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Chapter Twenty-Three

T he walk is deceptively named. It's long enough to be a hike .

I was expecting a nice country path with a romantic avenue of trees, leaning in to gossip over my head.

There are trees, but they’re regimented, evenly-spaced, canopy-shy maples.

They border a darkly-paved drive wide enough for two vehicles to pass, marching toward a house hidden beyond a high wall of shrubs with a second arching gateway.

It's nice, but there's no personality.

There's nothing to suggest, beyond the whimsy of the front gate, that it’s Dav who lives here.

My Dav, who is proud of his wine, and secretly loves silly socks, and drinks his coffee with a hit of espresso.

My Dav, who is tactile and comforting, and tries hard to please.

My Dav, would be a hedonist, it's so clear in the way he makes meals, and makes love, but is not allowed to be.

That's what this walk looks like: Dav being denied.

Again.

In the ten minutes it takes me to get to the house, I oscillate between sorrow, fuming anger on his behalf, and curiosity.

There are more walls inside the estate, low enough I have a view of the outbuildings and vineyards they section off.

What would I find if I walked across the manicured lawn, risking the wrath of a security detail or gardener to crush the grass and hop the nearest boundary?

The sustainability-nerd in me is desperate to see if the original watering systems are still in place, if the equipment is run on gas, or solar, or literal-horse-power.

I want to poke through every shed, analyze a real working farm that has been at it for centuries.

I don’t because that can wait.

I’m going to see Dav.

I pass through the ivy-heavy wall— an inner bailey , my brain screams, a fortress prepared for a siege —and the house that’s revealed looks like something out of Jane Austen.

( Dav was seventeen years old when Jane Austen was born , I recall with a jolt .

) The house is two and a half stories, topped with a pitched roof and dormers, built of the same sandstone as the walls, and overflowing with fussy classical detailing.

The windows and front door are surrounded by stonework that looks like Greek pillars.

The front door is topped with a little stone roof trimmed with ornate scrollwork, and a modern front door in a cheeky wine-red. I bet Onatah put him up to that.

The whole building is so quintessentially Loyalist it might as well be on a postcard.

But this isn't a museum. People live here: housekeepers, farmers, winemakers. And I’m standing like a dumbass in the middle of the inner courtyard, surrounded on both sides with a riot of barely-controlled rose bushes.

I wonder how many pairs of eyes are watching me through the regimented rows of rectangular windows.

The thought of being judged by the people who know Dav's private life better than I do gives me goosebumps.

The front door opens before I'm halfway up the three shallow steps.

"Hi," the woman holding the door open says.

She's shorter than me, white, probably in her mid-thirties, with funky glasses and plump cheeks that betray a ready smile.

Right now she looks serious, but not the bad kind of serious.

Her gaze drops to the pin on my lapel, then bounces up to my face, politely bland.

"Uh. Hello. I'm, uh, I'm Colin."

"Yes, I know." She waves her hand to invite me into a narrow, well-lit foyer.

"Um, Onatah dropped me off."

"I know that, too," the woman says, and nods to a small screen beside the door, where a video feed streams a view of the front gate. It flicks to the walkway, the inner courtyard, and a terraced stone patio. Yikes, she watched my whole walk-of-not-shame. Awkward.

She thrusts out her hand, business-like and confident. "Sarah Appleby." We shake. "I'm the P.A."

"Colin Levesque," I say, like an idiot, because she knows who I am. "I’m the, er, boyfriend. I think? I hope."

She shoots a reassuring, if slightly pitying smile at me, and I follow her out of the narrow, wood-paneled front hall. We head through a pair of double doors with an elaborate stained-glass transom into what looks like a formal sitting room done up in powder blue and daisy yellow.

Okay, so maybe this place is part museum. I tuck my elbows in as we weave through spindly sofas and tables, which someone clearly stole off the Downton Abbey set, terrified of knocking over some precious family knickknack.

Christ, this room doesn't feel much like Dav, either.

Is any part of his life his own?

Sarah bustles through a side door—green baize and everything—and suddenly we're in an ultra-modern industrial kitchen. It's easily as big as my whole apartment, bisected by a massive worktop lined with stools.

One side is all chefy stainless steel, and the other is a wall of pantry cupboards, as elaborately and classically wrought as the exterior of the house, but in expensive gleaming wood, and likely just as old.

There's a big bay window framing a spectacular view of the vineyards, ringed on the outside by the limestone patio I'd seen on the security feed.

And sitting at the window, curled up on their knees to reach coloring books on a much-loved family-sized dining table, is the last thing I expected to see in Dav's house: kids.

Two of 'em. And the little girl, maybe seven years old, is ginger.

I feel all the blood drain from my face.

Both kids bolt up from the table with delighted "Mom!"s.

