FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Standard disclaimer:

This is a furry adult story containing gay males in sexual situations as well as explicit language and descriptions. No kids are allowed so this story is only for those who are 18/21 or whatever the age is at your legislation. If you are not of the legal age, you shouldn't view this story because you might lose your innocence. Also, by browsing this story you have done so by your own consent and wish to view such material. if you do not wish to view such material you should leave this site immediately.

*

Hello, all!

This story was born in that strange twilight hour when you wake up at the middle of the night, lay restless on your bed while trying to fall asleep but are unable to when your brain just keeps getting flooded with thoughts and ideas and images and plots and characters....*chuckle*

So, here we go, something on the more romantic side. I think this will have two or three parts.

As always, written for my own pleasure, but I'd be selfish if I kept it bottled up in an RTF file and never look at it.

If you love or hate the story or it makes you go "uh, okay" , why not take a couple of seconds after you're done to comment, vote, fav, send hatemail, etc? It all helps me to become a better writer and keep the stories coming.

Now that this is out of the way, let a wintery tale commence!

Cheerio!

*

A fair warning to all readers : This story includes frank medical detail in non-sexual situations, so if you are easily squicked, you have been warned. It may get a bit graphic.

*

For Dan,

beautiful, as I sit here, alone and restless in my lonely existence, I can't stop thinking about you. I lay restless on the bed and my notepad is resting against my folded-up knees while I keep writing this letter for you. My head is swimming of memories, of all those past moments we can never recapture, and they make my chest swell with emotion, at all the possibilities, all the chances and the times we were together, that are now gone forever.

I look at your picture, and can't help but smile, even if I know, that I can't curl up to sleep and put my arms around you now. You are...so beautiful...in your body and your soul, that sometimes it chokes me up to think about you like this. I know, I know, sappy gay dog talking, I'm the one who cried my eyes out when we watched Beauty and the Beast together. You kept teasing me about having a hard-on from watching the Beast bathe, but really, I was just already primed up for listening to Angela Lansbury sing THAT song.

Enough weeping about Disney cartoons. Though I must admit, you're probably the one fur who has seen me cry the most ever in my life. You've seen me at my worst and my best, and you have stood by, and you have been there for me. I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am for all those moments when you've pulled me back up to my paws, and how proud I am for the fact that I have stood by you when you have needed me as well.

I remember the exact moment when I saw you for the first time. My recollection is so clear, because I wrote the time down. It was January the 7th, 2008, and the time was 03:20 in the morning. At that desperately early hour of the morning, I stood by the prone body of a great black bear, lying on a gurney and surrounded by a team of doctors and nurses working relentlessly to save his dwindling life. I stood near his head, next to the madly beeping heart monitor, and my gloved paws squeezed the medical file where I had been noting down all the treatments we had been giving for the poor soul who had been brought in 45 minutes earlier by the ambulance service.

I remember the doctor asking me when was the last time we put in the epi, and I remember turning to face the night shift attending and telling that it was 5 cc's about ten minutes earlier. The wolf doctor had looked at me through his plastic splash goggles and then turned his eyes heavily at the heart monitor next to me before he said it was time to call it, and told me to note down the time, 03:20 am.

I gave Nurse Carol a glance, and she stopped pumping the ambu bag that had been forcing oxygen into the poor man's paralyzed lungs. She gave me a small sympathetic nod, and turned to close the heart monitor. I gave her tiny smile back, a professional, curt smile, to tell that I was fine, and turned back to my notes, to jot down the time of death, 03:20 am.

I first saw you through the webbed window on the swinging door between the two trauma rooms. I watched how you and your colleagues pushed the gurney in to the trauma room already staffed by the full emergency team. I can't remember why your patient was in, but I do remember how you stood there, holding up the IV bag with your glowed paw. Your maw was moving and you were speaking to the on-call doctor, and you were the image of professionalism, all calm in that storm of grief and pain and hectic rush to save the life of the fur your ambulance had brought in.

I don't know why I noted you so vividly that first time. Perhaps it was the proximity to the life shattering event, the death of that bear whose name I can't remember even though I wrote it down to his file, or the name of his wife whom I passed at the corridor on my way to the staff room to get the fifth cup of coffee for the night. Perhaps my brain took a snapshot of that moment, of my fingers moving the pen over that tiny box in the patients notes where I wrote :DECEASED - 03:20 am" to signify that we had terminated the treatment. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn't seen you before, or at least couldn't remember seeing you.

