Archive | March 2017

Almost Out The Door For A Date, Cya

After Cya gets ready for a date

Cya was too old for this.

“Go.” Her Kept gave her a gentle shove towards the door. “Listen… ma’am.” He seemed to suddenly realize he was giving her orders. “Just ah.” He coughed. “I was serious. Remember that he’s probably sane, okay? I mean, unless you were doing your trick specifically for someone who wasn’t.”

Cya raised her eyebrows at him, which really wasn’t fair of her. “Do you think I’d forget that?”

He heroically didn’t squirm. “Yeah? I mean. No offense. But I know you’ve told me your crew is a lot more stable than they used to be, but I also know you built a city with your bare hands. And I know what kind of person you’ve been Keeping for – for forever. I mean, I’m that kind of person. And I know what I’m like.”

She tousled his hair – dark hair, this time – and gave him an affectionate smile. “I don’t think I went looking for someone who needed me. But my subconscious does weird things with the Finding sometimes. Thanks, sweetie. I’ll try to remember he’s a normal person.

Normal. She was surprised to find how nervous the thought made her. He was right, Barzillay was. She didn’t have a lot of experience with normal – with normal adults. Normal kids, sure. She’d been teaching for decades. But normal adults?

Remember that he’s sane. What would he do when he realized how much she… wasn’t?

Next: https://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1273430.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1269924.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Need to Fight a Bunch of Monsters….

Okay, in #4thewords I need to fight a whole bunch of 200-250-word monsters.

So just for this weekend I am asking:

What would you like to see 180-250 words of?

No promises, but I need 50 leaves and I’ve only got 27, sooo.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1269514.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

The Tale-Teller – a story for Patreon

The thing was, she was both the tale-teller and the story.  She was both the portrait and the model.  She was the song and its subject.

There were theories about that, of course: theories and theses and stories and myths.  Stories have a lot of power, after all.

And storytellers have a power, a mystery, all of their own.

✒️

She came into town, whispers and mystery.  Wild like the harvest wind, lean and hungry. Continue reading

Hooked In

This is written to sauergeek‘s commission and a request for more about how Beryl’s father got hooked into the family.
🎣
In high school, there had been a couple people — two in every year, three in the class that were freshmen when Mark was a senior — that were just a little bit different.

Not “didn’t follow the social conventions quite right” different, not “their accent says they didn’t grow up around here” different, but somehow just a little strange, despite conventional clothes and conventional haircuts.

To himself, Mark thought of them as “shiny” or, sometimes “sparkly,” but since none of his buddies seemed to notice — and none of the sparkly people seemed to notice him — he thought little more of it.

Then came college.

Freshman year, first semester, Survey of American Literature I. She sat down next to him and smiled, and Mark was hooked.

She wasn’t beautiful, he supposed. Amy Marconi, sitting behind her, looked like a model and smiled like she wanted to show him what was under her sweater. But this girl, she sparkled.

He introduced himself awkwardly, and she was kind about his clumsiness. He offered to study with her, and she accepted — if they did it as a group with her cousin and his girlfriend.

Well, that wasn’t too un-promising, so Mark agreed. Anything to spend a little more time around that sparkle.

It was three years and more than a hundred dates — study and otherwise — before he admitted that the sparkle had been what first caught his eye. By that point, he’d met her sister, her cousins, and her parents, and he had a pretty good idea that her family had the biggest concentration of sparkle on the Eastern Seaboard.

She’d smiled at him. It was a small thing, but he could see the way it lit up her mood behind the expression. “You can sense the — ah, the sparkle?”

He didn’t say can’t everyone? because by now he’d learned that most people were completely blind and obstinate when it came to such things. Instead, he said, “your Aunt Asta has a sparkle that defies belief, but yours is more mobile and, ah, multicolored, and your cousin Suzanne has some wild night-time fireflies.”

She’d stared for several minutes. For a moment, he thought that mentioning the cousin had been a bad idea. No girl wanted the guy she was dating to notice her cousins, after all, especially not one who liked to wear scandalous things the way Suzanne did.

“You know,” she said slowly, and he braced for impact, “this means I’m going to have to marry you.”

