Envy had slept in one of the guest rooms, but still it was the first time she’d curled those long legs underneath my kitchen table.
Was I supposed to wait on her? Fetch her tea? I felt the first bubbling of anger, which was still one of my best things, when I didn’t know what else to do.
“What kind of tea do you want?” Jason asked. He put his coffee down and went to the cabinets. He’d stayed over enough to make tea without having to ask directions.
“Mint,” she said, and laid her head on her arms so that she looked like she was going to take a nap on the table.
“Peppermint, spearmint, or a medley?” he asked.
“You pick,” she muttered, not raising her head.
“Rough night?” I asked, sipping more of the strong black coffee.
She moved her head enough to roll an eye at me through the fall of yellow hair. It reminded me disturbingly of Dev, her cousin, who was also a weretiger of the gold clan, and one of my lovers. Dev was short for Devil, which was a nickname for Mephistopheles. Envy had gotten one of the better family names.
“You really need to have sex with him more often.”
“You mean Richard?” I asked, because she was also sleeping with Jean-Claude, head vampire of the United States and my fiancé. I did mention that we were polyamorous, right? It wasn’t cheating, because everyone got everyone else’s permission, but it was complicated, sometimes very complicated.
“Yes,” she said, still just looking at me with that one inhuman eye.
“Did Richard ask you to talk to me?”
“No,” she said, and just looked at me as if waiting for me to say something. Was I supposed to pry information out of her?
“What made it a rough night?” Jason asked. He’d filled the rapid-heat electric kettle, and it was starting to warm up. He had a mug, and a tea bag was trailing out of it, waiting. There was actually loose-leaf tea in there somewhere, but no mint outside bags.
Envy turned her head enough to look at him, so that all I could see was the thick hair. “I don’t think you’ll understand.”
“Try me, I’m very sympathetic.” He grinned when he said it, which left a debate on whether he was really sympathetic or just kidding.
“He really is a good listener,” I said.
She rolled her head back to look at me, and I realized that her hiding her face in her hair might be a stress reaction. What the heck had happened last night?
“He says you and he just can’t get your schedules to match up for sex lately, is that true?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, and drank more coffee; maybe if I just drank enough of it, I could do this conversation without losing my temper.
“Do you enjoy the sex?”
I drank more coffee. Maybe if I drowned myself in it? “Yes.”
“When he’s really rough in bed, how do you get him to stop?”
“You get him to stop by saying ‘No, stop,’” I said.
She rose up enough to shake her head. “No? I can say no and he’ll respect that? I mean, how do you tell him it’s too rough?”
I fought not to frown at her. “I say, ‘Ow, that hurt, stop it.’”
Jason piped up, “Or my favorite, ‘Do that again and I’ll kill you.’”
“You’re not saying it right, Jason; it’s ‘Do that again and I will fucking kill you.’”
He laughed. “Oh, yeah, I forgot that part.” He leaned against the cabinets, grinning at both of us. I didn’t feel like smiling, so I glared at him. His grin widened, eyes sparkling with it.
I shook my head and went back to huddling over my coffee. Jason was incorrigible; trying to corrige him just irritated me and amused the hell out of him.
“Ow really is a safeword for me,” I said.
“Richard says you like rough sex—was he lying?”
I stared into my coffee, debating on whether to get up and add to the cup, or if I had the courage to look her in the face while we had this conversation. Fuck, courage it was.
I turned to look into those beautiful otherworldly eyes and said, “I like rough sex. I like sex with Richard. Now, what’s up? What do you want to know, or say?”
She sat up straighter, squaring her shoulders. “Well, that is direct.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve had this conversation with other girlfriends of his over the years, so just say it, Envy. Did the sex get too rough last night?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you want me to do about it?”
“Do you really like sex as rough as he does?”
I shrugged. “Yes, sometimes, not every night, but yeah.”
She shivered. “Fine, Anita, you want to be direct, I can be direct. I had to tell him to stop, or ease up, constantly last night. He’d been great, the sex would be wonderful, he’d bring me to orgasm and then he’d start being too rough again, as if once he made me come he thought it earned him the right to be too rough and hurt me.”
“Most women can take rougher intercourse after enough foreplay,” Jason said. “He wasn’t trying to be mean, just thought he’d done enough prep work to have sex the way he wanted to have it, and you’d enjoy it, too.”
“Well, I didn’t, and I had to keep telling him to stop. I finally told him to get off me, that was it.”
“Do you mean for last night, or do you mean done as in done forever?” I asked.