You, Me & the Dragon

By McKenzie Rae

What sort of animal thrives on loneliness? That's the question haunting retired actress Daria Halifax.

 

After leaving Hollywood, Daria has become an elusive shut-in, hiding in her penthouse apartment in Delian City until the day her sister buys her a friend-for-hire subscription. Conversations with her paid companion inspire Daria to venture back into the world, but she soon notices that something strange is happening to her home city.

A fearsome dragon is on the prowl.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crazy Ink
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215602386

Book preview

Other Books Set in Delian City

Dreamer’s End

Starlight Park

Happy Land

For Aunt Lucy

I love your open honesty and how you’re always willing to talk with me about anything.

Prologue

Rain in Delian City is like water being poured over a dirty dog. It doesn’t truly clean anything, just makes the grime damp and gives it a certain moldy, rotten odor. All the glitter and flashing lights can’t disguise the smell of a wound in the earth left to fester.

In her penthouse apartment, Daria watches people as tiny as ants scurry and swarm beneath her. They are so small, so distant. It’s hard for her to believe that she was ever one of them. She doesn’t keep any reminders of her old life in her home. No artwork on the walls, no digital files that she might be tempted to look at. Daria has even set up parental blocks on her computer, so she doesn’t do something stupid like Google herself.

These days, all she does is log data. It’s easy once she gets into a rhythm—and her father made sure that she didn’t feel pressured when she joined his company after making the switch from Hollywood. Daria wouldn’t say that the transition from acting to data entry has been comfortable, but it certainly is less traumatic than it could have been without her father’s influence greasing the wheels.

She makes a cup of black tea and takes it to the living room where she can watch the rain through glass panels.

Across the street from her apartment building, countless floors down, is a Chinese restaurant. Daria is not sure what the name of the restaurant is since she’s never faced the front of the building. She only sees the dragon created from red neon lights mounted on the brick wall. Its clawed feet stand atop the window, beneath which customers sit and wield chopsticks. Some nights, she opens the door to the veranda and allows the smell of fried rice and orange chicken to waft from the street. However, with the rain kicking up all kinds of sewer and garbage smells, Daria opts to leave the doors and windows shut.

Instead, she relaxes silently in her tower and watches the red dragon bathe in the rain.

Chapter One

She doesn’t know how this happened.

Daria’s world order is arranged like lines of dominos. It doesn’t take much for the whole system to come crashing down. She’s careful not to bump the table, though. Everything remains steady. The dominos don’t fall.

Then one day, the doorbell rings.

Tammi means well, but she’s a bull in a China shop. Or rather, a bull in a room full of wobbly dominos. At first, Tammi shows up accompanying the man and rings the bell to her penthouse. Probably, she means to take some of the edge off as she introduces someone new into Daria’s environment. It has the opposite effect. If anyone is the stressor, it’s Tammi. The invasive species—she thinks his name is Nico—is better at not disrupting her ecosystem than her own sister.  

If it was a one-time thing, Daria would be fine. It’s not, though.

It’s every weekend.

His purpose in her home is unknown. He rings the bell by himself now. No Tammi, which should be a relief, but now the long stretches of silence are awkward. Her sister may have trampled the wildlife, but at least she kept the conversation flowing. Daria can’t do that. Can’t figure out what it is that people talk about when they can’t discuss work or the weather.

He already knows what she does for work. Or what she used to do. She can’t remember what he said he does. Tammi likely told her when she introduced him. It’s been too long since then for Daria to politely ask. She studies him covertly whenever he visits, looking for clues. Is he here to do housekeeping? No, she quickly rules out that option. Not once does he touch the vacuum or the duster. Sometimes he does the dishes, but that’s only when he eats a meal.

Is he a therapist? She doesn’t think so. A therapist would try to talk to her. He never says a word even when she knows that he catches a glimpse of her. After he enters her apartment for the day, he turns on the TV. Usually, it’s a news network. Apparently, it’s only for background noise since he tends to busy himself with other tasks while it’s on. She has seen him balance his checkbook or pay bills from his phone. A lot of the time, he sits with a notebook and a trigonometry textbook in his lap. He looks too old to be in college. She would guess that he’s closer to her own age than that of someone in their late teens or early twenties. Possibly, he’s gone back to school then. She’s seen the black backpack he carries, but that doesn’t always indicate a student.

Does she pay him? No, of this Daria is certain. She checks her bank statements. Whoever he is, she isn’t cutting him checks. However, that doesn’t mean that Tammi isn’t slipping him cash on the sly.

Is this a setup? Like a blind date but the home-delivery version? He’s handsome, she supposes. As soon as that realization strikes, she scurries up to the roof and stays there until he leaves for the day.

It occurs to her that most people would notice his appearance sooner. His hair is black and curly. His skin is the pleasant color of the toasted bread she eats every morning. Whenever he sits down to watch the news and get some busywork done, he takes a pair of reading glasses out of his backpack and places them on the bridge of his nose. It’s a box she wishes she hadn’t opened, because now when she looks at him, all she can think is: he’s handsome and he’s here for some reason and you’re ignoring him; you’re a terrible host he hates it here...