It was so out of the realm of anything that he’d been expecting that Mark stared at her with his mouth open for a minute, possibly as much as three minutes. At least she didn’t seem surprised. At least her smile was glittering with mischief and not with anger.

“I,” he cleared his throat. “I, ah.” He rubbed his hands on his jeans. “I was hoping you’d say that. Well, I hadn’t asked, yet, and I’m not sure I’d really thought I had a chance, but I was hoping if I asked, you’d say yes, and—”

She kissed him, which blissfully saved him from having to say anything else.

“That kiss.” His wife was gone for the evening — a girls’-night-out with her sisters — which left Mark alone with his children; his youngest was at a sleepover, which left only the kids Mark felt he could be a little more honest with, and Chalcedony wasn’t really listening, which meant Mark was talking primarily to his two children who were brimming over with the sparkle.

“I mean, let’s be honest, the moment I met your mother, I was hooked.” His smile was crooked. He never minded being hooked, but sometimes he did feel a bit like a fish on a line. “The minute I realized people had sparkle, I was hooked. But when she kissed me…”

Beryl’s expression was thoughtful, like she’d never quite been kissed like that. Good, thought Mark, uncharitably. It was too early to lose her to some boy.

Stone, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to know what it felt like, and like he knew what it didn’t feel like.

Mark coughed. “So I was hooked when I met her. I was reeled in when she kissed me. But then I met the family…”

Even Chalcedony took part in the long groan. They all loved their family, of course they did. That didn’t mean they were ignorant of what their family was like, especially to outsiders, especially to men.

“Did they know?” Beryl leaned forward. “You have the sight. I mean, I think that’s what you said. You see the spark. Sparkle? I kind of like sparkle better. That’s not common, is it? I don’t know many people who can do it in the family…”

“I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t related to the family who could do it, besides me. Doesn’t mean there aren’t people who can. I mean, there’s plenty of people not related to us —”

“As far as we know.” Stone’s tone was dramatic. Then again, Stone’d had plenty of run-ins with the family lately.

“—not related to the family, as far as we know, who have some sort of power. It’s not all us — you. It just seems like it sometimes.”

“Sometimes it seems like they want us to believe that, or like the gr- like the older generation believes it, though,” Beryl offered.

“Well, the grannies like to have their story be the right one.” There was no use pretending that wasn’t the case. “And they do hold on to power. Sometimes I’ve wondered if they hold on to too much — but that’s a story for another day.” He didn’t need to be sharing family conspiracy theories with his kids. They had enough to worry about. “Anyway — no, the family aren’t the only ones with the power.”

“But…” Stone’s dramatic tone was gone. Now he was speaking slowly and thoughtfully, picking out his words and working through his theory while he presented it. “You said Mom said she ‘had to marry you.’”

“That was just—” Mark shook his head. He tried not to lie to his kids, even when it was uncomfortable. “All right, I like to think that your mother would’ve married me anyway. But yes. I always did get the impression that there was a little familial pressure going on there.”

“So — they like to have people with the power marry in. And men who marry in, uh. People who marry in, really…”

“They can get railroaded, yeah.” There was no arguing that point.

“So maybe not everyone with power is in the family?” Stone looked mildly sick. “But they want everyone to be in the family?”

“That…” Mark spoke slowly, considering that from all angles. “That would make far too much sense.”
🐠

Want More?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1269057.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Cuties – a ficlet of Doomsday

“So, which one of you asked?” Tokugawa ​leaned forward over the table, gaze bobbing between Byzantium and Charon. Charon’s new collar was silver with a band of something that seemed to change in texture and color depending on the way the light hit it, and it matched four rings on Byzantium’s fingers.

They shared a look, new-Keeper and new-Kept, and a smile that was far too similar. They had that new-couple thing going on, where they seemed to echo each other in everything, despite or because of the fact that they’d been hanging out for most of their time in school together.

“Wellll….” Byzzie started, and then giggled. “Believe it or not, we were both going to ask the other one. On the same day.”

“You have got to be kidding me. To Tokugawa’s left, Rhine shook his head in mock-disgust. “Seriously? You two are too cute for words.”

“Oh, I think it’s sweet.” Nobody could miss the look Eire shot over Tokugawa’s shoulder at Rhine – well, nobody but Rhine. “They were so in sync about it. That’s how practice Keepings are supposed to be anyway, right?”

