The Dragon Keeper (10 page)

“Oh. Hi.” Her heart started racing as she swung back to face his desk, and she clenched her arms tighter around her middle. There were no words for how much she didn’t want to do this.

“I didn’t think you’d still be here after closing time,” she hedged. “I was just going to leave you a note.”

He shrugged and moved around the desk, half-sitting on the front of it. The arms of his lab coat pulled tight as he crossed them and stretched his neck from side to side, cracking his spine. He looked tired but pent up at the same time, as if the exhaustion couldn’t hold him back for long. She knew how that felt.

“I was hanging around until baseball practice, but apparently we just got rained out.”

“Slugger, huh?”

“More of a bunter and runner, actually. They put me on the top of the rotation because I can steal bases.”

Her eyebrows raised; he’d even said it with a straight face. “I bet.”

He laughed and shook his head. “It’s not a co-ed team, Yancy.”

“Whatever.” She paced back toward the wall, getting more nervous now that she had his attention. “I talked to Chuck today, and he said he got management to hold off on moving the hatchlings into the baby building.”

“I know. He called me, too.”

She took a deep breath, inflating the bottom of her lungs with that tight, bursting feeling, and turned around while she still had the humility left in her.

“Thank you.”

He didn’t say anything. It was probably the only thing in the world she could have said to leave him speechless. His eyes rounded, and his stomach even kind of sucked in, as if she’d gut-punched him. Maybe she had, in a way, but if they were trying to kill each other with kindness now, she sure hadn’t thrown the first punch. She paced back his way and tried to explain.

“They wouldn’t have taken my word for it. I could know everything in the world about Komodo dragons, but I’m a bitch. I know that. I haven’t played on their terms in the past, and they haven’t forgotten what happened last August—even though I’m trying to shut up and play along now in order to be a good keeper for these hatchlings.”

He cocked his head. “This is you trying to shut up?”

The laugh huffed out; she couldn’t help it. “Yeah, I guess it is. Anyway, you’re their freaking golden boy and they listen to you and I’m just saying that I know I wouldn’t have been able to protect their welfare without you. That’s all.”

“I’m trying to protect them, too, you know. When will you get that through your head?” He wasn’t letting her off the hook. Bastard.

“I guess”—she shrugged, a quick bounce of shoulders that stung the cramped muscles in her neck—“now, huh? Now I believe you. I don’t trust people because they always have something to gain.”

“I do have something to gain. I have three healthy parthenogenic Komodo dragons to gain. Who else but you could understand how amazing that is?”

“Yeah.” He smelled like antiseptic and cinnamon, and she started to get nervous again under his eyes. They were chocolate brown, rich and obnoxiously compelling, watching her as carefully as they’d watched the hatchlings by her side for the last eight months. Her stomach flip-flopped, and she turned to leave.

“I was thinking about what you said the other day. You know, your toast about evolution.”

She leaned against the doorjamb, frowning, and waited.

“I’m not trying to manage evolution, if that’s what you think. I’m making a difference in these animals’ lives, giving them the chance to live better, longer, and healthier with human supervision. You know how an animal evolves, how it survives? Two ways. Diversity and adaptation. Diversity—to weather the changing climates and food supplies. Adaptation—to fit themselves to the environment they’re stuck with.”

He ticked the points off on his fingers, and then shook his head. “And that’s what I don’t get about this whole thing. Parthenogenesis can’t be evolution. It’s devolution. Parth reduces the species’ genetic diversity, making it more vulnerable to those changes in the ecosystem. So here’s the fifty-million-dollar question. Why is parthenogenesis still happening when, biologically speaking, parth species should have been sucked into the black hole of extinction eons ago?”

Bumping her shoulder softly against the cold doorjamb, she inhaled, smelling the river scent that seeped into every basement room around here, and smiled at him. “I’ve got a better one for you. Why are seventy-five percent of wild Komodo dragons male?”

