by Zoe Chant
“Oh my,” Jillian said.
Theo looked at her blankly.
“Sorry. I forgot about the homeschooling. I’ll explain later.”
“People longed to be what they admired or loved or even what they feared.” His voice had taken on a storytelling tone, as if he were reciting, and she tried to picture a tiny Theo sitting around some campfire hearing all this. “The dreaming made the shifting happen, for the people who got the dreams in their blood. For animal shifters, at least. Dragons, unicorns, griffins—not to sound snobbish, but my family said our dreams were more aristocratic, more thoughtful. That we came from people who loved ideas. Fantasies.”
She unbuttoned the top button on his shirt. “Do you think of yourself as a particularly cerebral person, Deputy St. Vincent?”
“Not when you’re doing that,” he said wryly. “But you see what I’m saying. People don’t generally long to become something they’re about to cook for dinner. Deer shifters are the closest I can think of, and even now you don’t see that many of them.” He lifted her head up, his thumb against her chin. His eyes were warm. “You aren’t afraid to just dive into it.”
“I like knowing everything I can.”
“And almost everything you go to, right away, is about how to treat other people fairly and not hurt them. I really do want to see where you call home, by the way. I’ve told you enough about mine.”
“You’ve told me about the place you used to call home,” she corrected. “As far as I know, right now you live in a featureless motel room.”
“It’s not quite that bad,” Theo said. She had the sense he was deflecting, but she wasn’t sure what it was he didn’t want to talk about.
She could tell when he’d decided to say it anyway, though, because he suddenly looked away, his golden-brown lashes down, shading his eyes.
“I like my house. But it always feels empty. I brought everything I valued from home that was mine to bring, but—I was so used to having everyone else’s treasure to fill up the space, too. It feels like I’m just rattling around inside this huge space. Work is better.” And his voice did lighten then. She listened carefully to the relief in his tone. Relief and... surprise?
“Take me there, then,” she said. “We have to get out of here anyway, right? I’ll take you to my apartment, and you can take me to your office. I’ll show you my real self if you’ll show me yours.” Why did that feel more intimate than the sex?
Maybe she was a virgin when it came to full disclosure. Now came the real deflowering.
*
It never stopped amazing her how short the drive was between where she’d grown up and where she’d run away to. It felt like they should have needed a passport instead of just a half-full tank of gas.
“Are you sure it’s okay for me to be taking you away from work like this?” she asked for maybe the hundredth time.
Theo squeezed her hand. Even with all her nervousness, his touch sparked something in her. To feel the heat of his body and the calluses on his fingers was more of a turn-on than most of the actual foreplay she’d had in her life, dutiful though some of it had been.
“I’m sure,” Theo said. “But you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“No, I want to.” She unbuckled her seatbelt, hoping the momentum of that decision would carry her forward. She turned to face him head-on. “I trust you. I’m just not used to trusting people.”
“With dragons, showing someone your home is something... intimate. Maybe even sacred. People have parlors where strangers are allowed to go and it’s considered extremely rude to go any further than that without a relationship. Your parlor is where you put the parts of your hoard that you’re proud of but less protective of. The parts of yourself that you want to show the world and the parts of yourself that you can bear to show the world. I know humans aren’t always the same, and I know I’ve had to invade your other home much more than was proper, but whatever you can show me, I will respect. I know what it means to be invited in.”
“Does it mean something to you to take me to where you work?”
He nodded. “It’s not uncommon to have strangers there, of course. The parlor is more of an idea than a reality. By telling you that it means more to me than just an office, I’ve let you in—when you see it, you’ll be seeing me and what matters to me. Which you wouldn’t be doing if you were just the guy delivering the coffee.”
“You’re welcome to bring me coffee,” Jillian said. She opened the door. “Always.”
She could look at Theo’s smile all day. “I’ll remember that. Gift-giving is culturally important, too.” The smile turned wry. “As my colleagues will cheerfully note led to last year’s Secret Santa debacle. Ask them, they’ll tell it better. This is a nice building.”
Jillian snorted in a way that made her glad Theo’s attraction to her was set in stone. “No, it isn’t.”
“No, it really isn’t.”
“I deliberately picked the ugliest apartment complex I could find. I started off looking for the most run-down, but I chickened out.”
“See? That’s why you wouldn’t have chicken shifters.”
“I should be helping people who didn’t have money, not being the poor little rich girl living in conditions no one wanted just to piss off her dad. I settled on ugly and I think I achieved it.”
The Steeplechase was an incongruously huge, sprawling concrete complex that looked like some unholy cross between a skyscraper—itself a blemish enough on the relatively flat skyline—and a prison.
