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_And, oh, wouldn't you like it? _

Oh, wouldn't you love it? 'Cause I know-

_I know that I would _

Eli tapped his fingers against the steering wheel in rhythm with the music, mouthing the words to himself as he went. This had always been one of his favorite songs, even though this one that came up on shuffle was the original bubblegum-pop version instead of his favored orchestral-lounge fusion. Still good, though; he liked the singer's voice, even though he couldn't quite match her high notes. That never kept him from trying, though.

_You could- you could tell me no _

_You could- you could ask me why _

_And I, oh, I would still tell you _

Tell you, tell you that I-

"In three hundred feet, turn right and your destination will be on the right."

The wild dog pressed his lips together and squinted at where he'd pinned his phone to the dashboard, hanging from a support arm he'd picked up at the mall a few months ago with the aux cord dangling out the bottom. Sure enough the map showed the unmistakable red pin coming up, and when he shifted his gaze up a bit to peer out the windshield, coming up among the tall grasses along the sides of the highway sat a small cluster of buildings. One had obviously been built as a gas station, with the pump canopy repurposed as shaded parking; the squat little building next to that had its front windows and doors boarded up, and quite a while ago looking at how chipped and degraded the plywood had become; and then the other side had_to be the restaurant Lynn had mentioned. Eli reached forward, tapped the _pause at the top of his screen, and turned the wheel to pull into the odd little turn-in.

Not too bad of a drive, all things considered. Roughly thirty minutes from where he lived, and at that, a good ten or so from the very edge of the city itself. All they had out here - Eli scanned the horizon as he pulled into one of the pillar-side parking spaces, a rusty shadow visible along the asphalt where the gas pump had been - were too-tall powerlines, billboards that all seemed to advertise churches, casinos, or both, and rolling hills, green grass already tinted yellow under the heat of summer now that the seasons had settled, and those surprising winds and uncertain rainstorms had pinched off. The highway only had two lanes as well, one there and one back.

He yanked the keys out of the ignition and reached forward for his phone, then pushed the door open. Lynn had already arrived: her car sat in one of the few other occupied spaces, and as Eli strode across the small drive to the cream-stucco building bearing a neon "Mexican Restaurant" sign in front of a shadow that looked suspiciously close to "Bail Bonds", there she stood, body half-turned away from him, one arm crossed over her chest, muzzle angled down towards her phone in her other paw. It didn't look like she'd seen him pull up. Remembering how she'd startled him at the movie, Eli looked around, changed his angle a little, lightened his step...

"Boo!"

One of the hyena's ears flicked up, assortment of piercings jingling, and her muzzle partially turned his way. "Hey, Eli."

"Hey Lynn." He swallowed, slid his keys into his pockets, frowned, pulled them back out to make sure he'd locked his car, slid them back in again. Today she wore an outfit similar to what he'd first seen her in, crop-top showing the belly-button piercing, short light jacket, slim jeans with a tear along one knee. Eli took a step around her, clasping his paws behind his back. "Um. What's up?"

Her radiant eyes remained fixed on her phone screen, lips lightly pressed together. After a moment she stuck her tongue into her cheek, gave a nearly-imperceptible sigh, then dropped her phone into her pocket - and met the wild dog's gaze with a warm smile. "Ready to eat. See what I mean about this place being kinda hole-in-the-wall?"

Eli glanced up at the sign again. Hard to tell in the light of mid-afternoon, but it looked like only a couple of the letters there remained lit. "I've never eaten at a Mexican restaurant called 'Mexican Restaurant' before."

"Once you have, you won't regret it. And, hey, it's better than that hipster-fusion place near you; that one's called Heavy Tortillery. Also-" She turned more fully to face him, leaning her weight on one leg. "You didn't greet me properly."

"I didn't?"

Lynn's arms came out, paws brushing over his shoulders, and Eli smoothly and easily fell into her embrace. He had to stand on his toes to get his chin onto her shoulder, though from there the strength of her arms around his back kept him upright; he returned the touch, squeezing her firmly against himself with just the slightest of nuzzles against her neck right where her thick mane disappeared into the shorter, softer fur of her body. Neither her shirt nor her jacket came down to the waist of her pants; Eli let his paws drop down, fingers dragging through that soft, warm fur, sliding over the lines of her ribs buried beneath flesh and muscle, digging into that same mane. Just the same, he felt her claws trace down over his back through the fabric of his shirt, simultaneously pulling him in closer and sending a few unexpected shivers through his body. She smelled of spice and perfume and just a little bit of sweat.

"Oohh." The hyena drew back, though kept her arms around his waist. Eli wobbled back onto his footpaws. "There we go. I know we just saw each other, but - it's good to see you again." From there she released him, Eli doing the same, and nodded towards the simple glass door. "Ready to go in?"

