I’m sick of overcooked meat. It can’t go on like this. It’s all I’ve been thinking about as Lantana greets me in front of my room. “Good morning, Ashura! I’m going to take the day off. Would you like to spend it together?”

  By the way her ears droop, I can tell this is a long overdue break. “Lantana, is there a kitchen I can use?” I find myself saying this before anything else. “I-I mean, of course, I would love to spend the day together,” I hastily add.

  Her brow furrows. “A kitchen? Well, I’m sure we could find one. But why would you want to use a kitchen?” She leans in out of curiosity. “Do you like to cook?”

  Not particularly, but I don’t have the heart to tell her none of her royal chefs know how to fry a steak. “It sounded fun.”

  “Well, great, then!” She brightens. “We can cook together.”

  A little while later, once we’re sufficiently hungry, Lantana shows me to a kitchen. This one is fairly small and looks more homey than industrial. There’s a set of parallel stone counters, one side with an oven and a stove, and a rack of food in the back next to the sink. The first thing I do is wipe down all the counters with soap and water.

  “What are you doing?” Lantana asks. Regardless, she copies me, taking a towel of her own and starting down another counter. “This kitchen is already clean.”

  “I’m still wary of cross contamination.” The cooks have been careful with my food, but I’ve still gotten sick more than once. “Dragons don’t really have food intolerances, do they?”

  “Oh, no.” Lantana drops her wet towel into a hamper and starts over the counter with a dry one. “Our guts are famously quite iron. I don’t think I’ve ever met a dragon—or leviathan, for that matter—who couldn’t eat something that was edible. What about humans?”

  “Wish that were the case for us.” Once we finish cleaning, I shuffle around the kitchen, looking for what I need. I find a basket of spices on one of the shelves, some knives and forks in a drawer, and a cutting board hung up on the wall next to a frying pan. “As well as raw meat, there are a lot of things some humans can’t eat. Milk, bread, fermented foods…not to mention allergies.” In the corner of the room, I open what looks like a closet, only to find a magically cooled walk-in storage room. Icicles climb up the metal walls and wrap around the base of the shelves, making me wonder if they are part of the structure or purely accidental. It’s packed with different kinds of meat. Sure enough, I find some semi-thawed beef steaks on a shelf, thankfully labeled and dated.

  “That sounds inconvenient,” Lantana says as I walk out with the steak.

  “Believe me, it is.” I lay the cut down, wash my hands again, and start mixing my spices as I speak. “I’m just glad I’ve avoided the worst of it. The only thing I can’t really have is caffeine.”

  “Does it make you sick?”

  “No, it just gives me anxiety.”

  Lantana pauses for a half second before saying, “Don’t you already have anxiety?”

  I look at her, nearly losing track of what spices I’ve mixed. Do I have anxiety? Well, of course, all the time. But I get a sense she’s referring to a more clinical usage of the word. I read somewhere that dragons have diagnoses and special terms for different types of mental struggles. In the human kingdoms, people just say you’re crazy because you don’t exercise enough. “What makes you think I have anxiety?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure,” she rushes. “I’m not a doctor, after all. I guess I assumed that you—um—based on your aura and how you act—”

  I give her an easygoing shrug to not make her worry. Or, is it to not make me worry about her worrying? Now I’m questioning every frantic thought, sleepless night, and physical discomfort I’ve ever had. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I don’t see why it’s important.”

  “But wouldn’t you seek help if you did?”

  Seek help? Now I’m just confused. Is she talking about medicine? Is there medicine for anxiety?

  “Sorry,” she says, “I don’t mean to overstep. It’s your business.”

  I think on her words as I coat the steak in oil and rub in my spices. “It’s okay. I...I appreciate that you care,” I say, each word coming out slow and deliberate.

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  Lantana just nods. She watches me as I prepare the steak. “That’s a lot of spice,” she comments. “Won’t it be overwhelming?”

  “Most of it will cook off,” I explain, glad for a subject change. The chefs must not realize that when they make steak for me, I can almost never taste anything other than the tough meat.

  She nods thoughtfully.

  While I’m working on the meat, Lantana steps away and starts grabbing ingredients from around the kitchen. She retrieves a large pepper-like vegetable, a block of cheese, spices, and various other ingredients I can’t quite name. Although I don’t believe she cooks for herself much, she works faster than I do, and already has the vegetables hollowed of seeds by the time I’ve finished spicing and oiling the meat.

  “What are you making?” I ask.

