kingdomsofrain | tfln open post

~~Do I mistake you, or~~

At the risk of exposing some measure of ignorance, or of a failure in myself to catch hold of a joke—

It hadn’t occurred to me that you might [ … ] wear any such thing publicly.

I think I’d like that.

Would you care to

[ ... ]

I find I like the thought of it.

In seven days, or seventy.

[ There's a delay, followed by a link to a photo of a day collar. ]

For the sake of clarity, I meant this for public wear. Discrete, identifiable by anyone in the know, and not likely to chafe.

(Perfect for a brat.)

No, I'm not likely to wear a big studded dog collar while going about my everyday business.

[...]

Here's an interesting question to consider: assuming we make it past seven days (or however long your patience holds), and you manage to get a collar around my neck, what do I get?

Or rather, what will you wear, to show my claim? A collar doesn't seem appropriate at all.

[...]

But I like the thought of a show of [...] [...] commitment, maybe.

To your Puppy, I mean.

No, I mean 'to me'

But this is all just hypothetical. I'm

It's

You're getting carried away, and it's hard not to let myself get caught up in it

I'm

Edited 2021-12-22 03:34 (UTC)

It's all hypothetical. You don't have to answer.

Don't worry; I'm not asking for anything more than what you've given already. I'm happy, Desmond.

And I'm leaving now - sorry for the delay there. Ten minutes. :)

Ask whatever you like.

Ask always for more; Jack, you may always ask for more, and speak whatever wish possesses you. This is the right of my Puppy; the right of my brat.

Regarding the question at hand, it’s no less than fair play that I should wear a sign in kind.

And it is another proposition I find pleasing. (Shall I tell you? You spoke of what you'll get, of what I might display, and I knew a shock along my spine. Remarkable, the things you do to me.) My inexperience prevents certainty of suggestion, but do you think a ring? A bracelet? Cufflinks, perhaps.

We'll find something suitable, Puppy. I insist on it.

 When we make it past those seven days. 😌

Studs wouldn’t suit you in the least. You’re subtler than that, I think.

You’d look well in a silver chain. A permanence of moonlight caught upon you.

(Silver for me, as well, I think. Why should we not be forever joined in moonlight?)

I await your arrival - and your pleading eyes - eagerly.

And I tell you again: Never fear to ask anything of me. There is precious little I wouldn't give.

[ 1:31 p.m.]

[...]

So, how did it go? :)

Edited 2021-12-23 03:49 (UTC)

[ 1:40 p.m. ]

My Honey Pup.

Forgive my delay, won't you? I've only just arrived back at the shop.

And as it happens, I come bearing news. It won't surprise you to hear that Mayor Mills was— Hm. Let's say she wasn't particularly thrilled to see me.

I believe she expected a longer face. Less spring in my step? (Perhaps it was the lingering scent of honey that threw her.

Perhaps it was the revelation of where that honey came from— And why its scent lingered on my throat.)

Toothless threats were endeavored. Claims of foul play - an absurd feint, given the hole she dug herself, and into which she would gladly have tossed you and I alike - were fired.

But I'm pleased to report that I've been put into possession of a substantial sum of money. You may consider your business with the mayor closed. She had no choice but to accede to the contract.

Congratulations, Jack: You eliminated half the farm's debt in one deftly managed swoop.

You've done very well, my Puppy.

Do you know what words played out in my head, over and over, as soon as I set foot in that office?

'Low end porno.'

🙄

Well. That constituted one set of words.

I confess it was rather drowned out by the far more pleasing repetitions of 'I'm bringing honey,' and 'My Desmond.' 😌

It really was a pleasure doing business with you, Desmond. One of the most enjoyable experiences of my life, as a matter of fact.

Not that I'm done with you.

[...]

I am far, far from done with you. My Desmond.

:)

'Low end porno' for her, low budget horror for that office. I don't know who told her that enlarged swarms of dragonflies made for any kind of bipartisan-friendly artwork, but it looks like the kind of thing Hitchcock would reject.

The whole office is just distracting.

1:51.

[...]

1:52.

1:52:13.

I thought seeing you for lunch would help, but we've got four hours and change now, plus the memory of your hand. And your throat.

I'm not going to survive.

[...]

How long do you suppose the 'new romance' honeymoon period lasts?

1:56.