"Yeah." That scent lingered in his nose and thoughts. Four days had apparently been enough for him to forget how good she smelled. "Nervous about your exams coming up?"

The tinkling of a bell sounded their entry, followed by the call of one of the waiters further back in the restaurant telling the two that they'd be seated in a moment. Eli took the chance to look over the place: the inside was far more promising than the outside, and the smell of fresh cooking in the air made his stomach rumble quietly. He hadn't even thought he was that hungry, but that changed his mind.

Lynn shrugged, watching the waiter-slash-host, a brown-dusted coyote well into his middle years, bustle up to the front desk. "Yeah. I guess so. Not quite finals yet, though these weird summer semesters go by really quickly." The coyote held up two fingers; Lynn nodded. "Yeah. Just us two. Anyway - they call them intermesters, or, weirder, summermesters."

"Wow." After a moment, the waiter led them to a two-person table positioned near a window looking out over the distance, the flat lines of the road twisting off between the hills and grass. "I don't think my school had those."

"You said you went to community college?"

"Yeah."

Lynn scooted forward in her chair, frowned, looked over the side at one of the legs, scooted forward a little further, then refocused on the menus the coyote set out on the smallish table. "Thank you. Don't take this the wrong way, Eli, but was that - was that planned? Community college, I mean."

"Kinda." It was the type of menu that looked printed at home and bound at a local office supply shop, with a plastic binding and three-hole sheet protectors covering the pages. "It was never not an option, right? Just, like... during high school I was occupied with finishing that, and making sure I had a plan for college, but I never really decided on anything." He shrugged. "I actually failed a paper in my English class because of that. The entire last quarter-semester was about 'college preparedness' and I did badly since I didn't have a specific major or school in mind."

"Wow. That's lame."

"Yeah. I mean..." He turned the page, eyes instantly homing in on the Enchiladas section. "...I dunno. Mom thought I coulda gotten a scholarship. We always had the community college in the back of our heads, 'cause, y'know - really easily affordable, good place to get the basics down."

"Yeah. I dig that." Lynn pulled her menu up a bit, obscuring the lower half of her muzzle from view.

"Good place to start. Just - never really decided to finish." Another shrug. Their cheese enchiladas sounded excellent. "By that time I had a job at the library, and by my second semester I'd gotten promoted to my current position. It pays... well enough, y'know? So I figured, might as well stick with that. Keeping a job is easier than getting one."

Her eyes flicked up to him again, though she didn't continue the conversation. Eli swallowed, shifted in his chair, and flicked to the next page of the menu, though didn't find anything interesting there. From there he looked up again, bottom of his menu resting on the table... and his eyes fell on Lynn, who'd set hers down and now looked out the window with her chin in her paw.

The sun hung in the sky roughly off in that direction, though not so that it shone directly in her face: her eyes caught and reflected the glitter, a bright white spot amidst whatever colors she had in there. Sometimes green, usually a tint of brown... today he could just barely, _barely_pick out an outer ring of orange surrounding a rich brown band, then from halfway along and into the edge of her pupils, soft grey-green like an overcast sky before a powerful storm.

Suddenly, the eye he could see flicked his way. Eli reached for his drink, missed it, scrambled to catch it before it fell over, then brought it to his lips, and missed again so that the straw poked against his cheek. The hyena's lips curled in a soft smile that he quickly felt infect his own face - and then his was gone again a second later, replaced with tightly-drawn lips of surprise against the sudden touches against his footpaws.

Or - or against his ankles. Lynn's smile had widened with his shock of surprise, the blunted claws of her toes touching and tracing at the short fur along his ankles, toes themselves sneaking up a short ways into the legs of his pants, lightly pushing, spreading and squeezing. Eli felt his surprise melt down and give way to soft embarrassment, which of course only seemed to coax the hyena on further; still holding his drink, he leaned in for another sip and actually made it this time. Lynn did the same, and then, Eli's lips tightening on his straw in a sneaky smile, she stopped and raised her eyebrows.

He pushed his own footpaws back against hers, returning the little touches and squeezes, stretching out against her ankles and running his pads up along those slim jeans. No way he'd be able to get _underneath_them, but still: she pushed against him and he pushed back, pads and toes brushing, soft rustling just barely catching their ears. He held her eyes and she held his.

And, oh, wouldn't you like it? ???? Wouldn't you love it? ????'Cause I know-

"Are you ready to place your orders?"

Eli jumped, immediately pulling his footpaws back and shoving his gaze toward the coyote. Lynn, however, took one more sip, let her eyes linger on the wild dog's face for a second longer, and looked up at the waiter. "I am. Wanna go first, Eli?"

