Ch 22: A Second Decision

Ch. 22: A Second Decision

The first thing which struck Quar, more than how oppressively tiny was Ray's private room when she stepped into the doorway of his apartment, was the smell. It was pure Ray clinging to every fiber and pore of that room, all of his moods, his sweat, his sex. She could not stop her nose from twitching around flaring nostrils, or the immediate surge of heat in her belly. Otherwise, she thought she concealed her reaction rather well. She leaned with one palm heavily on the jamb and her body pressed against her arm while she ducked her head into the room to peer around, feeling that to cram her body into the small space would be to crowd him out of it.

"That is a pleasing view of the island to fall asleep to," she said, ears tilting toward the screen depicting a view of the island.

Stepping into his room to hold the door open with the tips of his fingers, then let it slide shut behind her once she was inside, Ray was still thinking a little about that offer to watch Rriigkhan documentaries on other worlds, other species. Did Quar know how much that would mean to him? Documentaries on his own planet, on species he would never see himself (like an orca) or ones that he just couldn’t experience fully (like a colony of ants) were the only television that could really keep him drawn in for any length. Zoos, aquariums, the horses he’d feed old baby carrots to in Minnesota – they’d always fascinated him.

Animals, other people, other species, they were so other. They were what broke him out of the solipsistic experience of life to remind him that his was only one view on the universe, neither Truth or even particularly true.

And that was even before the transgressive nature of knowing what it was that the “they” didn’t think humans were ready to know. Seeing luer, and orantu, all the creatures on the Antlic Islands (and being bitten by a rock louse!) already put him well beyond the curve of xenofaunal experience.

Speaking of transgression, he was glad that having a top floor apartment allowed them to descend on the stairs and avoid most of the common room; strictly speaking, having Quar in here was against the rules (as were thoughts of what they could be caught doing in here) but he felt as if he had Dotta’s unspoken blessing.

“I know. It’s not really sized for Rriigkhan in here. Sorry. I didn’t think about how low the ceiling would be. Here, let me just seat the com…” he said, trailing off as he pulled it from his wrist and plopped it down into the little saddle shape in a back corner of his desk, where it began blinking with a little blue indicator LED much like the sled. “And then you can have a seat on the chair, if you’d like. Or the bed. Either is fine. But you probably have to close your eyes or look away while I change. It’s not like I have underoos on under the wetsuit.”

He flashed her a grin and a quick wink, then turned to face his wardrobe where’d he’d have his own clothes hanging, and well as bins to collect what he’d keep for the campus laundry and what would be submitted for reclamation, and show up reprinted in his slot by the next shift. “No clothes printer in here, I’m afraid. If there’s not one in your cottage, though, I’m sure there’s a panel you can order whatever you want on it. There’s probably a way to do that in here, too, but I haven’t really bothered to figure that out, honestly. It’s been kind of nice to actually collect a few things that I plan on keeping. Like that shirt from last night. And now it has a good memory attached to it. Okay, actually, can you tug this zipper all the way down to the bottom? And then you’re not supposed to look.”

Getting the wetsuit down around his belly was easy enough, but tugging it down past his thighs and stepping out of it was another matter entirely, and one that involved leaning on the wardrobe and against the wall at various stages, and probably shouldn’t have been rushed, since it just seemed to take longer.

“It is a nice view, yeah. It’s from an offshore buoy. I think it’s curated, rather than live, but I still like to think that when I get right up to the wall and squint, I can see things I’ve worked on in the pixels. No matter how good a job Dotta has done at making sure the island still looks natural from a distance. I mostly leave it on that. But I have a bookmark with a view from a scope on the far side of the moon, with all the colors boosted so I can see the nebulae and the galaxies. That’s pretty incredible, too.”

He grabbed an undershirt because it was closest, and used it to dry off his body, before grabbing some non-descript black boxers and socks from a sealed package. The paper was printed with his name, Integrity contract ID number, and his sizes, just like the black jeans he pulled out of a recycled drawer as well. Choosing a shirt involved a little more deliberation – really, that was the only thing he considered to be his clothes. He had a fitted polo, a sort of faded salmon color with horizontal stripes across the chest that gradually grew thicker until the very top of the shirt and the collar were white. He’d picked the design out of the web during a night of searching; while he wasn’t really good at those sorts of things, he thought that maybe it was the same design he’d had back when he was married to Michelle, around the time Oranda was born.

They were happy times, and even if he couldn’t hold on to the moments, holding on to the happiness was important. Having the shirt let him do that better than photos would. He tugged it on, down to his waist and smoothing the wrinkles over his chest, before reaching for the other clothes.

“Almost done. You didn’t bring your grooming kit, did you? If you needed a special oil, we might be able to put the order in now so it’s waiting when we get to your cottage. Does it bother you if I wear cologne? I haven’t done that for a long time; I don’t even know if this is good stuff, but it might help cover up smelling like fish and kelp.”

-- (Double check against chat for next post)

Quar eased herself into the room with her head ducking under the lintel. She awkwardly lowered herself onto the bed with her knees apart and her tail flopped out behind her so that the end smacked up against the wall. She hated to intrude on his sleeping space, but the chair at his desk was not designed with Rriigkhan tails in mind and hers would be squashed if she sat there. When he mentioned undressing her ears perked, head swiveling toward him with a jerk. Was his apartment really this single room? She'd expected some wall panel to slide away that would lead to the rest of it... a toilet, a wardrobe, a groomery...

She blew air from her nostrils and dropped her chin down into her palm facing away from him, her elbow in turn resting on her thigh so that she was hunched. Her fingers prodded at her lips in consternation.

If he were Rriigkhan, ironically, his nudity would not have meant much to Quar. She'd seen Rriigkhan bodies often enough that those visuals alone were not arousing. But humans? The last time she'd seen human genitals...

No, not Ray's. It had been a human pornography film, one she'd watched in a moment of weakness when the memories of their one time together were freshly branded into her psyche. The "plot" of that film was only a little more believable than the ridiculous situation she found herself in now. Did Ray know what he was doing to her? Quar grit her back teeth, but discarded the notion he was deliberately tempting her the very moment it occurred. His scent did not warrant such an accusation.

"I already ordered clothes for myself," she said, lifting her chin from the cradle of her hand to glance over at him. That hand lifted off her leg, then clenched into a hesitant fist, then dropped down onto her thigh again. She debated with herself for a second that felt like an eternity, unseen by him, about whether or not she should tell him to unzip his own wetsuit – surely he was capable. In the end, the imagined hurt in his voice she would surely hear if she rebuffed him goaded her into standing, into moving in behind him to sullenly tug the zipper down by hooking the tip of one claw into the little hole on the... metal tab-thing.

In that moment before she turned away she could not help but watch the wetsuit gape open into a thin triangle of skin paler than the rest of him, his back so sleek without fur and yet lined with visible muscle that shifted when he moved. She could not stop herself from imagining slipping her fingers into his suit to grip his skin at either side, to part the wetsuit fully by dragging her palms down to his hips. Her nose was inches from the back of his head; her lips twitched up with the urge to bite him, wrinkling without quite parting. But that lasted only an instant before she'd turned and retreated to what was temporarily "her" side of his room, to sit back on his bed with her chin in her palm again, glaring at the screen while the end of her tail rapidly twitched.

"I brought nothing with me at all, only the clothes I wore," Quar said, her words slightly clipped, risking a glance his way by rolling her head to the side on the platform of her paw. "The bungalow will be equipped with all basic necessities." Like a minibar in a human hotel, Quar would be charged for everything she'd opened or used during her stay. "I already found several varieties of oil in a drawer by the bed, but stupidly, I forgot to bring one with me." Seeing that he was almost dressed and guessing they would be leaving soon, she straightened and let her arm fall into her lap.

"Cologne does not bother me, but... humans and Rriigkhans, our ideas about what makes a smell lovely does not seem to be the same. Your natural scent is quite pleasant to me, and cologne will not cover the fish and the kelp. It will only layer more scents on top." That he thought cologne would mask a smell was an interesting look into the way Ray's senses worked.... could humans only detect a few scents at a time? Intriguing. And a little frightening to contemplate.

----

Quar had never been a chatty sort, but during the walk across Two Harbors she was particularly quiet, responding minimally to Ray's own attempts at conversation. To her it was quite comfortable to walk in silence with him across the beach, ears swiveling outward to listen to the gentle hush of the waves washing over sand, to the katydids chirping in the grassy hills over the beach, wu-wu. wu-wu-wu. wu-wu-wu. Most repetitive animal noises were mating calls; even the insects of Santa Catalina were searching for love, and probably finding it with more ease than Ray or herself.

She realized as she walked, sinking further into despondency with every footprint she pressed upon the sand, that to remain friends with Ray would either be impossible or an excruciatingly painful experience. How could he touch her body and feel nothing? He could not. She could not.

How long before one of them cracked and crossed a boundary?

This question turned in her mind like a wagon wheel trundling along a rut. The wheel would turn forever – there was no solution, no resolution, no end point, only ceaseless turning. And the longer the question turned, the more sand would run out of his hourglass. Missed opportunities stacking up. Memories that could have been instead blown away like dust. Just like Nahrosh... everything he had wanted to share with Quar, all was blowing away, never to be recovered. Her eyes moistened but Quar quickly blinked it away and returned to the human beside her.

It felt so good to be with him! She wanted to admit that to the world! She wanted to proudly display him, to say this treasure is mine, only mine! Here was a man who wanted not her wealth or favors or gifts, only her time. Though she walked with her head bent, hands clasped behind her back, now and then she stole sideways glances at him... scrutinizing glances, hesitant glances, wondering what kind of thoughts turned in his own head. Always she looked away again, to examine the hills or the ocean without really seeing them. Her tail drifted in contemplative S-curves behind her.

As they mounted the final series of steps that lead to her bungalow the porch light switched on, highlighting three tidy stacks of cardboard boxes of similar sizes near the front door. The boxes were an identical sandy pink, Boho Boutique printed in gracefully looping, chocolate brown, delicate English cursive along the sides. There were twenty boxes at least, each big enough to contain either a complete outfit or one article of clothing. They had probably been packaged by machine at the time of printing; a human would have been more efficient.

Quar stopped before reaching the steps to the porch, staring hard at the footpath with a set jaw and her fists balled at her sides. Her tail had stilled.

The benefit of being noseblind, of existing within a bubble of limited senses, was that the sounds that Quar gave off were his only clue as to how she felt. He’d already been trained by Michelle not to judge every huff and sigh as indignant, to let a complaint be a complaint and a sigh simply be the cost of standing up when one was comfortable, and he could imagine that Quar was simply tugging down his zipper as a friend might.

He could get it himself. It would have involved a little bit of a dance, since he wasn’t as flexible after a night dive as he would have been even in the morning, and it might have been awkward to do in front of her. He would have reminded himself that he could buy a zipper hook for a negligible amount in Avalon (or just expensed it!), and the shot to his pride would be over in seconds. But in truth, he wasn’t living up to his promises. He wanted her to be there, inches from his skin. He wanted to feel her breath on him. He wanted the excuse to imagine her claws oh-so-carefully peeling the neoprene away to bare his shoulders.

It wasn’t the ‘good’ that he’d promised her, and he hadn’t even started grooming her yet. He was weak. He was being terrible to her. And he didn’t know what choice he had. Just offering to give her up so easily felt like promising to fast indefinitely. It wasn’t right, what he was doing, feeding a fantasy at her cost. It was desperate. But the other possibility, of distancing himself from her, was just absolutely impossible.

It would get better in time; he promised himself that much. Pain usually did, even if ‘better’ just meant a callus to protect him from it while it continued to grow. He’d get used to this forever friendship, and his mind wouldn’t run to things that weren’t on the table.

But honestly, would she blame him for closing his eyes for a moment, and imagining her arms wrapping around him and just holding him? There was nothing wrong with that kind of physical affection. He could forego sex for the rest of his life if it meant they could hold each other. (And there he went making promises he might not be able to keep.)

All that was left to do was step into some faux-suede shoes (not the heavy boots for once, but the lighter kind with rollable soles that he’d discovered made walking all over Integrity a joy) as he held the little glass bottle of cologne. His eyes sought out Quar’s, weighing her response, and then he dropped it back into the desk drawer, unused.

- - -

Once upon a time, silence had been Ray’s friend. That wasn’t to say that a younger Brian Tanner didn’t still put earbuds in every chance he got, but sitting opposite a friend in a room, just strolling along in a park with Michelle or Oranda, or staring up at the ceiling on a lazy Sunday morning were all very comfortable without having to try to fill the moment with noise. That had changed when silence was the crack in the door that his brain needed to fill his thoughts with recrimination and regrets, and the habit of silence was lost.