Out of sheer curiosity, Jillian had read up on the history of the building, which had been tossed around in a game of real estate hot potato for several decades now. Each new owner had decided that they would be the person to whip some beauty into The Steeplechase’s forbidding dourness. Once, pink curtains had been installed in all the windows, pink being considered a cheery color. In the nineties, an owner with a Gothic streak had decided a touch of classiness could push the building’s ugly front into real character and had covered the place with gargoyles. Then someone had come along and painted the gargoyles to look like cherubs without actually changing their shape. Three years ago, for no reason Jillian could work out, someone had added a huge wrap-around deck out of unstained wood and covered it with potted palm trees.
Currently, the owners were into cheeky irony. A huge waterproof sign flapped in the wind and announced, THE STEEPLECHASE: AT LEAST IT’S CHEAP! One around the back proclaimed: THE STEEPLECHASE: A NICE PLACE TO LIVE, BUT YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO VISIT!
Irony, the apartment manager had told Jillian confidentially, was very “in.”
Theo considered the sign. “Is it cheap?”
“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”
“You like it,” he said, now evaluating her with the same attention.
“Well, I’ve lived here for years,” Jillian said. “After a while, it’s like if you have an ugly dog. It might be hideous to look at, but it’s yours, and you know it’s sweet-tempered. The cherubgoyles freak me out a little, though.”
She let them into the lobby, where the ugliness continued with a pink marble floor that had the thick, creamy swirls of cherry ice cream. Someone had graffiti-sprayed LOOK UPON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR on the wall by the elevators, which had impressed the manager as a compelling example of outsider art and on-point architectural criticism. A gilt frame now surrounded it.
“Rogue English professor?” Theo said, nodding at it.
“Whoever it was came back after they put the frame up and got halfway through spraying DON’T FRAME THIS, YOU before they must have gotten scared off by the cops. That’s down by the garden-side door.”
“Did they frame it anyway?”
“Of course not. We at The Steeplechase are very respectful of the wishes of graffiti artists as long as they express them in a timely fashion. I’m on the fifth floor.”
The elevators were comparatively mundane, though they did all have glassed-in signs exp
laining in brief the history of The Steeplechase. Words like “eccentric” and “quaint” tended to turn up a lot.
She had gotten her place at a discount even for The Steeplechase because it was right off the bank of elevators—she slept with earplugs to keep herself from hearing chimes all night long—so all it took was a single turn before she was unlocking her door.
This really did feel intimate. But, she reminded herself, she was showing it to the person in her life who would most appreciate and understand what she was showing him.
This is moving so fast. Like land-speed records fast.
But she had heard so many stories—even stories without dragons!—that had this kind of fairy tale love. How many times had she heard grandparents at the center reminisce about how they had known right away? How many times had some elderly man looked lovingly at his wife while telling Jillian how he had proposed to her before the sun had even gone down? History was full of people who had fallen in love at first sight.
And anyway, she told herself practically, I didn’t fall in love with him right when I saw him. I fell in love with him on a squeaky attic bed.
Jillian let Theo in.
She tried to remind herself that he came from a family and even a species that appreciated beauty, grandeur, and wealth; that he was a man who knew the worth of things at a glance. If he didn’t like her apartment, that was only understandable.
It was just that this was the life she had built for herself, not the one that she had been born into; the one that was still good, not the one that had turned out to be rotten at the center all along. She wanted him to like it because she wanted him to like her.
Her hands were sweating enough that her fingers slipped on the light switch on the first try and she only got it right on the second. Well, there it all was on display. There she was.
Theo walked past her into the apartment and said nothing at first, as if he wanted to give her his true opinion and not some immediate, easy reassurance. Even though she was going crazy with anticipation, that made her feel better. He knew that she wanted honesty more than anything else.
She looked around. Demerits popped out at her—a stack of junk mail lazily left on the coffee table even though there was a trash can right there, the weird color mismatch between the couch and the throw pillows, the fridge with its takeout menu magnets proclaiming how little she used the kitchen.
But even on edge, she could also see why she called the place home. It was a little sanctuary of peace and coziness that she’d made in a stressful, chaotic life. The throw pillows had been chosen not for their color but for their unbelievable plushness, so she could rest on one of them on the nights when even watching TV sitting up felt like too much to ask. The books with their tightly stuck-on USED stickers on their spines had been culled from hundreds of visits to thrift shops and secondhand stores. She could have told him where each one had come from.
Theo turned back to her. There was nothing but sincerity on his face. “It’s you. It’s beautiful.”
She laughed to conceal her relief. “Oh, come on.”
“I mean it,” he said. He picked up a coaster off her table, handling it was delicately as if it had been priceless china. Of course he’d gone unerringly to the small extravagance that she’d allowed herself, to the little touch of beauty she most liked. The coasters were colored, crackled glass, each one different and flawed-looking, like a segment of geode with more restrained colors. “These are beautiful and they’re durable, too, you can feel it in the weight. There are all these little touches, but it’s the overall feeling that matters, not each and every bit of furniture. This is a lovely, comfortable parlor, much homier than your father’s house. There’s a lot more soul.”
