“We don’t have to obtain permission to mate, once the mating fever is upon us. This was different. I wanted to marry you anyway, even though I understood the ramifications. I negotiated with the king. I tried to bribe him. I begged.”
Willow leaned forward, resting her hand on the table, shocked. Arawn was kind and quiet, but he had a strong, stubborn pride. “Are you all right?”
“I would’ve fallen to my knees if I’d thought it would have changed anything. I would have prostrated myself before the throne in front of all the Dragon Court. I didn’t, though. It was a private audience, and he talked with me for hours, instead.”
“Your king talked you out of it? Because I’m not a dragon shifter?” But he’d said that most dragons married other kinds.
“He convinced me because he was right. It could not have ended well.” When he looked up at her again, his eyes had acquired a silvery sheen. “There was no way it could have ended well.”
She had never seen him emotional before. She leaned forward, her hand inching across the table that lay between them.
“We might have had a few good years together. It might have been only weeks or days. But someday, somehow, even if I had stayed in the dens and never gone out into natural society, my fated mate would have found me, assuming I have one.”
“But if mates are fated, then all dragons must have fated mates.”
Arawn said, “Yes, but no. Some dragons never find their mates. It is thought that their mates die before they meet. Or their paths never cross. Or maybe some dragons are fated not to have mates. We don’t know. But unmated dragons have shorter lifespans, and they never really mature physically in some ways. Mating is an important part of the dragonish life cycle, socially and biologically. Maybe I would have been one of those, and maybe I could have stayed with you. But someday, on any day, a woman might have walked in—probably a woman—and I would have fallen into mating fever for her.”
Willow would have lived in fear of it, every day, every time he left their house, every time the doorbell rang. “Oh.”
“It’s biological, in a supernatural way. Just like I couldn’t force it to happen, I couldn’t have stopped it from happening once I met my fated mate.”
“And you would have left me, then. Even if we’d had children?”
“We wouldn’t have been able to have children. Dragons can only have children with their dragonmate.”
“But you would have left me. You would have taken one look at this other woman and left me.”
“I don’t know what would have happened. The compulsion might have been too strong, like an addiction or a mental illness, and I might have gone after her. I want to think that I wouldn’t have, but people don’t intend to become addicted to drugs or alcohol. No one plans to die from cancer. Biochemistry and biology don’t care what we want.”
“Maybe it’s better that you did leave. Seeing you run after another woman would have been worse.”
Arawn sighed. “There’s more.”
Gods of Magic, there was more? Willow steeled herself to hear it.
“If I did not leave with the fated mate, if I tried to stay with you, I would have fallen into a mating frenzy. If the fated mate isn’t present, it causes severe illness. It can cause insanity. Sometimes, it’s fatal.”
Willow’s hand crept across the tabletop and touched his fingertips. “This mating thing can kill you?”
Arawn flipped his hand over and caught Willow’s fingers in his. Warmth spread into her skin. “Most dragons mate during the mating fever. The frenzy is quite rare. Even then, only one in four cases of mating frenzy is fatal.”
“That’s reassuring.” It was not.
His fingers squeezed hers, not a quick affectionate pulse, but like he was holding on. “If I survived the mating frenzy, I would have become senescent. All dragons who don’t mate during their fever and frenzy become senescent, every last one of them.”
Willow swallowed hard, but her stomach was roiling. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“I read a lot about senescence when I went to LA for that trip to meet with the king. Senescent dragons become very sick, usually homebound, often bedridden. It’s a horrid cross between depression, other peripheral and central neurological illnesses, a muscular atrophy disease, and a chronic pain condition. Some waste away and die during the senescence. Some choose not to live like that. Some recover after thirty years or so—”
“Thirty years of that!”
“—but they’re always more frail, more solemn, afterward. If a dragon survives senescence, even if they find a mate afterward, you can tell by the slow way they move and the odd way they don’t blink that something has happened to them.”
Willow felt like she couldn’t breathe. Flashes of Arawn bedridden like that, suffering pain and illness for decades, spun in her head. “I would have let you go. I would have told you to go.”
He held her hand, his eyes squeezed shut. “And that’s why I left, because I didn’t want these terrible choices to be forced upon us. But I have missed you so much.”
“I missed you, too,” she said before she could stop herself. She couldn’t leave it at that. “But I’m okay. I’ve moved on. I’m okay now,” she lied.
He was still looking down. “Good. I’m glad. You should have moved on. I want you to be happy.”
“Well, good. Because I have. And I am.”
He said, “I’m not, and I haven’t moved on.”
She should have been mad at him because he had left her, but living in fear of that fated-mate woman out there somewhere would have been worse. “So, your fated mate hasn’t found you yet.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry. I want you to be happy, too.”
“I want to see you.”
“You’re seeing me right now. You just have to quit staring at the table.”
He did look up. His eyes weren’t exactly angry. More like serious. Or vulnerable, but he didn’t know how to do vulnerable. “I want to see you. There are no strings attached. Breaking up was my fault. If I had known you were a supernatural, I would have explained all this, but it wouldn’t have changed anything. We both had exactly the same reason for not telling each other we were supernaturals.”