But he could sense it in Quar, could feel that the quiet wasn’t the sound of a gulf growing between them but just a contentment with the night.

(He thought he could. He imagined that was the case. What if it wasn’t? What if she was thinking about uninviting him tonight and leaving, if something had changed that he hadn’t realized? Godammit, silence still unraveled him, left him open to second-guessing. He’d have to relearn it, if it was Quar liked.)

After sharing an anecdote about running into ‘ghosts’ in Two Harbors in the middle of the night (just Integrity guests who had wrapped themselves in bedsheets post-coitus in a desperate bid to buy cigarettes) when he had the worst craving for pepperoni pizza, Ray shoved his hands into his pockets and worked on accepting the silence like she had.

It ate at him. It bit at him like frost on his ears and nose, harrying him, filling him with doubt. He had to focus to keep his breathing steady, to keep from hyperventilating. Focusing on the shattered tiles embedded in the path helped; he could busy his brain imagining what the tiles would have looked like whole. On her porch, he stared at her boxes, realizing he should offer to bring them inside, or simply do it.

Instead, something else entirely burst out of him. “You know, I would do just about anything to keep from being sent away again.” There was far more desperation in his voice than he intended. “Whatever it is. Re-signing with the ICG. Not coming inside. Shaving my hair.” His laugh at that was a bark without much humor. “I promised to be good. I will. But I’m really afraid, Quar, of doing something that will have you thinking that it’s better if I’m not near you. Probably just like saying something like this.”

Quar visibly winced, which meant a slight dipping of her head to the side away from him and an upward twitch of her shoulders while her ears tucked backward. Her nostrils flared. He was upset. He'd noticed that she was upset. Obviously. She let the twitches proceed through her tail, so that the end where it curved sharply up like a shepherds hook waggled back and forth with her agitation.

"You aren't being very 'good,'" Quar said quietly, shifting to face him, tilting her head until she guiltily met his eyes. She just as soon dropped them to look down at their feet as she took a step toward him, hands still fists at her side. "But I have not been good, either." Her fingers twitched at her sides and she raised her hands haltingly, dropping them and lifting them stiffly again. The pounding in her sternum and in her skull joined the music of night silence along with the crickets. The moment stretched on forever. Two paths lay before her, and her own throbbing pulse might well have been feet bearing down on her, forcing her to quickly make her choice.

This time, it wasn't her willpower slipping away. It was with strength that she reached out to him, with the resolve to hook her claws into the future she wanted, and as Cal might say: Fuck the haters!

Her free left hand settled over his shoulder. Her right hand unwound the cord from her palm and tossed the bag away into the grass so that paw could come up to cup his cheek, covering his ear with the warmth of her palm like earmuffs. The fingers ruffled through his hair as her claws poked out of her fingertips without touching him. The pad of that thumb stroked over his temple. Closing the distance between them until their chests were inches apart and the peeled-back collar of her wetsuit brushed him, she bent her neck to lean over his head.

"I don't want you to be afraid. I don't want you to hurt," Quar breathed against his scalp, her eyes briefly closing to savor the scent just under her nose while the hand on his shoulder tightened. Her words were quiet enough that her tongue made wet sounds in her mouth as she spoke. "I am Tsarkeh. I am going to take what I want, as I should have done those four years ago."

She bent her knees, the hand on his cheek moving down to lift him under his buttocks, the hand on his shoulder supporting him under the armpit as she hefted him up over her shoulder. She held her weighty crest to the right to make space for him as she carried him up onto the porch, through the sliding glass doors after a brief lean to one side so that her hand could catch the latch and shove the door open. When she stepped over the threshold the lights in the bungalow switched on in their soft evening-yellow. She did not close the door behind herself.

Kesshh that weight of him, like a big sack of salt on the crook of her neck but warm and solid and male. When she reached her bed her hand moved to the base of his neck to support him while she bent, and the other arm braced over the small of his back to deposit him gently onto the buttoned-on bedcover. Her arm slid out from underneath him but did not go away, settling on the rough fabric that clothed his hip as she climbed up knees-first onto the bed, then dropping onto her elbow and ribs to stretch out alongside him, spooning but leaning over him. A mix of solid color and patterned foam pillows from the previous night of her tumultuous sleep were still strewn about. She dropped her snout to nuzzle up alongside his cheek, pressing the cool damp of her nose over his cheekbone while she sniffed aggressively and unrestrainedly with quick staccato inhalations. When she pulled back her head it was to crack open her jaws, to drag her canines over him in a light nip while her dark lower lip rolled open to smear wetly against his chin.

Relatively. He'd been relatively good, compared to what he wanted. He didn't say it out loud - in fact, he caught his lips between his teeth so he wouldn't - because it wasn't really the time to argue. Besides, her admission made it moot. His chin tipped up toward hers, and he peered into those blue-gray eyes, absolutely and unrelentingly intent on finding answers inside them.

He’d been holding his breath, apparently, because it all came out in a rush when her hand closed over the side of his head, heavy and slow through his nose. His lips parted now, filling with color again where they’d blanched between his teeth. His head tipped forward under her chin, so his face sunk into her ruff, so his skull nested under her mandible, where it seemed to fit like a puzzle piece. The words that came out of her felt like a harpist strumming at the taught strings between heart and soul, but what he wanted to hear most of all was the promise that she’d never send him away again.

He would do almost anything for that promise. But he couldn’t deny her – or himself - this moment, not to extract that promise from her. All he could do was trust her, and subsist on hope. He wasn’t going to make demands on her, not when the only cost he ever bore was heartache, and it could take everything from her. His hands came up, following the metallic strips on her ribs just by coincidence. They wrinkled between his fingers when he grabbed at handfuls of the neoprene to hold himself close. (The bodysock saved him from pulling out two handfuls of fur under her chest in the process, at least.)

A surprised grunt escaped him when he was suddenly off his feet, and his weight was suddenly in the breadbasket of his stomach. An arm flung over Quar’s back to brace him, to keep him from tipping too far over – being handled so easily just wasn’t part of his regular experience, even if he’d spent the last four years thinking about the moment, so it was a bit like hanging on unnecessarily in a roller coaster, and then laughed as she carried him across the threshold, even if that probably meant nothing to her.

Again his eyes were a bit wide and wild as she set him on the bed, expecting her strength to give out at the last and for them to fall together; of course it didn’t, and they didn’t. “A mighty Tsarkeh,” he breathed, without sarcasm.

Was he released from his promise to be good? What she said…. And that was a kiss, almost. It had to have been. It seemed like forever that he searched her for an answer; it was probably half a second, though, before he turned his head in toward hers, kissing at the side of her mouth behind her fangs, running his hand up through the exposed fur at her neck to roll her ear between his thumb and the side of his finger.

“Whatever you want is freely given,” he murmured back. “Practically shoved in your lap,” he added with that laugh back in his voice, before it turned serious and breathy again. “But you can take it anyway.”

Quar pressed her paw into the small of his back to snug his belly up against hers while her head pulled up to peer down at him, her gaze liquid soft and heavy-lidded. She hadn't bothered to brush off her paws as she came in and now particles of sand fell from her pads as her legs moved against the bed. She brought one knee up to overlap his legs with her own, the bottom of her paw pushing on the top of his shoe. Her wetsuit dampened sensation, but she could sense his solidness when her belly expanded against his, and in the way he imprinted the mattress. The hand moved up his spine again, stopping briefly to tug down his shirt because she was rumpling it, then sliding up his neck and ending with her claws combing gently through his hair. Something in the quality of her gaze changed, deepened, and she bent her head until they were pressed forehead-to-forehead, the velvet fur of her brow against those fuzzy lines she often thought of as caterpillars, he shaded by the wide plate of her crest.

"I want to hold you until the strength of my arm drains away," she said, voice roughened at the edges, those fingers pressed tighter to his scalp while her trembling howrfs peeped out over his head to shake that lusty bready scent into the air. Not because she thought it meant anything to him – she knew it did not – but because it was such a relief to hold nothing back. "And I want your kisses." Her fingers scissored shut on a lock of hair and she used it like a handle to tug his head back as she pulled away by a few inches, to lap at the cleft of his lips with her lids making narrow wet lines of her eyes.

"And I want to chart you," she added as she pulled away again, repeating a line from her letter. "There was no time for it when I was caught in my storm. Now..."

She wedged the hand of her left arm, the one supporting most of her weight, under his ribs and scooted down the bed to bring her nose to his belly, flipping up his shirt with the other hand. She mushed a wet kiss onto the skin above his belly-button, then another and another, leaving behind wet marks to cool in the warm air. She extruded only a sliver of tongue from her lips, which meant that with each kiss she was pressing the end of her snout to his flesh. The soft moist fur under her nose and puffs of warm air ghosted over him before each slick downward press. That fishy-decay smell still clung to him, but as she had told him it did not mask his own wonderful scent. (And was not 'gross' to her anyway, as it might have been to a human.) Her right hand tunneled under his shirt to grip him firmly with her pads below his shoulder blade.

Her tail lifted in a slow, floaty wag behind her. She kissed him next with a broad lick that dragged the full length of her tongue over the divot in the middle of his belly, and as her tongue curled back into her mouth her head tilted aside, lips lifting from her teeth so she could mouth at him. She explored the shape of him with her teeth just as she might with the pads of her fingers, learning the contour of muscles under the skin, feeling how he breathed. Fangs and incisors dimpled his flesh without any intent to puncture, but he would certainly sense the power in those jaws.

She wanted his kisses – she almost had one before she caught him by the hair and separated, but got a smacking sound at the air instead. And she almost got another when she came for his philtrum, but he was too late by a second, kissing at the air a second time. The second time a laugh rolled out of his throat; it wasn’t like they were lost opportunities, just banked away for the future.

The harder thing was pacing himself, not getting over-excited at this new possibility and overreaching with his enthusiasm. His body moved beneath hers, accommodating where she needed to shift her weight, arching through the lower back to make room for her arm beneath him. The neoprene bound against cottonette threads of his clothes, so they tended to rumple and lift, but it slid smoothly against his hairless skin. The whole time his gaze followed her, occasionally looking up to her crest, following a flicker in her ears. Outside of a pillow he grabbed above his head when the bottom of his shirt lifted, the rest of the world might not have existed.

On his back, especially lifted over her arm, his belly made a sort of dish, hollowing out beneath his ribs, where usually he was fairly flat from the sternum down. Even with all the swimming and manual labor, he had no defined six-pack and his belly had a soft pudge to it under a barely indented navel. Little gaps or hollows were defined by his pants between his hip-bones and that pudge; he was known to hook a finger in there from time to time.

But that dished out stomach twitched and jiggled when she kissed it; her nose was significantly cooler than her tongue or lips, cooler than the air in the room, and combined with the short hair above her lips and under her chin, it brought out a ticklishness he’d long forgotten existed. It wasn’t as bad as it had been years ago. Mostly he could survived through it without breaking out in a laugh for twisting up to escape, and when her lips gave way to tongue, any bit of laugh stored up in his breath escaped in a groan instead. Muscles relaxed through his shoulders and thighs, and warmth began to build in chis chest.

He'd meant to pull the pillow under his head; instead he clutched it to the top of his hair like some kind of a hat. “I can take off my shirt,” he offered, his voice just enough to vocalize instead of whisper.

Quar broke away from him to sit back on her thigh after giving him a squeeze with both paws. When she lifted her eyes and saw what Ray was doing with the pillow her tail thumped rapidly against the bed behind her.

"You are so cute," she said, huffing a small laugh through her nose and letting a smile crack her muzzle. She wanted to scoop him up in her arms and smother him in her ruff, but she did not. Instead she leaned forward to pick up one of those hands in hers and bring it down near her chest, where she could dip her head to kiss the back of his knuckles, one tiny chaste lick. Then she covered his hand with her other and gave it a pat.

"Take it off," she agreed. "And unzip me, too." She released him so that she could swivel around to sit with her back to him, one leg hanging over the edge of the bed with that paw on the floor. Her heavy tail flopped across the top of his thighs when she moved. Though it wasn't currently wagging the weight was alive in his lap, responding when he shifted with twitches of its own. She looked over her shoulder to watch him from the very corner of her eye. Her own wetsuit had a long cord attached to the zipper – he could reach it just as easily as she could have.

Quar's body shape could be broadly defined as an inverted triangle. The neoprene stretched across the expanse of her powerful shoulders below the folded-down collar, part of which was hidden in floof. From ribs to rump she was a rectangle more than an hourglass, but at the small of her back a muscular bottom swelled out. Just now, the wetsuit was creased where hip met thigh. The padding over those hips was just thick enough that the bone was not visible, and could only be felt by pressing.

