Page 32 of Double Her Pleasure

“So, tell me, if the males run the house, tending livestock and farms, protection and so on… what exactly do your females do? I mean, I’m not complaining or anything, but I’m kind of accustomed to doingsomethingto pull my own weight,” she pointed out.

Agor grinned at her over his shoulder. “Bored already, are you? The shine is off the egg it seems.”

“The shine is off what?” she shook her head. “Never mind. I’m not bored, just wanting to feel useful,” she clarified.

Brydis gave her a sympathetic look. “Shine is off the egg means that the newness is over,” he pointed out.

“Ah,” she commented. Her lips curled in a brief smile. “We say that the honeymoon is over. It just designates a period ending where a relationship is all new and sweet.”

He nodded. “Very appropriate. As for our females, they more or less do whatever they please. They tend to be our creative element. They are artists, inventors, scientists, historians, and so on. They have a nature inclined to being broody and are good at things that require that sort of meticulous work. Occasionally, there are females who are aggressive and assigned warrior status, or even those that have a tendency toward rookery keeping. Despite how it may seem, while there is a certain predisposition, nothing is ever entirely set in stone.” He glanced over at his twin. “Jill is accustomed to having something to keep herself occupied. It is not unreasonable for her to ask what the established norm among our species is.”

Agor nodded. He had turned from the stove to regard her thoughtfully, leaving his twin to curse and quickly move the food around in the various pots and pans stretched out across the stove between them.

“You’re right. What would you like to do?”

Caught off guard, Jill froze. She had half hoped they would have a solution with some sort of job that she could do to contribute. She didn’t expect to be asked what she wanted to do.

“Uhm. I don’t know. I really don’t know what needs to be done around here,” she admitted.

Agor suddenly broke into a smile that immediately made her worried that some sort of crazy idea was now being entertained.

“Very well. You may accompany me tomorrow. We will start early with the kennels and then check on the valkeli flock and see how they’ve been managing themselves in our absence. We may need to move the flock to another grazing area on our mountainside, but we will see.”

“A whole day outside,” she murmured, unenthused. “Sounds perfect.”

Sounded like hell. But she asked for it.

She let the conversation drop as Agor resumed assisting Brydis with the meal. The grifalc—Waylo she remembered Agor calling him, unless there was another huge beast of the same appearance on the mountain—opened his beak in a wicked yawn. It didn’t appear to be an attempt to intimidate, but it still gave her an excellent view of the bone-crushing capabilities of the large beak he was armed with. His mouth snapping shut; he regarded her through slit eyes as he dropped his head once more upon his paws. His wings, which were huge in proportion to his muscular body—but they would have to be to move his bulk around—stretched slightly with his every breath, reminding her of the rhythmic movement of Agor and Brydis’s wings when they weren’t attempting to keep them plastered firmly against their backs.

Why did they do that anyway?

Jill’s gaze drifted back over to the males. Brydis had drifted away from the stove to a food preparation table, the appetizing smell of cooked food following him. His red wings twitched and flexed with the swaying of his weight and the movement of his arms. In fact, like Waylo, there was a subtle amount of flaring in time with what she could notice of breaths. Even the feathers that ran up the entire length of his tail would occasionally expand like an unfurling fan when his tail swayed. Agor almost made a ninety-degree mirror image as he continued to work, his body shifting and picking up similar movements to those of his twin, his own tail fanning every so often as if his silver and blue was the shadow of Brydis’s gold and red. The faint layering of purple and gold that she could barely see from the corners of her eye seemed to twist and dance as they moved, settling into a rhythm of living energy surrounding them that appeared to breathe with its pulsations and move with them.

A smile curled her lips as she watched their unconsciously coordinated movements with fascination. Brydis stilled, breaking from the rhythm of his activity, and he turned to look at her curiously. Jill grinned at him unabashedly.

“You guys are really too cute. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun watching anyone simply just move while doing something as normal as cooking.”

He gave her an embarrassed smile and picked up the dish in front of him before moving it to the table where they had placed her. To her disappointment, his wings were once again rigidly pinned to his back as he did so, and his tail curled around his leg, its every feather flattened and completely smooth.

“Some habits are difficult to break, even after many revolutions in service,” he admitted before returning to the stove.

“But why would you even want to?” she asked as she craned her neck to get a better look at what he was doing.

His head cocked at her question. “Why?” Turning back toward her, he carried another container to the table and set it down in front of her, this time with a puzzled expression on his face. He shook his head and gave her a heart-warming look of pure affection. “Even though you are right here in front of me, I still somehow manage to forget that you don’t understand how it is with tails and wings,” he observed with a chuckle.

Her eyebrows rose at his words, but she leaned forward with a small smile. “That troublesome, is it?”

Agor snorted with amusement as he carried another large, covered dish from the stove to the prep table, gently nudging Brydis aside in the process.

“You would ask that when you’ve never stood in a confined place with a youngling who hasn’t yet gained much in the way of self-control and is mercilessly wing-slapping and thwacking you with their tail.”

A grin split her lips at the observation, and Agor winked at her playfully as he finally carried the remaining dish to their table and set it on a rotating platform with the others at the center of the table.

Brydis chuckled. “He’s not wrong. As younglings, we’re taught to respect each other’s personal space, but as warrior class, it is ingrained even further since we spend time in very tight confines with other males, especially when situations require us to go into space.”

“That and some of our gear protects us better when our wings and tails are tucked away,” Agor adds.

He made a face and his tail uncoiled and stretched out leisurely behind him. With the feathers closed, it looked like an exceptionally long, smooth, tapered tail. It suddenly unfurled, fanning wide, every feather from the tip of his tail to its base peacocking for a moment and treating her to an up-close look at his tail feathers that she’d never seen before. She blinked in surprise at them and bit back a smile. They were very much like those of a peacock. Not in texture or form, but the eyelike marks were nearly a dead ringer despite being in different colors. Agor’s dark blue tail-feathers had eyes of pale blue, green, and silver. Those markings ran down the length of the longer feathers, whereas smaller feathers had no more than one or two “eyes” at most.

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