Page 17 of Nine-Tenths

"Awww, thanks daddy," I say, making sure the sarcasm is audible. "But that'll keep me in here."

Dav frowns. "The chocolate bar?"

"Yup," I say, popping the 'p'. "But I appreciate the gesture."

"Is it the nuts? I've seen you drink almond milk."

"The cocoa," I correct. "A rare but annoying food allergy. Do you know how many restaurant desserts have chocolate in them?Allof them, is the answer." It feels good to be bantering with him again, feels normal, and natural, and not at all like I just had a freak-out in public in front of like, two dozen people. Some of whom arestill staring.

"Chocolate," he murmurs, chagrined.

"Don't tell me you're one of those people who is going to weep for me because I can't have it. Cause I'll tell you, to me it just tastes like puking after birthday parties."

"Vivid." He wrinkles his nose.

"You eat it for me," I tell him.

Dav pockets it instead. "I'm not fond of sweets."

"It'll melt in there."

He makes an annoyed growl-purr sound, and hands the chocolate to a wrecked-looking mom holding a sobbing infant a few seats down. She seems grateful.

"And what's that?" I ask, pointing at the novel.

He hands it to me and retreats into himself, as if waiting for me to find something wrong with this offering, too. "I had nothing to read to you, so I went to the gift shop."

A scantily clad woman in a white Gothic dress smolders up at me from the cover. The dress is mysteriously clinging and wet while her flowing blonde tresses are dry. She's leaning back against a dude with a faint bluish tinge to his dark skin, slit-pupiled eyes the piercing color of a Polynesian sea, rippling biceps patterned with tattoos, and his forearms peppered with cobalt scales. Both models are showing the same amount of cleavage—which is to say,lots.

Yum.

"The Azure Ariki's Royal Bride." I read aloud. The flop in my stomach turns back into a flip. "Are you making fun?"

"No?" Dav says. "You said you liked draconic romances."

I did, didn't I?

"That's… thoughtful," I allow. "Thanks."

Oh god, he’s actuallynice.

It’s weird.

It’s cute.

Oh, fuck.

"Shall I read?" He holds out his hand, waits for me to relinquish the book. The gesture is small, polite, like he's not comfortable with touching me now that my panic attack has passed. He hasn't taken me accepting it once as blanket permission to keep at it, and that's, yeah, that's thoughtful, too. That’sattractive.

I'm exhausted, and still sweating, and aching, and I wish like hell I could get comfortable in this chair. I want to be read to. I give him the book.

Dav leans on the armrest between us, so he's close enough that he won't be interrupting anyone else. I wish he would wrap one of those careful arms around my shoulder.

"Chapter One," he begins gently. I let my eyes slip closed and lean as far into his space as I think I can get away with. "Yalente's father had been a missionary during the Wars. He had uprootedthem from Zeeland in 1844, and it was 1846 before Yalente again found herself between four walls in a place she could call home."

Dav is a lovely reader, and when I realize his shoulder is just the right height to rest my aching head on, well, I can blame it on the exhaustion, right? Panic attacks take it right out of me.

"It was a... ah, a small reed house," he reads, voice hitching as I get comfortable. "And newer than the little stone cottage over which her dying mother had left her mistress at the tender age of fourteen. Now twenty, Yalente was losing her second home, for the Maori Rangatira had triumphed. The Pakeha had lost, and were now being evicted from the land they had stolen. Including Yalente, who began to understand what it meant to have unknowingly and unwittingly been a thief…"

---