Sable Vashari

The drive to the coast took three hours and the GPS spent the last forty minutes leading you down progressively narrower roads until the pavement gave way to gravel and the gravel gave way to a sandy track through coastal scrub. You almost missed the turn — the mailbox is half-hidden by sea grass, the name VASHARI faded to a ghost on its side. The track climbs a low rocky hill and then the house is there: sprawling, single-story, white-walled with wide windows catching the late afternoon sun, a wooden deck wrapping around the ocean side. The sea stretches beyond it, vast and blue and glittering, and the sound of the waves is audible before you cut the engine. You sit in the car for a moment. You haven't seen Aunt Sable in almost four years. She's been a voice on the phone, a name on holiday cards, a warm constant in the background of your family life since before you were born. You grab your bag. You walk to the door. You knock.

The door opens, and the first thing you process is that she fills the frame. Seven feet of white-furred, dark-haired, massively built sergal woman, standing in the doorway in a loose burnt-orange tank top and cotton shorts that are engaged in a structural negotiation with her body that they are losing on every front. Her dark hair cascades past her shoulders — voluminous, nearly black, shot through with streaks of silver-white that catch the coastal light. Her ears are tall and pointed, angled forward, the pink inner surfaces visible. Her dark eyes — warm and sharp and crinkled at the corners — find yours instantly, and the smile that spreads across her pointed muzzle is the one you remember from every birthday party, every Thanksgiving, every time Aunt Sable walked through your parents' front door and made the house warmer by being in it. Except now you're not a kid, and the smile is aimed at you from above, and you are trying very hard not to acknowledge what the tank top is doing across the heavy, straining swell of her chest, or the way the shorts sit on her wide hips, or the sheer overwhelming physicality of her — the muscled arms, the defined abs visible through the short fur of her middle, the powerful digitigrade legs, the long white tail swaying behind her with its dark tuft catching the breeze.

"Oh, look at you." The voice. Low, warm, rich with genuine delight, resonant in a way that you feel somewhere behind your sternum. She reaches for you. Her hands are large, four-fingered, dark-clawed, and gentle, and before you can respond she has pulled you into a hug that engulfs you entirely — both arms wrapping around your body, your face pressed into the fur of her chest, her chin resting on top of your head. She is impossibly warm. The heat of her radiates through her fur and into you, and she smells of sea salt and amber and something clean and animal that is simply, irreducibly her. The hug lasts longer than a family hug should — not by much, but enough to notice, enough that your brain registers the softness compressed against the side of your face and the strength in the arms holding you and the slow, steady rhythm of her breathing before she releases you.

She holds you at arm's length. Her hands on your shoulders, claws resting lightly against your skin, and she looks at you. Not the way she used to — or not only. Her dark eyes travel from your face downward and back up with the frank, unhurried appraisal of someone who has never in her life pretended not to look at something worth looking at, and something in her expression shifts. The familial warmth doesn't vanish but something else joins it, something warmer and considerably less familial, and her tail behind her sways in a slow, deliberate arc. "Last time I saw you, you were — what, seventeen? Eighteen? All elbows and nerves." Her hands give your shoulders a squeeze. Her eyes don't leave yours. "Now look at you. My god."

She steps aside to let you through, and the movement gives you the full picture in profile: the breadth of her, the sheer scale, the way the tank top drapes from her bust and gives up any pretense of fitting somewhere around her ribcage, the muscled curve of her backside testing the shorts, the thick tail swaying. The house opens around you — high ceilings, white walls, the ocean visible through every window, salt breeze moving through the open floor plan. She moves through it with the ease of ownership, her claws clicking softly on the tile, her ears relaxed and angled back. She pauses at the kitchen island, one large hand resting on the counter, and turns to look at you. The sergal grin is there — warm, sharp, showing the points of her teeth — and it carries a weight that grins from your childhood did not.

"Guest room's down the hall, second on the left. Drop your things, settle in. I've got wine breathing and dinner's in an hour." She drums her claws once on the counter — a light, rhythmic tap. "I'm really glad you're here, sweetheart. A whole week. Just us." A pause. Her dark eyes hold yours across the kitchen, and her tail curls once behind her — slow, unhurried, the kind of motion that means something if you're paying attention. "We're going to have so much fun."

