“Alright, alright.”
She stood up and stretched, padding over to brush some of True Name’s head-fur into order. “And you enjoy your time outdoors. Or melting on the couch, or whatever it is you are doing.”
“Mm. Do enjoy yourself, May.”
+ +Once May had changed her clothes and stepped away, a few long minutes of silence fell. Ioan finished eir tea. True Name got lost in thought, or perhaps dozed.
It was, ey realized, the first time they’d been alone together in weeks. The three of them had been cooped up together since both skunks had overflowed. The circumstances had rather forced their hands in the matter, at least until today when they’d apparently started feeling well enough to get out.
There was some lingering discomfort in the air, though, some careful distance between them. Something about what memories True Name had of em — something ey couldn’t possibly know — and what that meant for them still made its presence known. It wasn’t that they hadn’t interacted. Far from it, actually. She’d opened up far more than ey’d expected after the merger, watching May practice her monologue, talking about the decades and centuries before ey’d known her, about the time lost between her and May.
@@ -195,6 +197,8 @@“It crossed one of my boundaries,” she said, then forced herself to stand still and slow her breathing as she stared out into the night through the windows. “Sorry, dear. Like I said, it is awkward and confusing. I feel like I have been given control of some new, unwieldy machine and am only learning how to use it through trial and error.”
Ey nodded, tamping down the urge to apologize again. “Take the space you need.”
Her shoulders slumped. “I would like nothing more than to disappear out on the plain, but I should probably stop just running away from such things.” She smiled tiredly to em and held out a paw to help em stand. “Come. The least we can do is make dinner. Then we can discuss it further when your partner returns.”
+ +May’s response to the discussion of encroached boundaries, later that night when she’d returned, knocked both Ioan and True Name off-kilter. She laughed and tousled both eir hair and the fur atop True Name’s head, saying, “Well, took you long enough.”
“Wait, what?” ey asked.
“I have been placing bets with myself on how long it would take until it came up. Whichever part of me guessed “the minute I leave you two alone together” wins, I guess.”