The unapologetic hand on her thigh and his brazen words both seem to stick in her craw. 

“What?” she bites at him, forgetting all her good upbringing on purpose. In her head, her grandfather’s outraged voice echoes: “That’s ‘beg your pardon,’ girl. Mind your manners.”

It falls silent the moment the feline leans in.

And leans in.

And leans in ever more, like a mighty oak tree might lean, or a towering sand dune.

The monster that is so much bigger than his human disguise leans towards her in tandem. She can feel its heat on the side of her face, its hot breath streaming out of his mouth, tickling her cheek as he speaks in her ear.

“I smell you,” he whispers. They whisper. Both of them, he and it. “Sweat and fear and feathers and”– his palm slides another centimeter north, up on her thigh and down in between— He drops his voice even farther— “a dripping cunt.”

“No,” she croaks, sounding like a crow, “no no no.” Or a mouse.

Between her legs, everything heats up and twitches. Her knees strain closed, but it makes no difference. His hand is there. His fingers are there.

“No need to deny it, Birdie,” he whispers. His beard tickles the shell of her ear. “In fact, I like it. I like that smell a lot.” He inhales noisily through his nose. The sound shivers through her. “I’m also partial to your sweat, and my first nose loves that fear, but… your cunt is the sweetest smell on this plane, by far.”

She bites back a knee-jerk ‘Thank you.’ Damn her manners to hell. Her down feathers seem to curl into corkscrews.

“That smell makes me wonder about your taste,” he continues, and the word 'taste' rolls like thunder in his chest. “I bet you’d taste like burnt sugar, wouldn’t you? Or sweet cream? Honey and spice?”

“I-” Just a small squeak.

His voice, tinged with eagerness, becomes so breathy that it’s almost hard to hear over the rushing of her blood and the now-distant roar of the plane. “You have tasted yourself, haven’t you? Tell me. What do you taste like?”

“I never—never did that,” she hushes, her face going red, ears burning. I never did either of that.

I could do that?

Oh.

He laughs. On the inside, his real self yawns, lethal and amused. He’s close enough that she can hear it in his chest. Even in his human guise, it’s just underneath the thin membrane, close by, so loud and so very… there. There, like his hand on her thigh.

His mouth and nose nudge her ear. She flinches away, but not far enough.

“I’d taste you all day long,” he pledges. “I’d drink up your dripping honey and I’d lap up all that delicious sweat, too. Make you squeaky clean.”

Squeaky. She is already plenty squeaky. Or she would be if he and his words and his palm on her thigh hadn’t struck her mute.

He huffs another quick laugh and gives her hand a squeeze. Her claws seem like more of a hindrance to her than to him. To him, it seems like an intimate embrace of digits. “Your dainty fingers, too. My special cleaning service. What do you say?”

Paia says nothing. She sits and her body clenches in places and releases in others. Thrums and throbs. Hot and cold. Flutter, flutter.

Many things happen at once.

Her bird tucks itself fully back into hiding, overwhelmed and dumbfounded by all those foreign second emotions. It takes its claws with it. Leaving her alone with the feline.

Leaving her to perch next to it. Next to him.

The very moment the claws are gone, his blood-slick hand lets hers go – and immediately, his left comes up to catch it again before it can fly away. He interweaves their fingers and deposits this new knot of palms and knuckles on his left thigh.

Two humans, lovers, sitting together in a plane, holding hands for comfort and pleasure.

He leans back, apparently relaxing again, casually tucking his injured and bloody hand against his side as though it’s not important – just in time for a cordial nod to one of the flight attendants who are now walking up and down the aisles, doing flight attendant things.

Paia dimly notices that it’s the same lady, the one with the philtrum, and that she takes her and her new neighbor – and their joint hands – in with a smile. Philtrum-lady shoots a quick and satisfied, even thankful, glance at the feline’s face. She thinks we’ve made a friend who will help us through this flight, making her job easier.

Paia feels the perspiration under her arms and on the small of her back seeping into her shirt.

The bird doesn’t know what to do, so it does nothing.

She doesn’t know what to do. Everything is all confused. She tests her fingers – so small and breakable, woven with his big, strong ones – in his new clutch. They just flail.

A sweaty-hot ghost of his hand remains heavy on her now-empty thigh and doesn’t seem to go away. She frowns at the spot on her leg.

