Page 103 of Nine-Tenths

"No, no." I stand, reach out.

Can I touch him like this?

Am I allowed?

Do I actuallywantto?

I freeze where I am, two steps from the bed, hands raised. Unsure of my welcome.

"You're lovely," I say, with as much feeling as I can muster. "Don't hide. I'm not scared." Okay, so my heart is beating like a jackhammer and my breath is bottling up in the hollow of my throat, but so what?

The gaze Dav levels at me asks,Really?

"Really." It hits me, all at once, thatthisis what I’ve promised my life to. And it isn't the actual dragon before me that leaves me feeling like I've been punched in the gut, so much as the heavy reality of what I'd unknowingly tethered to finally smashing into me after a day ofnot thinking about it.

This is it for me.

This is my everything, for the rest of my life.

And there’sno getting out of it.

"Dav? I can’t," I choke, reaching out for him. "I can’t breathe–"

Chapter Twenty-Nine

When I come to, we're in a different room. A glance out the night-darkened window makes it clear it's been a bit since I…

Since I what?

Swooned like a fucking maiden.

Onatah was right: Iamthe princess.

My throat tightens again, and I—

Five things I can see: the back of a light brown, worn-out leather sofa to one side of me. A hideous popcorn ceiling, yellowed with age and tobacco. A brass-and-amber glass lamp hung in the corner. Orange shag-carpeting that has been worn flat. Wood-panel walls that I think are original, and very lived in.

The leather is buttery under my hand, well-cared for despite its age. My hair, when I run my hands through it, is sweat-dampened. My toes, when I wiggle them, are wrapped in hands, on a lap. There's a knit blanket, heavy across my belly, anchoring me to the world.

I hear soft music, something slow and jazzy. The soft, cautious cadence of breathing that's not my own. The creak of the house settling around us as the night cools off.

I can smell the cedar chest that the blanket must have come out of, and a faint whiff of smoky-amber of a dragon in human form. When I reach out, brace myself on the arm of the sofa, grab for the back of his neck, it's Dav I taste when he submits to my kiss.

"How are you?" Dav asks, when we part. He tugs at me until I'm leaned up against him.

I’m fragile in a way that I can't name. I want to burrow into Dav, live between his heartbeats, safe and unseen. Unjudged. I want what we have. But I don't want it thewaythat we have it. And I don't know how to tell him that, because he's sohappy.

He showed me something beautiful, and breath-taking, and incredible. And the sheer scope of the truth that I was the one who got to see it, the meaning behind my access to his most intimate confidences, it scares thefuckoutta me.

But isn't that what Dad used to say?

"I loved your mother so much it scared me shitless, Colin. She walked up that aisle and I swear to god, it was the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen in my life, Helen in that white dress."

"Then why did you go through with it?"

"You know how there's good pain, and there's bad pain? Like a massage, and dropping a hammer on your foot?"

"Yeah."

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