by TJ Cross
"Yes, as a matter of fact," the dragon answered.
Letting him in, I walked towards my bedroom, not caring enough about my decency to need to close or lock the door. After all, he had already seen everything, hadn't he? Everett seemed to have the same idea, because he followed me to my bedroom, strutting around like he owned the place.
I turned around to face him as I dropped the towel, my cock instantly stiffening at the knowledge that he was looking at me. "Like what you see?" I managed to say, putting on a flirty edge to my words.
"Very much," he answered, watching intently -- with that alpha hunger in his eyes that absolutely turned me on, even if for some reason I knew there was an impressive, impossible, and impassable barrier that would stop me from being able to carry on like usual with him.
I made a play of tugging the bottom of my t-shirt to dance and do a little show for him, but as he watched with greed and lust in his eyes, I decided to subvert his expectations by instead lifting my shirt only to reveal my belly -- swollen and large with the womb he had impregnated into me.
"That's your baby," I murmured, cupping my round belly with both my hands.
Everett watched and watched and watched, struggling to stay impassive. He was a naturally passionate man, I knew, and being toyed like this was not his forte.
But it gave control of the situation to me, even if it was only for a minute or two, and I appreciated the reversal of power here.
I was the magnificent one with the large belly, the magical baby inside me proving how valuable I was to Everett. I was the one carrying his heir, even if I could still see him dismiss this truth as an impossibility every time his eyes browsed all over me.
"You look beautiful," he said with strong emphasis.
I thanked him, smiling as I slipped on a pair of belted chino shorts that went down past my knees. "You wanna talk indoors or outdoors?" I asked, quickly covering up and bringing attention back to his original agenda.
"Outdoors would be nice. I feel like every time we've spent time together it's always been inside," he answered.
Inside me, more like, I murmured softly. The thought of him fucking me filled me with yet more lust and I realized then going outdoors was probably going to be a good thing.
If I stayed in the apartment alone with him, it was only a matter of time before we would be pinned together in bed.
And I wasn't prepared to do that unless he gave me at least some indication of how he would factor into my life and my future as the parent to a dragon baby.
It wasn't until we were well outside, down by the playground that sat in the courtyard of the three apartment blocks that comprised my building, that he started talking.
"I've been wondering about the meaning of love lately," Everett began. "True love is something we dragons revere so greatly... although it seems so contradictory. Dragons are destructive creatures, cruel beasts that if left unchecked could wreak great devastation onto their communities. Yet we place true love even above fire and blood."
Nodding, I thought on the implications of what he was saying. "Could it be that dragons crave the redemptive qualities of love?"
"How so?"
"Well, many humans are drawn to organized religion because it offers us a pathway to redemption, like, you know, Heaven," I offered. "Doing good deeds all the time is one thing, but many people are comforted by having the option to have all your sins and misdeeds forgiven if you're savvy enough to repent and think about God before it's too late."
Everett nodded, the motion of his neck looking bizarrely stilted for once. I realized now that this was what happened when you were in close proximity to a shifter of great age and alien values -- even describing the idea of what most religions described as Heaven was something he needed to process and understand.
"Have you ever been in love before?" I asked him, point-blank, stopping by the sidewalk so I could properly follow his reaction.
Everett didn't even hesitate. "Yes, once and only once before. It's going to be a little over a hundred years ago now. I suspect you won't be surprised to find out it was a man I was in love with. He was a shifter, but one of particularly weak stock that he was practically human like you... his family had intermarried with humans for generations and as a result he controlled no powers. But that didn't matter, of course. His personality was what attracted him to me, not his lineage."
"What happened to him, then?" I asked, but my stomach twisted even as I could already guess how this story would end.
"He died. Not of old age after a happy period together, sadly. But in a senseless act of violence that he was just a bystander to. It's been such a long time yet I feel so angry about it still. I loved him -- and I was burnt by it. His loss shaped my future opinions on, well, love," Everett confessed.
I looked at him, nodding. "I'm so sorry," I murmured.
"It doesn't matter," the alpha shrugged. "He died, he was supposed to die anyway. Unless you're a dragon or some other unfortunate creature burdened with immortality, death is just a date away."
My hands held his. The psychic connection between us seemed to hum in my head, becoming more active upon the touch. I didn't need our bond to tell me that his cynicism over his long-gone lover was still raw.
