That changed one night: Valentine’s Day. How or why is unimportant. All that needs to be shared is that her mottled brown ears were placed in a box labeled Sad Things in faded red Sharpie. With it went her pink rhinestone collar with the little silver bell and silver tag with her name on it that declared her Property of Kay, her tail, her kitty slippers and kitty mittens and her furry little kitty bottoms. Banished to the top shelf in her closet, hidden away, there they languished for months and months and months…
Some things, once broken, never heal. Kitty hearts, however, are surprisingly resilient, and kitties love to tell tales almost as much as they like to take long naps, snuggle with their owners, or lap milk from their ceramic bowl and chase yarn balls down the hall, mewing delightedly.
I
One night, not so long ago, a very curious kitty and her owner awoke my inner kitty once again, making me pause in the midst of an online conversation and pull out the step stool in order to retrieve my box of sad memories so that I could, once again, don my kitty ears and collar. The transformation was painful, but over quickly and, where once Rachel had stood, a slightly disheveled light brown kitten stood, her eyes impossibly large, her ears back, her tail down, trembling with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. She spent the next few hours slowly coming out of her shell, purring softly, rubbing up against legs, arms, nuzzling cheeks, licking noses… better yet, there was another kitty in the room. For the first time, I had a playmate of the four legged, triangle eared, soft and furry kind!
It stayed with me, that feeling, not for hours, nor just over night, but for days, smiling shyly every time I thought of her, so much so that my owner began teasing me.
“You’ve got that look, Rachel.”
“Huh?” I replied, proving once again that my conversational skills are without equal.
“That distracted look, the one that either means you’ve done something you’re not supposed to…”
I shook my head vehemently at that, denying even the possibility. After all, hadn’t I been the model of perfect behavior ever since I’d had my heart stomped on and smashed into little bitty pieces (Ok, so perhaps I am still bitter about that. It’s my right, after all, as the injured party)?
In fact, other than a single close call, where I’d told a bed time story to a certain someone that might have toed the line of what was proper behavior and what wasn’t, I’d been as close to perfect as it was possible for me to be. Certainly, playing with myself while chatting online when the other person is unaware of what you are doing, doesn’t count. No emotional or physical connection. The timing is purely co-incidental, am I right? And that night with the dancer with the amazing muscle tone and the penis that curved rather nicely upward doesn’t count; it was not only fully sanctioned by my owner-slash-wife-slash-lover, but she was the one who suggested it and, if I recall correctly, his cock spent more time pumping in and out of her pussy, not to mention her ass, than it spent in mine by a ratio of four to one. Not that I was comparing! That reminds me, her birthday is coming up. I wonder if he’d agree to let me gift wrap him…
“… or are about to do something you’re not supposed to be doing.”
Once again, I shook my head, this time less decisively. After all, I was thinking about doing things that would get me into trouble. Thinking, however, and doing are definitely not the same.
“Care to share?”
Oh, that tone. How I hated it. Perhaps hate is too strong a word. Resentment might be a better one. It was the tone of command, that moment when she stopped being my lover and began being my Mistress. Sighing, I smiled shyly at her, putting on what I knew to be my most innocent expression (after all, it was one I’d practiced in the mirror at least a thousand times since we’d become partners. It consists of a slight down tilt of the head so that I was looking up at her through my lashes as I pulled my lower lip slightly between my teeth and opened my eyes as wide as was humanly possible. My kitteny look.
“Remember I told you about the other kitty girl?”
She raised one eyebrow, her dark brown eyes expressionless, neither smiling nor frowning.
“Was I, perhaps, asleep at the time?”
“No…”
“Distracted?”
This time I simply shrugged and focused on the string of Christmas lights that hung above the window behind our dining room table, one of several strings that decorate our house year round.
“Go on, babe.”
I took a deep breath, refusing to be intimidated into a conversation I wasn’t sure I wanted to have. My resolve lasted less time than it took to draw air into my lungs.