“Why?” He looked confused.

Still smiling, she watched as he made the connection, as it spread across his face. “You think they’re reproducing via parth in the wild? It’s not just zoos?”

“Exactly.”

“Or maybe females just have shorter life spans due to disease or increased predation. You can’t jump to conclusions like that.”

“Are you kidding me?” Meg laughed. “You can’t tell a male Komodo from a female unless you do a blood test or happen to catch them having sex. How could one gender possibly be at risk for a shorter life span?”

He nodded. “Point taken.”

“So if parth is such an evolutionary black hole, why have Komodos survived this long? Maybe they got the recipe right a long time ago, and we’re all just catching up.”

Let him chew on that for a little while. She pushed away from the door and was going to leave—again—when he stopped her—again.

“You are a good keeper.” He shifted on the desk. “You just said you were trying to do everything in order to be a good keeper for these Komodos, but don’t worry about it, Meg. You already are.”

She was going to say
thank you
. The second time was always easier; at least, that’s what they said about murder, which couldn’t be too much harder than gratitude. She could hear the words rumbling around in her chest, but before they could make their way up and out of her throat, she leaned over and kissed him.

It was quick—just four lips meeting around a fast inhale and a freeze. The flip-flopping in her stomach twisted sideways, curling up into her chest, expanding. Soft, she thought. Warm and soft. And then, straightening back up—oh God. She bolted from the office, speed-walking down the vet hallway, past the bathrooms, and back into the keeper’s cage with her face burning hard through the sixth ring of hell.

Kissing Antonio? Her mind stumbled to catch up to the shocks racing through her body. What the hell was she thinking? She stood in front of her locker, staring blindly into the dark void at the back of the tiny, metal cubby.

The cage was empty. Most of the keepers packed up and headed home as soon as the zoo closed. The few late shifters were all out milling around, taking care of exhibits or cleaning up for the night. On any other day, Meg would have been watching the news on the couch with Ben by now, eating greasy takeout and ignoring whatever he said about the headlines—not here, standing stupidly in front of her locker and trying to erase the fact that she’d just kissed Antonio. No, not just erase it—suck it into the far reaches of oblivion.

“Hey.”

She spun around. He was lounging against the doors that led from the cage back to the veterinary wing. She opened her mouth to say something—explain, apologize, blow him off—but nothing came out, not even air. He just watched her—not smiling, not speaking, a ready audience for her next humiliation. Forget that. She tossed her hands up, shrugged, and turned back around to her locker, pulling off her work boots and chucking them into the bottom compartment. That’s all he got—a shrug. It was probably more than he tossed at some women himself. As she sat on the bench to lace up her tennis shoes, his lab coat rustled up behind her.

“What’s that picture?”

“Gemma and her daughter.” She refused to glance up and tried to ignore the horrible heat that pumped through her face.

“Brilliant, Yancy. Thanks. I meant the other one, the one on top.”

She stood up again and tried to focus on the welcome distraction of the picture, unsure when she’d really looked at it last. She was always too damn busy, rushing through here unloading junk or packing on some more, never stopping to notice anything that wasn’t out of place. Now she stopped and looked. It wasn’t even a photo, just a black-and-white copy she’d made out of a book, and it was so old the paper was curling and brittle at the edges. A blonde woman smiled into the camera in the center of the frame, and an adult Komodo stood next to her. They were practically cuddling; the dragon’s head tilted in toward the woman’s hip, and her hand rested on its neck. The woman’s hair was pinned back in waves, and her elbow jutted strongly outward, like a Rosie the Riveter of the dragons. Meg didn’t know why, but she’d always loved that elbow, all sharp angles on top of the proud, cocked hand, glowing white against the dark curl of the dragon’s tail sweeping behind her.

This picture was nothing like Antonio’s microchip magazine cover. The woman and the animal were companions, not two mutant halves of the same head. This was old and organic, not Photoshopped and cold—but somehow the same sadness took hold of Meg as she stared at it, the same hopelessness she’d felt facing his magazine cover.