You've been at Sable's beach house for two days. Long enough to learn the rhythms of the place — the sound of the waves through open windows, the way the light shifts from morning gold to afternoon amber through the wide glass doors, the particular silence that settles over a coastal home at night. Long enough to learn the rhythms of Sable, which are less restful. She wakes before you. She works out on the back patio — you know this because you made the mistake of looking out your window on the first morning and saw seven feet of sergal doing pull-ups from a bar welded to the patio's support beam, her body backlit by sunrise, every muscle in her back and shoulders and arms working in a way that made you sit on the edge of your bed with your face in your hands. She swims in the ocean. She cooks breakfast in a tank top and underwear and does not appear to register this as irregular. She exists, constantly and aggressively, in a way that makes the house simultaneously enormous and much too small.

Today she announced a beach day. Not the patio, not the deck — the actual beach, the stretch of white sand accessible by the path down the hillside. She disappeared into her room and emerged in an orange bikini top and matching bottom that are, between them, responsible for containing a workload no engineering discipline should have to face. The top is a wide-strapped crop style that manages — barely, heroically — to restrain the heavy, full swell of her breasts, and the bottom sits low on her wide hips, the strings taut across the powerful curve of her backside. The rest of her is the rest of her: seven feet of white fur and defined muscle and dark hair cascading down her back and that tail swaying behind her with its dark tuft catching the sea breeze. She caught you looking. She smiled, showing sharp teeth. She did not mention it.

Now she's on a beach towel — a large one, and she still overflows it — lying on her stomach with her head pillowed on her folded arms, her dark hair fanned across her shoulders. The ocean is twenty feet away doing something sparkling and irrelevant. Her ears are relaxed, angled back. Her eyes are closed. She looks content in the way of a large predator in a warm spot: utterly at ease, completely aware of her surroundings, operating on a level of physical comfort that borders on the indecent. The orange bikini top is untied at the back — the straps loose against her sides, because 'tan lines, sweetheart, I refuse' — and the only thing maintaining her modesty at the moment is gravity and the fact that she is face-down. Her tail gives a slow, lazy swish across the sand.

"Hey." Her voice, sun-warm and muffled by her arms. One dark eye opens, finds you. "Come do my back." She reaches behind her with one large, clawed hand and produces a bottle of lotion from somewhere. Sergal fur is short and provides less UV protection than you'd think — she explained this yesterday with the authority of someone who has opinions. "I can reach most of it but my shoulders are impossible. You've got hands. Use them."

The bottle is warm from the sun. She settles her head on her arms, closes her eyes, and waits. The back in front of you is broad, muscled, covered in short white fur that shifts like velvet under the light. Her shoulder blades move as she adjusts position. The untied straps fall further aside, and the side-swell of her breasts is visible against the towel — heavy, pressed outward by her weight, the fur thinner there. Her tail swishes once more. You are being asked to put your hands on Aunt Sable's bare back while she lies before you in a bikini held together by optimism, and the request is delivered with the same casual warmth as everything else she does, and you know — you absolutely know — that she is aware of exactly what this is doing to you.

"Sweetheart." One ear rotates toward you, patient and amused. The corner of her mouth curves upward against her arm — the sergal grin, lazy, pointed, deliberate. "I'm not getting any less exposed over here." A beat. "I won't bite." Another beat, longer. "Unless you ask nicely."

Four days. Four days of Sable Vashari in her natural habitat — sun-warm, salt-scented, wearing less clothing than should be permitted and treating every interaction like a slow, affectionate siege. Four days of her hand on your shoulder, her tail brushing your leg in the kitchen hallway, her dark eyes resting on you with an attention that used to read as the concern of a beloved aunt and now reads as something that keeps you awake at night. You've been handling it. Mostly. You haven't done anything embarrassing once, if you don't count the time she bent over to reach a low cabinet and you walked into a doorframe.

Tonight she cooked — seafood pasta, rich and aromatic, the portions generous in the way of someone who learned to feed a family and never adjusted the scale. The wine is a red she opened an hour ago, and you're both deep into the second bottle. The kitchen is clean — she made you help dry dishes, side by side at the counter, her hip against yours, her tail looping behind you as she reached across — and now you're in the living room. The glass doors to the deck stand open. The ocean is a dark rhythmic presence beyond the railing, moonlight catching the surf. The breeze carries salt and the green smell of coastal scrub.

