FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The needle tapped up and down in a rhythm that Jack remembered from his childhood. He pushed the fabric through with beads of sweat trailing down his face. "Why am I the one doing this? Shouldn't you be learning how?" He looked up to see the green kobold playing with her phone, Jack cleared his throat loudly and she peeked up from behind the glow.

"Because you're better at it than I am. You've seen my attempt at making more shorts." She leered towards him with a raised eyeridge, looking over the machine he sat at. "I've never used anything like that before."

"Have to start somewhere," he grumbled, he'd been at this for days now with no real improvement. The look on the lady's face was priceless when he came to pick up the sewing machine though he couldn't help feeling embarrassed. The needle tapped a few more times and then he nodded to himself. "Well, I think it's ready," he said and dangled the clothing towards her, but Lys was already back to staring at the phone. He tossed it at her, wrapping it around her left horn. "Two points."

Lys stuck her tongue out at him and peeled the sock off her horn. She gave it a once over before sitting down on the edge of the bed. Jack bit his lower lip and wrung his hands together as he watched her stretch out her leg and flex her foot a few times. She scrunched up the sock to pull it on, snarling when the thing snagged on her toeclaw. "Be patient," Jack said.

"Hmmph, kobold feet were never meant for such things." Bundling the sock up again, she tried to get her claws through the holes at the bottom. Jack risked a half-smile, hoping he'd managed to cut them right this time. Sewing for digitigrade feet and legs proved a challenge though he was becoming a tailor for her sake. Bit by bit she pulled it up until it wrapped snugly around her lower leg.

"Well?"

The kobold stood up, stretched her leg, and took a few steps around the bedroom before looking up at him with a thumbs up. "Fits nice, doesn't slip."

Jack let out a huge sigh and sunk back in the chair before he wiped his brow. "Ten time's the charm...what? Why are you looking at me like that?"

"How about one for the other foot?"

The corner of his mouth twitched. "Other foot, yeah." The area around the sewing machine was a mess of spools, discarded attempts, and unraveled fabric. The joints of his fingers ached from all the fine work and it made him worry he'd develop early arthritis trying to fashion his lover a full wardrobe. Still, he felt very proud, seeing gaudy purple and blue patterned sock on her foot though he made a note not to let her pick out the colors anymore. Her toeclaws stuck out of the holes he'd cut while leaving the rest of the foot covered. He imagined any kind of shoe would need the same sort of treatment.

_Shoes._He shuddered to himself, sewing clothes was one thing; he had at least a little practice under his belt thanks to his mother, but Jack couldn't see himself taking up cordwaining. He dreaded to think of what a custom pair of shoes might cost to say nothing of finding someone willing to make them.

"Thank you for the gift, my love." She laid the finished sock beside the sewing machine as she beamed a smile at him. He felt glad all over, maybe shoemaking was easier than it looked?

"You're welcome. Gift...oh shit!" He sprang up, almost knocking the table over and taking the sewing machine with it.

"What? What did I say? Is something wrong?" Lys trailed after him.

He shook his head as he went for the door. "No coordaining. I just kept forgetting..." he said more to himself as he turned the knob. Jack stepped out into the warm afternoon and Lys stopped at the door frame, watching him disappear from view down the steps. Jack didn't have to hear her sigh; he could feel it. "If only..." he thought about their time in the park and the convenience store. That had gone well enough so why did he feel paranoid about letting her go outside? Aside from the fact that there were idiots everywhere who'd try to run her off, or call the police, or who knows what else. The past few months and his growing love made him overprotective, paranoid even, but the world pulled no punches and he couldn't tolerate the idea of her being hit.

He slipped the key into the trunk, the boxes sitting right where he'd left them. Originally, he intended to surprise her the other day, but then a certain yellow kobold on his doorstep threw off his plans. Later, he remembered them when he was on the way to work and then forgot them again by the time he got home and on it went until he reached the weekend where he promptly forgot them again until Lys said something. Under normal circumstances he'd never let something so valuable sit in the back of his car for so long and it made him worry that all the stress was having an effect on his brain.

"We really need to go out someplace," he said in passing as he lifted up the first box. "Just wish I knew where." The package was just odd enough to make getting up the steps tricky without letting it slip out of his fingers and memories of almost getting knocked down the steps gave him an unsure gait. He saw Lys waiting there by the door for him, ever so slightly more on the outside than the inside, just enough so that the sunlight touched her scales.

She ogled at the box in his hands. "What in the world did you get?"

"You'll see." He motioned for her to step out of his way.

