The Long And Short Of It

The one and only Cut N. Paste audibly grumbled as the sunlight streaming through the window landed perfectly on her face, rousing the earth pony from her comfortable slumber. The first thing she noticed after the sunshine though, was that her face was pressed into somepony’s decadently soft tuft. In no rush to get up, Cut snuggled further into the pony’s fluff and took a deep breath.

‘That... smells nothing like Anon.’

Suddenly, a pair of small but strong hooves wrapped around her head, pressing the mare further into the tuft. As Cut was pushed further and further into the fuzz, an unmistakably feminine voice sultrily whispered, “Oh, you like that don’t you, slut?”

Cut was not comfortable with what that made her feel!

‘I should probably pull away, but… Pike’s tuft is so soft and voluptuous…’

She couldn’t look down at her own, pathetic tuft from her current position, but she could feel it. Pike’s was so much bigger, and so much softer…

Cut sighed, wistfully.

‘Why must my genes be so accursed!?’

Confronted with a paragon of femininity, how could a lowly beta like her not be filled with totally platonic attraction?

‘How could I not want to completely drown in my herdsister’s tuft? There’s nothing dyke about that! But you know what’s even less dyke? Dreaming about my coltfriend shoving my face into that same tuft with every thrust as he rails me! Nothing homosexual about that!’

Not to imply she had dreamt that, of course.

...More than three times.

....Consecutively.

Suddenly, Cut felt a familiar weight fall onto her withers, bringing her back to reality.

“Babe, didn’t anyone ever teach you that sharing is caring?” Pulling her face back just enough that she could look up, Cut saw that Anon had draped himself over her AND Pike. Sometimes it was easy to forget just how big he was, but times like this made it easy to remember.

‘H-Hot…’

Shoving his face right next to hers, the two of them enjoyed bathing their snoots in Pike’s lovely tuft.

‘Now Anon’s in here with me, that DEFINITELY means it's not dyke! Right? RIGHT!?’

“Okay, it’s fucked how much longer your years are here,” Anon bemoaned as the three of them went through their morning routines. He couldn’t help but notice how long this winter had felt. Mostly because seasons here were actually longer than they were back on Earth.

“No,” Pike piped up as she followed him into the bathroom, “what’s bucked is that your Earth months are complete nonsense! Twelve months, each with thirty-five days, makes so much more sense!”

“Yeah,” Cut added through a mouthful of toothpaste. “What were the humans thinking!?”

Cranking the valve on the shower, Anon resisted the urge to sassily roll his eyes. “Sor~ry humans can’t, you know, control the weather!”

Pike scoffed as she took a place at the twin sinks next to Cut and started searching for something. “Sounds like an excuse to me!”

He chuckled as he tested the water with a hoof.

‘Ahhh, nice and warm already. Pony water heaters really are magic!’

Without further ado, he crossed the threshold and immersed himself in the wonderful world of a morning shower.

“Move over, stud!” Before Anon could even think about closing the curtain, Pike had zipped into the shower with him. She cheekily came to a stop right under him, taking advantage of all the water running off of him, and now on to her.

Blushing a little at the lewd positioning, the stallion briefly considered asking Cut to join in as well. However, that thought was immediately snuffed out by the memory of the last time the three of them all tried to squeeze into the shower together. Talk about a disaster! Pony showers really aren’t meant to have two ponies in them, but three!? Frankly, they were lucky no one broke anything.

Pike, meanwhile, was contentedly humming below him, and the stallion could feel her hips bump his hocks as she lazily swayed them side to side. “Mmmm, Thanks for volunteering to help me scrub all those hard to reach places.” Giving in to the banter, he summoned his hands and gave Pike’s cute little nips a tweak. He could tell her guard was down by how she stiffened under him—and by the adorable little shriek she made!

“EEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

After getting a hold of herself again, gone was the smugness she’d entered the shower with, as Pike looked up at Anon and glowered. “Don’t do that.”

