Chapter 18
Notes:
Milo
“You should fuck me again,” Milo said the moment Rowan opened his door, barging past him and unloading his stuff all over the place.
It was all too tidy. It needed a bit of chaos.
“What?” Rowan squeaked, closing the door and walking after him, stepping over his shoes and ducking under the swing of Milo’s tote before it landed on the sofa.
“I tried to shift again,” Milo said. “Got all emotional…grrr…clenched, manifested, all that. And nothing. Literally not even a scale.”
“How many times did you try?” Rowan stuffed his fingers under the collar of his shirt and pulling it away from his skin.
Milo followed the movement, tongue coming out to wet his lips because he knew what Rowan had beneath the soft fabric.
“Milo?
“Huh?” He glanced up. “Oh, uh, like…twice.”
“That’s not a lot of times.” Rowan frowned.
“Yeah, but it’s also twice too many to not actually do anything. I’m not very good at not being good at things. It’s frustrating, and frustration isn’t a feeling I deal with well.”
“Right…” Rowan said.
“So I figured you should fuck me again,” Milo said. “You legit dicked my dragon out of me, so I feel like that’s your superpower, and with great power comes great responsibility and all that…y’know?”
Rowan’s eyes almost bugged out of his head and he turned red again. “W-what?”
Milo paused himself and his master plan. “That is…if you want to? I’m not forcing you! You said you enjoyed last night. And I definitely enjoyed last night. So I put two and two together to make—”
He simulated sex with his hands.
Rowan looked like he was having a malfunction as he watched.
He dropped his pantomime show. Maybe he needed to simplify things?
“Do you find me attractive?” Milo asked.
That was an easy place to start, right? But as he said it, he realized he actually cared about the answer. He usually didn’t worry about how others viewed him, but with Rowan he was opening up a vulnerable spot that hadn’t been there before, and it was now exposed with no way to cover it back up.
Rowan shifted anxiously on his feet. “You’re an attractive person.”
What the hell kind of cop-out answer is that? something in Milo screamed.
He stepped closer to Rowan. “That doesn’t answer my question. Do you find me attractive?”
Rowan reached over while Milo kept him trapped in a prison of relentless eye contact and slid a potted plant off the side table. He hugged it to his chest like a teddy bear, like he needed the emotional support to answer.
“Yes.”
That growling creature in Milo’s chest hummed in contentment. He smiled in relief. It was kind of a weird reaction, but he was new to this dragon thing. Maybe they were vain? Maybe he’d unlocked his inner narcissist along with his scales.
“Do you…” Rowan abandoned his question and Milo focused back in on the conversation.
“Do I?” he prompted, encouraging him as best he could to get it out.
But Rowan was in full turtle mode. He hugged his plant tighter. “Nothing.”
Milo frowned. He could push. He knew how to push. But something in him wanted Rowan to feel comfortable enough to ask or say what he wanted without Milo having to drag it out of him or corner him. He felt like Rowan didn’t often get to say what he was really thinking.
They were left in awkward silence.
“Am I making you uncomfortable?” Milo asked.
“No,” Rowan grumbled. Then, softer: “No.”
“Good.” Milo blew out a relieved breath. “Sooo…round two electric boogaloo?”
Rowan pulled a face at his phrasing, which, fair. It wasn’t that sexy. But Milo could still see the hint of desire in Rowan’s eyes. He knew what that looked like now, had seen it up close, had felt it on his skin and tasted it in his mouth.
Rowan pulled back. Again.
“We should try and handle your shift without…that. It’s hardly practical.” Rowan was still blushing.
Milo frowned. He wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t mean Milo thought he was right either. “But—”
Rowan escaped with his plant farther into the apartment, and Milo restrained himself from jumping on his back. Why did the dragon have to be so climbable?
Pouting, Milo followed him to the sofa, noting happily that his sneaky object placements around the apartment were still very much where he had left them. He should really add something over there by the window. And then…
His eyes strayed toward Rowan’s bedroom door and his heart beat faster.
What if he hid something in there? Where the scent of Rowan was no doubt the strongest. At the heart of his home, which no doubt held the most precious pieces of his hoard.
“Milo?”
He dragged his gaze away. “Coming!”
Instead of leaving a respectable distance, he sat himself right next to Rowan on autopilot, their thighs brushing and bringing Milo’s attention out of Rowan’s bedroom and right back to the dragon himself.
Rowan stared at him.
Milo stared back.
“You’re really close,” Rowan whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” Milo whispered back.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re still doing it.”
“So are you!”
“I’m just matching tone.”
Rowan looked at Milo’s lips as they moved, and Milo barely controlled his anticipation as he watched him lean in slightly with every exchanged word.
Milo fluttered his eyes closed and pursed his lips.
Rowan sprang up. “I’ll get the new books I ordered.”
Milo was left blinking in shock at the empty dent Rowan’s ass had left in the cushion.
He turned around and scowled at Rowan’s retreating figure.
When he came back he was armed with a stack of literature that he used to create a wall between them. He physically placed them like you would a chastity pillow on a bed.
“Is this for you or for me?” Milo asked.
Rowan kept his eyes on his construction. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The dragon was ridiculous. And cute. Why was he so cute?
A flash of something caught Milo’s attention and he pulled out a parenting book with a baby dragon on the cover before it was buried by another one.
“Do you have something to tell me?” Milo gasped. “I didn’t get you dragon-pregnant, did I?”
“What? No! Why would you say that?” Rowan yelled, scandalized.
“You have the baby book, not me.”
“It has techniques to teach young dragons how to deal with their first shifts!”
“Oh. That makes more sense.”
“You think?!”
Milo crossed his hands on the book wall and straightened his shoulders. “Please, continue.”
Rowan started mumbling to himself adorably about Milo’s insanity and how there was something wrong with him as he began flipping through the first book, smoke leaking out of his nose. Milo watched him for a while, feeling more fond than he should have given that he was the topic of the rant.
“If it helps, I did research a bunch of techniques. But everything comes back to this emotional connection, and I try to get there on my own but it’s like there’s this block in my head or I get distracted by something shiny or a noise or—”
“Do you find me attractive?” Rowan asked suddenly.
Milo snapped his mouth closed. “Huh?”
Rowan appeared horrified that words had come out of his mouth at all. He looked back down at the book. “Nothing.”
His brain caught up, and Milo realized Rowan had been holding on to that question this whole time. That was what he hadn’t allowed himself to ask earlier.
“No take backs,” Milo said.
“I didn’t say anything to take back,” Rowan flat-out lied.
“Yes, you did. You asked if I thought you were attractive.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“So you won’t want my answer, which is that you’re probably the single most attractive dragon I’ve ever had the pleasure of biting, or that I think your chest should be the seventh wonder of the world and have a national holiday and statues in its honor,” Milo said, watching every micro expression of happiness flitter across Rowan’s face.
“Because, you know, you never asked that.”
Rowan shyly lowered his gaze, fiddling with the corners of his book. “You really think that?”
Milo gracefully climbed over the book stack to his prize. Which meant he crashed right through and got a hardback corner in the thigh for good measure.
Rowan still caught him under the arms and stopped him from sliding off the sofa in the ensuing information avalanche.
Milo wrapped his own arms around Rowan’s neck and like an awkward frog, moved one leg up and then the other to straddle Rowan’s book-covered lap.
“I really think that. Perhaps more graphically.”
Rowan snorted, but he was a pleased pink instead of an embarrassed fire-red. “I appreciate your eloquence for my sake.”
“So, about that plan I had…”
Rowan stole his mouth in a kiss and Milo groaned in victory. “I’m definitely more of a practical learner.”