"Oh, uh - yeah. Yeah, sure. Um - can I get these cheese enchiladas, with the rice... nah, no beans. Actually, can I get double rice?"

The coyote nodded, swiftly writing that down. "Double rice... and for you, ma'am?"

"Tortilla soup." Lynn leaned forward, giving a pleasant smile. "And can I get extra - what are they, the little crunchy tortilla bits?"

"Absolutely."

"Wonderful. Thank you."

After writing that down, he half-bent over to swipe up their menus, gave them both a practiced smile, and sped back off down the aisle, soon to lean in to check in on another of the four or five other occupied tables. Eli watched as he went off, ears and whiskers perked, tail kept high... though with a distinct wilt to the brushy end. That confidence of his was rehearsed and maintained, not genuine.

When he next looked at Lynn, however, her entire _air_had solidified, muzzle tilted slightly down towards the table though with those prismatic eyes still levelled at him, seeming as though she still stood above and leaned down over him. A good, strong aura, the very one that had scrambled his brain and made him trip and scramble over his own words that first time they'd met in the music shop.

A veritable hammer of a woman. With lovely squishy-firm pawpads, calloused yet yielding. A shiver shot up Eli's leg.

"So." She leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms up over her head. "Sorry to drop off right there. I was - thinking about something. Do you have any plans for the future, Eli?"

"Plans?" Maybe more like a magnet than a hammer. Hard to resist, and every time he got close, all of the important control-panel parts of his brain didn't work quite so well. "Um. Well... not really, I guess. I have an alright job, I have... some friends." Well, there's Marlin. And also Randal from high school, but we... haven't seen each other since then, and really we just share memes and shit online. Maybe I should get back in contact with Shelby again. "Renting a place on my own. Job doesn't pay enough to have, like, a lot of spending money, but there is some. And Mom drilled into my head when I was little, 'there's a difference between being able to buy something and being able to afford it', so I try to save a lot."

"Yeah. All that's great." Tall hyena ears flicked back at the sound of someone back in the kitchen dropping something. "But what do you want to do?"

"Want? ...Well, I like to play video games, I guess. Read sometimes. Watch TV."

Lynn leaned in over the table. "How old are you? Twenty-something? Twenty...seven? Ish? Yeah. Surely when you were a kid, you didn't wake up every day and think, oh, hell yeah, I'm gonna work in a library for the rest of my life. That really boils my potatoes. Right?"

"Hey." Marlin had a habit of bugging him on that point, trying to get him to switch to the midnight-stocker position that the fox had - "I've always wanted to see what it feels like to bang in the refrigerated section," he'd made sure to tell Eli, "back behind the milk jugs, y'know? And there's enough room in the aisles that I can pound you from behind, and if someone walks by, I can pretend I'm trying to reach up to a higher shelf..." - but when Lynn did it, it just made him a chuckle. A warm, genuine chuckle. There was no malice or disappointment in her voice, just... urging. "It pays."

"Of course it does. My first job was as a front desk clerk for a local police station. It paid just fine, but it didn't make me happy." This time when she took a drink of her water, she avoided the straw entirely and tilted the glass to her lips. "What do you want to do, Eli?"

He sat back, crossed his arms in front of his chest, chewed on his lower lip in thought. When he looked back down at Lynn, her eyes still remained on him. Here_he_ was, trying to avoid staring at her too much - it felt exactly the same as his first crush in high school, with him twitchy and embarrassed that the target of his attention would catch on - and then Lynn weighted her gazes as if in challenge.

It wasn't like she didn't know, though. There was no way. That silence earlier had filled Eli with that too-familiar twitchiness, the realization that they weren't quite close enough to remain quiet in each other's presence without awkwardness, but... then there were the footpaws, and her smiles, and the hug at the start of the day...

_ And I would still tell you-/ Tell you, tell you that I-/ __ I want you, I want you to know,/ I want you... _

"Oh. Um." Eli coughed and shifted again. "Well, when I was in high school I kinda liked writing. Like, stories. I kinda got discouraged when I wrote Marlin something and he never read it, though..." Another shrug, accompanied by a sip of his water. "Then he asked me to write him something for him. So I did."

Lynn, arms crossed in front of her chest as she sat back, gave a noncommittal and unamused bark of a laugh. "He didn't read that one, either."

"He did not."

"God. Eli..." Her paw fell lightly across his on the table, the touch startling him into drawing it back a half inch. Lynn didn't clamp down or hold him in place, though, and when Eli looked up at her, it seemed as though she hadn't noticed. She had, of course, but made nothing of it. "I'm really sorry. I know you already know my thoughts on him-"

"I do." One of his other friends often dug into him about why he still put up with the fox. Eli had intentionally dropped off speaking with that friend, not because he took offense to the complaints, but rather because he knew everything his friend said was true, and he knew that Marlin wasn't a great fit for him. But it just annoyed him having to hear about it so often, being urged to do something that he knew he should, but really didn't want to. Like Mom bugging him to set up a dentist appointment for the first time his senior year of high school.

