Lyra, Quit Horsing Around!

        Bonbon shut the door behind herself and sighed.

        It had been a long day.

        Working a front-facing retail job in any industry was a recipe for misery, but Bonbon had made the regretful decision of choosing a job that also happened to require years of culinary training. She wondered sometimes whether spending the better part of her twenties and her entire future worth of income on student loans had been worthwhile, and seldom came up with any answers. She told herself she liked what she did, but there were only so many fancifully decorative candies you could make in a day before the patterns started to blur together. Even more disheartening was the fact that no matter how hard she tried or how many treats she made, some with the pinnacle of her sugary design effort, the kids and other customers that ate them seldom took more than a few seconds to admire them before wolfing them down. They were just colorful sugar, and the differences in taste didn’t matter much when they went down in handfuls amidst a mix of other, less carefully-crafted treats.

        Bonbon pulled a bag of gummi-bears out of her jacket pocket as she hung her coat up in the hallway, the daily bonus of hours alone with unmonitored candy-bins.

        At least the job had a few perks.

        That said, a daily allowance of chewy, tooth-melting treats was not doing wonders for her physique. Bonbon had put on more than a few pounds since she started at the sweet shop, and it was showing everywhere it counted, making her hips swell out and her breasts yearn for a larger size of bra. She tried to tell herself to cut back when she remembered, but the allure of gummi-anything was usually too strong to resist.

        She chewed a handful of the candies as she walked down the hallway. Being away from the smell of sour sugar was always a comfort, even if parts of her apartment did frequently reek of unwashed dishes and equally unwashed clothes, amongst other things. Right now, though, she just wanted to melt away into nothingness. Maybe she could wake up in a world where eight hours of her day wouldn’t be taken up by tooth-rotting monotony.

        She made a right turn into the computer room just before her bedroom. No wi-fi at work meant she tried to avoid using her cell-phone’s data whenever possible. There could be piles of unread emails waiting for her – though if there were, they were probably all Facebook notifications. She’d been meaning to unfriend Derpy for a while after waking up to three hundred all-spam messages advertising how many eggs Derpy had found in Farmville.

        Bonbon didn’t have to flick on the light; it was already on as she walked into the room. She clucked her tongue as she noticed the computer monitor was on as well. Not any way to cut costs on an already astronomical electric bill. How many times had she told Lyra to turn the computer off when she wasn’t using...

        She took pause at the computer screen. Instead of the vacation photo of her and Lyra Bonbon had selected as a desktop background some time ago, a video playing in a browser window took up the whole of the screen, with room on the sides for the profane advertisements playing alongside the content paused halfway through playback.

        ‘Well hung stallion takes young girl hard’, Bonbon read. She sighed.

        She tried not to look at the still-frame the pause bar was frozen on, involving some pieces of anatomy in other pieces of anatomy in a way that she couldn’t imagine could be comfortable. She walked more quickly down the hallway, not storming, though certainly a change from the leisurely pace she’d made her way inside with. The door to the bedroom was open a crack. She pushed it inward and walked inside.

        “Lyra, I’ve asked you a thousand times not to–”

        Bonbon’s eyes caught up with her mouth halfway through her reprimand. Instead of a Lyra tucked into the covers of their queen-sized bed, or a Lyra getting dressed after a shower, there was a Lyra was  lying in the center of the bed, completely naked. Her thin, limber legs were spread wide, and she had both her hands between them, holding onto a length of thick black plastic that could reasonably be mistaken for a long, floppy vaccuum cleaner hose, if not for the flare at the tip and the fake veins along the sides.

        Lyra’s eyes flew open as she heard her roommate’s voice. Her pupils shrunk and she froze like a deer in headlights.

        Both girls were stared for a moment before time caught up with them.

        “Gah!”

        Lyra made a noise like a startled chicken and rolled sideways. She caught the blankets with her as she tumbled, eventually reaching the side of the bed and toppling to the floor. The placement of her toy vanished to speculation as she became a ball of squirming nakedness wrapped in luxuriously thick quilts.

        Bonbon put her hands on her hips and sighed with a roll of her eyes.

