Chapter 10
Milo
He has a nice voice , Milo found himself thinking as he drifted in and out of focus listening to Rowan’s deep bass as he read…something.
Dragon related, he was pretty sure. See? He was totally paying attention. Dragons were…there. Historically speaking. They existed. And they did dragon things. Things Milo would be doing too very soon. As soon as he learned all the stuff.
And his brain was really good for learning. He was a sponge. A super absorbent, gigantic sponge that would just soak up all of the—ooooh a butterfly. He looked to his left and saw a beautiful, ruby red butterfly fluttering away from him.
He skipped to go after it, wanting a closer look because he had never seen a butterfly so large. Or that color.
It was also flying in a really weird pattern.
Loopy and swoopy. Weirdly precise. Milo squinted and realized the butterfly was leaving thin silverish trails.
Like a plane. Or chemtrails. Were butterflies in on the chemtrail business?
Why was nobody talking about it? Seemed like important information to be covered by the magical THEM that seemed to be behind every alleged conspiracy theory.
Was he about to uncover one of the world’s secrets all by himself?
The trails lingered in the air in front of him before he realized they actually formed…letters. He tilted his head to read and gasped when the words registered in his head.
Are you fucking asleep?
Are butterflies always so rude? he wondered as he watched the scene in front of him shift in and out of focus, leaving him weirdly disoriented as he tried to figure out what was happening.
Something shook his shoulder and he jumped, eyes popping open as the butterfly was replaced by blazing eyes in the same ruby color.
Rowan.
All that bulk and heat was hovering inches above Milo, a large hand braced by his head on the cushion, noses a fraction apart. And all the butterflies he was chasing ended up in his stomach at once.
“What?” he asked nonsensically, trying to concentrate on anything but the perfect slope of Rowan’s prominent nose that was dusted in freckles, the shape of his lips and the trim of his short beard, the wonder of his scales, which caught the light beautifully this close.
His fingers itched to touch.
Rowan reared back and slammed the book in his hand closed, snapping Milo out of his musings.
“You were asleep,” Rowan accused.
Milo sprang upright and turned, only then realizing how close Rowan had been sitting.
The edge of the coffee table was just a few feet away from the couch, and Rowan’s frame filled that space until his knees were brushing Milo’s on either side of his thighs.
Milo had effectively pinned himself between them as the dragon glared at him.
“No, I wasn’t.” Milo shook his head. “Totally listened to every word you read. It was fascinating. I learned so much.”
“I literally only managed the intro. Not a single piece of vital information was reached.”
“Oh,” Milo said. “Your reading is very slow.”
“Oh my god.” Rowan stood up and walked off. “You’re infuriating.”
Milo frowned at the shift in position, because Rowan was all the way across the room now and his legs weren’t warm and tingling anymore.
“I was just tired.” His voice sounded less combative now and more…whatever the opposite of that was. He didn’t have much experience with it. He looked up slowly and saw Rowan frozen in place, eyes glued to him and head tilted.
“How many jobs do you actually have?” Rowan asked.
“The three main ones that you’ve seen.” Milo waved a dismissive hand. “And then a couple of temp things I do here and there when things get tight.”
“When do you sleep?” Rowan asked, rounding the dining table into the attached kitchen. He opened his fridge and started rummaging through it, pulling out plastic containers of things.
“When I can,” Milo said, stretching his neck to see what he was doing. “And when I can’t I’ve got coffee and energy drinks to keep me functional.”
“Nothing about you is functional.”
“Hey!” Milo was going for offended, but, like…he wasn’t wrong. “What are you doing?”
“Lunch,” Rowan said, giving him an exasperated stare. “I’m doing lunch.”
“Is my lesson already over?” Milo frowned.
“Unfortunately not. But it’ll happen over food because if your schedule is that terrible then I assume your eating habits are abysmal too.”
“Ethel feeds me,” Milo said, but he shuffled into the kitchen and sat at the counter while Rowan popped a full plate into his microwave. “You cook?”
“Not even a bit. No time.” Rowan crossed his arms as he waited for the food. “My mom and my sister are both great cooks though, and they send me home with all the leftovers.”
Milo found himself intrigued. “You have a big family?”
“Parents, three siblings, two nieces, a gaggle of aunts, uncles, and cousins,” Rowan said. “Dragons are family oriented. We usually stick together.”
