Sea Lion Shores i want a hot dog real bad

Making everything suddenly about her isn’t what she’d meant to do. She’s worked on it for months, now, and he’s just feeling it for the first time. It’s not easy. It’s ugly and hard and it really doesn’t get better. She wanted to prove that it did, somehow, but she’d failed at that too.

Ragged breaths part his fur as she tries to collect herself, feeling him press closer against her. She nuzzles into his chest until he pulls away from her. Ears twitch upon her head but she doesn’t open her eyes to look, instead tightening when his tongue washes over her face. “I’m sorry,” she mumbles, hardly forming the words, but the gesture is the same nonetheless.

Keeping her eyes closed, she focuses on the attention of his grooming. Occasionally she twitches an ear or adjusts a fraction to hit a certain spot. They’ve been close before but they’ve never been like this, she’s never seen this side of Artaax and quiet honestly, she never really thought he’d be like this at all. Something tells her it should be Blixen comforting her, holding her. Something even tells her it definitely shouldn’t be Artaax but she listens only to familiarity and without all the exploration and unknown, she finds it easier to mold herself to him.