        Lyra peeked her head up over the bed. The blankets were wrapped around her torso and head like a hooded cloak. She grinned sheepishly, her cheeks flushed.

        “Sorry,” she said, “I kind of lost track of the time. Forgot when you were coming home, heh...”

        “You know, it’s not like I wanted to come home and find my girlfriend waiting for me or anything.” Bonbon’s mouth contorted into a scowl as she glared in Lyra’s direction. “Not like after a hard day at work I’d maybe like to check my email and not find horse porn on the computer screen.”

        Lyra kept her grin and let it widen into a hopefully more apologetic disarmament. Her cheeks reddened Bonbon’s voice grew sterner..

        “Sorry,” she said again. “I forgot...”

        “I noticed,” Bonbon said, and sighed, turning to leave.

        “Bon, wait–”

        “Just finish and get dressed, or whatever. I wanna to take a nap.”

        Bonbon didn’t wait for a response. She shut the door harder than necessary.

        Lyra sat for a moment in silence. She felt hot under her blankets, left to think about what the best course of action would be to avoid offending Bonbon any further.

        The brunt of her sizable black toy hadn’t left her during her tumble. She could feel it inside her, making her feel tingly and hot and full, but not quite full enough.

        Well. She’d already messed things up today. May as well finish digging her grave before she attempted to climb out of it.

        With her hand held firmly in place between her legs to keep her fake stallion-friend inside, Lyra untangled herself from the blankets and lay back down on the bed. Within a minute her eyes were closed, and her hand was busy with the rhythm she had found before.

        She stuck her tongue out as her hand moved, and licked her lips, picturing the regal looking creature that would go along with the feeling of her toy. She came shortly thereafter, and took a moment to compose herself before going to find Bonbon and attempt another apology. Bonbon answered it only with a dismissive deadpan; she could never take Lyra seriously when she still smelled like sweat and silicon friendly lubricant.

        The clock read 8:30 as Bonbon woke up from her nap. She’d half expected to shut her eyes for a few hours of sleep and drift off long into the early morning the next day, but eight-thirty wasn’t bad. It gave her the rest of the evening to feel like she wasn’t completely wasting her hours away from work. There was enough time to watch some TV, make dinner, and enjoy it in the company of her girlfriend, whom she tried to remember she was supposed to be mad at.

It was easy to be between states with Lyra. On the one hand, Bonbon had come home more than once in the past few weeks to find evidence of Lyra’s growing fixation, and today had been forced to put her nap off as a result. On the other hand, Lyra was wonderful. Yes, over the past few months she might have developed what Bonbon felt was an unhealthy interest in well-endowed stallions, but she was still the same spunky, cheerful, light-hearted girl Bonbon had fallen in love with months ago. Moving in together had only made Bonbon realize how in love she was, and the first few weeks of their mid-relationship honeymoon had been filled with giggles, naked tickle fights, and more instances of sore tongues and cramped hands than either of them could count.

        Now, things were still nice, but there were problems.

        Bonbon didn’t think Lyra’s taste in pornography was worrying, necessarily. If Lyra had mentioned her proclivity for equines offhandedly during some pillow talk, or maybe had to explain a browser load or search term autocomplete on occasion, Bonbon wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Bonbon was by no means a puritan; she had her own set of fetishes that she would happily share with Lyra if asked, and had done so on more than one occasion.

        What she did not do, however, was inundate her poor, uninterested girlfriend in her fetish every minute of the day. She did not keep tiny horse statues on the window ledges and bedside tables, nor did she have a stuffed horse plushie named Caramel that she kept in the bedroom and brushed occasionally, despite the fact that the horse’s felt lining put it in no need of any sort of mane maintenance. She did not leave open browser windows of young girls being ruined by giant lengths of splotchy horse dick. She did not greet her sweetheart with a foreboding of disinterest in intimacy for the rest of the evening, evidenced by a focus on finishing herself off with a ridiculous looking plastic horse dong.

