Page 35 of Nine-Tenths

Chapter Twenty-Eight

W hen the vineyard caretaker Luiz Mendoza calls me "Master Levesque", I just say, "Colin's fine," and remind myself of Rule Four. This isn't exactly the kind of hard work I thought relationships would be, but I’m already in for the pound; might as well be in for the penny.

And Dav, joyful under the August sunshine, he shines like a new penny, too. He watches proudly as Luiz and I chat hectolitres and acreages, aphids and natural pest deterrents, and the virtues of grafting. We yap long enough that Luiz tuts and waggles a finger at Dav.

"Master Tudor, your nose."

"I'm fine," Dav says, childish petulance creeping into his tone. "Dragons don't get skin cancer."

"But a red nose will not be appealing to your young man." He winks at me. "Help me, Mast—Colin. He's a bad influence on the children."

The playful banter is endearing, and puts some of my worries about Dav’s attitude toward the human beings his ‘owns’ to rest. This man, decades his junior, mother-hens Dav. And Dav is okay with it.

"There’s nothing sexy about blisters," I play along.

"Dash it, I'll get the bloody hat!" Dav throws his hands in the air.

He turns toward a chicken coop that's hidden from view of the back patio by the natural rolling curve of the land—nothing in Niagara is ever flat —and before he can get a few steps, Luiz adds: "Since you're headed that way, take the feed with you, boss."

Dav spins on his heel, and eyes up a massive sack leaning against the end of a privacy hedge.

"That's too heavy—" I protest.

"Draconic strength," he reminds me, hefting it effortlessly onto his shoulder, and, okay, yes, more of this please.

"Nice," I comment as I enjoy the sight of Dav walking away. "You didn't engineer it so we're alone so you can give me a shovel talk, did you? Because like, Sarah already did that with her eyes over breakfast."

Luiz sticks his hands in his pockets, and offers up a shit-eating grin. "Tell me more about these Green Farming grants?"

"Very subtle subject change," I praise, and I proceed to do just that.

The crunch of boots on gravel gives me enough warning to face Dav as he approaches, and boy am I glad I did because it is a sight .

"There," Dav says, holding his arms wide. He's wearing a ratty wide-brimmed straw hat, like something from Far from the Madding Crowd. He looks so stupid . I love it immediately.

A lifetime of stupid, happy moments like this spool out before us; busy days filled with farmyard chores, and early morning porridge, and grapes. All of it meaning ultimately nothing, but at the same time are the fabric from which the everything of a contented life is woven.

Content.

Yes.

That's what I feel.

Aside from owing Hadi an apology, and my family an explanation, I'm content.

Can I be content with being owned?

Dammit.

The hazy golden bubble deflates.

No. I am happy, goddammit.

And I am going to stay that way.

Dav plops a similar hat, though newer, on my head. "You don't have the advantage of scales."

Luiz tugs a bottle of sunscreen from his chest pocket, and I attack the back of my neck, my pokey-outey ears, and my nose.

"If you had that, why did you…?" Dav starts, but then realizes he's been played. "Shall we start with the chickens, Mine Own? Seeing as I've just delivered their breakfast."

"Sure." I toss the sunscreen and a goodbye over my shoulder to Luiz. "I thought you weren’t allowed to labor in front of humans."

"It’s different when it’s my own farm," Dav says. "It’s not for them, it’s for me ."

"Sounds like splitting hairs bullshit to me."

"Hmm," Dav agrees, without agreeing.

We spend an hour at the coop, watching the calculated head bobs of the feathered menaces. The way they move reminds me that birds were once dinosaurs.

Some people think that the first dragons were actually dinosaurs, but like the way that some species will always evolve toward crab , it's been proven that humans and dragons evolved separately from some common ancestor millions of years ago.

Us towards furry and mammalian, them towards scaly and reptilian, but in such a way that we became compatible enough again that, like homo sapiens and homo erectus , we can interbreed.

Although, like, how exactly dragons make babies—eggs?—is a guarded royal secret.

Maybe it's ugly, I think, imagining a big-ass egg squeezing out of a human-sized vagina. Ouch. I try not to imagine what it would feel like if a contraction shattered a shell.

Thinking about eggs makes me wonder if Dav has siblings. And baby photos. Or… baby portraits , I guess, seeing as he was born before cameras.

What did my forever-person look like before me?

Putting it like that, it seems immediately and vitally important that I've never seen his dragonshape.

