Pocket Dungeon, page 16
“You don’t have to keep thanking me for things,” I teased. “I’m happy to do them.”
“That’s why I keep thanking you!” she exclaimed with a laugh. “Because you are so kind to me!”
“I can’t imagine not being kind to you,” I said. I meant it, too. I hadn’t known Yasha very long, but she was already one of the most fascinating and sexy women I had ever met. There was something undeniably electric about her personality. She was able to be terrifying, adorable, and sexy all at once, and it was a thrilling combination to observe. Just being around her made me feel like I was getting a headrush.
“You are a good man, Wes,” she said with a firmness that left no room for debate.
Simon watched this entire exchange with his brows permanently raised, but he didn’t say anything. It was a small thing, but I appreciated it nonetheless.
I quickly paid for her stack of books, and Simon bagged them up for us in a large, brown paper bag with Page Turner’s logo stamped on the outside.
“Thanks, man,” I told him as I took the bag from his outstretched hand.
“No problem,” he said. “See you tomorrow?”
“Most likely,” I laughed.
The bag bulged and threatened to break under the weight of all of the books Yasha had chosen. The notion was strangely endearing, and I had no problem hefting it up and cradling it close to my chest instead.
“Where are we going next?” Yasha asked as we made our way out of the shop and back onto the street. She looked around the city with the sort of wonder and awe that only came from someone who had never been anywhere like it before.
It was such a soft expression for someone who, under other circumstances, was so fucking terrifying.
“Hm,” I murmured. “What would you want to do next?”
Yasha turned her eyes back on me and studied my face as if I might be joking. There was an almost serious set to her sharp jaw as she stared at me. Her dark pupils grew and contracted in the shifting light from the clouds above and made her golden irises stand out that much more.
“What can we do?” she leveled the question at me and tilted her head to the side. It was a strangely predatory look, but I found it rather telling that instead of fear, I felt what was definitely arousal.
Okay. So we could mark that down as something new I found out about myself.
“Well, there’s lots of things,” I began. I offered Yasha my free arm as we started to walk back to my motorcycle in the alleyway by Page Turner.
I leaned up against the machine as I racked my brain for something a woman like Yasha might find interesting. She seemed so amazed by such simple pleasures that I probably didn’t have to think too hard, but I found myself wanting to impress her. This was a woman who had fought a dragon with a sprained ankle. She was impressive enough to deserve being impressed.
“Well, we could go to the Lincoln Park Zoo,” I suggested. “Have you ever been to a zoo before?”
Even from underneath the hat, I could see Yasha’s ears twitch.
“Zoo?” she repeated the word slowly. “What is that?”
“It’s a place where they have exotic animals in exhibits for people to see,” I explained. “They have a really big gorilla area.”
Her nose scrunched. “That sounds barbaric.”
“Most zoos nowadays are used for conservation purposes,” I said. “They help animals that are dying in the wild to build up their population again.”
“We do not have zoos back on Arcadio,” she said with a shake of her head. “The animals are our ancestors and brethren. It would be… blasphemous? Is that the word?”
She didn’t seem offended that I had suggested the zoo, but it was clear that it was going to be a no-go for Yasha.
“Hmm…” I tried to reroute my suggestions.
I didn’t think that a lot of the touristy things would appeal to the strange woman in front of me. She had practically wept for joy at the sight of the shower, for crying out loud. Maybe I was thinking too extravagantly.
Then an idea struck me. It was simple, but I had a feeling based on everything I knew already about Yasha and Arcadio that it would be something she had never experienced before.
“How about we go get some ice cream?” I offered.
“Ice cream?” she repeated the words like they were entirely foreign on her tongue. “I do not think I know the translation for that. What is it?”
I grinned. “Come on. It’ll be a surprise.”
