Tales of MU

In Which Mackenzie Indulges An Unusual Impulse

“I used to think that they just went to bed together and then woke up the next morning,” Sooni continued. “Then when I heard someone say that two people were sleeping together, I thought ‘Oh, I know about that!'” She laughed a little, then and it wasn’t her normal silly little girl giggle. I think she was actually laughing at herself. “Even when I found out about sex… well, I thought they were different things. In school, I thought the other girls were being gross when they talked about sex, but that they were being sweet when they said they wanted to sleep with somebody. I just wanted to find somebody to sleep with me.”

“I guess I can understand that,” I said.

It would have been easy to make fun of her, but I remembered being younger and hearing other kids talking about stuff like giving head and stuff and not knowing what they were. Hell, there had been a fairly substantial stretch of the ninth grade when I’d thought that “making out” and “putting out” were the same thing. If I’d been involved in more, you know, actual conversations with people, I could have embarrassed myself.

Anyway, I liked the actual sleeping with Amaranth as much as I enjoyed sex play with her… in fact, if I absolutely had to pick between the explosive orgasms and the snuggling and cuddling, I’d probably have to go with the latter. I’d pick comfort over climax, and love over sex.

Not that I actually had to choose.

“It just seemed like… such a lovely thing,” she said. “I remembered how I used to let Maliko into my bed when we were little, and how we’d fall asleep all curled up around each other, and I thought… if that’s what people do when they’re going out with each other, then I wanted to try it. I… I made a bit of a fool of myself with a boy, and Father pulled me out of school.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I hadn’t cared much for it, anyway,” she said. “I did very well in my classes, but I did not mix much with the other students. Also, they made me wear inside shoes.”

I couldn’t really fault the school for vetoing her big clunky sandals… they were loud as hell when she walked. I briefly wondered if her mother had picked them out so she’d have some warning when Sooni was coming… then I felt bad for thinking that. Sooni was opening up to me. I should try to be nice, I thought.

“After that, it was all private tutors,” she said. “That was better. I did not have friends at school, but once I quit going I had more time to spend with Suzi and Maliko.”

“Why didn’t you have any friends?” I asked. It was interesting to hear her admit that… I would have guessed she’d rewrite her own history so that she was the most popular girl in school.

“I would have, but I did not get the chance,” she said. “I think the guards made people nervous, and we always had to leave quickly when classes were over.” She paused. “Also, I think people were jealous.”

I decided not to ruin my growing… still small, but growing… appreciation for Sooni as a person by asking her what she supposed they were jealous of.

Even if he had exaggerated his power and influence to her, it seemed obvious that her father was somebody important, especially if Sooni had gone to school under guard. There were all sorts of reasons that people could legitimately have been jealous. All the same, I could see myself asking and her telling me that they were jealous because she was so popular. I just didn’t want to risk that.

As much as I would have loved to do a few things to Sooni and then have her throw me down and do everything else to me, it was sounding more and more like that really wasn’t what she wanted. It killed me to admit that. I was… to borrow a phrase from Steff, horny as fuck. I just had to look at her, her long legs sheathed in translucent red fabric with little flowers, her pussy just barely obscured by a strip of cloth, her breasts… oh, her breasts… her… you know, I kind of lost that sentence.

She had nice breasts, was the point.

But my brain felt sluggish and my balance was still a little bit missing. I wasn’t exactly tired, but I felt like I could have laid down and taken a nap without much trouble. That might be for the best, I decided, if she wasn’t really ready.

“Sooni, if you want… we could just sleep together tonight,” I said.

“No!” she said. “I know better now. We have to have sex, or it won’t count.”

“Well, it could just be for a start,” I said. “There is something to be said for starting slow, you know. I mean, I’m sure there probably is… and we do have to start somewhere”

“How would we start if we were going to have sex though?”

You throw me down on the floor and tell me how filthy I am. Fuck. I needed to figure out how to masturbate on purpose.

Well, we could try, anyway.

“Um… we could start with a kiss,” I said.

Yeah, that would be a good start… get in close, start exploring her mouth with mine, then her body with my mouth… and hands…

It was a start.

