Page 27 of Mated in the Stars

“No,” I shook my head. “Not unless you count some of the chickens and pigs that I hand raised. I’m single. I’ve always been single. It’s just sorta what you do back home until you meet your person. I’m not a virgin, though,” I added the last line quickly.“Sex happens. Romping happens. Usually at festivals with other singles but sometimes out in the woods if you arrange it.”

“And no one has kids from that?” Elio asked.

“I’m sure some people do. I never did. I was careful, though,” I explained. “I want kids, of course.”

“That’s a good thing. Fred has six of them counting our egg and I don’t think he’s willing to exchange them for puppies at this point,” Elio laughed trying to break the tension that hung in the air.

We fell into another long bout of silence and I wondered if this was normal behavior for Fred or if he was somehow keeping his freak out off his scent. I almost asked Elio about it but wasn’t sure how much they wanted me to pry into their lives. They’d invited me into their home and into their nest but we were so new to each other.

“Is Minter your first kid?” I asked, trying to find something to fill the silence with.

“He is,” Elio nodded. “He’s a handful sometimes but I adore him. He’s the one who told me about you.”

“Does this get easier? The whole mate thing? The knowing what to say thing?” I asked.

“It does. After the claiming vows it gets easier for most people. Fred and I had some complications. He believed I had fooled him into thinking I was his true-mate for some dark magic reason. I’m good at magic but I’m not that fucking good,” Elio laughed, turning onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. “For us three? I think it’ll get a lot easier. Right now, I think Fred is cooking and eating his feelings. He misses her. He’s processing. I think he thought he processed it all before but I don’t know that he’ll ever fully process her loss. I don’t think he’d be Fred if he did. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dancing around ghosts or competing with dead foxes. It’s not like that. It’s just in some ways, she’ll always be in whatever room Fred’s in.”

“I think it’s nice,” I said and hurried to add. “Not just because I was Lotus but because think about it. If something happened to one of us, it’d be the same. As long as he or anyone who ever knew him was alive, it would be like we were too. They’d talk about us or talk about how he talked about us. My whole life I’ve just sort of been a farm kid who hunted too. I had some fun at festivals. I’ve had some good friends, but I’ve always felt so insignificant. It’s like I was a bit of dirt buried all the way down. Only important to the other little bits that touched me but thinking about how you both were waiting on me – I was just never some tiny bit of dirt. Maybe in the grand scheme of things I am but ---” I took a deep breath. Plenty of folks hated when I waxed too philosophical back home.

“Go on,” Elio said and moved his hand closer to mine until our fingers brushed together.

Acting braver than I felt, I entwined our fingers together. I waited for him to pull away and say it was too soon but Elio only gave my hand a reassuring squeeze and asked me to finish my thought.

“Don’t leave a dragon hanging like that,” he smirked.

“I think I’m catching Fred’s dramatic flair,” I chuckled and squeezed his hand back. “But maybe none of us are as insignificant as we feel sometimes.”

“We aren’t,” Elio shook his head. “Well, we are, and we aren’t. We are because were no more important than the next dragon but the next dragon isn’t more important than us either in the grand scheme. Especially, the grand scheme of the flight here. You’re one of us now. You’ll see how it goes.”

“I have a bit,” I nodded. “I like the food points.”

“Some people do barter their stuff, but I think it’s mostly a hobby,” Elio shrugged. “No one needs any of it to have the important things. We all contribute, though. I don’t know how things will work as more people come onto the worlds. Idon’t know how trading with other groups will work. I imagine it’s something we’ll all have to vote on every time because technically all the food and stuff belongs to all of us flight members. Maybe we won’t trade at all. Maybe we’ll decide that’s the easier way or the better way.”

Elio rolled onto his side again and brushed a lock of hair away from my face. He studied my expression as if he was committing all of me to memory. He was gorgeous too with his eyes alight with hope and a bit of lust. He smelled the same as the expression he wore. Though, if Fred didn’t stop feeding us, we’d forever be on the cusp of lust.

“The kitchen will run out of food eventually,” Elio laughed, picking up my thoughts over the flight link.

“But they’ll just bring more,” I smirked.

“That’s the idea.”

It wasn’t until I was dozing off in the nest with Elio and Fred that night full of food I had never tasted before that I realized maybe Fred had cooked all that for me. I had spent a great deal of my life complaining and bemoaning the lack of variety in my diet. He hadn’t served me a single egg that I could discern.

After we’d finished eating, Fred and Elio polished up the egg and we all settled down. We talked life in circles – them about the kids and how the Starscale Dragon Flight worked. Fred talked a little a bit about his life on Earthside and I told them about the farm and hunting back home. We talked ourselves to sleep.

***

I woke the next morning as hard as a rock and life feeling more surreal than ever. I was asleep in a nest with an egg. A nest that smelled like my true-mates. My two true-mates. The egg was theirs. I was here with them. I was in their house. I was sleeping in pajama pants borrowed from Elio. Everything smelled like them.

I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and tried to clear away the fog of surrealness. Fred and Elio weren’t in the nest. Their egg was still here. So they hadn’t gone far. I rolled onto my back and let out a long, slow breath. The nest was just as comfortable as any bed I’d ever slept in. Maybe a bit more now that I was surrounded by my two new favorite scents. I glanced over at the red egg, my only companion in the nest currently. It wasn’t even up to my knee yet, but it had grown a tiny bit over night. I rolled onto my belly and grabbed the polishing towel and scrubbed out a smudge. My reflection shined back at me in the shell.

“They really keep up on this stuff, huh?”my dragon chimed into my thoughts.

I strained my ears to hear where my mates had gone off to. Surely, they hadn’t left me alone in the house with their egg. They hadn’t known me long enough for now. I blushed when my ears found them. A soft moan echoed from another room. So soft and sweet as if Elio tried his best to keep me from hearing him. Part of me wanted to tiptoe down the corridor and watch them. Only without asking first, that was a creepy thing to do, and I wasn’t a creep. Even if the back of my neck burnt like I might actually go into heat.

Instead, I pushed myself upright and after double-checking nothing that could hurt the egg was left in the nest, I tiptoed into the kitchen. Someone had already made coffee and left out all the fixins. From staying with Sunny and Laken, I learned that Starscales liked their coffee extra bitter and often skipped out on the sugar. Moonscales or ‘Moonys’ drowned everything in sugar. I fell somewhere in the middle but if I had to choose a side, I’d err on the side of too much sugar, rather than not enough.

I made myself a mug and waited for them to finish up their really good morning. Their scents hit my nose when the steam from the shower leaked into the rest of the house when they opened the door. I blushed harder than I had the day before,imagining their bodies twisting and moving together – groping, squeezing, touching each other with abandon in only the way lovers who had been together many years could without worry.

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