by Amy Faye
So I wait a little longer, because that seems like a good excuse not to go back yet. It’s snooping, but I have to wonder all of a sudden. Medically, what’s up with dragons?
Does a dragon need painkillers? Do they take antidepressants? Do they have heart medication? I’m sitting in one of the five bathrooms in the house. It’s as good a place to keep medicine as any. Particularly since this is the one right by the boys’ rooms.
So I open up the medicine cabinet. Nothing. There’s a handful of toothbrushes and a few razors for shaving.
There’s got to be something, though. No medicine at all? I start working my way through cabinets, top to bottom, left to right. In the third, I score on something. But it’s not medicine.
A baggie, filled with paper strips. There’s a piece of folded up paper in there, with them. I open up the baggie, my eyebrow already raised. What the hell, right?
Pregnancy tests. It’s odd, if this really is the room shared by the boys. Then again, apparently it isn’t exactly unheard of for them to have girls around. What had he said? Seth’s high-school girlfriend ‘practically lived here for a year’?
What kind of trouble could he get up to in that time?
I smirk at the thought. A lot of trouble. A lot of pregnancy-test trouble. They’re probably old. Old tests, far as I know, tend to give false negatives. It’s pretty common knowledge, I guess. Well, since they’re here, I mean, I might as well.
I have to pee anyways, and I have to have some excuse to flush the toilet.
There’s a dispenser of Dixie cups by the sink. I take one and very carefully pee into it. Then, off to the side. I drop a couple tests in. Nobody’s going to miss them, I tell myself. Then I count off the time that it says on the paper while I finish my business.
Five, four, three, two, one. Take them out, wipe off excess ‘fluid.’ Set them aside. It’s all in fun, and it’s a negative, because the tests are from back when Seth was in high school, which was, what, nine years ago?
I don’t know how long it took, after that. It was probably not very long, but I think it’s longer than ninety seconds before I stand up and start pulling my pants back up. There’s a dark purple strip, with an arrow pointing to it that says “CONTROL” in tiny text.
Next to it, on both tests, is a very faint, but absolutely certain, pink line.
I blink. Then I blink again. Then I pat the strips dry on a bit of toilet paper, slip them into my pocket, flush the toilet, make for the door and remember that the baggie is still sitting open on the counter. I close it up, put it back where I found it, and walk wide-eyed into the foyer.
Blake’s waiting with his brothers. Waiting to explain how it is in dragon families, I guess. The same thing they’ve been doing since he finally convinced me that he wasn’t nuts.
“Blake, babe, I need you to come upstairs.”
“Is there a problem?”
“Just come on. There’s, uh… a bug. I need you to take care of it, okay?”
He smiles at me, his eyebrows raised in amusement. “A bug?”
“It’s big and gross and I think I killed it but I just… I feel like I’m going to throw up if I clean it up but I know I can’t just leave it, okay?”
“I’m right behind you,” he said. Then he turns back to the couches full of boys and shrugs. “A bug, I guess!”
I hear it from behind. I don’t turn around. Hell, I’m already trotting up the stairs and near the top, by the time he says that. But I don’t go into the bathroom. I go into the bedroom, halfway so that Blake can see me when he reaches the top of the stairs.
He follows me in with an even more amused expression. “Babe, I don’t know if now is exactly the right…” I fish the tests out of my pocket and hold them out flat in my hand. “What’s this?”
“Look at them.”
“Okay, I’m looking. What am I looking at?”
“Blake?”
“Are you going to tell me what’s up, or not?”
“I found those in the bathroom, and took them. As a joke. I mean I haven’t been feeling my best, but…”
“Wait. Pregnancy tests?”
“That’s what they are.”
He looks at them again. “You’re pregnant?”
I shrug. “I guess I am.”
“Oh. OH.” Then his arms wrap around me and he lifts me easily off the ground. “Oh my God! I’m so excited!”
“I’m not! This is impossible, Blake! I can’t get pregnant, remember?”
“Maybe that’s just with humans. Did you think of that? Because I’ve got two tests right here that say different.” He laughs. It doesn’t have the forced, nervous sound that so much of my own laughter has had lately. “God! I’m so… I love you so much, babe. When do we tell people?”
I don’t know what to tell him. The only thing I’ve been certain of, for all this time, is that I can’t have a baby. And now, I find out that’s not true. I’m excited. Of course I’m excited.
But is it normal to be so scared?
19
The words echo again in my head. ‘When do we tell people?’ I still haven’t answered him, after thirty seconds. I can practically feel them ticking by in my head, Thirty five. Forty.
“I don’t know,” I admit, finally. Seventy-eight seconds by my count, not that I had a clock on the wall to compare to.
“I know, it’s not time. Yet. But I just can’t get over it! God. So wild. So exciting. God. Dad’s gonna flip!” The pit in my stomach almost manages to close itself up as I watch his excitement. It’s infectious.
“Just give it a couple more weeks. We’ll tell them when it’s time, okay? Once we’ve had time to let this all, I don’t know… process.”
“Of course. Of course. I’m just. God!”
“Can you just hold me for a minute?”