I try to recapture the sense-memory of his wings stretched over my head, his tail wrapped around my ankle, even the stab of his claws in my arm; every moment I glimpsed the other half of my other half.

I've gotten into what amounts to a marriage without even having the important pre-cuffing conversations like if Dav wants to combine finances, or have kids, or whether he has horns.

We meander to the barn, where I'm distracted by Dav's gentleman landowner menagerie: a couple of grand old Clydesdales who still work the plows in the areas the electric tractor can't reach, a fat old sow, and a small gaggle of geese with a horrible leader who tries to steal my new hat.

Dav lets half a dozen goats out of the barn to do their duty keeping the weeds and grass around the base of the vines cropped, and the low-hanging fruit eaten so the upper grapes develop sweeter.

They also provide excellent fertilizer. We follow the goats down the path toward the back patch, dodging examples.

"I'm so impressed you do the thing with the goats. I love the thing with the goats."

"I know," Dav says gently.

The back lane is idyllic, bordered on either side with wildflowers and the chest-height sand-stone walls that intrigued me yesterday.

(Did I only arrive yesterday?)

A field of vibrantly green grain waves gently in the midmorning breeze.

The world smells of evaporating dew and fresh country air.

It’s filled with the soft bleats of the goats and the tinkle of the antique bells strung around their necks, the hum of bugs whose names I don't know, but I bet Dav does, and the distant white-noise of the traffic beyond Dav's insulating walls.

It's romantic as fuck, so I reach out and snag Dav's pinkie finger with mine.

His answering smile is like the bright crescent of the sun during an eclipse.

Dav explains the terroir of the grapes, and how land has always been worked the same way here, mostly because he's a stick-in-the-mud.

The exception being only the stuff that made it easier on his workers themselves, like introducing machinery as it was invented.

Although, he admits, he has made some sweeping alterations of late to take advantage of the new understandings in sustainability.

The goats are left to their own devices, trained to wander home when it's milking time.

Our ramble eventually leads us back to the house, where this mysterious cook has left a buffet on the kitchen counters.

I meet more farmhands (I'm never gonna remember all these names) filling their plates and taking them outside to enjoy.

And through all of this, I can't get the thought of scales and tails out of my head.

And yeah, okay, some of the thoughts are kinky—hello, I read draconic historical romances like they're going out of style—but mostly I just wonder what Dav looks like.

By the time we've had lunch, and we've taken a wagon ride out to the middle of the vineyard with Luiz and his teenaged son Diego to tie off the new growth, I’m a man obsessed.

The second Diego and Luiz are out of hearing range, I blurt out: "Hey, can I see you? Is that a weird thing to ask?" I tack on at the last second, because I remember how strongly he reacted to my request to even visit this place.

"You do see me," Dav says as he ties a vine to the guide-wire.

"No, I mean the…" I don't say real you , because the humanshape version of Dav is just as real as the draconic one. "The scaly you."

It takes Dav a second to process what I'm asking. When he gets it, his whole face does the complicated wriggle I can't interpret, and the sides of his face flush red with little scales.

"Not now!" I hiss.

"Oh, no, certainly not," Dav says in a low gravelly rumble, and he cuts his eyes over at the others. I've asked for something sexier than I realize, according to the expression that finally settles on his face.

"But it's okay? To ask?" I check in.

"For you? Yes."

"And it's okay to show me?"

"Yes," Dav husks. The smolder he levels at me would keep him employed as a romance book cover model for years.

I swallow hard, and my throat is so dry it clicks.

I reach for the water bottle Luiz had tossed at our feet and take a few strong pulls, trying to ignore the feel of Dav's eyes on my neck, the line of my arms. He takes his turn with the bottle and I turn away from the others to adjust the lay of my jeans as subtly as I can.

"Hey, slackers!" Diego calls. "Stop whispering sweet nothings! We want to get back in before the sun sets, eh?"

Dav and I hop to like naughty teenagers caught beneath the bleachers with their hands down each other's pants.

"After dinner," Dav says softly.

"Okay." Excitement, anticipation, and a small, hard ball of fear churn in my guts. Fear of what, I'm not sure. That maybe this will change everything? That maybe Mum was right, and I’ll realize that we're too different, too late? That maybe it will change nothing ?

I've never seen a dragon in the flesh. I have no idea how it will make me feel. What I do know is that I love Dav, no matter which skin he's in, and no matter what stupid rules his culture imposes on our relationship. I love him. And he loves me.