“It’s not quite that bad,” Theo said. She had the sense he was deflecting, but she wasn’t sure what it was he didn’t want to talk about.
She could tell when he’d decided to say it anyway, though, because he suddenly looked away, his golden-brown lashes down, shading his eyes.
“I like my house. But it always feels empty. I brought everything I valued from home that was mine to bring, but—I was so used to having everyone else’s treasure to fill up the space, too. It feels like I’m just rattling around inside this huge space. Work is better.” And his voice did lighten then. She listened carefully to the relief in his tone. Relief and... surprise?
“Take me there, then,” she said. “We have to get out of here anyway, right? I’ll take you to my apartment, and you can take me to your office. I’ll show you my real self if you’ll show me yours.” Why did that feel more intimate than the sex?
Maybe she was a virgin when it came to full disclosure. Now came the real deflowering.
*
It never stopped amazing her how short the drive was between where she’d grown up and where she’d run away to. It felt like they should have needed a passport instead of just a half-full tank of gas.
“Are you sure it’s okay for me to be taking you away from work like this?” she asked for maybe the hundredth time.
Theo squeezed her hand. Even with all her nervousness, his touch sparked something in her. To feel the heat of his body and the calluses on his fingers was more of a turn-on than most of the actual foreplay she’d had in her life, dutiful though some of it had been.
“I’m sure,” Theo said. “But you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“No, I want to.” She unbuckled her seatbelt, hoping the momentum of that decision would carry her forward. She turned to face him head-on. “I trust you. I’m just not used to trusting people.”
“With dragons, showing someone your home is something... intimate. Maybe even sacred. People have parlors where strangers are allowed to go and it’s considered extremely rude to go any further than that without a relationship. Your parlor is where you put the parts of your hoard that you’re proud of but less protective of. The parts of yourself that you want to show the world and the parts of yourself that you can bear to show the world. I know humans aren’t always the same, and I know I’ve had to invade your other home much more than was proper, but whatever you can show me, I will respect. I know what it means to be invited in.”
“Does it mean something to you to take me to where you work?”
He nodded. “It’s not uncommon to have strangers there, of course. The parlor is more of an idea than a reality. By telling you that it means more to me than just an office, I’ve let you in—when you see it, you’ll be seeing me and what matters to me. Which you wouldn’t be doing if you were just the guy delivering the coffee.”
“You’re welcome to bring me coffee,” Jillian said. She opened the door. “Always.”
She could look at Theo’s smile all day. “I’ll remember that. Gift-giving is culturally important, too.” The smile turned wry. “As my colleagues will cheerfully note led to last year’s Secret Santa debacle. Ask them, they’ll tell it better. This is a nice building.”
Jillian snorted in a way that made her glad Theo’s attraction to her was set in stone. “No, it isn’t.”
“No, it really isn’t.”
“I deliberately picked the ugliest apartment complex I could find. I started off looking for the most run-down, but I chickened out.”
“See? That’s why you wouldn’t have chicken shifters.”
“I should be helping people who didn’t have money, not being the poor little rich girl living in conditions no one wanted just to piss off her dad. I settled on ugly and I think I achieved it.”
The Steeplechase was an incongruously huge, sprawling concrete complex that looked like some unholy cross between a skyscraper—itself a blemish enough on the relatively flat skyline—and a prison.
Out of sheer curiosity, Jillian had read up on the history of the building, which had been tossed around in a game of real estate hot potato for several decades now. Each new owner had decided that they would be the person to whip some beauty into The Steeplechase’s forbidding dourness. Once, pink curtains had been installed in all the windows, pink being considered a cheery color. In the nineties, an owner with a Gothic streak had decided a touch of classiness could push the building’s ugly front into real character and had covered the place with gargoyles. Then someone had come along and painted the gargoyles to look like cherubs without actually changing their shape. Three years ago, for no reason Jillian could work out, someone had added a huge wrap-around deck out of unstained wood and covered it with potted palm trees.
Currently, the owners were into cheeky irony. A huge waterproof sign flapped in the wind and announced, THE STEEPLECHASE: AT LEAST IT’S CHEAP! One around the back proclaimed: THE STEEPLECHASE: A NICE PLACE TO LIVE, BUT YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO VISIT!
Irony, the apartment manager had told Jillian confidentially, was very “in.”
Theo considered the sign. “Is it cheap?”
“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”
“You like it,” he said, now evaluating her with the same attention.
“Well, I’ve lived here for years,” Jillian said. “After a while, it’s like if you have an ugly dog. It might be hideous to look at, but it’s yours, and you know it’s sweet-tempered. The cherubgoyles freak me out a little, though.”
She let them into the lobby, where the ugliness continued with a pink marble floor that had the thick, creamy swirls of cherry ice cream. Someone had graffiti-sprayed LOOK UPON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR on the wall by the elevators, which had impressed the manager as a compelling example of outsider art and on-point architectural criticism. A gilt frame now surrounded it.