Sleepy Fox Hollow To the house in the pines where the road ends

It was more than that to Wylla, who saw this as the only way she knew how to say she was open to this. Words in serious moments had always failed her but her body never had—except that one time she got pregnant and birthed a hellion—and so body language was her most trusted form of expression. She could not keep the sting from her words, the sarcasm from her tone, but her body could convey no such thing. And yet, and yet ...

All at once it became too much when Mahler reciprocated, tracing his tongue along the underside of her jaw only momentarily. Her throat bobbed as she hesitated in her ministrations, just a second in time where the truth of it might be known—that the touch of his tongue had made something flutter behind her breastbone. That something was followed very closely by the abrupt desire to flee, which seized upon her so suddenly that she very nearly did lurch away, and grounded herself only by gripping the ground so tightly with her white toes that the knuckles hurt.

She had to do something to break the tension now. She wasn't made to handle it without snark. So Wylla did what she did best and ruined it by reaching suddenly up and poking her tongue directly into his ear in a wolfish wet willy. She indulged in this abrupt silliness, which she thought might irritate him more than anything, for only a second before finding the words to say, haltingly and with a rigidity that was almost certainly nerves, we can just see how it goes, day by day. And then she pulled away, surging further up the path in a desperate bid to escape her own vulnerability, but with a slow wag in her tail that invited him to continue their walk if he wished.