by Alan Marble
“Right,” he responded, squeezing his hands together, resting them in his lap and closing his eyes. Again he felt at a loss for how to respond, and again he felt the powerful yearning for this all to go away, for life to return to normal.
A feather light touch on his shoulder caught his attention, and he lifted his head just enough to see her green eyes regarding him with concern. “Jonah? You all right?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” he murmured, casting his gaze back down, once again.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
He didn’t want to talk about it, yet at the same time he did. He felt a need to get it off his chest, felt a need to air the confusion and doubt that was muddling his thoughts. More than that, though, he wanted someone to blame, someone to lash out against, someplace to direct the anger and frustration that he felt all wrapped up in one, but he knew Rebekah was not the one for that. He couldn’t do that to her.
Instead he just sighed. “I just … I don’t know. I mean, last night … I’m so confused …”
Again she touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Yes?”
Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to ask the question that he did not want to ask, the one that demanded to be asked, even if indirectly. “I mean … what really happened, last night, after we fell? Did I really … I mean …”
“You did,” she said softly, her voice almost cooing at him. “Just for a few seconds, but you did.”
He was not specific in his question and she was not specific in her response, but specifics weren’t necessary. The implications were obvious, terrifying, and impossible. A little quiver ran down his spine as he shook his head. “I don’t … I don’t know if I can believe that …”
“Oh, Jonah.” He felt her hand brushing along his shoulder, caressing softly. “I know it must be difficult for you but you know what happened, I don’t have to convince you. You know how it feels, now. The wind at your wings. It’s a part of you and you can’t ignore that.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he repeated, shaking his head, feeling suddenly dizzy as his mind tried to wrap itself around the enormity of what was going on, of what was being said. Once more he tried to convince himself that what happened was nothing more than a bad dream, a nightmare, something to be forgotten. Even the strange journey across the country could be chalked up to a weird psychotic episode, his mind’s way of coping with perhaps a long unfulfilled desire to travel, that even now he might still be sleeping fitfully back in his apartment. But as he felt himself shuddering, on the verge of tears, he felt her arms wrap around him, pulling him against her shoulder, caressing and comforting. He could feel her, smell her. She was too real to be any figment of his imagination.
“I can’t. I can’t do this,” he murmured, shuddering once again as he allowed himself to be held, leaned against her, let her support his weight.
“Sure you can.” Her voice was positive, supportive, managed to ease some small part of his heart in spite of the confusion. “Just be yourself. It doesn’t change who you are, at your core, Jonah. Just what you are. You’re still the same person inside.”
It sounded silly, cheesy, and made him laugh a little in spite of himself, even if he knew it was a genuine statement. “And what would you know about that? Who I am, at my core?”
“I know you’re a good person.” He couldn’t help but to look up, see her smiling at him, doing her best to soothe his frayed nerves. It was working, at least a little. “Don’t forget, I’ve known you longer than you realize. It’s been my job to keep an eye on you, make sure nothing happens to you. When you watch someone for that long you get to know them fairly well.”
“Do you realize how creepy that sounds?”
She laughed softly at the accusation, a sound that was as infectious as it was light. “You’re right, that does sound pretty bad. It’s not like that, at all. I’m not a stalker, I promise!” She smiled, laughing again, stroking her palm lightly against his chin, dragging against the stubble that had formed on his cheek. “But I mean it. You are a good person.”
Jonah found himself smiling, if only just. “And you think this makes me a good … ah … dragon.”
“Of course!” She smiled brightly, her green eyes shimmering a little as they regarded him, a faintly mischievous look playing at her features. “If only you could have seen yourself last night, Jonah. It’d make so much more sense to you. I suppose in time, it will, but if you could see yourself the way I saw you …”
“The way you saw me?”
She nodded. “The way I saw you. The way I still see you. You’re a good man, Jonah, and you’re a good dragon, too. Not to mention you look pretty good, as a drake.”
He wasn’t sure why but the statement suddenly made him feel uneasy, or at the very least uncertain of himself. He could feel his cheeks flushing, so he briefly cast his eyes back down toward his feet. “Thanks. I think,” he responded, with a quiet laugh of his own.
A soft touch on his cheek caught him off guard, a surprisingly gentle sort of caress that seemed to be both soothing and somehow electrifying all at the same time. Looking back up away from his feet he found his eyes meeting hers, big green orbs staring right back at him in silence for a long moment. Jonah felt conflicted. On one hand, here was some woman he barely knew who had dragged him back and forth across the country, who had been trying to convince him of some impossible truth that he was just now learning might, in fact, be possible after all.
On the other hand, she had saved his life, more than one time. She had taken on the strange, murderous creature that had killed his friend, that had been after him ever since. She had, if her story was to be believed, plucked him out of a freezing river and brought him back to safety.
There had been the mixed signals that she had been giving him ever since they met. Warm, charming, even inviting at one moment, yet in the next she might come across as somewhat sarcastic and distant. Worse, still, was the fact that he had undoubtedly found himself attracted to her. Physically, to be sure; the longer he looked, the harder he found it to take his eyes off of her. But even now he found himself craving her company, the pleasant way in which she laughed, the smile that seemed to brighten her features in just the right way.