“What’s your name, Birdie?” The feline rolls its head against the headrest again to look over at her, so utterly, insultingly, obnoxiously relaxed.

The pad of his thumb brushes back and forth over the knuckle of her thumb. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Should she tell him? Why? Why not?

He shrugs. “I can keep calling you ‘Birdie’. No problem.”

“Psephotella Tau Cassiopeia,” she grits out. “Paia.”

“Paia,” he says, and she’s never heard her name said like that. Like he takes the word and strokes her beak with it.

“Will you promise me something, pretty Paia?” he asks, pulling her by the hand until she leans his way, then leaning in to nuzzle his mouth against her once more. Letting his voice drip straight into her ear.

Her feathers ruffle on the inside, but not… not all in a bad way. Just in a strange way. She shrugs, half to answer his question, half to dislodge the ticklish sensation.

“When we get off this plane and you finally fly away from me… “ he starts. Puffs of his breath tickle the shell of her ear.

She shuffles in her seat. She wants to fly away from him now, but the bird has left her alone.

“… and when you’re back home on your roost, or wherever critters like you flee to…”

His nose in her hair is so distracting. Her scalp prickles, prickles, prickles, prickles all over.

She can hear the insolent smile in his words when he finishes his question with a half-drawled, half-whispered, “… would you touch and taste yourself while you think of me?”

“No!” she shoots reflexively, too loudly. In a smaller voice, she repeats, with all insistence she can muster, “No. I do not want to do that.”

She doesn’t.

She really really doesn’t!

He smirks. She can feel it when he smirks. “Do what? Touch yourself, or taste yourself, or do it while thinking of me?”

“None of that,” she protests with emphasis. Her cheeks feel hot. “We don’t… We don’t... do that!”

“Hm.” He blows the dismissive sound out of his nose. “'We' also don’t take the plane to get away from home, though, do we?” he asks, leaning forward a bit so that he can look her in the face – so that she can see him ostentatiously looking around at all the empty seats and the absolute lack of avian company. “All alone among the less friendly Hominidae. 'We' don’t leave the volary without the flock, do we?”

Paia grits her teeth and turns her face away from him, towards the window. There is nothing but white-grey clouds behind the double pane now. Oh, how she wishes–

His fingers tighten painfully for a split second. He squeezes her knuckles until they feel ready to pop. Her head whips back around to him, ready to–
Suddenly, his fingers are just loosely drumming against the back of her hand instead of squeezing it, and Paia blinks at it, confused. Wriggles her fingers. Nothing. Mad. You're going mad.

“Ultimately, you can do what you want,” he says easily and shrugs his broad shoulders. “Once you’re out of my sights, I won’t ever know either way.” Then, he leans in again conspiratorially, drawing her gaze away from her hand and to his face. To his lips as he speaks, vows, “But I will see to it that you’re going to want to touch yourself. In fact, I bet you’re not even going to wait until you’re out of the airport once we land. You’re going to find yourself a quiet little toilet cubicle and put your delicate fingers so deep in your-“

“What’s your name?!” Paia asks too loudly, too shrilly.

The humans noticeably startle around them at the strange and sudden noise. Paia and the feline both cock their heads and freeze for a moment. Waiting. Listening.

The small wave of their attention dissipates quickly, though. It always does. Humans are never alert for long.

“Y… Your name?” Paia repeats, softening her voice.

He and she look at each other for a long, long moment.

She looks at the freckles on his nose, and at the curve of his lips, framed by his red-gold beard. His teeth are white and seem very… pointy.

He looks into her eyes. Just her eyes.

“Caspian Matkasur Bhaskor,” he answers. The Rs at the end roll and purr on his tongue. “Bhas.”

“Bhas,” she echoes and then frowns darkly at him when his teeth seem to get whiter and pointier in response to her saying his name. His smile is crooked and as insolent as his words. Angrily, she demands, “Stop talking about… about me… touching and, and-and tasting myself, Bhas.”

She will not say ‘please’. No. She swallows the damned word down.

“Very well, Paia,” he – Bhas – agrees lightly, stroking her with her name again, and smirks more broadly. “I will resume talking about me touching and tasting you, then.”

She tries – really, really hard – to not roll her eyes. It still happens. He chuckles and nudges her arm with his almost playfully as if they’re old pals.