Milo swallowed and looked away.
“My parents must not have got the memo,” he mumbled, looking down and picking at a coffee ring on the counter.
“You have no information about them?” Rowan asked, pulling one plate from the microwave and putting the second in to warm up. He lined the cutlery up in front of Milo and put another set on the opposite end for himself.
Napkins, forks, knives. A proper sit-down meal.
“Nope.” Milo shook his head.
“Then you can’t know what happened,” Rowan said. “You might have been the most wanted baby ever before life screwed it all up.”
“I sincerely doubt that I, of all people, was the most wanted.” Milo tried for a joke, but Rowan decided to flip it all and take it seriously.
“Why wouldn’t you be?” he asked sincerely.
Milo squinted, covering the fact that his heart had thumped against his rib cage in a way he’d never felt before. It was foreign and uncomfortable, and he was already squirming from all the serious talk and didn’t want any more of it.
“You’re right,” he said. “I am kind of amazing.”
“There we go,” Rowan said with an eye-roll just as the microwave beeped.
He turned to grab the other plate and Milo let out a sigh of relief, taking a few deep breaths as he examined Rowan’s back.
Who even was Rowan Rangecroft? Milo had the sudden inkling that his initial impression of him might have been all wrong.
Rowan brought the plates to the counter and set one in front of Milo.
It smelled amazing!
Smoky salmon with creamy potatoes and some mixed grilled veggies. Even reheated, it looked entirely too appetizing.
He speared a forkful of everything and shoved it into his mouth, too impatient to try it all individually.
His tastebuds cried out in happiness and he almost shed a tear.
“OMG, tell your mom I’m gonna adopt her,” Milo said with his mouth full. Ethel was a better baker than she was a chef. She could handle basic dishes, but this was heaven on earth.
“The moment I tell her that the papers will be drawn up,” Rowan said with a half smile. Had Milo ever seen him smile before? It made him look younger. “You are entirely too skinny for her perception of what an adult should look like.”
“Eh.” Milo shrugged. “I got that whole Q-Tip aesthetic working for me. But she can absolutely try and fatten me up. I will gladly volunteer myself for experimentation.”
“I’ll let her know.” Rowan’s smile lingered.
“So your mom had four kids?” Milo asked.
Rowan nodded as he took a bite of his own food. He seemed to be a “don’t let this food touch the other foods” type of eater, but his bites were massive. A few forkfuls had him clearing half the plate. “Yup. Raina’s the eldest. She’s married and has twin teenage girls. Then Riley, Ruben, and me.”
“You’re the baby??” Milo asked, because he would not have clocked that AT ALL. “You have a middle child vibe, to be honest.”
Rowan rolled his eyes. “Ruben and I traded personalities. He’s the free spirit wild child who went off to do his own thing outside the family business. After that shock to my parents, I just couldn’t imagine doing the same.”
There was something in that statement. Some kind of wistfulness that seemed to drift like smoke before being blown away.
“So you all work for the family?” Milo asked, prodding a little deeper.
“It’s how things usually go with dragons.
Investment, finance, construction, law… Whatever type of high-end job you can build into a legacy is where you’ll see dragons.
It’s instinctive to want to accumulate wealth, to bundle things up together and build on it.
To cushion your family with material things so they’re secure. ”
“Sounds nice,” Milo said, chewing slower.
“It can be. It’s also constricting, sometimes. The boundaries can be too tight, the cost of crossing them too high for some people.”
“Are you some people?” Milo asked, and Rowan froze for a moment before his shoulders slumped.
“I did what was expected of me,” he said, and that was a non-answer if Milo had ever heard one.
“But not what you wanted.”
Rowan put his fork down and crossed his arms over his chest. “Not everyone gets what they want.”
“Ruben did,” Milo said.
“Ruben is an outlier. He had to lay the groundwork for the idea very early on. Never conforming, never following. By the time he was an adult my parents were literally of the mindset that as long as he’s not on the most-wanted list, it’s fine.”
“What does he do?” Milo asked, realizing he might have pushed too far.
“He’s a concert pianist.”
Milo barked out a laugh. “Did not see that coming. Was expecting lion taming, fortune telling, birthday party clown.”
