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“Guillermo may I speak to you for a moment thank you excuse us please,” said Nandor. Halfway through the sentence he already had his hand around Guillermo’s elbow and was pulling him away from the bewildered newcomers and out of the room. Guillermo did not protest as he was—not quite dragged, but very very insistently directed away from the party, down the hallway, and into an empty room.
The Temple of Blood Devourers was full of empty rooms—or maybe this was their intended purpose. Vampires did a lot of arguing.
“What’s wrong?” Guillermo asked as Nandor shut the door behind them.
“Why are you all of a sudden introducing me to people as your husband?” Nandor demanded.
“Because…you are,” Guillermo said. Nandor let out a shout of frustration and threw his hands up.
“Unbelievable!” he cried. “You cannot just change your mind about these things Guillermo! They are very serious! Do you not take this marriage seriously?”
“Of course I take it seriously!” Guillermo protested. “How do I not—”
“I am not your husband! I am your wife!”
There should have been a record scratch sound effect. Guillermo should have been drinking something so he could spit it out. The universe at large should have done something to reflect the way Guillermo’s entire brain imploded and exploded at the same time over those four short words.
He tried to say something, but he couldn’t quite make his mouth form any words. He blinked several times, and finally managed,
“What?”
“What do you mean what? I proposed to you and I asked you to be my wife and you said no, you wanted to be my husband, and we have the argument and then the big heart-to-heart and I do a bunch of thinking, and I agree! Okay, you can be the husband! You are happy, I am happy, and now suddenly you go switching it around on me—!”
“Hold on, whoa, no, I never said I wanted to be the husband, I said I wanted to be your husband! We’re both husbands! I’m your husband, you’re my husband! There is no wife in this equation!”
Now it was Nandor’s turn to stare incomprehensibly at Guillermo.
“How does that work?” he asked, with just a touch of derision. “We cannot both be the husband.”
“What do you mean how does it work? The way it’s been working!”
“The way it works now is there is only one husband.”
“Not on my side of things it doesn’t! It hasn’t! Isn’t! Whatever!” He was trying to think of a single instance at any point between the moment Nandor first proposed and five seconds ago that Nandor had even once mentioned this particular marital dynamic detail. “Have you been telling people you’re my wife?”
“Of course I have!” Nandor said. “You think I would go around lying that I am the husband or something? You are the husband, you are in charge, you are the one who makes the decisions—"
“Laszlo is Nadja’s husband and he doesn’t make the decisions!” Had Nandor been more deferential since their marriage? He’d certainly been more agreeable, but Guillermo just thought it was a mixture of being happier than he’d been in a long time and finally recognizing Guillermo as an equal.
Nandor rolled his eyes.
“Laszlo is Nadja’s guy-wife. Nadja is his husband.”
“That—that’s not what they call each other.”
“But that’s what they are.”
“Nandor, I don’t want to be in charge. This is a partnership—”
“Yes, I know! You already did that speech when you said you wanted to be the husband, remember?”
“Your husband,” Guillermo said, pointedly. “Not the husband. Your husband.”
“What. Is. The difference.”
“The difference is you are also my husband!”
“No I am not!”
Guillermo put his fingers to his temples. This was getting them nowhere.
“I do not…feel comfortable referring to you as my wife,” he said slowly.
“Why not? What is wrong with being a wife?”
“Nothing! If you were a woman I wouldn’t be any more comfortable calling you my husband! Guy wives aren’t a thing anymore; there’s just wives and husbands! And the women are wives and the men are husbands and that’s just how that works now.”
This wasn’t fair, Nandor was dredging up gender roles so old they were carved in stone, so why was Guillermo the one who sounded like a conservative pastor giving a sermon about the dangers of same sex marriage?
“But I do not want to be your husband,” Nandor said, in a voice that was mostly irritable, but just soft and sad enough at the edges as to make Guillermo feel like an absolute heel. “I want to be your wife.”
“Why? What do you get out of being my—my wife—” It felt so weird even saying it. “—that you don’t get out of being my husband?”
“Because as my husband, it is your job to take care of me, and as your wife, it is my job to be taken care of,” Nandor said. “If we are both husbands, who is being taken care of?”
Guillermo was very quiet for a moment. He cupped one elbow in his hand, and rested his chin in his other hand, pressing his mouth against his palm to keep himself from finding out if the sound rising in his throat was a scream or a laugh. After a minute, he shifted his grip enough to speak.
“So you don’t take care of me?”
“I support you,” Nandor said, as if it was obvious. “That is different.”
“How is it different,” Guillermo asked, calmly. Nandor rolled his eyes and made an exasperated noise. He stared at the ceiling, thinking in that very Nandor way that said it was all your fault he was having to go through all this effort.
“It is…you are fighting the enemies, and I am handing you the stakes. Yes?”
“That’s what I’d be doing anyway!” Guillermo exploded. “That’s what I’ve been doing!”
“Exactly!” Nandor exploded right back. “That was my big realization! That was why I agreed you should be the husband! When you look at us, over all these years, the more you acted like the husband, the happier we were! If I was the husband, it would be going backwards, like when you were my familiar! I don’t want that!”
Guillermo was silent again. When he spoke again, it was in a much calmer voice.
“We aren’t going to fall back into old patterns just because we’re both the husband. I mean—husbands. Nothing is different. It’s just what we call each other.”
“I am very happy to be your wife, Guillermo,” Nandor said, softly. Guillermo hated when he got quiet and earnest like that. If Nandor ever figured that out just what it did to him, Guillermo would never win another argument again. “I am happier as a wife than I ever was as a husband.”
Guillermo tried to shore up his suddenly rapidly crumbling resolve. Nandor was even doing the big, sad eyes like a soaking wet kitten begging to brought in out of the rain.
“Let’s, let’s compromise, maybe? I’ll call you my husband, you call yourself my…wife, and we both know what we mean. Right?”
Nandor did not look totally convinced, and gave Guillermo a dangerously woeful look.
“I suppose,” he said. “But you know that I am your wife, yes? Not your husband.”
“Yes,” Guillermo said, with great difficulty. You love him you love him you want him to be happy… “Even when I call you my husband, I know you’re my…wife.”
Nandor relaxed. The triumph in his smile would have been infuriating if it wasn’t mixed with so much relief.
“Good,” he said. Nandor reached out a hand and danced his fingertips across Guillermo’s belt buckle, smiling coyly. “And now I can perform my wifely duties, yes?”
Guillermo tried to smile and keep his skeleton from ejecting out the back of his skin. He was actually relieved when the door opened.
“Oh,” Laszo said, sounding put out. “I’m supposed to tell you two you can’t sneak off to fool around until after you’ve mingled for at least half an hour.”
“We’re not fooling around,” Guillermo said.
“Yes, I can see that. Note the expression of deep disappointment gracing my visage. What the hell are you two doing in here?”
“I needed to make Guillermo understand why I am his wife and not his husband,” Nandor explained. Laszlo shot Guillermo a puzzled and slightly disdainful look.
“Obviously.”
“That’s not how it works anymore! You and Nadja--”
“Hold on there,” Laszlo said, sharply. “I may call her my good lady-wife but we all know Nadja’s my husband.”
Guillermo let out a sound that was half-laugh and half-sob and buried his face in his hands.