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said no, at the same time. Asher laughed, and this laugh held humor. “How can you not know?”
“Micah loves me. He takes care of me. We sleep nude in the bed even if Anita is out of town. I clean his house, I fix his meals. We touch each other in private. We just don’t do certain things.”
“You don’t sodomize each other,” Asher offered.
“Yeah,” Nathaniel said, and he almost smiled, but not like he was happy. “We don’t do that.”
“It’s not to every man’s taste. Even those who like men are not always sodomites,” Jean-Claude said.
“But Micah doesn’t think you are lovers, do you, Micah?” Asher asked. I realized that Asher wasn’t just going to try to tear down what he and Jean-Claude and I had; he was going to try to tear down everyone.
Micah took a deep breath and let it out in a loud rush. “I guess I thought that if we weren’t fucking each other, we weren’t lovers.”
“So Nathaniel is trapped as I am trapped, wanting, but never having.”
Nathaniel said, “I think I like girls a little better than you do, so it’s not as big an issue for me.”
“If Micah would fuck you in the ass, would you say no?”
I so wanted out of this conversation, but it was like a car accident: Once you started spinning you could only wait and see what you hit.
“No,” Nathaniel said.
“Liar,” Asher said.
Nathaniel started to smile, fought it off, and said, “You’ve seen him nude. I’ve never had anyone that large do anal sex on me. I think it might hurt.”
“You are a pain slut. You like hurt,” Asher said.
“In most ways, yes, but I was raped as a kid, so I like anal sometimes and I miss it, but I don’t like it to hurt. Hurting like that is a trigger event. It throws me back into being raped.” He shook his head, a little too rapidly. “I think if I’d been treated better, then I probably would like it, but I wasn’t, and we do together almost everything that I want to do.”
Asher said, “I am sorry, Nathaniel; in my own hurt feelings I forgot that other people have been hurt, too. But I will not let even your sad story stop this conversation. We will have it out, and then when I am rejected one last time I will go and stay with Narcissus until arrangements can be made for us to leave.”
“The werehyenas are a third, or more, of the security for Jean-Claude,” Micah said.
“Not my problem,” Asher said.
“You’d really cut our manpower that badly, knowing that there are masters out there who would see that as weakness and try to kill us?” I asked.
“I cannot stay here and have my heart broken over and over, Anita. I will go mad. Either I must be someone’s lover, or I must go.”
“Wait,” I said, “you’re my lover. You’re my lover in every way that any other man has been. I haven’t denied you any part of me.”
He looked at me, and I gave him a look back. “Oh, come on, just because I don’t like anal. No one else gets to do that, either.”
“It’s not you he wants,” Micah said.
Asher looked at him. “Are you saying it’s you I’m pining over?”
“You said that Jean-Claude loved Anita better than you; well, don’t you love Jean-Claude better than you love Anita?”
Asher looked at Micah, and finally he nodded. “Touché, Nimir-Raj. I have loved Jean-Claude for centuries, so yes. Did you know that I chose Julianna as my human servant because I feared I was losing Jean-Claude’s love?”
Jean-Claude said something rapid in French. He was sitting forward and looked startled at last.
Asher went on. “I never told you because it was too pathetic. You know I like women, but I like men more. Didn’t you ever puzzle at why I chose to tie myself to a woman as my human servant?”
“You loved her,” Jean-Claude said.
“Eventually, but I chose her for you. I knew what you liked and I shopped with an eye for keeping you, not for satisfying myself, and it worked. It worked better than I could have dreamed. I should have realized that I had set myself up for the two people I loved most in the world to love each other more than they loved me.”
Jean-Claude made as if to reach out to the other man, and then let his hand fall back. “We did not mean to hurt you.”
“You never mean to hurt me, Jean-Claude,