That's fortunate, Jack - my Jack - for I have only just begun with you. ;)

Nor are you so far from me, even in this period - four entire hours! (plus change!) - of absence. We are crowded by memories, are we not? Of touch rescinded too soon. (To be fair, there isn’t time enough in the world to touch you as I should like.) Of a stolen lunch spent in warming arms, time at once stretching endless and blinking past in mere moments.

Puppy, Puppy; in the shop, I see your image still. I turn, and I expect to meet your honeyed eyes. I blink, and mistake some shadow for a peripheral glance of you.

Here I stand, and dream on you.

My throat recalls your lips.

My hand traces the ghost-form of you, even in your absence.

My hands drifts along the desk that held us near.

You must, my Puppy, survive these hours ahead. For I demand your persistence, I require your persistence: I must replace these ghosts with the fact of you. (A truth in this newness of romance. A truth that I expect will accompany ~~romance~~ ~~our romance?~~ ~~this romance~~ our romance through its every stage.

New, established, and venerable; I expect our eagerness will shake us all the same.)

And I’m quite certain I owe you a kiss. Would you dare to expire, when still that hope awaits?

Four hours. A bit of loose change. And I will meet you with that kiss.

If only you can endure!

It’s an odd choice for a symbol, isn’t it? I would have thought a packless predator might suit her better— Or at least better embody her ambitions.

I’d suggest it’s a feint or a means of provoking distraction, but my true suspicion runs toward ‘unfortunate taste’ or ‘errant aesthetics.’

Which would account for the frenzy of birch trees, as well.

I hope you weren't planning to sell that desk. I hear it's haunted by the ghost of a lunch date. If anyone bought it - for something as mundane as outfitting an office! - a faint honey smell would permeate the room. An inexplicable sense of warmth and need would overcome the owner upon touching it.

Haunted furniture depreciates in value, for the record.

And also.

If you did sell it, I'd never get an encore performance. Wouldn't that be a tragedy? I'd only have the memory of - mm. A handful of hair, the taste of honey, and you, holding on for dear life.

[...]

No, I don't dare expire. And if you believe our romance will be 'venerable', if you keep offering me kisses (and more than kisses) to draw me from one moment of longing to another, I might just live forever for you.

Not sanely.

You absolute goddamn tease.

[...]

I can't stop smiling. You know that? Someone's going to think something's wrong with me.

[...]

I can still taste you.

2:06:11

Edited 2021-12-24 06:37 (UTC)

Bold of you to assume she's any kind of predator, and not a scavenger with an overinflated sense of self-importance.

[...]

Although.

Dragonflies are predators, I guess, in the scaled down sense of 'eating other insects'. They also eat their mates, genitals first. Maybe we're not giving her enough credit.

[...]

Maybe the trees were a calculated, Freudian touch?

[...]

Wait. Is that entire office meant to be a phallic threat? (We're back to 'overinflated sense of self-importance', if so.)

[...]

No, you're right. Unfortunate taste / errant aesthetics (or, putting it simplest: fuck ugly.) No sense in trying to find meaning where there isn't any.

Edited 2021-12-24 06:23 (UTC)

Oh, no. Given the right market, you’ll find that a bit of haunting can enhance the value of most any item. Particularly in quaint New England backwaters, where local lore takes on an air of charm. Even more particularly when the lore carries with it a touch of moonstruck romance.

It’s no meager thing, to own a desk imbued with deathless adoration.

Fret not, though, my Puppy, my Exquisite, Honeyed Haunting: I value that desk far above what anyone can hope to pay.

You see, the lore now attached to this desk is dear to me. I brush fingertips across its surface, and feel my hand alight with quiet fire. I set eyes upon rosewood, and am captured by a hundred charming whispers, by the elixir of my own name. And I know the caress of fingers through my hair. And I know the ghost of an insatiable, exhilarative tongue.

It’s as if I touch this desk, and conjure you.

Nothing in the world could induce me toward its parting.

And after all, I would like that encore. Very, very much.

You, upon whom I mean to bestow endless kisses.

You, with deft and devastating hands.

You, whose smile, whose laughter heartens me like no other sign on earth.

You are brilliant, Jack; in soul and bearing alike. I hope you know that. I’d like for you to know it always.

I posit that our mayor would make a sorry scavenger: too proud to pick over any scraps; too occupied with plaguing her fellow foragers to secure choice meat.

