A Boy and His Dragon (11 page)

“You
are
bored, aren’t you?” Arthur hadn’t thought Bertie would look so upset over someone asking for more work.

“No, no, I just… after the other night, and thank you, by the way, your spaghetti was delicious. We loved it.”

“We?” Bertie only looked more upset, frowning and putting his hands firmly down on the island.

“I have your Tupperware.” Arthur did his best to stay on topic anyway. Bertie frowned and shook his head.

“Tupperware?” He clearly didn’t care about his dishes. His frown became a full glare.

“My sister had some.” Arthur didn’t want to relate all of it, how the two of them had been so grateful for real food that they’d practically licked their bowls clean. It was too embarrassing.

Bertie let out a loud breath, but Arthur didn’t want to be interrupted yet. He still had to get his apology out. “It was nice what you did for me, but I shouldn’t have fallen asleep like that. It wasn’t R. Cooper

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what a good assistant would have done.” He stopped to swallow and make sure his voice was even. “I’d understand if you wanted to go with one of the other applicants. Someone with more education.” Or someone who had just the one job so he wouldn’t fall asleep at his other one.

“Arthur, you puzzling little human.” Bertie put down the vegetables and rolled an apple toward him. Arthur stepped forward to catch it before it fell off the edge of the island, but he didn’t eat it.

He didn’t know what it meant, or if he liked being called a little human, even if he was.

“The first applicant ran away when she saw me. The second was qualified, but he couldn’t stop telling me
how
qualified, and his favorite period in history was the American War for Independence.” Bertie’s expression was disdainful of either the applicant or his taste in historical subjects, maybe both. “I chose you because you didn’t run, and because you were also qualified, and because your interests ran alongside mine. You also wanted it the most. You were the best choice.”

“Really?” The apple was smooth and perfect against his fingertips. “I thought….” Arthur remembered Bertie’s sense of smell, and his tongue, and his burning stare. “You didn’t do it because I… interested you?” He wasn’t asking about the flirting. He wasn’t. It was bad enough that he was asking why he’d been hired at all.

Bertie’s head went back.

“What kind of Being would that make me if I had?” he demanded with his eyebrows raised.

“I’m sorry.” Arthur stepped forward again but stopped when Bertie’s gaze met his. “I didn’t mean it like… like that. I just thought you saw how much I needed it and you were… curious.

That’s what I meant by interested. I didn’t think you were…

interested
.” Arthur wet his mouth. “In me.” Bertie’s head went up even higher, then lowered. He took a second while he thought that out, and he must not have found A Boy and His Dragon

71

Arthur’s reasoning
too
offensive, because he finally smiled and spoke.

“Did I give the impression I wasn’t?”

Arthur forgot about the apple completely. He stared so hard his eyes burned, and then he remembered himself enough to blink and look away. When he looked back, Bertie’s shoulders had dropped, but he was waving around at his cabinets.

“But if you’d rather organize my spices, Arthur, I would not say you nay.”

“What?” Arthur’s pulse was suddenly racing. He couldn’t manage anything else, and he finally moved, inching forward in a kind of blind heat. Bertie took a long, sharp breath.

“I’ve never had an assistant, so I might get things wrong, but I am flexible. If it makes sense, I doubt I’d object to anything you might suggest.”

Arthur was imagining the innuendo in everything. Even

“organize my spices” sounded dirty to him at the moment.

“If you think of anything, just add it here.” Bertie tapped a notepad on the fridge. Arthur recognized the paper as one that more than one note had been scribbled on before being stuffed into a book.

“I was the best?” Arthur heard himself echo the earlier words and flushed as he stood up straight. He might as well ask if he
really
interested Bertie and completely admit how high school his crush was. “But I fell asleep.”

“Arthur.” Bertie frowned and took another second, this time apparently to gather his thoughts. “You don’t have to solely focus on work here. I thought I told you that.” Arthur started to shake his head and was cut off.

“I dislike focusing solely on work. You love to. Neither way on its own is correct. We’ve proven that already since I am behind with a looming deadline and you were so exhausted that you fell asleep. But it’s all right. I think we’ll balance each other out nicely once we figure this all out.”

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“But I
fell asleep
.” Arthur couldn’t keep the distress from his voice, and Bertie tutted again before tossing him a smile.

“Darling, you’re only human,” Bertie scolded him with too much amusement in his expression and then went back to putting away vegetables. “Now eat your apple so you can battle books and dust bunnies with your full strength.” It was a nicely phrased order, but Arthur didn’t move until Bertie had only the wine left to deal with. Then he saluted.

“Yes, my lord,” he replied with a straight face in answer to Bertie’s earlier teasing tone and turned on his heel just as Bertie raised his head to look at him with a startled, soft look on his face.

He kept the apple in his hand, and the sound of Bertie’s slow, approving laugh followed him out.

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IF BERTIE thought Arthur was the best, then Arthur was going to try his hardest to be the best, and for the next few days he worked harder than ever, only stopping when Bertie insisted he stop or when he had to eat.

He was exhausted, but for the first time in years he felt good about it. Not that he was going to fall asleep on the job again if he could help it, but he felt accomplished when he got home every night and excited when he came in to work in the morning.

He knew Bertie was pleased with what he was doing, and that was what mattered right now. The other things Bertie said, or hinted at, Arthur was too busy to think about anyway.

Dreaming about it didn’t count, because not even dragons could tell what a person dreamed of, and in Arthur’s dreams, Bertie meant exactly what he’d been saying, and Arthur wasn’t too scared to take him up on his offer.

