“We’re less than two hours out,” I said.
Damian shuddered.
I touched his arm. “It will be all right.”
“Enough of this,” Jean-Claude said, and took off his robe. His body looked incredibly white against the black of the robe, as if his skin were carved of marble, and he was absolutely nude. He looked like some Renaissance statue come to life, like a male version of Galatea come to make all your romantic wishes come true.
Damian looked at the floor as if the rug at the foot of the bed had suddenly gotten much more interesting. You’d think after a thousand years of “life” he’d be less embarrassed by nudity, or maybe it was the nudity in question. Jean-Claude could have that effect on people, or maybe it was the whole heterosexual-man-outside-the-locker-room thing.
“We’re just sleeping with Damian, remember?” I said, half laughing.
“Since I am not sleeping beside Damian but on the other side of you, ma petite, I think my lack of clothing will not infringe upon his virtue.”
Damian was so not looking at the other man in the room. I tried not to laugh again at his discomfort because there’d been a time when I’d have been just as uncomfortable for other reasons. I’d tried so hard not to have sex with Jean-Claude, to not let him seduce me. For Damian, nudity just wasn’t a thing that straight men did with other men much, at least not in the modern day, and Damian was very straight, much to Nathaniel’s disappointment. My happily bisexual fiancé would have loved for Damian to be at least as friendly as Richard was with Jean-Claude. Oddly, Richard was just about as heterosexual as Damian, but he did bondage with us. There were needs we met in Richard’s life and he in ours because of it. Damian was utterly vanilla—not a fault, but for the rest of us in these relationships it made it even more awkward, because we were so rocky road with extra cherries, gobs of whipped cream, and sprinkles on top.
Damian looked at me, and the look seemed to ask a question as I stood there in my blue robe.
“I’m wearing jammies, under my robe,” I said.
Damian smiled. “Should I say thank you, or aww?”
That made me smile. “Either, neither, let’s get some sleep.”
“We are still waiting for Nathaniel,” Jean-Claude said, “but we can get into bed while we wait.” He walked to the side of the bed nearest the outer door, which had become his side. He flung the black coverlet aside to reveal sheets the same royal jewel-tone blue as my robe.
“You matched my lingerie to the sheets,” I said.
He smiled, obviously pleased with himself, but it was as he swept back the blue sheets with a flamboyant gesture that I realized he was nervous. It had taken me years to figure out that though he could be flamboyant, it wasn’t his preference, and when he was doing it when it wasn’t necessary it meant he was nervous. Why the nerves? I wondered, as he climbed between the sheets and lay down. His long black curls spread across the pillow perfectly so that they framed his face, caressed the pale spill of one shoulder and still managed to leave half his face almost bare of hair so that the royal blue pillowcase framed the perfect line of his cheek. It also brought the blue very close to his eyes so that they went from a blue so dark as to be almost navy to suddenly a brighter blue set off by the thick black lace of his eyelashes, the perfect arch of his eyebrows. It was the kind of show he’d put on for me when he was trying to convince me just how beautiful he was, except then he’d worn pajamas, because he’d known that him nude made me run for the hills in the early days.
Did he want Damian to see him as beautiful, or was one of the most gorgeous men on the planet needing reassurance that I still appreciated his beauty? If it was for Damian’s benefit, that was a conversation for another night, but if it was for mine, that I could do something about. If it was something else altogether, I’d ask Jean-Claude later when we were alone. I smiled at him and let him see that I saw every bit of theatrical-worthy beauty on display in the bed. If we’d been willing to let down our metaphysical shields he could have felt exactly how much I admired the view, and I’d have known precisely what his motives were, but then Damian was my servant, as I was to Jean-Claude, so maybe we’d all have gotten a peek into each other, and that might have made Damian run for the hills, depending on what we were all thinking and feeling.
“You do know that one of the reasons it took so long for you to seduce me is that I just couldn’t believe that anyone as beautiful as you really wanted to date me, and not just make me another notch on their bedpost.”
He smiled and some tension left him, so at least part of what was going on in his head was a need for reassurance from me. I’d come into this relationship believing that someone who had been a ladies’ man for centuries wouldn’t need any reassurance. Jean-Claude had taught me that everyone needed it.
“There are no notches on my bedposts, ma petite.”
I grinned at him. “The bedposts couldn’t survive all your conquests.”
“There are not so many as that.” And then he laughed.
I felt a bubble of eagerness in my stomach, like happy butterflies. It wasn’t me. “Nathaniel is almost here,” I said.
The bodyguards gave a businesslike knock and opened the door for our other half, or would it be our other third, or our fourth? Nathaniel walked in wearing a pair of silky lavender sleeping shorts that fit him very nicely, so nicely that the view from the front distracted me for a minute from the rest of him, but I recovered, because it was all a nice view. His shoulders were wide, his arms well muscled, his chest deep, and his stomach flat and fit. He’d started to get a six-pack of abs, but every time he got truly cut across his abs, he lost too much of that great ass of his, and Nathaniel just didn’t look right below a certain weight. He had the Adonis belt where the line of his waist did that soft square line down along the hip, now hidden inside the silky shorts. The muscles of his thighs were impressive and so were his calves. He’d actually had to cut down on his weight lifting because he’d started to muscle up more than he wanted to for dancing onstage. Genetics would have let him muscle up in a way that the other two men in the room couldn’t. Jean-Claude and Damian both looked great, and Jean-Claude hit the gym for the same reason Nathaniel did, so he’d look great taking his clothes off onstage, but he was built long and lean like a long-distance runner or a basketball player as opposed to a football player.