So that was how Fensa ended up dating a dragon.

At least, that’s how it felt. They were already mated. And both he (in dragon form), and Eos (in whatever form he decided to take), slept in the cave with her wolf every night.

But each morning, before he and Eos left to hunt, Xenon escorted her to the hot spring. He’d set her down at the bottom of the mountain, and they’d walk the two-hour journey side-by-side.

To Fensa, it felt an awful lot like how she’d envisioned the traditional Viking courtship, thanks to the detailed descriptions her papa had once shared with her. Having always preferred his wolf to his man, Papa hadn’t managed to connect with any one village girl. So he never took part in such rituals. But Fensa’s grandmother, Chloe, Ever the Wise, frequently sent her son in wolf form to “escort” the young wolves on their courtship walks to the village’s local hot spring.

In fact, the only reason Olafr survived the morning dragon attack that had killed his family, was because he’d been escorting a young couple back from their courtship in wolf form. His wolf had jumped into the fight without thought of shifting, since he didn’t have a sword nearby anyway. And his wolf’s speed and dexterity was what kept him alive, even as burnt corpses began to pile up in the large field where the people of his village had gone to fight the serpent enemy.

But then he’d been struck by a silver arrow, and effectively turned back into a man. And the last thing he remembered was his beloved brother, FJ, shouting at him to run up the mountain toward the gate, so that he could say the words that would send hurtling him through space and time to his fated mate…right before he made a killing blow at one drakkon, only to be burned alive by another.

Her papa would disown her and never speak to her again if he knew she had not only mated a dragon but bore his child. And yet…the feeling of being courted by the dragon during their dawn walks was impossible for Fensa to ignore.

Their first few strolls were mostly silent. But sooner than expected, Fensa began sharing things with him. Little things, at first. Stories from her childhood, descriptions of future technologies. Foods she missed, along with numerous failed attempts to describe concepts Xenon didn’t understand, like video games, spices, and reality TV.

In turn, he described his first two thousand years on Drakkon. Which to Fensa sounded like a cold, antiseptic, motherless affair. It mostly involved training, and servants, and “Game of Thrones”-level palace intrigue. Xenon did a much better job of explaining Drakkonian concepts like how his kind derived nutrients from a planet devoid of animal life, the label system, and their stunningly low infertility rates.

It was funny. Though they’d been mated for over three years, they’d never really had much time to talk with one another. Life in what she still referred to as Beringia had been…well, very full, very active, and very cold. When he wasn’t hunting for food, Xenon worked. And shortly after Eos’ birth, Fensa had fallen into the role of weirdest stay-at-home mother ever. Which meant handling all the child rearing, and eventually focusing on her own “work” of figuring out where the hell they were, and—more importantly—how to get the hell out of there, and down to the Arizona gate. Then there’d been that epic walk/escape into hiding towards the west, across the remainder of the land bridge they called home. Through Alaska, down the California coast, before cutting east when she spotted the Channel Islands.

Fensa had been far too busy navigating, and praying/hoping/pleading to engage in much chit-chat with Xenon. And truth be told, the thought of making small talk with the mate she would eventually betray felt like a pretty shitty thing to do, even though she had her reasons—very good reasons, she’d thought at the time. But over the course of the first three months in their new Arizona home, Fensa and Xenon talked to one other more than they ever had in the past three years.

Of course, all good things must come to an end. And that’s what eventually happened with their long walks together. By the fourth month, instead of walking awkwardly beside her, Xenon began setting her down farther and farther from the cave. Gradually flying them both closer and closer to their hot springs destination, until one morning he carried her the full distance, and set her down on the bank next to the spring, neatly reducing their two-hour trip to mere minutes.

At the hot spring, Xenon the dragon would “honor” Fensa with a sizzling underwater orgasm. But as promised, he only allowed her to keep her eyes closed for a little while. Less than a week after he began flying her the full distance, he commanded her to sit on the bank of the spring and watch. “Observe what your drakkon does to you.”

The sight should have repulsed her. And as she watched his long, oversized tongue extend forward, and push into her sex, she felt a sudden urge to grab it with both hands, and shove it away from her.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, she sat with a dazed, lust-filled expression on her face, watching the forked tongue work its magic in her pussy with helpless fascination. Until she was hit with the biggest orgasm she’d ever had outside her heat. And though she didn’t black out this time, stars still radiated at the edges of her vision as she watched the dragon clean the milky white release from her dark pussy—

“Oh fuck,” she cried, throwing her head back, and coming a second time, just from the cleaning.