Though she'd been speaking with authority, Quar felt a little uncertain. She thought she remembered the scent of human arousal, but... it had been so very long ago. He could not respond sexually to her pheromones. That time in the louse cave could have been a fluke. Human males became erect for no specific reason sometimes, or so she'd once read.

“Okay.” Abandoning the pillow, he bent his knees and used them as the counterweight in a crunch that left him sitting up, arms in his lap. His thumb and forefinger fumbled open the single button below his throat with unconscious muscle memory, then he hooked his fingers inside the collar and tugged it smoothly off over his head. Shoes and socks came off with a few back-and-forth slides of his toes against his heels; he wasn’t usually in the habit of abandoning clothes in a rumple on the ground, and it was a burr in his thoughts, like a noticed misspelling left behind in a note to Dotta.

Ray made more of an event with Quar’s wetsuit, deliberately pulling the draw slow enough that the click of each individual magnet pair separating was audible. The same-polar magnets on each side of the rift made the fabric curl as it separated, and that reminded him of the petals of an orchid for some reason. Only one hand was needed for the pull, so the other stroked down her spine – or rather the thin fabric of the bodysock that contained her fur beneath it.

When the zipper pull got to the base of her tail and met the larger magnet snaps there, which contained the base of her tail, he popped those open and then spread the suit down her shoulders to her upper arm, where he left them for the moment. The bodysock was an undyed golden brown, semi-sheer, as thin as it could be without letting fur slip through. Decades ago it probably would have been reusable, but it basically rolled on now and set to fit, it would always lose its elasticity in the second wear. Along the back there was a strip where the weaving looked a bit like the stitching in a St. Andrew’s spider web; when he pressed apart on her shoulder-blades, the sock split there, peeling away and shriveling up on itself like wet tissue paper, to leave her fur residue-free beneath.

He wanted to comb his fingers through it, to nuzzle his face into her back, but she was right that it would need oiling and brushing; it felt a bit plastered flat, almost like keratinous plates rather than fluffy strands. Still, he raked fingernails through it, on edge so his fingertips wouldn’t just drag, leaving furrows on either side of her spine that remained in the wet fur, and made a shape sort of like an inverted tree – or trunk and roots, perhaps – that spread at the base of her spine. On a lark, he scratched at the base of her spine where it met her tail. Had he done that before, in the cave? Was that universal to furry mammals, or just a dog thing?

Probably, she wanted to drive, and he’d let her eventually, but what sort of rush were they really in. It wasn’t like anyone would come pushing in through the door she left open, any more than they’d snatch the packages off her porch.

He shifted on the bed to face Quar’s back more directly, spreading his legs in those black jeans (fortunately, they stretched enough to allow the flexibility) so they butterflied out and the inside of his calves pressed against her thighs. “Tell me if I’m doing anything wrong,” he said into her back as he leaned in against it. His hands worked under her wetsuit, not pushing it further way, but using the slack to snake it around her trunk so his hands pressed to her belly. Fingernails slid lightly, not intentionally copying what her tongue had done to him earlier. But his fingertips moved lower, to find the swell of her …breasts? Udders? He searched Cant for the right term, but ‘mammaries’ was as poetic as that language got. Well, he didn’t need to call them anything out loud. He simply filled his hands with them inside her wetsuit, giving them an appreciative squeeze, and found her teats with his thumbs and the side of his finger, just as he had her ear earlier, to rub them and listen for her reaction.

“I want to explore you, too,” he said lightly, “but even more than that, I want you to feel good. It’s okay to move me to where you want me. Show me what you like.”

Quar was expecting to quickly peel off her wetsuit. She wasn't expecting anything so... sensual. She leaned into his touch with a deflating sigh, shoulders lifting when his fingers stroked through her fur. The bulges and dimples that formed when her muscles flexed could be felt by touch even when they weren't really visible under the flattened fur – while not as long as her ruff, the fur down her backside was still thicker than what she had over most of her limbs and front. With Ray so close behind her it was impossible to turn her head far enough to see him so she straightened out. Then his fingers touched the base of her tail. The fat trunk twitched where it was pressed into his lap, the rest rippling where it was flopped over one of his legs to half-hang off the bed, and she squirmed a little because the base of her spine was sensitive enough to be ticklish. She exhaled in three quick puffs through her nose, neck arching.

"You're not doing anything wrong," she breathed, straightening her spine to lean back against his face. The warmth of his body felt very nice there, but more than that, it was being held that she loved. While his fingers moved against her belly, her own hand ran along one denim-clad leg until she reached his naked foot. (Why did humans wear this unpleasant coarse fabric, and always on the lower half of the body? A mystery.)

On her hands she had short, fine fur with no undercoat, the strands lying flat against bone and following the knobby contours of her knuckles. It was with the soft knuckle of her thumb that Quar stroked the arch of his foot while her fingers closed around the top. She'd been curious about his feet before but never had got the chance to inspect them closer. Now her head tilted to one side and she pressed with the pad of her thumb, first into his arch, and then between the lobes of his "pad." His toes were still very strange to her; they seemed shrunken, which made her cringe a little, and the hard plates of his nails reminded her of stunted ungulate hooves. She ran a pad over the tops of those toes and thought of piano keys.

Then his warm hands closed around her teats and Quar's hand froze. Heat stroked between her legs and her jaw slackened while her ears fanned back, tongue curling up to touch the backs of her teeth while a guttural purr rumbled up from deep in her chest. Her head was still tilted more to one side, and now her eyes slowly closed to just enjoy his touch for several long moments while her hand squeezed around his foot. The other gripped his calf like it was a guard rail to hold onto. She couldn't stop herself; she resituated her thighs so that her buttocks spread out a little more and rocked with tiny movements of her hips to rub herself against the bed.

She could easily have let him play with his nipples for... hours, Quar thought. He could rest his head between her legs and fondle her while she sat back reading the news, or they could lie down head-to-feet on their sides while he suckled and she dozed. Or they could sit like this and he could cup a breast with one hand and rub her groin with the other. That sounded like a good time to Quar, but she was not going to be quite so selfish.

"What I like," she echoed, ears twitching upward just a little while she lifted her chin as if to look behind her, but she didn't even bother craning her head that far; it would have been impossible to see him. Her eyes were still slitted and her face lax. "I like this. But, the thing I have fantasized about most over the years," she said in a coarse, rumbling voice while she squirmed again, enjoying the swollen heat that was her clit plumping up and passage expanding, "...Is your lips between my legs. I have imagined how you could... suck at me, the way you sucked on my tongue." She snorted loudly with a flick of her head, feeling just as hot on her face. If she didn't have fur she would probably be turning dark the way he did.

She realized, however, that damp mussy fur probably was not all that pleasant for him to touch or to stick his face into. Hadn't he made some comment about wet fur having a bad smell, a long time ago? She gave his leg and his foot brief squeezes before reaching up to work the wetsuit down one shoulder, leaning forward so she could jiggle her arm back without smacking him.

"I am not in any rush," she added, again almost looking back at him over the opposite shoulder while she peeled the wetsuit off that arm. "Last time I was in heat. Now I am not." The very apt English term for estrus had quickly worked its way into Rriigkhan vocabulary, although Quar used the Cant word for a warm temperature.

“I’d like that, too.” There was a smile in Ray’s voice, a laugh not far behind it, just a bit of a waver in his tone and in his breath where it rustled into her fur. It was the uncertainty in her cadence that made it – not funny, but unexpectedly sweet. “I’ve thought about it before. Among other things.”

His legs weren’t used to this kind of stretching, and were already starting to ache a bit after just a few minutes, but squeezing them back against her helped, as did leaning into her back. He moved as she did, giving her space to shrug out of her suit, leaning more against one shoulder or another, but never quite far enough that he couldn’t keep his arms around her waist, so his hands could stay on her. There was no plan, no pattern to the movements of his hands, because it wasn’t work, just more exploration, only very finely focused. And it wasn’t a ‘charting’ exactly, because the exact position of glands beneath the surface, or ridges and wrinkles along each teat didn’t matter so much as their suppleness between her fingers, and the way it made her react.

“I’m not in any particular rush either,” he said after a minute, “but it’s nice to have a destination to meander towards.” His left hand moved further down, since he was leaning to that side, sliding between toward the curve where her pubic bone would curve inward, between her thighs. So many things were different between Rriigkhs and humans – like that ‘heat’, for example, and the sort of thing he could find on the internet wasn’t exactly ‘research’. He’d understood the concept of Quar’s heat from when Dotta mentioned it years ago, but since then, it led to questions he couldn’t really find answers to without really prying. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was about to ask Dotta.

Without heat, did she even feel arousal? Well, he had the answer to that, now. His fingers insinuated themselves between the bed and her, providing something more substantial for her to move against.

He’d imagined this long, slow, steamy evening of unspooling years of pent-up desire. All those plans – if they could be called that – flew out the window when he felt her hot against the inside of his fingers.

“On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for cutting right to the chase.” Already he was climbing out from behind her on the bed, clomping down to stand on the floor in something of a rush, and fussing with his jeans to strip them off while he was taking those few steps around his legs. “You have to kiss me first, though,” he said matter-of-factly while pushing his jeans down his thighs and trying to step out of them at the same time. They were still around his ankles when he leaned in, a hand on either side of her jaws (and the fingers of the ones that had been beneath her lifted away from her fur) to press his lips to the front of her face, parted them to tease at her teeth and her lower lip with his tongue. When he parted, it was tugging on her lower lip between his as a wordless promise.

“And don’t be afraid to touch my head. Or hold it. Or squeeze it or grind on it or whatever. It’s a feedback loop – not anything to be shy about.”

He kicked the jeans the rest of the way off his last ankle. His boxers were still on, prominently tented, and threatening at any moment to release him through the fly that was on the verge of parting at the front.

Instead, he settled to his knees, eyes still on Quar’s. At the last minute, they dropped, nearly closing, and his tongue, flat and wet and hot, traced up that rare furless surface. It wasn’t the delicate touch of a hesitant tongue-tip, or the heavy drag of a mouth trying to take half the ice cream off the cone in one go, just contact, like the kiss, unabashed raw wet skin to raw wet skin. Lowering his mouth again, he started again, taking a slightly different path between folds, and again, and again after making way for his hand to fit in and spread some of the thin overlapping fur off to the sides.

His gaze lifted again before he tilted his head to the side and gathered up one side of her – a swollen outer fold, between tongue and wet, full, upper lips, to suckle on it and slowly move upward. Wet sounds escaped his mouth as mild suction slipped past his tongue, but it kept wiggling side-to-side and pressing into her furrow on the way toward her hood at the top.

Quar was in no rush to get the wetsuit off. Peeling it down her torso meant she would have to stand up to push the rest of it down her legs, and that would mean breaking contact with Ray. When her arms were free and the emptied top of the suit was piled up in her lap, she held him by the ankles again. Her eyes drifted shut. Her breaths came noticeably harder now, the barrel of her chest expanding against him. She arched her back to push her rear against his lap while she continued to rock against the bed. Her movements were tiny, and she wasn't accomplishing much for herself, but it was hard to sit still with Ray's hands fondling her so nicely.

His fingers encountered sticky damp on the outside of her slit, and even more slickness when her lips enveloped his fingers with her now more eager rocking. Her head tilted to the right, almost on her own shoulder so the profile of her jaw faced a corner of the ceiling, her eyes still closed. A creaky wet alligator purr rolled from the back of her mouth. He wasn't touching her clit or he'ethrr, but her folds rubbing against his fingers applied a very gentle pressure on those areas.

A tight, tiny whine vibrated in her throat when his hand withdrew, her eyes coming open and her head righting itself, although she didn't really mean it. Loosing his hand certainly meant that something better was soon to come. She turned with heavy lids to watch him climb over the bed, her tongue flicking out expectantly below her own nose.

You have to kiss me first, though.

Her tail thumped once, minutely, but it was the jack that pumped up her ears with surprise at his forwardness before they leveled along her crest again.

"Ask and it is given," she purred. One big hand splayed against his bottom to draw him in between her legs, (slowly, so he would not trip!) and then the fingers tightened up to hold his cheek in her palm through the boxers. Her knees closed around his thighs, not tight enough to lock him in place, only to touch more of him with more of herself. She herself leaned back a little to make space for him and opened her jaws only wide enough for her tongue to thrust gently out, molding against his tongue and lips in a slow lap without attempting to delve and leaving a light smear of saliva behind on his upper lip. His kisses were so very.... erotic. That was the only word that fit, even a sweet unhurried kiss like this one. She jiggled the hand that held his bottom to weigh the muscle and the fat, to experience how it shifted in her palm, and she let him go with another expectant little tail tap while peering softly into his eyes. Her hard breaths had blown against his face during that kiss.