Lys stood in the middle of the boxes, turning about slowly, holding her tail in her hands. "What is all this stuff? You really shouldn't..." It took two trips to get everything. All of it had gone to his workplace, it was easier that way. With each package he laid out Lys looked more excited and troubled. Her expression changed from glee to guilt and back again.

A smug grin crossed his face. "Well, if you think it's too much, I can just send them all back."

"No! I want to see what's inside first."

Jack took a seat on the couch and watched. She took one of the smaller ones in hand and sliced away the tape with her claw. The brown cardboard box fell to the ground as she took out something wrapped in a dark, plastic bag. She tilted it all around and finally sniffed at it. "What is it?"

"Open it and find out, but be careful."

A thin strip of tape held the bag closed. She pinched it with her fingers and peeled it away, taking out the contents gingerly. Lys eyes the square shaped plane. Many odd plastic slots sat atop it along with capacitors and other odds and ends. She ran her finger across the circuitry. "Wait, I know what this...no...Jack, you didn't."

He smiled. "It's--"

"No. Did you?"

"Open up the rest and see."

After that she tore through them like it was Christmas. Laying aside the contents of one and moving onto the next. The floor became littered with strips of cardboard, tape, and bubble wrap. In a few minutes she'd opened them all save for two. Lys flicked her claw into the box and pulled out. "A camera, so is this one," she gestured to the last box.

"I hope they fit. I just got black since I didn't know what color you prefer."

She opened it up, revealing a headset. The green kobold laid them down with trembling hands and eyed the bounty around her once more. "A computer, so I can be--"

"A streamer."

Lys ran to him, falling into his waiting arms with tears in her eyes. "Thank you. You really shouldn't have. Lys doesn't even want to know what this costs."

"No, you don't." He chuckled and squeezed her close. "So, you like it then?"

"I love it, but why?" she asked into his chest.

"What do you mean 'why'? It's what you wanted, right?" For just a moment he worried she might have only talked about it idly and he might have just spent a load of money for nothing.

"Of course it is, but I'm..."

"I can do nice things for my ma--wife."

She looked at him, face wet with tears. "Say it again."

"Wife."

"Not like that." She swatted him gently and rubbed her eyes. "Say it again, all of it."

He chuckled and kissed her on the snout. "You're my wife, I can do nice things for my wife." It came out a little stilted, but it still earned him a lick across the cheek.

"Yes, I really like that. I don't care what anyone else thinks, minister included." Lys wrapped her claws around his hands and laid her head on his chest. Her scaly hide felt soft as he stroked her shoulder, at least it always seemed to feel soft during the tender moments. His mind's eye drifted back to Lys in the decorated gown. Her green tail jutting out from the back in contrast to that pure white, twitching and spasming as she did her best to keep it under control. A pair of long, white gloves, perhaps with the ends cut off for her claws which would be holding a bouquet of the reddest roses. His hands felt clammy, he could see himself standing there in a tuxedo looking at his bride-to-be, her golden eyes staring past the veil. Nothing about it out of place.

"So, about the computer." He nudged himself out of the daydream, looking at the assortment of computer parts on the floor, and the mess. "It's been a long time since I put one together, but--"

"I want to put it together. How hard can it be?"

"Do you even know what half of those parts are?"

"Sure I do. That's the motherboard." She pointed at it with a smug look on her face. "And that...that..."

"That?" Jack asked, eyebrows raised.

"It's some kind of card...thingy...okay, you can help, but I want to be the one doing it."

"Fair enough, of course you have to learn how to use it, how to type, how to deal with psychos on the internet."

She snorted. "I can learn all of that. I learned to use the phone, didn't I?"

"I didn't say you couldn't, there's just a lot of details. Anyway, you want to get start--" His pocket vibrated, disrupting his train of thought. Jack yanked out his phone in a rush, figuring that there was only one person on his contact list who'd bother to actually contact him.

"What is it?" Lys asked.

He narrowed his eyes. "Allison wants me to meet up with her tomorrow. 'Important, big news' she says." Big news could be just about anything, but he automatically assumed it would be bad news in the end since she'd gone all this time without saying a word. At least now he didn't have to try to cold contact her to see what was up, he could get it right from the source.

"What kind of big news?"

"She didn't say, so whatever it is she wants to spring it on me which means I probably won't like it," he said with a laugh.

Lys's tail stiffened for a moment. "She wants you to go out to see her?"

"Well, yeah."

"Alone."

"If you don't want me to go..."

"I didn't say that."

"So I can go?" He raised an eyebrow at her.

"I didn't say that either," she said with sass in her voice. "I don't like her very much."