The hyena's eyes narrowed. "-and I'm not_going to stop on that point." Flashes of Friday night, of that raw _emotion coursing through her, splayed ears and bristling mane, gritted teeth, curled lips... "But you do deserve so much more. So much better."

I deserve... He shifted again, suddenly aware all over again of her paw over his. It felt as though Lynn forgot it was there; Eli swallowed, pinched his lips together... then turned his paw over underneath hers, placing them palm to palm and hooking his thumb around the back of her paw. The striped hyena's ears perked, and for a moment, her eyes widened. She had forgotten; a second later, she gave his a soft squeeze. Eli squeezed back. Thirty minutes spent in driving had given him a lot of time to think.

"I'm just saying, Eli..." She shrugged, then folded her arms across her chest again. He hadn't realized how warm her paw had been, resting over his. "He doesn't listen to you. He ignores your concerns and your worries. It sounds like he kind of only wants to fuck you? Which I..." For a second there, her eyebrows drew down and she frowned, seeming to trip over her words. Then, though, she got over it, shook her head, and continued. "Well. He doesn't even - doesn't even appreciate your hobbies, or support what you enjoy."

He hadn't thought about writing in a long time, truth be told. In high school he found he had a lot of free time, and then he met Marlin and about half of that free time ended up suddenly gone. Well,_he'd figured, _I used to do this a lot with a couple friends, and I haven't really had a reason to do it, but now I have a boyfriend, so... why not try it again?

And nothing came of it. He still had the couple of journals in his old closet at his parents' house, filled with silly little stories of spaceships and alien civilizations, or swords and magic, or sometimes both, handwritten since his high school hadn't allowed laptops.

Lynn went on. "Now. I won't tell you that you have to pick that back up, 'cause like... I used to play sax in high school, and it got pretty annoying when my mom kept on trying to push me back into it." She reached back and adjusted the fluff of her mane over her shoulder. "And, Eli, you should never let someone force you to do something you don't want to."

I need to know that you want to do this. I need t- "Y'know, that does seem like something you'd say."

Her eyes narrowed again, though this time, a hint of amusement sparkled beneath. "But. Anyway._I think - I _think - that it'd be real great if you get back into that."

Genuine interest in her voice, sincere pleasure on her face. Eli found himself pulled gently out of his stirring thoughts, myriad echoes of I deserve... and well, I mean, I like her, and it's the weirdest thing to think about, but... I haven't been on a date since... and_do I want to date her? I think... I think-_

"Yeah? You... you do?"

Her smile seemed to strengthen a bit. If anything, that just lent better weight to her answer. "Yeah. I do. I'd love to see what you can do with that. Expand that interest, that hobby into part of your routine, part of your day that makes you happy... you deserve it, Eli."

I deserve...

"I'll - I'll think about it. I..." Eli reached up to cover his mouth behind a light cough. Over on the other side of the restaurant, the coyote pushed his way through the door to the kitchen with a pair of platters balanced on his paws over his shoulders. "Thank you."

Do it, idiot. You spent eight minutes thinking about how to word this question.

"So. Um..." He shifted again, leaned against the window, realized how warm it was, scooted away. Eli reached up to scratch behind one of his ears, licked his lips, swallowed. "Lynn, um... can I ask you something?"

The hyena crossed one leg over the other and leaned back again, eyeing the straw in her drink to ensure it made it to her mouth. "Shoot."

The coyote turned the corner at the end of the aisle, grinning at a pair of older wolves and saying something in quick Spanish. "Is this, like... a friend date, or, like a - _date_date?"

There it was again, her sharp, deliberate gaze flicking up to his muzzle, piercing right through him, nearly making his heart skip a beat or two. One of her ears had given a slight twitch, but otherwise, she seemed unruffled by the question: she continued pulling along her straw, the level in her glass gradually dropping, until her ears flicked again towards the waiter sliding up alongside the table.

"Your food! Thank you. Tortilla soup... be careful, it is hot... and the cheese enchiladas. Is there anything else I can get for you?"

Eli's mouth felt dry. Lynn turned in her seat, glass still raised.

"I think we're alright. Thank you."

"Thank you. Enjoy."

Then, before he was even out of earshot: "It's funny you mention that, Eli."

Lynn's tongue flicked out over her lips. She placed her glass back down on the table with a light tap, then met his eyes once more. He'd been watching her glass as she did that, but - had that been a small, nearly-imperceptible sigh? An inhale and an exhale, as if preparing herself. That was unlike her.

"I was just about to bring that up, too."