by Martha Woods
It was something like peace, but with the constant, looming threat of violence, that might erupt at any moment.
It was a peace that I did not trust for even a single moment.
The moment I let my guard down, I thought, would be the moment Ryl struck back. The man himself had not yet been found, and there was no way in hell that he or his men had simply rolled over and surrendered so easily.
But what else could I do, for now?
All was quiet. My men had yet to find any trace of Ryl or his closest confidantes in hiding. It had to be assumed that his loyalists were managing to find new ways of communicating outside of their previously held meetings, we simply didn't know how, when, or where such communications were taking place.
We remained vigilant, but for the time being, we seemed to have little option but to pretend as though life among the Protectors was back to how it once had been, as all the while we remained on our guard, and prepared ourselves to strike the moment a Dark One dared to raise his ugly head again.
–––––
It was a muggy, late July afternoon. Humidity weighed heavily on the forest air, but the sun was bright, and things felt serene. I had spent very little time with my boys in the weeks since I'd been dealing with Dark One drama, and so the four of us were out for a picnic today, enjoying the weather, and the feeling that we were young and carefree– my sons, far more than myself.
I watched in the distance, as Fri paced across a log over a waterfall as though walking across a tightrope. He, of all my boys, reminded me the most of his mother. Always the mediator, the even-tempered one, seeing reason even when his brothers were seeing red with fury about something.
Well- usually the mediator, anyway.
Nol happened to be one of the few people who could really get his ire up, as he was attempting to do now.
As Fri paced his log, Nol came flying suddenly at him in his dragon form, whipping around either side of him, trying to knock him off his balance. He slid his tail between Fri's ankles and started wriggling, causing Fri to hop back and forth from foot to foot in order to avoid being thrown off balance.
“Nol, cut it out! Stop being a doofus! I wasn't bothering you! Dad!”
Fri looked over imploringly at me, and I smiled at him. Maybe I should have intervened, but I thought it might be good for Fri to learn to stand up for himself. And in any case, I knew Nol was just trying to get his brother to play with him, and I was sort of curious to see how Fri would react.
He might not have done so at all, but once again Nol seemed to know exactly which buttons to push. He surged forward, snapping playfully at Fri with his jaws, and Fri was forced to hurry and duck for cover, losing his balance as Nol fluttered past.
“Damn it, Nol!” he yelled, and suddenly toppled off the log, looking like he was about to plunge into the stream below. I may have been the father of a dragonshifter, but I was still a father, and I felt a pang of anxiety as Fri's little body toppled, only for him to catch himself in midair.
He transformed just before he hit the water, beating his small gold wings, and letting out a scrawny, but adequately menacing roar as he surged upward, thinking he was standing up to Nol as he snapped after him, and seeming wholly oblivious to the fact that he'd just given him exactly what he wanted.
Whatever animosity the middle child might have felt to the youngest, it seemed to evaporate quickly enough. Soon the two brothers were wrestling around in midair, biting and scratching at one another, but in a way that, to this observer in any case, seemed a lot more fun than it was threatening.
God, how I wished I could be like that again. So innocent and carefree. My expectations of life not yet dashed by such a cruel and crazy world.
I watched the two of them for a while, twisting around through the air. They flew fast in my direction, and I had to duck to avoid being hit by them. I watched them recede through the trees, and almost thought about joining them. They loved it when I did that, pretending to fight with them, obviously using only a small portion of my actual strength, and always letting them ovepower me in the end.
I decided to sit this one out, however.
The day felt too lazy, and I felt too content as I was.
Let them carry on, I thought. Everything felt perfect just the way that it was.
Well... Almost perfect, anyway.
My thoughts, as they so often did these days, returned to a familiar place.
To Melina. To what she would think if she saw my boys wrestling around. What she would think of if she saw me joining in the fun.
Come to think of it, did she even know I had three boys? Had I mentioned it, over the course of our very brief exchange?
I didn't think so...
Would she care?
I had to laugh at this– the notion that she had been unfazed by her encounter with a dragonshifter, but that the fact of that same dragonshifter having three young sons would be a dealbreaker for her.
Would it be, though?
God, why couldn't I stop thinking about her?
I looked around, trying to distract myself from these thoughts.
Where the hell had Ynder gotten to, I thought? Why wasn't he playing with Nol and Fri?
“Oh, there you are,” I muttered, finding my oldest son seated against a tree trunk, a book open in his lap. He raised his eyebrows at me, as though silently asking, what do you want?
“Nice day out, isn't it?”
“I guess,” he said noncommittally.
“Don't you want to play with your brothers?”
He shrugged.
“Don't like the game, huh?”
“It's okay. I get tired of fighting sometimes,” he said sagely.
I was impressed by this.
I crouched down beside him against the trunk of the tree, and we sat in silence together for a while.
My thoughts went to all of their familiar places, how I wished things could be, but how they couldn't possibly ever be, but how desperately I longed for them all the same.
“Can I ask you something?” I said after a while.