Yet he hardly knew her, he reminded himself. Jonah had never really been one to fall for someone head over heels, and the possibility that it was happening to him now was terrifying.
He wanted to pull back, wanted to leave, run out the door as fast as he could and leave her behind, leave behind all of the events of the last few days, run back to his existence where everything used to be normal and sane and boring. Yet, at the same time, he felt drawn in to those eyes, drawn into the surprisingly soft and gentle face. He might never have felt himself to be so torn before in his life.
So it was that he surprised himself by leaning in, abruptly pressing his lips against hers.
He half expected a swift and violent reaction, he half expected to be pushed away, feel a palm slapping across his face, or worse. There was a moment of hesitation in which she didn’t move, her green eyes widening slightly at his advance and her hand moved - but not to strike him. It slid lightly over his shoulder, pulling him closer, pulling herself up against him, and leaned into the kiss.
Jonah felt something inside of himself shift, a barrier that he had been keeping up around himself collapsing down all at once. The fleeting desire that had been tickling at the fringes of his consciousness leaped up to the fore, and when she reciprocated by leaning into the kiss he knew that he wanted this, that he wanted her. Reaching out to slip his own fingers past her ear, feathering their way through her red hair and tilting his head he deepened the kiss. A soft sigh sounded from his throat as he tasted her lips against his own, closing his eyes to drink in the sensation.
She did not seem content to sit there and accept the kiss passively, either. She kissed him back every bit as firmly as he did, turning her whole body to face him more fully, shifting against the be
d and holding herself against him. Pulling her lips briefly away from his own she leaned her head back, her voice suddenly coming up low and husky. “Jonah …”
With her head leaned back like that, her neck exposed to him, she seemed suddenly so open, so vulnerable. He would also had to have been a fool to have missed the desire that she was now openly signaling, and he did not fail to act on it. Ducking his head lightly he began to kiss softly at the side of her neck, her skin there so soft and smooth against his lips. Emboldened, Jonah let his hands slip down her back, all but pulling her into his lap, feeling her slender body quivering slightly against his own.
“This isn’t part of my duties,” she murmured with an obvious teasing tone to her voice, leaning back again and giving him a broad, mischievous smile - but there was now more than a hint of desire burning in her eyes as she playfully tried to push herself away from him.
Returning the impish smile, he tightened his grip, letting his fingers slip beneath the hem of her shirt and begin to brush against the bare skin on the small of her back. “You don’t seem to be complaining.”
Rather than complain, however, she simply took control of the situation Swinging her legs around she wrapped them around his middle, pushing on his chest suddenly and swiftly, knocking him on his back, gazing up at her from the bed. Shifting her hips again so that she was straddling his own, she began to grind on him lightly, leaning in with a sound that was almost like a growl, and caught him up in another rough, passionate kiss.
Jonah groaned quietly in response. He could already feel the rush of heat in the pit of his stomach, could already feel the familiar heat focusing in his loins in reaction to her advances. The barriers deep inside of him had already failed and were rapidly giving way to the swell of lust and desire that was building inside of him. He kissed her back roughly, firmly, lying on the bed, running his hands against her arms, down her sides and over her hips, pulling her back against him. God, did he ever want her.
Again she broke the kiss, tugging up on the bottom of the tacky souvenir t-shirt that he had been wearing. He didn’t need any better encouragement than that to lift his hands up above his head, letting her tug the entire shirt up and off, leaving his chest and stomach bare. As she rested her hands on his tummy and grinned down at him, he suddenly realized that he did not remember putting either the shirt, nor the unfamiliar sweat pants, on. “Something tells me that this isn’t the first time you’ve seen me shirtless,” he teased, grinning.
In revenge, she slid her fingers up and tickled them against his armpits. Gasping, he squirmed and tried to bat her hands away. “No, it’s not,” she finally responded, relenting with the tickling so that she could sit up and follow suit, pulling her shirt off and shaking her hair loose as she did so. “But it’s the first time you’ve seen me without.”
Getting his first look at her without a shirt on, Jonah could not help but to grin. She was slender but not unnaturally thin, perhaps a little more musculature to her figure than he would have guessed before. Her skin was soft and smooth, every bit as much as her neck was, perfect and practically unblemished. She was not extraordinarily buxom, a gray sports bra concealing only a modest bosom, but it was just the kind of figure that he found unbearably attractive. “We … we’re really going to do this,” he whispered, almost in amazement, as he reached back to run his finger against her bra strap, intent on loosening it.
She only smiled at him demurely, licking her lips as she leaned in closer. “You have no idea how bad I want you, Jonah … can’t wait to feel you, join with you …”
Just as his fingers caught the clasp, a strange thought suddenly popped up in the back of his mind. He could vividly remember the conversation they had back in Omaha, the discussion about how rare it was for there to be a new dragon born, about how she was one of the youngest of all of them besides him, about how she had been waiting for her turn to find a mate. Pulling his hand back with a startled gasp, he blinked. “Oh, god … you want me to … you want an egg, or something …”
The fiery passion in her eyes wavered, Rebekah leaning back a little to give him a confused sort of look. “What … what are you talking about?”
