We got settled into the booth, portioned out our food, and started eating before we started talking, because we could talk in the car, but we couldn't eat most of the food we'd gotten in the car while driving. Have you ever tried to eat a salad in a car? Of course, I hadn't ordered a salad, I had a burger, but you can't eat Jimmy's burgers in a car either unless you want to be wearing all that yummy condiment goodness.
"Red meat is bad for you, you know," Zerbrowski said, sort of forlornly.
"My cholesterol is fine," I said, stacking the bun higher with all the layers of vegetables on the burger.
"Mine, too," Brice said, as he took his first bite.
"You should have said something when we were ordering, if you were going to pout, Zerbrowski."
"Would you have ordered a salad to keep me company?"
"No, but I would have felt guilty about it." I took the first bite of the burger. It was juicy and cooked to perfection. The veggies were crisp, ripe, and yummy. I tried to keep the look of bliss off my face, but I think I failed, because Zerbrowski looked like something hurt.
Brice and I ate in happy silence for a few minutes, and then I said, "Sorry, Zerbrowski, but I eat salads at home because Nathaniel decides the menu; when I'm not at home, I eat what I want."
"Nathaniel is your live-in boyfriend?" Brice asked, after he'd swallowed another bite of burger.
"Yep," I said, and took another bite of burger.
Zerbrowski gave me a pained look.
I ignored him.
"You said he does the menus; what does that mean?"
"He does most of the cooking, as either head chef or sous chef to one of the others."
"You make it sound like a restaurant," Brice said.
I shrugged. "The men started it; whoever is the main cook for a meal is designated chef and the others are sous chefs. It's their system and it works, so I just work with it. I figure if I'm not doing the cooking, I shouldn't bitch about how they want to do it."
"Very reasonable," Brice said.
I shrugged again and took another bite of my burger.
"She usually is," Zerbrowski said, as he took a small bite of his salad. He chewed the lettuce as if it were the opposite of yummy.
He was only about nine years older than me; would I have to give up burgers someday? Of course, I was as lean as I had been in college, but more muscular. Zerbrowski had started getting a little thicker around the middle, nothing bad, but he had put on weight. With two kids and a wife, he had more trouble finding time to hit the gym. Kids seemed to make things a lot harder; good thing I'd probably never have to worry about that particular complication.
"Earth to Anita," Zerbrowski was saying.
I blinked at him. "What?"
"What were you thinking about so hard just now?" he asked, and he looked suspicious.
"Nothing," I said.
"Liar; women are never thinking nothing."
"When you say you're thinking nothing, I believe you," I said.
"I'm a man, I really am thinking nothing."
I gave him an exasperated smile. "What the hell does that mean?"
"It means I want to know what you were thinking about so hard just now."
"And I said, nothing, so I'm not going to answer you."
He grinned. "See, you were thinking something."
I frowned at him. "Drop it, okay?"
"No," he said.
"You enjoying your rabbit food?" I asked.
"That was low, Anita," he said, and he stirred his salad with his fork, not really eating it. Maybe that was how you lost weight on salads; you just didn't want to eat them, so you didn't eat, and voila, you lost weight.
I ate my first French fry. It was crisp, salty, and yummy, too.
"If your lovers are all shapeshifters, then why do they eat rabbit food?" Brice asked.
"You mean when they should be eating rabbits?" I asked.
"Did I offend you?" he asked.
I thought about it. "Sorry, I'm just grumpy. Most of them are exotic dancers, and eating too much meat will make you bloat sometimes, get a little meat tummy. When you take your clothes off professionally, you want to look your best doing it."
"Again, very reasonable," he said.
"You sound surprised," I said.
"If you'd been listening, Brice was saying that you have a reputation with the other cops for being unreasonable."
I looked at Brice. "That true?"
He studied my face as he said, "They say you have a bad temper and bust their balls a lot."
Zerbrowski snorted and almost choked on his soda.
I frowned at him. "I don't back down, so if that busts their balls, then so be it."
"They're jealous that the itty-bitty woman is better at their job than they are," Zerbrowski said, when he could talk again without coughing.
"Itty-bitty?" I said.
"Argue if you can?" he said.
I started to frown, and then just smiled. "I'm short, what the f**k of it?"
Brice laughed.
I looked at him.
He held up his hands in a little push-away gesture. "Hey, I got no problem with anything."
"Fine; weren't we supposed to be discussing you, not me?"
He nodded. "How can I discourage Arnet without pissing her off?"
"I'm not sure you can," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"Nathaniel Graison was my live-in sweetie but I wasn't telling everyone at work, so Arnet saw him a couple of times, thinking he was just a friend of mine. She decided she wanted to date him, and then felt like I'd made a fool of her by not saying up front that he was mine."
"He's a wereleopard, right?"
I looked at him; it wasn't a friendly look. "How do you know what kind of wereanimal he is?"
"He's on the website for Guilty Pleasures. They list the animal form of all the strippers, I mean dancers, who shapeshift."
"Were you checking up on my men?"
"I can look at the men at Guilty Pleasures and pass it off as research, getting to know the local wereanimals and vampires, and no one questions why a male cop would like looking at male strippers."
I had a moment of feeling a little odd that Marshal Brice might have looked at Nathaniel's picture, or Jason's, or Jean-Claude's, and lusted after them. Was it that he was a guy? I didn't think so. I think it was just that he worked with me and you're not supposed to lust after the sweeties of the other cops, or at least you're not supposed to let the cop in question know that you lust after his sweetie. It's just not cricket, somehow.
"Makes sense," I said.
He smiled. "Thought you were going to get weird about me looking at your guys."
"Its not the possible lusting after my guys; I know how yummy they are. It's the idea that you might be checking up on them for future hunting purposes that would piss me off."
He looked genuinely shocked. "I would never do that to a fellow officer."
"Jessica Arnet has; she damn near told me that someday Jean-Claude would go apeshit and we'd have to do something about him."
"She did not," Zerbrowski said. He looked genuinely shocked.
"She threatened your boyfriend?" Brice asked.
I nodded. I was suddenly not nearly as hungry.
"What did she say exactly?" Zerbrowski asked.
"She told me that Jean-Claude was just a pretty monster and if he wasn't around that Nathaniel would be free to have a life."
"She said exactly that?" he asked.
I nodded.
"When?" he asked.
"Three days ago."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I was trying to decide if this was something I should handle between Arnet and me, or if it was something to shove up the food chain."
"And?" Zerbrowski asked.
"And I think she went too far by threatening my boyfriend. She's gone to the club on nights that Nathaniel works. She's told him that she would rescue him from me and Jean-Claude. She's told me pretty much the same thing, but that was like over a year ago, almost two. I thought she'd let it go, moved on." I looked at Brice. "Nothing personal, Brice, but if she can obsess about you instead of my sweetie, I'd feed you to her."
"Gee, thanks, Blake," he said.
"If I'd told her that Nathaniel was my lover from the beginning, would she have fixated on him? I was embarrassed that I was living with two men, and I was trying so hard not to love Nathaniel. God, I was so in denial about how I felt about him back then."