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She looked down, because it was easier than meeting Carissa’s eyes, but she could feel the princess weighing her sincerity.

“Fine.” Carissa stepped back, leaving the door open.

“I won’t bother you after this, I promise,” Ev said, following her inside. “I just needed to—”

She stopped. The shimmer of stilled wings lay arranged in a mournful circle where Carissa had been sitting. Her butterflies.

“I was too late,” Carissa said, running a hand across the stubbled remains of her hair. “I don’t know if it was something in the shampoo itself, or if it was hunger, but I found them all over the garden and…”

She gestured, helpless, and the motion made her shoulder blades stand out beneath the straps of her dress.

“I really am sorry,” Ev said. “For this. For everything.”

If Carissa had wanted to make a statement or anger her father, if she’d wanted the attention, she could have posted a dramatic video of her shaving her head and crying, but she hadn’t. She’d just wanted to save the butterflies.

Ev pictured her in a too-large bathroom as bright as the atrium, all marble tile and a double sink, even though Carissa was only one person.

The thrum of the razor against her skull and the thrum of the dragon outside as a wall-length mirror shone Carissa back at herself and locks of her hair fell to the floor.

“I’m sorry, too,” Carissa said. She looked over her shoulder at Ev, her voice defeated and tired. “It was shitty flaunting what I was throwing away. I know you won’t believe me, but I understand what it’s like to want something and feel like you’ll never have it.”

“Tower turned me down. The Academy as well,” Ev said.

Carissa was the first person she’d admitted it to out loud. She hadn’t even told her mom or Ms Averill, saying she hadn’t heard back yet. It was both liberating and solidified the course laid out for her.

“It’s a good thing your family sold the manufacturing plant. Otherwise, I’d end up working for you even though you fired me today.” Ev tried to make it a joke, but she wasn’t sure it landed given the expression on Carissa’s face as she turned to her fully.

“You’re going to work at the plant?”

“I guess.” Ev looked away. “I don’t have much choice. At least I like chemistry.”

“You could leave,” Carissa said. Ev looked up, surprised. “I mean, you could go somewhere else, right? You don’t have to stay here your whole life.”

“I…don’t know.” It had honestly never occurred to her before.

Her mother, her aunt, her uncle all worked at the plant.

Even the father she’d never known had met her mother there before they’d decided it wasn’t going to work and he’d moved on to another job, another town.

Her mother had his contact information. They’d decided it would be Ev’s choice if she ever wanted to reach out.

Maybe she could look him up after she graduated, maybe they could even meet.

She’d never been anywhere but here, but that could be a start.

The possibility was both thrilling and terrifying.

“Anyway, I guess we both made some assumptions,” Carissa said, unhappiness creeping back into her voice as she turned to survey the butterflies. “But if you want to keep pretending to tutor me for the cash to fund whatever you do next, that’s fine by me.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in your way.” Ev felt herself blushing, and was glad Carissa wasn’t looking at her. “I mean, you’ve got your friends and…”

Ev trailed off, unsure where to go from there and even less sure as Carissa’s shoulders stiffened.

“Not really,” Carissa said, standing still. “I’m not sure any of them really know me, or even want to. They like my online cred and that I pay for shit when we go out together. They like that I have a dragon.”

“Shit.” Ev didn’t know what to say, cheeks warming further, but with embarrassment this time when Carissa looked at her over her shoulder again.

Then the corner of her mouth lifted, a half-smile. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”

Perfect. Beautiful.

Ev wanted to keep her talking and found her mouth running away with her, too conscious of the words, wishing she could stop even as they kept pouring.

“I always figured because you were surrounded by people at school that you were happy and had everything. I figured the dragon was like an accessory and—”

Carissa snorted, cutting Ev off. “You thought I was a monster like my father, using ____ for personal gain.” Carissa said a word in the middle of the sentence that Ev didn’t understand.

It blurred and shivered and sang in her mind.

“_____,” Carissa repeated, brushing her fingers over the tattoo at the back of her neck.

“It’s their name, my dragon. They should be free, but I begged my father to let me keep them as a pet.

It’s the only way I could think to stop him from experimenting on them or using them in his products.

It’s not enough, but I thought if I could save even one… ”

Carissa let her hand fall to her side. Ev took a step closer, but stopped, feeling like she was intruding. Her hand tingled, the memory of resting against Carissa’s forearm and feeling the heat of her skin.

“I’m sorry,” Ev said again. “I wish I’d known all that. I mean, I wish I’d known…you.”

She hoped Carissa heard the distinction in the last word, cheeks flaming now, hotter than the remembered furnace of Carissa’s skin. The tilt to Carissa’s smile grew, and she turned to fully face Ev, a glint in her eye.

“You could have talked to me, you know. If you’d wanted to get to know me.”

Ev’s mouth opened, shut; a landed fish. Was Princess Carissa teasing her?

“You didn’t even know I existed until I showed up at your door to tutor you,” Ev protested. “You would have laughed in my face, someone like me trying to talk to someone like you.”

“You don’t know that,” Carissa said, the shine still in her eyes. “You could have tried.”

She’d moved slightly closer now, close enough that Ev could have reached out to touch her arm again.

The pitch of the dragon’s song sat in her belly, like one of those bowls full of water that chimed when you dragged a special stick around the edges.

Ev felt it all the way through her, like nerves, like falling, like want.

Almost like what she’d felt when she first saw the dragon.