“You want me to knock you up,” he sputtered, a little more abruptly and pointedly than he had meant to.
Any desire that had been in her eyes suddenly went cold, an angry and pained scowl forming on her face. “What … what the hell?” Reaching for her shirt she pushed herself away from him, jumping off the bed, taking a few steps back and holding the shirt up to her chest as if to hide it from his vision. “What the hell is your problem?”
The shocked and offended look on her face made him realize that he had just made a mistake. Shaking his head, he sat up, his voice continuing to sputter. “No, I mean … it’s just, what you said before, and I was worried …”
“Oh, no. No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head, her voice growing angry. “You thought that I wanted … gods, no! With a whelp like you? Shit, Jonah, there are better, stronger drakes for something like that.”
Jonah blinked in surprise. “Whelp?”
“Gods, gods,” she repeated, hastily pulling her shirt back on over her head and tugging it back around her midsection. “I can’t believe you actually thought that. And now I can’t believe I really was about to … and with you? What the hell was I thinking?” Turning on her heel, she stomped toward the door.
“Wait,” he said, getting up to his hands and knees and waving urgently. “Rebekah, no, wait, I didn’t mean it like that!”
If she heard him, she did not give any indication. The door swung open and she was briefly silhouetted by the bright sunlight beyond before the door slammed shut behind her with enough violence to make the window next to it shudder.
“Shit,” he cursed, fumbling his way off the bed and looking around for his discarded shirt. “You really messed this one up,” he accused himself. It had been a little while since he had enjoyed someone’s company in that way, and to be sure his now frustrated libido was already castigating him, but it was more than that. Rebekah had looked genuinely offended, sincerely upset, and he felt like an asshole for doing it.
It was a confirmation in a way. He cared about the way she felt, cared about how she reacted - cared about her. Some part of him sunk at the realization, telling himself that he wasn’t ready to care about someone like that. Not there, not then, and not with a woman who had dragged him well outside of his comfortable little world. He had himself to look out for; he couldn’t afford the baggage of something like that.
Yet care he did. He knew he had to do something, he could not just sit there and let her go thinking he was that shallow. Managing to get his shirt back on, he patted the pockets of his sweatpants to make sure that he still had the key to the door and made his way outside.
The sun, high in the sky, illuminated everything with a brilliance that forced him to squint and shade his eyes. It had the effect of washing out the otherwise brilliant reds of the nearby buttes, lending the scene a sort of washed out and desaturated quality, seeming to match his recently deflated mood. Blinking away the brightness he glanced around for some sign of where Rebekah had gone, but there was none.
A few doors down there was a cleaning lady, standing outside a door and sweeping the dust off into the parking lot. Jogging over to where she stood, he cleared his throat. “Hey, excuse me, did you just see a woman with red hair go by?”
Peeking up at him with a hint of irritation for being interrupted, she shrugged her shoulders. “I saw a woman run past, yes.”
“Did you see where she went?”
“That way,” the housekeeper muttered, gesturing off in the direction opposite the nearby mercantile.
Jogging his way toward the pavement, he shouted back a halfhearted “Thank you!” When he got to the roadway, however, peering to his left where the woman had indicated, he was a little disappointed to find that he could not only see Rebekah or where she had gone, but did not see much of anything at all. Th
ere was a small unmarked building, and across the road another scattering of buildings but that was it. There was another small sandstone bluff that the highway curved around, but he could not see anything beyond.
“You sure she went this way?” he called back over his shoulder, looking back to the housekeeper.
The woman looked up again and frowned at him. “She went that way, yes.”
“Is there anything down the road?”
“Navajo Bridge,” she said, without any clarification as she had apparently decided the conversation was over, pushing her cleaning cart into the room and closing the door behind her.
Taking the woman’s word for it, Jonah began to jog down along the side of the road in the direction indicated. The little bend around the corner proved to be longer than he realized, a good quarter of a mile at least, a handful of cars passing him along the way and leaving him to breathe in the dust and exhaust they left behind. By the time he had made it around the corner he was already wheezing and coughing in spite of himself.
Not too far in the distance, he could see a wide gorge opening up in the ground, not unlike the one he had encountered last night, and could not help but to feel a little twinge of discomfort deep in the pit of his stomach. Particularly when he watched the cars making their way across a bridge, there.
Before the bridge there was a little outcropping of buildings on the left side of the road. Again they proved to be a little farther away than he realized, and as he set off jogging in their direction, he found himself a little winded when he finally got close enough to read the sign that proudly proclaimed the buildings were the “Navajo Bridge Interpretive Center”. Overhead a pair of flags, one for the country and the other for the state, flapped in the breeze, framed against the stark blue of the sky. A few travelers had stopped there, milling about outside the center, speaking a language that he could not quite place.
Stepping toward the buildings, he glanced back in the direction of the bridge, only to realize that there were actually a pair of them. One carried the traffic, the other, apparently older bridge, seemed to serve pedestrians only. There were a handful of people milling out upon the bridge itself. From there he could spot a shock of fiery red hair.