He blew her a raspberry. “Fine, fine, your nips aren’t as tweakable as Cut’s anyway.”

The moment those words left his mouth, he heard the sound of a surprised and flustered Cut knocking something over at the sink. She must have been listening in, just as he’d hoped. “Oh jeez!”

‘SCORE! That’s two for two, baby!’

With a victorious smile on his face, Anon got to work scrubbing down both himself and Pike. Looking down at her, he had a front row seat to the sight of her glower melting away under the power of his semi-skilled ministrations. He could already tell that today was going to be a great day!

Splashing some fresh lather into his incorporeal hands, he set to work really working it into Pike’s flanks. Which she appreciated, of course. “Mmmmmm.” The more he worked the suds in, the more she leaned into his hands. Which, considering they weren’t actually attached to anything, was an odd sensation. It was almost like he was both standing above her and standing behind her at the same time.

‘Schrödinger's fondle.’

“Don’t think this makes up for twisting my gals,” Pike suddenly said, as she continued to lean into his magic.

The stallion was so, SO very tempted to grab them again, but he resisted. There would be plenty of time for more of that later. “I know deep down a part of you likes it. And that part can’t hide from me forever!”

She looked up at him pleadingly, a touch of genuine desperation in her eyes. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve got Cut’s to play with?”

But of course, Anon was unmoved. “No.”

Pike dropped her head into her hoof. “Their balls are always fatter when the full moon’s out, just a day or so more,” she muttered under her breath.

That was not the kind of reaction he’d expected. A pony saying, maybe? He made a mental note to ask her about that later. “Consider it a small price you’ll pay so we can spend our first Christmas with your parents instead of just as a herd.”

Pike glanced up at him questioningly. “Christma—” she started, before she suddenly stiffened up even more than she had when he’d tweaked her nips.

‘Did... I say something wrong?’

“Hey, hon,” he began, placing a worried hoof on her shoulder, “I was kidding about—”

“It’s not that,” she cut him off. “It’s... nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

That was weird; was there something about going to her parents that had her worried? What could that possibly be? She’d always spoken so highly of them. Another topic to broach when they weren’t about to start the day, he supposed. “Hey, speaking of your parents’, have we got Cut in on that plan yet?”

“Of course we have! We told her...” Pike’s statement trailed off as the thestral searched her memory. After more than a few moments of clearly drawing a blank, she called out beyond the shower in a last ditch effort. “We told you about that, right, Cut?”

“Um, well, no,” Cut weakly answered. “What’s Christmas…?”

Pike looked down at her hooves for a moment, before something dawned on her. She turned to Anon, confusion mixing with dawning horror. “Oh Luna, we haven’t planned the trip out there at all, have we?”

Her realization made his stomach drop.

‘Oh FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!’

Unfortunately, Anon had been forced to leave that situation more or less unresolved. He and Pike at least managed to get Cut on board, but seeing as they all had to go to work, he’d been forced to put their trip planning on hold until at least tonight. Which left him sitting at his desk, worrying and lamenting. “Oh God, it's so much closer to the holidays now! Tickets are probably so much more expensive!”

Cut stopped in the middle of her work, looking up and squinting for a bit before turning to face him. “Why would train tickets get more expensive?”

“ANONYMOUS!” a voice yelled out from across the way, prompting both his and Cut’s heads to swivel towards the source of the voice: Jargon’s office. “GET IN HERE!” Jargon’s tone, as always, demanded immediate attention, so with a shrug towards Cut, Anon stood up from his desk and headed out. Seeing as Jargon’s office was on nearly the other side of the office floor, he had quite a little trek ahead of him!

As usual, he opted to walk around the outside of the cube farm as opposed to through it. He preferred to hear the snide comments from his coworkers come from just one direction as opposed to all of them, thank you very much. Although, since he’d started dating Cut, he couldn’t help but appreciate the direction those comments had taken.