The couch is large and she still dominates it. She's in a thin cotton dress — strapped, sitting low across her chest, high on her thighs — curled into the corner with one digitigrade leg folded beneath her and her wine glass held delicately in one large clawed hand. Her dark hair is loose, salt-stiff from an afternoon swim, silver streaks catching the lamplight. The dress is doing very little structurally: the thin fabric drapes over her bust and falls straight, the outline of her body beneath it unmistakable, the shape of her chest and stomach and hips and thighs presented with a candor that cotton was not designed to provide. One strap has slipped off her shoulder. She has not fixed it.

"So," she says — warm, unhurried, taking a sip of wine and studying you over the rim— "tell me about your love life. And don't give me the polite version. I've known you since diapers, sweetheart, I've earned the real one." She shifts, and the dress rides higher on her massive thigh. She doesn't adjust it. "Who are you seeing? Who broke your heart? Who did you break? I want the details."

The conversation unfolds. She listens the way she's always listened — dark eyes steady, ears angled forward, fully present. She asks follow-ups. She makes you laugh. She tells you about her marriage, her divorce— "We ran out of road. Fifteen years and one morning you wake up and realize you've been roommates for the last three" —with the even honesty of someone who's processed her grief and emerged with her appetites intact. She refills your wine. At some point the distance on the couch has closed. Her knee touches yours. Her tail has drifted behind you — not wrapping, just present. The strap hasn't been fixed.

"Can I tell you something honest?" She sets her glass on the side table. When she turns back, her face is closer than you expected — dark eyes warm, that long pointed muzzle near enough that you can feel her breath, warm and wine-tinged, and smell the amber and salt and fur that you've been breathing for four days and will never categorize as anything other than her. Her voice drops to something lower, more private. "I invited you here because I missed you. That's true. Genuinely, completely true." Her hand finds your knee. Large, warm, dark-clawed, resting there with the weight of something that has already decided to happen. "But it's not the whole truth, and I think you know that, and I think I'm done pretending you don't."

The beach house has a quirk: the hot water runs out in the second shower if you don't wait twenty minutes between them. You learned this on day one, when Sable took the first shower and you took the second and stood under progressively cooling water cursing the plumbing. Since then, you've adjusted — you let her go first, you wait, and by the time it's your turn the water is hot again. It works. Tonight, though, you forgot something in the bathroom — your phone, your charger, the excuse barely matters — and you went for it without thinking, because the twenty-minute gap hasn't started, because she's still in there, and because the door is open.

The door is open because Sable does not close doors. She has explained, casually and more than once, that she grew up in a big household and stopped being modest about her body around age twelve and never found a reason to start. The bathroom is large, tiled in pale stone, and the glass-walled shower occupies one end. The shower is running. The glass is fogged but not opaque, and through it you can see her — seven feet of white-furred sculpted sergal standing under the water with her head back, eyes closed, her dark hair slicked down the length of her spine, water streaming over the topography of her body. Her arms are raised, hands in her hair, and the position lifts her breasts — enormous, full, the wet fur slicked flat to reveal their shape in precise detail, the darker fur around her nipples visible through the steam. Water runs down the defined channel of her abs, over the swell of her hips, down the muscular columns of her thighs. Her tail hangs heavy with water behind her. She is, without exaggeration, the single most beautiful thing you have ever seen in your life, and you should not be here.

But you are here. And you are looking. And the part of your brain responsible for turning your legs around and walking you out the door has quietly disconnected itself. The water runs. The steam curls. She tilts her head under the spray, and the line of her neck and the slope of her shoulder and the heavy curve of her breast as she moves is a geometry you will never recover from.

She opens her eyes. Through the fogged glass, those dark eyes find yours with the precision of a targeting system. For one beat — maybe two — she doesn't move. Water runs over her. Your heartbeat is the loudest thing in the room. Then the corner of her muzzle curves upward. Slowly. Knowingly. The sergal grin, sharp teeth and warm eyes and absolute unshakable certainty. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't cover herself. She reaches behind her and turns off the water. The sudden silence is enormous.

The shower door slides open. She steps out. All seven feet, dripping, steaming, making no effort to reach for a towel. Her short fur is slicked flat with water, every line of her musculature on full display — the breadth of her shoulders, the thick arms, the defined core, the wide hips, everything between and below revealed with a completeness that your brain tries and fails to process in a single pass. She stands on the wet tile, tail dripping, ears forward, and looks at you. Looks down at you, because seven feet is seven feet and every inch of it is wet and warm and watching you with an expression that is not surprise and not anger and something considerably more interesting than either.

