No matter how early I got there, though, Ryse was always already waiting.
“You’re late,” he would tell me.
“I am not,” I protested indignantly. “It’s not even light yet!”
“It will be in ten minutes. Come on—let’s get to work.”
As it turned out, he wasn’t joking about work. He pushed me hard—sometimes harder than I thought I could bear. But then I would remember that Chud Larson was still somewhere in the halls of the Academy, and I would work even harder.
“You can do it,” Ryse would say as he coached me through another round of push-ups or pull-ups. He wanted to build up my upper body strength, though he said I had surprisingly strong legs for my size.
He encouraged a lot and praised me when I felt like giving up. We were becoming something like friends, I thought. Or maybe he was more like my mentor. But still, sometimes I caught him looking at me in ways that made me nervous.
Once, I caught him staring at my chest with a puzzled expression on his face.
“What? Do I have something on my shirt?” I demanded, looking down at myself. The problem was, now that I was no longer on the edge of starvation, my breasts had started growing again. And my nipples were tight and pointy from the chilly air in the gym. But that shouldn’t matter because I always wore my Dragon Glass pendant—all Ryse should see was just a skinny First-year cadet with a flat chest.
“No,” he said, looking away quickly. “It’s just…sometimes you remind me of a Gold-wing’s scales.”
“What do you mean?” I asked frowning.
“Well…they look one color in the shadow and another color in the light,” he explained. If you saw M’alex in his cavern on Level Five, you’d think he was just royal purple. But when you see him in the sunlight, his true beauty comes out and you can see the gold on every scale.”
“What are you saying?” I scoffed, trying to act like the whole thing was ridiculous, though my heart was pounding. “That being all sweaty makes me beautiful?”
But Ryse refused to take the bait.
“No. I’m just saying sometimes you look one way…and sometimes you look another.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I pointed out. “I’m always just me—just Auri.” My hands were slippery with sweat as I willed him to believe it. Was he somehow seeing through the glamour my Dragon Glass pendant cast over me? But how was that possible?
Luckily, Ryse backed down.
“You’re right.” He shook his head. “Ignore me—I didn’t get enough sleep last night. Come on—let’s go for another round of squats.”
The incident worried me—should I start binding my breasts again? But Ryse never said anything else about it, so I tucked the small incident away uneasily into a corner of my mind and tried to forget it.
Other than that, I won’t deny I enjoyed working out with him—especially when he corrected my form.
“No, no—lift with your legs, not your back,” he would say, putting one big, warm hand on the small of my back briefly. Or—“No, look—you’re doing that wrong—“ as he took my wrist in his hand and showed me exactly how to curl one of the heavy stone weights the cadets used to build strength.
I liked it when he held my feet for sit-ups, and I especially liked it when he held my legs when I did pull-ups. At first I could only hang from the bar, but after a lot of effort, I was able to do more and more until I was up to twelve.
Ryse could do fifty without stopping himself, but he never denigrated me or called me weak. He just wrapped his arms around my legs and gave me a little boost so I could do “just one more” when I felt like I had reached my limit. Then he would help me down by supporting my weight as I came off the bar and setting me gently on my feet. It seemed like he always held me just a fraction of a second longer than he needed to, but I didn’t complain—I loved it.
Even when he sweated, he smelled good—like leather and clean, masculine musk. I hate to say that I noticed, but I did—I couldn’t help it. We were spending more and more time together and he was big and tall and strong and protective. Though I knew he could never return my feelings, I confess I began to get a little flutter in my stomach every time he was near.
Besides the hour we spent together in the morning, I went flying with him every day during our Battlefield Signaling class. Sometimes, when I was soaring on M’alex’s back with Ryse’s arms wrapped firmly around me, I thought that I had never been happier in my life.
But we weren’t completely joined at the hip. After some argument, I ate breakfast and lunch at my old table with Jorn-o and my friends, and had dinner with Ryse at his table in the evenings. After a few days of this, the Second-years seemed to accept my presence and there weren’t so many hard looks thrown my way.
I ate with a better appetite now, but every night, Ryse gave me his own bowl of Dragon Custard to eat along with my own.
“I can’t eat two bowls,” I protested, the first time he did it.
“You can and you will,” was his firm reply. “You need to build up your strength. Impression Day is just around the corner and after that, it won’t be long before Hatching Day. Once your dragon cracks its shell, you’re going to need as much stamina as you can get to keep up with it.”
“Are newly hatched dragons really that hard to deal with?” I asked, frowning.