        Lyra did all of these things, and Bonbon felt like she was starting to reach her limit. She wasn’t sure what she’d say if she had to suffer through another of Lyra’s overly-earnest attempts to share her arousal. Not like she hadn’t already endured her fair share of it. She’d thought she might be spared further showings of Lyra’s horse-porn videos after sitting through the first one and making it clear she wasn’t interested, but that wasn’t the case. Lyra was always dragging Bonbon to the computer when she found a new one she felt was particularly good.

        “Look at that,” she’d say, her spiky voice sparkling with enthusiasm. “Look how big he is. Isn’t that totally hot?”

        Lyra had never picked up on Bonbon’s exasperation, though. Bonbon had considered being more direct, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. It’s hard to tell someone you love that something they’re so passionate about utterly disgusts you. At least now evidence of Lyra’s obsession was becoming a matter of courtesy, so Bonbon had some possible ammunition if things finally reached a breaking point.

        Bonbon tried to forget about it for the time being. Finding things to aggravate herself over was a waste of the rest of her evening, and even if Lyra was apparently more interested in her ‘Chance Stallion’ than a romp with her partner, there was still TV to be watched and a nice bed to snuggle up in. Even if Lyra didn’t want to fool around, she still made a good cuddle partner.

        In an apologetic fashion, Lyra had offered to do the dishes in short order after dinner. She might have offered to cook if her previous culinary attempts hadn’t all ended in blackened pots and pans and unrecognizable food masses that made the kitchen reek of burning for weeks. Bonbon was content to do the cooking, and she appreciated Lyra’s extra enthusiasm in helping to clean up. She usually did anyway, but the fact that she had jumped to it so readily showed she was at least a little sorry.

        Bonbon fell into bed with a sigh. She quickly burrowed under the covers and nestled herself into her side of the bed, closing her eyes and breathing slowly as her head hit the stack of cushy pillows. She’d only been awake for an hour or two after her nap and already felt tired.

        She enjoyed the relative silence of the bedroom for a moment before the quiet creaking of the door drew her attention. She pried herself into consciousness to catch sight of Lyra grinning at her, tip-toeing across the carpeted floor and sliding into her side of the bed. Bonbon smiled and shut her eyes as Lyra’s body made the mattress dip slightly in the other direction.

        Lyra snuggled up to Bonbon without speaking, and Bonbon’s hands found their way around Lyra’s waist as Lyra’s did the same to her. Bonbon shivered a little as Lyra’s fingers, still wet from dish-water, touched the small of her back, but she settled after a moment and pulled Lyra closer, basking in the warmth of her lover’s body as Lyra nestled her head into Bonbon’s ample chest. There was more than enough cushioning to make for a comfortable pillow, as was the case with the rest of Bonbon’s body. Where Lyra was slender and tall, Bonbon was the opposite, though neither of the two so far in one direction that they looked like the absolute epitomizations of their body types. Bonbon was pudgy but not obese, or maybe not even fat depending on how much she sucked in. Her stomach had a bit of a bulge to it and love handles to go along, and she could told herself once a week she could stand to take up jogging again to help trim some inches off her thighs, but she never listened to herself; gummi-worms were more accommodating than the unpleasant hardness of the pavement underfoot.

        As a result of her pudginess, Bonbon’s build was accentuated in other places as well. Her breasts more than filled up the selection of bras she’d bought years ago and had been meaning to replace for a while, and the roundness of her butt made every load of laundry a potential hazard to her wardrobe after her jeans were threatened with the shrinking potential of the dryer. Still, Lyra was adamant that she loved Bonbon’s curves, and before she had gotten a job at the candy store she had solicited more than a few regular visitors at the diner she had worked at. Luckily she was in an apron and far behind the counter most of the time these days, so leering men ogling her shapeliness were less of a problem. She always had the guaranteed let down of Lyra’s presence if it came to that, of course.

        Lyra wasn’t Bonbon’s polar opposite, but she was certainly a good deal more elongated. ‘Lithe’ was the word Bonbon had used to describe her before, and Lyra had protested, saying that word was for slinking jungle cats and scrawny gazelles. Lyra would argue that she still had some meat on her bones and grab a tiny handful of stomach flab as evidence, which usually prompted a set of giggles from Bonbon, followed by naked tummy kisses and the subsequent removal of clothing. Lyra didn’t have as much to hide under her shirt as Bonbon; she was blessed, or cursed, depending on your stance, with a runner’s chest. She did jog as a result of nature’s suggestion in her physiology, but not enough that she didn’t lament not having a more substantial set of eye-candy to match Bonbon’s. Her butt wasn’t quite as scrawny as the rest of her, but she still eyed big-bottomed girls with envy when she was out, or with something else when she was at home and had Bonbon’s sizable derriere in her hands.