She stood up then to push the wetsuit down her body, wriggling hips and legs in the same little dance he had done, then sitting again on her naked bottom so she could lean forward and work the wetsuit down the bends of one leg and then the other. When it cleared the final paw she tossed it in a ball away from them. Her fur was still damp and plastered flat on most of her body, but stirred up on her belly where his hands had played. That, plus a dry ruff, made her appear even more top-heavy than usual, but it also highlighted the smooth dish below her hip bone, where hip met thigh above the swell of powerful quads.

So he does not need any direction from me to become erect, she thought with interest, eyeing the tent in his boxers while she scooted to the extreme edge of the bed. There she could sit on the top of her tail and glutes while angling her hips up, using one arm behind her to support her inclined torso. She gazed down the curve of her own belly at him, which not only rose and fell but rolled with quick, excited breaths. This was a moment she had seen in her mind's eye for years, and now she was here and so ready to finally live it. He filled a space in the room that no fantasy construct ever could; knowing it was Ray's eyes watching her, and Ray's mouth that touched her was all more arousing than the act itself.

She let her lids droop to make slits of her eyes, and let her jaw slacken to breathe out through her mouth with a tightening of her belly while she drew air in through her nose to catch all the scents. The scent which greeted him was mostly a familiar animal-musk tang just as the edge of sourness, with the addition of the more markedly Rriigkhan yeastiness and the surrounding hint of dustmotes-swirling-in-sunlight that was her fur. She made another tiny, appreciative sound in the back of her throat when his mouth actually met her and she wriggled against her face. As his mouthing went on her toes, braced on the ground at either side of him, curled into the huge, fluffy white rug over the hardwood floor that marked off the bedroom as its own space. When her toes uncurled the claws came out, lifting before digging back down into the carpet. That paler, milky coffee tan that painted the soft fur on the insides of her thighs brushed at his ears, although mostly she was attempting to keep her legs spread for him. Her tail hung down from the bed and curled over one of his thighs, hugging him as much as she was able to with that weak limb.

"I think you are teasing me," she breathed, rocking her hips to squish the plump of her groin against his face. Her hands were still braced on the bed to hold herself up. She was not quite at the point of needing to smush him down between her legs.

Teasing? Ray’s eyebrows asked. He didn’t break away to speak, not now, but he snorted in humor against the thin fur that curled away from her mons. One brow lifted further, definitely teasing (or perhaps threatening,) and his head straightened out at the top of her cleft, so his upper lip was in that fur now. His lower lip – well, it wasn’t relevant at the moment.

Maybe he was being overly cautious. Everyone was different, but he’d been straight-armed in the forehead more than once by Michelle (once hard enough that she took a picture of the red handprint before it faded, and put it on their timeline without explanation – they’d both laughed about it later). Sucking right on her clit before she put him there?

So Ray’s tongue found it first, now sliding up through the smooth skin below it to find the shape of it, sort of measure the size and how it fit into the cup of his tongue, and lap at for a few seconds before the point of his tongue circled ‘round. Then, he sucked. His eyes watched Quar again, but not intently, not on the verge of stopping the instant she breathed differently. His focus had gone into his mouth, and his eyes were backup, sending information to his brain that it simply shunted off to background processes. At first it was mostly the work of his tongue and upper lips, more surrounding and squeezing than really sucking, but as his tongue drew back between his teeth, his lower lip slid up beneath to take up the slack. His upper lip came off the fur, and together they formed a wet ‘O’, not so much around Quar’s clit directly, but around a quarter-sized space surrounding it, to spread the suction while his tongue swept against it between them.

The fingers that had been spreading her before were wet enough to rub between her labia, and getting wetter. Enough of his attention was partitioned away to run his thumb through the fur where it was starting to soak, and then to work that in. He hadn’t thought to file down his fingernails that morning, but he kept them trimmed to the white on a regular basis, as often as he was in gloves for his job. Who knew if she was anything like a human on the inside, really, but if she was like Michelle, once his thumb was all the way (he took it slow, easing it in deeper thrusts while he sucked), the pad would end up right where it would rub a nerve cluster, and his index finger would fit to—well, Quar wasn’t exactly Michelle’s size. He’d need bigger hands for that. Or just to keep his lips where she’d asked for them.

His knees shifted a bit, moving back behind him so he was leaning into her – he would have been on all fours, if either of his hands were on the ground. The one that wasn’t occupied inside her had wrapped around her thigh to hook on top, and his fingers were idly combing through her fur. Or they had been. The scents of her, the noises traveling through body, the little movements and muscle-clenches in her thighs were turning him on. Slow blinking had given way to staring down into the fuzz right beneath his eyes. His mouth sucked harder, more intently, almost like he thought he could nurse from her; his lips slid around different angles, and his tongue would draw back into his mouth to swallow, then return to flick and press and sweep circles. But that arm, wrapped around her, pulled at her leg to bring it against the side of his head.

He was making sounds, too – and not just the obvious wet sounds of suction broken at his lips, the squelch of his thumb when he pushed it in and out, or the heavy whuff of his breath leaving his nose. His face was pressed to her now, making as much contact as he could, even if it meant squashing his nose or pushing it sideways, but he was vocalizing – just the unintentional mua-mua-mau of someone who had lost sense of the moment and was lost in it.

The first taste was always the strongest – sometimes so strong that even when it wasn’t off-putting, it could be daunting. A little bitter, a little earthy, a little sour – and in this case extra salty from the sea – he was used to chasing it down after a few minutes, but this, sticking to one spot, meant any little fresh sharpness in the mostly-neutral palate in his mouth (even if it was just a bit of salt coming out of her fur) made him freshly greedy.

Quar had always liked pressure on her clit, and being acclimated to her own pads meant she was not likely to be over-sensitive to touch. And she thought she knew what suction would feel like; Rriigkhans could suckle, too, after all, even if she'd only felt that on her teats before.

But she was not prepared for the fine control he had over his lips, the way he could use them to grip, or how a small pointed tongue could apply very exacting pressure and almost run between her clit and the hood.

She sighed out when the heat of his mouth finally closed over the spot she'd wanted him to find, shifting her weight to the left so her right palm could settle lightly on his head, cupping around the curve over his temple. Her fingers idly stroked by curling inward and then flexing out to dig furrows through his hair. Those pads, each its own plump little cushion, were much smoother-skinned than those of her feet. A collection of a few long creases and many tinier wrinkles lined the skin, especially around the edges where the pads rose out of the fur, and a speckling of pits marred the softness without eradicating it. There were blemishes, too, where the black had turned almost pink, that came from a lifetime of wear. When her pads got close enough to his scalp that she could feel its lumpy contour under the coarseness of his hair she let her pads rest on him, though she was careful not to apply too much pressure; her arm held the brunt of the weight and she moved with his movements.

"Good kit," she sighed. At the end of the last word her tongue oozed out to wet her lips, but rather than draw it back into her jaws she caught it between her teeth so a flat sliver of pink was left peeping out. One side of her lip lifted up, exposing teeth but not gums more on one side than the other. It would have been a smug expression if her eyes had been better focused, but they had glazed over, and though she often watched Ray's face she did not seem to be seeing him.

That was until the real suction started. Her cheeks and lids tensed, eyes widening as if in bafflement; her jaw parted enough to release her tongue while her lips fell lax over the teeth she'd been baring. She stared bewildered into Ray's face while her ears dropped even lower, flattening against her neck. The sound she made quite unintentionally was a short, wordless huff riding an automatic exhalation. The pleasure building in her clit paralyzed her ability to speak but not her fingers. They petted over his hair, unhurried but with faster movements than her idle stroking before to encourage him while her claws slid out to scythe at an angle through his hair.

The addition of his thumb elicited a guttural and drawn out moan that rose up into a whine at the end. She already knew his short thumb could go no deeper, but she couldn't stop herself from wriggling against him like she was trying to help him work it in. Her muscular cheeks clenched rhythmically against the bed to lift her, to help her rock her hips. She'd been trying, too, to let her tail rest gently against his leg, but that was moving now in increasingly erratic patterns; it occasionally would thump against his ribs before dropping down to the floor again.

"Yes, yes, you good boy," she said gruffly, with a touch of crazed desperation that matched her wild eyes. Those words burst out unplanned. The fingers which had been stroking his hair at an angle changed direction; now the pads tightened on his scalp while her claws poked against him, not to dig but to hold, lightly, at first felt only as little pinpricks if even that through his hair until her tendons began to flex. The grip of her claws tightened and loosened rhythmically as they partially retracted and extended again.

He is inside my body, Quar thought, and that alone was enough for a fresh surge of arousal to heat her, to heighten those sensations that were already so good on their own. She wanted him to take out his thumb and replace it with something larger, but to ask for that would require him to remove his lips. He had pushed in past the first tight ring of muscle into slick, smooth, gripping heat to press against the solid lump of what he would call a G-spot. When she clenched, he could feel that ring contract against his finger and sense the movement of her walls deeper in.

"I may... I may orgasm... from this," she finally huffed out, realizing it was true even as she announced it. She was telling him this because she thought she ought to make him back off; she should save her orgasm so they could reach it together with him inside her. But Quar didn't push him off. She couldn't. If anything the pressure of her pads against his scalp increased, not really shoving him into her lap but at least holding him. To pull back his head would be to press himself into her gripping claws. Her thumb stretched across his forehead at the hairline, that curving talon almost reaching the opposite temple. When he nudged her leg she needed no additional goading to hook it over his back. Her thigh rested against his shoulder to bury his ear in fur. If he could tip his head back he would find himself trapped by the bulge of her calf which lay between his shoulder blades and neck. The toes of that paw curled inward but it was only air that they gripped.

The other paw scrabbled stupidly. First it landed on Ray's calf, footclaws poking out while the pads molded around and pressed into him, then lifted when she tried to hook her ankle around his thigh. The angle he was kneeling at made that awkward, and she found that without her paw on the ground she had less leverage to buck, so she planted it again. This time the toes splayed out in that plush rug, claws digging in.

She panted loud enough to hear herself now, her jaw working wordlessly, sometimes vocalizing on the outbreath without meaning to. She meant to release his scalp so she could pat him, tell him he was doing a good job, but she didn't seem to be able to release her grip on him. Her claws came out of the other hand to dig down into the bed cover. She rode his face for what felt like a long time, rocking against him while the pleasure built, constantly telling herself they should stop but never getting round to pushing him away. It was always one moment longer, only a while longer... She could feel the wet both oozing out of her and being worked out of her when his fingers drew back until the fur below her vulva became matted, plastered to her body with it.

"Ray," she suddenly hissed, the name formed only with a rush of air when she realized she was going to orgasm. She was still staring at him with that bewildered expression, now with an almost spasmodic furrowing and lifting of her brow and twitching in her lips that made it look like she was preparing to speak. Her jaw dropped open even farther. She was tugged along the crest of a powerful wave, every sensation heightened by this erotic experience. She meant to say his name again, but the only sound she did make was more of a sharp upward trailing whine while her muzzle lifted.

The fingers on his scalp crawled to the back of his skull to clamp down on him, finally shoving, finally mushing him down into her groin while the leg behind his neck tightened to lock him in, her thigh shaking against his cheek, and Quar bucked unashamedly up into his face. For a moment she didn't care about anything, not his comfort and not how stupid she must look with her eyes rolling up to the ceiling, or the way her tongue waggled against her teeth at one side of her mouth. She didn't care about the dumb little whines coming from the back of her throat. She wasn't aware of her walls pulsing around his fingers, her stiffened clit standing up against his tongue, the spurt of juice that gushed out of her folds. She only cared about riding this wave of pleasure, up, UP; so sharp, so full, every sensation heightened by the pure eroticism of the act, and even as she dropped down on the other side of that wave she continued to grind up into him with her hand tight in his hair to wring out every last drop of pleasure, to keep on coasting on and on and on....

The clenching in her thighs evened out first and her legs fell open, the one over his shoulder releasing its tension and loosening up around his neck. She dropped down onto her elbow instead of her palm to sit there panting, running her tongue over her teeth to seek out moisture because her mouth suddenly felt dry. Her tail, which hadn't been moving much through her orgasm now lifted in quick, agitated lashings, but that too was beginning to smooth out.

