“Your brother mentioned something about it downstairs.”
Doubt that. iAm rarely talked to people unless he had to.
So she must have been looking for him. Right?
Trez let his lids lower. “Hey, do you mind sitting down here—I’m finding it hard to keep looking up at you.”
Liar.
“Oh, but of course.”
Niiiiiice.
As she eased herself onto the bed and arranged her robing, he knew he was milking it, but come on. He’d spent a considerable amount of time lying on the tile in front of the toilet merely hours ago.
“Are you sure you are not in need of a healer?” she asked, her eyes hypnotizing him to the point where he just watched her blink, those long lashes swooping up and down. “And be of truth this time.”
Oh, he wanted to tell her one kind of truth, all right. But there was no reason to act a fool.
“It’s just a headache that lasts awhile. Honest. And I’ve had them all my adult life—my brother doesn’t get them, but I heard my father did. They’re not a party, but nothing that’ll hurt me.”
“Has your father passed?”
Trez tightened his face to make sure he showed nothing. “He’s still living and breathing. But he’s dead to me.”
“Whatever for?”
“Long story.”
“And …?”
“Nope. Too long, too complicated.”
“Did you have other plans this evening then?” This was said with a quiet challenge.
“Are you offering to stay with me?”
She looked down at her hands. “This … long story of your parents. Is that why you have a last name?”
How did she know …?
Trez started smiling, and it was a good thing she was ducking his eyes or she would have gotten a whole lot of his pearly whites.
Someone had indeed been checking up on him—and wasn’t that interesting.
As for the last name? “That’s just made up. I work in the human world and I needed a cover.”
“What manner of work are you engaged in?”
Trez frowned, picturing the inside of his club—and then the inside of that bathroom he’d used as a fuck palace how many times?
“Nothing important.”
“Then why do you do it?”
He took a final long draw on his Coke and stared into space. “Everyone’s got to be somewhere.”
God, he really didn’t want to get into that part of his life—to the point where if she had to leave because the convo ran out of gas, fine: In a flash, images of him having sex with that long succession of human women flashed in front of his eyes, taking Selena’s place until he couldn’t even smell her anymore.
To Shadows, the corporeal body was an extension of the soul—a reality that was perhaps self-obvious, but in fact, far more complicated in the way the s’Hisbe viewed it. Bottom line, what you did to your body, how you treated it and cared—or didn’t care—for it, was directly transmuted to the very core of you. And as sex was by its very nature the single most sacred act of the physical form, it was never to be undertaken lightly, and certainly never, ever with dirty, nasty humans—particularly the pale-skinned ones.
To Shadows, pale skin equated to illness.
But the rules didn’t stop at the doorstep of Homo sapiens. Making love was completely ritualized in the Territory. Sex was scheduled between couples, or halves, as they were known, formal scrolls being exchanged across marbled corridors, consent requested and given through a series of prescribed directives. And when all was agreed upon? The act was not completed during the daylight hours, and never, ever without a bathing ritual first. It was also announced to all and sundry, a special banner hung upon the chamber door, a genteel way of stating that unless the place was on fire or someone had an arterial bleed, there was to be no disturbance until one or both parties emerged at some future time.
The trade-off for all the barriers? When two halves hooked up, it could last for days.
Oh, P.S., no masturbation, either. It was considered a waste of communion.
So, yeah, his people wouldn’t have just frowned on his sex life; they would have handled him only with barbecue tongs while wearing a Hazmat suit and a welding mask: He’d banged women at eleven a.m. and three in the afternoon and waaaay before dinner. He’d taken them in public places and under bridges, in clubs and restaurants, in bathrooms and seedy hotel rooms—and in his office. In only maybe half the cases had he known their names, and from that august group, he could recall maybe one out of ten.
And only because they’d been weird or had reminded him of something else.
As for the pale-skinned thing? He hadn’t discriminated. He’d had all races of humans, some even at the same time. The only sector he hadn’t fucked or been sucked off by had been males, but that was only because they didn’t appeal to him in the slightest.
If they had, he’d have gone there.
He supposed all was not lost. Shadows did believe in remediation, and he’d heard of cleansing rituals—but there was only so much a guy could do to repair damage.
The irony, of course, was that he’d taken a sick pride in ruining himself to the extent he had. Juvenile, sure, but it had been like he was middle-fingering the tribe and all their ridiculous bullshit—especially the queen’s daughter, who they all thought he should be in a big hurry to nail on a regular basis for the rest of his life.
Even though he’d never met her, wasn’t interested in being a sex toy, and had no intention of volunteering to be locked in a gilded cage.
But it was funny. In spite of everything that he hated about the traditions he’d been born into, he found himself finally kinda seeing a point to them: Here he was, in his post-migraine float, within kissing distance of a female he was dying to worship with his body. And guess what. All that rebellion he’d enjoyed so much was making him feel filthy and totally unworthy.