        In a way, Bonbon thought their differences made them fit together better, like two halves of a distinct whole.

        Bonbon let herself reach a half-dozing state for a while, curled up with Lyra against her chest. She loved the feeling of Lyra’s slender fingers on the small of her back just above her jeans, and how Lyra would trace circles on her skin as though she was writing hieroglyphics only the two of them could understand. Bonbon had never asked for the translation, but she could feel the meaning of the gesture as it changed. Soft, tender lines meant ‘This is nice, let’s stay here for a while.’ The curves that Bonbon guessed were a heart meant ‘I love you.’ And when Lyra’s fingers drifted below Bonbon’s waist and into the back of her jeans, that meant ‘Take off your pants.’

        Lyra’s fingers danced near the top of Bonbon’s pants for a moment, but skirted away after a few seconds as though Lyra had remembered something suddenly. Bonbon opened her eyes as she felt Lyra’s palm flatten against her skin. Lyra smiled at her with slightly reddened cheeks, and Bonbon smiled back.

        “Your shirt’s all wet from the dishes,” Bonbon said, taking the edge of Lyra’s t-shirt between her fingers and pinching it to demonstrate the discolouration the soapy water had left. Lyra looked at it and gave a tiny shrug.

        “Yeah, I guess it is. Is it bothering you?”

        Lyra and Bonbon’s voices were as different as their bodies were: Bonbon’s was thick and well-rounded like a mother or a rubenesque seductress, and Lyra’s was sharp and tomboyish, with a hint of a laugh or planned mischief in every syllable.

        Bonbon grinned and slid her hand down Lyra’s side, feeling the softness of her t-shirt disappear into even softer skin where Lyra’s midriff was exposed.

“No, but I think you should take it off anyway.”

Lyra smiled softly. She pulled herself back a bit and tucked her hands underneath her t-shirt, then yanked the entire thing off with a single motion. To Bonbon’s delight, Lyra’s perky tits stood out plain, bare in the absence of her bra.        Lyra blushed a little and moved to nestle herself back against Bonbon’s chest, but Bonbon’s hand met Lyra’s shoulder and pushed her back.

        “Mmn-mhm. You stay right there. In fact, lie down a little.”

        Lyra did as directed, letting Bonbon turn her onto her back with a touch on the shoulder.

Bonbon could feel the stiffness in Lyra’s muscles.Without speaking a word further, Bonbon slowly withdrew her hand from Lyra’s shoulder and let her lie back on the bed. Lyra drew in a long, slow breath as Bonbon kneeled on the bed next to her, drinking in the sight of Lyra’s naked chest with her eyes like it was water after a long day of thirst. Lyra tensed as she felt Bonbon’s hand again, this time on her stomach, tracing tender circles around her bellybutton and up along her ribcage. She sucked in a deep breath as Bonbon’s fingers reached the underside of her breasts, and let it out as Bonbon’s hand descended again, returning to her stomach.

        “You’re cute,” Bonbon said as she moved her hand up again. Lyra grinned at her bashfully and drew another breath as Bonbon’s fingers touched the bottom of her right breast.

        Bonbon kept going this time. She didn’t want to tease. Her entire hand wrapped around one of Lyra’s tits, and her other joined it on the opposite side of Lyra’s chest, grabbing both small handfuls and squeezing them softly.

        Lyra sucked in air through her teeth and closed her eyes. Bonbon could feel Lyra’s body arching to meet her touch underneath her fingers. She could feel the eagerness in Lyra’s hip movements and tiny wiggles as Bonbon kneaded and caressed her breasts. It was enough to make Bonbon similarly breathless, knowing she was turning Lyra on so much from just a touch. It made her want to do much more than just touch.

