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An Odd Request

"No," Mitch said flatly, turning to walk back down the promontery.

"But Mitch, you promised!" Michelle whined. Michelle was quite large for a queen, broad in the shoulder and extremely chesty underneath a cream-peach, paint-stained t-shirt. Her hips were wide-set to the point of being bird-like, and her thighs arced out, from under tight-fitting daisy-dukes, more grandly than gracefully toward the thundrous knees that rested over her curvacious calves. Her outer oblique muscles were large and soft, and they bowed out at her sides as an echo of her great bust. She was also fairly long in the limbs, so she had two inches on Mitch.

Mitch turned around and glared up at her. "You know, I thought that most people understood this:" he roared. "I am not a queen. I am not...can't most people tell I'm a guy?" His gender was indeed self-evident from how he carried himself. His clothing was slovenly and out-of-style (he couldn't help female trends), and he had never once combed or trimmed his dense, dark headfur, which to him had the appearance of being a mane.

A canvas bag behind Michelle was bulging with multifarious accoutrements ranging from paints to beads, and somewhere in its folds lay the tools for some of the more arcane forms of ceramics. Next to it lay a slightly smaller bag containing diverse and sundry instructional books. They suddenly looked isolated and lonely as she padded down the slope after the poor tom she had caused such offense.

"Look," she said gently, touching Mitch's shoulder. "I'm sorry, but I couldn't find any decent queens who would be willing to model for me. I almost had a nice lioness lined-up for me as a substitute, but she suddenly had to move. She was way too lanky to pass for a puma queen, anyway." She growled. "But Mitch, we discussed this, and you made a promise to me."

"I don't even remember that conversation!" he exploded. "You know, Shelly, I just wanted a chance to see you somewhere. You always talk to me, and I hoped you might want to see ME, not try to exploit my body flaws."

Michelle stepped back, her face scrunching up curiously. "Well, I didn't know you were even into queens. I always used to see you with that hob, and everyone knows about his proclivities. I tho-"

"Anthony is mo-nog-o-mous," Mitch said, exaggerating his enunciation of the term. "Some people are just wired that way. I thought most people understood that...Shea and Anthony have never even thought..." He shook his head sadly at people's ignorance.

Michelle took a few deep breaths, closing her eyes and counting to ten in her head. Finally, she she opened her eyes and started talking. "Okay, Mitch," she said. "Okay." She took a step toward him and put her paws together. Unlike Mitchell's more feralish, padded paws, Michelle's paws were soft and fleshy, yet they were large and arachnodactylic in a way that Mitch had always found to be appealing.

"Mitch," she pleaded, "This is my honors project from last year. It's overdue, and Mr. Conner is already threatening to take another ten points off."

Mitch felt a little sympathetic, and his temper started to cool. "I don't know," he said softly. He was starting to remember parts of the conversation from the other day, and he knew how hard she had tried to find someone who would work. "I just wanted..." He tried gesticulating with his paws, but they fell his the sides helplessly.

Michelle's paws fell also, and she dropped her head. "I'm sorry," she said.

There was a long silence between them, and it went on to the point where they could hear each other's breathing. Michelle's lungs were tremendous kettle-drums that could blast her voice out as a thick, rich alto, and they worked very quietly most of the time. Mitch thought it was a funny thing to find attractive in a queen, but he found them to be very comely. He reached up and scratched his temple, and then he dropped his paw to the side again, his anger defeated.

"Do you really feel attracted to me?" Michelle said in a sotto voche that brushed like a gentle feather against Mitch's ears.

"Yes," he said.

She wiped her mouth gently. Her slightly cleft upper-lip formed a nice Cupid's bow, and underneath it trembled another that was full and bright with life. "I'm not even attractive," she said.

Mitch gasped. "Bullshit!" he shouted. His face was contorted in disbelief. "Shelly, you must be crazy. I like everything about you. I could trace my eyes over your curves for decades, Michelle, I-"

Michelle almost wept. "I'm not. I'm fat, Mitch, and I'm broad-shouldered as a hyena bitch. "You're crazy." Her voice strengthened, and she put her paws on his shoulders. "Look, Mitch, I'll line you up with someone who is as pretty as you are, but would you please try to work with me on this? I didn't mean to get you upset." She looked into his eyes pleadingly.

The cougar tom's tail twitched gently. He had always hated his tail, which was another feral trait that reminded him of his relationship to his brother. He would never have gotten over the weirdness of his feet without Anthony, and he had never thought he was anything special at all. He found himself to be more of a freak. "Okay," he said finally. "Okay. I'll pose here for one sketch, but after that I would rather take this indoors. Believe me, I don't want someone getting a snapshot of me posing like a female as they pass in a boat."

"Paranoid," Michelle accused humorously.

"What about it?" Mitch replied with a grin.

With that, Michelle started setting up. She got out a simple all-graphite pencil and a bristol sketch pad. For good measure, she got out a protractor, a small ruler, a pocket calculator, a tape measure and a trig chart. There were some other tools she pulled out for the occasion that Mitch could not readily identify. The trade of a portrait artist, it seemed, contained levels of complexity that he had not begun to figure.