“How did that loser manage to hit THAT?” one mare cried.

“He must have a fetish,” another chimed in. “You saw the hangers between her legs when she walked in! She didn’t even try to hide them!” Their anguish turned his canter into something distinctly more reminiscent of a strut, and he taunted them in his head all the while.

‘Oh yeah, Cut gets a piece of this and you don’t! So if you think she’s a loser, what does that say about you, bitch?’

The thoughts put a devilishly smug smile on his face.

But, not wanting to waste more energy on his cringe coworkers than strictly necessary, he turned his attention away from them and towards the office itself. He’d never really put much thought into it before, but he appreciated how ponies really did their damnedest to liven everything up, even cube farms. Despite being an office building, the interior made him think of a cottage more than anything else. The parts of the walls that weren’t dedicated to windows were all extravagantly painted too, full of color and life. Even the cubes had some color on them! They were all made of polished wood with white trim, and low walls so they could easily talk to their neighbors!

‘You know, they kind of look like—’

‘Wait a minute, oh my God. They’re just stalls, from a barn! Pony cubicles are STALLS.’

‘I’ve been working in a STALL this whole time!? What the fuck!?’

This revelation disturbed him so deeply that he didn’t even notice he’d reached Jargon’s office. Which, of course, caused him to walk face first right into the door. “Agh! Fuck!” Pausing to rub a hoof on his now sore muzzle, he just barely caught Jargon chuckling to herself and saying something about how ‘stallions walk around with their heads in the clouds.’

‘Okay, let’s get this over with then.’

Pushing open Jargon’s door with a little more force than he’d meant to, he stepped into her office. “You called, boss?”

Very annoyingly, she did not get right to the point. “Ahh, I remember what my husband was like after we first met. It was months later and he was still knocking things off the counter!”

‘You sure he wasn’t just scrambling to escape you, Jargon?’

“I’ll have to set aside some PTO for the two of you come spring. You won’t be able to keep your hooves off each other!” Jargon said with disturbingly smug confidence. Anon balked a little. He was really not a fan of the implications of her trying to predict his sex life. Nor was that even close to one of the things he’d expected to hear today when he’d walked in. “I’m sure you’re thinking you don’t want foals now, but no stallion can escape the power of an Earth mare’s fertility!”

‘Okay, what the fuck!?’

He glared at her for a moment. “Boss, is this really what you called me over for?” Some of the vitriol in his head had definitely leaked into that response.

She just looked at him like he was insane. Well, he certainly felt like he was going insane, at least. “Of course not! Here, this showed up at the office for you.”

She tapped a gilded envelope on her desk. Closing the distance to it, Anon could see that ‘gilded’ didn’t actually do it justice. The whole thing was wreathed in an ornate gold pattern depicting two rather majestic unicorns. And written in gold ink was his own name, front and center. He supposed it must be fan mail or something, otherwise they would have just sent it to Pike’s apartment. Curiosity piqued, he popped the envelope open and slid the contents into his magic hands.

It was, predictably, a letter. Surprisingly however, a small gold medallion also fell out. Much like what was on the envelope, it depicted a unicorn, this time standing in front of a blazing sun.

‘What the hell?’

Turning his attention to the letter, he began to read.

Dear Anonymous,

I’ve been a fan of your articles for quite some time, and recently I came into possession of some very interesting information. As my favorite gossip writer in the city, I can think of no better pony to share it with! So please, come by the castle this evening at seven sharp, and we can discuss this juicy development. Just show this medallion to the guards and they’ll take you right to me!

Hope to see you soon,

A fan

“Hm.” Looking up from the letter, the look Jargon was giving him made it intuitively obvious that she expected him to tell her what it said.

‘Wow, rude.’

“It's a fan. Says they want to meet, and that they’ve got a scoop for me.”

Jargon smiled like a wolf eyeing a fresh piece of meat. “Well, what are you waiting for then? Get going!”