by JD Ruskin
“I can look up more quotes for you,” he ventured, aware that he was frowning harder as Bertie moved away and the offer didn’t call him back. He could get used to Bertie sitting close to him. That probably wasn’t a good idea. For a second he glared down at the book as if the poems had created this problem and not his body, his imagination, and everything that came out of Bertie’s mouth.
“First get us a late lunch, would you?” Bertie stepped around one of Arthur’s temporary stack of books and pulled a book from the middle of a small pile. He let out a guilty-sounding gulp when the top of the stack fell over and quickly bent down to straighten it before glancing back at Arthur as though Arthur was going read him the riot act or point out that he was putting the books back in the wrong order.
Arthur didn’t get a chance to say anything. His stomach growled before he could, right on cue at the mention of lunch. Bertie was too busy with the books to grin, but Arthur imagined one anyway.
“There’s some things in the kitchen, or if you prefer, money and take-out menus in the envelope on the fridge, but we need something to keep us from fainting away, don’t we? While we do all this hard work.”
He stood up again, not even looking close to fainting away. Arthur tried to stay serious, even if he was being teased or tricked again.
“I really don’t expect you to feed me.”
“Arthur.” He got another sigh for his efforts, a longer, louder one. “I am certain any other assistant would not have done at all. You’re… you’re a very good boy.” He cleared his throat and moved quickly on. “Look at what you’re already doing for me, putting my house in order.”
Arthur hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms. It made him feel a bit like a hausfrau, but Bertie didn’t give him time to reflect on it or protest.
“I’d like to keep you as long as possible, and I can’t do that if you’re dead or in a hospital because you won’t feed yourself.”
There were counterarguments, Arthur was sure, but he couldn’t seem to think of any. Maybe that touch had scrambled his brain. He glared at the book of love poems again.
“Okay,” he agreed in the same soft tone as before, glancing carefully over in time to see Bertie’s shoulders drop. Arthur wondered if he’d been expecting another argument, but he didn’t say anything. Just waved again to indicate that he didn’t care what the food was when Arthur tried to get his preference.
He simply took his new book and curled up on the floor in front of the fireplace, where Arthur had a feeling a roaring fire would be crackling soon enough.
Arthur watched him for another moment, thinking about the idea of selfish, jealous, miserly dragons and where it had come from. Then he got up to feed them both before he could ask Bertie. He had no doubt that Bertie could tell him; he just wasn’t sure he could make it through the explanation without embarrassing himself even more.
THE RAIN continued to fall for the next week and into the week after that. It meant late fall was starting in earnest, and earlier, darker evenings. It also meant more people ordering food in, which meant more work and more tips for Arthur on busy weekend nights.
The money was good. He rode fast so the food was always hot, and people appreciated that, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep doing it, especially in the rain. It helped that Bertie insisted on feeding him whenever he got the chance, but the rain had soaked through his jackets last weekend and riding around in the damp ones was giving him what felt like a permanent chill in his bones.
Kate was not happy with him but did her best to dry his clothes out, even wasting quarters in the laundry room using the dryers. They were only going to get wet again, but there was no reasoning with her. It was like trying to convince Bertie that a cup of noodles was an adequate lunch.
It turned out dragons, or at least his dragon, had a lot in common with his mother and weren’t able to stand watching people go without a meal. Arthur would have felt worse about it, but it was hard to feel guilty on a full stomach; and there was something about the sight of Bertie wearing an apron, of all things, and humming in the kitchen that shut Arthur up before he could protest. Bertie loved to cook but didn’t like to cook for just himself, or so he claimed. Arthur didn’t believe him at first, but after seeing him in the kitchen, he changed his mind. It did make him wonder what Bertie did for food, or would have done in his dragon form when he wouldn’t have been able to reach the countertop.