I grabbed the second helmet from my bike and passed it over to Yasha. I pulled on my own, and the two of us arranged ourselves carefully on the motorcycle’s seat. All of Yasha’s books were carefully sandwiched between us, and I missed the feeling of the fox-woman’s body pressed tightly against my own, but I would survive.
Once I was certain Yasha was settled, I revved up my motorcycle and pulled carefully out of the alleyway and back onto the street.
There was an ice cream shop not far from Page Turner that was pretty good, but maybe I had just wanted to be close to the woman again.
Sue me.
Yasha let out a delighted laugh as we zipped through the ever-crowded traffic and down the busy streets. Her arms tightened around my waist, and I felt the sharp press of her claw-like nails through the material of my shirt, but found I didn’t mind the sensation.
I sort of felt like I wouldn’t mind anything Yasha did.
We rode for only a few minutes before I pulled off into a narrow bit of street parking in front of the tiny, hole-in-the-wall shop. The neon sign above the door read “Casper’s” in a vibrant pink and featured the little ghost from the store’s logo.
It was a super Instagram friendly shop, and whenever Carrie was in town, she made me take her there so she could take a picture next to the boba tea mural on the wall.
Yasha carefully stepped off of the bike without putting much weight on her injured ankle. I shrugged off my helmet before quickly moving around to slip my arm around her waist to support her weight. I took the sack of books from her arms and balanced them in my free arm as we made our way to the front door of the shop.
The fox-woman pushed open the door, and the two of us were immediately hit with the smell of warm vanilla and freshly baked waffle cones. It was a pleasant, comforting smell to me, but Yasha’s eyes nearly bulged out of her head.
She sniffed the air before turning to look at me. Her eyes were even wider than usual, and her plush lips were slightly wet and parted. It was a tantalizing sight, and something I would have enjoyed much more than the ice cream.
“What is that wonderful smell?” she asked me in a reverent whisper. “Can I taste it?”
I struggled to keep in a laugh as I helped her through the doorway of Casper’s and into the tiny shop. The floors were a black-and-white checkered tile that made the shop seem far more old-fashioned than it really was, and the walls were a pastel pink. One of the walls featured a colorful mural of anthropomorphized cups of boba tea with smiles on their faces.
There were a few vintage-looking metal tables with vinyl seats, and a set of four booths along the walls. Despite the fact it was the afternoon on a weekday, the shop was fairly busy, and only one table was left open.
“Come on,” I told Yasha. I helped guide the fox-woman into the line stretched out from the register.
She seemed incapable of standing still as she whipped her head around like she could somehow follow the scents of ice cream and sugar. It was perhaps one of the cutest things I had ever seen.
When we made it up to the glass display case that showed off the dozen of ice cream flavors waiting in the large tubs, Yasha practically pressed her face up against the glass.
The petite woman behind the counter looked at me as her dark eyebrows shot up. She had a bright orange pixie cut that made her look like some sort of alternative fairy. The little nametag clipped to her pale blue baby-doll t-shirt read “Stevie.”
“She’s never had ice cream before,” I said with a shrug, like that was something totally normal. “She’s foreign.”
Stevie’s face softened slightly as she looked back at Yasha and her eager, excited face.
“Hey,” she greeted. “Do you want to try a sample of anything?”
“Sample?” Yasha repeated. She looked between me and the young woman behind the counter. “I can try any of them?”
It was that response that seemed to sway Stevie to Yasha’s side entirely. The young woman smiled brightly and pulled out a small cup of multi-colored plastic spoons.
“Totally,” she said. “Whatever you want. Usually we can only do one sample, but if you want to try all of them, you can definitely try all of them.”
I mouthed the words ‘thank you’ to the worker, and while Yasha studied each of the small, handwritten labels over the ice cream flavors in the case, I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and shoved it into the little glass tip jar by the register.
“Here,” Stevie offered Yasha a spoon with a glob of a beige-colored ice cream. There were small flecks of what looked like cookie dough or something inside the bite. “It’s called Cookie Butter, and it’s my absolute favorite.”
