Excerpt: A Penny For Your Memories
First off, some news: we did it!
Love all you guys. :)
Today’s excerpt is from my story in the newly-released Draconic Desires anthology. If you like hot sex and dragon transformation stories, then this is the anthology you’ve been waiting for all your life!
Nesbit curled up in the drawer from the 1820s, a very comforting decade for him to remember. After winding himself around the stacks of coins, he held a nice silver one against his chest. Memories flooded back to him, of a sunny day on a hillside and a pair of fruit bats who’d liked to fly with him. They had found this silver coin by the side of the road and had thought he would like it.
That had been a good day. They had flown to the edge of the wood together, done loops around each other in the air, eaten mango in the highest branches of a tree, and the bats had told him about all their friends in the town and what everyone was doing. Nesbit didn’t know most of the people involved, but he liked the stories and liked that the bats had cared enough to share the stories with him. What had their names been, the bats? Oh, yes, Amit the talkative one, and Nameen the one who liked to run his claws over Nesbit’s tail.
He rubbed the coin along his sky-blue chest scales, and the memory grew brighter, the sun and the wind, the thick smell of mango and the tangy smell of the bats, their striking black and orange fur. They’d said his blue scales made him look like a piece of the sky had dropped into the tree with them. Nesbit closed his eyes.
“Nezzie!”
Some kids calling for him. He didn’t have to answer them now, though. In a few years they would be preoccupied with their own lives, and their younger brothers and sisters would be the ones asking him to fly them around, or tell them stories, or do fire tricks. Or, if he waited long enough, the next generation of kids would be the ones coming around. It was all the same to Nesbit.
He tried to shut out the noises outside, to remember Amit’s and Nameen’s voices. His wings flicked with the memory of flying and his body shivered pleasurably. In the memory, they planned to come back the next day, and the knowledge that they would eventually leave his company and pass away was far off on the horizon.
“Nezzie?”
The voice was closer now. They were inside his cave? He didn’t think any of them wanted a story that much.
“Nezz?”
Now the voice was familiar. But it couldn’t be. Could it?
He dropped the coin and hurried to the front of the drawer, putting his front claws on the edge to peek over. “Jay?”
The shape at the entrance to the cave, limned by starlight, resolved into a dhole in a loose polo shirt and shorts, his ears perked. “Nezzie, you there?”
Nesbit jumped out of the drawer and glided to the ground, growing to match Jay’s size as he did. He knew that size well; in the decade since a young ten-year-old Jay had first come to play with him, the dhole had grown two feet, but most of that had been between his thirteenth and fifteenth years. And from only a few steps away, Jay looked much the same as the last time Nesbit had seen him: soft golden-red fur, lighter under his muzzle, pointed ears perked. Even the tentative, whisker-lifting smile was the same expression burned into Nesbit’s memory. The dragon sniffed, his thin tongue flicking in and out. “You’re supposed to be gone.”
“I was. I came back.” Jay took another step forward and then stopped. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” Nesbit’s tail swept the cave floor. He tried to sort through the confusing emotions: he was glad to see Jay again—more than glad, if he were honest—but he knew it wouldn’t last, that the dhole would leave again and Nesbit would have to curl up and lose himself in memories for months to forget.
Jay’s tail fell still. “Kishan said you haven’t come out to hang out with them in a month.”
Nesbit shrugged. “It doesn’t seem that long to me.”
The dhole looked behind Nesbit, at the neat array of dressers and wardrobes, and then back at the dragon. “Have you been out at all since I left?”
There it was, out in the open. Every time Nesbit thought he had a handle on how to talk to people, they changed. There had been a time when everyone was direct, and that was unsettling, but he’d gotten used to it. Then things changed and it was impolite to say what one was thinking, and that was confusing. Now they were back to being direct, or maybe it was just that Jay was. Nesbit, uncomfortable, hid behind a different truth. “Yes. Once or twice. It’s just…I don’t know what to say around them anymore. I feel like they’re just coming to be polite, like they just tolerate me. They’re getting older.”
“I was years older than Kishan is now and you still played with me.”
“But none of your friends came,” Nesbit said. “It was just you and the younger kids.”
“They came all the way to the cave to see you,” Jay pointed out.
“Did you ask them to?”
The dhole’s ears went flat. “I asked them to look in on you, sure,” he said. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
“I’m not alone.” Though he couldn’t see any of the coins, he felt them all around him.
Jay looked around the cave and plainly didn’t see what Nesbit was talking about. “I, uh, I missed you,” he said awkwardly.
Nesbit swished his tail across the floor. The feel of the cool rock on his scales calmed him. Jay was young and didn’t understand the patterns of the world as Nesbit did; even though he was back now, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to leave again. Prabhavarti had warned him about this, all those centuries ago. So he changed the subject. “I don’t think the others like me. I worry I’m going to say something old and they’re going to make fun of me.”
“They like you,” Jay said. “Especially Kishan. He was sad he hadn’t seen you.”
“That’s nice, I guess.” Nesbit looked down at the ground.
“He really does.” Jay took a step closer. “Like you, I mean.”
Now Nesbit could reach out and touch him, and he wanted to, wanted to take the dhole and pull him close, but he couldn’t make himself do it. The fact that Kishan liked him seemed supremely unimportant in this moment. “Okay.”
There was a clink of metal that made Nesbit’s scales shiver. “I, uh, I brought you something,” Jay said. He pushed a russet-furred paw into Nesbit’s view, in which three bright gold discs lay.
“What’s that?” Nesbit asked, although his spine tingled at the sight of the coins and his claws flexed, already feeling the shiny metal between them.
“It’s a gift. An apology, sort of, but mostly they made me think of you. They’re…old coins minted for the King. A hundred years ago, I think? Maybe more than that, before the first World War. I don’t know what they’re worth, but…” He pushed his paw out farther. “I thought you should have them.”
Nesbit swallowed once and then grabbed up the coins. He brought them to his chest scales and rubbed them there, letting the feel of the gold—they were pure gold, indeed—course through him. And then he dropped them, his scales still shimmering with the memory of them, and wrapped his arms around Jay.
The dhole staggered back a step and then returned the hug. “I missed you,” he said again.
If you want to see more of it, pick up Draconic Desires from FurPlanet and get this story and many more!