“Right,” Willow said.
“And now we understand the situation. I’ll understand if you want to keep this purely professional. You’ll be working with the sea serpents in the fountain, not in my office area. I’ll stay away as much as I can. We’ll have professional meetings with someone else in the room. We will have little cause to interact. I can have someone else evaluate your performance. I’ll be the soul of decorum. I will understand.”
Willow held onto his fingers like a lifeline and didn’t look away from his blue, blue eyes. “Or?”
“Or, I want to see you. I realize I screwed up. I realize the break-up was my fault.”
“I can’t imagine living like that. You were right to do it. It was the least bad option out of some really horrible ones.”
“But it was my fault. The mating fever problem is my fault, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. And yet, I want to see you. I’ll do whatever you want, whatever it takes. If you want lunch, I’ll take you to lunch and listen to whatever you say. If you want to take a walk, I’ll walk wherever you want. If you want to go to the gym, I’ll drive you, run on the treadmill beside you, and put your smoothie on my membership tab. If you want to go shopping, I’ll hold your purse, wait for you outside the fitting room, and pay for whatever you want. I just want to see you.”
That felt a bit too much like a commercial exchange. “You don’t have to do that.”
“It was my fault. I will do anything to make it up to you and atone for my inability to produce the mating fever.”
“But, it’s not your fault. It sounds like you tried everything you could think of to bring it on. I wish we’d talked about it at the time, but yeah, neither of us took the first step to admitting that we aren’t naturals.”<
br />
“It is my fault. I apologize, and I am at fault.”
Willow tightened her hand in his. They were stretched across the table to reach each other. “I can’t deal with another break-up. We can’t be anything more than just friends.”
“I understand. I consent to this. I won’t push. I won’t test your boundaries. I just want to see you. We are just friends, and I am the friend who pays for everything.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to. It would assuage some guilt. It might restore some balance so I don’t get caught by karmic rebound. Please.”
“Breaking up with you was so hard. And because we didn’t tell anybody we were seeing each other or living together, or even that we were dating anyone, I couldn’t talk to anyone about us breaking up.”
“I am sorry.” He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. “I didn’t tell anyone, either.”
They’d had to be secretive at first because Arawn had been her instructor in college. He wasn’t a fully-fledged professor, just a graduate student-instructor for her discussion break-out session of an upper-level political science class, Hegemony in the 20th Century. They’d had coffee a few times during the semester, but it was only after the semester was officially over that they’d met again at a party and started dating. So technically, it hadn’t been an ethics violation, even when they’d been holding glances for far too long while he was teaching her class, and her blouses had become tighter and lower-cut every week.
One time, he’d glanced at what she was wearing and crushed the stick of chalk he was holding to powder.
After that, because they’d both assumed the other one was a natural, they’d hidden their friends from each other and each other from their friends. It wasn’t forbidden for her to date a natural, but it wasn’t encouraged, either.
Plus, there was that whole problem with the magical contract she’d signed, stating that she wouldn’t tell naturals about witching society ever again. The enforcement clause in that included expulsion and renunciation, so she hadn’t wanted to invite questions from Arawn about why her hippie friends wanted to slap crystals on his forehead and would he mind sitting in the pentagram for just a few minutes? Also, pay no attention to the pink wombat watering the plants.
So she hadn’t told anyone about him: not her parents, not her social media contacts, and not even her best friends, Bethany and Ember. A lot of witches handled it that way, not coming out of the coven closet until they’d put a ring on it.
Most of Arawn’s friends must be dragons, she now realized. There had been one person he’d introduced her to over coffee, a serious, black-haired, older woman named Brengwain, who’d smelled like incense smoke even over the aroma of burned coffee beans that had permeated the Starbucks. Maybe she had been the prophet he had mentioned. Willow had thought it was weird that his friends never came around, but he’d had plenty of texts and calls coming through his phone, photos of himself with two other guys in his apartment, and plenty of contacts on social media. So, she knew he had friends. Not having any friends might have been weird.
But they’d socialized with their college acquaintances together, going to bars and movies with his grad student friends or her dorm buddies.
Their friends had all been naturals, though, as Willow thought back. Yeah, none of her college friends had been supernaturals, and she hadn’t caught a magic vibe from any of his friends, either. Huh.
“It was hard,” she told him.
“Me, too,” Arawn said. “I’m sorry. When can I see you again?”
Willow wanted to shield her heart. She wanted to tell him no. She wanted to slide out of the booth and walk away.
Except that she wanted to say yes so much more. “Tonight?”
“Supper. A show if you want, or a movie. Or a walk on the Strip. I’ll pick you up at six.”
Uh-oh. “You don’t have to pick me up. We can meet somewhere.”
“I don’t mind. I told you I would do everything, and I will. Text me your address.”
She had to keep him from seeing her place. “Oh, I accidentally deleted your contact info from my phone.”