"It all makes sense to me somehow, like there are things clicking into place here," I murmured to Everett. "I feel like I know you deeper than... I don't know. There's something missing. Maybe it's this crazy bond we have, over what we share. Over the baby."
I paused and exhaled, saying what I needed to say. "Your baby."
He glanced at me, unwilling to fight me on this, but still finding it in himself to say, "I don't have to remind you that there has to be some sort of a logical explanation for our baby, for it to be ours."
Now I laughed. "Logical? Everett, it's a goddamn miracle womb inside my male, gay belly. I don't think logic applies anymore, even if you're so insistent it could only come to pass through magic or something. Give it up, Everett. Just accept it."
"May as well ask me to accept that the world is flat, or that the sky is actually below me," he remarked with a smile. "But I believe you. I do, honestly. It's my baby... and I want to be part of our baby's life."
My heart felt the warmth of joy that came from his declaration. "I'll find you that explanation, no matter what it takes," I grinned. "Even if it's fucking time travel."
"That's not an element of dragon power," Everett seriously answered.
I laughed again and punched his arm. "Relax, you uptight flying reptile."
We were close enough to kiss, and I blinked momentarily as I felt myself draw closer to him, the attraction between us undeniable. My lips made for his, and they pressed in the sweet embrace of a kiss...
Jolting me away from the playground and instead to some other place. I felt yanked out of my body, now in some dark candlelit room. Soft surface. My heels dug into the surface... it was a mattress. A bed. There was Everett, asleep next to me, naked as I was. What happened here?
"Did you drug me?" I said, confused but still game enough to joke about it. I reached over to turn him to face me, but before I could do that, I felt a whooshing sound in my ear as I began to get swept away again by the jolting, yanking sensation.
Now I was on a boat, looking out to the sea as I felt Everett's presence behind me. He wrapped his arms around me and whispered in my ear.
"I've been meaning to tell you this for a very long time, Jordan. I love you," he said, pressing his head against mine. I turned around in surprise, wondering why he called me by that name.
But again the rushing wind overwhelmed my head, no longer transporting me to different scenes but instead flooding me with images I barely had the time to process, let alone interpret.
A beach, with my footsteps the only ones to see for miles to go...
Tangled with him by a fireplace, moaning as I scratched into his back while he pushed his whole weight against my body...
A busy street surrounded by other pedestri
ans, turning my head and laughing as I called his name, only it wasn't in my own voice...
Jordan, I mentally noted.
"Yes," I heard a voice reverberate in the sky. I looked around but saw no one. It was as if it was Everett's, only deeper. "I see it now..." it went on.
And just like that, I felt my body split open in agonizing pain that almost as instantly as it surrounded me, it left me. When I came to, I was still at the playground, in Everett's arms.
"Do you know what just happened?" he said urgently, the growl in his voice apparent.
"I don't... I don't understand..."
Everett looked at me in a way I had never seen him look at me, haunted by something. "We both experienced that blast of memories... except they weren't my memories, Finn. They were yours. You had his memories."
"I had Jordan's memories... your first love's," I whispered, shocked.
"True love did give us that baby," Everett said, his tone colored with revelation.
"A love that's survived over generations... and incarnations," I completed his thought for him.
But it was too much for me to take, too much for me to understand. Even looking at Everett made me feel disturbed -- the alpha dragon held me close to him but I pulled out of his grip and ran.
I had to. All of it made sense, but none of it made sense to me.
CHAPTER TEN
"Mom, can you tell me about Nana? You always said there was a big family secret about her you were going to tell me some day, but after she died... you sort of never did."
I was at my parents' place, finding sanctuary in the comfort of my family. I had told them everything, glad to get rid of the discomfort that would have come from trying to avoid the topic of my very visibly changed body. At first they had taken it for a joke, but in the end, they listened.
After a while, they even started joking about it. My dad, a lifelong prankster, announced to me that unless the baby kicks while he was cupping my belly, he was going to assume that I just had one crate of beer too many.
"Beer bellies are soft, Dad," I laughed, shaking my head in amusement.
"No, they aren't," my father answered. "Not when you've got a stomach full of buffalo wings too. Ask me again after Monday Night Football."
My mother, in contrast, was still getting over the pregnant-man thing. She decided she was going to believe me, but believing me meant I was also still getting the sort of silent treatment that came from her judging me for being so sexually careless.