        Bonbon paused and withdrew her touch abruptly, prompting Lyra to open her eyes as she wondered the soft hands on her chest had gone. Bonbon was there, kneeling over her when her eyes opened, and Lyra smiled as Bonbon leaned in and gave her a quick peck on the nose.

        “I could spend all night touching you like this,” Bonbon said with a smirk, and Lyra blushed and bit her lower lip at the suggestion. “...but I’ve been wanting to get home and see you all day. I really need to just get dirty for a bit, if that’s okay with you.”

        Lyra nodded enthusiastically, her mouth still frozen in an embarrassed smile.

        Bonbon grinned at her.

        “I’m glad. We can take our time later, and I promise I’ll get you as turned on as you want, but right now I just need to fuck...”

        Lyra let out a soft moan at Bonbon’s emphatic profanity, and craned her head towards Bonbon, her lips pursed in search of a kiss. Bonbon met Lyra’s mouth in the same fashion, and they kissed, hard, and Lyra moaned again and writhed against the bedsheets as Bonbon felt the fire of the embrace spreading through the rest of her body.

        Bonbon broke the kiss after a few seconds, leaving Lyra with her neck still craned forward, her eyes glazed over.

        “Pants, off,” she said. Lyra nodded feverishly through the haze of her arousal.

        Bonbon jumped up from the bed as Lyra undressed. She made her way to the chest of drawers in the corner of the bedroom and kneeled.She rifled around in the lowest drawer for a moment before finding what she was looking for. She took the object she had unearthed and set it on the floor as she stood up, then pulled off her t-shirt and tossed it to the floor. Her bra came shortly thereafter with a behind the back pinch of her fingers, and her breasts jiggled as they sprung free and settled on her chest. Her jeans followed shortly thereafter. She slid them off with a practiced salaciousness, bending forward and giving Lyra a good view of her ample backside. She grinned as she heard a soft moan behind imagining Lyra blushing at the sight of her curvaceous booty.

        Bonbon turned to Lyra with a smile on her face.

        “I want you on your hands and knees. Now.”

        “Okay...” Lyra managed to speak again, but the word she found sounded timid and docile. Bonbon wasn’t in the habit of being so direct unless she really wanted something, and if that was the case it meant that Lyra was in for quite a treat if she behaved well.

        “Looking that way,” Bonbon said, pointing to the wall. Lyra nodded and averted her eyes toward the curtains on the bedroom window instead of the sexy, well-shaped naked body a foot away from her.

        She couldn’t see, but she heard the snap of clasps to her right, and the sound of something jingling slightly thereafter.

        “Move forward a little,” Bonbon said, suddenly behind her. Lyra nodded wordlessly and complied. She shuffled forward on her hands and knees, still keeping her eyes away from the weight she could feel on the mattress as Bonbon climbed up onto the bed.

        “Head down,” Bonbon said again. Lyra whimpered. She was already wet, and Bonbon’s commanding tone was only pushing her further towards becoming a whimpering, needy mess.

        Lyra gasped as she felt Bonbon’s fingers suddenly on her hips, and the firm, abrupt imposition of a smooth object poking at her from behind. She clenched instinctively as the head poked at her opening, but relaxed as she felt Bonbon’s weight shift with the object, matching it one for one in conjoinment.

        “You are soaked,” Bonbon said mostly to herself with an incredulous giggle in her voice. Lyra moaned and buried her head in the sheets, readying herself for Bonbon’s entry.

        Bonbon gave herself a few seconds to slick up the tip of her strap-on before she slid forward. Lyra’s folds parted for her without hesitation, and after a single thrust she was buried deep, her artificial phallus wrapped around by Lyra’s eager slit. Bonbon let out her first tiny noise of pleasure as the vibrating plate on her clit pressed down extra hard with the force of Lyra’s hips moving back to meet her own.

        She waited only a few seconds before pulling out and slamming back home. She was in no mood to be gentle.

        Lyra let out a tiny whimper of anguished pleasure as Bonbon thrust inside her again, and she kept a low murmur as Bonbon picked up her thrusting with a regular movement, pounding her plastic shaft into Lyra’s pussy with a methodical slap, slap, slap.