“You just did,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice.
“Smartass,” I said, playfully tapping the palm of my hand against his head.
“I thought we couldn't say that,” he said.
“It's just you and me,” I said. “We can say whatever we want to for right now.”
Silence for a moment. “Yeah,” he said finally. “You can ask.”
I waited, not wanting to make things awkward. Finally, I asked anyway, “Do you miss your mother?”
To my surprise, he gave me a direct answer. “Yeah,” he said. And then, as though to qualify this, and not seem overly sensitive about it, he added, “Sometimes.”
“I miss her all the time,” I said. “I'm sorry, that you three didn't get to know her as long as I did.”
“It's not your fault,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But I'm sorry life turns out the way it does sometimes.”
“That's just life,” he said, and I couldn't tell whether this was sage or nihilistic beyond his years. Maybe both.
“She loved you, with all her heart. You know that, right? She never would have left, if the choice had been hers to make. She was just... She was very strong. Up until the very end. But she just got so sick. And she wanted to stay with you three so much. But in the end God needed her too much. He called her, and she had to go, even though she didn't want to.”
“Really?” Ynder asked, and there was clear skepticism in his voice at the idea.
I sighed, and shook my head, even though he couldn't see me on the other side of the tree trunk. I couldn't bring myself to insult his intelligence like that. “I don't know. But I do know that she loved you. And that if she is with God, she still loves you guys as much now as she did when she was with us.”
“I know,” said Ynder, and added, to my surprise, “thanks.”
Silence ensued again. I let him return to his readin
g, although I imagined I'd screwed up his concentration to a considerable degree, and he probably wasn't focusing too well.
Maybe I should have quit while I was ahead. But I hadn't had the chance to confide in anyone in the ensuing weeks what was constantly on my mind. And crazy though it seemed, at that moment, my eldest son seemed to me one of the wisest, most grounded people I knew, and I thought that he, if anyone would be able to give me some manner of insight about what I should do. Even if he didn't have a direct answer for my situation, his reaction, I thought, might be like a divining rod, something that might at least steer me in the right direction.
“Can I ask you something else?” I said, after maybe five minutes.
Nol and Fri zoomed past us, belching little gold fireballs at one another.
“Yeah,” said Ynder.
I waited a moment, apprehensive about his response, as though whatever came out of his mouth next was a final verdict, one which I would have to respect no matter what his judgment.
“Do you think it would bother you if I started seeing someone new?..”
Melina
The whole thing felt like one big anticlimax. Like a life-changing event, that turned out not to be life-changing at all.
I was still stressed out. Still overworked. Still poorly rested.
The only difference now was that, on top of all that, I also had the great delight of wanting something that I knew was impossible for myself. The first thing I had really dared to want for myself in years, but which I knew that I could never have.
His gold eyes still seemed to stare back at me from across a great distance. To see into me, even from afar.
When he'd looked at me, it was like he'd known me, better than anyone. Better, even, than I knew myself.
But maybe that had all been in my head. I mean, it must have been, right? He wouldn't have left, if he'd really felt for me the way that I thought he did, the moment our eyes locked.
I mean, I understood the situation was a difficult one– at least, I understood it from the little bit that he had told me, in the few minutes he'd given me to process so much downright unbelievable information.
Was I crazy for believing him, I sometimes wondered? Was I crazy for believing what I had seen with my own two eyes? I mean, I had been totally sleep deprived on the night of the events in question, so any sane, rational person might be quick to say that yes, of course I had imagined it!
But then how did you explain my wrecked car? Or the forest blazing gold and emerald, and those craters in the earth where the- I think he called them the Dark Ones had fallen? How did you explain the stains on my sheet where he'd bled during his night's stay, if the man himself had never been anything more than a figment of my imagination?
I wished that I could convince myself that he was just that. A fantasy. A product of my self-conscious mind, projected as an escape from my stressful, frustrating, unsatisfying life. At least then, maybe I could talk myself out of wanting him, and convince myself to focus my efforts on pursuing that which was actually real and tangible.
But I couldn't stop thinking about him.
Couldn't stop spinning in circles, chasing my tail, so distracted from my work by thoughts of him, that things went even more slowly for me than they usually did. It became even more difficult to search for meaning through the mountains of paperwork I was faced with every day. I mean, how could any of this mean anything? How could anything humans believed in have importance, when there was an entire, hidden world of dragonshifters out there, and when the king of this hidden world had saved my life?
How could I possibly think of anything except for that, as long as I knew that Alza was out there somewhere, and as long as I remained sure that his feelings for me must burn as strongly as my own did for him?
I couldn't explain how I knew that this was true. I just knew.
And for weeks after our initial encounter, I was certain he would come back any day now, to confirm for me what I already knew fully well to be the truth.
Any day now. Any day now.
But then the days began to pass. They turned into weeks. And soon, it had been well over a month.
The intensity of my emotions remained as fiery as ever, but the conviction that he would return to see me again slowly faded, more and more, leaving me in an anxious, hopeless state, which I didn't think I could ever find my way back out of again.