“She’s nice.”
“Nice?”
“Sweet.”
“You fuck her yet?”
“Oh my god, no!”
Filled with righteous indignation I folded my arms across my chest and feigned a look of extreme hurt, one that caused her to burst out into peals of laughter.
“But you want to.”
“She doesn’t laugh at me.”
“She makes your panties wet, you mean.”
Righteous indignation quickly turned into the shyest of smiles, this one not rehearsed.
“Kinda. Yeah.”
With a sigh, she bullied me gently towards the love seat, pulling me down as she sat, framing my face in her hands, so that my lips were slightly puckered, gazing deep into my eyes.
“Why?”
I stared into her eyes, all of our shared history on parade in my memories. The first time we’d met, me a confused teen with no prospects of what to do with my life, let alone where I was going to sleep that night, her a sharp and focused young woman working her way through a prestigious university. The first night we’d kissed under the mistletoe, not as lovers, but as friends sharing a moment. The first time we’d made love… oh, god, I’d finally met someone who loved to fuck as much as I did, who wasn’t afraid to try something new, adventurous and ‘forbidden’. Someone who I could go shopping for shoes with and have it turn into a game of intimate touches until neither of us could stand it anymore and it was all we could do to get inside of her front door before tearing each other’s clothes off. And then, there were those times we didn’t bother even trying to make it back…
Other things stood out too. She was the one who sat beside me reading me tales of Winnie the Pooh while I was too sick to even keep the book upright, even though she’d split the last fourteen hours between classes and work. The one who stopped by my little closet at the Mission because ‘she hated eating alone’ always bringing enough for two, knowing how tight things were for me financially.
Oh, and so many beautiful moments. Christmases shared, family gatherings survived, the night I’d convinced her to sneak into my dad’s garage, high on acid, and drive his HO scale trains around the track he’d spent the last ten years carefully laying out. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that much. In fact, there’s been a lot of joy in my life since I first met her. It’s a very rare thing not to hear laughter in the home we share.
Foremost in my mind, however, was that night, not two months ago, outside of Grace Cathedral when we promised each other that, for however long our fragile little hearts kept beating, we’d love and cherish and honor and obey each other. And yet, here I was, admitting that I wanted to play with someone else…
“She understands what it’s like to be a kitty.”
It was the only answer I had to give. It was also the truth. Kay is, for lack of a better word, a Domme. Not the kind you generally think of when you hear the word. Whip wielding women in leather thigh boots with a permanent sneer engraved on their faces. Those only exist in pornos… well, not entirely, but most true Dommes I know are so much more than that; real people with all the beautiful complications and nuances that come with the territory. With Kay, it was a sense of confidence, a subtle aggression. She has an edge within her. She is driven to succeed beyond expectations; school, her career, her personal life, her single minded purpose to eradicate clutter and dirt within the confines of our house, an almost impossible task with two kittens and a girl with a kitty heart running around underfoot and off the leash. And yet, she is patient with me even when I’m at my worst.
That said, for all that I love her, for all that I she is my sun, moon and stars, there are times when I want someone… different. Don’t we all, at some time in our lives, desire that? No matter how much in love, it’s our nature to wonder about the grass on the other side of the fence. Not a forever girl, but a right now girl who could feed that part of me, that desire, that need. Kay is my forever girl. That would never change, but did that mean there was no room in my life for other kitties? Stubbornly, I pressed on.
“I miss being a kitty.”
I wanted this to be the funny moment in my tale, where I reveal that I shed some crocodile tears and added a little quiver to my lip in order to soften her up. My tears, however, were very real. A flood of feelings, of hurt, of loss flooded through me with those words, and I dissolved for a moment. Not for long, but long enough to earn her embrace, her kiss, her soothing words, one of which stood out in my mind during the next few days…
“We’ll talk about it.”