It wasn’t enough. After the first few days of watching him fuck her with his tongue, she begged him to shift. “You can’t be happy with this arrangement!” she pointed out. “Please shift, and fuck me. Please!”

But he wouldn’t give in. Only invited her to bathe with him in the hot springs before they returned to the village.

After her bath, he did exactly as he’d done every morning prior: dropped her off with the other women at the bottom of the mountain. To sew and, depending on the season, gather various plants, nuts, and berries to go with whatever the males brought back from the hunt. Although the food was far more plentiful here, they ended up having to hunt more often, since they could no longer rely on ice and snow to make otherwise highly perishable food last for long stretches of time.

“I must away, Reverence. Thank you for the honor of your company this morning.” Xenon bent his head slightly, and then held up a massive, taloned forepaw.

“And…ah, thank you for the honor of yours,” she answered awkwardly, holding up her hand and moving her palm forward to touch his.

“Other way, Reverence,” he reminded her.

Fensa stopped the forward motion of her hand, holding it still and elevated until Xenon’s much larger dragon palm pressed into her way smaller hand.

The whole concept of reverence continued to stymy her. Which meant she was frequently at the receiving end of lessons on how to accept address in a reverent manner, and how to initiate address in return. Fensa now knew she should cast her eyes downward when making a request, but always meet his gaze directly when asking a question. They must touch foreheads upon seeing each other if more than a few “wing hours” had passed since they last spoke. And press palms when parting. Unless, of course, they were parting for more than a few wing hours. In which case, they were supposed to touch forehead and palms together. Or something like that.

It was seriously more confusing than that one year of high school German she took before wisely deciding to switch to Spanish. The little details kept tripping her up. For example, if they met “in the heat”—which meant during the day in drakkon speak, he touched his forehead to hers. But if they met “in the cold”—at night—then she touched her forehead to his. However, the hand thing was the complete opposite. He touched her palm when he left for the hunt; she touched his before she left to shift with the moon. And she still couldn’t say for sure when she was supposed to use her right palm, and when she was supposed to use her left.

But Xenon remained patient. Resolute in his insistence that she learn his customs, even if she’d eventually die in what to him would seem like the blink of an eye. Assuming he ever blinked.

“Farewell, Reverence,” Xenon said before taking off for the hunt with a great downward flap of his huge wings.

Note for next lifetime, she thought to herself as she watched Eos burst out the cave to join his father. Never get into a fight with somebody who’s going to live fifteen to eighteen thousand years longer than you. Just don’t.

Xenon’s patience game was beyond tight. And though Fensa knew what she knew, she found herself wondering how long it would take before she cracked.

Months and months passed, and though Fensa was getting tongued down in the sexiest way every day by a dragon who no longer repulsed her, she became increasingly less satisfied.

Until one fateful morning when she woke to her mostly useless bioware bleating, ^{“GOOD MORNING, FENSA. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”}

A year. One whole year had passed since he gave her the trust ultimatum! Fensa looked over her shoulder at the dragon, still sleeping soundly. The one she couldn’t even lie to about trusting because he’d see it in her damn “flame.”

“You know it’s my birthday,” she told Xenon as he flew her to the hot springs that morning. “Where I come from, usually the mate gets the other a gift.”

“What gift would you have of me, Reverence?”

“Sex,” she answered without pausing to think about it. “Hot penises in holes action. That’s what I want, all I want for my birthday. Give it to me, please.”

“It would give me great pleasure to grant your request, Reverence, but you have not yet given me the words that will allow me to shell my dragon and mate without breeding with you.”

“Question—isn’t letting you tongue me down, like, every day enough?”

“If it were, we would not be having this conversation, Reverence. Until you truly trust your drakkon, drakkon I will remain.”

This was crazy. He must get how crazy it was. How could she trust him when there was no way to prove he wouldn’t kill her father’s entire family?

But she said nothing, already knowing his answer: “Nonetheless, Reverence, that is the condition.”

