Brent woke up one Saturday morning with one arm around Alice, a pretty, slender brunette, and another around Kirsten, a blonde whose generous curves were best described as
zaftig
.
He slipped his arms out from under them slowly, not wanting to disturb their sleep. Alice rolled over as he got out from under the covers. Kirsten, thankfully, covered up any noise he might make by snoring. He wiggled himself down to the foot of the bed, and out. Turning around, he satisfied himself that both girls were still asleep. He smirked, at the thought that he'd worn them out the night before.
Brent walked around the bed, donned a bathrobe, and walked over to the nightstand next to Alice, from whence he retrieved his phone. The little light flashing informed him he had texts, or possibly another stupid update to install. Phones were handy, he supposed, but he found them annoying, too. The dragon blood in him did not give him an affinity for technology.
He walked down the hall and looked at his texts.
Sally had texted him fourteen times.
Want to come over to my place?
That was the first one, sent a few minutes after midnight. He had probably been inside Alice at the time. Or Kirsten. One of the two, because he hadn't been looking at the clock and taking notes. He had better things to focus on.
Are you asleep?
I'm so horny.
Are you with Chloe?
Then there was a gap of an hour or two, followed by:
I can't stop thinking about you.
I think I love you.
Do you love me?
You don't have to answer that, pretend I didn't ask.
But I wonder.
And then at six:
Wish I could wake you up with a blowjob. If you gave me a key, I would be on my way to you.
It's been three days since we were together, it feels like an eternity.
I'm going to send you a key to my place.
There's no other man for me than you, Brent, you know that right?
And at seven:
I'm not saying you should be giving up other girls. I'm not saying that.
And at eight:
Brent, I love you.
Texts are stupid, Brent thought. You can't read inflection with texts. You couldn't tell the difference between "I'm
not
saying that" or "I'm not
saying
that." It was hard to tell exactly what someone meant, and easy to ascribe meaning that wasn't there based on how you read it. Handwritten letters might be better. Waiting to say things in person was better yet. But one thing he could interpret, which was that fourteen texts in a row, despite the lack of response, meant that there was even more unsaid, and that he was occupying a lot of real estate in Sally's mind at the same time that he had been sandwiched between two other girls, each gorgeous in very different ways.
Alice might give him good advice as to how to handle it, but Alice was asleep. Brent held the phone in his hand, trying to figure out what to text back. It would be kind to text something.
I love you, too
, might be kind, in the short run, but in the long run he thought it would create expectations he might not meet.
Thanks for all the texts
would be kind, perhaps, but it might come across as rather cold, and besides, he wasn't especially thankful. It was, to be sure, an ego boost to be loved, and to be thought of, and his cock had twitched at the thought of a wake-up blowjob from Sally, despite all the activity it had enjoyed the night before. But on the whole, he would much rather have gotten a single
hope you're having a good night
text, rather than the fourteen he'd gotten.
Sally didn't understand, not the way Alice did. She did not realize that he was a dragon in human form, and that he would live for many hundreds, if not thousands of years. She would grow old, and die, and he would remain almost untouched by time.
He peeked back in the room. Alice was still asleep. He walked away, down to the kitchen, and pulled out his phone again, as if coming up with the right words would be easier when staring at a screen. It wasn't.
On a whim, he texted Gardner, his biological father. Gardner was nearly a thousand years old, and while he'd never liked the old man, Gardner was growing on him. Gardner had been a dragon for a very long time, and Brent had known he was a dragon for less than a year, and Gardner had met Sally, so he had some context and Brent wouldn't have to explain everything. Nor did it seem as important to choose his words quite so carefully with a text to his father as it did with Sally.
Sally's getting clingy. Fourteen texts overnight while I slept. What do I do? I don't want to hurt her.
He smiled. If he didn't like texting, Gardner probably liked it even less. Brent set the phone on the counter and started making omelets. If one of the girls woke up, he'd give them the next omelet, and otherwise he'd eat it himself. He had a big appetite. The first one would be plain, and the later ones would benefit from the mélange of bell peppers and onions he was sautéing in another pan.
His phone buzzed. Possibly Gardner, he thought. But more likely Sally. He flipped the eggs over and watched as the omelet obtained that perfect, gooey but not liquid state in the center, while firm and golden brown on the outside. He set the omelet on a plate, and then looked at his phone.
He's on his way over,
said the text, ostensibly from Gardner, although clearly from someone else. Probably from whatever woman Gardner was sleeping with. That possibly meant Brent's mother, but probably not, as Gardner didn't want any woman to get too attached. Brent chose to believe that the woman who'd texted him with Gardner's account was not related to him in any way, and was not a woman that he, Brent, had also slept with.
