My tongue stalls between the flat blades of the beater. “Yanyk?” I manage without drawing my tongue back.
Laura gives an unhappy shudder. “Not cows. They are not cows.”
I talk through slurping Bash’s beater clean. “I don’t want to know.” I hand the sparkling beater to Laura, and she eyes me before she delicately grasps the far, far end of it like I’ve covered the whole damn thing with slobber.
Bash draws his tongue back in his mouth, eyeing his secondhand beater like he’s undecided on this chocolate mousse stuff. He holds his out to Laura to take like he’s pinching trash between his fingers.
I attack it before it can leave his hand. “I’ll finish it if he won’t.”
“Be my guest,” Laura says.
“You could be licking poison,” he worries.
I nudge him with my knee. “It’s not poison, stop freaking out. And Laura, thanks for having us over. ANYtime you need a taste tester, you say the word,” I tell her.
Bash’s lips thin and his ears drop straight down.
Crispin coughs to hide his snicker.
Bash’s glare is cast in his direction.
I catch Bash by his tail, which catches his attention. I lick a bit of chocolate off my top lip, enjoying the way Bash watches my mouth. I finish the beater and hand it to Laura too. “This was fun! But,” I check my bare wrist, pretending to have a watch—a reference which means very little to Bash, because Rakhii don’t really wear watches. They have these wrist blades that would make wearing anything below-forearm kind of tricky. “Unless you guys have anything else you want us to try, we’re gonna head out. We need to meet with Mandi about drumsticks.”
“You’re welcome, and what’s this about drumsticks?” Laura asks, confusion painting her face. She waves a hand back at a table laden with test dishes. “Aren’t Crispin and I doing the ‘birds?’”
Her finger quotes clearly broadcast how we all feel about the weird-ass ‘birds’ that live on this planet. They aren’t chickens. They aren’t Turkeys. Think of Emus—but even angrier. And they can fly. Basically, it takes three hobs to hunt one bird down, but luckily, the birds carry a lot of muscle (i.e. meat) so each bird goes a long way, feeding a bunch of us at a time.
“You guys are still in charge of the birds. Mandi needs musical drumsticks, not—” I wave my hand at the burgeoning table behind her, because the birds we eat here? Their thigh-drumsticks are so big, it looks like we’re eating friggin’ dinosaurs. “—not the edible kind.”
“Mandi knows how to play an instrument?”
“Like every instrument,” I confirm, bobbing my head. “You should see the kid play the drums, I mean dang.”
“That’s neat,” she says, and Crispin nudges her from the sink and begins to wash the dishes. She grabs him by the neck and drags him down to nuzzle his ear.
He starts to purr.
Bash’s hands close over my ears. “It’s time for us to leave.”
Hob purrs have interesting effects on human females. It can drop us off to sleep or turn us on, depending on the type of purr-effort the hob exerts.
We say our goodbyes and back out of their house.
Technically, we live one door down from them. But I wouldn’t say we live ‘next door.’ Because it isn’t in the nature of either Rakhii or Gryfala to tolerate close neighbors, so we’ve got some serious space between our places. Everyone in the human village has space between their places.
It’s still not enough for Bash though.
So we’ve kept the cave. And when Bash has had too much people-ing—like tonight, no doubt, considering how many couples we’re making the rounds to visit—we’ll retreat there, where no one will bother us for the rest of the night. He won’t have to see anyone’s face but mine for hours and hours, and that’s the way he likes it.
And because I’m getting my visiting fix now, I’ll be fine all night. Like a battery, I just need to recharge my socializing meter and I’m good.
We visit Mandi, who needs a source for her drumsticks and reeds. Before talking with her, I had no idea that drummers go through a pair of sticks about every three hours.
“Where have you been getting them before this?” I ask.
She points to the male behind her. Her Catman-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. “He’s whittled me every stick I’ve used.”
I clutch my hand over my heart. “That is so romantic. Dear God this is good TV!” I moan.