Dragon Romance: Dragon Fire (Paranormal Shapeshifter Hero Protector Firefighter Romance) (Fantasy Shifter Werewolf BBW Pregnancy Women’s Fiction Short Stories) (24 page)

After showering and changing, Daisy lay on her bed. She thought about calling Angela or Jessica, but didn’t feel up to it. Instead, she lay on her back with a book held before her eyes, trying to lose herself in a fictional universe. But all she saw was Tooth and Dorian.

*****

It was around eleven a.m. that Daisy realized Dorian wasn’t coming in to work. She looked for him all morning. At first there wasn’t any urgency in her looking. She simply wanted to see his ice-blue eyes and that white-toothed smile. But the more she looked – and the more her look was met with nothing more than an empty chair – the more she began to worry. She hoped he wasn’t sick. It was strange, imagining that big, strong man curled up in bed with a cup of lemon herbal tea and bad TV playing in the background of his coughing fits. But it was possible. He was human, after all.

She kept looking for him all day. By Friday, she stopped expecting to see his face in the office. That night she and Angela sat in a bar having a couple of drinks and talking idly. Daisy felt obliged to wade through the small talk before she got stuck into what she really wanted to talk about. After half an hour, she blurted: “Where the hell is Dorian?” (She didn’t mention Tooth, though she hadn’t seen him, either.) “He hasn’t been into work all week. Has he quit?”

“Not that I know of,” Angela said. “Ray the Superman Supervisor seems pretty angry with him because he hasn’t come in all week and has said nothing about it. So I’m not sure what’s going on. Maybe he skipped town.”

Angela meant it as a joke, Daisy knew, and yet she found it hard to laugh at the very real prospect. Maybe he
had
skipped town, just flown into the Nothing or the West or wherever men went to lose themselves. Maybe he was now surging along at one-hundred miles per hour towards the coast, not a care in the world, joking with Tooth about the girl they’d tricked into—into what? Into giving her an orgasm? If it was a trick, she thought the joke was on them. What had they even
gotten
out of it?

“I have to tell you something,” Daisy said, and told Angela about the Park Incident.

Angela listened politely, though her ever-lower jaw, dropping almost to the floor, couldn’t hide her shock. Daisy blushed and shrugged. “It felt good,” she said. “I don’t know—it isn’t me—but I was so horny and they were so hot and I didn’t really think about it. I just
did
it. Do you know how rare that is for me, to just
do
something? It felt pretty awesome.”

“Babe,” Angela said. And Daisy waited for the rebuke, for the judgement, for the words of hatred and unveiled hostility. But all Angela said was: “It
sounds
awesome.”

Daisy giggled like a teenager and then finished her drink. She finished three more before Angela had to get back to her family. In the taxi home, Daisy kept thinking about Dorian Sykes and Tooth. Daisy had already tried to look Dorian up on the internet. All she’d gotten for her troubles was page after page of unrelated content. It was impossible to look up Tooth, of course. She couldn’t exactly write
Hunky Guy Who Calls Himself Tooth
into the search engine. 

For the next two weeks she existed in a sort of dream world, always expecting to walk into work and see Dorian and yet knowing that she wouldn’t see him: a curious case of double-think if ever she had experienced it. Dorian had become Schrodinger’s Dorian: there and not there at the same time until she walked into the office. And each time she walked in, even though she knew the likelihood of him being there was diminishing with each day that went by, she somehow expected to see him, smiling up from his desk. “Were you worried?” he would say. And Daisy would lie and say: “Not even a little bit.”

But the truth was that she
was
worried. She couldn’t account for it. After all, did she really know these men? And yet she couldn’t help but worry. What had happened to them? Had they—it was an awful thought—but—could she contemplate it? Had they
died
?
What, both of them?
she thought.
Both of them died, at the same time, and no one knew anything about it? No one at work knows that one of their employees is dead? Why hasn’t there be an all-hands meeting about “mourning”, etc.?

After a month had passed she was almost ready to accept that she would never see them again. She met up with Jessica and Angela, had coffee, went to movies, and had drinks after work. She resumed her normal life. But always, in the back of her mind, she saw – and felt – Tooth and Dorian. She saw their white-blue eyes, their
same
white-blue eyes, and she felt their hands and their lips on her. Sometimes she would look up from her desk and then flinch. He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t there. He hadn’t been there for a month.

And then she came home one day to a letter. She rarely received letters – no more academic correspondence for her – and yet this was, undeniably, addressed to her. She tore it open with an eagerness spurred by the hand-written address, not the printed address of bills and other miscellaneous drudgery. The words were written in a beautiful, flowing script.

She read:

I must apologize, dear Daisy, for leaving so abruptly. Tooth and I have taken an interest in you. I know how that sounds, but it is true. I cannot tell you where we are. This letter could be intercepted and that would be bad for us. But I can tell you that we haven’t forgotten about you. We will be back in a month. There are things we need to discuss, important things. You will understand soon enough. Just wait a month, and it will become clear.

Dorian.

Daisy read the letter over twice more and then lay it upon the coffee table, went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine, and returned to the table to read it again, trying to convince herself that any of this made sense. But what made sense about it?

He might as well have written in Latin for all the sense that it made.

She finished off another glass of wine and then pinned the letter to the refrigerator. One month and they would be back, he said.
Well
, she thought.
I better get some kind of goddamned explanation.

*****

Daisy did get an explanation, but it was not one that filled her with a great deal of comfort. Confusion and fear and a dangerous break with reality were more
that
explanation’s specialty. She jived to the tune of Normal Life for another month, doing all the things normal people did: movies, drinks, walks, and so on. She tried to push the one-month deadline from her mind, like a schoolgirl avoiding homework for the longest possible time. But it kept returning, in the unhurried moments when her mind was left to explore. She couldn’t help but be ravenously curious about what the
hell
Dorian and Tooth were doing, and how she fitted into all of it.