“Okay,” she said. She pulled one foot back, out of the thong of her sandal, then stepped out of the other one, and padded across the floor in bare feet towards me. Shoeless, she was a lot closer to being my height. She was moving towards me slowly… not exactly stalking, but almost tiptoeing forward. She reminded me a lot of an animal then, strolling across a meadow.

As I watched her approach, I thought about what it would be like to kiss her. Her mouth… it wasn’t quite the same as a human mouth. She didn’t have a muzzle, but her face was a bit more pointed towards the front, and she had those canine teeth. It would be interesting, I thought… and anyway, there seemed to be little point in wondering too much when I was about to find out.

She reached me and stopped. I wondered if I should take the next step, but then she started to lean forward. In order to make things easier, I closed my eyes and parted my lips, tilting my face towards her and trying to look inviting.

She gave me a little peck on the cheek.

“How… how was that?” she asked.

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” I said. “When people are going to… get involved like this, they usually kiss on the lips.”

“Oh,” Sooni said. “I knew that. That was just my practice kiss. Close your eyes again!”

I did, and I did my best to get back in the same position, even though I had a pretty good idea what was coming next. Sure enough, Sooni put her lips to mine for the only very splittest of split seconds.

“Sooni, is there any kissing in your comics?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes the panel even takes up the whole page.”

“Well, that’s because this is kind of important,” I said. “I mean, you can’t just decide to have sex with somebody… there has to be passion. And kissing is a way to find out if there is, you know… or to build some up if there isn’t.”

“Oh,” Sooni said. “You mean making out,” she said, making a face and sticking out her tongue.

“Sooni… it really doesn’t seem like you’re into this,” I said. She was close enough that I could smell her, and I gulped the scent down… it was mostly the slightly musky fragrance of her hair and the bits of fur. There was something else that was a little unpleasant, slightly caustic even… I figured it had to be whatever she used for her tan.

Even with that, her smell… and the fact of her proximity… was getting to me. I could feel the heat between my legs, the beginnings of the stirring that usually came when Amaranth laid her hand on my backside. My body was going to make things difficult for me, it seemed. My brain was sending out alarms, but it was paying attention to other signals.

On the other hand, who said my brain was right? Sooni was awkward and inexperienced, just as I had been, the first time Amaranth threw me up against the tree. Instinct had taken over pretty quickly. It seemed like Sooni wasn’t aroused, but I didn’t have Amaranth’s senses… how could I know for sure without actually going forward?

In the absence of special senses, I had to rely on what my eyes told me… and one look at the clothes Sooni had picked out was pretty persuasive. Who could possibly have put together an ensemble like the one she was wearing without at least some tiny little scrap of sexuality behind it?

As soon as I thought that, I thought of who could… and I realized that I couldn’t do this. I wanted sex… I wanted it so badly I felt like I might explode… but she was only doing what she thought she was supposed to do. If I went through with it under those circumstances, I’d be taking advantage of Sooni just as surely as people had taken advantage of Two.

More so even than most college students, Sooni had a serious case of arrested development going on. She was like a child… pre-sexual. She knew about sex, but she didn’t really understand it, and she didn’t actually want it. She only wanted what she thought it represented.

Or maybe another way of putting it was that we both wanted it, just for different reasons…

I shook that thought away. This wasn’t right. It probably wouldn’t even be that good. Sooni’s attempt at kissing was probably a pretty accurate indicator of what we had to look forward to.

At the same time, I felt like we’d made real progress in relating to each other as people. I didn’t want to throw that away. It was kind of a weird balancing act, morally. Sooni had done all sorts of shit I could not begin to condone just in the small amount of time I’d been aware of her existence, and who knew what else before that… but I didn’t want to shun somebody who was, at heart, just weird and confused.

“You are so quiet,” Sooni said. “Are you ‘spacing’ again?”

“Yeah, I kind of was,” I said. “Uh, Sooni?”

“Yes, Mackenzie?”

“I really want to be your friend,” I said.

