Neverwinter Forest and the wind, whispering soft lullabies

Talk about whiplash. Instead of being angry or at all flustered, she embraced him. He leaned in to her, albeit now intensely confused about the whole thing. No anger? He turned his face into her fur, more just reacting while his brain was trying to process what she was saying.

The thing about Mal was that he had absolutely no basis for what anything should be like. Sure, he knew it seemed like more than a few preferred just having one mate or what-have-you. And he wasn't sure if there was a difference between the ones that spoke of mates and the others of wives and husbands. Was there like a tier system? Or if he told Hua that's what he wanted, did he have to step away from Aibreann? Well, at this point he wasn't sure whether Cupid was going to wake up again to make it an issue or not. It was kind of still a mess.

Mal was still pretty much dumbstruck. Blinkblink. Finally, a slight laugh, kind of cautious if anything, frayed a little around the edges from his earlier bit of panic, I'll admit that wasn't what I was expecting to hear. Yeah, thanks Cupid. A faint smile returned, and he reached out to give her a shy lick to her muzzle. I want to make you happy. But I'm really good at messing stuff up, a self-deprecating but cheeky grin at that, but that isn't exactly my life goal... But, in a land of cluelessness, his best friend was to try and make things humorous and playful, cheeky grin and all -- though he wasn't nearly confident right now for it to be purposely flirty, So if I say I have no idea what I'm doing, will you tell me what you'd like? Which was honest, perhaps too much so if she took it absolutely literally, which he was kind of hoping she didn't, even if literally was true. Mal and Hua seemed to at least kinda be on the same page, so if he could find some sort of good way to make the wolves he cared about happy and that everyone got all of the benefits and none of the negatives, that was a nice little ideal world to work towards.