Eventually – as normal life trundled along like a cumbersome beast – another month had passed. She was walking home on the day of Two Months Passed, trying to trick herself into believing that it was just another normal day. And then she saw Tooth outside of her apartment, leaning against the wall. Her heart began to beat in her throat. Her palms began to turn into pools of water. Her legs became wobbly. And then she righted herself.
You’re not a teenager, Daisy,
she thought.
Pull yourself together
.

She
pulled herself together
as best she could, and then walked on steady(ish) steps to where Tooth stood. He moved away from the wall and stood opposite her. She wanted to hit and kiss him at the same time. He was, after all, half of a whole that had given her immense pleasure. And he was, after all, half of a whole that had given her immense anxiety. But in the end she just stood there, waiting for him to talk, unable to form words of her own.

He nodded. His hair was longer, his beard was longer, and he was wearing a black t-shirt with faded blue jeans. “I suppose you are angry,” he said.

“Yep,” Daisy said. “But more than that, I want some kind of explanation.”

“I think you should invite me in,” Tooth said, fingering the tooth-pendant around his neck. “You may want to sit down when you hear it.”

“If I need to sit down, I’ll sit in the street.”

“Really,” he said, and something about the way he met her eyes, the hardness in in the icy pools, made her listen. “Invite me in.”

“Fine,” she said, and minutes later they were sitting at opposite ends of the couch.

“Where’s Dorian?” Daisy asked.

“At home,” Tooth said.

“Why isn’t he here?”

“He wanted me to explain.”

“Explain what?”

He stood and began to pace the room, arms out at his sides, like an aggressive pedestrian. He looked at Daisy and nodded again. “First of all, you need to know something. Dorian told me you like to read, right? Well, what was it Shakespeare said, something about there being more in heaven and earth than we can see?”

Daisy was half-ashamed, half-proud that she knew the proper quote. She said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Yeah, well, you need to know that that’s true,” Tooth said. “There never was anything truer, as far as I can tell.” He fingered the tooth. “Look,” he went on, and sat on the coffee table, his knees touching Daisy’s. “You see this tooth? This tooth is from the Wolf that Made me. This tooth is from my Maker, the one that called the moon into my life. You see, Daisy, Dorian and I are werewolves.” He powered on before Daisy could say anything. “For the past two months he and I have been at the Council of the Wolf Brethren. Where to start? Okay, look. Dorian only got a job at your place of employment because he Scented you. We both did, about half a year ago. We Scented a woman so wolf-like – so wild and strong and loyal – that we had to come to this city and see you. We have Scented you now, and nothing can change that. But it is forbidden by the Council for Wolves to receive pleasure from humans until permission has been granted. That is why we could—do what we did in the park—and—”

“That is why you wouldn’t let me do anything in return,” Daisy mumbled.

Tooth nodded.

Wait, Daisy, you’re not actually going to believe this crap, are you? How can you? It’s absurd? It’s the stuff fairy stories are made of. (Well, no, that’s fairies.) You know what I mean! It’s make-believe! Werewolves don’t exist. Just because you go around calling yourself “Tooth”, it doesn’t make you supernatural
. “How do I know what you’re saying is true?” Daisy said.

Tooth shrugged. “You don’t,” he said. “There’s a full moon in two weeks. You’ll be able to see then, if you like. But for now?” He shook his head. “We don’t have much in the way of powers, except for our sense of smell, which is about as good as a dog’s.”

“And that is
very
good, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “I know you had a tuna sandwich for lunch, and I know you ate mints to try to cover the smell. I know for breakfast you had a banana and strawberry yoghurt. The perfume you wear is expensive, smells like lavender, but you haven’t worn it in three—no—four days.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Daisy said, somewhat uneasily. “You could just be stalking me.”

Tooth held out his hands. “How can I prove it to you?”

“Go into the bathroom,” Daisy said.

He inclined an eyebrow.

“Just do it, please,” she said.

He did as she said and walked into the bathroom. Daisy shut the door after him and then went around the apartment closing all the curtains. Call her paranoid, but for this to work properly she needed to make absolutely sure no one could see into the apartment and relay the information to Tooth—
what, via an earpiece? You’ve been watching too many movies.
Well, maybe she had, but she would try this anyway.

When all the curtains were closed, and cool evening sunlight filtered through turning the room a dark shade of orange, she went into the kitchen and collected a selection of food: cucumber, tomato, a half-full bowl of leftover tuna pasta, a bag of cheese and onion chips, a quarter-block of cheese. She set the food around the apartment, hiding it in different nooks, and then stood in the center of the room.

“Right,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yep.”

“What I’m going to do is, walk around the apartment and stand next to food. If your sense of smell is really as good as you claim, you’ll be able to tell what kind of food I am standing next to.”

“Okay,” Tooth said, without any apparent hesitation.

Daisy walked across the apartment stood next to the cucumber, which she had placed on the coffee table. Before she could ask Tooth if he knew what she was standing beside, he called out: “Cucumber.” She cursed, silently, whether out of fear or amazement she didn’t know. She walked to the television, next to which she’d placed the tuna. “Tuna,” he said. “Tomato, cheese and onion chips,” when she was stood next to them. She walked into the bedroom, far back into the bedroom, beyond the range of any human smell. She closed the door behind her, making it doubly hard. Then she shouted: “What now?” There was a slight pause –
I knew he was making it up
– and then he called: “A block of cheese—a half or quarter block. It’s going moldy, by the way.” She looked down at the cheese and, sure enough, it
was
going moldy.