I Married A Dragon (Prime Mating Agency)(14)

“Taste and let me know what you think,” Cedros said with enthusiasm. “I have marinated the meat overnight with the spices I believe match the most what humans use in their cooking. It’s pranar meat, a favorite among my people. And I have vegetables cut up for you, too.”

Cedros clamped down after this flurry of words, probably more than I’d ever heard him say in one go since my arrival. This apparent shyness from this mountain of muscles was quite endearing.

I ogled the meat, my watering mouth silencing the little voice at the back of my mind, warning me this might taste foul. I picked up the massive utensils. To my delight, the knife cut through the meat like butter. It was nicely pink inside, the exact shade of medium I liked. I brought a tiny piece to my lips and braced for it.

My eyes nearly popped out of my head, and a rapturous moan rolled out of my throat at the wondrous explosion of flavor on my taste buds. The meat was tender and juicy, spiced to perfection. I could have sworn I was eating a prime rib steak. Cedros grinned from ear to ear, exposing an impressive pair of fangs I hadn’t really noticed before.

He piled a bunch more meat on my plate as well as a mix of vegetables, some steamed, others raw in a salad. I followed him as he placed my dish on the circular dining table with chairs that didn’t quite seem to know if they wanted to be normal chairs or bar stools by their odd heights and lack of backrest.

Nonetheless, I dug in, my hollow stomach welcoming the delicious sustenance. The flavors were messing a bit with my mind as the greens that resembled lettuce tasted like carrots, the reddish things that vaguely looked like tomatoes tasted like cucumber, and the purple root-like raw vegetable actually tasted like cherry tomatoes.

After a few bites in, I realized Cedros was just sitting next to me, staring at me with a silly grin. I immediately felt self-conscious.

“You’re not eating?”

He shook his head. “We eat our meat raw, often a live catch that we hunt in our battle form. Although, when in a hurry—or not in the mood to hunt—we will sometimes go buy live chattels at the market.”

“Oh… So you never have social dinners sitting around the table?” I asked, taken aback.

“Not in the way humans do. Our battle form allows us to consume larger animals, which spares us from having to eat for days, maybe even up to a few weeks, unless we exert ourselves a lot during that time. But we share small bites in social settings.”

“Small bites like what?” I asked, fascinated, while taking another bite of my meal.

“Any foods and drinks that ferment fast,” Cedros said matter-of-factly. “We can usually eat them in a single bite. We serve trays of them, and people eat the ones they like.”

“You guys serve each other gas-inducing amuse-bouche during social events?” I said, my disbelieving tone more a statement than a question.

Cedros smiled. It softened him in the most amazing fashion. “We do not get ‘gas’ that way,” he said in an amused tone. “We produce hydrogen as a byproduct of most of the things we eat. It gets stored in our primary hydrogen storage chamber at the back of our stomach.”

He rubbed his hand over his neck, and it glowed, diffusing some heat.

“Some of it gets transferred to the heating chamber along our upper chest and throat. It is a smaller hydrogen chamber. We can preheat the hydrogen there before igniting it to spit fire, or simply to diffuse heat. It is practical to warm us up, or a youngling. And it is both soothing and a display of affection to warm others who we embrace with it.”

“That is wicked cool,” I said, genuinely impressed, after swallowing my mouthful. “But how do you ignite the hydrogen?”

He grinned, then pulled his tongue out at me. Beyond its impressive length that awakened far too inappropriate thoughts in my mind, its raspy appearance reminded me of a feline’s tongue. To my surprise, he scraped it against his sharp upper teeth, and a tiny spark flickered.

“Oh, my God! It’s like a flint!”

He nodded. “As we control the amount of hydrogen we release, we can control the size and intensity of the flame. So when our chambers grow too full, we might breathe out tiny flames to burn some of it.”

I tilted my head to the side and glanced at one of his arms on the table. “Speaking of burning, your own flame licked your arm earlier while you were cooking the meat for me. And yet, you seem unscathed. Are you immune to fire?”

A glimmer of approval crossed his fiery eyes. “Good observation. No, we are not fully immune to fire. We just have a high tolerance and resistance to it. This little flame, for a few seconds, will not bother me at all. Considering how often we accidentally breathe fire, it could be problematic, like because of a powerful sneeze. We’d incinerate people nearby. But if we were to be exposed for a sustained period to our most concentrated fire, we would reach the point where damage would occur, and we would burn.”

While fascinated by all of this, my mind had remained stuck on the fact that they could accidentally breathe fire because of a powerful sneeze. Judging by Cedros’s sudden air of confusion, my face was undoubtedly showing how freaked out I now felt.

After a beat, his face lit up with understanding, and he burst out laughing. “Do not fret, my Kaida. I will not breathe fire on you. This was just an exaggerated example. I could almost count on one hand how many occurrences of people accidentally breathing fire on another have occurred in the past century. We are in control of ourselves. Usually, ‘uncontrolled’ fire occurs in moments of extreme emotion, like someone having an orgasm. And even then, they always aim away from their mate.”