“What,” Rhine scoffed, “disgustingly cute?”

“No.” Eire sulked, which was also missed or ignored by Rhine, “mutual agreement. Like a real Keeping. Something they came to together and hashed out.”

“It’s sweet, sure,” Rhine grumbled, “but ‘like a real Keeping?’ Really?”

“Like a real Keeping ought to be,” Tokugawa interjected. Nobody wanted Rhine getting Eire all worked up again. “And I think it’s kind of disgustingly cute – but in a good way. Cheers, you two.”

“Thanks.” Charon leaned his head on Byzzie’s shoulder. “It’s going to be an interesting year.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1268887.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Kitties~ (A sketch of Tír na Cali)

There had always been something a little strange about the Baroness Enasshi ni Firanne O Tertia’s household.

To be fair, the entire O Tertia household had been strange right from its founding, and their little barony, barely more than a town and some fields, drew more attention than something its size had any right to.

But ever since Enasshi – and what sort of name was that? – took over from her mother Firanne (speaking of names) on that worthy’s seventieth birthday (speaking of anomalies; most Baronesses had to wait until their mother died, not just until they turned seventy; seventy was nothing to the children of the gods), the little Barony’s little household had gotten even stranger.

Lady Enasshi had spent three years in Great Britain when she was in her early twenties, something that was not unheard-of but not all that common, and there were those who suggested that it might be a British influence. Others suggested the two years in Japan, the year in France, or even the six months she’d spent touring Africa. As a rule, it was generally agreed that, for a Californian noble, she’d spent far, far too much time overseas.

Which might be what they could blame for her staff, almost all bred moddies somehow unsuitable for Agency service. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with having genetically-modified staffers. It wasn’t even that there was anything wrong with having them as your butler and maid, your cook and your groundskeeper. (There was something a little questionable about having one as one’s Consort, but the Lady’s choice and the Consort’s were sacrosanct in that matter, and absolutely nobody was going to tell Lady Enasshi that she couldn’t have a dapper, well-turned-out cat-boy as her Consort.) It was just that, in addition to the oddity of a staff that was almost entirely moddies, from the chatelaine down to the pot-boy, in a rather well-appointed household, Enasshi insisted on dressing every single one of them in beautiful and elaborate livery that wasn’t now and had never been the style in Tír na Cali.

Most Californian nobles dressed their slaves simply- khakis and shirts with the household monogram was common – saving the frou-frou and ornamentation for their companions, their butler (only sometimes) and fancy-dress parties. Visiting their houses, even the house of a Countess, was like visiting a friend. Everything was casual. With Lady Enasshi, not so much.

“I don’t know what to wear,” bemoaned the youngest daughter of the Baroness Stasia ni Ysabet. “The last time I went to a lunch at Enasshi’s, the boy trimming the weeds was better dressed than I was. And I was in couture!”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1276560.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1268300.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Paint Me Blue, a continuation for Finish It Bingo

After <a href=http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/565158.html
>Paint it Blue, for my Third Finish It Bingo Card.
.

For a while – a week, nearly two weeks – Clarisse thought that her Keeper had forgotten the incident.

She was both relieved and annoyed: relieved because it meant that he was not going to pursue some sort of punishment for her mouthiness. He was not, as a rule, the punishing sort, but she was normally not the defiant sort, at least not in a manner he’d recognize. Annoyed because it was important, very important, and he was unfortunately important to her. He should understand her better – or, at least, it would be pleasant if he did.

Two weeks later she came home from her magic class – Yaku, and nobody at all was surprised that she was good with water, were they? – to find him tinkering with a wheelchair. Not her wheelchair; she was in that. This one had wide wheels and a more supporting foot-plate, a smaller profile and a better place for her backpack where she could actually reach it.

“It’s not done yet,” he greeted her. “But I installed a grab bar in the kitchen, too. I know you can hold yourself up for a little while if you have something like that.” He tilted his head at the dorm’s tiny kitchenette where, indeed, he’d run a bar the length of the cabinets. “So.” He set down the wench and looked up at Clarisse. “Who are you?”

“I…” She backed her wheelchair up and looked at him cautiously. “I’m sorry?”