If Bertie had meant what he’d been saying outside of Arthur’s dreams, then he
was
interested, but he was leaving it to Arthur to make a move if he wanted to. Which was stupid, as Arthur always told Bertie in his dreams. Of
cours
e he wanted to. He wasn’t blind and he wasn’t immune to all that attention focused on him, but when he woke up from dreams of Bertie’s mouth, of that tongue at his ass, of Bertie fucking him, it never felt real, and so Arthur just worked and turned his head whenever Bertie called him a pearl so Bertie wouldn’t see his blushes.

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It was better that Arthur didn’t do anything about his fantasies.

Arthur realized that all over again as he got to Bertie’s house and heard his phone beep with a new message.

Bertie trusted him, he thought again as he reached for his key to the house and then for his phone. The message was from Dante.

He had asked Dante for information a few weeks ago, but seeing that name lit up, Arthur shoved his phone back in his pocket without reading the rest.

Dante was a wealthy professional student, well known around the school as the go-to guy for anyone looking for drugs, term papers, or fake IDs. Not that he dealt with any of that himself, he just always knew a guy. Dante knew everyone, including the kind of human magicians with means enough to buy their way to greater magical power. It was the only reason Arthur had contacted him or had anything to do with him.

He felt sick, the internal warmth at the thought of seeing Bertie this morning all gone. Bertie had probably made scones again. He wanted to feed Arthur, and here Arthur was, about to find out if there was anyone out there interested in buying a dragon scale.

Of course there would be. The power in those scales, even in a scale that fell off naturally as opposed to one given freely or one removed by force, was legendary. Arthur had thought… he thought when he asked Dante that it was only a possibility he might come across one. He might find a scale in the garbage or lying around or something, an unneeded, forgotten scale to take home and sell to get creditors off his back and maybe help with the rent until he could afford someplace better.

He hadn’t had the job then. Hadn’t known Bertie. Hadn’t been fed and called a pearl. He’d assumed Dr. Jones wouldn’t even miss the scale, and though it felt wrong to have even a small ulterior motive in taking the job, he told himself it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t stealing to take someone’s trash.

Stealing or not, however, it
was
dishonest. It
felt
dishonest. He knew it even then. He’d be looking his employer in the face, and instead of just being grateful for an incredible job opportunity, he’d be thinking about taking something from his home.

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He scowled and reached in to turn his phone off. It worked for bill collectors, it could work for Dante. Then he looked around again, at his bike resting against the wall and then at the key in his hand.

Arthur was the only one locking and unlocking the door.

Bertie certainly wasn’t doing it. Maybe Arthur should just accept that even almost stealing wasn’t for him. To take anything of Bertie’s, much less sell it for money, made him close his eyes to fight off a wave of sickness.

Of course, the creditors would keep calling, even if Dante didn’t. There were medical bills and student loans and an old credit card needing to be paid off, to say nothing of the cost of living, food, rent, clothes.

Arthur inhaled and pushed the door open, hoping the air that swept in with him would disguise the guilt twisting his stomach if Bertie should scent the air, but if Bertie noticed anything other than his arrival, he gave no sign.

“Arthur!” he called out, moving across the room like he’d been pacing a moment before and still had momentum. “Where is that volume of Neruda? I am fairly certain I left it in here.”

“Ah.” Arthur moved, both to hide from that sharp gaze and to seek out the book in question. “I meant to ask why there were so many notes in a book of Chilean love poems.” Bertie pounced on the book when Arthur produced it, though Arthur had plucked the notes from it a few days ago. Bertie flipped through it and then gave Arthur a wounded look to find it empty.

Arthur dashed to his backpack for his laptop with Bertie right on his heels.

Arthur seemed to be the only one affected by all that warm, heavy breathing right in his ear and the near contact of their bodies.

He skipped back to the couch with his laptop and sat as he opened it up, saving himself from any more torture.

Bertie still didn’t seem to notice Arthur’s flush or shaking hands. He looked from Arthur to the pages of the book to Arthur again while the computer started up and only calmed when Arthur found the notes in question and began to read them out loud.

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Maybe reading love poems wasn’t the best way to cool his heated skin. The lines were intimate, sad in a soft way that Arthur hadn’t found in Classical love poetry. Even the words about sex, already suggestive enough to make him afraid to look up, were filled with a longing that made his chest ache.

Arthur read until the Neruda-related notes were done and Bertie’s eyes were closed on some thought, though he couldn’t see what these quotes had to do with Bertie’s book. His outline, which had been bare of most details, had only suggested that not all of the dragons fled to the mountains and underground the way most other dragons had when humankind, desperate to prove itself, turned on them.

It had been the lines comparing waiting for someone to a lonely house that made Bertie shut his eyes to think. Arthur waited with his fingers over the keyboard after pulling up the outline.

“That’s the one, Arthur, but only toward the end. Because the betrayal wouldn’t matter, not to a wise, learned race that knew what it was seeing. They would only wait, the breathlessly romantic little darlings.”

“What?” Arthur asked as he typed, because notes were notes even when he didn’t understand them, and keeping track of these things was his job.

Bertie opened his eyes to look at him. “I think I’ll begin the chapter with it. I do like a line that makes me cry, and I don’t want things to get too dry and boring.”

It was good that Arthur was used to professors who talked fast, so he could keep up. He nodded as he typed.

“You want the line to head a chapter?” He considered that. “Is that what most of these notes are about?” He thought back to Bertie’s other books. One he’d finished, the other he was working on. There were quotations scattered through them, but no structure that formal. They had clearly been more along the line of thoughts interspersed with the text to humanize—if Bertie wouldn’t mind the expression—the subjects of his work. “If I get more of what your book is about, I can help with that… expand the outline.” A Boy and His Dragon