Page 84 of Nine-Tenths

I don't think I should have to be the one to close the gap, though.

After all,heleftme.

Dav rests the packet on a stack of books. "You shouldn't have this."

"I don't care. You made those for me. I saved them. So we can… it's stupid, never mind, I… I just… I thought, the first morning, after you come back, I wanted to make coffee for you. Our last batch. Symbolic.Fuck."

Dav's fingertips linger on the bag. "I know."

Another long stretch of wrongish silence, like a bath that's just too hot. You can't relax into it, just yet.

"You didn't come back," is how I finally break it. Dav winces. "I was worried," I add. It's true. It's not the whole truth, but it's true. Dav curls in on himself more, shame etched on every curve of his limbs. "There were paparazzi!" I force a laugh, but it's fake and weak. "They gave us a celebrity couple name—Alvalin. Sounds like a medieval weapon."

"I'm so sorry," Dav whispers into his own chest.

I'm close enough to touch him. Close enough to reach out. It's clear now he won't reach first. Doesn't feel he has the right to. Okay.

I can work with that. So I do. Cup my hand, extend my arm, aim for his cheek.

Dav flinches and hisses like a terrified kitten.

I gasp, horrified. Not because he cringed away, but that he cringed away fromme.

He's always been weird about people touching him. But never me. Not when he saw it was coming. When was the last time anyone touched Dav in a way that wasn't meant to hurt him?

How do dragons punish one another?

"Okay." I take a step away, give him space. "I'll let you do the deciding about—" Something warm and dry coils around my ankle. I look down, expecting a cat. Instead, it's a vividly red snake. I swallow back a scream, and quash the instinct to kick.

Because it’s not a snake.

It’s atail.

Chapter Twenty-Four

"Don't…" Dav starts, but then chokes on whatever it was he was going to say. The smooth lines of his waistcoat are rucked up, golden freckles shining along his hip.

Don't go?

Don't scream?

The scales are softer than I expected, sliding along the skin above my sock. There's a row of wine-red shark-fin spurs along what I assume is the top of his… spine? But they're not touching me. The arrow-head spike folds in like an umbrella against my shoe. It's not at all the hard weapon I expected it to be, when I tried to guess what Dav's other form might look like.

"I don't know if this is the right time to say this," I whisper, staring down at the appendage slowly coiling around my leg, to the same tempo as Dav's anxious hand-wringing. "But your tail?"

He cringes back further. "Yes?"

"It's adorable."

His mouth drops open.

I crouch and get my hand under his tail. It's no wider than my arm, about as long again as Dav is tall, and tapers into a point about the circumference of my little finger. He lets me lift it. It's heavy. And expressive. He curls it around my forearm, the arrowed tip sliding over my palm.

I press my lips against the fire-warm scales.

It smells like Dav, that smoke-and-cologne smell. And carpet dust. Bleh.

"I missed you," Dav hiccups miserably.