His arms wrap around me, and for along time I feel like I’m going to be fine. It’s a good feeling, one that I don’t know if I can keep doing without for long. My gut tells me that I can’t keep this up forever, but I can damn well try.
“You okay, Cass?”
“I’m going to be great.”
“You’re not upset, are you? I understand, you know. I’m not going to get mad at you.”
The implication takes a long time to sink in. Time I spend with my head resting on his shoulder, enjoying the feeling of his body close to mine. Did he mean that he thought I might want to… oh God!
“I’m not thinking… I’m not going to… No. No!”
His arms squeeze tighter. “Okay. I just didn’t want you to feel like you had to do something for me. Something you weren’t comfortable with, I guess.”
I let out a long breath and then push him away gently. “Okay, we need to go back down. I just needed to tell… needed to tell somebody, and you needed to know.”
“I’m glad you told me. I’m glad it’s happening.”
I lean against his shoulder for a moment and let my head rest against him. Just a moment. Then I straighten up.
“Come on, lover boy. We’ve got to get back to them.”
“I know.”
We take the walk back to the stairs side by side. The stairs are wide enough; the whole place is large, and if I wrap my arm around his waist we could get through everything but the doors without having to turn to the side. You could have a wild three-legged race here.
Blake goes first down the stairs, though. I don’t think I can go first, and I’m still not sure that I can stand the conversation we’re going to have to have. The conversation about dragons and how they live. I could probably use it for at least one thing, though.
I could ask if they take medicine. If human medicine even works on them, since they’re apparently something totally different.
“How did it go up there? Took you both a little while.”
“Oh, man, you shoulda seen it! Biggest bug you ever saw! Blood from the ceiling down to the floor! We had to repaint the walls.”
“That right?”
Blake
put his fingers up an inch apart. “That big. You could’ve stepped on two of them and not noticed.”
Seth laughed at that. I don’t know his sense of humor, and the truth is that at this point I’m not sure if I’m interested in finding out about it. But that seemed to have tickled his funny bone somehow, regardless.
“So are we having this talk, or what? I’ve got stuff to do today.” That was Lance.
“Keep your pants on, big guy,” Blake says. “Everyone’s got to step on bugs sometimes.”
Blake turns on me as I walk up. “So do you have any questions for us?”
“Uh… so like. How long do dragons even live?”
Lance decided to take that one. “That depends. Are we talking about real knuckleheads? Knuckleheads like your boyfriend? Another year or two, tops.”
Blake looked over at him with a thick line between his eyebrows. “That’s insensitive, dude. Come on.”
“Smart ones? The eldest I heard of was ten thousand. But uh… that’s pretty extreme.”
“So what’s the average?”
“Uh… let me make a comparison… A hundred is pretty old, right? But there’s people out there, humans, who are, what, a hundred ten? Hundred twenty?”
“I guess.”
Seth cuts it off. “Two thousand is old. I’ll make this easy. Your boyfriend’s about four hundred years old. Every couple years, he goes back to college to try to learn anything at all.”
“Oh.”
“I’m three. Dante, two and a quarter, and Lance, the sweet young babe, is almost a hundred and forty.”
“Oh. So… I guess age is just a number, huh?”
“You’re not going to ask the last one?”
“How old is your dad?”
“Uh… let me do some math here. He was a newborn in, uh… 5247 BC… so… Yeah, not going to do that. Seven and change. Seven thousand.”
I let out a low breath. “Holy shit.”
“He’s no spring chicken.”
A voice from down the hall boomed through the whole room. “Who’s talking shit?”
I turned and Anatoly himself strode into the room. Knowing that he’d been born around the same time as Moses made things a little bit different. He still had the intense, dark expression. Still had the deep, craggy lines through his face.
And he looked virile as hell.
Margaret coming up behind, her hair a little bit rumpled and a halfway-dazed look in her eyes, only completed the image. For seven thousand years old, he was practically young.
“Didn’t mean nothing by it, Dad. But she’s got to know, doesn’t she? Don’t you figure she deserves to know?”
“I think her sire should have told her, is what I think. But barring that, then yes.” He lifted one hip up onto the couch, which completed the image of the entire Yovanovich clan, the entire executive staff of one of the largest arms dealers in the world, all together. “So if you’ve got any other questions, I’ll answer them, so you don’t get the wrong idea from my idiot sons.”
“Wait,” Blake cut in. He stepped forward from where he’d been standing, leaning against the couch. “I have a question.”
“Please tell me that you’re not about to make an ass of yourself with some stupid joke. You’ve been around for four hundred years, you’d think you’d have gotten over them.”
Blake’s stare was daggers at Seth. Then he turned back to me, and I looked back, not bothering to hide my confusion.
Then he dropped down in front of me to one hand, pulled something out of his pocket, and I damn near died as he spoke the words I didn’t want him to say to me. Not right now, not right here, not in front of all these people.
“Cassidy Black, will you make me the happiest man in the world by agreeing to be my wife?”
That did it. What had previously been near-constant nausea caused by a baby I couldn’t possibly be carrying, became a twisting, flipping, squeezing feeling in my stomach that I recognized just in time to sprint out of the room and find a trash can to be sick into.