They’d had this conversation before. Far more times than she cared to admit.

But Fensa was never one to give up easily. So she came at it from another angle. “You know, you won’t have much longer with me considering my short lifespan and all. You said dragons only mate once. Aren’t you afraid of wasting what little time we have left together?”

“Your lifespan is short, but I find my time stretches longer whenever I am in your company, Reverence.”

Ugh. “What you’re saying is time doesn’t fly when you’re with me? You know, that’s considered an insult where I come from.”

“Interesting. It is regarded as one of the highest compliments where I come from.”

Scratch that tactic off the list, she grumbled to herself a few minutes later, as she stripped off her clothes, dropping them haphazardly on the rocky shore.

All this intimacy only made it worse. She had never been courted. Never felt so close to anyone besides her fictitious twin sister. And Xenon had oh-so-patiently taken down the wall she’d built around herself. Dismantling it brick by brick. Healing the wounds left over from their argument. Bridging the rift. Healing them with his insistence that she get to know his dragon.

Ok. She was used to his dragon now. Cared for it, even, as she had the man she hadn’t seen in a year. And even better, she’d totally accepted her fate. Accepted she would live here and die here. Somewhere between this birthday and the last, she’d become totally okay with that. But something was still stopping her from writing “happily ever after” on this story. Something dark blue, big as the buildings she hadn’t seen in years, and maybe stubborn enough to let her die without ever knowing normal consensual sex with his human form again.

“Your head burns a strange red today, Reverence. What has you so enflamed?”

You, she thought in her most private mind, where he had no chance of hearing her. Because why spend her birthday arguing with the dragon she l—

“It’s getting hotter and hotter out. I’m wondering if the hot spring will feel too warm today,” she said, interrupting her inner thoughts before things got out of hand.

“In my natural form of drakkon, I do not feel temperatures at either extreme, but I can fly you to a lake if you have wish of cooler waters, Reverence.”

“No, thanks. It was just an observation.”

Silence. And she could tell he was watching her as she folded her now much shorter hide dress carefully, analyzing her flame.

But in the end, he walked into the hot spring, sinking to his torso in the warm water. “I would hear another tale of your time traveling family while we bathe, Reverence. Perhaps of your Viking grandfather.”

Yes, her Viking grandfather. One of the first to fall, defending his kingdom against the dragon attack.

“And now does your flame burn distressed. Forgive me, Reverence, for my request.”

Putting more effort into controlling her emotions, she stepped into the water and pasted on a smile. “No, it’s okay. I do have a story about him, and a hot spring, if you can believe it. My grandfather was desperate for my grandmother to return with him to the past, and to his village. But she was having none of it. One day, he decided to change strategies, and he tricked her into saying the spell that would bring her back to his time.”

“Spells. This is how you call the codes that trigger the fated matching portals?”

“Yes. Anyway, my grandmother was, like, Donkey Kong angry with my grandfather for bringing her into his time without her consent.”

“Indeed, such behavior shows a complete lack of reverence.”

“Exactly. Then you won’t be surprised to hear how pissed she was at him. She refused to talk to him for, like, weeks. My grandfather didn’t know what to do. In the end, and even though they were technically already mated, he began to court her in earnest…giving her gifts, and showing her things only she would appreciate. Turns out, one of those things was a local hot spring where she could take a warm bath, the first she’d had in…well, a long time. According to legend, and my papa, three months later they declared their love for one another.”

“Love,” he repeated, using one huge forepaw to scoop water over himself. “Like that yellow flame you feel toward Eos.”

“Yes, but different,” she answered, unable to look away from how the water snaked in silvery rivulets down his gigantic, dark blue body. “Not the love a parent has for a child. But romantic love. The kind of love one—” she hesitated for a moment before deciding to hell with it, “—one mate might have for the other.”

There was a long pause, and then he looked directly into her eyes. “Romantic love. You mean the way your flame yellowed when I asked why you had not killed me for the crime you thought I would commit. And the way it burns for me now as you watch me bathe.”

His sincere question punched her in the gut. Fensa found she didn’t have the words to respond, even through their mind link.

“Why has your flame darkened again, Reverence? Are you ashamed of burning this way for me?”

Her eyes dropped to her new best friend, the steaming water.

“I would have your eyes, Reverence. And your answer.”

