Been a busy month, but I haven't forgotten to work on my stories. Wishing you all the best. Oh, and I'd like to give a shout-out to Lunna88 on ArtStation; a talented freelance artist whom I'm pleased to call my friend. IF any of you are looking for character art I recommend looking her up.
Make your choice, adventurous stranger
Strike the bell and bide the danger
Or wonder 'til it drives you mad
What would have followed if you had.
The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
Shamus texted Judy that evening, thanking her again for the good time. He wanted to ask whether she'd decided where their next date would be, but resisted. He wanted to play it cool; avoid seeming overly anxious on the matter. The truth was, he was a bit anxious. He'd gone from hardly expecting to get a bite for one date to a confidence of two, and reasonable expectation of more.
Then, too, there was what Mike had said about further dates. Not to mince words, Mike hadn't skimped on advice about the physical side of the relationship. 'You don't want to just be a guy friend,' the musk ox had said. 'Expectations are established early on, and that includes just how physical you want to get. You don't want to go too far into the relationship without-'
It was at that point that Shamus, throwing dignity to the wind, had covered his ears and started singing the national anthem, putting all of his particular talents into doing it as badly as possible.
The discussion following this was best forgotten, culminating when Mike shrugged and simply said Shamus should have it his way and not complain when it landed him in the friend-zone.
Shamus shook his head. Surely Mike was wrong about that, right? This was Judy; not just some bunny bimbo who didn't know how to think ahead. He knew her better than that; respected her more than that. Just because Mike's advice had worked so far didn't mean he was always right about these things.
Shamus almost got as far as convincing himself that Judy might have agreed to a second date even if he'd ignored all Mike's counsel when he got to work early the next day.
"So it worked out, then," Mike remarked as Shamus passed by. He spoke just low enough not to draw attention from the other guys.
The poor buck tried to hide the surprise in his reflexive jump, feeling uncomfortably like he had when he was little – well, littler – and had nightmares about showing up at school without his pants. The smug certainty in the bovine's tone didn't help.
"Is it that obvious?" he asked, trying to sound equally smug.
Mike raised an eyebrow. "Well, if you'd crashed and burned you'd probably look about as bouncy as a beach ball that shook hands with a porcupine. But since you're acting like a clown fish in a shark tank, I'm guessing you're as nervous about the second date as you were about the first."
Passing a bucket of greasy rags, Shamus resisted the urge to throw one over his shoulder and see how close he could get it to the musk ox's mouth.
Pressing on relentlessly, Mike joined him in working on one of the cars left for repairs; an old Moocedes that needed work both above and below. While Shamus tinkered around underneath, Mike went to work replacing some corroded battery connections.
"So, tell me what happened," Mike persisted.
Shamus did, half because he wanted to share what felt like the biggest win he'd had since his dream job blew up in that misfiring tractor and half because he hoped – somewhat naively, he knew – that Mike would ease up on the rest of his advice if he knew Shamus had followed it thus far.
Ironically, his hopes were fulfilled - though hardly the way he had expected. With the car's engine smack in his way, he had no idea Mike had paused to take a drink of water until something he said caused the latter to start hacking and sputtering.
Kaff cough… "You said what?!" gasped Mike, before letting out a few more wheezing sputters.
Shamus quickly slid out into the open, where he found Mike almost doubled up and leaning on the side of the car for support. With a quick bound he'd probably regret, he landed next to his friend and propped himself on the open hood, winding up a foot and whamming it across Mike's back to spread out the force. That seemed to do the trick, since Mike at least managed to get his coughing under control.
"Thanks," Mike managed, taking another sip of water to reset his throat. When he was sure he had swallowed it all the way, he turned to Shamus. "So, what was that you said?"
It took Shamus a moment, rattled as he'd been by the brief crisis, to remember where he'd been in the story. "We were talking about what we wanted from a relationship, and I told her I wanted to marry, eventually."
Mike pitched his head forward, pinching his forehead with a hoof. "That's what I thought you said. Buck, are you neurotic?"
Shamus shrugged helplessly. "You said to be honest and direct," he admitted.
"And not to come on too strong," Mike countered, "especially on a first date. You should never throw yourself at a girl, man. It makes you look desperate."
Folding his arms, Shamus adopted an unimpressed expression uncannily like Judy's; one, in fact, he'd subconsciously learned from her back when they were kids. "Well, she did agree to a second date. Don't you always say 'if it looks crazy but works, it's not crazy'?"
Mike stared incredulously at him, a half-vacant look in his eyes as if he were watching his worldview come unraveled thread by thread. "I may have to rethink that," he admitted, "because you're definitely crazy."