But you couldn't call it careless anyway, could you? It's not like I walked into that first tryst with Everett thinking this was a possibility, that I might actually end up pregnant from it.
If it was, I would have definitely insisted on a condom.
"You know, baby or no baby, I probably should've insisted on one anyway," I chuckled to myself.
When I felt my mother had thawed a little, I asked her about her mother, the eccentric grandmother I had adored and remembered fondly even though she had died about ten years ago.
"Finn, she was a wonderful woman, but you would know that already," my mother said. I watched her consider all the various stories she had about her, waiting for her to choose the best one. I knew which one it would be. It was always the same one. "When I was a little girl, my mother had a pink jeep that she drove all over the state. It was a noisy, barely functional thing she had somehow bought off an army base before I was born, but it never once broke down. She'd do all sorts of errands in that jeep, wearing a scarf around her head and seating me and your uncle Bill in the back. We used to love it."
"What happened to the jeep?" I asked.
"Had to sell it, of course. She had to make her own path alone... something happened between her and the rest of the family, and because of it, she just... was left to fend for herself. With two kids. Her husband abandoning her too, siding with my mother's own family in this."
This had to be part of the secret she was hiding. "Why? I mean, that just seems to crazy."
"Well... are you sure you want to know, Finn?"
I nodded.
"Because she didn't fit in. My mother, you see... all she'd ever tell anyone was that she came from rural New Hampshire, but there was a lot more to that. This was back before the Revelation, of course, long, long before shifters came to the awareness of humans. So her original family, they're a small pack of wolf shifters... she was a shifter herself, but for some reason -- her choice, as I came to understand it -- she sort of forsook being a shifter. Like in order to hide and live among humans, she just abandoned her nature as a shifter to begin with."
"She... became human?"
"No," my mother corrected me. "She never was truly human. She was just a shifter who no longer had the aspect of the wolf in her. Meaning she only had a human side... so she was a human shifter, but not quite a human."
"But that would mean..."
I saw my father walk over to my mother, standing behind her and squeezing her shoulders as she nodded to confirm what I was saying.
"Yes, son, you're a shifter yourself. So am I. Your father isn't, but who knows if there's a shifter up the chain? Since the Revelation everybody's discovered they've had ancestors with shifter blood. Some of these humans, upon awareness of this, even find the power to unlock their shifter affinity and start their lives anew."
"But others don't, and just live normal, ordinary human lives," I murmured, thinking of my mother, thinking of Rufus.
"Your grandmother chose to abandon being a shifter, so she could blend in as best as she could with humans. It worked. Am I truly a shifter as a result? Both my parents are, so I should be... but I've never once felt any urges or desires that would suggest that I had a bestial spirit inside me," my mother clarified.
"Neither do I."
My father raised an eyebrow. "Son, you've got a dragon baby inside your belly. I don't think you can exactly say you don't have a bestial spirit inside you."
I laughed. "No, I don't mean like that. I suppose... this conveniently explains what happened this afternoon, then."
"When you ran away from your boyfriend?" my mother asked.
"Not my boyfriend, mom, he's just, uh, the guy who got me pregnant," I reminded her. "Anyway, let's pick this conversation up in a little bit, okay? At dinnertime or something."
My father snorted. "Nothing like talking about dragon impregnation to truly liven our family dinners."
I went upstairs to my room, impressed by how it was entirely untouched from my last visit. I wondered if I could still find any contraband in my usual hiding spots: weed, possibly, or cigarettes... or hell, torn pages from gay porn magazines folded and hidden into crevices inside the walls.
With a smile, I settled down on my bed, happy to feel the springy, soft mattress give way to my weight.
Despite talking about Everett and the situation surrounding him, I had hardly had a chance to give the alpha a thought, and the first emotion that came over me now was that I felt incredibly bad over running away from him during our little talk -- the one that had expanded, somehow, to some sort of past life reliving.
Incarnation... This couldn't be a human trait. Could the latent, passive aspects of my shifter heritage turn out to be the reason why I was somehow a reincarnation of Everett's original love?
If that was the case, it wasn't working for me just yet. Rather than accept magic as it was and live in peace, I was actually madly jealous. I wanted Everett's love, and the thought of competing with some guy a hundred years ago who died and somehow left his memories in my mind... well, that just wouldn't do.