by Tempe O'Kun
A faint groan rumbled in his throat. “Just don’t do it again.”
“I think I can manage that.” She flopped a paw down their bodies to grope his thick tail. “How ‘bout this idea?”
“This was a surprisingly good idea.” He caressed her shoulder. “Though I still like being myself.”
“Yeah!” Her powerful paws gripped his hips. “I never imagined I’d be so good at knotting you.”
The husky groaned, burying his face in her throat fluff.
“Aww, shy Maxie.” She stroked him from shoulder blades to tail. “Want me to grab the urn?” Under the weight of afterglow, she rolled her head to one side to face him. “So we can switch back?”
Max heaved a sigh, still stuck on her dick. Being under her fluffy bulk like this, having her buried inside him like this, felt safe and pleasant on a very deep level. He doubted her picking him up and staggering downstairs to get the urn would feel as good. Maybe they’d have to keep something on hand for next time. A blush heated under his cheek ruffs at the thought of a next time. They had all the time they wanted, so long as they kept working to understand each other. And, having been Kylie for a little while now, he decided he had a lot left to understand. He rubbed a webbed paw down her flank, a smile blooming in his voice. “Later.”
In the grocery parking lot, Kylie watched as Max and two of the suits from the Chamber of Commerce loaded cabinet doors into the back of her mother’s car. She leaned against the hot steel of a fender, clutching a never-used burial urn.
Carrying one door at a time, the ferret weaved around his companion. “We should hire an intern to do the heavy lifting for us.”
Marv chattered. “Pay some some college kid minimum wage and ask tell him not to tell everyone aliens exist? Yeah, that’ll go well.” His bushy red tail twitched with impatience. “In a small business, you gotta do the legwork yourself.”
Max, returned to his husky brawn, grabbed the last five doors and placed them inside the hatchback.
The slender mustelid slithered up to Kylie and extended a paw. “My urn?”
With both hands, she plopped it into his grasp.
“Thank you!” He snatched the vessel away. From his pants pocket, he produced a lens cloth and polished the paw prints from it. When able to admire his reflection on the golden surface, he grinned.
Marv vibrated them both a jittery handshake, in turn. “Pleasure doin’ business with you kids! Look forward what you can cook up for the industry.”
Her boyfriend’s gaze stopped her from snapping at him
They headed back toward the Chamber of Commerce building. “Why’s it gotta be my stuff we loan out?”
The red squirrel laughed. “Because you have the most stuff.”
“You can’t prove that.” A pout entered the ferret’s tone.
“I’ve seen your storage unit, Bob…” Their voices faded out of earshot.
The otter watched them go, palms resting on the hood of the car. “Well, we made our deal with the secret cabal.” She heaved a sigh. “What’d we do now?”
Sidling up to her, Max slipped an arm around her shoulders. A moment passed in comfortable silence, as he pulled up a document on his phone. Then he smirked down at her. “Your mom did want us to pick up groceries.”
They headed into the store. Max texted Laura for the shopping list. Kylie extrapolated a rough approximation of it into their cart before he got a reply. The main difference was a generous stack of frozen eel pies. They rang up at the self checkout, smiled with sympathy to the kid who had to collect the carts in an alien costume, and headed back across the parking lot.
Noon light shining off every car in the lot, Kylie waddled to her mom’s hatchback, a giant paper-wrapped salmon fillet in her paws. Heat leached from her paws into the refrigerated fish. She opened the back and placed the meter-long prize inside. One good thing about being an otter again was that she wouldn’t demolish the whole thing before she got full.
Max loaded the six bags he’d been carrying into the car. He climbed into the driver’s seat. The suspension creaked under him, though it didn’t rock nearly as much as the Amphicar. He started the engine.
She popped into the passenger side, shut the door, and buckled up. Upholstery radiated heat through her pelt. Her fingers danced over the AC controls, so nimble compared to borrowed husky paws. It felt good to be herself again.
A heavy claw rapped on her window.
“Ah!” She squawked and turned to face the intruder.
A big cat in a business suit stood just beyond the door—the cougar from the Chamber of Commerce meeting. He made a roll-down-the-window gesture with a few extended claws.
She glanced to her boyfriend.
He shrugged.
Putting on her most serious expression, she rolled down the window. She looked the muscular feline over. When she realized his height advantage, she thumbed the seat’s motorized controls, slowly rising without breaking eye contact.
The cougar leaned in, his forearms resting on the window well, his shoulders filling the entire opening. “You know, Joe was a buddy of mine. Came to the meetings for years.” A pause, then his tone darkened. “Maybe he was an alien. I don’t know.”
Max’s ears rose. “Should…you be talking about this in public?”
A midnight laugh rumbled past the cougar’s teeth. “Do you have any idea how many people shout about aliens in this parking lot?”