“Cookie Butter,” Yasha said the words like she was tasting them before she even put the ice cream in her mouth. She took the spoon from the Casper’s worker with a tentative hand before bringing it up to her lips.
I watched with probably a little too rapt attention as Yasha darted her tongue out to lick the ice cream from the sample spoon. The sight was more than a little obscene, and I had to glance away to preserve any of my common sense.
Yasha moaned in delight, and I was once again very, very glad that I was not staring at her. The sound was going to play in my mind on repeat for the foreseeable future. I supposed now I would have to add “ice cream” to the list of things that were far sexier than they should be.
“Do you want to try any other flavors?” I asked Yasha once I thought I was physically capable of speaking again.
Yasha still had the spoon clamped between her mouth. A small trickle of ice cream was tucked into the corner of her lips, and I felt the overwhelming urge to lick it clean off.
“I will have this,” she said. “A lot of this.”
Stevie laughed. “I can do that! Do you want it in a bowl or a cone?”
Yasha turned to me, as if she was waiting for some sort of explanation. Her eyebrows were furrowed, like she didn’t understand the question. I figured we might as well give her the full experience.
“Waffle cone,” I told Stevie. “And I’ll have the same. With sprinkles.”
“You’ve got it!” the young woman said.
Yasha watched her with rapt focus as she quickly doled out two cones of ice cream and rolled them around in a bath of sprinkles until they were entirely covered.
Each cone had to be nearing a thousand calories, but my stomach growled at the sight. I reached out to take both cones and passed one to Yasha.
“Thank you,” I told the woman behind the counter as I slotted my card into the reader.
“Happy to help,” she told me with a grin. “Let me know if I can get anything else for you.”
I nodded my thanks and pulled my card free. With our ice cream cones in hand, Yasha and I made our way over to the single open table left in Casper’s. I slipped into the vinyl booth on the opposite side of the fox-woman.
She seemed to be entirely enraptured with her ice cream cone. She hadn’t taken so much as a bite yet, and instead was slowly turning it around in her hand as she studied the sprinkle coating.
“If you don’t start eating soon, it’s going to melt,” I told her with a laugh.
As if to emphasize what I meant, I licked up the side of my ice cream cone and carved out a path in the sprinkles with my tongue.
Yasha laughed before doing the same. For some reason, I had a feeling it was far sexier when she did it. A sprinkle stuck to the very tip of her nose, but I wasn’t about to tell her. It was far too cute of an image to push away.
“How is it?” I asked. My cone had already started to drip down the side of my hand, and so I started to eat faster. The last thing I wanted was to be entirely sticky and then have to ride home. That was a great way to make my motorcycle absolutely disgusting.
“This,” Yasha said seriously. “Is the best thing I have ever eaten. What is this made of? I have never had anything like it. It is so sweet and cold. This is nothing like the food we ate last night.”
“Pizza,” I said. “And it’s made of milk, sugar, and some flavorings like cookie butter in this case.”
“Cookie butter,” she said the words as if she was trying to make sense of them. “How is it so cold? We do not have food this cold on Arcadio. There is nothing like this at all.”
“It’s kept in a freezer,” I explained.
“Freezer?” She studied me over the top of her ice cream cone.
“A machine that keeps your food cold, that way it stays good for longer. And there are some foods, like ice cream, that are meant to be eaten frozen,” I said.
Yasha nodded seriously, like this was some sort of important lesson I was telling her. She had already managed to eat her ice cream down to the waffle cone.
A sprinkle was stuck to her lip now as well, and I couldn’t help it. I shifted in the creaking vinyl seat and leaned over to thumb it off of her lip.
Our eyes met, and Yasha studied me carefully. Then, as if testing the waters, she poked her tongue out of her mouth and licked the pad of my thumb.
“Sweet,” she said, as if we were casually discussing the weather and I wasn’t imagining about a thousand different things I could do to her in this booth.
