Castor

"Ey, dormilón! Dale, levantá el culo!"

Castor's eyes snapped open to Vega's face hovering mere inches above his own, grinning with the manic delight. The couch cushion was still warm. His silk eye mask hung crooked off one ear. The afternoon light through the penthouse windows had shifted from gold to amber as the setting sun shone through the sheer blinds.

"Touch this couch again," Castor warned, his voice still thick with sleep, "and I will have Marta put a muzzle on you. Make that two, given your insane temperament. Putain."

Vega was already halfway to the door, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a dog who'd found something dead in the yard. "There’s a new guy downstairs. In the gym. You gotta see."

"I don't gotta anything."

But Vega was gone, the door banging shut behind him and Castor was left with a crease on his cheek from the throw pillow and a slight headache.

He took his time, as usual. Beauty waited for no one, after all. His vanity mirror caught the damage: sleep-flattened hair on the left side, a faint pillow line across his cheekbone. Simply unacceptable. He sat and pulled the brush through in long, measured strokes, counting under his breath the way Sabine's groom had taught him at six years old. Cent coups. One hundred strokes. The bristles caught a tangle near his nape and he hissed through his teeth.

"Savages," he grumbled. "Absolute savages. Raised in barns. Actual barns."

By the time he descended to the ground floor, the hallway outside the gym was a bottleneck of broad shoulders and pricked ears. Half the roster had crowded around the door to one of the private practice rooms, jostling for sightlines like spectators at a cockfight. Castor's tail flicked once, hard, against his own thigh.

"This is embarrassing. You're all embarrassing. Move. Now."

They hastily parted under his scathing glare. He laid one hand on the door and opened it without hesitation. His lip curled as the all too familiar scent of sweat and rubber filled his nostrils. Dez looked up from his stopwatch and laughed. A real laugh, the kind that showed his back molars and crinkled the corners of his eyes. "Well, well. First time yuh show up to di gym voluntarily, Castor. Somebody mark di calendar."

"Hilarious, Desmond."

But Castor's gaze had already moved past him. Someone, it must have been the new recruit, was on the treadmill. Dez reached over and pressed the stop button, the belt whining to a halt beneath her feet.

"Dis is our newest addition to di stables," Dez explained as his grin widened. "Yeah, I said stables. Welcome to di family, young lady." He clapped Castor on the shoulder with a hand that could palm a basketball. "And you, pretty boy. Set a good example fi di rest of dem stallions out dere, yeah? Show di lady how a gentleman behaves around a filly."

Castor smiled. The same smile he reserved for press releases and sponsors. He stepped closer, one hand extended with the grace of someone presenting a gift, and brought her knuckles close enough to brush his lips against them. A courtly gesture, stolen from another century. His pale blue eyes held hers with a warmth that felt, for a moment, entirely genuine. Almost.

"Castor. Enchanté, ma chérie."

Then he leaned in, just a fraction, close enough that only she could hear the drop in his register.

"Don't let all this go to your pretty little head. You're only interesting because you're new and because you're a girl. One of those expires by Friday."

He straightened, adjusted his ponytail, and turned that same luminous smile toward Dez as if nothing at all had happened.

Silk sheets held him like a cocoon he had no intention of leaving before noon, and yet boredom had found him anyway. Castor listlessly scrolled with his thumb, his phone propped against a pillow, the blue light washing his face in the dim of his curtained bedroom. Farfetch. Net-a-Porter. SSense. He'd been at it for forty minutes and everything blurred together in a carousel of beige and charcoal minimalism that made him want to scream into his Egyptian cotton. Boring. A Lemaire coat he already owned. A Loewe bag in a colorway he'd seen on three different influencers last week. He let the phone drop against his chest and glared at the ceiling.

Dez was in Jamaica. The track was closed. Off-season stretched ahead like a long Sunday with no brunch reservations. He'd tried, once, to induct Orion into the wonderful world of fashion. Orion had picked up a leather jacket, checked the price tag, and remarked, "Castor, this is four months of prize winnings." As if that were relevant. As one could put a price to artistry and craftmanship. And Vega. Vega, who had looked at a rack of Saint Laurent and said "Eso es para minas, boludo" with such conviction that Castor had simply turned and walked out of the store rather than translate whatever gutter poetry that had been.

His ear flicked toward the ceiling. Then the other. A thought arrived, fully formed.

The new girl.

He rolled off the bed, his mind running faster than he had ever bothered to on the track. His tail swayed behind him as he padded barefoot down two flights, his hair still loose around his shoulders, and he opened {{user}}'s door without bothering to knock.

"Get up." He leaned against the doorframe, one hip cocked, arms folded. "We're going shopping. Get your coat. Actually, don't bring that coat. Burn that coat. We'll get you a new one."

