Finally, I met his stare. It hurt my chest just to look at him. The pain was sharp and enduring. He was the only thing in my life I’d ever wanted badly enough that it made me shake like an addict.

I had never been like him. His absolute faith in our love, in our ability to be together, in spite of the odds, had floored me. And I had stolen it from him. And from myself. In the cruelest way that I could think of.

I’d never just been with him, thinking it would last forever. I’d always known the clock was ticking on our affair. My sense of borrowed time had always been acute. But it still made me ache to know I’d never have him like that again. A brief taste of his body only made it harder to bear the permanent loss of his love. Still, I couldn’t seem to stop myself from coming back for more.

“Maybe,” I said vaguely. “We can always just blame our libidos.”

“I’ve grown rather accustomed to blaming you,” he said with a rare combination of bitterness and humor.

A corner of my mouth lifted slightly. I shrugged. “Join the club.”

He moved toward me, and that was all it took to sweep me back in.

He backed me deliberately into the wall, pressing hard against me until I gasped from the sheer, solid contact. “Ask me for it,” Dom growled at me, and it was clearly an order. He was trying to get a reaction, I thought. I wasn’t in the mood to balk at his methods, though.

I ripped his shirt open. My hand slid down his chest and directly to his heavy erection. I gripped him with just the right amount of pressure that I knew he would love. “Please, Arch, may I have this?” I asked without a hint of mirth.

He answered by gripping my hair and pulling down until I went to my knees. I freed him from his pants and he buried both hands in my hair, pulling me towards his length. I obliged eagerly, taking him into my mouth with wet lips pulled taut over my teeth. I sucked him hard, drawing a groan out of him that I knew he was reluctant to give. I began the familiar rhythm that I knew he wanted, and that I myself relished. I used my hands at his base in a wet, twisting motion, and took him deep into my throat. He held my head and pushed into me. I felt the very air around us changing when he was close to release. He climaxed deep in my throat with a muffled groan, and I swallowed. I pulled back to look up at him, licking my lips. He put a hand on the wall, leaning heavily against it for a moment, but he’d always been quick to recover.

He lifted me back up to stand not even a minute later. And this time it was him that knelt, pulling down my tiny lycra boy shorts and my lacy thong in one efficient movement. He buried his face against my core, throwing one of my legs over his shoulder, and his clever tongue had me screaming in seconds. “Please,” I said, even after I came. I loved what he could do to me with his mouth, but it never felt complete until I had him buried deep inside of me.

He rose fluidly, burying himself to the hilt in the smoothest motion. He kissed me while he thrust, and I ate at his mouth, missing that intimate contact amidst all of the rest. He pulled back to watch my eyes near the end. Their changing depths had always mesmerized him, I knew. I wondered, not for the first time, if I had inadvertently cast some sort of spell on him. There was so much I didn’t know about my own power. But if it was a spell, why would I myself be just as caught up? I lost myself just as completely in his extraordinary gaze.

“Come,” he commanded harshly, and it did the trick. We climaxed together, our eyes staying locked.

 “What do you look like as a dragon? I’ve never seen one before. Is it similar to the legends?” he asked unexpectedly. We were both getting dressed. I finished first. My few scraps of lycra were much quicker to get in and out of than his tailored gray Armani suit. I kept my back to him as he finished getting dressed. Why did it sometimes seem so much more intimate getting into clothes than it did getting out of them?

“All of the dragon-kin are different. Different sizes, different shapes and proportions, different colors. But yes, we’re much like the legends. I have to imagine that most of those renderings came from real encounters with dragon-kin. My family does love to be worshipped.”

“What color is your dragon?”

“It’s unusual actually. My dragon never chose a color. She’s just like my hair, she changes on some whim, against my will.”

“Does that happen to dragons often?”

“Never that I’ve heard of. But I left the clan before I knew much. I’m flying blind on most of that type of information. Why do you ask?”

“So other dragons’ hair doesn’t do that?”

“I don’t think so. I’m horrible at changing my appearance on purpose though, which would be far more useful. I think the shifting colors might just be a sign of my lack of control over my magic.”

“What is your element?”

I looked at him now. He was just finishing his tie. It was a solid, vibrant blue that set off his left eye to perfection. “Fire. A lot of our kind are a mix of elements, which can be useful, but I’m almost completely fire. It’s the least subtle magic.”

“So no ice at all?”

“No. Are you surprised?”

“Only a little. I guess I always saw the fire. Though I have seen you practice subtle magics.”

I shrugged. “I was taught that we are the Firstborn. The gods gave us many magics to work with. I can use some of the subtler stuff, but it’s always been my weakness. Even simple glamour gives me a headache. I have no patience for it. Fire is great for an all-out battle, but outside of that, the other stuff is far more useful.” I studied him for a long time. It was so strange, talking to him about this, about what I was, after all of the years of secrecy. It made me want to tell him more, now that I was free to. “I don’t know if they believe it now, but draak used to believe that every kind of Other race after us was a sort of bastard version, stealing just pieces of our lesser magics. They believed that we were the perfect prototype that couldn’t be improved on, only copied poorly.”