Stagnancy was a slow death, and even if she had insecure moments with her progress, she wasn’t stagnant any longer.
She was living again. Some parts were good, and some where scary, and some were bad, and some were exciting, but at the end of the day…she was living again, not just marking days off a calendar.
Tammy leaned back into her rocking chair and exhaled slowly as her mind raced.
She was starting to understand Tawk’s language, and truthfully…she was really starting to like it.
Chapter Six
Tawk was an enormous creature.
He took up half the dang kitchen! For the twentieth time at least, Tammy glanced over at Tawk’s cupcake frosting station, where his gold eyes were trained on the vanilla cupcake he was frosting. He was careful and wanted the frosting to be perfectly smooth. She recalled his judgement on slobby women and smiled to herself. “Do you keep a clean house?”
“Perfectly clean. I have to.”
“Why?”
“It’s the only way the animal doesn’t drag me to the mountains to find a cave,” he muttered as he gently dipped the cupcake into the bowl of sprinkles beside him.
“Do all Sentry dragons like caves?” she asked curiously.
He shrugged. “I used to do a lot of research on dragons, just trying to figure myself out, and as far as I can tell, all dragons are attracted to dark, cold, open dens.
“Tell me about your home,” she said.
Tawk glanced over at her, and she was struck once again at the glow in his yellow-gold eyes. “You want to know about my hotel room?”
“Is that where you consider home?” she asked.
“Home is wherever I am.” He returned his attention to the next cupcake to frost. They only had a few more to do apiece. It was late, midnight already, and she needed to deliver these to the bake sale at eight in the morning.
“So right now, in my house, you would consider yourself home?”
Tawk looked around thoughtfully and then returned to scooping a glob of buttercream frosting onto his plastic knifeto spread onto the naked cupcake. “Only if I was sleeping here. Honestly, I don’t give a lot of thought to home. It’s not important to me. Not like it is to humans.”
“You don’t get attached to places?”
“No,” he answered, and she believed him because of the conviction in his tone. “I don’t get attached to anything. Except the damn coaster you gave me tonight.”
Huh. “I can get you more coasters. I read that treasure is important to dragons. Maybe your dragon sees coasters as treasure. Or something about the logo attracts him, maybe?”
“Maybe,” he rumbled noncommittally.
“So, you don’t have fond memories of your home when you were growing up?” she asked, so interested in his way of thinking. What made Tawk tick? She was so curious.
“I spent the first half of my childhood in a mansion.”
“A mansion? Were you rich?”
“Yes. My father knew how to make money. He was a landowner. Businessman. Home when I was a kid was a twenty-bedroom ridiculous house at the edge of a hundred acres for me to play on.”
“Whoa,” she said softly. “What was it like?”
“Huge wraparound porches with rocking chairs. Perfectly manicured lawns with the lines mowed into them. A full-time crew of gardeners for my mother’s rose gardens. I used to ask my mom to have a brother or sister for me so I would have someone to play with.”
“You’re an only child?”
He nodded. “Later I found out she had wanted a big family, but that my father had gotten fixed right after I was born. He did it without my mother knowing. She thought something was wrong with her until my father told her he’d had a vasectomy the second he’d figured out she’d trapped him.”