No. I'm not ready for you to come over.
Brent had been delayed by the omelet, and a little more by indecision of whether to say
you
or
him
. In any case, there was no response.
Brent started another omelet, while munching on the first one. He heard footsteps upstairs, and he smiled. Alice's footsteps, very light. It wouldn't have been hard for anyone to tell the difference between Alice and Kirsten, but Brent had extraordinary hearing, and could probably have distinguished between two women even if they were both the same height and weight. He could tell that Alice was lifting one leg at a time, but not walking, so she was probably putting on her panties. Then she walked to the stairs, and down, and at last, appeared in the doorway of the kitchen.
She was wearing only a demi-bra and thong panties, both black. Her brown hair was longer than when he'd first seen it, down to her shoulders, and he was aware she'd been growing it out partly because he liked it that way. He was trying very hard not to fall in love with Alice, and for a couple of months now he only had her over along with another woman. But to be alone with Alice in the kitchen still felt like a precious thing.
Alice, too, would grow old and die in the a flicker of his own lifetime. He realized it intellectually, but emotionally, he was human, and the idea of his long life was an abstraction. Alice, on the other hand, was very real.
"My father is coming over," Brent said.
"Gardner? Or Pete?"
Pete was the man who'd raised him. His mother's husband. "Gardner."
"Oh, well, no sense in getting dressed, then. He's seen it all."
She knew he didn't like to think about the fact that Gardner had sex with Alice before Brent even knew he was a dragon, so her saying that was a deliberate attempt at cruelty. And in the cruelty, a kindness, reminding Brent that dragon society was not human society, even if it intersected, and the sooner he faced up to the different rules the better off he'd be. Alice had been merely a plaything to Gardner, one of many. It would be healthy for Brent to think of Alice as merely one of many playthings himself.
And yet, from Alice's expression, however healthy she thought it might be, she did not entirely enjoy thinking of it that way. A favorite plaything, at least. The favorite plaything, possibly.
"Why is he coming here?" Alice asked.
Brent explained about Sally.
"Yeah," Alice said. "Girls get clingy. What do you expect?"
Brent shrugged. "You tell me to play the field, so I don't get too... attached. And then I play the field, and someone else gets attached."
Alice smiled. "Well, yes, you have lots of women. As it should be. You're a dragon." She grinned, walked forward, and caressed his chest. "Careful. It will burn."
He thought she meant his touch, but then he realized she meant the omelet. Quickly he flipped it out of the pan and onto a plate. "For you," he said.
"Looks yummy. Sure you wouldn't rather have me suck your cock?"
"Not at all. But the omelet will get cold, and my cock will be ready for later."
"Except Gardner will be here."
Brent nodded. "I'll take a rain check."
Alice smiled and took her plate to the island. She walked over to the cabinet, pulled out a glass, and filled it with orange juice from the refrigerator. "So if you're going to have lots of women, most women are going to want to console themselves with at least one other man. Otherwise, they're going to spend all their time thinking about you. Like Sally. You'll always have more women than any of us have men, especially because, well, we get rather picky. You know, after one has had a dragon, it's hard to enjoy a mortal man, and there aren't very many dragons."
"Right," he said. He couldn't deny he felt possessive about his women, sometimes. When he'd watched Alice blow another man - a dragon - in the club, it had tugged at him. But he agreed that fair was fair, that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, and the other way around as well.
"It stops us from feeling FOMO on lonely nights, for one thing," Alice said.
"Do you get FOMO?" Brent asked.
"I'm human, Brent. I get FOMO. I fall in love. I feel all the things, whether they are healthy or not." She stared at him, and he understood her message. The person she had fallen in love with was him, but she would quite possibly never say so in so many words.
He watched her eat her omelet, until he heard the sound of a key turning in the lock of the front door.
He hadn't given out keys. On the other hand, he was a dragon, and no burglar stood a chance. He moved to the kitchen entryway, shielding Alice from any intruder.
A man walked in, wearing heavy boots from the sound of it. He headed straight for the kitchen. When he saw Brent he broke into a big hearty grin. "Brent!" he said. "Good to see you! I came as fast as I could."
"Um, thanks Dad. Did you think of knocking?"
"And Alice! Nice to see you. All of you." Gardner looked her up and down, blatantly.
"Nice to see you, too," Alice said. "I was, um, just on my way to get dressed. I'll let you two have your man talk."
"He's still a boy, really," Gardner said. "Not even thirty yet."
Alice squeezed past Brent, and then Gardner. Over her shoulder she said, "Oh, he's definitely a man." And then she hurried up the stairs.