20
The noise behind me is so loud that I can’t imagine how deafening it must be in the room with them. And to be honest, there’s nothing I want more than to be able to walk away. But I can’t. There’s a thousand exits to this God damned labyrinth of a mansion, and a thousand ways that I can get myself out of it, but there’s no way that I can get back to Arcadia before they find me, and I’m going to have to face them at some point, no matter what.
Which is to say, like it or not, I have to face it. And to be entirely honest, that scares the hell out of me. But I've got to answer him, and I've got to do it soon. Today. In the next five minutes, probably, unless I want to figure out some way out of this house and out of his life, while the entire family waits for me just a few yards away.
I swallow hard and walk over to the sink, turn on the faucet, and drink straight from the tap to clear the stinging remains of sick out of my mouth.
"You can use a glass, you know," a voice says behind me. "I don't think anyone's going to hold it against you."
I spit the water out and feel almost clean again and turn to Blake. He's leaning against a wall and looks every bit like someone who expected me to run out after he asked me to marry him. Like it was all part of his plan.
"Feeling better?"
"You can't just spring something like that on a girl," I answer. I hope that I sound a little more confident than I sound. More like I'm in a laughing mood, rather than feeling like I'm going to throw up again if given the slightest reason.
In order to complete the illusion, I pull my face into a smile. If there's anything I'm good at, it's smiling. I've got a lot of practice with it. I have to, like anyone in any service industry.
"I'll be sure to give you more warning the next time we get married," he says. He waggles an eyebrow, hoping that it's going to appeal to me, and I'll be damned if it doesn't work, whether I like it or not.
"Don't get cute with me," I tell him. I hope he listens, but I know he wont. I like it about him, and I hate it, all at the same time.
"You got it. No more cuteness. You ready to come back into the other room?"
"I just need a minute," I tell him. "Can you make that happen for me? Just one minute?"
"A lot can happen in a minute," he says. "But I feel like one minute might be a little fast."
For an instant I don't know what he's talking about. Then he comes up closer and draws me into his arms with an eyebrow raised, and the meaning of his joke suddenly hits me.
"You pervert! God! Who would marry you?" I laugh at my own joke. He doesn't.
"Does that mean you won't agree to marry me?"
"I don't know if I'd say all that…"
"So you will?"
"I guess you're just going to have to find out by reading the papers, same as everybody else."
"Oh, good. Just what I've always wanted. My name in the papers. Are you feeling better?"
I lay my head on his chest. It feels good, and I want to stay like this forever. But I know better than to believe I can actually get what I want this time. "Yeah, I am."
"Are you ready to go back in the other room?"
"No," I say. I can't lie, and I don't want to even if I could. "But I have to do it some time, and I might as well make it now. Right?"
He smiles down at me and takes my hand, takes me back into the other room.
Anatoly spoke first as I stepped back into the room, my head bowed as I failed to keep my back straight under the weight of all those eyes on me, and the embarrassment of what had just happened. "You feeling alright?"
"I'm going to be fine."
"So, what? You couldn't stomach the idea of being married to this idiot?" Lance barked a laugh at his own joke, and I couldn't help cracking a smile.
"It was part of a trick that went wrong, actually. I was going to pull a bunch of colored flags out of my mouth, and then it would spell out my answer, but it turns out that it triggered the gag reflex."
&n
bsp; "Oh, well. That makes sense, too."
"Glad you approve."
"So?" Margaret said it this time. She didn't sound nearly as amused by the whole thing as the others. She sounded like she was clenched up from her butt to her shoulders and probably everything else in between, too. "What did she say?"
She was staring right at me as she said it, but as she finished the sentence I realized that she wasn't asking me. She was apparently asking Blake. What a treat.
"She said that she can speak for herself, mother," Blake said acidically.
"Well, fine, then. Speak up!"
I burned with desire to shut her mouth for her. But the reality is, that's not an option, no matter how much I'd like for it to be. So I do the next best thing and tell her exactly what she doesn't want to hear.
"I said yes," I tell her, and smile sweetly. It's easy to smile, this time, because the look of fury that erupted behind Margaret's carefully crafted look of amused interest is plain for anyone who looks at her, no matter how much she tries to hide it.
And for better or worse, anything I can do to ruin her day makes me feel a hell of a lot better.
21
The next week is a blur, and it only slows down because I start getting used to the blur. Like my mind just starts getting used to the idea that maybe I will just never be moving slow again. I think there's probably some big picture here. If I could bottle this feeling up and sell it to people, I could make it rich as a self-help guru.
There's a thousand decisions to be made all at once. Who's coming? Who do I even have on my side of the family? Big wedding, or small? How small? What kind of cake? Who's going to be doing the catering? What kind of dress? Who's going to be making it?
The truth is that I've always imagined what a wedding was going to be like, but I never really expected to have to answer the question of who was going to make my dress.
After all, I'm a normal person, like anyone else. The answer to 'who makes your dress' is 'someone whose name is on the label, when you go to the store.' Oh, sure, you get a seamstress to fit it, obviously. But the idea of having a custom-made wedding dress, made for the wedding? Unthinkable.