Maybe it was the fact that you were so handsome, but my brain was too tired and muddled to note it consciously. I didn't stop by to stare at you, instead, I removed my goggles and gloves and protective robe and threw them into the biohazard bin near the trauma room door while making my way out of the place that suddenly smelled not only of Chlorox and scrubbing alcohol, but of death as well.

I wonder why so many of my early memories involve so much death and suffering.

The next time I saw you must have been during January as well. It was another nightshift, and this time I even learned your name. Nurse Jackson called you Hobbins when you and your partner brought in a gunshot wound patient. I stood at my usual spot near the crash cart, ready to hand over medications that would be needed in saving the patient's life, and I held my patient file. If you saw me that night, you wouldn't have known me afterwards since I was wearing a face mask because the patient was HIV positive.

My last view of you was between the closing swinging doors, pushing your gurney out into the hallway.

Do you remember the first time we talked? It happened quite early into a nightshift, around midnight, I guess. It was a lull in the stream of patients, and I leaned to the wall next to snack machine at the hallway towards the lifts and the stairs, eating a Baby Ruth bar in a feeble attempt to get my blood sugar up. I felt chilly in my green scrubs - it was the blizzard season, after all, and the hospital was freezing - so maybe it was my envy of your thick and utilitarian paramedic outfit that first drew my eyes to you.

You had appeared into the corridor from somewhere at the trauma area, and you carried a medical backpack slung over a shoulder. I watched you as you sauntered to the coffee machine and fiddled with it, and banged the side when the machine ate you coins.

"It only makes black, sorry," I remember telling you, and you turned to look at me.

I remember your beautiful blue eyes gazing me over, and I remember you giving me a tired smile.

"Too bad, then, I guess I'll have my cuppa at the station," I think you said.

That was the first thing you spoke to me.

Maybe I didn't want to stop looking at you, or maybe it was my Good Samaritan complex talking, or maybe I was lonely, or horny, or whatever, but something made me speak more.

"There's always plenty in the pot at the staff room, you're more than welcome."

You smiled, and I even saw some of your teeth.

"Yeah, why not," you grumbled, and I gave you a nod, and you followed me to the staff room.

I told you to sit down on a couch while I fetched coffee, pouring it into two mugs. Mine had a big heart in it and it read "YOU HOLD MY HEART IN YOUR PAWS EVERY DAY" , and you got Nurse Linda's favourite mug, the on with a small chip on its rim, and that had blue flowers painted on it. I remembered to steal a dash of milk to it from Nurse Brenda's bottle of milk, and I walked over to you, handing you the mug. The thank you spoke to me was followed by the first smile I got from you.

We sat in silence and sipped our hot coffee. The lights were low, and I remember that there was a lot of snow at the window sill, so even the light of the city outside hardly made it in. It wasn't often that there was this much snow in Chicago, so I bet it had to all come down during my shift.

I must've asked you what you came in for, since I do have a vague recollection of you telling me about a dislocated hip and some nursing home, and how your ambulance had almost gotten stuck in back of snow, but thanks to your big ursine partner, you had managed to push it out of the trouble and back to the road. I think I must've just been nodding so that my ears flopped around.

I remember the smile you gave me when you handed me the mug back and thanked for the coffee again.

I think that the next time I met you was a little bit later. It was still snowy, and I think it was a sledging accident involved, based on the splinters embedded on that poor fur's leg. You handed me over the IV bag in the trauma room and gave me a nod of recognition, and you gave me one back. Isn't it strange how small things can stay in mind and seem so major even if they were so fleeting in the real life... tiny, tiny moments of existence in the flow of time.

Anyway, you always smile in that odd way when I get too philosophical, so I won't write more about that. I should probably write more about more relevant things, like the fact that I certainly wasn't looking to start looking at guys again. I had broken up with Ken only a couple of months earlier, and despite my gay friends' advice to go out clubbing and enjoying a rebound fling, I wasn't up to it. Instead, I would curl up under blankets in my little apartment, with a book and a steaming mug of mint-flavoured hot chocolate in my paws, my heater on full and with my favourite Kate Bush songs on repeat on my iPod. It felt empty without Ken who had been at my side since the first year at medical school, and sometimes I'd allow myself to float back to the memories of the good times, and I'd weep a little bit, and then go to bed feeling even lonelier than before.

I seriously shouldn't be writing about crying over some other guy, should I, baby? Back to you, beautiful.

