, and I had a moment to hear, feel, realize that part of the two men’s problem with each other was that they were both dominant. I don’t mean in a bondage-and-submission way, but just big, athletic, dominant men who were both used to winning. Jean-Claude had spent too many centuries at the mercy of other masters to be as obvious about it as Richard could be, but it was there as they lay as entwined as I’d seen them in a very long time. Who would submit? Who would bend first? Without me there to help them bridge that decision, they were stalemated. Asher helped them, too, sometimes, but if he hadn’t been in the doghouse, Richard wouldn’t have been there at all.
The sorrow among us all, the almost possibilities stretched among us like a light going out. Nathaniel said, “No, not this time.” He kissed me, and with Jean-Claude and Richard so deep in my head and heart, it startled me, as if the bedroom in St. Louis was more real than the van and the men touching me here. It was what the three of us could have been and never were. I let myself fall into Nathaniel’s kiss, fall into the total abandon of his love, his desire. He had no stop, held nothing back. It had scared the hell out of me at first, but now I realized that was why he was in my life, why he was my leopard to call, why we wore each other’s rings.
The sorrow from Richard was drowning deep, like the ocean had suddenly poured over us to dampen our spirits and drown us in “what might have beens.” Damian’s own sorrow spilled like blood into the ocean of Richard’s regrets. Nathaniel drew back from our kiss, and his eyes were solid, glowing lavender like flower petals with the summer sun behind them.