Lover at Last (Black Dagger Brotherhood #11)(155)
Author: J.R. Ward

Qhuinn swallowed his third shot in hopes of getting rid of the sensation. And the fourth. And meanwhile, the faces and br**sts and sexes of the many females and women he’d f**ked flashed through his mind –

"No," he said out loud. "Nope. No."

Oh, God…

"No."

As the guy next to him gave him a weird look, he shut up.

Wiping his face, he was tempted to order more to drink, but held off. Something seismic was trying desperately to break through; he could feel it trembling around the foundation of his psyche.

You don’t know who you are, and that’s always been your problem.

Fuck. If he got more tequila, if he kept swallowing, if he stayed his avoidance course, what Blay had said about him was always going to be true. The trouble was, he didn’t want to know. He just really f**king didn’t want…to…know….

Jesus, not here. Not now. Not…ever.

Cursing under his breath, he felt the geyser of realization start to really bubble, a loud-and-clear from the middle of his chest threatening to break out – and he knew that once it was free, he was never going to get it back underground again.

Damn it. The only person he wanted to talk to about this wasn’t speaking to him.

He guessed he was going to have to man up and deal with it on his own.

On some level, the idea that he was…well, you know, as his mother would have said…shouldn’t have affected him. He was stronger than the glymera’s condescension, and, shit, he lived in an environment where whether you were g*y or straight, it didn’t matter: Long as you could handle yourself in the field and you weren’t a total ass**le, the Brotherhood was down with you. Look at V’s sexual history, for f**k’s sake. Black candles used as something other than a light source in the dark? Hell, just being into males was a cakewalk compared to that stuff.

Plus, he did not live in his parents’ house anymore. That was not his life.

That was not his life.

That was not his life.

And yet even as he told himself that over and over again, the past that no longer existed was right behind him, staring over his shoulder…judging and finding him not just wanting, not simply inferior, but utterly and completely unworthy.

It was like phantom limb pain: The gangrene was gone, the infection cut out, the amputation complete…but the horrible sensations remained. Still hurt like a bitch. Still crippled him sure as a limp.

All those women…all those females…what was the true nature of sexuality, he wondered suddenly. What counted as attraction? Because he’d wanted to f**k them, and he had. He’d picked them up in clubs and bars, hell, even that store in the mall where they’d gone to get John Matthew some real clothes after his transition.

He’d chosen the women, singled them from the crowd, applied some kind of data screen that had weeded out some and highlighted others. He’d had them blow him. He’d sucked them off. He’d ridden them from behind, from the side, from in front. He’d grabbed their br**sts.

He’d done all of that by choice.

Had it been different with the guys? And even if it had been, did he have to label himself at all?

And if he didn’t slap a definition on himself, did that mean he wasn’t something that his parents, who were goddamn dead and who had hated him anyway, hadn’t approved of?

As the questions fired through his brain, pelting him with precisely the kind of self-analysis he had always stabbed out of his thought processes, he came to an even more shocking realization.

As important as all that shit was, as Christopher Columbus as he was getting, none of it came close to the most critical issue.

Not in the f**king slightest.

The real problem that he discovered made all that crap look like a walk in the park.

Chapter Seventy-nine

Assail did not condone swearing. In his mind, it was common and unnecessary. That being said, he’d had a shitty f**king week.

Down in the cellar of his house, in the vault, he and the twins had just finished organizing the haul for the last few days: Bills were stacked in bundles that had been through the counter, banded, and then sorted according to denomination – and the total was impressive, even by his standards.

All told, they had about two hundred thousand dollars.

The Fore-lesser and his merry band of slayers had been doing excellent work.

You’d think he’d be happy.

Not so.

In fact, he’d been a miserable f**king son of a bitch – and the reason for the bad humor just made him crankier.

"Go to Benloise," he told the twins. "Get the next batch of cocaine and come back here to separate it."

The twins were masters at cutting the stuff with additives and parceling it out into Baggies, and that was a good thing. The slayers were moving three times what had been sold before.

"Then make the delivery." Assail checked his watch. "It’s set for three a.m., so you should have enough time."

Getting up from the table, he stretched his arms over his head and arched his back. His body had been stiff lately, and he knew why: Being in a constant state of low-level arousal had tightened up the muscles in his thighs and his shoulders, among other physical aspects…which had been utterly resistant to self-regulation.

After years of not particularly caring for tending to his own erections, he’d fallen into a rut of pleasuring himself.

And all it seemed to do was underscore what he was not getting.

For the last week, he’d waited for Marisol to get in touch with him, expecting the phone to ring, and not because some unknown had shown up at her door again. The woman had wanted him as much as he had her, and surely that would lead to a reunion. It had not, however. And the fact that she had exhibited the kind of restraint he was struggling with, made him question not only his self-control, but his very sanity.

Indeed, he feared he was going to crack before she did.

Taking his leave, he went up the stairs and into the kitchen. The first thing he did was go over to his phone, in case she had called or in the event that Audi of hers had finally moved after seven nights of going nowhere fast: The damn thing had been parked in front of that house since he’d paid his visit, as if she mayhap knew he’d put a tracer on it.

Checking the screen, he saw that someone had called him, but it was a number that was not in his contact list.

And there was a voice mail.

He was not interested in fielding some human’s mis-dials, but as there was a chance it was a lesser breaking protocol, he knew he had to listen to the message.

As he accessed it, he walked in the direction of his humidor. He’d been smoking a lot lately, and probably doing too much coke. Which was painfully counter-intuitive – if one was already twitchy and frustrated, adding stimulants to that internal chemistry was gasoline to a fire –