Or like he’s a cat and she’s food that he’s playing with for now. She shakes her head to shake the thought loose.

“You should know that I have been told – repeatedly and by several independent sources – that I have very clever fingers,” he boasts and makes a show of touching each finger and fingernail of his right hand to his thumb, one after the other, like it’s an acrobatic, artistic feat. The lower third of his palm is smeared red-brown with drying blood. There are deep gouges at the base of his palm near his wrist, in his thenar and hypothenar, where her claws went in. They are already not even bleeding anymore. Monster.

“I’m certain you would enjoy them as well,” he says, recapturing her attention. “Here, let me give you a sample.”

He reaches across with his right and runs the tips of his index, middle and ring finger over the back of her hand. Small strokes. Then, small circles.

Paia sits and stares. She could have sworn that she once read in a science book how the back of one’s hand does not have many nerve endings. She wonders if that was a lie. Or if that doesn’t apply to those like her, who are people second, not first.

“Even here… so soft… Her skin is so delicate,” he murmurs as though to himself. “So nice to touch… nicer to lick…”

“No,” she says softly. Too softly. In her mind, she thinks of a movie she saw many, many times when she was too young to even understand the plot. She remembers a man, and a woman, and a kiss on the hand. It seemed so silly to her, how the woman gasped and swooned over such a modest, trivial gesture.

Seemed.

He turns their clasped hands around, exposing the inside of her wrist.

“I’d trace those pretty little veins all the way up to your shoulder.” He nudges the sleeve of her shirt up to expose half an inch more of her wrist where the filigree pattern of her veins shines blue and green through her skin, then slides the pad of his thumb over the place where her pulse is thumping. “Look at them, so fine.”

While she sits frozen, he walks his fingers across her sleeve and slowly, slowly towards the crook of her elbow. She manages a small shiver as his eyes caress her arm from her elbow up to her shoulder.

“Do you like to be touched under your arms, Paia?”

Just the words are enough for it to feel as though he’s already touching her there. She pulls her arms into her rib cage and hunches defensively. “No.”

“You are sensitive under your wings, hm?” He takes a long, audible sniff and makes a soft sound of pleasure. “You’d squirm like a little fish and holler like a howler monkey if I stuck my fingers in those sweaty pits, wouldn’t you?”

Probably. Paia shrugs helplessly.

He seems so very pleased with her reaction and with her in general, the glow of his pleasure is strong enough to warm her skin.

“Where else?” he asks, cocking his head. “Where else would I not be allowed to touch you with my cruel and clever fingers?”

She glowers at him with all her might. “You aren’t... You aren't allowed to touch me at all.”

His smile is all teeth and eyes. His teeth are so, so pointy and his eyes so, so sharp.

“And yet you sit right here, in your assigned seat with your seatbelt still on and no plans to go anywhere, your hand in mine, and your panties soaking wet.”

Paia glances down. Her belt buckle gleams dully up at her, faint scratches on the flap. Now that her bird has hidden, she could-

“Oh, please, please, make me chase you, Birdie,” Bhas purrs. “You know I will, and I will like it.”

He’s like an adhesive trap. She can neither fly nor even fall. All she can do is sit here next to the feline and listen. And shrug. And shiver a little bit.

“Fuck you.” The words slip out under her breath – the flock in her mind abruptly falls silent, scandalized – but Bhas can hear them easily. He chuckles hoarsely.

“Ah, Paia.” He smiles and enfolds her hand with his big, hot palm. “I’d love that. But I'd want to kiss you and taste you first.”

Their eyes meet. His left eye flickers with reflection as it moves. Both of his pupils are big and so dark, and his teeth are still so white-

“Coffee, tea?” The lady flight attendant with the penguin neckerchief, accompanied by her trolley stacked with plastic cups and bottles, appears beside them. She flashes Bhas a professional smile.

A moment of reprieve. Paia’s senses fold inwards, to the bird that perches with its back turned and its head under a wing. Overwhelmed and clueless about what to do. Not entirely frightened anymore.

Paia frowns at herself, then at Bhas when he suddenly pulls his hand out of their clasp. Casually.

Her right palm immediately feels so cold.

Her fingers are still smarting from how he crushed them at first, so she mashes her hands together and jams them between her thighs to combat the feeling.