It got to a point where I wished that that night had never happened. I wished that I could forget I'd ever learned about him, that I'd ever discovered the truth of his existence...
And then one night, there was a knock at my front door.
I looked up from my work, scattered about me on the floor and on every available surface of my living room. I spent so much time, wholly consumed by my work, that I rarely ever found myself entertaining visitors.
My heart began to race as I stood up, straightening out my hair and my blouse, preparing for an encounter that I knew couldn't possibly be about to happen. It was just wishful thinking, the kind I'd engaged in, day in and day out since the night of our first encounter.
But then I went to the front door.
I reached for the knob, my wrist trembling as I held it in my grip.
I opened the door.
And there he was. As handsome, and as rugged as I remembered him. His injuries healed, and his immaculate, muscular visage completely healed, completely well again.
“Hi there,” he said, with a confident smile that seemed to melt something inside me. “Remember me?”
“Alza, hi! I– I didn't expect to see you again...”
“You aren't disappointed, I hope,” he said.
“No, not at all!” I said. I wished he could feel the frantic whirlwind of butterflies in my stomach at that moment. “I'm glad, actually. Really glad.”
Our eyes met, and there it was again. The overwhelming heat, the irresistible pull between us.
“I'm glad to see you, too,” he said. “I, um... I wanted to properly thank you. Repay you, for saving me. Here. I wanted to bring you this. For the damage to your car.”
He extended a small canvas bag to me, its contents clinking as he handed it over. I opened it curiously, and was astonished to find myself in a possession of a sackful of gold coins, unlike any I had ever seen, the faces of dragons embedded on their surfaces. They glinted up at me from the porch light, and I tried to guess how much they could all possibly be worth in U.S. dollars. A hell of a lot more than my old wrecked clunker had ever been worth, I surmised...
“Oh, Alza... You don't have to–“
“I want to,” he cut in, and I looked up to see him smiling at me. I felt my face grow hot, and I smiled back at him. “You did a lot for me, and it's important to me that I properly express my gratitude.”
“Oh. Well. Thank you. That's very generous of you.”
There was a moment's pause, during which I had no idea what I should say– whether I should invite him inside, or whether this might be too presumptuous. I noticed, however, that he seemed to be trying to think of what he wanted to say next. I waited, and finally, he spoke again, surprising me with the very words I had been waiting to hear for weeks:
“I also wanted to ask you... I know these are unusual circumstances, but– well, I wanted to see if you might be interested in going out with me sometime? Tonight, even, if you're not too busy...”
I'm pretty sure my mouth fell open at his asking the question, and I should have embarrassed. But I wasn't.
It had only been a few weeks since Alza had saved me from the brink of certain death. But I felt like I'd been waiting an entire lifetime for him to ask me that question...
–––––
We fell into my bedroom, tripping over one another in our frenzied desperation. Our bodies hot, our mouths melting onto one another, electricity crackling between our bodies with each touch, each movement, each hint of what was still to come.
He pinned me against the bedroom door and pushed his tongue down my
throat, and I slid mine into his cheeks, loving the tightness of his grip around me, and the heat of his breath, and the pressing of his hardness up against my midriff, letting me know exactly what was on his mind at that very moment, as though all of these other signs weren't evidence enough.
We had gone out, earlier that evening, just as he'd asked me to. It had all been wonderful. Dinner. Conversation. A walk, holding hands through the park. But it all felt like a blur now. It all felt eclipsed by our mutual want for one another. The burning need that had begun so many weeks ago, but was only just now being allowed to reach its culmination.
As a rule, I did not go to bed with a man on the first date.
But this was not just any man.
For Alza, I was willing to break all the rules. I wanted to break them, and I wanted him in my bed with me, every bit as much as he himself wanted to be there. Our connection was primal, visceral, and any attempt to delay or to slow down what we knew what was inevitable, for even a moment longer, would be enough to drive both of us crazy.
And so I let myself be taken.
I let myself dissolve in the arms of this incredible man, who wasn't a man at all– who was something unlike anything I had ever encountered before, and yet who was so much more man than any I had ever known.
He sank his teeth into the side of my neck, and I imagined those sharp fangs of his digging into me, and the fire of his breath enveloping me, his serpentine body, twisting around and around me.
I ran my fingers through his hair, grasping fistfuls of it as my desire for him became excruciating. He drew a hand up, clutching my breast, caressing me through my blouse, causing the straps to fall down, down, down along my arms. He kissed my bare shoulder, and then brought his hands to my midriff, slowly pressing upward, sliding my blouse up along my curves.
He slid the palms of his hands up against my bare breasts, and waves of sensation flooded through me, making me short of breath, my nipples stiffening, becoming sensitized, and then seeming to dissolve in his mouth as he pressed his lips so tenderly up against me. He rolled his tongue around and around my nipples, pressed his teeth down into me, and pulled gently back. I moaned. He sucked back. A desperate shiver ran across my entire body.