Chapter 681 | My Dad Doesn’t Have a Tail

Chapter 681: 681 | My Dad Doesn’t Have a Tail

The girl looked at him, then at her mother, then back at him. Her lower lip pushed out. She lifted the other hand off the table and held both of them out toward Dralun, palms up, ash-grey and shaking.

"Can you hold them? Just to check?"

Dralun didn’t hesitate. He reached out and wrapped both of her small hands in one of his claws, the scales closing around her fingers and covering them completely. She giggled. It was a real giggle this time, high and bright, and she leaned forward to stare at where her hands disappeared into his.

"They’re warm," she said. "You’re warm."

"Rocks hold heat," Dralun said.

Nayeli made a sound and covered her mouth with the back of her wrist. Her shoulders shook once. Then she pulled her hand down, took a long breath, and sat back on her heels on the restaurant floor. The movement pulled the uniform tight across her thighs and opened the collar further, and I aimed my eyes at the menu board above the counter so fast I almost pulled something.

"She’s never done that before," Nayeli said. Her voice was low and husky, with an accent that rolled the edges off the consonants. "This afternoon. She was doing homework at the kitchen table and I heard her scream, and when I got there the table was smoking, and I didn’t know what to do. I put her hands in the sink. It boiled the water." She laughed, and the laugh broke apart in the middle. "I didn’t know who else to call. Nine-one-one says fourteen minutes. I don’t have fourteen minutes. I don’t have insurance that covers a fire truck."

"So you came here," Dralun said.

"I came here." She looked at him, and the fear on her face gave way to something drier. "Mrs. Reyes on Moss Street wouldn’t stop talking about you at the laundromat. The dragon who sat on her floor. The dragon who fixed her son. I thought, there’s only one dragon in the Eastside." She paused. "I thought, there’s no way it’s the same idiot who dropped me off a balcony at junior prom."

Ophelia’s grip on my arm turned into a vise.

"I didn’t drop you," Dralun said.

"You dropped me."

"You fell. I caught you. You hit the railing on the way down."

"You caught me upside down, Oliver. My dress went over my head in front of the entire junior class." Nayeli touched the scar on her jaw with two fingers. "This is from the railing."

"You told everyone a girl from Delancey hit you."

"I told everyone that because I didn’t want them to know I was dating the dragon kid." She said it plainly, and then she seemed to hear herself say it, and her mouth closed.

The restaurant was silent enough that I could hear Grandma Lin’s spray bottle dripping.

Dralun’s tail had gone completely still. The hook at the tip had uncurled, and the whole length of it lay flat against the floor, and his face had done something I did not have a word for. Shock was in there, and something underneath that I would not have expected from a man who drank tar for breakfast and grunted at children.

"Sixteen years," he said.

"Seventeen in May." Nayeli looked down at her daughter, who was still holding Dralun’s hand and running her fingers over the ridges of his scales in fascination. "I moved to Bakersfield after high school. Came back four years ago. My mother got sick."

"I didn’t know you came back."

"You didn’t look."

Ophelia was vibrating beside me. Actual, physical vibration, the kind of tremor that started somewhere in her chest and traveled out through her fingers into my arm. She leaned up until her mouth was almost against my ear, and her breath was hot and smelled of oat milk and lavender.

"He dated her," she breathed. "He dated a human girl in high school. He took her to prom. Oliver Bennett took a girl to prom and dropped her off a balcony and I didn’t know."

"I told you," I whispered.

"You said baby daddy. That’s different. This is worse. This is better." She pressed her forehead into my shoulder and made a small strangled noise into my jacket. "I need to go upstairs and lie down."

"You’re not going anywhere."

"I’m not going anywhere."

The girl looked up from Dralun’s hand and squinted at him with deep suspicion.

"Are you my dad?"

Every head in the restaurant turned to Dralun at the same time.

Nayeli made a sound like she had swallowed a fish bone. Grandma Lin dropped the spray bottle. One of the construction guys lowered his chopsticks and leaned forward on his elbows, his whole body angled toward the corner like the answer might pay out.

Dralun looked at the girl for a long moment. His jaw worked once. His eyes went to Nayeli, then to me, and in that look I saw him put the words baby daddy together with the source and file the source for violence later.

"No, I’m not," he said. "I’m a dragon who works upstairs."

"Okay," the girl said, and she seemed fine with that, and went back to tracing his scales. "My dad lives in Bakersfield. He doesn’t have a tail."

"His loss," Dralun said.

Nayeli laughed again, and this time it held together. She pushed her loose hair back from her face with both hands and let her head fall back against the wall behind her chair, and she closed her eyes for a second. The uniform zipper had slid another inch down while she knelt, and the black sports bra was losing its argument with physics in a way that I was absolutely not going to look at, so I looked at Dralun instead.

Dralun was looking at her.

He was looking at her for longer than he had looked at anything in two weeks, including the card, including the fire on Delancey, including me when I’d come down off a roof smelling like strawberries. His expression had settled into the face of a man who had forgotten he was allowed to have one.

"Rocks with a tail," Nayeli said without opening her eyes. "You said that to me once. Sophomore year, under the bleachers, when I asked if your scales hurt. You said you were just rocks with a tail."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything you said to me, you idiot. You barely said anything."