“It’s just an old zoo picture.” She shrugged.

Antonio hopped the bench and leaned in for a closer look. He tapped a knuckle to her scrawly handwriting on the top corner of the photograph. “Bub … chen?”

“That was the Komodo’s name, Bubchen. It’s German for sweetie pie.”

She could see his head nodding out of the corner of her eye. “I didn’t know you spoke German, Yance.”

“I don’t.”

“She looks pretty acclimated to humans. What happened to her?”

Meg stared at the photograph until the lines started to blur and an engine roar echoed underneath the silence of the empty building. “I don’t know,” she lied.

They stood there for a minute, quiet. She tried to listen for footsteps in the hallway, but no one ever interrupted at the perfect time. No one bailed her out of these situations, like when Chuck drilled her about corporate policies, or she had sixteen forms to write, or she was standing too close to the only man in the world who wanted to talk intelligently about Komodo dragons and happened to taste like cinnamon.

“This keeper”—Antonio tapped on the photo again—“is like you. She’s a dragon tamer.”

Meg turned around and met him head on. She could smell the antiseptic soap on his arm and the warm spice of his skin underneath it. “Piss off, Rodríguez. I’m just a keeper like anybody else around here.”

“Said the dragon tamer.” He smiled, and the flash of it moved like quicksilver down through her body, churning deep into her stomach and tingling through her limbs. It was as if someone had flipped a switch inside her. All he’d said was
I’m on your side
. That’s it. And now she wanted—no, it was better not to think about what she wanted.

She backed up into the bench, hitting the wood with the back of her calves, and grabbed her duffel bag. Thank God for duffel bags and all those straps that kept her hands busy.

“Give it a rest, okay?” she said. “I didn’t mean to kiss you. It’s just been a long week.”

“Fine.” He looked at the floor and leaned back into the wall of lockers. The hair he usually slicked back into a Desi Arnaz knockoff was falling into curls on his forehead. It was hair little girls would stab each other to get—dark, goopy spirals that swallowed the light. As Meg tried to figure out how to save face and disappear, his mouth started working, as if he was getting ready to spit out an equally nasty-tasting thank you.

Rather than say something first and eat it later, she waited him out until finally he sighed and said, “You are kind of a bitch, you know.”

Unexpected but okay. Meg zipped and unzipped a side pocket on the duffel. The zipper was broken; it never closed all the way anymore. “Yeah, you’re a sweetheart, too.”

“I like how you yell at people.”

“I like how you sexually harass them?” It came out like a question, and he laughed. She worked the zipper faster and faster.

“You’re dirty a lot of the time. And you smell like shit.”

She stepped closer, pointing at his mouth. “Your teeth are practically fluorescent. That’s not okay.”

“I watch you sometimes.” His gaze, which had been bouncing around the room, locked on hers. “Feeding Jata. Since the eggs—I—you’re amazing with her.”

His eyebrows buckled up, and he pushed away from the lockers with his shoulder. “I’m not trying to hit on you, and I’m not jerking you around. I just wanted to say it when we weren’t tearing each other a new one, like usual. So that’s all.”

He threw a hand up into the air and started to turn back toward the vet wing. “Good night.”

Fuck it. Meg closed the distance between them and kissed him softly, just a brush of lips and breath. They both froze. She felt his limbs tighten and wondered if his blood was racing like hers, if he felt this flush of pores opening and nerves rushing toward one another. For a moment she hovered there, pressing a kiss to his mouth—her mind emptied of everything but warmth and a thudding heart near her chest—and then she slanted her head against him, wanting to taste him, deeply, everywhere. It didn’t matter why or why not.

His hand moved to the back of her neck and cupped her head. She wrapped her arms around him and tried to speed up the tempo, but he held her back, sampling her mouth in sips and lazy, get-to-know-you swirls.