        Lyra was always the louder one. She moaned loudly and bit down on a mouthful of pillowcase for a few seconds before pulling it out of her mouth, the fabric covered in saliva.

        “Oh, Bon, that feels so good,” she moaned, her words slurred from her normal impish tone by the sway of her body’s response to Bonbon’s pounding.

        Bonbon grinned behind her.

        “Oh... does it?...” Bonbon’s rhetoric was interrupted by her own panting. Unfortunately, her jogging avoidance and lunchtime sour candies meant such vigorous thrusting was a little taxing.

        She had only been going for a few minutes and already she felt in need of a break.

        Bonbon paused and pulled Lyra back towards her, grabbing the best handfuls she could of Lyra’s waist and dragging her onto the significant length of strap on half-way inside her. Lyra groaned and let herself be moved, though she stayed still as the whole of Bonbon’s length lodged inside her.

        “You move... for a bit...” Bonbon managed between breaths. She lifted one of her hands to wipe the sweat away from her forehead.

        Lyra looked back and nodded before she complied, and immediately began fucking herself on Bonbon’s strap on, pressing her lightly-toned butt into the plastic of the vibrating plate and smooshing the tiny motor up against Bonbon’s clit, eliciting a series of soft grunts as she continued.

        “Does that... feel good too?” Bonbon asked, gathering the throes of her stamina as her breathing returned to a somewhat regular pace, now only disrupted by the pleasure of Lyra’s grinding and the humming on her love-button.

        “Ohhh, yes, so good...” Lyra moaned as she moved.

        “Do you like having my dick inside you?” Bonbon asked, playing into the mood of her previous directions. She’d never thought about having a dick for real before, let alone one this size, but sometimes pretending made her feel good.

        “Yes, yes,” Lyra said between her backwards thrusts. She held herself up with one hand, her other one having found its way between her legs to rub frantically at her own clit as she rode Bonbon with every movement of her hips. “It feels like... it feels like...”

        Bonbon’s eyebrows piqued in curiosity, though it went unseen to Lyra, whose eyes were closed in overwhelming pleasure. “Like?” she asked, the domineering bite still in her speech.

        “It feels like I’m riding a big stallion and getting myself off on his giant dick...” Lyra finished, moaning out the last word as her hand worked faster on her clit.

        What little movement had been in Bonbon’s hips stopped. She froze in place, though Lyra’s movement kept on.

        Bonbon’s mouth curled down at the edges.

        “Bon, please, can you... can you pull my hair, please, with your hand right behind my neck?”

        Bonbon’s eyebrows were still hunched a little, but she hadn’t completely abandoned the pretense of what she’d started. Besides which, Lyra’s ass pressing up against her vibrating clit still felt good, and it was hard to say no to the writhing, slender frame riding her artificial cock. She could let one comment slide, for now.

        She reached forward and took a handful of Lyra’s short, mint-green hair, suddenly aware that she was taking direction, rather than giving it.

        “Lean forward a little too? I wanna feel you hunched over me, please...”

        Bonbon complied to that with hesitance as well, though the logistics of her height made things a little difficult. She managed to get herself mostly arched over Lyra’s back, her face only inches away from the side of Lyra’s head as it jostled back and forth with her thrusting.

        “Oh, yes, just like that, it feels like you’re propped up over me in your stable and I can’t move away...”

        Bonbon’s faced soured further. She had to say something, surely? Or else she’d be forced to stay her protest forever forward again, knowing she had kept silent when Lyra had let relatively normal sex slip into the realm of her fetish again.

        “Lyra...” Bonbon started, her tone gone from cruel and commanding to agitated and teetering on the edge of upset.

        Lyra  turned her head back with an oblivious expression, her hand a blur between her legs.

        “Bon,” she said breathlessly, “I’m really close. Do you think you could... could you...”

        “What?” Bonbon asked, guessing she might as well let Lyra enjoy herself before she brought up the topic of what was sure to be an uncomfortable discussion.

        “Could you... whinny for me? Just, like, right into my ear, kind of low-sounding?”