Rowan stared at him for a moment, shaking his head in wonder. “Why are you so weird?”
Milo shrugged. The words didn’t feel like they contained a barb, instead they were full of a genuine desire to understand.
“It’s a gift. But I’m guessing not exactly dragon material.
I legit know jack squat about my lineage or breed or whatever else.
I didn’t even know I was a dragon until a couple days ago! ”
“We’ll be able to work out a lot of that if we can get to your shift,” Rowan said. “Dragon breeds have specific looks to them when fully shifted. Even in human form I can probably correctly guess certain things about your dragon form.”
Milo perked up at that. “Oh? Like what?”
“Well—” Rowan carefully looked him over. It felt weirdly intimate. “You’ll probably be smaller than my dragon, leaner. That usually means quicker in flight. More agile. I’m pretty hefty so my flying is slow.”
“Sick!” Milo said. “I’m gonna be like zoom zoom zoom…!”
He demonstrated his sick flying skills by waving a fork through the air, spilling shit everywhere.
“Yes, quite.” Rowan rolled his eyes, but Milo didn’t see any real heat in it. “You’ll also probably have similar coloring to your human features. So I’d guess white, silver or pale blue.”
“Okay, but that legit tells us all the stuff,” Milo said. “What breed of dragon is small and that color?”
“There are hundreds. Breeds merged over the centuries, evolved. We can narrow it down to however many possibilities, but I doubt we’ll be able to pin it down until we actually see your shift.”
“Right.” Milo shoveled the last of the food on his plate in his mouth and stood up. “Let’s do this, then!”
“Learning first.”
Milo groaned. “But we already did that part. My brain is at capacity.”
Rowan got up from his seat and put his huge hands on Milo’s shoulders. “We’ll try something more practical instead to hold your attention.”
Milo looked first at one hand, then the other, then up into Rowan’s face, feeling excitement build. “Are we going to try the dragonizing again?”
Rowan jerked back from him, face going as red as his hair. “No! Just…follow me.”
He walked away quickly and Milo followed, pouting…until he got distracted by the pictures on the wall, half-hidden by about five plants and surrounding shelves full of trinkets.
Family resemblance really was strong in the dragon gene pool. The whole Rangecroft clan were hulking red giants who had won the genetic lottery of attractiveness—the same eyes and scales, the same resting bitch face.
Milo wondered what his family would have looked like.
Like him? Could he look in the mirror and have some indication of how his dad would have looked?
Could he imagine a softer face and think of his mother?
Was there a long-lost cousin out there that he didn’t know about?
Would he pass a dragon on the street with white hair and wonder if they were related?
He sighed and went to walk away, only his feet seemed glued to the spot.
Milo felt the very sudden, but very pressing urge to leave something of himself among the shelves of trinkets and family knickknacks.
The compulsion was too strong to ignore and he felt in his pockets for something. Anything.
He pulled out a coffee cup keychain Ethel had knitted him to put on his keys and hastily placed it next to a framed picture, hiding it amid the foliage that trickled down from the higher shelf.
He was just pulling his hand back when Rowan approached. “I thought you were following. I was talking to myself.”
“Oh, uh, sorry. I got distracted.” A rush of endorphins flooded Milo’s brain as he hid his trembling hands behind his back.
Rowan examined him suspiciously but didn’t notice what he’d done. “Come on. I’ll show you some videos.”
“Sure,” Milo agreed, following him.
Something of me is here. Something of me belongs.
Notes:
Do you want a creamy potato recipe? Because here it is.
You will need 3 or 4 large potatoes. More is better when it comes to potatoes, we always say.
You will slice them with a mandolin so they’re really thin. Put whatever spices you like on them (we usually do salt, pepper, garlic powder, and some Italian herb mix). Drizzle with olive oil and mix them really well.
Then grab an oven-safe dish and layer them nicely until they’re flat. Pour a tiny bit of water into the dish, cover with aluminum foil, and throw it in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius (or 356 degrees Fahrenheit) for about half an hour.
Take them out, take the foil off, give them a little stabby stab with a fork to see if they’re done.
If they are, mix some cooking cream with a tiny splash of milk and pour it over the potatoes until they’re just about covered.
Sprinkle some grated cheese on top and put it back in the oven until it’s nice and melted.
ENJOY!!