She rested like that for several seconds, simply breathing and staring at the ceiling, before gently lifting her leg off his shoulder to set the paw on the ground again. Then she pushed herself up, curling inward over Ray and bringing her thighs together to "trap" him between them. Her hands closed over his head, her claws retracted this time, but instead of gripping him her palms petted over the back of his hair with slow, gentle strokes, one after the other, her arms cradling him just behind his shoulders. An arching neck brought her snout down against the very top of his head, her ruff brushing his face. Lips lifted delicately from teeth and she bit him harder than she ever had before – right at the cusp of hurting. As her jaws hinged shut the teeth dragged over his scalp, and when she pulled back her tongue lapped powerfully out, leaving a streak of damp behind in his hair. She was still breathing heavily, her belly rolling with the contractions, the strands of his hair shaking under hot jets of wind from her nose.

One of the hands that were petting him settled onto his shoulder while the other moved to stroke his cheekbone with the backs of her fingers. She herself leaned away to give him room to breathe and to get her ruff out of his face, though she still held him, still trapped him with her thighs. The ears that had been pressed flat to her neck lifted to a relaxed, almost sleepy angle.

"That was wonderful," she breathed out with lazy contentment, her face totally lax. Then her brows furrowed and her head tilted to the side as she peered at him. "Was I rough with you? I am sorry. Your face is red."

Just do THAT thing.

That was the instruction that burned into Ray’s mind, in Michelle’s voice, not hissed out between clenched teeth, or plaintive. The memory had her lit only with the gray of a Minnesota morning, not dreary, even though the outside was probably all frozen mud puddles and filthy snow piles from a long winter buildup that would take a few weeks to thaw out. It was that February weather where snow had lost its seasonal joy, and they’d become experts on staying inside, memorizing all the cozy spots. She sat on the bench in the kitchen nook, hand under her wavy undercut, playing with the fresh buzz at the back of her head, wearing an oversized teal sweater and underwear.

They’d already moved in together, but he was fully dressed, not yet comfortable with wandering around the house in various states of undress. While she was lit with the morning light filtering through the fogged up pane windows in the nook, he stood at the counter, stirring hot chocolate powder into his coffee.

He could imagine it all perfectly, that morning, when they’d caught the tail end of some special on sexual satisfaction and it turned into a long, all-day how-to session on what they each liked. He’d been struggling: did he fight her orgasm to keep his mouth where it was? Was she looking to be overpowered? Go limp and let her have her way.

Her answer had been so obvious, so easy that he felt a little like an idiot.

Flashes of Michelle came more rarely now, and at unexpected times. If he tried to summon the memory of her face to his mind, he’d struggle with the details, but during those flashes the details would be as fine and clear as if he was right there: the edge of the arch of her nose catching the light, that one squiggle of hair that fell artfully away from the rest across her cheek. He didn’t fight them when they came, but he wasn’t clinging to them anymore, either. Weirdly, in this particular moment, even though Michelle was there in his mind, she didn’t feel like competition with Quar, or that he somehow had to ask her memory for permission.

This was his life. He wanted Quar. What came before wouldn’t change; neither, though, was it any more than the preface to now. He wasn’t in some kind of elongated denouement of his first marriage. It was all just build-up to Quar.

Eagerly, he kept doing what he was doing while Quar crashed through the wavebreak of her orgasm, being the mouth and tongue and lips and hand for her to work against, without chasing every movement or simply riding it out, waiting until she was done.

It was almost a sympathetic orgasm at its peak, or at least a strong sense of flow: the internal narration fell away, time stopped ticking away at a steady pace, and it all just blended in this long ride of endorphins and oxytocin that imprinted on his mind: intimacy, reward, sharing. This was their private moment, forever theirs together, something they’d made, a memory that would linger in their bodies as much as their memories.

He wasn’t eager for it to end. He needed relief a little, maybe – more space to breathe, a chance to loosen the muscles in his neck and forearm – but he was there, too while she was wringing out those last bits of goodness from the moment, like there was some personal record to achieve. It was like trying to eke every bit of travel out of a wave, even when the board was already beginning to skitter against the sand.

The hand that had been in her dropped to his knee, palm up; it was more instinct since it was wet than trying not to smear her scents into the rug. But his other hand stroked down the top of her thigh while his breathing slowly returned normal, through long, heavy breaths that made his chest and belly swell. There was an afterglow surrounding him, and every bit of contact she made with him amplified it, even when there were teeth dimpling his scalp.

His eyes had closed – they were stinging with the fluids in them, though his tears would come eventually to wash them out – but he opened them, peering up at her from between his brows. The roots of his hair were wet with sweat and still a little damp from sea water that hadn’t completely dried; the front of his hair was half plastered to his forehead and half mussed back.

“Were you rough with me?” He snickered, and between the muscles of her thighs, his head turned slightly so he could nip at her, then kiss against her wet fur. “A little bit. But not too rough. Not close to too rough. If we’re doing it right, my face will definitely be red. My eyes, probably. Especially my nose. Lips a little swollen. That’s good. It was good. Wonderful.”

Then his arm did curl tight around her thigh, pressing it to the side of his head just as he pressed against that side. “I like this. The tightness. Being held. Here, especially, but in general. Tight hugs that are just about on the edge of hurting, or make it hard to breathe for a moment. Your little bite there. I want you to be rough, sometimes.”

Finally he brought that hand back from his leg, sucked on the tip of his thumb, and then the whole thing, so it pulled out of his mouth wet, but nominally ‘clean’. He did the same with the web up to the pad of his first finger.

“Are you tender right now?” That finger brushed through the damp fur at the crease where the inside of her thigh met the outer edges of her vulva, then brought it back to his lips. “Let up on my head for a moment. This is a nice come-down sometimes. You can squeeze again once I’m in place, if you want."

This time he did watch closely for her reaction as he fish-wriggled his head back up against her, not to press or suck or plunge his tongue in or anything so abrupt. Instead, his tongue and lips worked through the fur around her labia, only sometimes sliding flatly over them, drawing out the fluids that had seeped into them. Sucking worked better than licking with fur, but licking was his habit, and any hesitancy about getting strands stuck to his tongue had already been breached.

It didn’t replace a shower, in his experience, but it could make cuddling afterward a real possibility. Besides, even if he felt a little awkward saying it out loud, the taste was addicting, and her orgasm hadn’t changed that.

It was only a couple of minutes, but afterward, he didn’t make a move to come back up to her face level until he’d been invited. It was perfectly comfortable anyway, resting his head against the fine fur inside her thigh. “Did you see the water room in here yet? Is it just equipped with your usual drybath, or did it have a big tub, too?”

"On the edge of hurting," Quar repeated with a thoughtful tilt of her head, remembering he'd said something like that before. That was a foreign concept to her. Quar knew when flesh tore, or when her joints stiffened. Those pinching, aching, pulling sensations were the things she thought of as pain even though she knew they probably weren't. Or at least, it wasn't the type of pain animals felt, that could make them scream. What could hurt Ray? She saved that as a note to ask about later.

"I am not very tender," she said carefully, brows knitting and one ear lifting with a hesitant curiosity until she understood what he wanted. When she did, her tail pattered softly against his hip. She relaxed her thighs until her legs fell apart at either side of him, splayed like a frog, but rather than box in his ears again she locked her ankles behind his back. It was more comfortable to have her legs elevated when she dropped down onto her elbows, then flopped completely onto her back, arms stretching out to feel languidly around for one of the neck pillows – it dished in the middle to accommodate the Rriigkhan neck while cradling her at the sides. She dragged it to her with her claws, shoved it under her skull and kept her hands there, grasping the rounded sides until her arms relaxed to the point that they, too, fell limp onto the bed at either side of her head. She made a show of wiggling hips and shoulders to burrow herself down against the mattress.

The gauzy white curtains fluttered inward, pushed by a night breeze from the window over the bed. That reminded Quar that the door was open; she cracked open her eyes to hunt through the house controls, turning on fields around the door and windows (but not the one over the bed) to stop the exchange of air and dialing up the air conditioner a few more degrees so that Ray would feel more inclined to cuddle her in this heat. A quick search for "sensual human music" brought up several options and Quar picked from the top at random: Romantic Smooth Jazz. Graceful saxophone and a lightly funky back-beat trickled through the bungalow at low volume, a cover of some modern human pop song without vocals.

"You behave more like a Rriigkhan than I was expecting," Quar said lightly, as much to herself as to him. Ray couldn't see her face from there but her eyes had closed with an utterly blissed cat-sleeping-in-the-sun expression on her face. "After watching your human pornography videos I expected... something else." Her belly tightened with a little dry chuff. After a time, she tilted her head on the pillow so she could look past the curve of her shoulder, down her trunk at him. Sort of. She still couldn't see his face beyond her thigh.

"Come up here with me," she said, sprawling out her arm to pat the bed beside her. Every time she spoke her voice became remoter, almost dreamy. It wasn't that she was falling asleep, but she felt so completely relaxed that even raising her voice seemed like too much effort. But she did lift her head slightly off the pillow when he mentioned the tub.

"Yes. The kind that looks like a wooden cask without a lid, and a shower over it," she said with perking interest. A dip in ocean water was one of the few occasions that would warrant an actual water-bath for most Rriigkhans, so she hadn't been surprised to find so much space in the washroom devoted to a massive tub. As she parted her legs to let him up, she rolled partially onto one side, jamming an arm under the pillow and gazing up at him with ears raised expectantly. Her voice oozed out of her, pleased and smug to match the curling in her tail. "Do you want to bathe with me?"

Ray was already wearing a big grin from sudden flight of a saxophone solo standing in for the vocals on ‘Palmetto’, which was infamous for its particularly suggestive lyrics hidden behind a gentle pop hook. So his smile only changed, and his brows knit together when she… complimented him? “Is that good? Behaving like a Rriigkhan?” Almost certainly it was; while his opinion on Rriigkhan had surpassed that even of humans, largely, he still gathered that they saw other species’ behavior as ‘also good’, at best. It was likely a very high compliment.

But then she explained, and called him up, so he crept up to the bed to lay beside her, and use her bicep as a pillow so he could lay on his side, facing her. Naturally his arm draped across her ribs, and his hand and fingers combed into her ruff to catch in her fur. The heartbeat behind it was smooth and level and athletically slow, but quite strong enough to be felt through his fingers without pressing down.

“Ahhh. Yeah. Porn is something else entirely. Exaggerated, usually. Depends on what you watch, though. Anything good? You should send me a link.”

A second later he added, “I’m kidding.” That was a fairly common joke among his co-workers, Michelle’s friends, everywhere. But he could see the possibility that Quar wouldn’t take it that way, and he’d end up on some kind of porn mailing list. Then again, if she was curating it, maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad.

The tent in his shorts had naturally disappeared long ago, as blood pressure was needed elsewhere when he’d been between Quar’s legs, but a little damp spot of an absorbed drop or two of precum still darkened the black just to the left of the fly.

“I would. It’s only fair. I’ve probably done a number to your fur today, between swimming in the ocean and now this. But not yet.” His head moved a little higher on her shoulder and his legs bent to surround one of hers, so his ankles met behind her calf. The hand that had been in her ruff slid further through the dense fur, up to her neck, which he began to rub and stroke. “After all the walking I’ve done today and the swim, I need a little break. I bet it takes a couple of hours to give you a proper shampooing and conditioner. That’s one of the good things about being me. Less than one square foot of fur.”

He winked, even she probably couldn’t see it, and settled his head again on her shoulder. “How do you feel about kissing. After I’ve gone down on you. Some people have really strong feelings on that – their own body fluids and all. I get it – it’s no big deal. And I can go wash my face real quick if it bothers you. But if not, I’ve got a little more than four years’ worth of imagined kisses to catch up, and that’s something I really don’t want to wait until later for.”

The pillow elevated Quar's crest from the bed, but the scalloped edge cut into the foam (which was resilient enough to reform perfectly after her crest was lifted away.) The spent calm she'd been feeling rinsed away when he climbed into her arms; she buzzed with energy inside, and gazed brightly down her muzzle at him as her other arm settled over his waist to cup him around the back. Her tail could not stop wagging despite a growing ache. She'd scooted up the bed when he'd followed her up so her legs would not hang off, and now she bent them up underneath her. It felt more natural than leaving them stretched straight out.

Her fingers explored him, prodding and petting, feeling at the muscles of his back and lightly stroking his ribs, squeezing where neck joined shoulder, all very slow and exploratory. The joy of holding someone she really liked just wouldn't settle; every heartbeat pumped a dizzying cocktail of happy chemicals to her brain, and that was on top of post-orgasm bliss.