That wasn’t a complete lie. She’d burned some sage, sprinkled some salt in a sacred circle, and ritually deleted his contact from her phone and unfriended him on social media.
Arawn took his phone from his back pocket and slid his finger around. Her phone vibrated. “There. Text me your address.”
Which meant he hadn’t deleted her. He just hadn’t called.
“Um.” She could meet Arawn out in front of the apartment complex so he wouldn’t see. “Okay. Six o’clock.”
The restaurant’s hostess burst through the kitchen doors, carrying a plate with a burger and a huge salad bowl.
“Our food is here,” Arawn said, settling his napkin in his lap.
“Yeah.” Her stomach pinched itself. “Yay, huh?”
The hostess settled the plate in front of her, an enormous salad, piled high with grilled chicken and shrimp. The mountain of food was embarrassing.
Arawn only had eyes for his burger. “I’m famished. I haven’t eaten since this morning in Los Angeles. Flying makes you hungry.”
Willow forked her salad. “You always did have a huge appetite.”
He wove his long fingers around the burger, gripping it all around. “Dragon metabolism.”
“That is so weird to hear you say that so nonchalantly.”
He nodded. “This is me. This is who I am.”
Right. She’d never known his other half, his dragon soul, the half that did not love her and would not bond to her.
As painful as it was going to be to see the love of her life every day, to go out with him for however long she could stand it, her other options were worse.
Her life always seemed to be a choice among a bunch of bad options, but at least this time, she wasn’t stuck with the worst of all of them, which was thinking that he had never loved her.
He just couldn’t love her in the right way.
Old Habits
AFTER they finished lunch, the time was almost four o’clock, so Arawn walked her back to Smedley O’Tentacle’s HR office to finish her paperwork.
Once there, Arawn checked his phone and blinked, which was as startled as he ever got, and excused himself to attend a meeting or two.
Willow took a picture of the official job offer with her phone and emailed it to her apartment manager, thus saving her apartment right in the nick of time. She sighed, relieved, and Smedley raised one wispy eyebrow in question at her.
By the time Willow had filled out the paperwork, cramming her answers into tiny boxes by writing her references and experience with a sharp pencil, Arawn had returned.
He announced to her, “I’m here to take you to supper. If you don’t mind, I’ll change back into a suit, so as to be properly attired.”
She thought he looked just fine in the jeans and white tee shirt that she’d Cinderella-conjured for him, but she supposed he was right. If they were out after midnight—and there was absolutely no reason to think they might be—his clothes would disappear with a tick of the cell phone clock. Sudden nudity might be hard to explain if they were in a restaurant or dancing in a nightclub.
Kind of depended on which nightclub, though. A swinging dong might not even be remarked upon in some of the places Willow had gone in Paris.
Arawn asked her, “Do you want to wait here in the lobby or in the living room of my suite?”
“Wait a minute,” Smedley O’Tentacle snarled, leaning forward over his computer desk. “Look at me, Mr. Tiamat.”
Arawn turned and stared directly at him.
Willow watched, thinking it was weird that O’Tentacle had talked to a VP that way.
Smedley scrutinized Arawn’s eyes, squinting so that only his horizontal pupils were visible. His eyebrows lowered. He examined Arawn’s body or clothes or something, still peering from behind suspicious eyelids, and then leaned farther over the desk for a long, moist sn
iff.
“What is going on?” Willow demanded of him. “You can’t just sniff a guy like that.”
Smedley was still glaring at Arawn. “We’ve had some problems lately with what could have easily turned into sexual harassment claims, but it doesn’t appear that you’re going into mating fever.”
Arawn lowered one eyebrow and looked down at the floor.
Willow stepped forward. “Mr. O’Tentacle, I find this entire line of discussion highly inappropriate. The mating habits of dragon shifters are not a suitable conversation for the workplace.”
O’Tentacle sat back in his chair, confused. “I apologize?”
“You had better,” Willow said. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some exceedingly important, work-related, and appropriate subjects to discuss.”
She swept out of O’Tentacle’s office.
Arawn trailed after her, a faint smile on his face. “That was amusing.”
“It was none of his business. Where’s your place?”
He led the way into the elevator and pushed the top button in the right column.
Where the penthouses were.
“Oooo,” Willow said. “Swanky.”
“It’s good to be the VP.”
She laughed, and the elevator opened to a sumptuous, blue and silver suite.
Arawn said, “I liked this particular suite. It’s decorated in my family’s house colors.”
Willow looked around, studying the silver tea service on the counter and the dark blue, velvet upholstery on the couches. “Like, you mean, the colors your family’s house was decorated in? Your mom liked silver and blue?”
“It’s that dragon feudal system, again. They’re the colors of the Dukedom of Tiamat. Could we speak, very quickly, before we go out to supper?”
Here it came. Damn it, she almost got supper out of this racket. “Sure?”
“Thank you for—” He paused, glancing at the silver and crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling. “—if not for forgiving me, at least allowing me to try to make this up to you, somewhat. I appreciate the opportunity to spend time with you. I don’t deserve it.”
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