Stone Circle safe place

Ha ha, yeah, Charles said with an awkward grimace as Leta laughed away his reaction. He decided to just play along. Life so far had taught him that it was always best to just play along, after all. Whether that was a submissive reaction to his mother's disappointments, anger or whatever other emotion or a smile and a nod to Leta's carefreeness. The latter might just need a bit more positive reinforcement to ingrain in his head. But it all came down to the same thing: If you kept your head low, nobody would chew off your ears.

He nibbled a few more chews on his own stick and then got up, let it be for a bit as Leta showed up with another stick. It looked like a pretty good stick. As a matter of fact, Charles was a little jealous, even though he didn't recognise this emotion himself at all. As she asked how he would rate the stick, he said, Oh. Yeah, it looks pretty alright. His voice showed that he wasn't very impressed, even though he was pretty impressed she'd find such a good stick at her second try. But he wasn't going to tell her that. Then he grabbed it and put his paw on one end while he chewed on the other, giving it a good taste. The structure was pretty good too and even though Charles was far from a stick connaisseur he wished this stick was his instead.

Charles nosed the stick back to Leta and offered her a smile. There's better sticks around. I mean, it's pretty okay though. His voice sounded casual, as if he was letting her down easy. He tried to balance just between making her feel like maybe she just wasn't that good at this but without making her give up. Because he wanted to keep looking for sticks with Leta. He just didn't want her to realise that she was really good at it, because... well, he didn't really know on a conscious level.

Maybe he was afraid that she would realise that she was too good to play with someone like him, since she was his only friend in the world.