“Yes,” Nathaniel said.

“No,” I said.

“Good to know we’ve made a decision,” he said, managing to sound sarcastic and a little bit like he was laughing at himself.

“And if not the shower, I was thinking we clean up and then use the bed, but now we have way more audience and Anita won’t do it in front of Bobby Lee and Kaazim.”

Damian glanced back at the two guards. “I’m not that fond of being watched either.”

“I am, but I don’t think either of them are voyeurs, and the two of you won’t do it with them watching, so shower it is,” he said.

Damian touched the drying blood on his face. “Whatever we do, I want this off me first.”

“Don’t worry,” Nathaniel said. “Sex isn’t happening until we get cleaned up.”

“I haven’t agreed to sex happening at all,” I said.

“Clean first. Then we’ll see,” Nathaniel said, but he seemed way more cheerful about it than I was, or than Damian was for that matter. The vampire had gone strangely quiet once Nathaniel took his side of things. I wondered if Damian was worried that Nathaniel was after his virtue. He didn’t have to worry about that; I knew that Nathaniel would have popped his cherry ages ago if he’d thought Damian wanted it. I didn’t say that part out loud, but I might if Nathaniel kept pushing the whole sex thing.

10

DAMIAN STARTED TO turn on the shower, but I did the math in my head and said, “This is a regular-size shower. The three of us will never fit in here.”

Damian looked at me, and he looked more woebegone than he might have with the blood drying on his face. “I can clean up here and the two of you can use your shower.”

Nathaniel said, “Why don’t the three of us go down to our shower since it’s bigger?”

I nodded. “That was what I was trying to suggest.”

“Was it really?” he asked.

“Yes, really; we’ve all three just had a horrible nightmare and some not unhorrible side effects,” I said, looking down at the blood that was beginning to stick more and more to the once very nice lingerie and to my skin. “I think none of us would want to be alone right now.”

“I do not,” Damian said.

“I almost never want to be alone,” Nathaniel said, and grabbed Damian’s hand and led him toward me. He pushed me ahead of them through the door to find Bobby Lee and Kaazim standing near the bed, where they could see into the bathroom and maybe sit down on the bed.

“Is something wrong?” Kaazim asked.

“The shower is too small,” Nathaniel said, and continued to herd the two of us toward the door. Bobby Lee had to hurry to open it before we got there.

I started to laugh. “What’s the rush?”

“Don’t you want to clean the blood off you?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then no time like the present.”

I frowned at him and glanced at Damian, who gave me a look that seemed to say he had no idea what the rush was either. Bobby Lee led the way back down the hallway to Nathaniel’s, Micah’s, and my room. Kaazim brought up the rear. We were suddenly back to the room that we had just passed by minutes before.

Bobby Lee opened the door, and Nathaniel led both of us through and damn near pulled us toward the bathroom. Our room was a mix of personalities; three walls were a pale green and the fourth was a dark lavender, almost a purple. It was the wall that the head of the bed sat up against. The king-size bed was covered in a green-and-purple paisley bedspread, which had been a compromise with the peacock-patterned one that Nathaniel had wanted. I’d thought the paisley would look terrible, but it actually looked nice. Purple, green, and teal pillows of various sizes were artfully tossed around the bed. A stuffed toy penguin sat amid the peacock-colored cushions. The toy didn’t match the bed, but it was Sigmund who had been my comfort object long before I met any of the men in my life. There were more penguins in the far corner on and around a chair. It was half my penguin collection; the other half stayed in the house in Jefferson County. Sigmund was the only one that traveled back and forth with me from the Circus to the house. I rarely actually slept with him in the bed anymore, because with two or more people there just wasn’t room for him, but I liked knowing he was wherever I was staying the night.

There was a collage of pictures up on one wall, because we had more wall space here than at the house. The pictures were mostly candid shots of all of us, and when I say all of us, I mean all. Almost everyone we were sleeping with or had a strong connection to was somewhere in the framed photos. There had been pictures of Micah’s family on the wall, but I had protested that it felt weird having sex while his parents and siblings were looking at us, so he’d moved those to stand-up frames in the living room of the Jefferson County house. There were also pictures of the two of us as small children mixed in with his family there, and even a few of my own family, though those had been added under protest. Nathaniel had no family pictures to add, and no pictures of him as a child either. He’d run away from home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. He’d been seven when his stepfather beat his older brother, Nicholas, to death in front of him. His brother’s dying words were to tell Nathaniel to run, so he had. I knew he regretted not having a picture of his brother or his mother, who died of something that he thought had been cancer, but he’d been so little when it happened he wasn’t sure. I knew he regretted not having childhood photos to add to the collections that had been his idea to put up in the first place.