Bertie also insisted they take time out from working to eat properly, setting up plates around the island in the kitchen while explaining that he’d converted the dining room to another room to hold his books years ago and there was no other place to eat. Arthur considered trying to convert some of the books to an electronic format, but he had a feeling Bertie used only the technology he had to and would ignore any eBooks. He was as old-fashioned about that as he was about eating rituals like dinner.
Of course, after eating he’d stay chatting in the kitchen forever if Arthur didn’t eventually get up and insist on washing the dishes or putting them in the dishwasher before heading back to work. Bertie would sigh but agree with him, slipping back into his study with long, forlorn looks in Arthur’s direction.
He also took to clearing his throat before entering the main room and glancing at Arthur before removing any book from whatever temporary pile Arthur had it in. It was as if he didn’t want to disturb anything and feared Arthur’s response if he did. Arthur couldn’t figure it out. He had never yelled or even snapped at him. They were Bertie’s books. He could mess up Arthur’s increasingly complex system of stacks if he wanted to, and Arthur had no right to comment at all. It wasn’t as if Arthur would have shouted at him. He’d really only ever gotten furiously angry once in his life and it hadn’t been over books, yet if he turned to see which book Bertie was taking, maybe raise an eyebrow as he considered where it might end up later, he’d get a quick “I just need to borrow it for a bit. Sorry, Arthur” every time.
It would always be returned by the next day, too, which was better than however Bertie had put them away before. Now if only Arthur could convince him to switch temperature controls to something more reliable and steady than the fireplace—or whatever was going on with the heating that kept the house so hot. It might be a losing battle. If Bertie owned socks, he had yet to put them on that Arthur had seen.
In any event, the antique books were definitely getting moved to a better room as soon as Arthur cleared this one. He had the shelves clean and a rudimentary system for keeping them organized that was, of course, dependent on the other books he was sure to find in the other rooms. He was going to wipe the layers of dust off the knickknacks he’d collected as well, as soon as he had time, because it was worth it to do the job thoroughly.
And maybe there was a part of him that wanted Bertie to see it and call him something sweet again. Any of his terms of endearment would do, though “pet” and “pearl” were the ones that haunted Arthur’s dreams.
He took his time finishing Bertie’s second book, mostly because as he read it now, he heard Bertie’s voice reading it to him. Arthur had it bad and he could admit it, though it was probably just because he hadn’t had any kind of dating life in years and he happened to be working for someone who was incredibly hot. It didn’t help that Bertie’s books were fascinating in their own right.
The first had been large and ambitious in a dissertation-gone-out-of-control kind of way, a sprawling exploration of the witch and werewolf hunts carried out by humans, mostly on other humans, though Bertie had documented a few cases where some Beings’ lives had been lost too. It must have taken him years, though when Arthur finally finished it, he found himself wishing it had gone into more detail. The ultimate conclusion wasn’t terribly original; the more scared and abandoned humankind felt during the darkest of their dark hours, the more they turned on anyone different or with a perceived power they did not possess. But the way it was described was unlike anything Arthur had read before. It was no wonder the boo
k was epic in length: Bertie brought everything to life.
After knowing Bertie two days, Arthur had expected to find sympathy for the victims, most of them innocent of any real crime, even the real witches that might have been considered something like doctors today. He was surprised to also find sympathy even for the humans doing the persecuting, the torturing. Their ancestors had destroyed their books, their centers of learning, and they lived in isolated, perilous conditions with pestilence, war, and famine lurking around every corner; and those in charge told them that the very ones who might have saved them, or at least helped them, were the causes of it all. It was tragic to think of what could have been.
Not that the beauty of the lines had blinded Arthur to the ridiculously packed index and bibliography that indicated exactly how many texts Bertie consulted in his research. Whoever “organized” it had not had an easy job. Arthur could only imagine the mess, which made him resolve to go through the notes he’d already typed up and footnote and tag every source he could, to save time later.