Etcetera, etcetera.

She shouldn’t care if he likes being at her apartment. He disrupts ninety percent of her weekend routines. Daria has been impaled on a pole, and her body is attempting to adapt by growing around the pole. Theoretically, it might work, but it’s a piss-poor existence.

That makes her laugh. This Nico guy is making her existence piss poor? She achieved that status all on her own, thank you very much. For someone who regularly lives in isolation, his presence should improve her existence. And yet...

She’s had to start wrapping her fingertips again. That makes typing difficult; however, the alternative is to bleed on her laptop. She tries wearing gloves while she types, but scratchy fibers keep catching on raw strips of skin, making the situation worse. Has he noticed the bandages? They’re a new addition since his arrival. He doesn’t say anything about them.

He never comes up to the roof where she hides. Even so, she can still feel him downstairs, like a pebble in the heel of her shoe. But also like a pebble in her shoe, if she sits down and kicks her feet up, she doesn’t really notice him.

Her roof gives her an unobstructed, panoramic view of the city. There is a nightclub two blocks away that she finds especially pretty. At night, the building’s floodlights bathe it in a deep ocean blue. She wonders where Nico lives and how far he has to commute every Saturday and Sunday to get here. It all leads back to her original question: Why?

Pondering his presence isn’t why she’s tucked away on the roof. She wants to avoid these unanswerable queries, not confront them.

Daria pulls her blue blanket tighter around her shoulders. It’s one of those tied blankets constructed from two different fabrics, bought relatively cheap at a craft store. A long time ago, her sister cut the edges of the fabrics into strips and tied them together, forming one blanket. The solid color blue is on one side, and the other side is white with different colored bunny rabbits.

The roof is dripping in greenery. Since she is the only resident with rooftop access, Daria makes this her personal garden. She grows tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, and raspberries. She used to have three sunflowers, but they withered so fast. Every time she came up to the roof, she had to stare at their drooping husks. It was too depressing. Now, she has rose bushes.

Lots and lots of rose bushes.

Under the shade of the covered pergola—covered to keep out the rain—she curls her toes against a futon mattress. Bare toenails. Maybe she should paint them. She can’t bring herself to paint her fingernails anymore. Besides the fact that they’ve turned into a mess, the paint always chips within a couple of days. Then they’re not pretty anymore; they’re trashy. Too much work for too little reward. Her toenails will look nicer for much longer. But what if he notices the paint and comments on it? What would she say then? I just decided to do this on a whim. I’m not trying to impress you.

It might be true, but it sounds like a lie.

That’s another thing about Nico’s visits that irks her. She doesn’t feel like she can change anything in her own home for fear that he’ll say something about it. Evidence suggests that he’ll ignore any changes whether he notices them or not, but it doesn’t matter. The fear eats at her every Friday night. She doesn’t sleep well on Fridays. She spends half the night worrying about tomorrow. On Saturday morning, she’s sick to her stomach until he arrives. Then he settles in while she tiptoes around the penthouse like a ghost.

Between work and Nico, Daria can never relax. Weekends were the one reprieve she had, and then Tammi took them away. That’s right. She can’t blame him for this. It all rests on Tammi, her sister, the world’s worst gatekeeper.

Daria’s gaze drifts to her left. The buds on the rose bushes are peeling open. Shocks of red peek from within the flowers’ green sleeves. Her hips are sore from sitting for so long, and it’s tempting to walk around and smell the flowers up close. However, she has this irrational fear that Nico might hear the tread of her feet on the ceiling below. But she also doesn’t feel comfortable going back inside, because of course, he might notice her then.

More and more lately, things have felt like a rubber band being stretched to its maximum. Everything is fine until you hit that one breaking point. Then the rubber band snaps. When will Nico hit his breaking point? It must be soon. Daria feels the tension of the band stretching nearly to the point of no return. One of these days, she’ll walk past him, and he won’t just let her go.

She doesn’t want that day to be today. It’s safer to stay hidden on the roof. He might wait longer to confront her if she forces him to come to her rather than vice versa. What he’s going to confront her about, she has no idea. For being a terrible hostess? To which she’ll reply that she never invited him here. For being lackadaisical? To which she’ll say, who are you, the deadly sins police? No, she won’t say that. She’ll probably apologize and ask what she can do to help around the apartment. Which is ridiculous, since this is her apartment.

Beyond the door, she swears that the stairs creak. Daria knows how a rabbit must feel when they hear a giant, clumsy creature come stumbling through the brush. She freezes just at the possibility of the sound of Nico’s feet moving on the steps. For all she knows, he’s still seated in the living room, and she’s just crazy. Yet her heart starts hammering an unsteady rhythm every time she thinks she hears movement.

She is a coward without fail.

Not for the first time, Daria wishes that the stairs to the roof were in a more secluded section of the apartment. Knowing that the stairs are right across from the kitchen leaves her feeling exposed. Since her blood is thrumming with an uncomfortable intensity, she decides to sneak off to her bedroom. Her room might not have the same view as the roof, but at