I didn’t say anything. It was strange how none of it was unreasonable. Stranger still how much of it sounded, stripped of all context, like someone simply explaining their household to a new resident. Here is where things go. Here is how I like things done. Here is what you can count on.
You don’t have to guess.
I had spent twenty-something years guessing at everything. Whether there would be food. Whether the weather would turn. Whether my group would still be there when I got back from a supply run. Whether I’d wake up in the morning at all.
I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded.
He got up to make breakfast and I stayed in bed because he hadn’t told me to move, which meant I was being obedient, and because the sheets smelled like him and because I was honest enough with myself, at least in the mornings, to let both of those things be true at the same time.
When I finally wandered to the kitchen, he was at the counter working on something that smelled golden and rich. He’d already set a glass of water out for me at the place across from him.
Already accounted for where I’d be.
I sat down and watched him work. He talked while he cooked. First about a bird he’d seen on the balcony that morning, thenabout a recipe he’d found in the old human archive that he was going to attempt later in the week, then about nothing in particular. It was the most ordinary conversation I’d had in years, and I caught myself listening with a feeling that wasn’t quite contentment but was shaped just like it.
He slid the pan off the heat, cut a piece of whatever it was, and turned toward me with the fork.
I looked at it. I looked at him.
“You could put it on a plate,” I said.
“I could,” he agreed. He didn’t move.
I thought about the principle of the thing. I thought about how I would feel about this in a week, in a month. I thought about what it meant and whether it was worth figuring out right now.
Then I leaned forward and took it off the fork with my mouth.
It was very good. It was going to keep being very good because he apparently didn’t know how to make things that weren’t. He stood there with the expression I’d started to recognize—not quite smug but close enough to be annoying—and cut another piece.
I let him feed me three more bites before I took the fork from his hand and finished the rest myself.
He didn’t comment on that. He simply sat down across from me with his own plate, and we ate in the kind of quiet that doesn’t need anything added to it.
Later, when I was examining it, which I tried not to do, because examining it was where the trouble started, I decided that the part that was actually dangerous wasn’t the collar or the leashor any of the rules that were really guidelines that were really just the way things worked now. It was mornings like this one. The glass of water already at my place at the table. The fork held out without ceremony and without an argument about what it meant.
The tail arrived on the third afternoon.
He set it on the edge of the bed, the same way he set a glass of water at my place at the table—with the quiet certainty of someone who had already decided how this was going to go. I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet near the window, watching the city move below, when I heard the soft sound of something placed on the mattress behind me.
I turned to look.
The tail was silver-white, and long enough to brush the floor if I were standing. The fur was impossibly fine. The plug at its base was smooth and polished, smaller than his secondary cock—which wasn’t saying nothing, but also wasn’t nothing. He stood beside it with his hands relaxed at his sides and waited for me to take it in.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied.
He said it the way he said everything—calmly, without negotiation, without cruelty, like the answer was simply a fact being delivered. I thought about arguing. I had a great deal to say about my dignity and the very significant difference between a human woman and an actual animal. I considered saying all of it.
What came out instead was: “Does it have to be white?”
“It matches your collar,” he said.
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
He picked it up and I unfolded myself from the floor and crossed to him, which I told myself was simply faster than making him come to me. He turned me by the shoulder and guided me gently over the edge of the bed, pressing my chest into the mattress. My dress was lifted, the cool penthouse air meeting my bare skin.
His fingers slid between my thighs.