"No, it was not good. It was all very artificial. Awkward. And it was never you, so it was a hollow experience," Quar said of the pornography. Her hand slid lower down his back until the heel of her hand encountered a waistband. She stroked with the sides of her fingers, where she knew her fur was softest, at the place where his tail should have been; where a Rriigkhan would have been very sensitive, so perhaps he was, too. Then she pinched a handful of fabric from the seat of his boxers and tugged the waistband down, where it caught on the curve of his cheeks, so she could rub her palm back and forth over the parting of his cheeks and cup each of them in turn. She wasn't sure if he was shy about being naked still. She wanted to see all of him, but wasn't in any hurry about it.

"It will not take that long," she said with a snort, pushing one foot against the bed and subsequently squishing her cheek harder against the pillow. She lifted her chin and blew at his forehead to rustle his hair, then laughed heartily. "Your fur needs washing more than mine! It is sticking in odd angles." Her head darted toward him to boop her snout against his brow and press a quick kiss there with her tongue before pulling back to admire the wet smudge of her handiwork. "I will let you wash me, Ray, but only if you allow me to wash you, too. You will have to show me how to bathe my human." She moved her hand lower to hook under the back of his thigh, giving it a small tug so he would lift his leg a little and let her pet him there, too, although after a minute she returned to the small of his back, where her arm draped over so naturally.

She considered the drying stickiness on his face, rocking her head against the pillow while her eyes rolled with playful thoughtfulness to the side.

"Clean would be preferred, but not preferred so strongly that I'm going to let you up." She panted out another raspy laugh that flashed her teeth, hha-hha-hha-hhrrr. But as her gaze settled onto his her expression sobered and the patter of her tail calmed. Tension rapidly bled from her face. Her gaze jumped from one of his eyes to the other, flicked from his brow to his lips and back to his eyes again. Kesh, he's so beautiful to look at, she thought, eyes narrowing as her vision tunneled in on him. They were both grimy, smelly, sticky, their fur disheveled, but she had not felt so comfortable and so at peace with herself and another person in a very long time.

"I could stare at your face for hours," she said softly, bringing her hand up to hold him around the ribs under his arm, fingers spread out toward his back. It wasn't actually staring she was prepared to do, though; she leaned toward him, (really pivoting her head around the fulcrum of her crest embedded in the pillow) to press her snout to his lips. The hand on his ribs squeezed with light pressure, urging him into her. Her tongue parted her lips and then sought to part his, to explore the soft tissues inside his mouth, to run the flat of her tongue up against his teeth. She enjoyed him leisurely at first, indulgently tilting her head against the pillow and lifting her lip to give him access to her fangs.

As the kissing went on she began to heat again. It was a less insistent heat, but it was there, stoking a hunger. She nudged at his shoulder and lifted her head to raise herself off the pillow, to drag her arm out from under him so that she could prop herself on that arm and lean over him. Coaxing him onto his back underneath her so she could kiss from above, her other hand gripped him around the middle. She kissed the side of his mouth, then nosed down under his jaw, pushing at him with the insistence of a dog wanting to be petted to make him tip his chin back. From there she could access his neck.

Every time her snout dipped down the tongue came out to squish moist kisses to his neck, each planted tenderly as she made her way down, slowly traveling from jaw to collar. Often she lingered to taste him or to explore some contour of his neck by dragging her teeth over it. When she mouthed at him her lips smeared aside, nose pushed up over her gums while her jaw worked with little nibbling motions that pinched with her incisors in front. When he moved she whuffed from her mouth at him, almost vocalizing in a playful warning to be still. She found the carotid artery in his neck; with her lower teeth dimpling against his flesh, the artery throbbed against the flat of her probing tongue. And he had this cartilaginous knot in the center of his throat that she nibbled at, kissed at. She snuffled into the hollow of his throat and lapped from it.

The hand which gripped him by the waist moved up to splay out on his belly. Eventually she moved from there, too, dragging the pads of her palm and fingertips over the contours of his chest. She finally broke away from his neck to gaze down with slitted eyes at him, so she could watch for a reaction when the pad of her thumb brushed over a nipple.

"...What is the purpose of these flat teats?" she asked, even though she already knew the answer from looking it up herself. If she thought about it, Quar would know Rriigkhan males had nipples, too, but they were so tiny and so easily lost in their fur that neither sex really thought about them much.

“Hmmm.” Little hums and moans of approval escaped Ray – through closed lips, vibrating out of him – as Quar’s pads felt at him. Sometimes his eyes would close; sometime he would move back against her hands, straightening or tensing a muscle beneath her hands. It wasn’t ever to move away from her, not even to tease; it might not have been a massage, but being touched, being physically appreciated filled a need that was hard to verbalize, but had no problem – apparently – being vocalized. It might not have sounded like purring, but it served the same function: encouraging, expressing pleasure.

“Aww.” His eyes re-focused, head tipping up to find her gaze. “‘It wasn’t you.’ That’s a really sweet thing to say.” After a breath, and a moment of thought, he mused, “I think of porn as something like a fashion catalog. You know? I only ever notice the models if they really detract from the scene. Even though someone else is wearing the clothes in the catalog, I imagine them on me – or on someone I want to see them in. Though I’m not saying you should watch porn, Quar, obviously. I hope you understand – just because of …this, I don’t think anything’s different. My opinion only matters as much as you want it to. But if you do watch it again, imagine it that way. Put me in the scene in your mind’s eye. It’s good for things you might not be ready to ask for. Yet. I’ve done a bit of that, with you.”

His smile spread to his cheeks and he chuckled when she tried to return the stimulation at the bottom of his tailbone. “I’m not actually very sensitive there. Not that it feels bad. But – ahh! Yes.” The muscles in his buttocks and the top of his thigh clenched beneath her touch. “That I can feel.” The muscles relaxed and then clenched more deliberately, rolling while her hand played, and when her pads retreated to his back, he began slowly wriggling out of his boxers, moving them down his leg an inch or two at a time, as best as he could without being disruptive or moving away from her.

“Hah!” The quick bark of laughter when the conversation moved to his hair accompanied his eyes peered up under his brows, as though he expected to see that hair plastered into spiky angles. Maybe there was some of it in the corner of his eye – he could usually see it more than now – but he could definitely feel it. He still didn’t want to take his hands from her, even to make an effort to feel for it to see just how stiff and crusty it had become.

“Oh, yeah, I’m an easy wash: lather thoroughly, then rinse. That’s all my instructions say.” He broke for a quick grin, to see if that joke translated, before continuing. “But you’re right. My fur does take time. Sometimes almost as much as washing the rest of me. Although I’m a little bit hair-vain, so there is that. Some guys just wash with the same soap as everywhere else. But, okay. Yes. I’ll teach you how to bathe your human. As long as you make a point to call me that. ‘Your human.’” He sucked on his lips rather than let the grin spread too obviously again, but added, more softly. “I’ll teach you anyway. But do call me that. Please. And often.”

That cheek-cramping smile came anyway; how could it not with her flattering him like that, staring at him like he was special. He was like one beach stone she’d picked up and arbitrarily named a diamond, chose to mount on her finger. Granted, he probably was something to look at at the moment, though not for the best reasons. His color had settled out within ten minutes or so after getting up from the floor; even his eyes weren’t that red any more. But the rest of him? His hair? At least his eyes were more of a bright copper than their usual muddy brown. His hand had returned to her ruff earlier; other than the smile, his answer was holding onto that thicker, longer hair. He didn’t mean to pull on it, though it might have tugged a little. It just felt like it was for holding in exactly that way, and with his fingers more than any others.

His mouth to her tongue when it arrived. Still he wasn’t completely ready for just how deeply it could invade, the slick warmth of it behind his teeth across his tongue, the more velvety texture against the roof of his mouth. A horizontal swipe between his lips was one thing, but thrusting in, flat and then curling against the roof of his mouth was entirely novel. Not unpleasant – in fact, it was actually delightfully sexy once he expected it, and he wanted the taste of her mouth, but meeting her tongue with his own made him feel a little like a horny teenager again. Then again, only the ‘teenager’ part was wrong. Closing his lips on her tongue so it slid out between them, suckling so his mouth filled with saliva, was actually the closest thing to the soft, wet feeling of a kiss so far – maybe that would become their thing, the unique way they met in the middle. He did pull on her ruff then, to draw himself closer so he could angle his mouth and curl his tongue around her fangs, in an attempt to play the Rriigk a little more for her.

Then his hands went above his head as she moved on top of him; he went flat to his back and lifted his chin, angling his neck aside for her. His breath became heavier, stretching and compressing his bare chest, moving the muscles in his throat. He reached for a pillow again, and, finding none, he grabbed at the bedsheet when the breaths gave way to gasps. Sometimes he watched her, watched the white teeth between curled black lips, sometimes his eyes glazed to slits that just acknowledged the outline of her crest. The sum of his available attention was spent scissoring his legs slowly to get his boxers down over his knees. They ended up on one shin, where he left them.

He’d been biting his lips again when her pad rubbed his nipple. It took a cycle of breath before he managed a shaky word. “Those? They’re …uh, buttons. Sort of.” ‘Can you milk me, Greg? I have nipples!’ He’d never seen the movie that the line came from, didn’t even know what it was called, but the Al Pacino quote was still internet famous. “Like that spot at the top of your tail is sensitive, right? That’s really the only thing these do. They give you something to focus on where I’ll really feel it. Some people get them pierced for the extra sensitivity. I never went that far, but I thought about it. I was asked to. You could uhm… lick them. And nibble them. Gently. They’re sensitive to pleasure and pain.”

His chest and neck had flushed again, in part from her attention and the weight on him, but in larger part it was just the flush of arousal. Beneath her, his penis was thick again – not rigid (it could still be squeezed and even bent), but obviously aroused, and leaving little clear droplets along the underside of his belly.

"Your opinion has always mattered to me, Ray. That is why I talk to you," Quar said matter-of-factly. Everything is different, because of this, she added to herself only. That was a conversation to save for later. Perhaps Ray thought she saw him as simply a bit of fun, a feature of Santa Catalina to leave behind along with the reefs and the buffalo when it was time for her impromptu vacation to end. It wasn't that Quar wanted him for a lovemate – that would never be possible, even if she had wanted that – but she hoped to have him as a paramour for as long as this attraction lasted. She could not say how long that would be... They might soon find nothing of substance to hold onto when the novelty of fucking an alien wore away.

Quar hoped that would not be the case. Her chest filled with something lighter than air when she thought of the days they would spend together now. She didn't want this feeling to end anytime soon.

"Nevertheless, I choose to be the dutiful Naturalist and forego pornography in all but my weakest moments. But..." Quar's eyes narrowed flirtatiously. She threw her tail over his legs to share her thumping grin with him, then caught the hand playing in her ruff to clasp him by the fingers. She brought his hand down between them where her neck fur would brush against their hands, to cradle him to the valley between her pecs.

"What have you seen me do in your mind's eye?" she purred. One ear flicked up, stood erect for a moment before drifting down again. "You can't say such a thing and expect me not to wonder. Tell me... it does not have to be that thing you are not ready to ask for, but... something. If you do, I will share a thought I have had about you." She squeezed his hand. Her tail continued to thump lightly against his legs.

----

My human, she thought during that kiss. If lovemate or harem-brother did not fit him, my human did. That would be his role in her life. That sweet phrase was wingbeats in her belly, mostly because he had liked it so much. Now, his lips sucking on her tongue... that was tumescence where she was already slick. She groaned against his mouth and fidgeted against the bed, wiggling hips and pressing her thighs together. She loved the way their legs had tangled, how his skin slid against her fur when she fidgeted. With their faces so close he would be a blurry cyclops anyway, so she let her eyes close. Without vision she could focus more intently on the sensations in her mouth. Never, with another Rriigkhan, had she experienced anything like this. They might lick at her muzzle once or twice. Locking mouths together for an extended time seemed to be an act unique to humans. The tug at her ruff elicited a growl that oscillated between grumbly and playfully squeaky, and her splayed hand gripped his ribs with renewed vigor.

"I love how you kiss..." Quar murmured in one of those moments when they came apart for Ray to breathe, and for Quar to tap her snout against his lips in mimicry of human kissing. She let the moistened fur under her nose twitch against him and her tongue blot out like he was a bone to taste.

----

"Your entire body is sensitive to pain," Quar said skeptically, her eyes narrowing such that one was almost a slit. One ear flopped up with the momentum of her tilting head. That was mostly in jest; she would take him at his word. "Who asked you to do that?" Without waiting for an answer she lowered her snout to the nipple furthest from her, to open her jaws and press the sides (not the points) of her incisors against his skin so her tongue could drop out. There was nothing tentative about that first touch, but she didn't press hard, either. She merely lapped at the little pink bud, leaving a smear of saliva when she readjusted her jaws so the sharp points of her teeth did contact his skin. She jiggled her jaw with that same nibbling motion she had used on his neck, not on his nipple but around it, while her palm petted down his flat tummy.