But Fensa couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t explain how shameful this felt. Not just because he was a dragon, but because she’d known all along that he couldn’t, and therefore wouldn’t, return her feelings. After all, he’d told her this himself. She would always have his reverence. But his love? No, love wasn’t possible for a being like him.

“I can’t,” she explained on a mind whisper.

A sigh somewhere between a breath and a sharp screech sounded above her, and she felt something flexible, yet pointed, push into the soft flesh beneath her chin. Like an arrow made of rubber, strong enough to lift her head. It was his tail, the very tip, she realized as it continued to raise her chin so she had no choice but to look the dragon directly in his one good eye. It glowed red, the vertical pupil widening and narrowing as the sun flitted in and out of the clouds overhead.

“May I now give you a gift in honor of your day of birth, Reverence?”

Fensa felt too intimidated to respond. Mostly because she wasn’t at all sure how to answer without breaking one of Xenon’s many reverence rules. In fact, she was almost positive a lesson covering this precise situation had never come up.

As if sensing her dilemma, the dragon continued without waiting for her answer. “If you ever wish to harm me without the use of a weapon, clasp my tail just below the tip and squeeze. The underside of a drakkon’s tail is one of the most sensitive parts of his body. It is also one of the few places on our bodies equipped with both nerve and olfactory arrays. Apply pressure there, and I will be completely at your mercy and will most surely agree to anything.”

For a split second, Fensa imagined her hand lifting to grasp the underside of the tail that still nudged her chin up. She imagined what might happen, and what she might ask of him. Then her actual hand rose to gently rest against his tail before she dropped it to her side.

“Why? Why would you tell me this?” she asked him, the unexpected mixture of emotions making her inner voice sound unusually hoarse. “Why make yourself vulnerable to me?”

Another steamy sigh wafted from his snout. Fensa watched as the curls of smoke seamlessly intermingled with the plumes of steam rising off the hot spring. “When we are in these forms, I am big, and you are small. I would have you know you need never fear me. I gift you with my trust in the hopes you will one day gift me with yours.”

His words touched her someplace deep. Someplace she’d been trying hard to keep walled off from him, ever since she accepted that she would never return home.

The dragon tilted his head in a way that came off as both curious and bemused. Though technically his outward expression never changed. “You burn yellow again. This gift has pleased you, it seems?”

Another genuine question, but she couldn’t help the smile that lifted her lips. “Yes,” she admitted. “It has pleased me a lot. I like that you have given me a way to trust you.”

“Hmmm,” He lowered his great head even closer to hers, and peered deeply into her eyes. “You say ‘like.’ Yet what you truly mean is ‘love.’ You love that I have given you a way to trust me. You also burn with romantic love towards me,” he corrected. Only to ask a moment later, “And now you once more burn with shame. What is it about this situation that upsets you, Reverence?”

Now it was Fensa’s turn to sigh as she answered, “In my time, it’s considered pretty damn stupid to love someone who doesn’t love you back.”

“Doesn’t love you back,” he repeated as if the words were part of a foreign dish he’d never heard of, or tasted before. “But I revere you, Treasure. Is this not enough?”

Fensa shook her head, not bothering to try to mask her sadness. “No, unfortunately, it’s not. I realize this all probably sounds stupid to you since you’ve told me your kind isn’t capable of feeling emotions like love. But you must see how embarrassing, and ridiculous it feels for me to have these feelings towards you. And I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to reconcile it.”

Her revelation was followed by a long, heavy pause…and then he dipped his head to look away from her. Suddenly the steaming water of the hot spring had become his best friend.

“Look, can we please leave? I’m tired,” she said, unable to bear any more.

And though she didn’t squeeze his tail, she didn’t use her gentlest touch to push it away from under her chin. She also didn’t wait around for permission, or touch his paw, or do any of the dozens of other reverence shit he’d taught her before she headed off to collect her clothes on the shore.

To her relief, neither his footsteps nor voice sounded behind her.

Fensa cursed herself out six ways to Sunday for saying anything to him at all about her feelings. She should have stayed silent. Kept her own counsel, as the ghost of a dead king and father had once advised his princely son in the famous play by a long-dead (or more accurately, not yet born) English playwright.

