Hushed Willows “I Get Around” — The Beach Boys

After trysting with—shit, what was her name? Cat?—Finley hunted down his sister further north along the coast. Wildfire told him about a pack she’d discovered several miles over yonder. He could tell she was interested in joining and she probably wanted him to come along. He humored her, following her there to check it out, but Finley decided it just wasn’t a good fit for him. He left her there, wishing her well and promising to visit soon.

Now he trundled back toward Sequoia Coast, hanging a left to head inland for the first time. He decided to camp out in a patch of willows tucked underneath a mountain, mostly because it was cool and shady. It reminded him of sleeping under the palm trees on the island with… Meerkat! Finley sat up a little straighter, grinning to himself for finally remembering her name, then sank back against the smooth bark of the willow.

So she was mildly lost. She said mildly because she kinda knew where she was going but also not really, because Nephele was not having a good time bro. It was too hot, too hot for anyone to want to be out in the open.

She, however, had found shade. Blessed shade beneath willow trees. But even then, she paced in small circles, unused to keeping idle even when burning beneath thick grey fur. She licked her nose, walking in a slow circle around a willow to try and think of what she was going to even do next. Where the hell was she going, you know? Because Nephele didn’t know jack about where she was going. So she walked, mind a million miles away, slowly turning in circles like a disfigured carousel horse.

Names aside, she had been quite memorable. Finley smirked as he thought of their night together. She had been an awkward, bumbling and self-proclaimed virgin, openly keen on distracting and losing herself in their activities. He had found it rather endearing and he’d enjoyed himself, despite her inexperience. In fact, he was still feeling rather sated, seeing as they’d done it no less than three times in a row and he’d only begged off subsequent rounds out of a real fear that he might get rug burn.

When a pretty stranger literally wandered his way, looking utterly lost, Finley’s currently cowed libido made a valiant effort to perk up again. He sat up, then pushed onto all fours. He shook out his rusty pelt and approached, trying not to fall right into the white knight vs damsel in distress trope because how lame was that?

Hey! he greeted cheerfully, lifting a blackened leg off the ground to wave at her. His tail twitched too. You look a bit like how I feel: ‘what the hell am I doing and where am I going next?’ Finley quipped, pausing with a winsome smile to see what she’d say.

To say she was startled wasn’t quite right. You know that feeling when watching horror movies when the demon pops out of the closet and scares the guy in front of you so bad he throws popcorn all over you and you get mild burns from the butter? Yeah, that was accurate to Nephele’s feelings.

She jolted back a few paces, head thrown back to observe the man who’d startled her from her running thoughts. She gave him a blink, then another, before shaking herself. Cleanse off the shame, Nephele.

“Yeah, you uh...yeah. You got it. Τι λες τώρα, you startled me.”

His smile faltered momentarily when she startled, though it made a swift return when she spoke. There was a bit of nonsense thrown in there, starkly (and fondly) reminding him of Jawahir.

What did you just call me? Finley teased, finding himself just as intrigued by her exotic tongue as Jawahir’s… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Double entendres aside, he briefly wondered if he was developing a foreign language kink?

My mother calls me Finley, he added after a beat, his easygoing smile still in place. What does yours call you?

Ha

Haha

Wheeze

“Less of a name and more of an..expression? Of shock?” She said with a faint, nervous flash of teeth. Oh gods, how did people just...talk to each other like this, day in and day out, for funsies? She’d done it for a while, but it was different. Back then, she was arranging thefts, not small talk. Nephele swallowed.

Shit. Names.

“‘M...Opossum. Mom wasn’t too clever with my name.” She left out her tragic backstory. Gotta hit level five friendship to get that out of her.

Gotcha, he replied, just like he’d said to Jawahir. Sorry about that, Finley added for good measure. He was a lot of things, primarily promiscuous, but he also liked to think he was a gentleman. Contrary to popular belief, those things were not mutually exclusive!

His mouth gaped a little when she said her name. M’opossum? he thought incredulously, trying not to laugh. It then occurred to him that she’d simply stammered and he was the idiot.

I dunno, Opossum is a pretty dope name. You could put the Poss in my posse, Finley quipped, aware that he was veering a bit too hard into the cornfields here. Leave the dad jokes to Tegan, jeez.

Anyway, he continued in the next breath, you looked a little lost. Are you…?

Nephele couldn’t help the snort at the wordplay, valiantly digging her teeth into her lip to keep from breaking into a giggle fit. A mix of her own nerves and how genuinely funny she found dad jokes to be.

“Well...to be lost implies I knew where I was going in the first place.” She said simply, giving an awkward shrug of her shoulders, tipping her head to one side and letting her gaze skitter across the horizon, before returning to the self proclaimed “Finley”.

“....yeah I’m kinda lost.”