Jack set down the phone beside him and wrapped an arm around her. "I think she knows that, hence why she wants to meet me somewhere out of the house." He felt Lys grip him for a few seconds and let go. He'd have liked for his best friend and his true love to get along, but he learned a long time ago that the Rolling Stones were right. "Do you not want me to go? Tell me so and I won't."

The kobold grumbled under her breath; the points of her claws poked his skin as she drummed her fingers across his chest. "Hmmph, you're trying to guilt me."

"A little. She said it was important and I've never known her to exaggerate." There was a long silence after that. Jack kept eying his phone, staring at the message, knowing full well Al was doing likewise and waiting for him to reply.

"If Rodil comes to visit me again..."

"You can let him in, but please be careful. Oh, and don't let him touch anything and by anything, I mean the computer once we have it together. I'll have my hands full teaching one person how to use it without reducing it to a pile of smoking circuits."

"I wouldn't!"

Jack gave her a knowing look.

"Well, I'd show it off, I'd have to, but I agree."

"So, I have your blessing to see my one and only friend?"

She lifted herself up off his chest and gave him the evil eye to which he only grinned like a fool. Her scowl changed to a smirk and with great, exaggerated pomp, she lifted her hand above his head and tapped him lightly. "Yes, I hereby bless you." And then she made some odd gestures that looked like a mangled sign of the cross.

"Been watching a lot of YouTube, haven't you?"

"Tell her that you'll see her before she shows up at the door."

Smiling to himself, he sent a quick "Ok, when? Where?" to Allison. Less than a minute later he got a reply, asking if McDonald's tomorrow at 10:00 was okay. Something about that made him sad, the bitter taste of two months ago obviously lingered to make going to their old stomping ground out of the question, but he said "Ok" nonetheless and tried to prepare himself for the dread of Mickey D's. Al shot back with a "See you then." And that was that. His stomach turned and he felt a tingling premonition, the kind that never seemed to be wrong no matter how much he wanted it to be.

"What's wrong? You look worried."

He shrugged. "Ehh, I hate not knowing and she's keeping this under wraps until tomorrow. Going to McDonald's of all places, bleh."

"At least you get to go."

"Are you trying to guilt me?"

"A little."

"I'd bring you back something, but I don't think you deserve that."

She sprang off of him, looking offended, but he grinned. "The food at Mick Dee's isn't very good," he said, standing up.

"Now I'm curious, how bad could it be?"

"I'll get you an Egg McMuffin and you can see for yourself," he said.

Dinner was quiet and neither of them talked over their bowls of Mac and Cheese, but she kept eying the pile of parts in the living room with a fiendish glee. He could hear her overzealous tail think against the chair whenever she peered at her loot for too long. It felt grand, knowing he'd done well. The cost of the computer parts meant little compared to her excitement and the chance to chase after her dream, though his pessimistic mind drifted to the trouble of teaching her to use it, how not to delete essential files, and how to set up all this streamer crap.

From there he segued back into Al's "big news", wondering why she'd kept quiet this whole time only to spring some big announcement on him. Whatever it was, he'd find out tomorrow.

***

Jack looked at his meal with an upturned lip and nervous hand. Being in the working-stiff business, he knew all about the joys of stopping off at whatever place was open to eat whatever happened to resemble food. After a bad encounter with a salad, he became a dyed-in-the-wool brown bagger and the fare before him didn't look too fair, but Al had paid so he felt obligated to at least try and eat it.

"Thought you liked McDonalds," she said.

He took a scant bite out of the McMuffin and waggled his hand at her. "It's okay."

"Liar."

He took another bite. "It tastes like egg-flavored Styrofoam. So, what have you been up to?"

"Oh..." she took a sip from her coffee, the smell of it being the only positive things he could say for the place, "just stuff, working. What about you?"

He shrugged. "Stuff. But what's the big news?" Jack asked.

She closed her eyes with a sad smile and set aside her coffee. She brushed her hair with her hand a few times, making him nervous. "I'd been thinking about what you said before, about working where I worked when I went to college," she said while she dodged his gaze. He tensed up, expecting to get some kind of tongue lashing about not going back to school, or finishing, or some other kind of verbal berating and readied himself to give some kind of smashing riposte to whatever unwanted advice she was about to give him. "And well...I got a new job."

"Hmm?" he mumbled, thrown off-guard. In his own mind he was already backpedaling.

"You know, when we...anyway you asked me why I was still working that dead-end when I'd gone to college and you were right. So, I cleaned up my CV and...I got a new job!"

