The admission made the shame inside me bloom and grow like wildflowers in the summer. I had known precisely what was happening when I’d had him over my lap, and I hadn’t had the least interest in stopping. I wished he were still sitting on my lap, even.
I leaned in, pressing my forehead to his and sighing. “You’ve done nothing wrong, Blake. You may be the only creature I know who can currently say that.”
He made a tiny sound almost like cracking ice as he stared into my eyes. Was he shocked? Shocked that I was capable of admitting the truth, or shocked at the truth? Somehow, I suspected that not a lot of people in his past had given him that.
I wondered if it got hard to recognize what was true, when you were told constant lies.
Just because I’d been honest, though, didn’t mean I wanted to deal with it any more than anyone else. So after a moment, I pulled away, turned, and left the cave.
Only afterward did I think about the fact that I hadn’t tied him back up.
I’d just been musing to myself about how the man was perhaps the only one I knew who hadn’t done any wrong, though. Was I so determined to disbelieve my own observations?
I marched steadily along the rocky shoreline for an hour, or maybe two, glaring out at the frigid sea. What were we becoming? Or better put, since the others had accepted Blake easily, what was I becoming?
Something I didn’t especially like.
I’d known a dragon in my youth who had hoarded mirrors, and I’d never much liked visiting her home. I suspected I would like it even less now.
She had also been rather unpleasant, given to pausing for long periods in order to stare at herself in those mirrors, leaving me to wonder if she truly hoarded the mirrors, or if she cared more about her own reflection inside them.
Odd, how some could look at themselves and see only the attractiveness of the outside layer. Even some dragons, who should know better, since we could shift forms.
“That bad?” Gareth asked, coming up behind me and startling me half to death as I stood on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
I huffed at him and turned back. “I’m not sure who I am anymore.”
“You haven’t changed,” he said, as though he was pointing out the obvious. I turned to glare at him, and he held up a hand. “You haven’t changed. Only your perception of the world has. You thought that because we weren’t like other dragon clans, the humans would treat us differently than the others. Now you know they see us all as the same. It’s sensible of them, really,since trusting a dragon has almost never proven a good idea for them.”
“Then why does Blake trust us?”
His gaze softened, and he turned to look at the ground. He truly liked the human.
Fuck me, so did I. It was just that Gareth seemed totrustBlake, and all I could see when I thought of humans was my sister’s body. They all seemed to trust him. Were they all naive, or was it something else?
“Blake isn’t like most others, human or dragon. He’s a bit like you were before, only when his own brother sent him to do awful things, somehow it didn’t change him. When Eilonwy died, you realized things. You . . . grew up, in a way. You stopped trusting in justice and hope and the inherent goodness of people. He didn’t.”
He didn’t.
And Gareth was right, Blake still trusted in others. But he didn’t trust himself, which was . . . wrong?
“We’ll all be sad if you send him away,” Gareth continued after a moment. “We’ll agree and do as you say because we . . . let’s be serious here, even though you don’t want to be, you’re the closest thing we have to a leader. So if you say Blake goes, we’ll help you bundle him up and fly him back to that castle. But we’ll all be sad about it. We’ll miss him. Because he fits here, Andreas. He’s one of us. He doesn’t fit with his own people just like we never fit with other dragons.”
“And you want to fuck him.”
“And I want to fuck him,” he agreed easily. “We all want to fuck him.” The look he sent me, eyebrows lifted, told me I’d fooled no one into believing that I wasn’t a part of that number. “It doesn’t change that he fits with us. Besides, maybe it’ll stop Harri and Bran from wrestling it out all the time on who likes to be on bottom more, since the answer is neither of them.”
I scoffed. “It’s you.”
“I know. But they’re kids, and they still think it’s about some kind of hunter-brained war for dominance, rather than simply doing what you enjoy doing with your body.” He smiled out at the sea, and I was sure he was thinking about Blake again. Maybe whether Blake would be willing to fuck him.
I rolled my eyes. “You would think that since women are always in charge of dragon clans, they’d understand that penetration doesn’t make anyone weak.”
He shrugged that off. “They might be over a hundred, but they’re immature. And the only woman they’ve ever lived around as adults was Eilonwy, who’d have never slept with either of them. Not on a bet.”
I tried not to laugh, because even if he was entirely right, it was disrespectful. To say nothing of the fact that we didn’t discuss the relationship Gareth had been building with my sister when she had died. The certainty that the egg in my fireplace was his. After all, we were dragons; the egg belonged to the clan.
The egg.