Fensa missed her pretend twin sister. Wished she had someone else to talk to about all this. Wished for the sometimes good, sometimes bad advice her delusion used to give her.

Shocking but true: she missed being a psycho. Someone who’d had to be locked away for the good of herself and others.

When Fensa had finished pulling on her clothes, she found Xenon exactly where she’d left him, still gazing intently into the water. As if he’d suddenly become enraptured by his own image or—more likely—because he could no longer look her in the eye.

And that’s when Fensa decided she’d rather walk the two hours back to the village alone than ask him for a ride.

“I need to clear my head. I’m going to walk back,” she pushed into his head.

No answer.

She’d never seen him go so still, not even when that red dragon landed outside the glacier station. A frisson of alarm interrupted her rejected she-wolf spin out.

“Is everything thing alright?” she asked the dragon she’d been so determined to leave behind just a few seconds ago.

His large dragon body jerked as if it were coming out of a trance. “Don’t you see?” he asked. But then he shook his head. “Oh, of course. I sometimes forget that you cannot see. Your flame, or mine.”

“What’s going on?” she asked, now genuinely alarmed. “Are you okay?”

“I am…confused,” he replied, his tone less measured and more perplexed than she’d ever heard it…even during their earliest days together in the glacier lab before Eos joined them. “I was contemplating your yellow flame, and pondering what it meant to you. I then glanced at my reflection in the water and saw my flame mirrored there. It no longer burned red and orange as it has for so long in your presence, but a deep yellow. The very same yellow you burn for me. This I…do not understand. Can it be this feeling I have when I think on you, the way my flames warm to yellow…can it be the ‘love’ you speak of?”

The dragon’s great head finally turned to look at her, as if seeking a diagnosis for a new and rare condition. “Treasure, is it possible I feel the same love for you, as you do for me?”

Fensa’s heart caught in her chest. She might not be able to see the revealing images Xenon saw in the steamy hot spring waters, yet she somehow knew by the sheer confusion and distress in his voice as he asked his questions that...“Yes. Yes, I think you might love me. Oh, my God…”

“But—but how can this possible?” Xenon swung his deep blue head from side to side, peering through the steam rising off the spring with his one good eye as if he might somehow find the answer to all his questions buried inside. “I was so angry with you. In truth, I am still angry with you when I think of what you attempted to do to me, and to our son. Yet this anger…I cannot reconcile it with the love you speak of. I understood it to be a pleasurable feeling. You often wear a smile upon your face when you glow with it for Golden Son. So how is it that it can make me feel so…”

“Ugly? Confused? Awful? All of the above?” It didn’t take Fensa long to run through just a few of the negative side effects of love. She gave him an empathetic smile. “You aren’t the first, and you definitely won’t be the last to notice the double-edged sword of love. There’s a reason so many artists have written and sung about the very thin line that exists between love and hate.”

“I do not understand. Please explain, Reverence.”

“It’s a saying from my time. More poetry…a way of explaining how two individuals in love can feel a deep connection, and care for each other one minute, and burning anger and disappointment the next.”

“I see…”

But then his head suddenly whipped back to focus on her. “Treasure,” he said quietly in her mind. “You now flame the same yellow as I. My words match the emotions you feel inside?”

Talk about a real language barrier. How could she possibly describe the feeling that had made her so despondent only a few moments ago, but now made her feel almost light with giddiness? “Yes, I suppose they do. Your flame. Is it really burning yellow? For me?”

“It truly does,” he replied. “And the longer I observe the answering yellow of your flame, the less I mind my flame, and the…confusion it brings me.”

Fensa laughed, though she knew he wasn’t making a joke. It was just…so like her dragon to use his skills of frank observation to cleanly slice through something as complex as love to better understand and define it. Including that it’s a lot easier to handle how vulnerable love makes us when our feelings are returned, and you know you’re not alone on this sometimes bumpy journey.

She smiled up at him. And although he was unable to return her expression in his current form, she could feel the intent of his smile as surely as if his huge dragon lips had pulled back into a sharp-toothed dragon grin. There they stood, partially immersed in the warm, steaming waters of their secret hot spring. A woman and her dragon. A dragon and his woman. Staring at one another in wonder. Smiling their shared, secret smiles.

And then the fragile moment was abruptly smashed to pieces.