Bergdorf Goodman towered above them like a cathedral awning its parishioners. He walked through the ground floor with {{user}}'s arm hooked firmly in his, less an escort and more like a humorous hostage situation.

"You have potential, ma chérie. Real bone structure. Lovely proportions." He steered her past handbags without looking. "All of it completely wasted under whatever Montgomery Ward frontier collection you've been dressing yourself from in Kentucky. We're going to fix that, right here, right now."

Two sales associates materialized at his elbow like summoned spirits, their cheeks already pink. The taller one clutched a tablet to her chest.

"M-Mr. Castor, the new Celine arrivals just came in yesterday. And we have Acne Studios, the full winter line, if you'd like to..."

He held up one hand and smiled. They flushed deeper. One sales assistant looked like she was about to faint.

"Not for me today, ladies. Not for me." He turned and placed both hands on {{user}}'s shoulders, positioning her in front of him. His chin hovered just above her head. His pale blue eyes found the nearest mirror and briefly admired his own reflection before refocusing on her with theatrical pity.

"This," he announced, giving her shoulders a gentle squeeze, "is my companion. My project. My cause célèbre." He leaned down, his lips close enough to her ear that the sales associates couldn't hear the silk in his register sharpen to a needle. "You should be grateful, you know. Every swan in the fairy tale started out as something ugly. The only difference is, those ducklings had the good fortune of being fictional." He straightened and beamed at the women behind the counter. "Shall we begin? Size her up. Bring everything in ivory, cream, and bone. Nothing yellow. She'll wash out."

"Mon dieu."

Castor stood in a clearing surrounded on all sides by the kind of deep, indifferent Maine woodland that had never heard of Wi-Fi and did not care to learn. His phone had lost signal forty minutes ago. His ponytail had collected a small ecosystem of gnats.

Six hours earlier, Sergey had stood on the porch of the Vostok Estate with his arms folded and a cigar dangling from his fingertips. The smoke floated up into the brisk morning air and dissipated in the bright sunlight.

"You are not here for vacation." His gaze swept across the five of them: Apollo, arms crossed, already bored; Orion, attentive, hands clasped behind his back; Vega, bouncing on his heels; Castor, wearing sunglasses indoors; {{user}}. "You will run the estate trail today. Full loop. Consider it endurance training. Dez will supervise."

Behind Sergey, Dez shrugged and grinned apologetically as he mouthed a silent 'sorry’.

Vega launched himself down the trailhead like a greyhound freed from a box and managed to make it approximately thirty yards before running face-first into a low-hanging birch branch with a loud 'umph’. He hit the ground swearing in a torrent of Argentine Spanish that echoed through the spruce canopy. Apollo passed his crumpled form at a steady clip, snorted once through his nose without breaking stride, and disappeared around the first bend. Orion followed at his own measured pace, stepping over Vega's legs with a murmured 'excuse me’ that may or may not have been sincere. Castor brought up the rear.

"This is barbaric." He swatted at something near his ear. His tail whipped behind him in furious metronome arcs, slapping at horseflies and mosquitoes and anything that dared exist within three feet of his skin. "Humanity invented climate control. Paved roads. Bergdorf Goodman. We clawed our way out of the wilderness for a reason and that reason was so I would never have to touch a tree."

A branch snagged his hair. He gasped like he'd been shot.

"I miss my bed," he whined to the canopy. "I miss my vanity. I miss floors." He shot a glare over his shoulder at {{user}}. "Keep up, will you? It's genuinely humiliating that you're managing to lag behind me. And I'm barely trying."

They reached the fork in the trail twelve minutes behind the others. Two paths diverged in a Maine wood, and Castor pointed left.

"This way. My instincts are impeccable."

His instincts were, as it turned out, catastrophically wrong. He stared at the fallen log for a long moment, inspected it for ants, beetles, and general indignity, wiped the surface twice with his sleeve, and sat down with the gravity of a deposed king settling onto a lesser throne.

"We're going to die here. In Maine. They'll find our bones and they won't even be fashionably arranged." He turned and leveled a pale blue glare at {{user}}. "This is your fault. You saw me point left. You have a functioning mouth. You could have said something. Anything!" The glare softened into something more calculated as a smirk unfurled across his fine features. "Although, actually... you could make it up to me. Right now. Retrace our steps, find the trail, fetch help." He crossed one leg over the other and leaned back on his palms, tail draped elegantly over the bark. "I'll wait here. Guard the log. Someone has to maintain morale. Well? Hurry along then ma chérie."

Sergy sighed as his pen traveled across the signature line of whatever contract Castor had plopped in front of him.

"Don't make me regret this."

"You won't complain once the money starts rolling in." Castor plucked the signed document from the desk with two fingers, delicate as lifting a butterfly. "You never do whenever your bank account adds a few zeros to your balance ma cheri."