The otter’s heart pattered. She hadn’t fought off an alien weirdo in her own living room to be intimidated by some suit. Now if only she could stop the cold flood of adrenalin in her limbs.
Gary’s claws drummed on the steel of the car door. “I just thought I should have a little chat with you.” Spring sunlight shone off his pelt.
Wiggling whiskers in annoyance, Kylie crossed her arms, still holding the giant slab of fish. “About what? Revenge?”
“Revenge? You think there’s any money in revenge? No, we need to talk about how things work around here. This town, it’s a performance. Sure, a few things around the edges are supernatural. But the money comes from how we stage it. We all have our parts to play.” His slitted eyes narrowed. “You kids are from Hollywood, right?”
Ears up, the husky tilted his head. “Yes?”
He snapped his fingers into a little pistol gesture at them. “Right. So you understand everything is really about money.”
She considered whacking him with the salmon, but she didn’t want to bruise it. Maybe she could open the door really fast and whack him in the knees. She filed that away as a backup plan.
The big cat looked between them. “You two keep in mind what part you’re supposed to play. Save your dramatic scenes for the public. Otherwise, you could end up with nothing.”
Kylie looked at her boyfriend. The dog looked back at her like the cat was out of his mind.
“That got your attention, huh?” He straightened the collar of his brown tweed suit, picking a tiny fleck of lint from the lapel with a single sharp claw. “I hope today demonstrated that everything works better when we all play ball. You help us. We help you.”
She crossed her arms over the slab of fish. “And if we don’t wanna work with you guys?”
“Hey, you’re big names. I get that. But you should be happy with your piece of the action.” He grinned. “The Chamber runs this town. Previous Bevys never caught on, but we still made plenty of money off their antics.”
The otter jabbed a claw toward the middle-aged cougar. “Now, listen here—”
With rapid-fire clicks, Max sent the window creeping up a centimeter at a time between Kylie and the cougar. “That all sounds good, sir.” He nudged the pane of glass up another few clicks as he began idling the car forward. “Thanks for the heads up. Gotta get these frozen eel pies home.”
Gary stepped back, ears askew as the car puttered away and out of the grocery parking lot. For a long moment, he stood, watching them go. As they pulled onto the street, he adjusted his power tie and stalk
ed off toward his large luxury vehicle.
“Hey!” Kylie popped up in her seat and chattered at her boyfriend. “Why are we driving away?”
“Because you’re from the city, where people talk tough but don’t act on it.” Both hands on the wheel, he studied her from the corner of his eye “And I’m from the country, where nobody finds the bodies. I don’t want to find out where on that spectrum this town falls.”
“I was turning the scene around!” She threw her paws toward the upholstered ceiling. In a refreshing twist, they didn’t hit it, since they weren’t on gigantic Max arms. “It was a dramatic reversal.”
“Rudderbutt, it doesn’t work that way.” He allowed a microcar with a “Waldorf’s Psychic Whisker Tuning” vinyl decal on the back window to merge in front of him. “Don’t antagonize these guys for no reason. They’re probably some kind of ancient merchandising cult.”
With a half-sincere pout, she crossed her arms. “You never let me chew the scenery…”
“Nor do I let you crawl out the window and bite a city official on the ankle.” He steered around a pair of grizzled grizzlies sweeping the air above a storm drain with homemade electronic devices. “Which is what I suspect was about to happen.”
“At least we still have these.” She pulled the bracelets from a vest pocket. They looked so innocent, something she could have seen clipped on her middle school backpack.
“And that’s a victory.” He nodded, then furrowed his brow. “I’m trying, but I’m not sure how we can test them.”
“Oh, I can think of a way…” Her elbow nudged him in the ribs.
“I mean outside the bedroom, you hornball.” His massive paw dialed up the air conditioning. “To in prove the supernatural.”
She waved a bracelet in each hand. “We’ll just use them.”
“Two sci-fi actors acting like they’ve switched bodies?” His gentle blue eyes flicked to her, then back to the road. “I feel like we’ll get dismissed before we can prove anything.”
She waved a webbed finger toward him. “See? That’s smart.” She brushed a lock of hair back from her eyes. “Told ya you weren’t just the muscle.”
Tail swishing against the back of the seat, Max cast her a demure smile, ears tipped back. Then they popped back up as his muzzle switched to a smirk. “And you’re very brave to take on the world, being so small.”
“Hey!” She punched him in the arm. “I’m pretty tough per kilogram.”
He nodded. “I’ll be careful to only put things on high shelves if you don’t like them.”
Wiggling in her seat, she chattered in triumph. “Finally, the respect I deserve.”
He patted her thigh.
Her paw rested atop his. “We’ll just have to find some sap to test them on.”
“Someone who won’t sue us for subjecting them to however those bracelets work.”
“Yeah!” Her lithe body bounced in the seat. “Like Mom.”