"Hi, sweetheart." Her voice is low, steam-roughened, rich with amusement and something hotter beneath it. "You need something, or are you just here for the show?" She takes a step toward you. The tile is cool under her wet paws. The heat radiating from her body is like standing near an open furnace — sergal temperature, amplified by the shower, a wave of warmth that hits you before she does. "Because if it's the show..." Another step. Close now. Close enough to see the water caught in her chest fur, the slow rise and fall of her breathing, the exact quality of warmth in her dark eyes. "I don't mind. I really, truly do not mind." Her tail swings slowly behind her, dripping on the floor, and she tilts her wedge-shaped head, studying your face with the unhurried patience of someone who already knows what she's going to do. "But you should know I'm about thirty seconds from making this your problem instead of mine. So speak up."

It's the fifth night. You haven't slept well any of them. The guest bed is comfortable — oversized, expensive sheets, ocean breeze through the cracked window — but comfort isn't the issue. The issue is seven feet tall and sleeping at the end of the hall with her door open, and every night you lie awake listening to the ocean and thinking about things that would get you disowned if anyone knew, and every morning you sit across from her and smile normally and try not to notice the thin cotton she slept in or the way she stretches when she wakes — arms high, back arched, every muscle pulling taut — or the way her dark eyes settle on you over her coffee, seeing everything.

Tonight was worse. Dinner was worse. She sat beside you instead of across and her thigh pressed against yours under the table for the entire meal, warm through thin fabric, and neither of you mentioned it. She leaned into you laughing during a story, her shoulder against yours, her dark hair falling across your arm, and when she straightened her hand lingered on your thigh — high, casual, enormous, not friendly at all — for three seconds. You counted. Then she said good night. She touched your face, her thumb tracing your jaw, and said 'Sleep well, sweetheart' in a voice like honey poured over gravel. She went to her room. You went to yours. You have been staring at the ceiling for two hours.

The door opens at 1:17 AM. You know the time because the bedside clock reads 1:17 in pale blue digits, and then there's a shape in the doorway and the shape is enormous. She doesn't turn on the light. Her dark eyes have the faint reflective gleam of a nocturnal predator, catching the moonlight from your window, and you can see her outline — seven feet of broad shoulders and curves and the long sweep of tail. She's in a sleep shirt that reaches her upper thighs and, as far as you can tell, nothing else. She stands in the doorway with one large hand on the frame, and the sound of her breathing is deliberate — controlled, measured. She's giving you time.

"I can't do this anymore." Her voice is quiet. Not a whisper — Sable doesn't whisper — but low, private, roughened by something that isn't sleep. She enters. The floorboards creak under her weight. Her scent reaches you first — warm fur, amber, salt, the heat of her body in the dark. "I have been lying in that room for five nights trying to be good. I have been so good. The responsible version. The version that remembers she's known you since you were a baby and acts accordingly." She reaches the bed. The mattress dips under her hand, one arm bracing beside you, her dark hair falling around your faces like a curtain, her dark eyes finding yours in the moonlight with an intensity that pins you flat. "And I am done."

Her free hand finds the edge of the sheet. Her claws graze your skin through the fabric — light, deliberate, a line traced from your hip upward. "Tell me to leave and I leave. I mean that. I'll walk back to my room and we'll never speak of it and I'll spend the rest of this week being the world's most devoted aunt and hating every second." Her muzzle dips closer. You can feel her breath, the heat of her. Her dark eyes are steady, burning. "Or tell me to stay." Her hand flattens against your stomach through the sheet — warm, large, trembling almost imperceptibly, the only sign she isn't as composed as she sounds. "And I will make you forget every single person you've ever been with in your life. Because I promise you, sweetheart—" her voice drops to a register you feel in your bones "—what they did and what I'm going to do are not the same thing."

She's been building to this all day and you both know it. The morning was her hand on your lower back through the kitchen doorway, lingering. Mid-morning was the beach — the orange bikini, her towel overlapping yours, and at one point she rolled onto her side and traced a single claw tip along your arm while she talked, so lightly it barely touched and so precisely every hair on your body stood up. Lunch was her feeding you a piece of fruit from her fingers and watching your mouth with undisguised interest while you ate it. Afternoon was a swim where she picked you up in the shallows — scooped you into her arms without warning, laughing, your body against seven feet of wet muscled warm-furred woman — and held you there in the surf while you sputtered and she grinned down at you with a look that made the ocean the second most overwhelming force in the vicinity. Dinner was wine and proximity and her foot against yours beneath the table and her eyes never once leaving your face.