“You said I don’t get to decide who you are.”

So he had remembered. Clarisse nodded cautiously. His expression was giving nothing away.

“So, who are you, then, blue-haired girl?”

Clarisse ran her fingers over the grips of her wheelchair. This was not a direction she’d expected him to take. “I’m not sure yet,” she admitted. “I never expected the mermaid thing.”

“That adds on. It doesn’t change your core. Well…” He frowned. “Sometimes it messes with your brain, Changes. Are you feeling a need to go swimming?”

All the time,” she admitted, before she could stop herself. “Problem is, I can’t swim. No pools where I grew up.”

“That does put a damper in it.” He studied her. “Also, — oh, hrrm.” He shook his head. “Another day. Today is about who you are.”

“Why interested all of a sudden?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You didn’t care when you jumped me in the hall. Or put a collar on me, or any of that.”

“Hey, I’d been watching you for a while. Problem is, I didn’t realize you were flying false flags. Or maybe I suck at semaphore.”

“Sema… oh.” She snorted. “You mean the blue hair?”

“Usually means ‘pay attention to me’.” He fiddled very pointedly with the wheelchair he was working on, not looking at her.

Clarisse smirked, although he couldn’t see it. “Ah. Mine means, ‘Don’t tell me how to look.’”

“Parents?” Now he looked at her.

“Parents, teachers at my old school, other relatives…” She shrugged. “Grown-ups in general.” A sudden suspicion overtook her. “Shit, you’re not gonna make me dye it back or magic it back, are you?”

He snorted. “I don’t think I’d dare…. But, seriously, no. I liked the blue hair on you when I tracked you down. I like it now. And this isn’t about me, remember? Except me reading you a little wrong.”

“Just a little.” For the first time in weeks, she found herself enjoying herself.

“You still haven’t told me anything about yourself, except by implication. Here, how about I start? Will that help?”

She knew his name and his dinner preferences, but she knew very little else about him, except that he had a temper and did not appear to be a rapist. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Okay. So.” He sat down on the chair and looked at her. “I was Kept my first year here. Almost everyone is, I think you notice. And they did it the sneaky way, tricked me into it. I’m not great at sneaky, and I decided, well, if we’re all going to play monsters, then we ought to own it.”

“You talked me into it.” His voice had been far more melodic then than it normally was.

“But did I lie to you?”

“Well, you did that singing thing…”

“You got me. But it’s not mind control, it’s not even really emotion control. It’s just sort of a smooth-the-way. Makes you less likely to stab me.”

“Hhnh. That’s only a good power if you’re going to wander around irritating people who want to stab you.” Of course, she wanted to stab him quite frequently, but he’d actually given her an order against that.

“Well, that’s possible. And I can, well, I can do more with it, if I concentrate.” He shrugged. “I just didn’t want to cheat quite that badly.”

“There’s rules to this?” That was the first she’d heard of it.

“Yeah. Outright threat is fine, sneaky is fine, offering protection against bigger monsters is fine. And, to be fair, if that asshole had gotten you, he probably would’ve been a far less fun Keeper than I am.”

Clarisse considered that, trying to be fair. “I don’t think I’d want to see what that ended up looking like.”

“Well, for one.” He touched her hair. “He would probably have wanted you to be who he wanted, instead of who he wanted.”

“But -” she frowned. Something about the way he said it made her wonder. “Could he? Could you?

“That’s… well.” He put his hands on his lap and looked away for a moment. “Starting from the obvious. I can tell you what to wear. I could make you change your hair back. I have the Words for it; I could change your hair, grow it out long if I wanted, even change your skin color, although the teachers would probably get cranky about that. I can tell you what to say and what not to say. I can tell you who to talk to and who not to, when to talk, when to stay quiet. I can tell you what to think, but it’s a dangerous road and careful people don’t do that. Often.”

Clarisse spread her own hands on her lap and frowned at them. “That sounds awful,” she admitted. “But would it change who I was?”

“It didn’t change who I was, but it – well, it changes who people think you are. Sometimes that means the one follows the other, from what I’ve seen.”

“Hnn.” For a moment, she couldn’t look at him. “I don’t think I’d like that.” She hesitated. It didn’t change who I was. “Did you?”

