The Tangle The stick, the thorn, the briar

Being young and relatively unscathed by the world of males and their desires for dominance and their wanton thrills for proliferation, Fenix hardly knew what had struck her in a blinding matter of seconds. Her eyes widened by a few millimetres as she watched him with some foreign feeling that unfurled closer to perplexity than it did to astonishment. It wasn’t just that she’d been wittingly dismissed as part of his plan to persuade her, either — dude wouldn’t even play along. Fucking rude.
 
There was a pristine little pause that developed between them as her gaze hardened a little, quietly restraining an entire fleet of choice remarks from surging through a seemingly calm surface, and she found herself squaring her ruddy shoulders as she looked him over. She managed to settle on tendering a fairly petulant, “Nah,” then blinked and moved to brush past him on deftly placed paws.