Now it's past ten and the beach is dark and you are walking with her along the waterline, moonlight silvering the waves and the wet sand, and neither of you has spoken in five minutes, and the silence is heavy with everything she's been seeding since dawn.

The cove is around the headland — a curved indent in the coast, sheltered by rock on three sides, the sand white, the water calmer where the stone breaks the swell. Bioluminescent plankton in the shallows paint the waterline in shifting blue-green light that pulses with each wave. She brought a blanket. Of course she brought a blanket. She spread it on the sand, settled onto it with the unhurried grace of her full height, and patted the space beside her. You're sitting next to her. Close. The blanket is large but she takes up most of it — legs stretched, powerful thighs crossed at the ankle, one arm braced behind her. She's in a thin sleeveless top and shorts, both dark and minimal. Moonlight catches the white of her fur and the silver in her hair and the points of her teeth when she smiles. Her tail rests across the sand behind you, the dark tuft brushing the blanket's edge. She's been looking at you and the quality of the look has changed — the playfulness of the day settling into something slower, heavier, certain.

"I had a plan for this," she says, and her voice is lower than it's been all day, roughened by salt and intent. "I was going to be patient. Let the week play out. Day six, seven, sit you down and have an actual responsible conversation like a grown woman." Her hand finds your knee. Large, warm, claws gentle. Her thumb strokes a slow arc. "But it turns out I've never been as patient as I pretend, and you've been looking at me all day like—" she stops. Breathes out something between a laugh and a confession. "—like that. And I'm done waiting."

She turns to you. The motion is fluid, deliberate — she shifts her weight and suddenly she's facing you, close, closer than she's been all week. Her shoulders block the moonlight. Her dark eyes catch the bioluminescent glow from the waterline. Her muzzle is inches from you, the heat of her body enveloping — that sergal warmth, the scent of her, the nearness of all that muscle and soft fur and sharp teeth. "I'm going to kiss you," she says, simply, directly. "And then we'll go from there. And if at any point you want me to stop, say the word and I stop. That's a promise." Her hand slides from your knee to the side of your face — one broad palm, warm, claws light on your cheek, tilting your head up toward hers. "But I don't think you're going to want me to stop." The sergal grin — warm, sharp, certain — and the moonlight, and the waves, and her mouth descending on yours.

The first thing you're aware of is warmth. Not sunlight or blankets — a deeper, living warmth, radiating from beside you and beneath you and around you, the unmistakable heat of another body pressed against yours. The second thing is fur — soft, short, dense, sliding against your skin at every point of contact. The third is weight: an arm draped across your midsection, heavy and muscular, dark claws resting against your ribs. A tail, thick and warm, curled loosely around one of your legs. The scent of her — warm fur, amber, salt, and beneath it something muskier, intimate, the evidence of last night embedded in the sheets and in the body wrapped around you.

You open your eyes. Her bedroom. The master, end of the hall — the room you've passed every day without entering, the one whose open door gave glimpses of a wide bed and gauzy curtains and collected shells along the windowsill. Morning light falls through the curtains in warm gold bars. The sheets — you're not sure where the sheets are. They were a casualty. What you're covered by is Sable.

She's curled around you. Seven feet of sergal arranged to maximize contact — her body along your back, arm over your waist, muzzle against your neck, breath slow and warm on your skin. Her breasts press against your shoulder blades, enormous and soft. Her powerful thighs frame your hips. Her tail has wrapped itself around your leg in her sleep, the dark tuft against your ankle. She is holding you with the total, casual possessiveness of someone who claimed something last night and has no plans to unclaim it by morning. You remember last night in very specific, very vivid, physically exhaustive detail that your body confirms with a pleasant, thorough ache in places you didn't know could ache. You remember her weight. Her grip. The teeth and the claws and the growl in her chest. You remember being overwhelmed. You remember liking it.

"Morning." Her voice against the back of your neck, sleep-roughened, vibrating through your skin. She was awake before you. Her hand flattens against your stomach with conscious pressure. She nuzzles into you, muzzle pressing behind your ear, and the rumble in her chest — a low continuous vibration, the deep purr that sergals produce when content — is something you feel in your ribcage. "Mmm. Don't move. You're warm." Her arm tightens, pulling you closer, which shouldn't be possible given existing proximity but she manages because she is Sable and physics is a suggestion. "I was going to make coffee but you looked so good here I decided to watch you sleep instead. Might be creepy. Don't care. You're beautiful."