Shamus shook his head. "Look, I don't think I could come on strong enough to scare Judy off if I wanted to. A charging rhino's not strong enough to phase her. Nauseate, maybe, but she's tough. Heck, her toughness is…"
He broke off with the feeling of one who had barely avoided stepping off a cliff. He'd been about to say that Judy's toughness was why he was still breathing. It was one thing to say that to Judy, or even to the counselors he'd spoken with since that fateful day. It was another to say it to a coworker.
Mike stared at him, his expression of incredulity replaced by one of intrigue. "Is what?" he asked.
Shamus tried to squelch the seed of regret in his gut. 'Think fast, rabbit,' he thought to himself, fishing in his brain to finish that sentence with something way less need-to-know.
He made a show of shaking his head as if snapping out of a trance. "Is… one of the things I love most about her," he finished as brightly as possible. "Sorry; caffeine deficiency."
He made his way over to the break room as its quick-brew machine, bracing for some further question. The sound of the shop door opening and the entry of a certain anteater almost made him laugh. For once, his least favorite coworker had actually spared him from annoyance and embarrassment – for now, anyway.
Judy was not expecting a debrief on her date any time soon. The night following her date with Shamus, Taelia was out late with her band and the bunny bedded down without seeing her, expecting to be up and off to work before Taelia rose.
She had underestimated her roommate, as she woke up in the morning to find that despite the sun not being up, Taelia was. Not only had the vixen showered and dressed, but she had a hot breakfast waiting on the table.
"And I thought I was a morning mammal," Judy chuckled.
Taelia shrugged, turning off the soft country playlist she'd been listening to. "Too much coffee last night," she admitted carelessly. "Or at least that's my best theory. I thought I had burned through it all, but I woke up two hours ago and couldn't get back to sleep."
Pulling out a chair, Judy jumped up into it and poured herself some juice. "Works for me."
Judy could feel the vixen's probing gaze on her, in a way which in bygone eras might have signaled imminent attack. Meeting her roommate's gaze, however, she found only a curious smirk.
She didn't get to be where she was in the police force without knowing enough to crack this code. "You're wondering about my date, I take it?"
"Of course," Taelia answered brightly.
Judy considered a simple, 'Well, I'm not telling' by way of reply, but decided not to. Taelia had been dating Nick long enough to learn most of his tricks for 'interrogation by annoyance,' as Judy liked to call it, and if she didn't get an answer with that alone she just might recruit Nick himself to help her out. It might be an interesting battle of wills, but it would be too silly for words; never mind for the nuisance it would grow into.
"We went to a coffee shop," she replied, shrugging. "Sat and talked, had some cookies on the way out. It was okay for a first date."
Taelia's eyes lit up. "Hmm, a first date?" she queried, her interest thoroughly piqued.
Judy sighed, reaching for the coffee pot. "You caught me undercaffeinated," she griped as Taelia pushed it her way. "But yeah, he said I could pick the second date, so I decided why not."
The vixen took a bite of toast and washed it down with grape juice before answering. "Soooo, do you think there's some long-range potential?" she asked.
It was a good thing Judy's mouth was empty. As it was she managed to keep a straight face, but had she been eating or drinking she wasn't sure whether she could have avoided a new meaning to the phrase, 'nasal spray.'
She shrugged carelessly, recalling her surprise at Shamus' own very open ideas on that front. "Feeling that out," she replied. "I'm not even sure if long-range is what I'm looking for."
Taelia raised an eyebrow, and Judy suspected she was recalling that Judy had chosen her career path when she was nine and stuck with it through obstacles that might have turned aside a charging elephant. All she voiced, though, was a smug, "but you have thought about it."
Judy raised an eyebrow of her own. "Oh, so now you're psychic?"
"Well, I know you're not the type to be cautious. Let's see; wasn't it thirty times getting chewed out for recklessly endangering yourself on the job?"
Clearly, Nick had taught Taelia far too well. Judy decided it would be idle to point out that it was actually thirty-four and counting, and instead simply laughed. If Taelia could leverage their shared connection with Nick, so could she. "Are you just getting impatient with Nick?" she asked, folding her paws one over the other and raising an eyebrow.
Taelia let out a huff. "Touche," she admitted, pointing a fork in Judy's direction, "but now I know you're dodging."
Judy just laughed again. "More fun that way," she replied.
The ticking clock made for a convenient excuse to focus on eating and keep further answers to a minimum.
On her usual train ride to work, Judy wrote up a quick text message to Shamus.
'Roommate wanted all the details from yesterday,' she wrote. 'Didn't tell her you used the M word. ;)'
She considered that briefly, then replaced the winking emoji with a wry smirk. Normally she wouldn't be so cautious, but Shamus… well, she couldn't put her finger quite on it, but he was a special case. She didn't want to give him any false signals until she was sure they were going in the same direction. He deserved that much, at any rate.