He jumped into the second book after the first, wondering why someone like Bertie would choose such a serious subject matter, but unable to stop reading. The Blood of Wolves was a study of the massacre of wolves, and the subsequent flight of all werewolves from England during the Anglo-Saxon period. It had a detailed explanation of where many of them had ended up, with a few chapters at the end about the shifter Beings among the Native Americans and how they’d been mostly wiped out along with their human relatives before those European weres could ever really encounter them. It was a tragedy, and Bertie’s sympathy was with everyone; from the early farmers in those primitive forests who had encountered fearsome, giant wolves; to the weres who had faced first slaughter and then the slow deforestation that took away their homes.
This must have been what Bertie meant when he said dragons tried to look at the larger picture. There were no sides Bertie didn’t try to understand, though Arthur detected some anger in the later chapters that hadn’t been in the first book—anger at those who killed the wolves and weres and then tried to claim their power and strength by taking their names and wearing their pelts. It made Arthur think about dragons being hunted for the power in their body parts. People frequently compared dragons to weres, but Arthur had never really thought about why.
Bertie’s book or books on dragons had to be in the house somewhere. Arthur just hadn’t found any copies yet, and he was afraid to snoop around too much. Not that he’d encountered any locked doors. What he had encountered was dust in every room but the two most used, the kitchen and Bertie’s study, although the study was a mess too.
When he peeked into the study, he saw a desk with a large, obscenely comfortable-looking chair, a laptop, another couch, and the only TV he’d seen in the house. The couch and TV were both low to the floor—really low, as if Bertie watched TV in his dragon form. Arthur remembered Bertie’s dragon legs as being shorter, so Bertie probably couldn’t climb up onto a regular-size couch without difficulty. It still seemed decadent somehow, like a pile of pillows on the floor of a palace or something similar. Bertie would probably have worked that way too, if he could have used his laptop with those claws, but Arthur somehow doubted he could. It might be part of what took him so long to write, but perhaps he thought more clearly in his natural form.
The curtains were drawn, leaving the room dark except for the electric lights, and instead of bookshelves, there were end tables covered in magazines, journals, and paper notebooks. Arthur half expected to find a quill, but instead there were costly pens sitting next to dishes and jewelry boxes that had been used as ashtrays. Arthur emptied them and put everything but the dishes with the other knickknacks he intended to clean, and then stopped on his way into work the next day to use the leftover money from his trip to the herbalist to buy more toilet paper and two cheap ashtrays.
He did it for the sake of cleanliness and his sanity first, and for the smile he got at the sight of them second. It didn’t take much to get a smile from Bertie anyway. Arthur just had to walk in the door and Bertie would be grinning and talking and giving him confusing orders that Arthur couldn’t seem to make himself mind.
He resolved to get more information on dragons before his own smiles got any more out of control. Though so far a deeper Internet search had only gotten him facts on reptiles and information from the last census. He mentioned that one to Bertie, asking why the U.S. population of dragons was so small compared to other countries—not that any country had a population of dragons that could be called large, unless he counted the Firesnakes in Finland—although in proportion to the population of the country, the numbers were about the same. Bertie stopped fretting over some bread he was making to huff at him.
“The numbers reflect those dragons who identify as ‘pure-blooded’, Arthur, which indicates how flawed that census information is.” It was a surprise to watch Bertie pop his dough into an electric oven: Arthur had expected to find something less thoroughly modern and more like charred bricks and wood fire. “Not that there isn’t some concern amongst my kind about losing our species completely to interbreeding with humans. Dragons used to be much larger.”
It made Arthur pause. He’d been asked to slice onions, so he was slicing and trying not to cry. That idea was a new one. He hadn’t realized dragons were capable of having children with humans. A few of the Beings were; he didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him before.