“A dutiful naturalist,” Ray repeated, mostly under his breath especially as he spoke over (or under) Quar with no intention of cutting her off. He appreciated the term, but wanted to reinforce it in his mind. He was not an expert googlist, and had a very ante-postmodern approach to internet research, but on the solar-system-bound net, he’d found that so much of what was available on Rriigkhan culture was mere speculation, mostly from people like he’d been twenty years earlier. In other words, unless he was trying to confirm his bias, it was mostly useless; wherever the real answers to real questions were, they were buried beneath a thick layer of shit and drivel that were the opinions of people like him. Feelings, rather than information.

(Not that feelings were unimportant, at all. But they were meant to be shared personally with those who shared a life context, not scattershot into the permanence of the net for everyone else to absorb as information.)

Anyway, if he wanted to know what ‘Naturalism’ really was, he was probably going to have to ask her at some point. He pinned it as a conversation point tomorrow. Maybe during a long bath.

“But,” he agreed, and then listened to the question he knew was coming, because she was right. Of course if the shoe dropped, one had to hear the next.

“This might not sound like very much to you, honestly. It’s been different among humans. And, admittedly, I tend to watch the first quarter of any given porn before I move on. So if you are skipping to the end, we’re definitely watching different things. With all that qualification out of the way…” He stopped to breathe a guilty chuckle, and to take a deep breath so he could finish what really wasn’t much of a revelation, but still took a surprising amount of willpower to admit. “I imagine you holding me. From behind, mostly. Sitting between your thighs, leaning back against your chest, and your arm around me. Maybe your hand playing with me between my legs, maybe just holding me so I can’t get away. Not that I want to get away. I don’t know. In the cave, you were so …strong. And that made me feel something I hadn’t really ever felt before. It’s not about being overpowered. Or maybe it is. Held so tight that that there’s no question of getting away just makes me want to stay all the more. Or laying on top of me when I’m face down. Biting my shoulder and the back of my neck. Licking my spine. Grabbing my bottom. Maybe…” His face was getting so red now, and his chest felt heavy, but he kept pushing through. "Biting it. The same sort of thing – held down. Held. Your body and mine. It surprisingly hard to find porn like that that doesn’t end up taking hard left turns. But it was really easy for me to picture you in it.”

“That’s not the only thing I imagine!” he added quickly, laughing at himself again. There was so much color in his face that his grin blanched his lips and parts of his forehead. “But some of the things I want to do to you don’t make as much sense with humans. Like, you know how I said I liked your legs around me… and then there’s the position of your …breasts. Lying between your thighs so I can kiss them and maybe suck on them, if that’s not too weird for you… Anyway, my face feels like it’s going to explode; your turn.”

- - -

“That’s true,” Ray agreed. “And I think that makes it more sensitive to pleasure, too. I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine what it must be like for you. Bodies – human bodies, or at least my body, I guess – likes surprises. That’s why biting, scratching, tight squeezing, all of those things are so intense. It’s the not-knowing, the anticipation of what’s to come and the relief that it’s all pleasure that makes it so strong. It’s this rush that comes rippling through my skin, no matter how used to it I get that it’s not ever really going to be pain. It’s kind of like tickling, almost. That sensation, that rush. Are you ticklish? Does that go away with the pain?”

None of that answered who had asked him to pierce his nipple, but it gave him something to do while she was exploring him with her mouth. Sometimes it came out uneven, breathy, especially as his chest or belly twitched under her mouth, or he was caught in an easy laugh. His hands wanted to come up to touch her face, and moved in that direction a few times, but he caught them and instead reached behind her crest to rub there.

“Do you… Do you want to talk about the past? I don’t mind. I don’t have any secrets in that regard, honestly, though maybe it’s been hard to talk about it sometimes. But – I don’t know. I want to learn all about you, but I’m sort of afraid to ask you about your past. I shouldn’t—it’s not like it’s a mature response. But I’m probably the sort who would draw comparisons and end up feeling jealous of someone else who you really loved, who fit you in a way that I can’t. You know? I kind of-- I heard there was someone like that for you.

“And I get it! Because you and Michelle are nothing alike. And when I think about you, I’m not at all comparing or contrasting you with her, even if memories do come up. You’re Quar, and I want you, now. I don’t want to go back in time. I don’t want to change the past or play ‘what if’.

“All of that is a long way to say there’s a story there, behind the answer to that question. Not that it’s awfully heavy, but one story leads to another. You know? I will open my book for you, but I don’t want ‘showing you the picture’ to turn into ‘making you sit through my photo scroll’ if that’s not what you’re looking for.”

A clicking purr sighed out from parted lips as Quar listened to his answer. His fantasies were not very different from the things she had thought of!

"Yes, it's very red," she teased, releasing her grip on his hand so she could weakly pinch his cheekbone between two knuckles. "It's adorable the way your skin changes colors. You telegraph more than I do with my tail." It continued to telegraph a flustered, devious joy against his legs. Jaws parting to breathe through her mouth, Quar filled her chest up with air to share her own desires on the outbreath.

"I thought the same only a while ago... you suckling my breasts... nursing on them. I would greatly enjoy that. It isn't weird to Rriigkhans. It's common foreplay. Hhhh, now I'll give you a real answer." She wiggled, rocking in excitement on her shoulder. "I love to be corked. With toys, or with you." She used her paw to nudge one of his legs up, so his bent knee would rest between her thighs and against the heat of her slit. She tilted her hips to grind on him, not desperately, but idly. "I want your erect penis to rest inside me, but not during sex. We would kiss while my legs are wrapped around you, or simply chat as we are now, while you fill me." Her eyes closed, picturing how it would feel to have his girth pressing her open, and her fingers stroked through the hair at the base of his neck. "We would be connected. So close, closer than two people ever can be. Every time you begin to soften I will strengthen your erection with... hrrm." Her eyes opened to narrow at his. Her pheromones wouldn't do that, but friction probably would. "I'll rock my hips against you, push you in as deep as you can go. I'll lock myself around you, legs and arms and passage all." She did wrap herself around him then, her ankle hooking the back of his shin and her arm wrapping around his back to squeeze him tight with his arm trapped between their bodies.

"...And I want to cradle you on my lap while I feed you. I want to... to carry you like a little doll, and hold you by the wrists while I lick your ear so you can't squirm away, and brush your pretty fur while you sit quietly and obediently." Her nose wrinkled up and Quar snorted, unseen by him because the top of his head was pressed into the hollow under her jaw. It was a really dumb fantasy, something that had developed only recently. She had no idea where it had come from. Perhaps because humans were innately so little, so weak, that she wanted to emphasize it?

She released her hold on him then to push him back by the shoulder, so she could watch his face again, although her legs were still twined with his. Her howrfs peered out of their holes, jittering with the same arousing pheromones she'd expect to harden a male, even though she wasn't really looking for sex right now. This conversation was too much fun, and she really did want that bath first.

----

"We are ticklish," Quar responded absently, her words muffled and a little distorted because she spoke them without lifting her muzzle from his chest, and when her jaw moved her tacky lower lip caught on his skin. "And we do feel pain..." Another lick before she lifted her mouth enough to speak. "It is scaled down, and it does not last very long, but I think it is a type of pain. I feel aches, especially in my head, when I am upset. It is like pressure? I knew true pain when I was a child. That memory is so distant now, but pain then was sharper, and went on and on and on..." To prevent kits crawling into fires or smashing their own fingers in play, it was typical to dial down the pain responses only when a child proved mature enough to look after themselves without it. Quar had been eleven or twelve when she passed that threshold into adulthood, or at least that was how she'd viewed it at the time.

She paused abruptly when that hand reached behind her crest. Unlike the front of the plate, which was only bare keratin, thinly furred skin like velvet stretched across the underside of her crest. A Rriigkhan crest was slightly convex, gently curving around a hollow on the inside that was often not very visible past the thick ruff just behind it. A disorderly tracery of veins and arteries wormed through the velvet, pulsed with her heartbeat. Through that soft skin ribbing on the underside of her crest could be felt, blunted ridges that fanned out from a central 'backbone,' almost like the roof of her mouth, to increase the surface area of the skin. A few inches in from the outer edges of her crest the texture turned knobby, and it was here that skin thinned out considerably and fused to the keratin.

A sharp puff of breath blew against his skin. Her jaw was still open when she lifted her chin from his chest, but it closed automatically when she rested it against him in her own drool.

"I... I don't mind hearing about Michelle." Her jaw pressed against him when she spoke. Her lids drooped over her eyes and Quar cut her gaze to the side, guiltily. She was not comparing Ray to Nahrosh. They were far too different for that. But if she could go back in time? Change the past? Quar would accept that deal without hesitation. It didn't change the way she felt about Ray, but...

Slowly she sat up, putting most of her weight on one hip and thigh so she could gaze down at him, directly into his eyes. The hand that had been playing on his belly came up to settle into that curve where neck met body, her thumb lightly resting in the hollow between his clavicles.

"I am not jealous of your past love," she said. She forced out a tiny wry laugh. "I am far too old to expect my lovers to be virgins fresh from the mother's teat. I sense that your family life was very important to you, perhaps even an integral part of your identity. That alone makes me want to know of it. If telling me any story of the past would cause you unhappiness, then don't, but know that I am willing to hear it." Her gaze dropped again, this time to watch her thumb stroke his throat while her ears laid back. When she met his eyes again it was hesitantly, with a tilt of her head. The skin above her eyes wrinkled and lifted, pulling together in the middle. "You 'heard?'" Her heart jumped with that old anxiety, that touch of dread that came from knowing something so private and so painful was beyond the reach of her fingers to grasp it and pull it tightly back to her chest. "How much do you know about my husband Nahrosh?"

Sometimes Ray wondered if it was inevitable that humanity ended up united under Guild Cant. He thought in it as much as he did English, and sometimes had to remind himself to say something again in English when he was in Avalon. Humanity hadn’t united under English, Spanish, or Chinese (though only one of those three was easy to learn), but none of the constructed languages humanity had were useful in the way Cant was, and – he suspected – none plugged so directly into the psyche.

Take ‘telegraphing’. That was a very human term, bundled up both in technological and sporting history. (He’d seen a special that touched on the history of sporting terminology when he was stuck at a bar with ‘friends’ in Texas.) In Cant, it was constructed from the roots ‘hii’, which implied lack of intention, and ‘chor-ru’, which meant convey. But there was no effort of translation between the two terms in Ray’s mind, and he doubted that Quar had even given a moment’s thought to translating the idea from Plenitongue to Cant. Cant seemed perfectly designed to structure thought and intention. Probably, there were human philosophers rewriting old treatises into Cant to crystallize what the art of human languages had left ill-defined. Language had always been ‘impressionistic’ in Ray’s opinion, but Cant provided the opportunity, at least, for precision.

Telegraphing.

What did it say about humans if they ended up uniting under the language Rriigkhan had designed so other sapient species could better serve them? Probably more than old Ray would have liked to admit.

“It will change colors back, too.” Wiggling a hand free, he drew with a hard press on his own forehead: the shape of a heart, with the downward point at the center of his brows. The finger left a streak of pale skin behind it that filled in flush again a second later, and the heart didn’t complete. In the moment, Ray didn’t think about whether that heart shape was as universal as Cant. “Sort of.”

Ray’s eyes were wide as he listened to her. It was dark enough in the room that his eyes would be wide anyway, but they seemed especially large at the moment. “Corking?” he repeated, not clear on the word, and then nodded as she explained it, and even managed an, “Ahhh,” sound at the back of his throat just at the edge of vocalization. “That sounds nice, actually.” He could have gone down the rabbit hole of trying to visualize positions and that rocking and grinding, but instead focused on that sensation of fitting. There was an innate satisfaction in putting things where they belonged, when they fit well: a key that went smoothly into a keyhole, replacing a teacup missing from the perfectly arranged china cabinet. That little mental reward translated into an enormous physical boon when he had been root-deep inside her before, as though he’d just solved the secret purpose to life and possessed the knowledge.

To linger in that high, intentionally stretching out that moment into some kind of dreamy bliss seemed almost like cheating life.

When she pushed him away, he was even redder than before, and smiling so hard that he ended up lifting a hand to cover his face, though the fingers parted immediately to let his eye peek through.

“Okay,” he said in a breathy voice, fighting through the smile. “Those sound pretty nice, too. Or… maybe nice isn’t the right word. I want you to.”

Howrfs or not, he was certainly hard now, skin tight and glossy along the shaft, pointing up toward his belly button and bobbing a bit in the air. His own gaze flicked up to those two little white caterpillars, knowing that it was reflex, flattered by the yeasty smell coming off of them. His hips rolled slightly so his thigh could move against her, which only stimulated him, too.