“I want to be your friend, too,” she said. She put her hands in mine. Crap. I wanted her so badly, and the touching wasn’t helping. She was still wearing the gloves, but somehow that made it worse. “That’s why we have to do this.”

“No, we don’t,” I said. “We can be friends without having sex.”

I felt some internal irony at saying this, but I had a few friends I didn’t have sex with… depending on what definitions of “sex” and “friend” you used. Well, Two definitely qualified. Then there was Feejee, who was sort of my friend and who I’d only sort of had sexual experiences with. Hazel was possibly my friend… she’d got me invited to the dwarf party, anyway, and I definitely wasn’t having sex with her. So, there were people.

“But this way we know,” she said. “We’ll fall asleep in each others’ arms and wake up in the morning as friends for life. Twenty years from now, or even longer than that, we’ll still be sleeping together in the same bed. We’ll be old and gray together.”

“Sooni… do you realize that if nobody kills me first, I could live for hundreds of years?” I said. “Without, you know, growing old.”

“Well that isn’t fair!” she said. “You can’t do that.”

“And, anyway, that isn’t how it always works out,” I said. “People can sleep with each other and then get up the next morning and hate each other… or they can get along for a while and then break up, or even just sort of drift apart.”

“Well, those people are doing it wrong,” Sooni said. “We’ll get it right.”

“Lots of people want that,” I said. “But it has to happen on its own, I think.”

“And it will!” she said. “We just have to have sex and then wake up together.”

“Sooni, in your scenario, how often do we sleep together?”

“Every night,” she said. “Whenever possible.”

“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “You aren’t ready, and I couldn’t give you what you wanted, anyway.”

“Yes, you could!” Sooni said. “You are a lesbian, I know it.”

“Yeah, I kind of am,” I said. “But I love Amaranth. I’m in love with Amaranth.”

“But if you do this, then you’ll be in love with me,” Sooni said.

“I won’t,” I said.

“I know you think that, but you don’t understand these things the way I do,” she said. It seemed like an understatement to me. “You don’t have to believe me, Miss Mackenzie… just do this with me, and tomorrow we’ll see who was right.”

“Sooni… I honestly don’t really know what I’m doing a lot of the time,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be right… and I’m sure that if I did do that, and you woke up tomorrow and saw that nothing changed, you’d be mad… you’d blame me for messing things up somehow… and even if it was for the wrong reason, you’d be right for blaming me.”

“Well, that has an easy solution,” Sooni said. “Don’t mess things up.”

It seemed like it would be impossible to make Sooni understand what I meant, especially as I seemed to be getting more and more tired. It wasn’t really taking the edge of my arousal, but it was threatening to overrule it.

“Sooni, I’ll sleep with you,” I offered again, fighting back a yawn. “If you want to, to try, to see how it feels… but I really don’t think we should do anything else, especially with how much we both drank.”

“The wine makes it easier,” Sooni said. “I don’t think I could kiss you without it.”

“Then we probably shouldn’t be kissing,” I said. “Or anything else. Let’s just go to bed… we can try just sleeping, and if you like it, we can maybe do other things when you feel like you’re ready for them.”

“But I am ready!” Sooni said, stomping her bare foot. The sound was underwhelming, and she seemed more than a little off-balance. “I’m ready right now!”

“Sooni, I’m going to go lay down,” I said, turning and walking… okay, lurching… towards the bed. “In the morning, when the wine’s worn off, you’ll probably thank me. Or stab me. I don’t really care.”

“Why don’t you want to love me?”

“People already love you,” I said, climbing onto the bed. Proximity to the covers seemed to be increasing my grogginess. I could practically taste the pillow. Well, you know what I mean. “Maliko.”

“Maliko is a neko,” Sooni said. “She isn’t like me.”

“You love nekos,” I murmured, my eyelids sliding downward as I tried to arrange myself. Behind them, I was seeing images of Sooni’s rapt expression, Sunday mornings at five. “They’re… so… pretty.”

“But I can’t love her,” Sooni said. “Not like…”

The rest of what she said was lost to blackness.

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Characters: Mackenzie, Sooni