Page 12 of Unhaunt Me

“I can fight. I can break things. I’m a dragon.”

“So your dragon likes to fight?”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from saying ‘No, he likes to fuck.’

“You should say it,”my dragon chimed into my thoughts but I shook him off.

Fucking led to the claiming vows and that wasn’t going to happen. At least not tonight. Not until I found some way for him not to see--- Well, anything.

“I can’t read your mind,” Tritus said, moving his hands to rest on my chest. “I can’t even pick up your thoughts over the flight link. It’s unnerving. While we’re training to be guides, we’re taught a bit of that but not even we’re good enough to shut it down like that.”

“Is that going to be a problem?” I asked him, searching out his eyes for answers.

“I hope not,” he said, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Though, problems are meant to be overcome or incorporated as not problems. I know you Moonys seem to think every problem can break the world but you’re a Starscale too now and we solve our problems and we find middle grounds.”

“And if you can’t find them?” I asked.

“Then we bloody build them, mate. You think these three worlds were just waiting out here for us? We made space for ourselves.”

As he spoke, he lifted one of my hands from his knee and placed it over the baby blue star scale over his heart. My knuckles were still dotted with scales from fighting the whistler.

“We’ll make room for you too,” he said when I didn’t say anything.

Tritus shifted positions, until he lay mostly on top of me with his legs resting between mine and his head over my Ren-colored star scale.

“It’s not about Melon. We were never end game. It’s not even about her mate. I don’t trust them to guard the egg. I don’t even trust Castor to do that and I should given the state of affairs.”

“What about me? Do you trust me?” he asked.

I wanted to say yes. I should’ve said yes. The Starscale Dragon Flight trusted him to guard pieces of draconic souls and the flight’s long history. He was trustworthy. Hell, he even smelled trustworthy.

“It’s not always easy to trust strangers,” Tritus said.

“We’re not strangers. I’m not going to retell lore to a keeper of the past, but you know it.”

“It’s not lore, mate,” he said, pushing himself up enough to meet my gaze. “It’s real. Both of us have seen enough to know that. I don’t mind the word lore but I need to know that you understand the stuff in between lives is just as real, if not realer, than this life. That stuff between lives is who we are as an accumulation of all our lives.”

“Like I said, we’re not strangers. That’s the hard part, huh? Some time and some place that wasn’t here or Earthside we knew each other and chose each other and now I think you’ll regret that.”

He huffed and a ring of smoke wafted out of his nose. I fanned it away as he straddled me again. His eyes were darker now as they narrowed in on me.

“We have to talk about this.”

“About what?” I asked.

“I happen to think highly of myself and my judgement. Unlike a lot of dragons, I know what my other lives have been like. I know the folly I’ve fallen into. I know what we’ve gotten up to. We’ve made good choices and not so good choices but the choice to be together isn’t and will never be something I regret.”

“You know all our past lives?” I blinked at him.

“Probably not all of them but a lot of them,” he nodded. “I know enough. I know what I need to know.”

“And that is?”

“I know the man I chose. I know the dragon I love. Everything else is just a tangled thread to unravel and weave into what we need it to be this time around. So, we can go back to your place, or we can go to my place.”

“Not to the party, huh?” I teased him.

“Not the party because someone wants to fight an awful lot for a dragon who claims he doesn’t like it. You can’t punch your way out of this. You can’t clobber some heckling asshole instead of telling me what’s up. You can but I’m not going back in there tonight. Not because I’m embarrassed but because it’s not where we’re supposed to be. There’s a reason so many newly met mates sequester away together. My place is probably more private and we’re gonna need privacy.”

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