Page 1 of How Not to Date a Griffin

Nolan

The warm, muggy air assaulted Nolan as he stepped out of the frosty glass of the hotel entrance.

A line of ride shares blocked the drive as the small crowd of well-dressed men and women awaited their rides, and Nolan had no choice but to wade into the swells.

He’d much rather be decompressing in his hotel room, but work conferences rarely afforded him the precious time.

The suit jacket he’d chosen for this evening of interactions—which blended him seamlessly into the masses—was already too warm, and he considered skipping back up to his room to change. But he feared if he returned to the silent oasis of his room, he might not want to leave.

And well, the dinner wouldn’t be on his dime, would it?

However, his dinner party was nowhere to be found in this mess, so he figured they must have gone ahead without him.

Fine.

Pulling his phone from his pocket, he pulled up a rideshare app on his phone and… stared at the prices.

It may have been a Friday evening in a very large city, but surely a taxi shouldn’t cost this much? The driver would only get the smallest fraction of it, anyway. Completely unfair, since they were the ones doing the driving and all.

Nolan scrolled through the options, and paused, thumb hovering over something he’d never seen before.

A flight? An icon of… was that a griffin?

“No, surely not,” he muttered to himself, and clicked the option more out of curiosity than anything.

Surely they wouldn’t send a real, live griffin to his location? That just seemed…

Well, actually quite ingenious.

Sure enough, it located a real griffin by the name of Reid. He would be arriving in four minutes.

A guilty, giddy flutter of excitement and apprehension struck him, and he almost canceled the ride immediately. But if his father and the rest of the crew had gone on ahead, they would not glance kindly on his tardiness.

Never mind the fact they could have just waited for him. It probably never crossed their minds.

Murmurs disturbed the mass as their attention was drawn to the sky, bracelet-adorned hands lifting and ringed fingers pointing. Following their interest, Nolan’s eyes widened as the half-lion, half-eagle creature flapped his wings and lowered himself to the sidewalk.

And waited.

Nolan supposed he couldn’t exactly call out the name of his rider, not with his beak, and—dear lord, Nolan was going to have to straddle the creature, like on horseback, wasn’t he?

How terribly embarrassing.

The last time he’d ridden a horse, he was twelve. It had not gone well. In fact, he’d fallen off and broken his arm. He’d had to wear that garishly green cast—they hadn’t exactly told him it would be neon when he chose it—embellished with immaturely drawn dicks for six weeks, thanks to his classmates.

Not that he still held a grudge. Of course not.

With a wince, Nolan made his way through the crowd and approached the creature from the side, hiding his apprehension behind a polite smile as he stepped into his eyeline.

“Hello there,” he greeted.

Silence answered him, and he chuckled awkwardly before holding up his phone, highly aware of the stares he was receiving from the throng of elegant couples.

“Are you Reid?”

The creature huffed through his very large beak, and Nolan stared. “Right. You are the only griffin in the area, I suppose, so you must be, right?”

He huffed again.