“It’s the only other place I’ve ever lived,” Jillian said. “On days where everything has gone wrong, I like coming home and thinking that this is sort of my life’s work, too... making a life for myself.” She touched her eyes and was relieved that she wasn’t crying. “I guess you’d know about that.”
“You’ve done a much better job than I have. Dragons aren’t notorious for liking comfort, but away from them, it didn’t seem like grandeur was what I really wanted. And I couldn’t figure out what I did want, so I have... nothing. Very shiny and expensive nothing, in some cases, but still nothing.”
“Hey.” She reached up and put her hand on his cheek. “Just remember you in the waterpark. Dumb rebellion that was tasteless except for how it was exactly what you needed—fun, casual splashing around in a place where no one knew you. Your judgment is pretty good, I think. You can figure out how to decorate a living room on a budget. And if not, we’ll watch some HGTV together.”
“I do like the shows about DIY,” Theo said, with adorable earnestness. He kissed the top of her head and she felt him breathe in the scent of her hair. “You make me feel like I could do anything. Even do my own tiling.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Jillian said.
*
On the way to his office, she could tell it was his turn to get nervous, or at least he thought it was, because he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers against the steering wheel even when the song on the radio—a sweetly sad Patsy Cline ballad—resolutely refused to have any percussion in it. Jillian wanted to reassure him that she would like whatever was important to him, but she knew exactly how reassuring she would have found that kind of promise and so knew it wouldn’t do any good. They were learning, step by step, what trusting each other really looked like.
She decided to distract him instead. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to think up questions she needed him to answer.
“You said shifters know who they’re going to fall in love with right away, right? Do they always find the other person?”
“No. And until yesterday morning, I wouldn’t have thought that mattered. Like I said, dragons keep to themselves, they don’t socialize as much with the rest of the world or even with other shifters—it can get pretty ugly at times. Trust me, if there’s a stereotype about a kind of shifter, I know it. So everyone I knew either found their mate where we grew up or they didn’t find them at all, and that meant that most of them didn’t. It all seemed... fine. You could see the difference between the ones who had their true mate and the ones who didn’t, though. I don’t know how to describe it.”
“There’s a lot of room between ‘fine’ and ‘happy,’” Jillian said.
“Yes, that. But we weren’t raised to be happy, so we didn’t think it mattered.”
She had never been raised to be anything but happy, never raised to do anything but make money and pursue her own pleasure without regard for the world around her. She didn’t know why their families had run to such extremes.
“It matters to me that you’re happy,” she said.
He leaned over and kissed her. “It matters to me that you’re happy, too.”
“And I want to meet your friends.”
“I am honored to introduce them to my mate,” Theo said, bowing his head slightly.
Mate, Jillian thought. It was the second time he had used that word specifically, and she decided now that she liked it. Girlfriend would have felt both too simple and too weak for what she could already feel between them. And she liked how primal mate sounded, no matter how decorous his voice was when he said it. It didn’t hurt that it made her immediately think about the way people always said mate for life.
That kind of reliability—she had never thought she would find it in a partner.
Although it was possible that if his coworkers—all shifters, hadn’t he said? Or mostly all?—hated her, he might start to rethink that whole destined to be together forever thing. As they walked into Sterling’s courthouse, far duller and more presentable than The Steeplechase, she tried to remember that she had met and liked Gretchen.
“Wait!” She grabbed his elbow just as he started to open the frosted glass door that announced the US Marshals Office. “You said they were all... like you, right?”
“Not exactly like me,” Theo said, lowering his voice as well. “But most of them all shifters.” He said the last word so softly it was almost more breath than speech and despite the chilly courthouse hallway and her own nerves, a warm and pleasant tingling spread across Jillian’s body.
“Is Gretchen?”
“No, Gretchen’s human. She’s from a family of lynx shifters, but every so often, the gene doesn’t present itself.”
“That must be hard.”
And being a lynx would suit Gretchen, she thought: she had that same compact muscularity and ease of movement.
Being a dragon suited Theo too, whether he thought it did or not. Whether his family thought it did or not, for that matter. He knew what had worth and he carried the feel of a fairy tale with him wherever he went. And he didn’t even need to breathe fire to be able to scorch everything within a hundred foot radius. All he needed for that was that pair of emerald eyes.
Theo said, “Gretchen likes you. They’ll all like you.” They’d better, his tone somehow managed to imply.
She nodded. Time to slay the dragon’s coworkers with her wit and charm.
They stepped into the office. To Jillian’s great relief, no matter how full it was with people who could turn into animals or mythological creatures, it still looked and felt like every other office she had been in, from the burbling water cooler to the mixed scent of toner and slightly stale coffee. It was the kind of place she usually visited to give speeches urging people to consider some of her kids as summer interns. She might associate it with a little bit of disappointment, but at least she no longer felt nervous.
The closest marshal to them was a leanly muscular man in his thirties, with thick black hair and a little bit of stubble. His eyes were the darkest blue Jillian had ever seen. In a building full of people in ties and suit jackets, he was wearing a battered olive Army jacket.