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Cosmo stopped suddenly and looked at Hawk, horrified. “Hurting? Oh, dear. Well, then no. No. If you need to go. Then you have to go.”

He wouldn’t have Hawk hurting, not for something as silly as just being with him. Not when Cosmo could go out and comeback and do whatever he needed to. That was… Well, it was mean.

And he wasn’t mean.

He never thought he was mean.

Do you want to go now?Cosmo had no idea what was going to happen, but he’d spent an enormous amount of time with the universe telling him what was going to happen and him not understanding what that meant.

This wasn’t much different.

“Do we need to find your hoard first? Or if I find it, do you want me to bring it to you? I don’t even know what I’m looking for and I sure haven’t found it yet. But I’ve been busy.”

Hawk stroked his back, hands never still. “Not if you cannot come with me. Not if I cannot be here, in your home with you. There’s a reason you are between worlds. A purpose. I can feel it.” Hawk took one of his hands and put it over Hawk’s heart. “Here.”

“Yes, but?—”

“Mmm. No buts. I feel certain I would not truly belong there anymore, either. It has been…millennia.”

“Oh, so you’ve been gone a long time.”

Hawk blinked at him, obviously confused. “Yes. You don’t seem to be confused by that.”

Cosmo snorted. Confused? Him? “Why would I? My people have been around for millennia.” Cosmo imagined he was old enough to have seen civilizations rise and fall. What was time to him?

Sometimes, he thought entire worlds came and went in the moments that he was just playing ball or chasing his brothers through the grass.

In the Land of Summer, time meant very little.

Not to people like him.

Hawk chuckled. “You are different, aren’t you? Unique in all the world.”

“Not at all. There are two carbon copies of me, a green one and a lavender one.”

“No. No, they are lovely and bright, and they keep things growing and sow illusions… But you shine like a beacon. You are a perfect rose in a thorny land, my love.” Hawk waxed poetic for him, and it made his heart melt. Goddess, Hawk was like no one he’d ever met in his whole life.

He wasn’t sure he could just let Hawk walk away into the dragonlands.

“We’ll figure it out.”

That was Cosmo’s position—they had plenty of time. What else were they going to do?

They could explore the house.

Make love.

Obviously, Hawk could go outside into the human world, so it wasn’t like he was being confined to a house.

Oh…house arrest. How funny was that? Cosmo started laughing, the giggles just kind of pouring out of him, and Hawk looked at him as if he had lost his mind.

Which maybe he had. He was considering house arrest of the biggest dragon he’d ever seen.

“What’s so funny, my rose?”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s going to take hours and hours of CSI to get you to get this.”

“CSI?”