One day, while I was on the phone with Draconic, her sister yelled from the background, “Is that Weiner Schnitzel?”
Draconic hissed and the sister laughed.
We went on talking. I pretended I did not hear her nickname for me, because I knew what it meant. She could not get me hard. No matter how much we kissed and no matter how passionate I was for her. No matter how much I ached to be with her, nothing she could do could make me erect. And it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine either.
At night I would seethe with thoughts of Poet. I would writhe as I thought of her body, black and warm beside me. I could see her arms around me and the clashing of our skin brought a fever pitch to my body. The erection problem wasn’t mine, and I was not self-conscious about it. I did not even once feel like less of a man or less of a lover because I knew it was not my issue.
To be honest, I can tell you what it was that made being aroused for Draconic impossible. She was insincere. She didn’t want me. She wanted to play me. I let her, because I needed the pain it caused and because I could talk to her. On the dark kitchen floor back in the corner formed by the cabinet and the fridge. Or around the corner in the laundry room on the washing machine top as the clothes slowly swayed me back and forth. Artist could talk to her pure magic. It ran through me again when I was talking to her. The things I said to her were mythic. The drama so hot and so intense she would cry with the beauty of the imagery I was speaking to her.
The whispers were not far off though. The other boys she was toying with were talking to other people about the things she was saying about me.
Nova said Draconic was disgusted by my body and the hair that covered my torso. He claimed she hated to touch it and seeing my chest hair peeking up over my shirt made her want to throw up. He claimed she felt dirty when she touched my chest and had to take scalding baths afterwards.
And I believed she had. I didn’t think she was disgusted by it, but I was certain she had said as much to them. Every time she would slide her hand down the back of my shirt and roll her eyes, I knew I was being played. Every time she would make me lift up my shirt so she could see my chest hair, I knew that as soon as she walked around the corner she was going to tell someone she was about to throw up.
Draconic did not believe these things she was saying about me. I will never know if she really was disgusted by body hair, but she had talked to other boys about my body. They knew about my hair. They knew things they should not have, and that meant she was a betrayer. She was false, and no matter how beautiful she made me feel when I talked to her or wrote for her, the reality was, she hated me.
One day she got a pass to leave her classroom. She went to my study hall and knocked on the door. She said the choir teacher wanted to talk to me. I was dismissed.
She took me out into the hall and slammed me against the wall. She pressed against me, rubbed her thigh up my leg and to my crotch. She kissed me as hard and as violently as she could then pulled back. She slapped me with every bit of strength she had. Then she walked away. She went back to her class. She had done what she set out to do.
The truth was she might have been on her way to Nova’s class to pull him out and do the same thing. Maybe she was going to do the same to Dent. I don’t know. She might have been making the rounds that day, but I can tell you when I got back to class, I crumpled up the story I had been working on and wrote a heart-wrenching one. I know that after school that day, I told a story to the drama kids about a werewolf who loved a fairy.
She was playing me, but I was making the sound I wanted to make, so I let her.
Tony came and got us one night in his El Camino. She sat on my lap as we went as a trio to the movies. We saw Nightmare Before Christmas and when the show was over, we got in his car and Tony drove us to the bridge.
I told her a story. I told her about the werewolf on the cliff and she cried. When I was done, Tony played a slow Guns N Roses song from his car and Draconic and I danced. There, in the moonlight and the winter air, we danced and I told her about the black, fur-covered man with tiger striped wings who wanted to carry her away and tell her secrets he had never told to anyone. The air was clear and the reflection of the moon and the stars on the river below us was a breathtaking scene of such decadent beauty that I wept as we danced.
When we got into the car, Tony drove around for four hours while I made out with Draconic in the passenger seat of his El Camino. Our bodies moved and our mouths were on fire, but I was not erect. She kept trying to touch my crotch and I would not let her. I did not trust her. My body did not trust her. And my body was geared for love, not lies.
In the end she just hurt me too damn bad. Too much letting me know there were other guys, too much letting them hear about my disgusting body, had broken me. I knew I had to get out when she got home from a date, ran to her room, called me, then with me on the line went to kiss her date goodnight. The verdict was in. Draconic was trying to kill me. She was breaking off bits and eating them.
Then I made the desperate move and I took in Mary.
The day Poet saw me with Mary, she vanished. She just disappeared. I didn’t see Poet again until a year later.
But by then, it was all falling apart anyway. I had a few more really great moments but Draconic had shattered something. Had ruined a part of me that could sweat magic and beauty. I was hobbled. Hobbled for years.
But first, Poet.
This chapter is from Reality of the Unreal Mind, Vol. 1: Teardrop Road, available on Amazon.
Jesse Teller 
Draconic the 🐐