His dark brown eyes lit up when she laughed at his dumb joke. Was there anything more pleasurable in life than making others laugh? It was almost better than sex… almost.

Finley mulled her words for a moment before replying, Well, let’s start with where you came from. And why you’re not there anymore. He held out a leg and gestured at himself, adding, For instance, I was born in a place called Triquetra. I left to go sightseeing with my sister. Now he pointed that same paw at her and said, Okay, go.

Nephele was back to chewing on her lip as she listened, before taking a pen to her own story and erasing half the details.

“I was born somewhere called Cloudmirror Manor, left when I was old enough, helped make a pack called the Monkshood..” She swallowed. Trying to put up the appearance that it hurt her to think about, when really she was panicking over what to do next, before breathing out a shaky sigh.

“Left a few months ago. Difference of opinion between me and the leader.” That was an understatement.

“So now I’m here. With you. Talking.”

That was more backstory than he’d anticipated. Finley blinked as he processed the details, wondering if she would elaborate about this difference of opinion. When she brought them back around to the present, he assumed she didn’t want to share, which was fair. They were hardly more than strangers at this point.

Well… he said after a moment, drawing out the word for several seconds. Talking is great but you know what’s even more fun? With Finley, the answer was almost always going to be “getting laid.” But after Jawahir and then Meerkat, he wasn’t actually in the mood. Opossum was pretty and he might get there but right now, he had something else on his mind.

Napping, he declared after a moment of anticipatory silence, suddenly tumbling to the ground and rolling around in the soft grass beneath the willows. The answer is napping. He wriggled, enjoying the ticklish sensation on his striped spine.

After a moment of this, he rolled onto his side and propped his weight on one stockinged elbow. Or eating. I could eat. How ‘bout you, Poss?

Nephele watched as the russet coated young man fell back onto his back, stupified by the action, before slowly lowering her own haunches to the ground, grateful to take the opportunity to be off her leg for a moment.

Then Finley suggested eating and she was sold. She was already packed less densely than your average wolf. Involuntarily, her tail smacked the ground at the thought.

“I could eat. I could also go for a nap. ‘M pretty flexible.”

Though Finley wasn’t currently angling to get some, he couldn’t help himself. You’re flexible, huh? he joked, complete with an eyebrow waggle. Truthfully, she looked like if he tried to bend her, she might break.

Why not, he said, pushing onto his feet again, both? Or all of the above, if we want to keep this lively conversation going. Let’s roll out, procure some eats, then come back here, feed our faces, talk with our mouths full and then conk out. Sound like a plan?

She knew flirting, stuck halfway between mortified and exasperated. She settled for amused exasperation, rolling her eyes playfully.

“I think that’s a good plan. Great plan, even.” She’d only eaten the bare minimum to survive for a bit now, praying nobody came across her trying to scavenge for earthworms and various bugs and small things. Nephele raised up into a sit, ignoring the dull ache of the scars on her leg.

“Shall we, Finley?”

Ugh, only my mother calls me that, Finley replied with a cheeky grin and a wink. Call me Fin. And we shall, Poss, he added, throwing an elbow at Opossum before beginning a shuffling walk away from the shadow of the mountain, toward…

He stopped to look sideways at his travel companion. Which direction should we head? You pick. Opossum could have a reason for her choice or it could be totally arbitrary. He didn’t really know his way around (except for the coast), so it wasn’t like Finley could tell the difference. And he assumed there was something edible in any given direction.

Nephele got a bit of a chuckle out of that, rising to follow Finley as he shuffled away from her. When he stopped, she stopped at his right flank, happy to take up her old position behind another canine.

“Uh...” Decisions weren’t really her forte, nor were directions, but she assumed she’d be corrected if she was wrong in the way she was pointing. So, she pointed.

“North?” That was decidedly not north. More of a southeast.

Finley pulled a face when Opossum pointed in one direction and said another, right before he began cackling. He didn’t mean to laugh at her, but that shit was funny!

‘North’ it is, he agreed without explaining his brief bout, humming a chuckle under his breath as he began to head southeast. Honestly, he was a little weary of the coast and he especially didn’t want to go looking for food there, so this worked out nicely.

As they padded along, a ridge rose up in their path, forcing the twosome to veer ever so slightly to the east (actual east, not Opossum’s east). That introduced them to an open plain. Finley exchanged a look with her. Surely there was all sorts of tasty morsels just hidden in those long grasses.

Pausing at the edge of the field, Finley rolled his neck and shoulders, then ran in place a little. Time to put these long legs to good use, he said, exchanging another look with Opossum before promptly vanishing into the tall grass.

Okay so she was rather wrong about directions, and she couldn’t help her face from breaking into a small pout.