  “A leviathan dish!” She explains as she mixes the other ingredients. “Well, a modified version, anyways. My father used to make it when he wanted a taste of home. Only, we never had seaweed, dolphin cheese, or coconuts on hand, so he made his own version of the recipe.” She starts stuffing the vegetables with the mixture.

  Dolphin...cheese? You can milk a dolphin? I shake the thought away and think better of asking. “Sounds good.”

  Lantana places her vegetables on a stone plate, then slides them into the oven. After that, while I’m just beginning to fry the steaks, another curiosity comes to mind. Something I don’t know if I want the answer to, but something I feel is a necessary question. “Um, Lantana, you mentioned before that I’m not the first human to volunteer for this marriage.”

  “No, not at all.” She sits back and watches the oven. “There were several before you.”

  I nod. “The others…if I may ask, why were they sent home?” I can feel her eyes burrowing into me while I watch the steaks fry.

  “Only one of them I would say was ‘sent home,’ Ashura. And that was for a good reason. The others left on their own terms.”

  I stay silent.

  “We started sending out letters requesting princes who were interested a few years after my first engagement fell through.”

  Engagement? “You were engaged?”

  “Ah…it’s a long story. Another time.” She continues. “The first response came after a couple months. But I knew right away things wouldn’t work between us.”

  When I glance at her, she’s deep in thought, her tail sweeping behind her. “Why is that?”

  “He was far too young for me, barely even an adult while I was nearly 30. I suspect his parents had some hand in the arrangement, or perhaps he was desperate to be in a relationship. I told him why we couldn’t be together, and he understood. He went home with gifts of goodwill, and I hope some more wisdom. A nice kid, really, but still a kid.”

  “Huh.” It’s strange to imagine that at our age, or just a little younger, Lantana was still looking for new relationships. When I turned 30, it was a few years into my relationship with Rosalind, and I figured my chances of finding someone else were completely over. Everyone else my age had already married and had kids, after all.

  Although there were certainly other reasons I didn’t break up with Rosalind, I wonder what would have happened if I had been bold like Lantana and unafraid to keep looking. Could I have found happiness rather than wasting away like I did? Would I have ended up with someone even worse? Or would I have been alone, but content, nonetheless?

  I certainly wouldn’t have found my way here.

  “After that, I started sending Alcina to inspect princes before we accepted them. She’s a trusted friend, and she knows what I’m looking for. Only, that led to its own problems.” Lantana rushes past the next part, clearly uncomfortable. “The first prince she brought, purely by accident, was vile. He acted fine in front of others, but when we were alone, he was completely inappropriate. I had him sent home immediately.”

  My head shoots up in alarm. “Were you—were you safe?”

  She stares at me, her expression almost holding softness, but I can’t understand why. “Yes, Ashura. I was safe.”

  “That’s good.” I look back at the meat as it cooks. “That’s really good.”

  “Jayle is a better judge of character than Alcina is, so I started sending him, too. Thankfully, by then, we were good friends.”

  I’m not sure why she specified that. I flip the steaks.

  She tells me more about the other humans. Some of them didn’t get along with her, one realized he wasn’t attracted to dragons, another realized he was in love with someone else…the common theme seemed to be that each of them chose to leave. Lantana wasn’t lying.

  “The human before you went home because he simply didn’t want to be far from his family,” she explains. “He had a great relationship with his parents and siblings, and he missed them terribly.” Lantana takes a hot pad and pulls the stone plate of vegetables out right as I take the steaks off the stove. “Other than you, he lasted the longest.”

  I pause. “Other than me?”

  She nods as she adds a final bit of butter and a dash of salt to her dish. “You’ve stayed here longer than any of the other humans have.” Lantana looks at me. “Isn’t that something?”

  Huh. I think on her words as we finish preparing the food. We sit at a small wooden table in the corner to eat.

  “I’m glad you’re still here,” Lantana says unexpectedly. I look up at her, my attention split between her and the meal. The steak is more well done than I wanted it to be, but her stuffed vegetables are spectacular. “I like you, Ashura.”

  This simple comment somehow gets me to blush. “I like you, too.” I wonder if things don’t work out between us…if we decide we aren’t compatible…if she would still want to be friends.

  I’d rather not think about that possibility. Despite the struggles I’ve been having, Lantana is so easy to be around. She’s the first good thing that’s come into my life in years.

  I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I lost her.

  “This is really good!” she exclaims. She takes another bite of her steak. “I didn’t know cooked meat could taste like this.”

  I can’t help but smile. “Th-thank you.”