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"Yeah. I won't, though. I mean, I'm your assistant, not his."
Bolivar snorted. "You can still be my assistant while you're halfway across the world exploring Japanese temples if you really wanted to. I was just going to give you a heads-up. Spending a week with Imrel will only let you see Canada through his bedroom window."
I got what he was saying. I'd dated guys. My virginity was technical, at best. "You think he wants me."
"Imrel wants everyone. I just wanted to warn you before you thought of a bunch of things you wanted to do there and then came back complaining that Imrel was always too busy to show you around except when he wanted to have sex with you. I've heard that complaint before, and it gets old."
I let that sink in, but I didn't ask which of my ancestors had chosen to have sex with a dragon. "I thought that kind of thing was off limits."
"Not really, not anymore at least."
"Oh."
Bolivar turned back to his book, and I realized that I was holding him up. "Well, goodnight then."
"Goodnight."
I left him and went right to bed, but I heard him down the hall from me, the quiet turning of his pages, his gentle humming as he read. I fell asleep to the sounds of him nearby.
When I woke up, Bolivar was in the kitchen with a pot of boiling water on the stove and two massive lobsters scratching across his kitchen table.
"Um. Are those breakfast?"
"Brunch," he corrected me.
It was nearly ten, and I'd seriously overslept. "So I should probably tell you that I haven't had much seafood before."
"Well, this is Maine, and pretty much all we eat is seafood and blueberries. You'll develop a taste for them sometime in the next twenty years."
He assumed that I was going to get someone pregnant and get out of my obligation as soon as possible.
"Do I just drop them in, then, or what?" I was trying to be helpful, but the lobsters were kind of weirding me out with their giant claws and large bodies.
Bolivar gave me a dark look. "Of course not. That's barbaric. How would you like it if someone threw you into boiling water? No, we will kill them first by putting a knife through their brains. It's quick and they don't suffer."
It was still hard for me to watch him do it, but it seemed fast enough.
"Can I do anything to help?" I didn't really want to, but I was there to be his assistant. Mostly I just wanted to talk to him and find out more about dragons. I still wasn't fully convinced that he even was one, aside from the picture I'd seen. And yeah,that was pretty good evidence, but only evidence of him being really freaking old. Nothing more.
Bolivar had his back to me while he put the lobsters into the pot. "Can you make a risotto?"
I didn't even have the faintest idea of what that was. "No. But if you showed me—"
"Some other time I'll give you a cooking lesson. How about taking out some of the hoagies and putting some butter on them? Then toss them in the oven for a bit. We'll have lobster rolls for brunch. Have you ever had them before?"
"No. I didn't grow up on a lot of seafood."
He shrugged without looking back at me. "That's not going to be an issue here, unless you suddenly decide that you hate the taste of it. Then, at that point, I'm really not sure what to feed you."
I smirked and got to making the rolls like he'd told me to. "I'm not completely helpless. I can make my own cereal and—"
He took a sharp turn toward me. "And you're mine for the next eighteen years, at the very least, so I want you eating right and taking care of yourself. That starts with no cereal." He dismissed me with that, returning to his cooking.
I could have easily said that I would do what he wanted to. I could have even reasoned that he was just trying to take care of me and wanted me to be healthier. But I balked at what he was saying. I'd been told my whole life about how I was supposed to act around the dragons, and how I was never supposed to disagree with them about anything, but I couldn't roll over and let Bolivar be right. Not about something as simple as my choice of breakfast foods, and not about the bigger stuff either.
"No. I'll eat what I want to." My voice was quiet. I was trying to be respectful. But I had to draw the line somewhere and I wanted to start right here and now. What would be next? Him telling me when I could and could not talk to my parents?Whether I could respond to texts from my ex who still randomly messaged me sometimes when he was bored? No. I worked for him, I worked with him sometimes, but I wasn't handing over my life to him.
Bolivar turned around, and I waited for his reprimand. I expected him to argue with me, or maybe even yell at me. I thought he would tell me I'm stupid, or just to do what he said, but then he smiled at me. "What kind do you like?"