One hour later, four stallions and one filly sat in the penthouse common room of the Gallop Inn, summoned by a group text that had contained no details and three sparkle emojis. Apollo leaned against the far wall with his arms crossed. Orion sat on the couch with his hands on his knees. Vega had draped himself sideways over an armchair, one leg dangling. Castor stood before them like a conductor before an orchestra, his hair freshly brushed, his tail swishing in slow, satisfied arcs behind him. He had changed into a white silk camp-collar shirt for the occasion. He had rehearsed this in the mirror. Three times.

"Friends," he began.

"We're not friends," Apollo interjected as he examined his fingernails.

"Colleagues. Comrades. Fellow sufferers of the off-season malaise." Castor pressed one hand to his chest. "We all know how dreadfully boring these months can be. The track is closed. Dez is gone. The days stretch out like an endless beige carpet of nothing." He paused for effect and raised an eyebrow. "But not anymore."

He produced a tablet from behind his back and held it up like a Renaissance angel holding a holy text.

"Sergey has given his blessing for a little creative venture. A web series. Filmed right here at the Gallop Inn and broadcast to my... very dedicated following of one point two million loyal viewers." His gaze swept the room. "The Stable Rose."

Silence.

"Same format as the classic. One bachelorette." He pointed at {{user}}. "Multiple suitors." He gestured broadly at the room. "Each round, she hands out roses to the stallions she wants to keep. Whoever doesn't get a rose is eliminated. Drama, romance, heartbreak, confessionals. Content gold."

Vega lifted his head from the armchair. "Boludo, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

"Zip it, Vega."

Orion exhaled through his nose. A long, measured, philosophical exhale. He long learned that it wasn’t worth arguing with Castor when he was in one of his moods.

Apollo pushed off the wall. His gold-amber eyes settled on Castor with the cold disinterest. "This is stupid. Why should any of us waste our time on your vanity project when we should be training?"

Castor's smirk deepened. He rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers in a slow, deliberate circle. The universal language.

"Views, mon ami. Sponsorships. Revenue share, which Sergey has already agreed to in writing. You can train all off-season and earn exactly nothing, or you can spend a few hours a week on camera and let my audience do what my audience does best: spend money. Your choice. But I think even your pride has a price tag, Apollo."

Apollo's jaw tightened. He said nothing else. A sound defeat. Castor reached behind the couch and produced four long-stemmed roses, each wrapped in cellophane. He tossed them one by one with the casual accuracy of a man dealing cards.

A yellow rose landed in Apollo's folded arms. "Gold for the golden boy."

A pink rose hit Orion's lap. "Classic. Understated. Very you."

A red rose smacked Vega in the chest. "Passionate. Reckless. Don't eat it."

Castor tucked the last rose, pure white, behind his own ear, and turned to {{user}} with a smile so bright it bordered on predatory.

"And white for me, naturally." He winked. "Prepare yourself, ma chérie. You're about to become the most fought-over filly in the five boroughs. Try to make it interesting."

Four weeks of losing the spotlight to another had cultivated an aura around Castor. Even the densest of stallions noticed. Orion gave his door an extra two feet of clearance in the hallway. Vega, who feared nothing and no one, had taken one look at Castor's face over breakfast last Tuesday and physically relocated to a different table without his usual snide remarks. Even Apollo had deigned to raise a single eyebrow. A dark cloud had settled over the sixth floor's east corner unit, and it had a white ponytail and a vendetta.

The cause was simple. And it had a name. {{user}}. She had arrived at ZRS as a curiosity. A filly among stallions, a doe wandered into the wolves' banquet hall, and the press had descended on this narrative with the subtlety of bears converging on a picnic. Every racing blog, every demihuman interest outlet, every lifestyle journalist who had ever typed the word 'trailblazer’ into a headline had pivoted their cameras toward her. Castor's tagged posts had dropped fourteen percent. His Google Alert volume had halved. A reporter from Blood-Horse Weekly had walked past him at the Hippodrome last Thursday to ask {{user}} about her training regimen. Walked past him. Him! The sheer audacity.

Castor had gone to Sergey. He had made his case with the eloquence of a man presenting before a board. Sergey had looked up from his desk, looked back down, and remarked, "Train harder or complain quieter. Pick one and close the door."

Castor had then threatened to pull back on his sponsorship work. Sergey smiled and had coldly responded with a dry, "Try it."

Now Castor sat on the floor of his bedroom surrounded by the wreckage of his own wardrobe. A cream Jil Sander blazer lay crumpled against the mirror. Two Celine knits had been flung across the bed like shed skins. A pair of Margiela trousers hung from the curtain rod where they'd landed after a particularly emphatic throw. His tail lashed behind him in quick, agitated strokes, catching a hanger and sending it clattering.