“I’m not good with directions!” She complained briefly, before they were off, pushed to the actual East by mountains. Finley stopped beside the edge of a field and she nearly rammed into his behind, stopping herself inches from doing so.

“Right, I’ll just-” Aaand he was gone. Nephele sat down for a moment, chewing on her cheek, before lowering herself into a hunting stance. Hopefully, Finley would flush something out.

If not, she was gonna have to go in. And get lost.

Finley couldn’t help but think of his ill-fated attempt to hunt birds’ eggs with Jawahir. And, ironically, his bounding through the grass flushed out some hidden fowl. Pheasant? he thought absently, ignoring the birds as they took wing.

His focus remained on critters a little closer to the ground. He dropped his snout and began sifting through the sedge’s roots, hoping to strike the trail of a hare or maybe a gopher. He licked his lips.

They parted when he burst through a particularly thick growth of overgrown turf and found himself peering down at a nest full of fuzzy little chicks, downy yellow with black splotches that could almost be called stripes. They began peeping as soon as he appeared, some of them scrambling up and over the confines of their nest.

He reacted instinctively, snapping his jaws back and forth, grabbing and swallowing pheasant chicks like they were popcorn chicken or something. There were so many of them and he ate every last one… except, well, one.

He snatched up the last chick, holding its head in his teeth as he turned around and ran back toward the edge of the field. Hey, Paw! Finley tried calling out to his companion.

She watched pheasants take flight over the grasses, blue eyes falling from the starkly decorated birds to the grass in front of her, before dipping her nose to the earth and taking a deep sniff.

And then she inhaled dirt.

Nephele coughed and hacked and sneezed for a moment, before she miserably picked her head back up a few inches, taking another delicate series of sniffs.

Of course, her attempt to track Finley was interrupted by the man himself, calling out another shortened version of her current alias. She stood up straight, bouncing up on her hind legs for a moment to try and peer over the grass.

“Yeah?”

He couldn’t be entirely sure he was running in the right direction, at least not until he heard her, “Yeah?” It turned out, he wasn’t going the right way, so Finley quickly course-corrected and ran toward the source of Opossum’s voice.

He saw her head pop up above the long grass about two feet in front of him and planted his feet, letting out a barking laugh of shock and shooting the pheasant chick straight toward his companion’s slightly open mouth.

A stellar shot by Finley from the three point line, it goes in the basket, all net baby!

Hoark

The last thing Nephele imagined when she popped up over the grasses to find her companion in eating whatever was in this grass was for a chick to go flying into her open mouth and straight into her gullet. If the sudden texture of downy feathers in her mouth would have made her gag, it became sure when the shell shocked young animal ended up in the back of her mouth.

With a cough that sounded like something trying to crawl out of the garbage disposal, Nephele landed on her four paws again, and managed to gag her way through spitting the chick out of her mouth. She stared at the animal between her front paws.

The chick stared back. They exchanged stares for a moment or two longer, before hunger won out and she snapped up the chick.

He could only watch in stupefaction as the chick went flying straight down Opossum’s throat, only to catch there. Finley cringed as he watched her choke, the look on his face screaming, My b! By the time he thought of striking out a foreleg and thumping her on the back, she hurled the baby pheasant onto the ground. He let out a little breath of relief, followed by a short laugh when she promptly devoured it.

I did not mean to shoot that down your throat, Finley swore to her, then realized what he’d just said and began laughing in earnest for a moment. Eventually, he put a black fist against his mouth and cleared his throat. I guess that’s what you’d call a snack attack…? Oh no, he was somewhere between Indiana and Wisconsin with that one (the lands of corn and cheese, respectively).

But it was like he couldn’t help himself as Finley queried, Still feeling peckish or should we move onto stage two of our grand plan? He could only speak for himself but he was stuffed and absolutely ready for a hardcore nap.

She was quickly finding out that an updated sense of humor meant she found dad jokes absolutely hilarious instead of the infrequent gallows humor that had predated this. Her tongue shot out to clean her lips in a motion not unlike someone sucking chip dust off their fingers. Blood, the chip dust of the animal kingdom.

“I can safely say you are the first person to throw a live animal into my mouth.” She said with a wry grin, relaxing more in the face of such a ridiculous situation. She’d just thrown up a live animal, she was allowed to get buddy buddy with the guy who’d did it, even if it was short lived.

“I could eat again..” Nephele paused for dramatic effect.

“But I could also do with a nap.”

I like being people’s firsts, Finley replied without missing a beat, grinning mischievously.

He rolled his eyes a little bit at Opossum’s non-commital response. Poss! he yelled, clapping his paws together. I need you to be more decisive. I just ate about 4,397 pheasant chicks and I can’t make anymore decisions relating to food! Although I’d be happy to barf up a couple thou for you if you want?