The hardest part for Mitch was getting himself disrobed. Mitch had to ask Michelle to turn away while he pulled his clothes off, so she politely turned her back on him while he removed his combat pants, his boxer shorts and his shirt. His nipples got embarrassingly hard as the breeze cut across them, and he realized that it was slightly cooler here than it was down on the beach. He covered himself and called for Michelle to turn back.

The queen's first object of interest was to arrange the setting. She had chosen a metamorphic rock that was lodged becomingly in the sedimentary stone of which most of the outcropping was composed. It had a soft and feathery appearance to it, as if it had been brushed gently onto the earth by an expert hand. It was a pleasant color of gray that supported the appearance that it was truly a plush fabric. Mitch somehow knew that Michelle had searched for several weeks to find it.

As the other cougar delicatedly ignored him, Mitch slowly began to feel less exposed. In fact, he found that the wind brushing against his fur created a very pleasant sensation, and he found himself turning so that it struck him in certain spots that simply felt good to have some wind cutting across it, his eyes slitting and his chin raising up so that it would blow at a certain angle into his nostrils.

"Great! You're getting into the role!" Michelle said.

That gave Mitch a start. He tried rearrange himself into a posture he felt to be dignified, his ears blushing hotly. "Jeez!" After a heartbeat or so of awkwardness, he composed himself. "So what do you want me to do?" he said, trying his best to sound casual and all-business. He abruptly stopped himself from trying to conceal his genitals because the behavior made him look more coy and effeminate than he liked. In public schools, almost all feline species were considered to have a possible utility as members of the marine corps during war-time, so they were acclimated early on to being exposed to other people's gaze, among other responsibilities. The all-feline charter school that Mitch went to had given him no such preparation, and he did not feel very comfortable at all in his own skin.

"Okay," Michelle said brightly. "I would like for you to go and kneel on that rock over there, facing to your right."

Mitch crept over to the rock obediently, hunching himself down as if to avoid objects hurled by objecting bystanders. He wondered as he arranged himself awkwardly on the rock if Michelle had brow-beaten him into this out of pure sadism. It would stand rightly to reason, after all. "Okay, this hurts my legs," he said as he tried to settle himself on the boulder. Also, kneeling down like this gave him an unfomfortable sensation that there was a sharp knife pressed against his testicles.

"Okay," Michelle said, and she began to dictate to him instructions on how to arrange his legs comfortably. "You want to have your right leg tucked under, so your ankles cross."

Mitch tried doing just that, and he felt his ears blushing again as he felt his ankles crossing over each other. He had known going into this that he was going to be serving as a stand-in for a queen. As he assumed the position, though, he felt the knife pressing against his testicles, and he got a sense of some invisible entity asking him, "okay, ready?" He was tempted to try to extract himself from this situation, but he felt it would ruin his last hope of getting involved with Michelle. He felt uncomfortably pinioned, and he was sure now that his Creator was a lot like those messed-up kids who remorselessly pinned-up captured butterflies with needles.

"Very good!" Michelle shouted encouragingly. "You're doing great. You look great. But try moving around to the point where you feel as comfortable as posible. There is a certain way you can sit on it that actually feels pretty comfy."

Mitch did as he was told. "Now take a deep breath," the invisible entity told him. Mitch closed his eyes internally and gave out a soft whimper.

"And your hands out in front of you," she dictated.

Mitch complied. The knife began to cut, and a frightened part of him screamed in agonizing pain. He took a few tense breaths, though. He could do this. He just had to get through this once, and everything would be okay. He'd have his chance with Michelle soon enough.

"No, spread them wider, and try to bend-"

Mitch winced. "Michelle, look, are you really going to be this picky? You said that I look fine, and you're going to give me cramps that will last for weeks!"

Michelle sighed softly. "Look, Mitch," she said, putting down her sketchbook. She came up to him and laid her paw on his shoulder, which sent an electric shock through the young tom. Her paws melted like plasma against his fur, each muscle in those long, dextrous digits seeming alive with an internal fire of its own. "Just relax, man," she whispered softly. "Everything's going to be alright."

Mitch took a shuddering breath, and he exhaled it slowly through his nose. The protesting part of his mind was still screaming, but its cries became plaintive and ineffectual as he felt himself melt under the queen's paw. "Okay," he replied. "I'll try."

As Michelle returned to where she was trying to get the sketch, he tried tracing his digits gently against the grain of the stone. It was really a wonderful sort of rock he was sitting on. The feathery look it had to it was due in part to little imperfections in the smoothness of the stone, and the imperfections followed a weird sort of pattern that was fascinating to run one's digits along. He tried pretending that he was magma, and he flowed gently against the rock. Somewhere within him, a tiny presence writhed as if it were being tortured and burned, but the rest of Mitch's mind had begun to sing with the beautiful rock that lay underneath his body.

"Okay, now try arching your spine a little more," a distant voice said.

Mitch's shoulders ground themselves together oddly, and he felt almost like he was doing the visual equivalent of growling ferociously. As his lips began to purse oddly, he felt something being severed from him, and it went hurtling over the edge of the outcropping. The presence from before, small and hopeless, seemed to lay curled-up in a dark corner of his mind, crying softly.

