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 gay or straight, it didn’t matter: Long as you could handle yourself in the field and you weren’t a total asshole, the Brotherhood was down with you. Look at V’s sexual history, for fuck’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 fuck 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 breasts.
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 fucking slightest.
The real problem that he discovered made all that crap look like a walk in the park.
SEVENTY-NINE
Assail did not condone swearing. In his mind, it was common and unnecessary. That being said, he’d had a shitty fucking 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 fucking 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.