Admittedly, it was four words, five if you count the contraction as two, but to me, it sounded like one… and that word was Yes. In my despair, I was triumphant. My inner kitten was already bouncing around inside my brain.
II
I am embarrassed to admit how much time I spent purring, mewing, nuzzling, and snuggling over the next few days, not to mention the time I spent rubbing up against inanimate objects. So far, only my ears and collar had made it out of the box, and it was rare I put on my collar by myself; that was my owner’s responsibility, after all. I did, however, get reacquainted with my ears.
Oh, how I missed them peeking up over my head. I spent a little more time than I care to admit passing in front of the mirror on the way here or there, peeking at my reflection, secretly pleased that there it was a kitty girl who stared back at me, rather than a human girl. Giggling, I’d slip into that mindset, flopping on the bed and s-t-r-e-a-c-h-i-n-g my arms out, my back curving pleasantly as I purred. Not that I would ever admit it. After all, I hate being laughed at more than anything. (And I am not going to tell how I’d put them on and carefully adjust them every time I went on line. No one had to know as long as I kept my mouth shut, right? For now, my secret is safe).
Nothing shook me. Not the awkward appearance of an ex-boyfriend one night while I was so lost in my flirtations that I hadn’t even noticed his arrival, nor his sudden disappearance from the site shortly after declaring himself back. The girl inside of me would have been sad, having planned to interrogate him on the past six months of his life as well as assure him that, yes, she’d missed him, even though he’d chosen to forget about her until it was convenient. Thing is, I am still fond of him. He is a good guy, and was the first person online to whom I’d ever let the cat out of the bag, literally, about my other identity as kitty girl. The girl, as I said, would be moody for days. The kitten, however, took it all in stride. All it desires is to be fed and nurtured, to love and to be loved. Those four basic needs. Everything else is simply window dressing. Look up Zen in the dictionary. I’m sure there’s a mention of cats.
III
But Rachel, where the hell is the sex? Admit it, that’s what most of you are asking. Just chill out already! For God’s sake, whatever happened to artistic expression? As so many writers have proven, just because it is porn doesn’t mean it can’t be great literature as well. Not that I kid myself that I’m on the same playing field as Charles Dickens. Maybe not even that gal who wrote the Twilight books which my owner adores so much (translation: I’m honor bound not to give you my honest opinion about the quality of writing). I’m simply asking for patience while I set things up.
We’d been invited to a party. More specifically, a Clue party. Yes, the board game. It wasn’t the first occasion we’d rode along with Mike and Cindy, our next door neighbors, to a gathering of their theatre minded friends for a night filled with fun and games. The first time, I had been cast as Mrs. Peacock while Kay had been Miss Scarlet. She’s spent the night flirting while being drooled over by every single living male as well as one dead one (Clue, after all, is a murder mystery) while I wandered around, too shy to actually play the game as it was supposed to be played.
Here’s how it works…( feel free to skip this part if you don’t really care and can’t wait to see some hot girl on girl action. Go ahead, I dare you. That said, there will be a quiz at the end; anyone getting one hundred percent wins… well, I’ll think of something).
Everyone is a suspect. Besides the usual suspects (Mr. Green, Professor Plum, Colonel Mustard representing the men – Mrs. White, Miss Scarlet, and Mrs. Peacock representing the women), there were a few new ones, all color coded as well. Dr. Brown, Father Black, Mr. Gold, Lady Pink, Miss Grey, and Mrs. Silver were also among the esteemed guests. I had been given the role of Mrs. White this time around, dressing in virginal white. By now, we were comfortable enough with this crowd to know that the atmosphere, while not necessarily erotic, was decidedly leaning in that direction, or would, once the wine bottles were uncorked, so we dressed appropriately. Kay, of course, looked stunning sheathed in a silver dress that did an excellent job of showing off her ample cleavage as well as her lovely thighs. Her shoes, of course, matched, as did the hairband and jewelry she’d chosen.