Page 69 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

He shuddered under me like a struck bell, head to tail, and the heat spiked, and the light of the scales flared so bright I had to shut my eyes. And the great solid bulk I was straddling dropped out from under me, shrank, impossibly. I fell the last foot to the ground, landing in a crouched position, and when I opened my eyes, there was no dragon.

There was a man.

He was kneeling in front of me where the dragon had been, close enough to touch, and he was — okay. I have never in my life, on either side of a magic mirror, seen anything as beautiful as him. He had light brown skin with a warmth to it, like a vibration of the dragon fire inside. A long, lean cut of a body, all of it completely naked, which meant I had a great deal more detail about his proportions than I necessarily needed.

I suppose there’s no way to wear clothes if you can shift your body into a dragon the size of a small house. His eyes, when he lifted them to mine, were not human. They burned. Orange as embers, the one piece of the dragon that had come with him into the smaller shape, and they were looking at me like I was the first warm thing he’d seen in a hundred years.

“Holy fucking shit. You’re a guy,” I said, with great dignity.

He didn’t say anything. He knelt there and looked at me, breathing like he wasn’t sure the air would still work for him in this body.

The strangest part wasn’t his beauty or the fact that he’d just been a dragon; it was something even weirder. I didn’t want to fuck him.

And I knew, with a sick, swooping, total certainty, that I was in love with Moerrven.

I shrugged out of my jacket. I don’t know why that was my first move. Some deep San Jose instinct that says when a man is unexpectedly naked and sad, you offer him outerwear. I held it out.

“Here. Cover your — you know. Your good bits.” I gestured at the general situation. “It’s a lot. You’re putting a lot out there.”

He looked down at the jacket, then back up at me, and hope moved across his ember eyes, hope that had been waiting a long time to ask anything of anyone.

“Do you not… want my good bits?” It wasn’t a line. It was genuine and a little fragile, like he already didn’t believe I’d say yes.

“No,” I said gently. “I don’t. And not wanting you is, objectively, the stupidest thing my body has ever done.” I pushed the jacket into his hands and folded his fingers around it. “You are — okay, you are unfairly beautiful. It’s actually rude. You should warn people. Also, put on the jacket.”

He held the jacket up to himself and frowned. “I do not think it will fit.” His eyes had gone bright and wet, ember to molten, and he held the jacket to his chest like it was the gold, and the gold was nothing. “Why do you not want me? You seemed to like talking to me.”

“Because I went and fell in love with a testy hundred-and-twenty-seven-year-old troll named Moerrven. I am gone for him. Completely. There’s no room in here for anybody else’s good bits.”

He smiled. It was a small smile, and a rusty one, like a door that hadn’t opened in years.

He turned his human hands over and looked at them like he’d forgotten he owned a pair. “You reached me,” he said. “No one has reached me in a very long time.”

“Yeah, well.” My throat had gone tight. “I don’t actually know what that means.”

“The dragon is me, but he is not. And I am him, but I’m not. Two souls inside one body, and his is the more powerful, because he’s a dragon. It’s… sometimes it grows difficult to fight my way out. But then the touch of a special person reaches me. Bare skin, against my head or my neck. Nowhere else works. It unlocks the door that he has barred shut.”

“I’m Sky. Sky Liang. What’s your name?”

“Oallian Vyranthos,” he said. “Well, the dragon is Vyranthos, and…”

“You are him, but you’re not,” I said.

“It’s complicated. And dramatic. But if you call me Oallian, maybe that’ll help remind him that I’m in charge at the moment, and keep him at bay.”

“Oallian.” I tried it out, and watched it land on him like the first warm day after a long winter. “Okay. Hi.” I looked at this devastating, lonely, ridiculous creature and I felt the unmistakable beginning of a very strange friendship. “Do you, perhaps, want to be friends?”

He blinked at me, then that timid smile returned and he nodded. “I have not ever had a friend.”

“Not one? Ever?” I sat with that for a second. “I can’t even imagine it. I grew up in a family with five kids. Five. I had the opposite problem: so many people in one house that being alone was a luxury item.”

He looked at me the way he’d looked at his gold, like I’d named a hoard. “Five,” he said. “How does anyone get noticed in a crowd of five?”

“You get loud. You get funny. You learn to do a backflip in the living room during somebody else’s graduation party.” I shrugged, like it was a bit, because it usually was. “And mostly you still don’t get noticed. You just get told to quiet down. Anyway. It worked out. Look at me now, best friends with a dragon.”

“How old are you, anyway?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s no calendar in this cave. Perhaps I should steal one?”