“No. I hated a lot of it, except… well, sometimes she told me not to hate it, and when that was over, I hated that part even more.”

“She?”

“She’s gone now. As things go, she wasn’t bad. She didn’t tell me what to think. She didn’t hurt me. But — she wanted a dress-up doll, so I was a dress-up doll.”

“What do you want?”

“That’s a very good question, isn’t it? I mean, I thought I was getting a loudmouth punk who wanted attention and liked mystery.”

“I like mysteries.” That wasn’t what he meant. “I like people not making assumptions about me. So you… you know, you don’t show much, it gives them less to make up perceptions on.”

“Except the blue hair.”

She sneaked a look at him. He was looking thoughtful. She wasn’t sure what she felt about him being thoughtful.

“Except the blue hair.” She fluffed it. “Got to give them something, or they’ll pester until they find something.”

“They?” He reached out, touched her chair, tugged her closer to him, until their knees were touching. She didn’t like him moving her chair — but, then again, she’d never told him that.

She shrugged. “You know. Other people in school. Teachers, staff. Everyone who looks at you and tried to put you in a box.”

“So you decided you’d give them a box to put you in, and then not give them — me, really — anything else to go on.” His brow furrowed and he touched her knee. It was a light touch, like he was trying to make sure she was there.

“When you put it that way…” When he put it that way, she felt guilty. She shoved the feeling down and snarled. “When you put it that way it ignores that everyone was already trying to put me in their own little box. All I did was give them something to pretend they were working with.”

“And me.” He nodded slowly, not seeming at all offended by her snarl. That was new. So much of this calm, thoughtful thing he was doing were new. “So… if I want to get to know you?”

“I—” she frowned. “I don’t know. I guess you could ask questions. I won’t lie, if you do.”

“Even if it’s uncomfortable?” His hand was still on her knee. It felt like it was burning a hole through her. It felt like he was holding her in his arms and cuddling her.

“Even if it’s uncomfortable.” She snorted at him. “Everything here is, you know.”

“A lot of it is. But — even magic?” He put his other hand on her other knee. The sensation was like fire and ice all at once.

She didn’t back up. She didn’t move his hands. “Magic is a pretty decent consolation prize,” she admitted. “But there’s still this stupid Change and the fact we’re in a dungeon and being a slave and…” She gestured broadly with both hands.

“Yeah.” He nodded with what looked like sympathy. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that. So… something about you.” He considered, as if he was about to ask something major, and then smirked. “What’s your favorite color?”

She smirked right back at him. “Purple.”

To his credit, he didn’t ask about the blue hair. “Mine’s grey.”

“You’re serious? Grey? How goth is that?”

“Well, a little goth, sure, but no, I really like grey.”

“I guess I oughta be glad you’re not dressing me all in grey, then.”

“I try not to do that,” he admits. “Maybe for the dances, but… well.”

“Yeah, well.” She looked down at her legs and sighed. This was notwhat she’d been expecting out of boarding school, magical or not.

He cleared his throat. “Right, so, now that we’ve broken the ice, on to the hard questions. What do you like to do?”

“Do? That’s pretty broad, isn’t it?”

“Well, I’m not going to ask what you want to be when you grow up.” He smiled crookedly at her. “I always hated that question. Now, when I go home, they say ‘what are you going to do with your life?’ instead.”

“Joy.” She cleared her throat. “Well… believe it or not, I liked roller derby. I had to sneak out of the house, of course, but it was awesome when I could…” Her voice caught and she looked away. “Damnit. I didn’t ask for this stupid school or this stupid Change or — or you.

“Hey.” His voice as surprisingly gentle, and his hand on her shoulder was careful. “Hey, can I hug you?”

“You own me,” she pointed out bitterly. “That’s what you said.”

“Yeah, but I can still be polite, can’t I?”

“…sure. Yeah. You can hug me.”

She was expecting something awkward involving a grab of her shoulders. Instead, he scooped her up in his arms and put her on his lap, hugging her tight. “We’ll figure it out. I can’t get you out of here, I can’t make your Change go away, but we’ll… we’ll figure something out, okay?”

“Why are you being so nice to me?” She shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She asked anyway.

“I guess.” He wrinkled his nose and sighed. “I guess I just needed to be reminded you were a person. Sorry about that.”

