“No, if she wants to suicide by cop, I don’t want it to be me.”

   “Suicide by cop: When a person wants to commit suicide but is afraid to do the task themselves, so they threaten police or pose a threat to innocents so that police feel they must kill them to protect others or themselves. Yes?”

   I nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.”

   “Do you believe that was what Cardinale intended with you tonight?”

   “No, at least not in the front of her head.”

   “Front of her head?”

   “It was a subconscious thought, in the back of her head, not a conscious thought, which would be in the front of the head.”

   “Ah, I think much more happens in the back of people’s heads than in the front.”

   “Ain’t that the God’s honest truth?” I said.

   “Yes, I think it is,” Echo said.

   I could feel the bass beating through the still-closed door; I kept walking and Roger opened the door, so well-timed it was like an automatic door. I didn’t even have to pause as we walked through. In fact, I hadn’t been planning to pause. I was just so used to security opening doors for me I took it for granted now. When did that happen?

   There had been a time when I would have known as much about Cardinale’s background as possible by now, but I’d trusted that if Jean-Claude thought she was okay, then she was, but what a six-hundred-year-old vampire king would think was okay might not be okay to me. Was it a sign that I trusted Jean-Claude that much, or that I’d grown arrogant?

   Echo paused with her hand on the door and turned to say, “I will make certain that Cardinale does nothing unfortunate tonight. If you can put this incident aside and be truly present for the date and its issues, I think that would be best. If you talk of all this first, it may spoil the mood.”

   “I was thinking the same thing.”

   She smiled, and it took her face from severe to truly beautiful. I understood why she didn’t use that particular smile much at work. Customers would have begged her to dance with them, even as dressed down as she could manage. I basked in the warmth of that smile, because I was on a very short list of people that got to have it aimed at them. It made me smile back, and blush, which was a habit I couldn’t seem to break entirely.

   The blush made her smile broaden enough to flash a delicate hint of fang and show that there was a dimple in that classically beautiful face. She touched my face and leaned in for a very unprofessional kiss. I knew how to French-kiss a vampire without nicking myself on the fangs, but her mouth was smaller than that of anyone else I’d kissed so it was more of a challenge, but it was worth it. She drew back first, leaving me a little breathless.

   “Enjoy as much of tonight as you can, Anita.”

   “It’s Jean-Claude. What’s not to enjoy?”

   She smiled. “Very true. I look forward to the next time we can share our king.”

   I blushed and couldn’t stop it. “Me, too.”

   She turned and looked at Ricky and Roger; I’d sort of forgotten about them. Echo could have that effect on me.

   Roger was staring at the floor as hard as he could. Ricky was looking at us as if we were something to eat. I glared at him. “You got something to add?”

   “You can’t blame a man for enjoying the show.”

   “Yes, actually I can.”

   “I am your superior and she is your queen. Both are people you should not be leering at,” Echo said.

   “I can control what I say and what I do around beautiful women, but I can’t control involuntary body responses.”

   “We don’t care about your erection,” Echo said. “It’s not important to us.”

   His anger slid across my skin like the smell of well-cooked meat. I’d acquired the ability to feed on anger the way that Jean-Claude could feed on lust. He’d shared that ability with me, but so far siphoning off people’s anger was something only I could do.

   I sniffed the air, making a big deal out of it. “Calm the fuck down, Ricky. You’re starting to smell like food: yummy, yummy anger.”

   “Fuck you.”

   “You wish.”

   “You just can’t behave respectfully, can you?” Echo asked.

   “Anita just seems to bring out the worst in me, I guess,” Ricky said.

   “You are officially on probation, Ricky,” she said.

   “That’s not fair.”

   “Life isn’t supposed to be fair.”

   “What does that mean?”

   “It means that only children whine, That’s not fair. Grown-ups understand that fairness is rare and good treatment must be earned.”

   “I’m good at my job.”

   “You are. That’s why I’m not going to fire you tonight. But remember this, Ricky: If you disrespect Anita, or any of the female employees again, you will be out of a job.”

   “How can I not look at them and do my job?”

   “You can look, but don’t leer.”

   “I don’t understand the difference.”

   She sighed. “I think you mean that.” She frowned and turned to me. “Go to our king and shared lover. I will see that Cardinale does no harm and try to explain the difference between a look and a leer to this one.”

   “Good luck on that last part,” I said.

   “Perhaps I will enlist some of the other male guards to explain the masculine niceties of looking but not being lecherous.”

   “Good idea,” I said.

   She opened the door for me, and the music engulfed us so that I could barely hear her as she told me good-bye, with her face back to its super-serious head-of-security expression. I found myself a little sad to leave her without one more kiss. I’d had other female lovers, but never one that made me think words like girlfriend. Was Echo my girlfriend? I wasn’t sure what to call her, but I was beginning to want to call her something. I’d never had a woman make me feel like I wanted to hang a title on her. I’d had one who had demanded it, but I hadn’t wanted to call her my girlfriend. This time it would be my idea, and ironically, I wasn’t sure Echo would want the title. She’d take it if I wanted to give it to her, but she didn’t need it to feel secure, and maybe that was part of why I wanted to give it to her. Romance can be very confusing.

   I left my girlfriend behind to make sure the live-in girlfriend of my ex-lover and current vampire servant didn’t harm anyone, while I went to have a date with our shared lover. I would have said shared boyfriend, but Echo really only had one person she dated, and that was Fortune, the love of her life and afterlife. Fortune was my girlfriend’s girlfriend, or maybe Fortune was my girlfriend, too. So did that make either of them my girlfriend’s girlfriend or just my girlfriend? Was Jean-Claude their girlfriend’s boyfriend? Or since everyone had at least occasional sex with each other, were words like boyfriend and girlfriend too old-fashioned to cover it? I was beginning to get a headache, and it wasn’t from the dance music.