“Why are you being nice to me, Lee?”
I suddenly feel defensive.
“I can be nice.”
“You haven’t talked to me in years, Lee. Then today...this morning...” Her tears start up again and my heart clenches. Suddenly, sitting on her bed, Nicole no longer looks like the evil monster I’ve built her up in my mind to be.
Now she looks...small.
Frail.
Breakable.
She looks broken.
“Nicole...” I sit down next to her before I can talk myself out of it, and I wrap my arms around her. I expect her to resist, but she doesn’t. She just wraps her arms sweetly around me and starts to cry. She sobs loudly into my chest, holding onto me, and suddenly, I wonder just how alone and isolated she’s been since she came here.
Living among dragons can’t be easy.
Not for a human.
Not for anyone.
“Why are you here, Lee?” She cries. “Why today? Why did you save me? You should have just let him kill me.”
“What? Nicole,” I pull back and lift her chin so she’s looking at me. “Why would you say that?”
“Come on, Lee. Everyone thinks it. You. The dragons. My ex. Everyone wants me dead. The world would be simpler if I was.”
“Your ex?” I raise
an eyebrow now. This is the first I’ve heard of an ex. And there’s a part of me that suddenly feels a little jealous at this revelation.
“It’s nothing,” she blushes, and looks away, but I don’t buy that for a second.
“Nicole.”
“I told you, Lee. It’s nothing. Now damn you, why are you here?” Suddenly, she jumps up and points to the door. “You should just go, Lee. You should go. I don’t know why you’re here, but it can’t mean anything good.”
“I’m here because we need to talk about everything happened at the bakery.”
“The bakery...” Suddenly, she seems to remember that it’s been destroyed. “Fuck.”
“It’s going to need to be rebuilt.”
“I’ll help, of course. I can’t do it on my own,” she says, and I can almost see her mind start to spin as she begins calculating everything that needs to be done.
“Nicole, you don’t have to do it on your own. I just wanted to find you and make sure that you-”
“Make sure I what? What is it, Lee? You haven’t spoken to me in years and now...”
She shakes her head.
“You might not be my favorite person in the world, Nicole, but damn if you don’t deserve to feel safe in your own home, at your own place of work. You do. You deserve all of that and more.”
I stop, and she stops, because what I just said is dangerously close to something I said years ago to her.
You deserve the sun and the moon. You deserve the stars in the sky. You deserve all of that and more.