3
Felix
I drove home on autopilot, the evening traffic on I-25 doing its usual impression of purgatory while my brain ran a highlight reel. Marc’s face when he saw me. The way his voice sounded wrapped around my name. The slight tremor in his hands that I’d noticed because I’d spent five years of my adolescence cataloguing every micro-expression that face was capable of producing, and apparently that database was still fully operational despite a decade and a half of disuse.
I needed groceries. The apartment had coffee and a half gallon of milk—I’d made sure of that before anything else when I’d moved in yesterday—but nothing else. Not exactly a victory dinner for surviving your first day at a new job and the emotional equivalent of stepping on a landmine.
There was a minimart two blocks from my building. It wasn’t the kind of place I’d normally shop, but it was eight-thirty and I was tired in a way that went deeper than muscle, and all I wanted was bread, eggs, maybe a bottle of wine, and the particular numbness that came with completing a mundane task.
I was in the back aisle, staring at a shelf of instant noodles with the vacant intensity of a man whose higher brain functions had checked out for the evening, when the bell over the door chimed again. I didn’t look up. People came into convenience stores. That was what convenience stores were for.
Then I heard a voice I knew, and my hand tightened on the packet of pasta so hard the cellophane crinkled.
Marc was at the register. I could see him through the gap between shelves—that distinctive height, the breadth of his shoulders in a dark jacket, his profile as he said something to the clerk in that low, unhurried voice. He was buying—I craned my neck involuntarily—what looked like a bag of ice and a bottle of ibuprofen.
Of course he lived near here. Of course we were in the same neighborhood. Because the universe wasn’t done with me yet, apparently. It was going to keep throwing him in my path until—until what? Until I broke? Until I forgave him? Until I acknowledged that seeing him made me feel things I’d spent half my life learning not to feel?
I turned my back to the aisle gap and stared at the shelf of canned soup with murderous focus. I would wait. He would leave. I would buy my sad groceries and go home and drink wine and not think about him. This was the plan. The plan was good.
The door chimed a third time.
Something about the sound that followed—the particular quality of footsteps that were too fast, too agitated, moving with the jerky arrhythmia of someone who wasn’t operating on a full set of brain cells—made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’d grown up in Toronto. I’d lived in neighborhoods that taught you to recognize the sound of trouble before it announced itself. My body went still before my conscious mind caught up.
“Open the register! Open it now! I’ll fucking—I’ll—“
The voice was young. Male. Cracking at the edges like something brittle under too much pressure. I pressed myself against the shelf and angled my head just enough to see the front of the store reflected in the curved security mirror mounted in the corner.
A kid. Couldn’t have been more than twenty, rail-thin, wearing a hoodie that swallowed his frame and jeans that hung off hips sharp enough to cut paper. His hand was shaking—his whole body was shaking, actually, a fine, constant tremor that spoke of chemicals rather than adrenaline—and in that shaking hand was a gun.
It was small. Black. Cheap-looking, the kind of thing you could buy off someone’s trunk for a hundred dollars. But cheap guns still fired bullets, and the kid was waving it at the clerk with the uncoordinated desperation of someone who hadn’t thought past this moment and was now drowning in the reality of it.
The clerk had his shaky hands up. “Okay, okay, man. I’m opening it.”
Marc hadn’t moved. He was standing at the counter, three feet from the kid, frozen in the particular stillness of someone calculating options. I could see his face in the security mirror—not afraid. Something else. Something focused and intent and almost—
The kid swung the gun toward Marc. “You! Don’t fucking move! Get on the ground! Get on the—“
“Easy.“
Marc’s voice was low, steady, the same tone I’d heard him use with nervous skaters. Palms up, non-threatening. “I’m not moving. You’re okay. Nobody’s going to—“
“Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up—“ The kid’s voice spiraled upward, the tremor in his hands intensifying, and a woman walked into the store, froze, but had the sense to shoot back outside before the kid swung the gun to her. At the same time a little girl ran up one of the aisles away from an elderly man who unsuccessfully tried to grab her. I didn’t think, I moved to intercept her and the bullets started. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space—a sharp, percussive crack that bounced off every hard surface and turned the minimart into an echo chamber of pure noise. The first shot went wide, punching through a display of chips near the door where the woman had stumbled back outside, screaming. The second hit a ceiling tile. The third—
I had the girl. She was maybe five, six at most, and I scooped her up and turned my back to the front of the store on pure instinct, curling my body around hers the way you’d shield a candle flame from the wind. She was rigid in my arms, too shocked to cry, her small fingers digging into my jacket with a grip that was going to leave bruises.
The fourth shot was different. I heard it leave the barrel and I heard it not hit anything—no impact, no shatter of glass, no thud of bullet meeting shelf. Instead there was a sound I couldn’t categorize: a dense, metallic tink, like a coin dropped on an anvil, followed by a grunt that I recognized in my marrow.
Marc.
The kid was yelling now, incoherent, the gun still going off in staccato bursts that had no aim or pattern. I was crouched behind the endcap of aisle three with the girl pressed against my chest, and the elderly man—her grandfather, maybe—had crawled to the end of my aisle and was reaching for her with hands that shook worse than the kid’s. I passed her over. She went silently, still rigid, eyes enormous.
Then Marc was there.
He came around the endcap fast, dropping to a crouch beside me, and his hand closed around my arm and pulled me lower. “Stay down. Stay—“
Another shot. This one was close—close enough that I felt the displacement of air near my head, a whisper of physics that translated to you almost died just now in the lizard part of my brain. Marc’s body was already between me and the front of the store, and he shifted his position to cover more of me, and that was when I saw it.
His left forearm, the one closest to me, the one that had been facing the shooter moments ago. His jacket sleeve had been shredded—not torn, shredded, the fabric hanging in strips like something had expanded underneath and burst through it. And beneath the ruined fabric, where there should have been skin, there were scales.
Dark. Iridescent. Catching the fluorescent light of the minimart in fractured prisms of deep blue-black and green, like oil on water, like the wing of some impossible insect magnified a thousand times. They covered his forearm from wrist to elbow, overlapping in tight, precise rows, and even as I stared—even as my brain stuttered and stalled like an engine flooding—I could see them receding. Pulling back. The edges softening into skin the way frost melts off a window, leaving behind forearm hair and human flesh and a scatter of what looked like fading bruises where the scales had been.
There was a flattened bullet on the floor between us. Mushroomed on impact, the lead splayed out like a tiny, lethal flower. It had hit his arm. It had hit his scales. And it had bounced off like it was nothing.
Marc saw me looking. Our eyes met from eight inches apart, and in his expression I saw something I’d never seen on his face before—not even in the break room, not even in that first moment of recognition. This was heartbreak.
Sirens. Distant but approaching, the wail cutting through the aftermath of the last shot. The kid had stopped firing—whether he’d run out of bullets or nerve, I couldn’t tell from behind the aisle. Someone was sobbing near the register. The clerk, maybe. The grandfather had the girl pressed against his chest, murmuring something in a language I didn’t recognize.
Marc’s hand was still on my arm. His grip was iron, and his fingers were hot—not warm the way a person’s hand gets from adrenaline, but hot, like he was running a fever, like there was a furnace banked somewhere inside him that the crisis had stoked.
“Felix.“
His voice was barely a whisper. “Are you hurt?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. My eyes kept dropping to his forearm, where the last traces of iridescence were fading into ordinary skin, and my brain was doing something it had never done before—trying to reconcile two incompatible versions of reality and failing at both.
The sirens grew louder. I heard the minimart door slam—the kid running, probably, though I didn’t care enough to look. Marc’s grip on my arm loosened, and he glanced down at his exposed forearm, at the shredded sleeve, and something shuttered in his expression. He pulled the ruined jacket tighter around himself, covering the evidence.
“Marc.“
My voice came out flat. Numb. The shock was doing that thing where it wraps everything in cotton wool and you can hear yourself speaking from very far away. “What was that.”
Not a question. A demand. He heard the difference.
“Not here,“
he said. “Felix, please. Not here.”
The police arrived in a chaos of flashing lights and shouted commands. I sat on the curb outside the minimart with a shock blanket around my shoulders that I didn’t need and gave a statement to an officer who wrote everything down with the practiced boredom of someone who’d taken a hundred statements at a hundred convenience stores. I said I’d been in the back aisle. I said I’d grabbed the child. I said I hadn’t seen much. All of which was true, except for the part I left out, which was the part where my former best friend had stopped a bullet because the skin on his arm had grown scales. The officer let me go after twenty minutes. Marc was waiting by the corner of the building, leaning against the brick with his arms crossed over his chest, the ruined jacket zipped up to his throat. He looked like a man standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting to see which way the wind would push him.
I walked toward him because the alternative was walking away, and I’d tried that already today and it hadn’t worked. The questions inside me were too loud, too sharp, too impossible to carry home alone to an empty apartment where they’d multiply in the silence until I drowned in them.
“My place is two blocks from here,“
I said. My voice still had that flat, post-shock quality that I couldn’t seem to shake. “You’re going to come with me. And you’re going to explain what I just saw.”
Marc nodded. No argument. No deflection. Just a single, defeated nod that made him look, for a moment, exactly like the sixteen-year-old boy I’d known—the one who’d never been able to deny me anything I asked for directly.
Mark followed me into the kitchen of my new apartment ten minutes later. I poured myself a glass of water because my hands needed something to hold and I didn’t trust myself with wine right now. Then I turned around, leaned against the counter—and looked at him.
He stood in my living room like a man awaiting sentencing. His shoulders were drawn in, making him smaller than he was, and his hands hung at his sides with the fingers slightly curled. The jacket sleeve was still shredded, and in the warm light of my apartment’s single lamp, I could see the skin of his forearm—smooth now, unmarked, as if nothing had happened. But I’d seen it.
“Talk,” I said.
Marc closed his eyes. Drew a breath that expanded his chest in a way that seemed to go on too long, too deep, like his lungs held more air than a human body should accommodate. When he opened his eyes again, they were darker than they’d been—not brown anymore but almost black, with something shifting in the depths like light moving through deep water.
“I’m a dragon,” he said.
The words hung in the air between us. Simple. Absurd. Impossible. And yet—
“I shifted for the first time when I was sixteen,“
he continued, his voice low and steady, as if saying it quickly would make it easier. “The night I disappeared. It happened in my bedroom. I destroyed everything—the furniture, the window. My parents knew it was possible. They’d always known. There’s a heritage in my father’s line, a gene that can manifest as—“ He gestured vaguely at himself, at the arm that had been scaled twenty minutes ago. “As this.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My mouth was open but nothing was coming out, because what did you say to that? What was the appropriate response when the boy who broke your heart at seventeen told you he was a mythological creature?
“They moved us that night,“
Marc said. “Within an hour of it happening. There’s a community—a dragon community in Alberta. A safe place for people like me to learn what they are. To learn control.” His jaw tightened. “And the first rule—the only rule that was never negotiable—was no contact with humans from your previous life. No letters. No calls. No emails. Nothing that could be traced, nothing that could expose what we are. The secrecy isn’t—it isn’t optional, Felix. It’s centuries old. It exists because when humans have found out about us in the past, the results have been—“ He stopped. Swallowed. “Bad.”
I set the water glass down on the counter. My hand was shaking again—that same fine tremor from this morning, when I’d first seen him through the viewfinder. But this time it wasn’t adrenaline or anger. It was the feeling of the ground shifting under my feet, of every assumption I’d made for fifteen years being picked up and rearranged into a pattern I didn’t recognize.
“You didn’t choose to leave,“
I said. The words came out strange—hollow, testing, like I was trying on a sentence to see if it fit.
“No.“
The word was raw. Marc took a step forward, then stopped himself, as if he’d hit an invisible boundary. “Felix, I didn’t—I begged them to let me call you. That night, while they were packing, I—They took my phone.” His voice cracked, and he pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes for a moment before dropping it. “I knew what it would do to you. I knew, and I couldn’t stop it, and I have never forgiven myself for that. Not for one single day in fifteen years.”
The anger—my reliable, familiar anger—was doing something I hadn’t anticipated. It was shifting. Not disappearing—God, I wished it would disappear—but reshaping itself, the clean, righteous fury I’d carried for half my life suddenly riddled with fault lines that hadn’t been there an hour ago. Because the anger had always been built on a foundation of he chose not to contact me. He chose. He looked at our friendship, at everything we were to each other, and decided it wasn’t worth even a phone call. That was the story I’d told myself at seventeen, and eighteen, and twenty-five, and last Tuesday. It was the story that had calcified around my heart like armor, and Marc had just taken a sledgehammer to it.
I sat down. Not on the couch—on the floor, my back against the kitchen cabinets, because my legs had made an executive decision without consulting the rest of me. I pulled my knees up and pressed my forehead against them, and I breathed, and the world I’d understood for thirty-two years rearranged itself around me in the dark behind my eyelids.
Dragons were real. Marc was one. He hadn’t left because he wanted to. He’d left because his body had betrayed him into something impossible, and the people responsible for keeping that impossibility a secret had given him no choice.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years I’d hated him for something he didn’t do.
“Felix.“
His voice was closer now. I heard him move—not toward me, but lower, as if he’d sat down too. When I lifted my head, he was on the floor across from me, his back against my couch, his long legs stretched out, and the distance between us was about four feet of hardwood and an ocean of everything we’d never said. “I know this is—I know it’s a lot. And I know that knowing the reason doesn’t undo the damage. You don’t have to—“
“Shut up,“
I said, but there was no heat in it. It came out exhausted, wrung dry. “Just—give me a minute.”
I thought about the boy I’d wanted to spend every day with. The boy who’d shared his lunch when I forgot mine, who’d stayed up until two a.m. on school nights helping me edit terrible short films, who’d once punched Jake Morrissey in the cafeteria for calling me a fag and gotten suspended for three days and never once complained about it. I thought about the space he’d left behind—the void I’d filled with anger because anger was easier than grief, and grief was easier than admitting that losing Marc Bouchard had been worse than losing my father.
“You could have found a way,“
I said. My voice was small. Smaller than I wanted it to be. “After. When you were older. When the rules—“
“I know.“
Marc’s voice was rough. “I know I could have. I should have. The rules were—they were real, Felix, and breaking them had consequences, not just for me but for the entire community. But that’s not—“ He stopped. Started again, and the words came out like they’d been locked in a vault and the hinges were rusted. “That’s not the whole truth. The truth is that every year that passed made it harder. Not because of the rules. Because of what I’d done to you. Because I knew that showing up after two years, five years, ten years, with a story you couldn’t possibly believe—I thought it would be worse. I thought I’d be tearing open something you’d healed, and I didn’t have the right to do that. I’d already taken enough from you.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make,“
I said, and the crack in my voice surprised us both.
“No,“
he agreed. “It wasn’t.”
Another silence. This one was thinner, more fragile, like ice forming over moving water. I could feel something shifting between us—not resolution, not forgiveness, nothing that clean or simple but something raw and honest and terrifying.
I moved before I knew I was going to move.
One second I was on the floor with my back against the kitchen cabinets and four feet of hardwood between us, and the next I was across that distance, my hands fisting in the front of his ruined jacket, and my mouth was on his.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t the kind of kiss you see in movies where two people who’ve been separated by fate finally find each other and the music swells and everything is soft focus and forgiveness. It was desperate and graceless and tasted like tears—mine or his, I couldn’t tell—and his mouth was hot, hotter than it should have been, and when his hands came up to grip my arms I could feel the heat of him through my sleeves like pressing my palms against a sun-warmed wall.
He made a sound against my mouth. Low, shattered, the kind of sound a man makes when something he’s been holding together for a very long time finally gives way. His fingers tightened on my arms, and for one terrible second I thought he was going to push me away—that the rules, the secrecy, the fifteen years of disciplined distance would reassert themselves and he’d do the responsible thing.
He didn’t. He pulled me closer. One hand slid up my arm to the back of my neck, and his fingers curled into my hair, and he kissed me back with a ferocity that matched mine and then exceeded it, like he’d been starving for this specific thing for fifteen years and had only just been given permission to admit it.
I broke the kiss because I needed to breathe and because there was something I needed to say while I still had the anger to say it. I pulled back just far enough to see his face—his eyes were fully black now, no brown left at all, and there was a faint luminescence along his cheekbones that might have been scales trying to surface or might have been my imagination, and I didn’t care which.
“I’m angry,“
I said. My voice was wrecked. My hands were still fisted in his jacket. “Marc, I am so fucking angry. You understand that, right? This doesn’t—knowing why doesn’t just—I’m angry.”
“I know,“
he whispered. His thumb was tracing a line along my jaw, and his hand was trembling.
“You left me.“
The words came out cracked and raw, and I let them, because I was done holding things together. “You left me, and it broke something in me, and I don’t care that it wasn’t your fault because it still happened, and I have spent fifteen years building a life around the shape of that wound, and you don’t get to just—“
“I know,“
he said again, and his voice broke on it this time, and his forehead dropped against mine.
“So here’s what’s going to happen.“
I loosened my grip on his jacket. Smoothed the fabric with hands that were still shaking but steadier now, anchored by the solid, impossible, furnace-warm reality of him. “You are going to spend every single day for the rest of your life making this up to me. Every. Day. You are going to show up. You are going to be present. You are going to explain every single thing about—about this—“ I gestured vaguely at him, at the arm that had been scaled, at the eyes that were still too dark to be human. “And you are never, ever going to disappear on me again. Do you understand?”
Marc pulled back far enough to look at me. His eyes were wet, and the luminescence along his cheekbones was definitely scales—tiny, barely visible, flickering in and out like his body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. And then his mouth curved. Slowly, like something thawing. Like a door opening after a very long winter.
“Every day,“
he said. “For the rest of my life.”
“That’s the deal.”
“That’s the deal,“
he repeated, and he was smiling now—really smiling, the way he used to smile at me across the cafeteria table when I said something that caught him off guard, the smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look like the boy I’d loved before I had a word for it.
I smiled back. I couldn’t help it. It felt like a muscle I’d forgotten I had, creaky and uncertain, and it probably looked terrible—tear-streaked and raw and sitting on the floor of a half-furnished apartment after nearly getting shot in a convenience store. But Marc looked at me like it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and his hand came up to cup my face, and the heat of his palm against my cheek was a kind of warmth I’d been cold without for fifteen years.
“You’re going to have to explain the dragon thing more,“
I said. “Like, a lot more.”
“I know.”
“And I’m still angry.”
“I know that too.”
“Good.“
I leaned forward and kissed him again, softer this time, slower, and felt him exhale against my mouth like a man finally setting down something impossibly heavy before I drew back barely an inch. “And just so we’re clear I never stopped loving you even though you’re an idiot.”
“I’m your idiot,“ he said, with the quiet, absolute certainty of a man stating a law of physics. “And you’re my heart, and I will show you every day how I never stopped loving you either.”
I nestled into his arms, still smiling, because I was going to spend every day for the rest of my life showing him that even though my world had changed, loving him never would.