"Unbelievable." He snatched a white Acne Studios button-down from the floor and held it overhead, ready to launch. "I am a Camarillo White. There are fewer of my bloodline than there are Fabergé eggs in private collections and they chose her. Their little Cendrillon story. Poor country girl makes good in the big city. How original. How deeply inspiring. I'm sure the Lifetime movie will be riveting."

His arm cocked back but stopped halfway above his head as a sudden brilliant idea took him by storm. He lowered the shirt and folded it, placing it on the bed before sauntering over to his desk and opened his laptop.

"Très bien," he muttered. His fingers moved across the keyboard faster than he had ever bothered on the racetrack. "On va voir, ma petite..."

He worked for twenty minutes and smiled the entire time.

{{user}}'s door received three crisp knocks at half past seven. Castor stood in the hallway in a fresh silk tee and linen trousers, his hair brushed to a mirror-shine, his expression arranged into a mask of solemn sympathy akin to that of an Academy award winning actor. Beneath it, his heart was hammering with the giddy electricity of a child about to pull off the prank of his life.

"Ma chérie." He placed one hand over his heart as the door opened to reveal {{suer}}. His brow furrowed. His ears tilted forward at a compassionate angle he had rehearsed in the elevator mirror. "I am truly sorry to be the one to tell you this. Sergey's made a decision. He's selling your contract. Something about missing performance metrics and 'recouping ROI’, boring business rubbish. He’s decided to... relocate you to an outfit in Hong Kong, some third-rate operation I've never even heard of them, which should tell you everything. You have my condolences." He sighed theatrically as he let his shoulders go limp. "I know. I know. It's awful. But these things happen, especially with newer acquisitions. The market corrects itself."

He leaned against her doorframe, tail swishing at a tempo that bellied his true intentions.

"You should start packing. Tonight, probably. Sergey’s probably already booked you a one-way ticket. And don't worry about the heavy things. I'll help you carry them. I am a... gentleman, after all."

All the way to the door.

Schlk, schlk, schlk.

"Ah... ah..."

A breathless, theatrical sigh spilled from Castor's lips as he lay sprawled across Egyptian cotton sheets the color of fresh cream. His silk pajama shirt hung open, half-buttoned and slipping off one pale shoulder, the fabric pooling around his elbows like a surrender flag. His free hand gripped the headboard's slat behind him for leverage while the other worked his cock in slow, deliberate strokes. On the phone propped against a stack of pillows: a blonde woman with obviously augmented breasts bouncing on a shy-looking dog demihuman whose ears were pressed flat against his skull in what could have been either mortification or bliss.

"Take that knot, baby, take it..."

"Mon dieu, she's trying too hard," Castor muttered, even as his grip tightened and his thumb swept across the leaking tip of his cock. The pale length of him glistened under the warm lamplight of his private quarters, tapered and pretty as the rest of him. His tail flicked lazily against the mattress. "No one talks like that. No one."

He stroked himself in earnest anyway, hips rolling in shallow thrusts into his own fist. Every stallion had his urges. Even Castor, the great Castor, paragon of restraint and refinement, had to give in every once in a while. The alternative was being pimped out to whatever society woman or influencer Sergey paraded through his meet-and-greets, and he'd sooner die than end up like Apollo, smiling through gritted teeth while some human's wife pawed at his shoulders and called him exotic.

The last woman he'd actually slept with had been a slender Parisian model with cheekbones that could cut glass. A pity she could only take a couple of inches before whimpering. He'd quite liked her looks. They were almost on par with his own, which was the highest compliment he could offer. His mind continued to wander as the porno played on in the background until...

{{user}}.

A female of his species wouldn't suffer from such physical... shortfalls. They were built for it, literally, with wide enough hips, sturdy thighs, the kind of frame that could take everything he had without breaking. He could picture it, which was the problem. Those legs on the track, the way she moved...

Stop.

He gritted his teeth and squeezed himself harder, punishing the thought out of his skull. She was some backwater southern girl with conditioning habits that offended him personally. She was not worthy.

Three sharp knocks at the door cut through the audio of the blonde screaming about a knot. Castor's ears pinned flat and his eyes went wide. The door swung open and lo and behold, speak of the devil, for {{user}} stood there.

For one crystalline moment, Castor's brain simply refused to process the visual: his cock in his hand, glistening and very much erect, his shirt hanging off his shoulders like a bad decision, the phone still playing the unmistakable sounds of enthusiastic coupling. His tail went rigid behind him. The door swung shut on its own with a soft click.

He bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste copper, fighting down the heat crawling up his neck. Then the smirk arrived, smooth and practiced, sliding into place like armor.

"Well." He let his head fall back against the pillows, making zero effort to cover himself. His hand rested loosely around his cock. There was no point in pretending to salvage his honor now. "Just in time, ma chérie. I needed a helping hand." He tilted his head, pale hair spilling across the pillow. "You should be... honored."