How was it that the space between them could be so little and so vast, so impossible, all at once?

“You could have talked to me,” Ev countered.

“ You didn’t know I existed,” Carissa said. “The me you knew was the one you hated.”

Her voice had grown softer, her look considering, or regretful maybe.

Melancholy. Ev felt the urge to hold her breath.

She wondered what the dragon’s song felt like in Carissa right now, how she experienced the notes and what emotions it turned up.

Hope bloomed between her ribs, but Ev scarcely dared to believe it.

“I didn’t, I don’t, hate you,” she said. “I was jealous.”

Carissa huffed a laugh. She tilted her head back, lengthening the line of her throat, a column Ev wanted to kiss.

The architecture of her collarbones sang as loud as the dragon; it took all the will Ev had not to track her fingers along them.

Carissa closed her eyes, giving Ev time to study the shadow of the stubble across her scalp.

“Okay,” Carissa said. “I’m going to tell you something really embarrassing.”

Ev waited. Carissa cracked one eye open, peeked at her to see if she was listening, then closed her eye again, letting the words out in a rush. “I had a crush on you back in freshman year.” Pink crept up the bared expanse of Carissa’s throat.

“Why?” Ev blurted the word before she could stop herself, and Carissa opened her eyes, smiling with a hint of self-deprecation.

“Because I had a thing for hot, quiet girls who are furious at the world, apparently.”

“Oh.” Ev wasn’t sure where to look, what to do with her hands. Her breath snagged in her throat, fighting her as she rushed the next words out. “So had, like fully past tense and you’re over it now?”

“Well,” Carissa drew the word out, smile returning, but shy now. “We’ve already established we don’t really know each other.”

But.

Ev heard the word, hanging hope onto it, even though it was probably foolish. “We could get to know each other,” she said.

“Sure,” Carissa said. Her smile wasn’t a promise, but it was a start, and the blooms behind Ev’s ribs were now in full riot, a garden that threatened to stop her breath.

“Would it be okay if I took your hand?” Carissa asked.

“Yes.”

Warm fingers against hers. Carissa’s smile deepened. Ev’s whole body was a sounding bowl now, shivering resonance from tip to toes. It was an effort not to shake physically.

“Would you like to meet my dragon?” Carissa asked.

“Yes.” The thud of Ev’s pulse nearly drowned the word out.

Carissa led her outside and down to the lowest terrace, fingers entwined with Ev’s, palm against palm. At the railing, Carissa spoke the word that Ev now knew for the dragon’s name.

A trilling chirp answered her, a sound she’d never known dragons could make. Their length unfolded from the shadows where they’d been curled, a sinuous motion like water flowing upward and upward, pouring themself along the stone until their head was level with the railing.

“Oh.” Ev breathed the word.

Carissa laid her free hand against the dragon’s snout. How it didn’t sear the skin from her bones, Ev didn’t know. She could feel the heat from here.

“They’re beautiful,” Ev said.

The dragon’s scales sheened in the spell-light. Their eyes were everything – stars and the night sky overhead, every color Ev could name, and several she couldn’t. Curiosity radiating from them, peeling back the layers of her flesh and bone, all the way to her heart.

“You can hold out your hand and let them get your scent, if you want, but I wouldn’t recommend touching them just yet.”

Ev held out her other hand under Carissa’s approving gaze and the dragon breathed her in, pulling her out of herself.

“I’m going to tell you something, too,” she said.

“I’m not sure if it’s embarrassing, or just horrible, or both.

” She took a breath. She felt Carissa’s expression turn questioning, but she couldn’t look away from the dragon, and she couldn’t bear to look at Carissa as she felt the truth drawn to the surface of her skin.

“When I first took this job,” Ev said, “I did it because I had this really stupid idea that I was going to steal your dragon and set them free.”

She kept looking at the dragon, Carissa’s gaze a physical presence leaning up against her.

“Do you still want to steal them?” Carissa asked.

Ev couldn’t quite read her tone. She turned to look, and for a moment, Carissa’s muddy-green eyes were the same as the dragon’s, all stars and impossible colors, and Ev felt a truth she hadn’t been sure of until this moment on her tongue.

“Yeah, I kinda do.”

She expected Carissa to let go of her hand, maybe shove her away again, but she didn’t.

She went on studying Ev like a thing she couldn’t quite puzzle out.

Ev very much wanted to run her hands over the stubble shadowing Carissa’s scalp; she wanted to kiss her, trace a hand over her shoulder and run it down her side to settle on her hip, not holding her, but asking her to stay close.

“I kind of want to steal my dragon, too,” Carissa said.

“Oh.” It was the only thing Ev could think to say, because the words sounded to her like something else – again, not a promise, but maybe an invitation, a door opened to let’s see where this goes .

It would be a lot easier to steal a dragon with their princess on her side.

Ev let the silly thought flash across her mind, unable to stop the goofy grin that followed, because she also couldn’t help picturing riding the dragon – was that even a thing one could do?

– behind Carissa, arms wrapped around her, breathing her in the way the dragon had breathed in Ev.

They wouldn’t need the rails that led out of town for other people who were never her – they could go anywhere.

“Would it be okay if I kissed you?” Ev asked before she lost her nerve.

Carissa leaned in when she answered. “Very okay.”

As their lips met, the dragon’s song shivered and thrilled and rolled across all three of them, like they’d already taken to the sky.