"They're not his," Sarah says, smirking as she hugs the younger boy to her thigh.

I hope my relief isn’t too obvious. "Well… okay."

I'd have been annoyed if Dav had children and he'd never mentioned them.

But the deal-breaker would have been that he'd hidden them from me, not their existence.

I'm suddenly wondering how a child with Dav's hair and my ears would look.

Besides it being a biological impossibility because, hello, we are both dudes , that is very much not what I should be thinking about right now.

You're mad at him, remember ? I remind myself, tearing my eyes away from the kids before my staring gets creepy.

You're worried about him, and scared for him, and you should not be thinking about how baby dragons are born.

You are getting lightyears ahead of yourself, Colin.

How about you figure out where the two of you stand before you start thinking about spawn.

Spawn that, may I remind me, you did not want with Rebeckah, which is what tanked your proposal before it even began.

I'm starting to think that Dav's PA is some kind of mind reader, because she says: "He's in the library. Third door on the right." She jerks her chin at a hallway off the back of the kitchen.

"Thanks. Uh, bye small humans."

They chorus a jumbled "bye!" at me.

It’s another wood-paneled affair that has seen some modernization, but not too recently. 1970s, I'd say, by the carpets.

"Of course there’s a library," I mutter to myself, peering into each of the rooms I pass: a pokey, plasticky '80s bathroom, and a meticulously tidy and '60s era office complete with black leather club chairs and crystal bar set.

The third door is a heavy beast of a thing polished to a high shine and probably original to the house. I ease it open.

This isn't a library. Libraries are tidy, carefully curated, with shelves that have been dusted, and lamps with stained glass shades. Libraries are neat gardens of literature.

This is a jungle. These books tower, they weave, they fill the space, climb to the ceiling, tilt. There must be shelves under all of the books somewhere, but I don't see any as I pick my way around a tumble of leather-bound tomes that surround the door.

"Hello? Dav?" The books swallow my words.

"Over here." Dav's voice floats out from behind one of the groves of paper and ink.

There’s a narrow path cleared through the mess, and I follow that around a corner.

Dav is standing in a shaft of syrupy late-afternoon sunlight, and I know enough about the bastard that it's clear he planned it that way.

More of his Old Hollywood Charm nonsense.

He slides his gaze, glowing gold in the dramatic lighting, to my feet.

This surprises me, until this gaze skims all the way up to meet mine, and I realize he's disquieted.

This isn't a slow, sexy eyefuck.

He's checking, piece-by-piece, that I'm all there.

Guilt springs across his face when his eyes land on the pin, then camps in a furrow between his eyes.

I've never seen that furrow before. He's always been a sort of perpetually youthful late-twenties, but now he looks old and exhausted in a way I've never seen him before.

It's not just the way the chiaroscuro of the sun carves heavy lines in the corners of his eyes, or the bruises under them.

It's something more. The not-quite-a-dimple is so deep.

I want to kiss the frown away.

I don't move. I don't know how welcome I am.

To be honest, I hadn't imagined what it would be like to reunite.

I think a part of me genuinely believed we never would.

That Dav would stay away—either because he'd been made to, or because he wanted to—and I would get old, and be forgotten, and die.

He's a dragon. He could ignore a human until he simply outlives them easily, if he wanted to.

He's already outlived every human he's ever known. Multiple times.

Yet here he is, standing in a shaft of light that's slowly inching away, dropping him into the cool evening darkness. He’s right there.

But also... not.

This Dav isn’t the right one.

He’s worn. He’s weary. He’s heavy with silence. He's wearing plain black pants, and a plain white shirt, with a plain black waistcoat. He looks boring . He's not even wearing fun socks, just a pair of worn-in, period-drama slippers. He matches his house.

I hate it.

He looks desperately unhappy. I thought he'd at least be pleased to see me .

That feeling twists up inside me again, the one that's squirmy and acidic.

The one that's kind of rage (but I'm not sure who it's directed at) and kind of misery (but I don't know what for), and kind of like a scream that's just waiting for me to breathe deep enough to give it life.

"Hullo, Colin," he says softly, when we've both looked our fill.

Dav's voice is, at least, still as wonderfully rich, his accent as strange and comforting. I half expected his voice to be thin and reedy, aged a century in the time he's been away, to match his eyes.

"Hello, Dav."

I reach into my blazer pocket and pull out a gift. It's a paper bag of his dragon-roasted coffee beans, crumpled and mostly-empty, with just enough left in it for one pot.

Dav steps forward, slowly, to take it. The sensitive insides of our index fingers brush, and I don't repress the shudder at the touch of his dragon-warm skin. His nostrils flare. It feels so good to be close to him again.

I want to be closer.

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

After all, he left me.

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 from me .

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 a tail.