I quickly pulled my thumb back before I could get arrested for public indecency and cleared my throat.
“You had a little--” I gestured to my own lip. “A little something.”
Yasha’s golden eyes flashed with mirth. She clearly knew what she was doing, and what she was doing was trying to fucking kill me.
Great. Fantastic. I loved that so much for me.
I shifted in the booth and thought about baseball and mailmen and the bunk bed building scene in Stepbrothers, the least sexy things I could think of, to distract myself from the gorgeous fox-woman from a different planet making eyes at me across the table.
“Do I eat this… this thing as well?” She reached out and poked at the cone with one of her sharp nails.
Instead of answering her aloud, I took a bite of my own cone. The treat crunched under my teeth and sent another volley of sprinkles flooding down onto my face. I laughed and quickly started to lick myself clean.
Yasha grinned and followed my lead.
We ate the rest of our ice cream cones in pleasant silence and simply enjoyed sitting across from each other in the shop. I finished my cone a little before Yasha, so I got up to grab a handful of napkins from a nearby dispenser.
When I returned, the fox-woman had devoured her entire ice cream cone and was waiting patiently for me.
“Here you go.” I passed her a small bundle of napkins. “To clean off.”
I used my own napkins to quickly wipe off my sticky hands and the tabletop. We had managed to drop sprinkles everywhere.
“I like ice cream,” Yasha declared after she finished cleaning off the sticky mess we had left. “I like ice cream very much.”
I laughed. “Good, I’m glad. There is a ton of food that you haven’t been able to try, I’m guessing. And I’d love to introduce you to all of it.”
“There are still more things?” She seemed shocked at my words. Apparently it was hard to believe there were more than a handful of items to eat on our world.
My brow furrowed. “Are there not many options in Arcadio?”
She shook her head vehemently. “No. There is not much in the way of food. We eat to survive, but this seems like something to eat out of enjoyment. I have never done that before. We only have dense meat and bread. There are a few things for treats, like berries, but something like this…”
She gazed back at the ice cream counter and the expansive menu that hung over Stevie’s head like she was having a hard time believing there were somehow more options, even just in the ice cream shop alone.
“Well, you’re on Earth now, and Chicago happens to have some of the best food the world offers.” I grinned at her. “We can find something else to order for dinner tonight. I’m sure we can find something that sounds good to you. Something else you’ve never tried before.”
“I would like that very much, Wes,” Yasha told me solemnly, like we had just made some sort of vow.
I helped the fox-woman out of the booth with one arm and carried our bag of books with the other. We made our way back out to my motorcycle along the street and quickly settled onto the bike to head back to my apartment.
I felt lighter and more alive than I had in a long time as we zipped down the street together. Yasha pressed the books tightly between us so they didn’t fall anywhere, but she still managed to rest her chin on my shoulder.
She smelled like a mix of the ice cream shop, some sort of enthralling musk, and a spice I couldn’t quite name. Together, the three scents mixed to be a heady, addicting perfume that I wanted to keep smelling for as long as I could.
My body reacted to Yasha’s presence like tinder to a wildfire. I had never come across someone as fascinating as her before, and it certainly seemed like she thought the same about me.
I navigated my bike back into the parking garage attached to my apartment building and made my way to my standard parking spot. Then I shifted the bike into neutral and helped Yasha to her feet.
“What will we do now?” she asked as we made our way back into my apartment. I was glad to see that the elevator was actually working, because I really didn’t want to have to carry Yasha up all of those damned stairs.
I pursed my lips and jabbed my finger into the button to take us up to my floor.
“Well, you could read some of your books,” I suggested. “Or you could take another shower, or a bath. I’m pretty sure I have bubble bath or something like that somewhere from a gift basket. I’ve got some movies we could watch. I could teach you board games or how to cook. I’ve got some puzzles and stuff, too. Saying all of this out loud, I sound sort of lame.”