With the revised message sent, she busied herself looking out the subway's lower windows. This particular stretch wasn't the most scenic in the city by a long shot, but it at least offered a nice vista of Savannha Central – especially to someone who'd gone down those streets as many times as she had. Looking over it, she could pick out the entrance Nick took into Tundra Town that first day she'd met him, and the rooftop where he had melted down the jumbo pop. And though the taller buildings hid the exact building, she could even ID the street where Jumbeax's ice cream shop stood. Then, too, there were other sites; the locations of arrests, a rescue or two, the avenue of a high-speed chase… just thinking about it pumped her up for the day's work as she got off at the station by Precinct One.
Then as she headed into work, an idea hit her so abruptly she jerked her head back. She pulled out her phone to send another message, but a call from the front desk made her look up.
"Hey, Hopps! Better hurry up! Chief's on about a busy lineup in the bullpen!"
Judy pocketed her phone with a shrug. 'Business before pleasure,' she mused to herself.
The ZPD wasn't the only place busy that morning, and as Shamus' garage was one of the other such venues it was some time before a certain buck got around to looking at messages. His stomach went into butterfly mode when he saw the morning's text from Judy.
'The M word,' he mused. Okay, so Mike had said to be honest about his intentions, and he'd known Judy long enough to be direct with her. Still, maybe he'd gone a little too far.
He was trying to think how best to reply, and leaning towards something about usually not being so bold, when the moving dots revealed that another text was coming his way.
'How are you doing?' came the message. Now there was a question he could answer a lot of ways.
'Fine. Just busy,' he answered. 'Lots of business this morning.'
Judy's answer came, 'Yeah, us too. You should have seen the bullpen this morning, and dispatch has kept us busy with calls about a missing echidna.'
Shamus winced. 'Nothing drastic, I hope?' He'd almost said 'nothing serious,' but checked himself on that. If any job deserved to be called serious, it was Judy's.
'Mostly false leads,' she answered, 'but she turned up half an hour ago and no one was hurt. Grabbing a bite now, and meant to tell you I picked a place for our next date.'
Just reading the words 'our next date' from a conversation with her was a little overwhelming even now. He thought about making some joke like, 'I'll promise not to mention the m word if you don't,' but thought better of it.
'Don't suppose you're going to tell me where,' he texted back instead.
Her answer came with a grinning emoji. 'I did say I wanted to have fun.'
He rolled his eyes and smiled a little. 'How did I know you'd say something like that?' he asked rhetorically.
The answer took him off guard. 'Dunno. Rumor has it we have some history.'
Thoughts of a reply were halted as Mike's voice sounded out Shamus' name. "Can I borrow you a minute? Gotta grab some oil filters."
Shamus shook his head. Here, again, his knack for reaching hard-to-reach places was both a blessing and a curse; a blessing because it made him a desirable employee, and a curse because it made him especially desirable when hooks, grabber poles, and other such tools went missing.
He followed the musk ox into the back supply room, so preoccupied with thoughts of Judy that he forgot all about their earlier talk.
Mike hadn't forgotten, but he discreetly closed the door and waited until he had lifted Shamus up to the top shelf before he spoke.
"She saved you, didn't she?"
Shamus, who was halfway to the dwindling supply of oil filters at the back, looked back in confusion. "What?" he asked, genuinely lost.
The yak pursed his lips. "Judy. You were going to quit; maybe do something drastic. You'd given up hope, and somehow she got you through it."
Shamus' stomach dropped, and he willed his face not to turn pale. So his near slip that morning had come back to bite him in the fuzzy-wuzzy butt. "How did you...?"
Mike raised his hooves, forestalling the end of that question. "I'm still not sure of the details. I'm just tracking the clues. There was some point where her toughness was more than a thing you admired. It was something you needed."
Time seemed to stand still as Shamus gazed up at Mike, feeling as if his very mind had been undressed - and boxed in to boot, poised as he was among the packages of small vehicle parts. Mike said he didn't know, but what had he guessed? Might he know more than he was letting on; maybe waiting, like Sherlock Bones interrogating a perpetrator, to have his all but psychic guesses confirmed?
Mike seemed to guess the unease he was causing – not that that could be a hard guess. He shook his head and raised his hooves again. "Look, you don't have to tell me anything if you don't want to, but if you need me I'm here to listen." Then he locked eyes with Shamus again, good and hard, and pointed one hoof at him with what was almost a jab. "And tell her, if you haven't yet. Whatever she did for you, she should hear it from you."
Shamus allowed himself to be brought down to the floor without making any comment - even about the fact that the grabber pole was right in its usual spot behind the door.
So, that's it for that chapter. Next time I hope to update Something Stinks, as that story is reaching its culmination. In the meantime, keep the feedback coming!
Easter Eggs:
Balto