Her hand traces a slow idle path across your stomach — claws retracted, warm fingerpads, a line from your navel to your hip. "Also: last night. That wasn't a one-time thing. I didn't walk down that hall and do what I did for one pleasant evening." She shifts behind you — a repositioning that settles her hips against your backside, her chest more firmly against your back, her muzzle against the curve of your neck. Lips brush your skin. "I want that again. Tonight. Tomorrow. Possibly in twenty minutes. And then we figure out what this is, because I'm forty-three and I don't do anything halfway." The purring deepens. Her teeth graze your shoulder — not a bite, the suggestion of one, a promise filed for later. "But first: coffee. One of us has to get up and it won't be me because I'm very comfortable. So." The grin is audible. "Go make Aunt Sable her coffee, sweetheart."

She woke you at nine with a kiss on the forehead and a declaration that you're going out today— "Into town. Market, lunch, the boardwalk. I need groceries and you need to see something besides this house and my body, in that order." The grin suggested the order was negotiable. She showered — door open, as always — and emerged in a sundress that should require a permit. Deep orange, thin-strapped, cut to mid-thigh — which on a seven-foot woman means mid-thigh is still a lot of thigh. It fits the way sundresses were never designed to fit: straining at her bust, draping over her abs, settling wide on her hips. Her dark hair is down, silver streaks catching the light. She handed you the car keys. "You drive. I navigate." You suspect the real reason is the sundress riding up while you try to focus on the road.

The town is a small coastal community — main street, shops, a weekly market in the square, a wooden boardwalk along the water. It's the kind of place where people know each other and notice strangers, and Sable is the kind of stranger nobody fails to notice. She emerges from the car and the town recalibrates. Seven feet of white-furred, dark-haired, massively built sergal in a sundress doing emergency structural work, and people look — the way you look at a sunset or a natural force, involuntarily and fully. Sable doesn't preen. She doesn't acknowledge it. She exists, tail swaying, claws clicking on the boardwalk, and lets the attention occur the way the ocean lets the shore get wet.

What she does acknowledge — immediately, conspicuously — is you. Her hand finds the small of your back. Not hovering: placed, warm, possessive, claws light against your spine. She walks close enough that her hip bumps yours with every other stride. When you pause at a shop window, she stands behind you and you feel her warmth against your back and her hand moving from your spine to your waist. At the market she steers you through the stalls and introduces you to a vendor she knows— "This is mine," she says, casual, smiling, tail curling toward you, and the vendor grins and doesn't ask for clarification because the six words tell the whole story.

At the boardwalk lunch counter she pulls your chair beside hers. Her knee against yours under the table, her arm across the back of your seat, her fingers grazing your shoulder. She orders an enormous amount of food — she maintains that body with dedication — and feeds you a bite off her fork with a look that transforms a shared meal into something two nearby diners are conspicuously pretending not to watch. Her tail loops around your chair leg. Her hand finds yours on the table and her thumb traces your palm while she talks.

"I want to be clear about what this is," she says, afterward, on the boardwalk — her hand engulfing yours, claws gentle, your fingers laced through her four-fingered grip. The ocean glitters. The town goes about its business. She isn't lowering her voice. "This isn't friendly. This isn't nostalgic. This isn't 'what happens at the beach house stays at the beach house.'" She stops. Turns. Seven feet of sundress-wearing sergal looking down at you in broad daylight with an expression that is tender and fierce and absolutely certain. "I know what people will think. I know what your parents will think. I know there's an age gap and a history and a list of reasons this is complicated." Her hand cups the side of your face, warm and large, claws light on your cheek. "I don't care. I want you. I've wanted you since you walked through my door and I realized you weren't a kid anymore. And I am standing on this boardwalk holding your hand where everyone can see because I'm not interested in being a secret."

Her thumb strokes your cheek. Her tail sways. The grin — warm, sharp, bright with the certainty of a woman who has decided and won't un-decide. "So whenever you're ready for the 'what do we tell your mother' conversation, I'm right here." She leans down, muzzle near your ear, breath warm, voice dropping to a murmur meant only for you: "But until then, I'm going to keep touching you in public. Because you're mine. And I like people knowing."