because that also meant the infernal Counter retained my no-sniveling status. I haven’t admitted this to Isla, but lately we’ve worked almost exclusively in the area in front of the Counter whenever possible simply to prevent the possibility of overwrought employees having easy access to change my hard-earned accomplishment of tearless days.
“Are you in a good mood?” Isla asks me, trying to gather her hair back one-handed with her stretchable hair-tying band.
“Thanks to you,” I murmur, as I catch her fall of hair in my fist and draw the band from her fingers. I tug on her mane and fire snaps low in my midsection, heating my groin as if I didn’t just attack my poor female. “I am.”
“I could have finished putting my hair up by myself,” she points out. She doesn’t sound irritated, and I’m glad.
“I trusted that you could. But I wanted to feel you again. If I hadn’t moved to take over, I wouldn’t have been able to grip your mane like this and wonder why I never appreciated human break times before.”
“You do now?” she sing-songs. And she buzzes her rump into my front. It shouldn’t be arousing, having metal clank into my legs, but upon considering what her metal represents, I’m immediately hard enough I could drill with my erection.
I tug her mane again, loving the way her neck arches, her muscles passive, submitting to whatever act I want her for.
I want her for all acts. All of them. “I have never looked upon them with so much goodwill.”
When I drag my claws through Isla’s tresses to better gather any loose hairs, she shivers and sighs in a way that tells me she finds the action pleasant. Feeling stares accumulate on us as I tend to my female rather than shout at all the humans to get back to work at their stations, I accept that my priorities will never be the same. Now that I have Isla, nothing will ever be the same.
And I am pleased with the changes. Before Isla, I existed. With Isla, I am… happy. I am finally, truly happy. Fulfilled.
“So hey,” Isla starts, cutting into my thoughts.
I stop teasing her hair and start applying the controlling band around her mane’s mass. “Yes?”
“There’s this big harvest gathering coming up—”
I make an agreeable noise. I’ve never looked forward to the event before. But I have been imagining attending. With Isla. At events like this, it isn’t uncommon for males to spirit away their females and return them thoroughly disheveled. I’m suddenly anticipating starting at the feast table. Isla could drop her napkin, and when she crawls under the table to retrieve it, she could use her pretty mouth on me in her wicked way—
“—and I said I’d totally ask you.”
She reaches her hand up and pats her mane, bumping my hands but not batting me away. She steps out from under my frozen self and smiles up at me. “Thanks! Feels perfect. So would it be okay with you?”
Her eyes are so bewitching. The scene I’d been building in my mind from a moment ago gets more distinct. My loins are afire. While everyone is tasting the fruits of many months of field labor, while I’m wet and hard from her mouth’s illicit attention, I’ll gather Isla, slip behind one of the stave-made granaries and—
“Bash? Is that a yes?”
I stare at her.
“It’ll really make it a celebration to remember,” she says.
“Yes, it will,” I agree, thinking of my plans for us.
Isla lights up like she has all the illuminance of the moon when it’s directly overhead. “This is great! The girls and I want to contribute, but we thought you might not be as enthusiastic as everybody else about taking time off of work to put on the big feast—”
“Stop,” I tell her. I hold up a talon. “Explain ‘taking time off of work.’”
Isla frowns and blinks up at me. “How many ways can I say it, Bash?”
“Repeat all you’ve said to me.”
Isla lowers one eyelid—not in the fashion of a wink, but in a squinty-eyed stare that tells me she thinks I’ve grown daft. “We want to take some time off of work.”
“No.”
Isla’s petal-soft lips part. Her petal-soft, cock-loving lips. And her eyes, her beautiful eyes look hurt. “No? But I want to put on a play.”
My tail thumps the stone ground, unhappy that she is unhappy. “Fine. You may take your people.” I steel myself not to glance at the Counter. “But I will continue tallying days that I