Chuckling, I stood with my hands out. “Okay, I get it. I’ll bring a towel.” I raced out of the room and up the steps, then back again in record time with two thick black towels in my arms, but when I arrived at the den, he wasn’t there. I hadn’t heard the front door open or close so I assumed he was in the house. Groaning, I ran a hand over my face, but couldn’t stop grinning.
“Kitty, kitty, where are you? I have a nice soft towel to dry you off,” I said in a soft singsong lilt. “Here, kitty, kitty. Here, boy.” He didn’t come back because he was a freakin’ cat , so of course he didn’t. I’d already given him a treat, so I couldn’t use that to lure him out, either. I crept out of the room into the hallway. I didn’t find him in the kitchen, or the more formal living room I only kept to satisfy my mother when she visited once a year from Georgia. When I turned into the laundry room, I had to laugh. My pretty Harley kitty was curled up on a pile of blankets he’d dragged off the top of the dryer onto the floor, and his wet clothes were gone. The dryer thumped softly in the background. So I couldn’t kiss, but I could see all that enticing skin?
Trying to make the pieces of this cat fit together in my mind— is it the man who doesn’t like the kissing, or the kitty who isn’t ready for it? —I carefully eased into the room.
“There you are, naughty kitty. Now those are dirty, since you dragged them onto the floor, but you’re such a beautiful boy, so I’ll forgive you. Are you ready to be dried?”
He cracked his eyes open and glared without moving. My heart hammered faster, and I grinned as I crept closer. What was life without a little danger anyway?
4
My heart thumped painfully against my ribs, excitement igniting heat in my veins, and it took everything for me not to wiggle my butt toward him. I’d come here with the intention of playing, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have sex. Maybe I did, maybe not. It’d been a while, a year at least, since I’d found myself an owner who not only gave me what I wanted, but I felt comfortable enough to let go of my control completely and allow him to fuck me. I certainly wasn’t in that area of comfort with Brad yet.
To me, sex was another statistic. How many STIs can you get from another person, what are the chances of something embarrassing happening during intercourse, and so on. These sorts of numbers were why I preferred to be in my pet frame of mind. I didn’t have to overthink things, and I could give up that anxiety and control, trust my owner.
He reached out for me, and I stared at his long fingers and nicely clipped nails; it was obvious he took care of himself. That was a good sign. If an owner could take care of himself, he could take care of a pet. It wasn’t in my nature to give myself over completely. Not yet. I wanted to play first.
I narrowed my eyes on his hand and swiped at him, and he retreated quickly with a smirk.
“Hey now, kitty cat, that wasn’t very nice.” He crouched in front of me, his gaze roaming down my very naked body. I’d stopped at my house on the way here to retrieve my ears and butt-plug tail because while I wasn’t sure if he really liked cats or not, I wanted to give it a chance. My tail was black and white like my ears, with white fur on the underside. The plug wasn’t big, but sizeable enough that I could feel it in my hole with every movement.
“Can I touch you?” he murmured. His smile had this kind of gentleness that made my tense muscles relax. “How about we go back to the den? We can talk about a few things.”
By talk, I knew he meant we’d discuss topics like our hard limits and safewords, everything we should have spoken about before I got ahead of myself and let my cat take over. I nodded, and when he reached for me again, I allowed him to swipe a piece of stray hair off my forehead.
“Come on, kitty.” He rose and turned, making his way out of the laundry room. Stretching, the plug shifted in my hole and I groaned, before following him out on my knees and hands. Luckily the floor of his house didn’t hurt as much as other places I’d been in. If we did this again, I might bring my kneepads. I followed him toward the den, with Brad stopping every so often to check that I was still behind him. When he got into the room, he went straight for the couch and fell onto it, patting the cushion beside him. “You can sit next to me, Harley cat.”
I purred in approval and slinked forward, raising myself to the spot beside him. Rolling onto the cushions on my back, I nudged his thigh with my nose, but when he went to scratch my belly, I swiped at him. I managed to get his hand this time, and he jerked back with a small laugh. Lying this way meant I was exposed to his hungry gaze. I didn’t miss how his stare stopped on my dick, which was already semihard and reaching up toward my belly button, twitching under the scrutiny.
He ran his palm over my chest in a circular pattern but didn’t go any farther south. “So, kitty cat, can you talk for me?”
I purred, tilted my chin back so I could look at him upside down, and nodded.
“Good boy. I’ll start. As I said, I’m Brad. I work for a blood bank and I play kickball. I’ve had a puppy, but I’ve never owned a kitty cat like you. I’ve been playing with pets for about three years now. I don’t clean up bodily fluids and I’m not into hard BDSM.” He tickled his fingers over my chest and I sucked in a deep breath, purring harder when a spike of pleasure shuddered through me.
My eyes slid closed for a few short seconds and I had to force them open again. I stared up at him, finding my voice, which was always harder when I’d fallen into my kitty world.
“Harley. An actuary for an insurance company. Bodily fluids and hard BDSM is a no for me too. I don’t want to bleed. I hate blood.” I stopped to shiver and a long unhappy meow slipped out, too.
“Same,” Brad said, scraping his nails over the nub of my right nipple. “Makes work interesting some days. Most of the time I’m in an office.” I tilted my head back farther and nudged his thigh again. “So no fluids or hard BDSM. I’ve done the hard stuff, but it’s not really my thing. Anything else I should know about?”
“I….” I frowned at his bare knee. His leg was hairy and I liked that. I preferred men who had some fur on them, and it could have been because I could never grow much myself. My chest had a puff of hair between my pecs, and I had some in all the normal places, just not as much as most men my age. “I don’t want to have sex tonight.”
Brad smiled gently and patted me on my right pec. “That’s fine, kitty. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want. Do you have a safeword?”
“Tarantula.” I blurted it automatically, my cheeks flushing hot.
He raised his eyebrows, and I knew I’d have to explain.
“I’m terrified of spiders. When I was a kid, my parents took me and my brothers to Australia and I was bitten by a redback. It’s dangerous and I nearly died. So I don’t like them.”
“That must have been scary,” he said, kind and soothing, and a tenseness I hadn’t noticed in my body evaporated.
“Your safeword?”
He startled and then smiled, and I understood why. I’d been around long enough to see selfish subs who never asked their Doms, or owners, for their own safeword, as though they never needed one. As far as I was concerned, both of us did. While the statistics of someone getting hurt veered toward the sub, Doms still had limits. “Cherub.”
“Cherub?” My eyebrows furrowed together, but finally I nodded. “Cherub.”