“You think your mom won’t sue us?”
She pulled out her phone and skimmed through her favorite sites. “You wanna post a blog entry about this?”
“I took some notes, but it’s still too weird.” He shrugged. “Soon, though.”
“No rush.” She waved a paw. “The Internet’s distracted by this cake that’s also a pinball machine right now.”
“Oh?” His ears perked.
“Yeah. You know those little metallic cake decoration balls?” She held her fingers up as if pinching an invisible grape. “Turns out they make big ones.”
The canine nodded at the road ahead. “What a time to be alive.”
Minutes later, they ground their way up the gravel driveway to Bourn Manor. The faded mansion, with its vines up the side like a kraken from the depths of the lawn, now held a sense of familiarity and safety. When did that happen? As Max pulled parallel with the house, Kylie spied her mother tending the plants in the sunroom. No sooner had the car stopped than Kylie burst from it and scampered across the lawn. Laura looked up from the water lilies in the reflecting pool and managed half a syllable before her daughter grabbed her by the paw. “Check out what we found!”
With only minor objections, the middle-aged otter plodded with her offspring to the car.
“Mother!” Once in full view of Max, Kylie snapped a bracelet on herself, then flourished the other one at Laura. “Allow me to change your life.” She slapped the bracelet on the older otter’s wrist.
Nothing happened.
“Well, in a small way, yes.” Laura examined the bracelet. “Are these cool again? Am I cool now?”
“No, Mom.” Kylie shrugged to her boyfriend.
He shrugged back.
Her mom shrugged too, having no idea of the mystical powers at work. She took the bracelet off with ease and dropped it into her daughter’s hands.
With a quiet chitter of disappointment, the younger otter wondered why it hadn’t swapped them. Not that she especially needed to run around in her mom’s body. She’d get to do basically that in twenty years or so. But it would have been nice to get her to admit supernatural stuff was happening around this weird town. Maybe it needed to charge back up? Or it was keyed to her and Max now? Or it only worked across species? Magic artifacts from the 90s really needed better documentation.
“We did have another thing to show you.” Max popped the hatch at the back of her car, revealing a full set of cherry wood cabinet doors.
Laura bounced in place. “Hey, wow!” Her paws clapped together, then traced over the intricate patterns. “Where’d you find these?” Fists on her hips, she turned to make sure the younger mammals appreciated the woodworking. “Look how nice that nautilus turned out.”
The large canine restrained a smirk at his mentor’s sudden enthusiasm.
“They were in Joe’s old shed. We had to fight the Chamber of Commerce to get them.” Kylie socked a webbed fist into the air.
“Well.” Laura nodded. “I won’t be commenting so I cannot be implicated.”
Max pulled the phone from his pocket, winced at a link to airline tickets, and put it back. “Story idea: intern to the evil conspiracy. Lying to the world at minimum wage.”
The plump otter’s whiskers rustled. “Why wouldn’t he tell the world?”
His index finger rose to the question. “Why indeed?”
His mentor nodded. “It has potential. Give me a draft by Tuesday.”
“Ha ha.” Kylie stuck her tongue out at him. “You got homework.”
“You do too.” Her mother turned to face her. “We have to start getting the house ship-shape.”
“Umm, why?” She flung a gesture toward the sprawling manor. “I thought were we just letting most of it return to nature.”
“As part of my continuing initiative to talk to more people than just you in a day…” She peered down her muzzle, through wire-framed glasses. “You father and his family are stopping by for dinner next week.”
Kylie spun to her. “What?”
“Yeah!” Her mom waddled the first stack of doors into the house. “Greg was delighted to hear you thought of him.”
“Thought of him?” She scratched her head. “When?”
But her mother had already disappeared into Bourn Manor, chattering happily.
Max cleared his throat. “Umm, that may have been when I was you.”
Finding her way back from being lost in thought, she glanced to her boyfriend. “What?”
“Well!” The hulking canine picked up the entire stack of cabinet doors in an effortless load, with an arm still free to shut the car’s back hatch. “I’d better get these inside.” He trotted swiftly into the house.
“Wait a second!” A chitter of outrage rose in her throat. Arms flailing, she scampered onto the porch after him. “Get back here! You hypocrite! What was that about shark-infested waters?”
About the Author
Tempo is a husky in a cowboy hat. Raised on a horse ranch, he lives in North Dakota with his very understanding wife. He’s be
en writing stories about talking animals since he learned to write and has been guest of honor at furry conventions as far afield as Toronto and São Paulo. He teaches creative writing and game design part time at the local college and has been interviewed about his writing on National Public Radio twice. He is also staff writer for the furry pop culture analysis series Culturally F’d.
FurAffinity: Tempo321
SoFurry: Tempo
Also by Tempe O'Kun
Windfall
Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny
Sixes Wild: Echoes