Perhaps she’s something outside the ecosystem altogether. An onlooker dipping in to snatch whatever resources she cares for. Blundering amongst suspiciously phallic trees and enacting slaughter without care for necessity or discretion in her acts.

She takes would-be prey in beings better left untouched. She attempts to bend what’s stainless into carriage of her haphazard will.

[ … ]

She erred gravely in approaching you.

I’ll ruin her if she dares to try again.

Careful, Desmond. You don't want to seem too eager.

~~Or too attached.~~

Don't let men like me think you enjoy our company. You have no idea how disruptive I can be; in fact, you might consider me more poltergeist than haunting. A nuisance, interrupting wholesome business for the sake of giving my boyfriend a thorough devastation [...]

[...]

Christ, I typed that word and felt the room spin.

You talk of what I do to you in memory, in lingering aftershock of kisses and deft touches; do you have any idea what you do to me with a single word?

'Be careful', I say. 'Wait a week', and 'don't get carried away' and 'you're being incautious'. 'You don't know me well'.

Do you listen? Not at all. You tell me 'boyfriend' and 'always' and 'mine' as though it's only natural to say those things, no matter how little time we've had.

[...]

I've waited so long for someone like you.

Of course - in my not-inconsiderable experience - there's no one like you.

What I mean is I've waited so long for you. You've been haunting me for years. That's all a ghost is: absence like dying.

I won't haunt you too much longer. Less than four hours now, and we'll be back where we [...] belong.

That's right, isn't it? Back where we belong.

Edited 2021-12-25 05:18 (UTC)

I have an interesting supposition for you.

What do you think will happen to her if she tries harming you again?

[...]

Are you pleased, knowing your Puppy's loyal only to you?

I listen to you always, Puppy. Attentively; eager. But where my heart goes, so I must follow, and speak of always, and call you, properly, as you are, my own.

Which word was it that dizzied you? ‘Boyfriend,’ ‘devastation,’ or both?

It’s both, for me.

Well. And your boyfriend is a devastation. Ask anyone you’ll like; they’ll corroborate the claim. The difference here is that the storm I bring to you is woven through with rapture, and softened at each edge with fadeless fondness.

A special devastation for a special, matchless man.

Which leads me to my next point: You say ‘men like me,’ when there is no being that can claim your likeness. When you are a creature completely new upon this world. There is no care to match your own; there is no soul that sings to the precise tune of your vibrance.

Though mine, I think - the discordant-seeming song that composes my being - meets your harmony in consonance. Though we, so unlike any other, have found a place in one another. ~~Perhaps a~~ [ … ] Perhaps a home.

What I mean: Yes, we belong together. You at my side; I at your own. Our hands seeking each other through the absences in air. Our lungs, our eyes, our dreaming chasing off all scraps and signs of ghosts.

What you’ve said about haunting

I know the feeling of a ghost, if not the reason; I

What do you feel in the hollows between conscious thinking, Puppy?

Notice that I don’t speak of banishing poltergeists. Please, Puppy; I like a bit of nuisance in my life. 😌

Oh, and for the record? There’s no risk of my seeming overeager. The trick will be conveying in fullness just how enthusiastic I am.

Jack, Jack. I've no wish for you to place yourself within the mayor's target.

[ ... ]

But I do like your loyalty. I cherish its thought.

And do you know, Puppy? I believe you could be dangerous.

I might like to see what you can wreak. In situations liable to bring no risk upon my Jack.

Oh, you'd be magnificent.

Edited 2021-12-26 22:13 (UTC)

What can I say? For all my deviance, devastation, and danger, I'm traditional at heart. If you want to dive right in and call me your boyfriend - and your own, ~~and say it's always~~ and talk about us in future tense - you'll find out I like to pay for dates, hold doors, and give amazing massages.

(Hm. You know all that already.)

And I'm loyal.

[...]

'Committed' would be apt, too, though it doesn't cover all the bases. (Or, more casually: a Puppy that doesn't stray. ;) )

Most of all to you - and yes, Desmond, I believe you and I are remarkably similar in nature. It was a thought I had last night, as a matter of fact. Or something along those lines.

More to the truth of things, I thought we're all there is of our kind. Whatever we are. This species of human that should never have existed.

[...]

From the perspective of others, anyhow. I'm very glad you exist.

~~And ever since this morning - breath and bedhead and pillow crease notwithstanding - I'm not too unhappy with my own existence, either.~~

~~I don't think~~ [...]

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