His eyes closed, and his head rocked back, lengthening his neck and pushing his chin toward the ceiling. “Maybe I’ll fantasize about those things now, too.” Late as it was, long as his day had been, it was easy to let thoughts linger on, like the shuttle running through the threads of conversation.

- - -

The hand that had been exploring behind her crest (in his mind, he imagined it a wrinkly carpet of moss between roots of an old tree in some ancient forest) fell away when Quar sat up, half-coincidentally falling to where her mouth had been, where his finger traced through a more obvious swathe of saliva left behind.

The tone in her voice had changed, closed off, and his first instinct was to chase her – at least verbally – to try to soothe whatever injury his mentioned had caused. His brows knit with worry now, and dreamy drowsiness flitted away as his focus returned sharply.

“Not much,” he replied, honestly. “Only that you loved – love? – him very much. That you still are registered as married to him, but there’s a past-tense aspect to it. I—I just guessed, really. Assumed that maybe you were a widow. Sort of like me. I sensed something like that about you. I’m willing to hear, too. If you want to talk about it. Or not, if you’d rather not.”

“Maybe this is a good time for me to go draw the bath?”

Quar stared down through Ray's chest for a moment, brows drawn, considering. Her hand withdrew from his neck to curl atop her thigh. She probed at herself to test for pain and found that old, ever-present ache. In six years the ache had faded, and that hurt almost just as much as the Nahrosh-shaped void she carried in her soul. She didn't want to spoil her night with Ray, but he clearly had already sensed that this topic raised her hackles. She did not want Ray to be left wondering for the rest of the night. That could spoil things, too.

"Yes," she said softly, affectionately, lifting her eyes to his. Her tail curled weakly up, once. "Let's bathe." She scooted off the foot of the bed, hooking his boxers with her claws as she went. They'd gotten worked down to his ankle at some point from her feet pawing at his legs, so it only took a little twist to work them over his foot. With an underhanded flick of her wrist she tossed them away at random, and then she was standing with her arms outstretched to him.

"I... am unsure how I feel, Ray." Though she spoke carefully, her voice was also level. Calm, now that the initial panic of being judged had faded. Ray would not understand the situation like a Rriigkhan would; he was unlikely to think ill of her. "I don't speak about Nahrosh. With anyone. I am not sure why that is. I have friends who would listen. And the pain is not so fresh, anymore. I feel all right. It's been six or seven years now." The Cant word she used for emotional pain shared a root with the words that described physical types of pain, but it was always clear which she was speaking of.

She held out her arms for him, and leaned over the bed to gather him up into them. One arm held him around the torso, fingers splayed on his ribs again. The other scooped under his knees. When she stood to her full height her arms tightened up to cradle him against her strong chest. Her pulse quickened when she looked down at that naked vulnerable body in her arms. His skin seemed so fragile, especially next to her own plush fur. He was defenseless not only against raking claws but something as simple as the weather. It made her want to protect him, which was ridiculous; protect him from what?

She gave him a little squeeze on her way to the washroom at the back of the house, pausing just once to heft him up to get a better grip. The curtain that hung over the doorway was tugged to the middle of the runner because Quar hadn't closed it correctly the last time she'd been inside. She caught the curtain with her crest and went in sideways, tossing her head to throw the fabric off her tines when they were inside.

Palm leaf patterned wall sconces lit the moment they entered. The jazz followed them, too, piped in through unseen speakers. It was cozy room just a little smaller than Ray's entire apartment. The toilet stool was currently lowered. The place where it would rise from the chalky pastel hexagons that tiled the floor would almost be invisible if not for the foot switch. A pair of free-standing wood and wicker cabinets flanked a dual drybath/aqualysing cubicle with frosted glass panes against one wall. A dormer window slanting under the thatch roof would have washed the room in natural light, had it been day. Beneath that roll-up bamboo shades appeared to hide a pair of long windows, but these were only mirrors that faced a padded wicker bench with drawers along the bottom.

The tub did look like a huge wooden barrel, although it was only round in front; it was set into the corner of two walls, so what would have been a circle got pinched into a rounded wedge instead. It was built into a wood panel half-wall, with wooden shelves running along the paneling and steps leading up to the tub. Like a cask, steel hoops appeared to band it. Unlike a cask, a bench ran along the inside, and over it hung three independently operable shower heads. (Although it would fill with water from jets under the benches.)

Quar touched her nose to Ray's temple before gently tipping him down to his feet, although her hand lingered on his side even when he was standing, and she angled her head to look down her snout at him. She opened her mouth, and her ears quirked up like she was preparing to speak, but then her gaze hardened and dropped away from him. The hand not in contact with Ray came up to smooth over the curve of her own chest, pressing the pad down into the muscle, hard. Her other hand fell away from him.

"I am not widowed," she began, eyes on the tile, hating that thickness in her voice. Her tail-tip twitched pensively down near her ankles. "Nahrosh is still alive, and he is still my husband, as you saw... But he is ill. His illness is a fatal one, so he is sleeping in cryogenic storage until a cure can be found. Such a cure..." Her eyes flashed toward Ray and darted off again before really making contact. She huffed out air in an unhappy mimicry of laughter. "His disease has been known to my people for near two thousand years, around the time our medical technology reached its peak. We have made very little progress since. I should not expect to see him again in my own lifetime."

This was a mistake, she immediately realized. This was the wrong moment to speak of Nahrosh. Not because she was in any danger of crying; the tears she had for him had dried up by now. But she did not know how to think of Nahrosh without letting all that bitterness wash over her anew. Standing stiffly in the middle of the washroom, one leg turned inward, her hand squeezing her chest, she felt as vulnerable as she had described Ray to herself only moments ago. It did not feel sexy.

Ray’s eyes narrowed on account of his brows lowering heavy across them as her mood swept him up in introspection. His heart rate was settling, his skin cooling; he felt loose, and especially tired now. “I think I understand.” For the moment he left it at that, while his thoughts circled around his own understanding of that feeling. Usually it was the case that as soon as he was given cause to think about Michelle, about his pain, he could think about little else. In the last few years, that response had begun to feel stagnant, selfish, even rotten. It required an effort of will, still, not to circle that drain, to try to connect to what Quar was saying, and how she might feel.

No matter how similar it might sound on the surface, that kind of pain was always very specific and private. It felt sometimes like it desired solidarity above all else, but that was no real salve.

Ironically, he was still in his own thoughts, which made it easier for him to just be swept up in Quar’s arms. Of course it sounded wonderful, the idea of her wanting to coddle him; in practice Ray had a strong streak of stubborn individualism and self-reliance. How could Quar really like him if he couldn’t take care of himself, if he wasn’t helpful and gave more than he took? But maybe this was what she needed from him? Maybe it was what he needed, too? Or at least it felt good, the combination of strength and tenderness.

He’d lifted an arm initially to drape over her shoulder, but their proportions were off; instead, both arms ended up folded against his chest, with one hand pressed to hers, and his temple against her bicep. He knew he wasn’t the largest man out there, but it was still a lot to take in, just how easily she lifted and carried him, without hefting or straining or that rushed, heavy breathing. His face turned to her, burying in the niche between her arm and chest.

He went down easily to his feet, but he lingered too, hand still on Quar’s chest, before it found her arm, wrist, and then squeezed the big pad of her thumb. Then he turned on the wood slats at the bottom of the ‘cask’ that hid the true floor, where water could be plugged or drained (and there would be a filter to remove Rriigkhan fur before it entered the plumbing.) He glanced at the controls before understanding them, and sliding his fingers across them. “What temperature do you like? I will take quite warm if you like it, but I am fine at any temperature that isn’t cold.”

Once the water was flowing in around his feet, he held his hand out, so Quar could lean on him as she came over the side of the cask – though it would likely be disastrous if she actually gave him her weight. “It sounds like love. And pretty romantic,” he added with an accepting shrug. “A lot of ‘romance’ seems to be painful for those who are in it. It looks like a sacrifice – and it is! – but if so much of our heart and soul is in someone else, it’s self-preservation to give up whatever we have to so that they can go on, right?”

“I don’t have the same sort of friends who would listen – and definitely not family – but that’s more by my choice, honestly. I think… not making friends has been a subconscious way to avoid talking about it. Maybe not always subconscious.”

He settled down on the bench, knees together, and tugged at the tip of his lip with his thumb and the side of his forefinger. Touching his face, his mouth, was a nervous habit, but he wasn’t nervous, really – just in his own head. “People always want you - me - to talk to a professional and work through feelings. And it’s all really well-intentioned. If you like someone, and they’re in pain, you want to relieve them of that pain, right? That’s what a good friend does. But the pain is maybe important because it’s real. The memory of them is real, and that memory can’t be separated from the pain, so if you let go of the pain, the memory goes, too…”

“I don’t know,” he added with a self-deprecating laugh and shake of his head, and a cautious lifting of his eyes to look at Quar again. “I’m not an expert on any of it. I just do what I think is right.” That tight smile turned sour as his gaze focused long, through the wall opposite the room. “And I’m pretty sure that talking to professional would tell me I was handling it wrong. But they don’t really know, do they? It’s always individual. This stuff. It’s between people. And everything between people is individual. What is between you and Nahrosh – it’s not going to be possible for anyone else to understand, really.”

He reached to touch her leg, to pet along the top of her thigh. “But I think someone could see you in the situation, and appreciate what they see in you in it. If that makes sense at all.” He laughed again, lighter this time, even if the shake of his head was still self-deprecating. “I’m not sure it does. I’m kind of babbling. I hope you don’t mind if I end up sleeping in tomorrow morning.”

"Quite warm is good," Quar agreed, and she did take his hand, but without really using him for support when she swung her leg up over the side of the tub. She settled down beside him on the bench, first with her legs stretched out together in front of herself, knee to knee and thigh to thigh. Her tail curled tight against her leg to rest over the tops of her ankles. With her buttocks compressed against the bench her fur fanned out; she'd sat close enough to Ray that it brushed his naked skin. Her claws had come out reflexively to help her grip the slats, and now they slowly eased back into her toes while a swirl of white froth rushed around them. She seemed to expand like a sponge as the water level rose; fur soaked up water, then lifted away from skin. When the water rose above the jets it calmed. No more froth.

The heat was almost as good as a massage on her calves and then her thighs, although she wasn't really in the right mood to appreciate that right now. Her hands had ended up in her lap, one fist curled in the other palm, and she stared down at them while she listened to Ray speak with flaccid ears.

He attempted to comfort with his words. What she'd done to Nahrosh was neither romantic or self-sacrificing, but Quar didn't have the heart to tell Ray that. It really would spoil the evening.

And then there was that sickening twist of guilt in the pit of her belly. If Nahrosh ever awoke, Quar couldn't even tell him how she'd spent these years without him. If he knew... what she'd done only minutes ago, it would irrevocably diminish her in his eyes. Her clasped hands moved to her crotch to watch Ray's fingers pet through her fur, eyes narrowing sadly as brows and cheeks tensed around them.

"Come here," she murmured, and leaned toward him to gather him up again with an arm behind his back and another reaching down to his buttocks. This time her hands mostly guided and supported while he scooted onto her lap himself, but she shifted, ankles parting and knees raising, to better support his weight, to be a chair for him to sit sideways with his legs perpendicular to her thighs. The water was almost up to their bellies when she wrapped her arms around him, her right hand wrapping around his body to cradle his face, to press him into her neck, so she could tilt her head and rest her own cheek atop his scalp. Her eye on that side squished shut, and she let the other slide slowly shut, too.

Quar did agree with Ray's hypothetical therapist. The way he dealt with pain probably was wrong. Quar did not feel the need to say that. She wanted only to hold him, her arms gradually squeezing tighter and tighter like she could wring the pain out of both of them, or like he was a stuffed toy to hug, while she rocked them gently from side to side. Her tail brushed against his thigh when she tried to wrap it around them, too, but the end of it was weaker and harder for her to control. Tinkling piano and a laggard saxophone wove their duet in the background.

The jets kicked off on their own when the water was almost to the rim of the tub, and Quar did let her muscles ease in that heat, her back sinking against the rim of the tub with Ray still in her arms. When her rocking stopped, the only movement came from her chest and belly expanding against him, tightening her hold by just that much. She held him for a long time, probably so long that it was getting 'weird,' to use one of his words... but every time Quar thought she ought to let him go, something made her tighten her arms instead. It was her answer to everything he'd been saying.

"I'll sleep in with you," Quar finally spoke, still in that murmuring voice, still with her cheek pressed to his head, although her tail twitched lethargically. "Perhaps we'll laze about in bed allll day."

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