        That was it. Bonbon lifted herself upright and pushed Lyra forward at the same time she pulled back. Lyra’s body toppled to the side as Bonbon stood up off the bed. The black length of her strap-on shone in the dim light of the bedroom, dripping with Lyra’s arousal.

        “For fucks’ sake Lyra. Can’t we have one night together where you don’t bring fucking horses into things?”

        Lyra’s face was a mixture of emotions. Her hand was still between her legs as she collected herself from her sprawled out thrown-forward position, but she quickly withdrew it and tried to deal with coming down from the so-close proximity of her orgasm. Bonbon’s words sunk into her ears slowly, and her eyes widened as though she suddenly realized she had said something regrettable in the throes of passion.

        “Oh...” she said quietly, all at once aware of where her body’s all consuming lust had taken her. “I’m sorry...”

        “Bullshit you are. Every day it’s the same shit with you. If it’s not coming home to you leaving horse porn on the computer it’s walking in the door to find you going to town with that disgusting fucking pony dong. That would be bad enough, but now we can’t even fuck without you wanting me to act like I’m a horse. I thought you liked me, Lyra? I’m a human girl, not a horse.”

        Lyra’s eyes had begun to fill with tears before Bonbon was finished, and by the last word she was teetering on the edge of full-blown crying, her face scrunched up in a pathetic look of utter misery.

        Bonbon saw the sparkling in Lyra’s irises and the look on her face and realized she had gone maybe a bit too far. She hadn’t meant to lash out so strongly, but the weeks and weeks of collected offenses had blended together into a singular ball of hate, and the interruption of an otherwise enjoyable intimate session together had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Now she was seething with rage, but aware that if she kept going she might not only make Lyra cry, but possibly hurt her so badly she might never see her again.

        Bonbon closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. She opened her eyes and raised her hands into the air beside her face, then slowly lowered them to her sides. She went to work at once on the clasp of her strap-on and undid it in short order, letting the harness and vibrating plate fall to the floor, whereupon she reached down and turned the vibrator off.

        “Look,” she started with an exasperated sigh, “just forget about it, okay? Let’s just... I’m not in the mood anymore, obviously, so let’s just go to bed.” She made her way to the side of the bed with her eyes on the wall the whole time, not wanting to look Lyra in the face. She didn’t want to see her sad, even if the sadness might have been appropriately warranted.

        Bonbon had no sooner crawled under the strewn-about covers than she felt the weight on the opposite side of the mattress disappear. Lyra had sprung to her feet and was dressing herself like she was getting ready to flee from a burning building. Bonbon caught a glimpse of her face and saw tears streaming down her cheeks. She mentally kicked herself and tried to get up before Lyra could make her way out the door.

        “Lyra–” she started, but was cut off before she could manage another word.

        “It’s fine,” Lyra said through the quivering wail that was her voice, showing that in fact, everything was not fine. “I’m just gonna... just gonna go for a walk or something. You g-get some s-sleep, okay?”

        “Lyra...” Bonbon could say only her lover’s name again before Lyra was gone, turning from a fast walk into a dash to the door, bursting into full-blown sobbing as she ran out of the room. Bonbon sat with her hand outstretched until she heard the front door slam. She let her fingers fall to the bed as she leaned back against her pillow and sighed.

        She had been too harsh. She could tell the instant the words had left her mouth. No matter how frustrated she might have been with Lyra’s constant emphasis on equine anatomy and its inclusion in their relationship, she shouldn’t have blown up like that. Really, what she should have done was to talk about it the first time instead of letting it build up into a bundle of frustrated rage inside her chest. But she hadn’t, and now, here she was.

        The bed seemed much less comfortable without Lyra there. Bonbon considered getting up and chasing her, but for all she knew, with the speed of Lyra’s jogging, she could already be a mile away. She was too tired to go hunting for a sprig of green-hair in the evening darkness.

        She could save her apology till morning. For now, the bed was there, and she’d been fighting off a further onset of unconsciousness since she woke up from her nap. Yelling, as it turned out, was exhausting. So, with hesitant preparations of apologies ambling through her head, Bonbon fell against her pillows and drifted to sleep.