When the flight attendant asks Paia if she wants anything, Paia manages a mumbled ‘No-please-thank you’ and earns a perfunctory-but-not-cold smile in return. Nice. Humans are so nice.

Bhas also thanks the flight attendant and sips a hot beverage from a plastic cup that he holds in both hands. Both of his hands hold that cup. Paia glances at them, and at it, and then down at her own hands that are jammed between her thighs. The right one still feels... lonely.

“You seem unhappy,” Bhas observes. Not unkindly.

“I don’t want to be here,” Paia finds herself saying and observes her left knee that's started jiggling up and down.

Not ‘I don’t want you to be here.’ Not ‘I hate you.’ Not ‘Go away.’

“No need to fret. Nobody really does.” He shrugs easily. “Everyone who works on this plane would prefer to have clocked off and be home. Everyone who travels on this plane would rather already be where they’re going. Nobody enjoys the ride.” She can hear a small smirk in his voice as he adds, nudging her arm with his again, “but speaking of rides, I bet I could make you…“

“No more bets, please,” she begs and has the insane urge to laugh. There’s a single Ha! bubbling in her belly. He’s… just impossible. He feels so big but plays it so lightly. Fleet-footed monster.

“’No more bets’?” he repeats, sounding overly affronted. “It is against my very nature to shirk bets, little Paia. So, if you want to buy my peace, you better offer something good.”

She presses her thighs together so that she can press her palms together, and shrugs. “What… What do you want?” The question leaves her mouth against her better judgment.

Bhas grins, more broadly and more wickedly than ever before, his eyes glinting delightedly. “Oh, you daredevil of a bird. You did not just ask me that for the second time.”

The Ha!-bubble bursts. Twice, even. "Ha!" she gasps out, "Ha!" He called us ‘daredevil.’ If the flock were here, they’d fall out of the trees crowing with laughter.

The feline sits up taller to look around over the seats, forwards, then back, craning his neck this way and that, but there is nobody in sight or earshot, not even any flight attendants. He flips the little plastic cup holder down and puts the half-empty cup into it so that his hands are free.

Then, he slings his left arm around her shoulders. The gesture comes so utterly naturally as though they have been intimate friends – lovers – for years. His big left paw cups her left upper arm and pulls her fully into his side, enveloping her with himself.

She feels covered, like an unwise bird is covered by snow during the night. But he is nothing like light, cold powder. Everything about him is large and warm and so… staggeringly solid. It takes her breath away.

“At this point in time, I want you to get up,” he murmurs down at her – his voice vibrates in his chest and in hers – and lets his index and middle finger walk over her safety belt until they reach the buckle.

“…and go to the restroom,” – click, the buckle comes undone – his nose and mouth are nuzzling into the side of her head, burrowing into her hair again and maddeningly tickling the tip of her ear –

“…and once you’re there,” he instructs, enunciating every word clearly, “you’ll pull that drenched crotch of your panties to the side, stick a finger in your cunt, then put that finger in your mouth, and lick your sweetness off.”

His whiskered mouth presses a kiss against the shell of her ear.

His lips are warm. Firm. Soft.

A quiet sound falls out of her mouth – frightened and desperate and surprised and shivery. Something between sigh and whimper.

He flings the two parts of her safety belt open with two loud clanks – right, left – exposing her stomach. Slowly, almost reverently, he puts his hand over it, cupping it gently right where that other bird is fluttering. Her breath wooshes out of her and back into her, and his hand rises and falls with her belly. So warm. Alive. So heavy.

“Then,” he continues while both of them watch his hand on her stomach, “I want you to come back to me and tell me in great detail what you taste like, because I need..." His tongue makes a ticking noise against his teeth, and he half-sighs, half-purrs a sound full of yearning and anticipation. "I need to know and I can't stop thinking about it.”

He drums his fingers playfully against her and all of her intestines seem to be affected by the percussion. Her lungs seem to clench. Her brain feels spongy. Her heart thumps right back at him like it’s a child’s knocking game on two opposite sides of a door.

“If you do that for me, I swear I will make not one bet more with you for this entire flight. Scout’s honor.” He finishes his speech on a light note, but she can feel his insistence and gravity when he demands, “What do you say, Paia? Will you do this for me?”

She trembles under his wing, all made of fear and pulse and small sighs that are also whimpers.

She trembles.

And nods.

***TBC***