"Really? That's great!" Jack gave her hug and she laughed slightly, but the tenseness lingered. "Doing what, where at?"

"It's a startup." She paused to flick her hair out of the way even though it wasn't.

Jack cleared his throat. "But?"

"But," she started, "it's out of state, just like all of those jobs."

He felt it coming, but it hurt far worse than he could have imagined and now he pondered the cause. Allison had turned down offers before and always for the same reason of being out of state. He liked to think he was the reason she stuck around. Perhaps that had been truer than he wanted to admit. He wondered if the fight two months ago had changed something. "You're leaving?"

She looked towards the ceiling and closed her eyes. "Yeah." She said it like it was terminal. A few moments passed in uneasy silence as it sank in for both of them. From here on it would be phone calls, and facetimes. It would be texts sent with the best intentions, "I'd love to, but", "We really ought to sometime", and "Work keeps piling up or I would". It was the long overdue putting away of childish things and moving on to something better. Doing new things and meeting new people, the kind of people you could build a future with. His mind went to those late-night gaming sessions, hearing the laughter as they huddled around the console playing Street Fighter. He tasted the over-seasoned fries at Blake's while they complained about tests and cramming. He felt the cool spring breeze as he walked across the campus with her, chatting about all those future plans.

"When?"

"I put in my two weeks last week and I've been packing and getting squared away since then. I have a friend I'll be staying with until I find a place," she said.

"Well...I'm really happy for you."

"Yeah."

"You'll be stopping by?"

"I wouldn't leave without saying goodbye to my best friend."

He almost choked up. Al had been there for him when no one else was and now his last link to the better parts of his past was moving on. He almost let things go pitch black in his mind until he remembered someone at home waiting for him. He'd been moving on as well. It was bitter, but bearable. He hugged her again "I really am happy for you."

"Thanks. Oh, how are things with you and Lys?" she asked with a bit more pep in her voice.

He finished off his coffee and smiled. "Good. Look, I know you don't--"

She raised her hand. "It's past and I really don't want to leave on a bitter note. You two have managed to stay together this long, longer than any of my relationships ever lasted." She blew the hair out of her face. "You have to be doing something right," she said between bites of scrambled eggs.

"I don't know about that; we had a fight the other day."

Allison looked at him in surprise. "About what?"

"Just stuff. We made up," he said with some suggestion.

Allison pursed her lips in a half-grimace, but he overlooked it. "See? You survived your first fight and nobody put a fist in the wall or dumped a Big Gulp of 7up over your head."

"That's oddly specific, Al." Jack choked down the last of his McMuffin which reminded him to get one for Lys to suffer through. He looked over the table, both of them had finished, there was nothing left to filter their conversation, nothing to save them from those odd silences where there ought to be someone speaking and right when it felt like he might never talk again. "I'm going to miss you."

She looked at him through her hair which had fallen back over her glistening eyes. "I'm gonna miss you too." Every attempt at small talk beyond that died after a few sentences, there just wasn't anything worthy to fill the kind of gap left by that kind of news. A sense of finality closed the conversation though neither of them wanted to leave yet. Al checked her phone. "I should probably get back; I still have some things to pack away."

Jack nodded in defeat and the two of them cleared off the table, dumping everything into the trash. "I'll let you know when," she said. Jack nodded once more and hugged her one last time before he got into line, watching her walk out. He stared up at the menu for a few seconds before deciding that Lys would just have to get an Egg McMuffin some other time and left.

The morning shifted to noon on the way home. He felt every bump in the road; every piece of loose gravel seemed to travel up through the tires and into the steering wheel he felt so on edge. Had it been because of that fight? Probably, most likely. The worst thing was not knowing how to feel about it. Whether he should be blaming himself for not being a better mediator or whether this was all a big pressure valve that needed releasing. The horn of a passing car did little to get his mind back on the road. He knew better than anyone that he'd been living in the past, it never occurred to him that he might have been keeping someone hostage at the same time.

The loud scrape against the bottom of the car as he turned into the parking lot took him out of his mental gymnastics and back behind the wheel in time to avoid going off into the bushes, though most of them were dead anyway. He reached for the seatbelt only to realize he hadn't buckled up before leaving and he went up the steps a changed man.

Lys looked up at him from the couch. "You're back, how did, woah!" He scooped her up into a long, tight hug. "Mmmf!" When he loosened up, she looked at him with a confused smile. "I'm happy to see you too, but what brought that on?"

He hugged her again, gently. "Nothing," he whispered. "Want to start putting the computer together now?"

"If you want, can't be too hard, can it? Are you okay? I thought you were bringing me something."

"I forgot."