“It’s…” It really wasn’t okay, no matter what this place seemed to think was normal. “I forgive you.”

Want More?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1267957.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Worldbuilding Month Day 4: Powers in the Stranded World

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
🌏
This Fourth one is from [personal profile] inventrix:
Stranded: are there styles of strand-working that are not represented by the Seasonal Siblings?

Yes!

Next question?

Ahem.

Let’s see. Autumn is reading the connections, Winter is smoothing them, Spring is tangling things, and Summer does… little charms, which are really either smoothing, tangling, or making a connection.

In addition, we’ve seen a star mapper – who honestly is a combination of reading connections and interpreting potential connections. Like a life adviser with cheat codes.

There’s also Severers, snippers. Those are – well, they might not be bad people, but it’s a bad power. It eliminates connections, as the name would suggest, cutting them off.

There’s Binders. That’s different from what Autumn does; it’s the power to actually tie a connection where one wasn’t before. (Autumn can strengthen a connection with the right ritual). Tattercoats is a type of binder, knotting people to his will.

There are people who do many variations on the powers of the seasonal siblings as well – a psychic is a star mapper, a curse is what Summer does, and so on.

There are people who can bend the Strands to provide them with energy – not a good idea in the long run – to hide themselves from view by moving sight along other paths, to protect places or people by charming them with a smoother path or a firmer roof.

And there are people out there who can just grasp the edges of what the Strand-workers are doing, but can’t do any of it.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1267669.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Educational disagreements

This ficlet comes after: No Apple for Teacher, which followed Useful.
Both of those fics are after Retirement and Retirement 2: 50 years after the original series, Kai finds herself in possession of Rozen while she considers leaving Addergoole East.

“You’re not teaching them enough!” Rozen’s voice was a roar. He knew he was getting way too loud, and some part of him – the part that cared about the Bond – felt a little guilty about that.

The rest of him was angry enough to override that part.

“I’m teaching them plenty! When have you been a teacher?” Kai glared up at him, her hair a halo of red. Here, alone, she looked like herself. He tried not to let that distract him.

“More times than you give me credit for! I was even a Mentor a couple times!” Now his pride was pricked. “Look, you want me to teach them combat. You have to let me teach them combat.

“I’m letting you teach them combat.” She was implacable. She wasn’t even shouting anymore. Rozen didn’t know what to think about that. It was starting to take the wind out of his sails, though. “I just don’t want you to teach them to be assassins.”

“Look-”

“I’m looking. You don’t need to keep saying that.”

Finally, he’d gotten her irritated. He swallowed the guilt-misery and nodded acknowledgement. “I’m not teaching them to be assassins-”

“No, you’re not.”

“Could I finish, please? I’m not teaching them to be assassins,” this time he hurried on before she could interrupt him again. “Just to take care of themselves. They’re kids, Kai, and the world is awful.”

He dropped to his knees. “Please?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1267407.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

In Which They Stop Kissing Long Enough to Talk

First: A beginning of a story which obnoxiously cuts off just before the description,
Previous: In Which The Kissing Continues.

🐝
He didn’t carry her to the bed, but not for lack of offering, trying, and offering again.

“I’m not a blushing bride,” she complained, “and, besides, I like my feet firmly on the ground.”

Amrit might’ve been – not exactly offended, but put out at how brusque she could be, considering where they’d been and what they’d been doing, but she kissed both his cheeks and then his lips, the affection clear in the gesture and her expression, and he gave in.

She liked him. Amrit didn’t know what to do with that. Sure, girls had liked him before, but not like – “You’ve really got no illusions about me, do you?”

“You like to work and like to keep busy but hate authority?” Something in her smile was challenging. It wasn’t made any less so by the casual touch of her hand on his chest. “You’re overprotective of people you care about but aren’t that familiar with the concept. You have a foul mouth and no tolerance for rules.”

“…I’m not a sweetheart.” He didn’t know what motivated him to say that. Some half-forgotten long-ago girl, perhaps?

Whatever his reasons, it made her smile. “I know. Are we going to bed or do I have to carry you?”

🐝
Next: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2020/06/26/beekeeper-in-which-they-go-to-bed/
🐝

Want More?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1267010.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable