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He went on to tell me how he started over. Like me, he lucked out being at the right place and the right time to move in here. He collected secondhand objects for a new hoard, his old one stolen from him.
“But you don’t live there anymore. Why do you have to follow their rules?” I leaned back, holding his face and watching it carefully. “Can’t I be your new flight?”
“Being expelled doesn’t erase that I still technically belong to them. They didn’t mark me as rogue.”
I had to ask him what that meant later.
“And it’s not that I don’t want to mate you. It’s not that my dragon doesn’t want to. If I do, I’m tying you to my consequences.”
I listened to him fill in the details and hated his flight’s Alpha more and more by the second.
“Do you understand that I want you? That it’s not about that?”
Did I? Yes. But also, not really.
“It’s ridiculous that you can’t mate. I still want to be with you.”
“Can you wait for me, Sheridan, please?” It was the first time it wasn’t a hard no.
“Of course I’ll wait for you.” Now that I knew the truth, I could wait as long as he needed me to. Maybe I’d manage to think of a loophole in the meanwhile.
I couldn’t change his past, what his flight had done, but I could make sure he knew I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Tea?” I climbed off his lap.
He looked at me in confusion.
“Huh? I told you all the gory details and you’re offering me a hot beverage?”
“Ummm, yes?” I didn’t want to tell him it was because if I stayed there and listened any longer, I’d cry.
I got up to put the water on. Maybe over tea, he’d be able to explain why his flight had such ridiculous rules that punished heroes instead of the actual bad guys.
13
RADLEY
Turning Sheridan down was the hardest thing I’d done since the flight cast me out.
And I’d done it twice. Once in the dirt in the woods, when he bared his throat to me and I refused. And one in his kitchen a few days later, when he wore me down and I finally told him the truth about the flight and the law.
I’d laid out every reason and waited for him to get it, to pat my arm and tell me he finally understood. More than once, he’d talked about the mark he’d left on my skin, and I’d explained repeatedly that it was nothing without a corresponding one from me to him.
But like in the bar that night, he did the unexpected. He didn’t leave or agree that he couldn’t be with me because of my history. He listened to the story, including every ugly detail, asking questions and making notes, and when I was done, he said, “That’s ridiculous.”
Sheridan didn’t understand flights, especially my former one. Heck, if I told him that when Stellan lived with his den, his Alpha had once bled him because he disagreed with a Beta, he’d probably say the same thing. Unless a human had lived in a pack, den, or flight, they could never really understand the culture.
“Tea?” Sheridan got up and boiled water before getting a tin of loose tea leaves from a shelf.
“Huh? I told you all the gory details and you’re offering me a hot beverage?”
“Ummm, yes?”
That was three weeks ago, and we were in limbo now. We hadn’t fixed what was unfixable. Sheridan wasn’t mine the way that I was his. But somewhere in those twenty-one days, we started being together in ways that didn’t need my teeth at his throat to count.
I ate dinner at his place most nights. Sheridan wasn't a great cook, even Indigo was better than him, so I’d bring the food and he'd reheat it. Pierogi had accepted me and slept on my feet, and Marmalade ventured down from the third floor when Indigo visited. She sat on the bookshelf glaring at the bunny. I understood a predator, I had one inside me, so I put a bell around the cat’s neck. That, combined with my shifter reflexes, would keep the rabbit safe.
One night Sheridan put on a film he swore I’d love but fell asleep on my shoulder twenty minutes in. That was what he did, and it was adorable. The rabbit was on my feet, and I didn’t move for two hours. My arm went dead, and I didn’t care. My dragon lay quiet as if he was expecting someone to tell us we weren’t allowed to be here.
