Funny, I’ve become totally used to having his voice inside my head, but I still haven’t been able to wrap my mind around it being less than two months until I’ll be expected to squat and squeeze out this baby.
But it’s definitely happening. Now that I’m in the fourth week of my unintended stay, my stomach has gone from a soft and fluffy belly roll to a firm little ball, filled with my half-dragon baby.
Yet another reason, I’ve got to get out of here, back to my own kind and a doctor who can cut this winged bowling ball out of me if the dragon king’s extended squat labor plan doesn’t work.
“Nah, I’ve got this,” I answer. Yeah, it would be nice to rest a little more, but I can’t let him take away the few freedoms I have. So I push all sorts of easy breezy totally no prob down our mate bond as I tell him, “And it’s not like I’m cooking anything hard. Just eggs and sandwiches and stews.”
My tone is reassuring, but his worry continues to resonate over our mate bond. “Would you…would you mind sleeping in my room with me tonight? I assure you, this is not an attempt to gain VIP access to your pants party. But as the pregnancy progresses, I find it harder to be apart from you at night. Everything in my drakkon being yearns to stay close to you. To protect you and watch over you, even when I sleep.”
God, why does he always sound so sincere when he says stuff like that to me? My wolf rolls over inside of me, wanting to give in to the delusion that he’s a protective papa and I’m the center of his universe.
But…
It’s just a trick, I remind my wolf. I don’t know what his endgame is, but there’s no possible way he went from the asshole who humiliated and derided me to this anxious father-to-be overnight.
“Why don’t you sleep in your own bed tonight,” I suggest. “Prove to me that you trust me like you want me to trust you.”
A hesitation, then another downward dip of his head.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I say. And with that, I retire to my room, leaving him outside in the hallway.
A few more days slip by. More biding time.
Then one day while we’re watching an Egyptian Kings documentary I realize it’s time. I’ve just gotten done listening intently to a story from Damianos about the Royal Geneticist’s Canis lupaster program. A lupaster is smaller than a wolf, bigger than a jackal, and apparently harder to manage than both. The program got out of hand so quickly, that he shuttered operations on the African continent, and rebooted with the much less clever European wolves. However, the ancestors of these lupasters went on to become some of Egypt’s most infamous kings and queens.
“Okay, we definitely have to watch a Cleopatra documentary next,” I say, queuing one up as I come to my feet. Hopefully, the show will be enough to distract him from noticing that I’m—
“Where are you going?” he asks inside my head before I can even finish that thought.
“To the bathroom. Then to make some popcorn,” I answer as I scamper to the little bathroom located under the stairs.
I take my time using the toilet. Maybe if I stay in here long enough, he’ll be so wrapped up in the doc, he won’t notice when I slip back through the living room and into the kitchen.
But, of course not. He’s waiting in the kitchen for me when I enter. With a bag of microwave popcorn in his hands.
“I’ve been ruminating…if you refuse to let me god speak a new servant, then you should teach me how to do the things you do as you will soon be too tired to honor me with your meals. First, you will teach me how to make this popcorn you like so much.”
Normally it would be hard not to laugh at the way he says popcorn, like it’s a foreign word. But a memory hits me. The first time I’d laughed at one of his many, many alternate versions of history.
He’d stilled mid-sentence.
“What?” I’d asked, the smile falling off my face.
“It’s just that I never saw you smile, much less laugh,” he’d answered, his tone full of awe. “Even music before the unfortunate entry of Mozart does not sound so beautiful.”
I’d laugh more times than I would have expected since then.
But it was a trick, I remind myself brutally. I’ve been tricking him, and he’s been tricking me.
If we give in to this delusion, the only way our story ends is with everyone we love dead, I tell my wolf, as I reach out to take the sealed bag of popcorn from Damianos.
“Okay, the secret to microwave popcorn is adding more butter and salt when it’s done.” I open the pack and hand it back to Damianos without the outer wrapper. “Here, put this in the oven for a minute and forty seconds and I’ll show you how I get it tasting just like the real thing after that.”