Page 42 of Culture and Curiosities
Pierce.
Which didn’t surprise me at all.
He was a wonderful pain in the ass who didn’t like most people, human or other, and yet still hated for anyone else to be in charge of the irritating people.
“I can’t decide if I should be there in person to help the situation or just enjoy the drama for the moment like one of the TV shows you showed me.”
Yeah, this was kind of like a daytime soap opera.
Attempted murder and everything.
Yeah, best town ever.
****
“Oh…” Don’t call him Daddy. Don’t call him Daddy. Someone might be able to hear us. “Do you think we can go in and look?”
Daddy Manny frowned, doing his head cock thing like he’d seen the other men do. “Is that not the point?”
Looking at the small strip of shops on the less interesting side of town, he focused back on me. “Shopping is a universal concept. They want you to buy their goods.”
But their goods were costumes.
“I don’t care if people think I’m odd. I know you won’t think I’m odd. But the owners are kind of weird about the other…you know…the people like us.” Probably shouldn’t say dragons or mages. “I can promise not to talk about sex toys but I can’t promise not to get excited.”
Or stay big.
Daddy squeezed my hand. “Is that your concern?”
“Part of it.” So I hadn’t been lying. “But I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”
“My Wren.” Daddy Manny leaned over and kissed my head. “Your youthful headspace is adorable. That can’t possibly make anyone uncomfortable.”
Still looking slightly confused, Daddy frowned again. “We are keeping our clothes on. We are not doinginappropriatepublic displays of affection. We will not mention diner topics. We will make everyone comfortable.”
Daddy’s frown that time was clearly because of a sentence issue but he didn’t worry over it for long. “If they are that easily offended, they should not be selling clothing clearly designed for youthful adults.”
Part of me wanted to open the bond wide again and either give him the word he was looking for or ask if he wanted me tohelp, but we’d been practicing keeping it toned down as much as possible around regular humans. When it was wide, we had a tendency to just use the mate bond to talk and that didn’t look human-normal at all.
Even Daddy Manny had realized that.
No.
Toman.
Even Toman had realized that.
Ugh.
I was definitely going to call him Daddy.
“Shopping for fun stuff makes me little.” I couldn’t help it. “Shopping for costumes woulddefinitelymake me little.”
Daddy shrugged. “I don’t see the problem with that. It is a store that sells costumes and toys.”
Technically he was right but I didn’t want to upset him.
Or make him upset with me.