“It’s a short-sighted, almost human view, since in my opinion survival of DNA means living forever, but I suppose it’s an understandable fear. Nobody wants to disappear.” Arthur wasn’t able to look over, not with his eyes stinging, but he had the feeling he was being carefully observed. “Soon enough my parents…. You haven’t met them yet, Arthur, but they are darlings. Perhaps not darlings…. They are quite difficult and concerned with the family name, and they think of me as their hopelessly fanciful son, throwing away his potential by not dominating some university with my genius, and they definitely identify as ‘pure-blooded’. Not that they hate humans, not at all. Of course not. They’ll love you… once they get to know you.” Bertie cleared his throat. “They’re both professors. I’m sure you can understand when I tell you their standards are high?”
Arthur nodded without looking over, mostly because he wasn’t sure where Bertie had been going with that, but he wanted to hear more.
“Soon enough, Arthur, my darling parents are going to start throwing willing, pure-blooded females my way to at least ensure that the line continues.
“We’re a very old family on both sides,” he went on when Arthur must have visibly reacted. Arthur couldn’t be sure; his vision had suddenly gone blurry and wet. “And as long as I don’t have to marry the girl, I admit, it’s not entirely objectionable. I might enjoy being a father.”
Bertie wasn’t smoking, but Arthur imagined him drawing on a cigarette anyway, exhaling a moment later in a long, lazy spiral. He went on in a quiet, casual voice.
“What would you think of a houseful of little hatchlings, Arthur? Are you fond of children?”
“Children?” was the only word Arthur could manage for a moment. Maybe it was the image of Bertie with a female of his own kind that rendered him speechless. “I didn’t know you were… that you liked women.” He’d been thinking that dragons must be like fairies, open to any gender and experience, or that Bertie’s flirting was merely habitual after all. Bertie started coughing and wasn’t able to stop until he had some water.
“Lovely creatures,” he whispered at last, and then shuddered so much that Arthur saw it from the corner of his eye. “But yech, no. No, pet, I do not like women. At least, not when they’re naked. You have no worries on that score.”
“Worries?” Arthur wasn’t able to deny it, not that Bertie gave him a chance to.
He slid back over to stand next to Arthur, scoop up his onions, and then drop them in a pan to caramelize them.
“Arthur,” he began almost hesitantly, then stopp
ed himself. A moment later he handed Arthur a cool, wet towel.
“For your eyes, love,” he explained with no sign of a grin, and then turned back to stir the onions.
About the only thing to be grateful for about the whole conversation, aside from confirming where Bertie’s interests lay, was that the overwhelming scent of onions and fresh bread must have hidden any trace of the momentary confusion and hurt Arthur had been feeling. Imagining how terrible he must have looked with red, watery eyes was bad enough; Arthur didn’t need to know if he’d smelled pathetic too.
He wasn’t sure if he could ask Bertie anything else about dragons now, not when one answer had left him more confused than ever and pretty sure he’d made his crush even more obvious.
If he wanted to keep this job for as long as he could, he ought to stop fantasizing about his overly flirtatious boss and find someone else instead. If Kate got that job, he could quit delivering food, and then maybe he’d have some time where he wouldn’t feel too exhausted. He didn’t think his crush on Bertie would go away, not with Bertie being the smartest, kindest, sexiest thing he’d ever seen, but at least it should be manageable if he got laid once in a while.
It all seemed reasonable enough to think about, right up until Arthur fell asleep, then it was Bertie kissing him, sucking him off, fucking him, and then he’d wake up and imagine it all over and over again with cheap, bedside lotion on his fingers and his knees bent so he could push in and think of Bertie. Then he’d come into work and catch a glimpse of that tongue before Bertie would beam at him and wish him a “Good morning, Arthur” as if he’d been waiting impatiently for Arthur’s return, and Arthur couldn’t help smiling back at him until he remembered himself and what he’d been doing just an hour before.
He honestly had no idea what to say when Professor Gibson e-mailed him to ask how the work was going and to let him know he’d sent Bertie a copy of his thesis. When Kate asked, her eyes narrowed, Arthur could barely resist the urge to tell her… if not everything, then enough of it. It would only alarm her, he told himself, and anyway, so far his feelings hadn’t interfered with his work.