"Great!" Michelle shouted. "Now, hold that pose for a while!" For several minutes, she remained silent as her all-graphite pencil scratched against the bristol, and she would fuss ocassionally with some of her equipment as she tried to get a good reckoning of the scene.

At some point, she had uttered an apology for taking so long, but Mitch was lost somewhere else. He was feeling comfortable in a way he had never really had the pleasure of. When Michelle finally told him it was okay to move, he shook his head slowly as if coming out of a dream. "Did you get a good sketch done?" he asked her as she came over to help him up.

"Several," she said.

"Several?"

Michelle made an expression of having realized something that she suddenly realized should have been obvious. "Oh," she said, "well there are different kinds of sketches you have to do, and they have different focuses." She led him over to where she had been working and leafed through several different versions of the scene, gesturing to each as she spoke. "See? This one is focused on getting all of the dimensions right, and so are these three here, each done from slightly different angles." It was essentially a cartoony version of him drawn around a rough stick-figure.

"This one," she continued, "is a study of the light-source and how the rays of the sun fall on you." It was as rough as the other sketch but in different ways. It looked like a bunch of misplaced smearings, really.

"Okay," he said skeptically as he looked at it.

Michelle chuckled as she moved on. The next ones looked a lot more realistic, and supposedly one was intended to get an idea as to how his muscles were put together. Another one was an examination of the different textures in the scene, and it had a series of patches on the side, with scribbled descriptions, that looked almost like a map legend. He also noticed on some of the sketches that there were to-the-millisecond references of the time of day, and all of them had dates on them.

What was most fascinating of all, though, was that he was not looking at an image of himself at all. It couldn't have possibly been him. The girl in the image had her back arced becomingly, and there was a strange sort of smile on her that he had never seen on himself. Also, her breasts seemed far too perky, and they seemed to hold up their own weight instead of laying against her torso like his did. Either something weird had happened to him, or Michelle had taken some serious liberties.

He finally cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Okay, so did you want to continue with this another day? I mean, I wouldn't think that you could get everything done with just this stuff, Shelly. It doesn't look all that accurate."

Michelle smiled at him sweetly. "Oh, you'd be surprised," she said. "I know my trade, Mitch."

"Oh, come on, Shelly," said Mitch. "I mean, when you're finished with this, maybe we could do something else. I have a basement we could use. It would be perfect!"

"I don't know," said Michelle. "Are you sure your parents wouldn't mind?"

Mitch smiled triumphantly. "They never use that basement for anything, and they don't go down there at all," Mitch said. "The only person who goes down there, besides the gas guy, is my brother, and he's just going after those camel crickets. Don't know how he gets in."

Now, Michelle was a little flummoxed over that. "Camel crickets?" she said slowly.

"Wetas," Mitch started to explain. "They're these ugly-"

"I know what those are," she said. "I mean, what would your brother want with some dumb sprickets?"

"Oh," Mitch said. "Well, that's why we can't figure out how he gets into the basement. He's feral-born."

Michelle made an enthusiastic, pleasantly surprised sound of such shape that it does not lend itself well to description, but it was perhaps somewhere between the sounds people make at magic shows and the noise a cub makes when given a treat by a doting grandmother. "Wait," she said, "you mean you have a feral living in the house with you? I thought that most of them were just castrated and eventually turned loose. It's not like most of them cause any harm to anything. We have a few of them in my neighborhood, but the problem with them is that they're all so skittish."

Mitch laughed at that. "It's kind of funny to think of Zeke being skittish. No, it's really nothing to see. You can come and meet him, though."

Michelle nodded graciously, still looking eager. "I'd really like that, yes! Maybe I can get Mr. Conner to let me do some extra credit to make up for this one being turned in so late. It was really due by the First of July, for crying out loud, and it's mid-August. He's pretty trigger-happy about docking points over that."

Mitch nodded, having known teachers who were like that. It wasn't that he could disagree, but it wasn't pleasant to be subjected to it. "Okay," he said, "so my parents are gone most of the day during the week, and it's going to be a little while before classes start. I mean, you could come over at any time during the morning as long as it's after 8:00 a.m..

The cougar queen nodded. "Okay, Mitch, I'll try coming by sometime in the next few days. I've got to finish this project as quickly as I can, though, so it'll be a while." Then, she did something that nearly made the tom swoon. She came up to him and embraced his naked body, giving him a kiss on the cheek. "And thank you for helping me, Mitch," she said. "It was really sweet of you to go through that for me."

Perturbed, Mitch blushed hotly and turned away as she let go, suddenly having to cover himself again. "Hey!" he protested, chuckling. "I'm not even dressed." He walked over to where he had piled his clothes earlier, and he dressed himself back up in combat pants that were suddenly a little tight around the waistband. Grabbing for his skateboard and holding it casually in front of him, trying to resume his "cool and casual" stance, he turned back to the queen. "So, just let me know when you can come over, and I'll see you then, alright?"

"Sure."