Gravity Happens

The next week was one of the most amusing of their lives for Magoon, Hark, and Maxwell (well, his unlife, at any rate,) as they watched Charlie and Eve circle each other carefully. They were dancing an awkwardly choreographed ballet of accidental bump-ins and hasty apologies as each tried to go about their business without unnecessary contact with the other, and failing abysmally.

Eve would not be able to restart her research in earnest until the bull dragons began making their way back to the pits in a few weeks, so she found a myriad other ways to occupy her time. Helping out in the pits was quickly ruled out, with the painful politeness Charlie and Eve accorded each other, and the wide berth they granted, it was virtually impossible for either of them to accomplish a single goal.

Without a proper healer on staff, the infirmary had descended into chaos which she set herself to righting immediately, but that proved to be a truly horrible method of avoiding Charlie because each dragon keeper found their way to the infirmary at least three times a day to treat the burns, scrapes, and thwacks they inevitably received from Old Derrides—Scaling the beast was a full time job for three men, and it was going even slower since Charlie was the only one on top of him. Hark had received a nasty chomp on the arm from a Fireball when the females first went into season, and dragon venom didn’t respond quickly to any healing solvents. So, Eve ended up patching up Charlie several times a day, exchanging forced small talk and pretending like even the smallest physical contact didn’t threaten to do them in.

When Evelyn took over Magoon’s kitchen duties, she found that preparing meals and keeping the kitchen in order didn’t give her any more freedom from contact with Charlie because, well, men eat. Loads. All the time. Every time they cracked down to the infirmary it seemed they needed to run through the kitchen to swipe a biscuit, or two, or ten. She picked up a share of the paperwork, plotting the nesting coordinates which were owled in from the other keepers in the mountains and responded to messages from other dragon enclaves around the world. Eve even rolled up her sleeves and started getting into the dirty work of oiling and repairing chains and the gargantuan cages which were sometimes used to transport dragons in extreme circumstances. When Magoon found her at that, however, he laid into her something fierce, telling her in no uncertain terms that that was no work for her to be doing. Eve protested just as fiercely, saying she’d been working dragon camps for years and had no objection to doing whatever work needed to be done, and her femaleness had not a whit to do with her capabilities. At that, Magoon whooped with laughter and crushed her in a hug, saying that it wasn’t work he didn’t want her to do because she was a lass, but because he just liked her too much. .

Down in the pits, Charlie was more than just distracted, and he made more stupid mistakes than he had as an apprentice. He tried to cover up his follies with jokes, but Hark and Magoon weren’t fooled any more than he was. He was screwing up because his head wasn’t where it needed to be. He was picking good scales and hammering too hard and straying too close to the hot earth because he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. He wouldn’t admit to either of his partners that he’d known Eve before, wouldn’t answer any direct questions about her, and pretended like he didn’t know that they knew that he was seeking her out several times a day—taking two or three breaks where he wouldn’t normally have taken any, and cracking down to the infirmary to immediately treat scrapes he usually would have ignored completely. No, Charlie wasn’t fooling anyone. Least of all himself.
* * *

“What do ye make of tha’?” Magoon asked Hark as they watched Charlie stride off toward the lodge for the fourth time that day.

“Shoot,” the big Texan whistled with a huge smirk on his face, “I just wish they’d get it on already, so we could get some work done ‘round here.”
* * *

Charlie was frustrated. He had a long list of tasks that needed to get done. He had an 850 year old dragon with a bad case of scale rot who refused to stay asleep, a valley full of pits that needed raking, with the loose scales sifted out. He had to replace several of the heat beds in the nursery under the lodge for the eggs that would be rejected by their mothers. He had to prepare a ridiculous number of invoices to various Ministries, and head down to check on the youngling’s pits himself. He hadn’t had an opportunity in over a week and a half, and while he trusted Hark’s judgment implicitly, some tasks he preferred to follow up on himself. And that was only the top of the list. And it didn’t look like any of it was going to get finished, now that she was back. Even more infuriating was the fact that she was nowhere to be found!

Charlie was stalking through the halls of the lodge. Eve was not in the infirmary, the kitchen, or the workroom. Logically, that left only the study, but he couldn’t very well just barge in there and demand to look over whatever she was working on the middle of the day, like a total nutter. He paced up and down corridor in front of the study, fitfully brushing back his wayward hair. He should go, he knew he should just go and leave her be, but it wasn’t that easy, now that she was back, he wanted her back. But he didn’t even know why she’d left in the first place. Did that even matter now? She was there wasn’t she? Right there? Right through that door?

“Bloody hell, mate, just go in there and talk to her. It’s not like she doesn’t love to see you too,” Maxwell said airily as he floated past Charlie.

“Maxwell! Maxwell! Wait! What are you talking about?! Maxwell!” Charlie whispered loudly, glancing nervously back at the door, “Maxwell! What do you mean she loves it too?”Charlie thought for a moment, straightened his shoulders, threw open the study door and stormed in. Eve was standing by the opposite wall, on her tip-toes, trying to reach a book that was just beyond her reach on the bookshelf. Charlie moved up behind her, close enough to feel the heat emanating from her body, and slid the book off the shelf, “You could just use magic you know,” he told her imperiously

“Just because we can do magic doesn’t mean we need to use it for everything,” she replied, just as haughtily. She turned beneath him and met his eyes, then froze. Desire and anger roiled in his gaze, and the barely contained emotions sizzled in the air between them. He stood close enough, she could smell that singularly-Charlie smell she loved so much, and could feel his heavy breath on her hair. She felt the strength he restrained in the narrow space between them, remembered what it used to be like between them.

She quivered in a tiny, barely perceptible way that rocked him. If he wanted to, Charlie could just reach out and take her. And he wanted to; he wanted to hold her to him so she could never leave him again, wanted to punish her for leaving in the first place. He wanted to shake her, to demand the answers he never got. But he wouldn’t, he didn’t have any right to, not anymore. He didn’t have any right to slide his lips against hers the way he wanted to; didn’t have the right to slip a hand beneath her shirt to reacquaint himself with the softness it concealed; certainly didn’t have the right to drop to his knees and bury his face between her silky thighs the way his body demanded. Just the smell of her, that soft, musky woman-scent that poured over him—he remembered it too well, and his body reacted in kind. He looked into her eyes and he saw his own longing reflected in their sterling depths.

“Was there something you wanted?” Eve whispered.

Charlie shook himself mentally, shoved the book in her hands, and bolted, slamming the door behind him.

"Bugger," she said, to no one in particular.
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A/N: R&R Pleeeeeeeaaaassseeee