It was a horrible night, the next time we really talked to each other. A car full of young furs had skidded off-road and ended up upside down in a ditch, and as a result, the Cook County General's emergency department was filled by four seriously injured patients. We worked through the night, stopping bleedings, splinting up fractures, immobilizing necks before we'd manage to X-ray them for fractures. I helped doctor Anderson put a double chest tube on a 16-year-old girl whose face had been cut by the windscreen. She was lucky to be alive as we pushed her gurney to the elevator to be taken to the surgery.

The worst off those four was a young cougar who had been thrown through the windscreen and who had ended up landing into a bank of snow. He came in strapped to the spinal board, barely breathing and with an erratic heartbeat, and as soon as we got him in to the trauma room, our blood was chilled by the sight of those dilated pupils and their empty stare. We carefully started to warm the poor soul up, dripping warm fluids into him, covering him in blankets and keeping him sedated while the portable X-ray machine was brought in and we'd stand there in our lead aprons and gowns and wait.

His skull had been broken by the impact, and he had broke his cervical spine in two places. There was no longer doubt that his unresponsiveness might have been caused by hypothermia from lying in the snow, now we knew that instead of that, his brain had herniated, perhaps during the drive in the ambulance to the hospital.

With my heart beating like mad I had left the trauma room, pulled off my gown and gloves and gone over to reception to take the phone and press the speed dial to take me to the UNOS hotline in order to inform them that we had a cadaver potentially suitably for organ donation. I had talked with the woman on the phone for a while, and then just...stood there for a while, feeling so goddamn helpless with the world.

I passed two middle-aged cougars on my way out to the ambulance yard, unable to look at them while I rushed out there, only clad in my scrubs, and collapsed to sit on a bench near the ambulance loading doors.

Now, you know I'm a big weepy, but I don't usually cry at work. I don't know what made that case special, I mean, it was certainly not the first time I had to deal with that kind of patients, but still...something that night tripped me over the edge, and I ended up sitting there with my face buried in my paws, and I cried hard.

You know I'm not some sort of a fussy twinky kind of a Dalmatian, but an athletic, pretty ordinary guy, so I must have been an especially pathetic sight for anyone who might see me. An ambulance came by bringing yet another patient, but I didn't even go out to help them. I was too spent, too much caught in my own little world of misery as I cried my eyes out over someone I never knew for more than the mad half an hour when we had been working hard to find out if his brain had become soup inside his skull or not.

I was roused by the feeling of something warm and good-smelling being pulled about my shoulders, and I looked up, vaguely alarmed, to see you. You had just sat down next to me, and your big, worried blue eyes were all over me. Your paws were still at my shoulders, and you were tugging your paramedic's winter jacket about me. I shivered at the sudden feeling of warmth as opposed to the terrible cold, and I sighed, sending a puff of steam out of my maw as I did. I snorted wetly, and shook from the tip of my nose all the way to my tail that hung limp between my legs.

"You okay there?" you spoke to me, giving me a look again.

I sighed and cursed under my breath, the "fuck" seeping into the night air with another puff of hot air coming off my strained lungs and disappearing to the starry sky.

My cheeks felt both hot and cold at the same time, probably from the tears freezing over them in the terribly cold air. I rubbed my knuckles over my eyes, trying to wipe out the remaining tears. I snorted again.

"Yeah, I...sorry," I mumbled. "Fuck..."

Your paw remained on my shoulders even after you had arranged your own clothes around me to keep me warm, and the presence was my lifeline...my only connection with the outside world now that my skin under my thin fur felt numb from the cold.

"Something rough showed up with the crash victims?" you asked me. "It looked pretty bad out there with that girl we brought in."

I nodded and snorted and felt more tears drop from my eyes.

"Yeah...instead of going to his homecoming, that boy is going to go to the operating theatre to have his major organs harvested," I snuffled, breathing in pained gasps. "Because he didn't wear his FUCKING seatbelt and ended up flying through the windscreen and FUCKING almost having his HEAD cut off!"

I snarled and growled, letting the pained words leave my lips, harsh and loud. They were dark, spiteful words, poised at an unknown receiver, certainly not the lion trying to gentle me. You squeezed my shoulders with your big paws and tried to smile to me again.

Then you asked my name.

I hadn't even realized you didn't know my name. That's how well you knew me, and still you held me, and tried to speak kind words to ease my pain.

"Speckle," I remember whispering my name between my clenched teeth. "Speckle Augustine."

You gave me another of those small smiles that looked too soft coming from a seven-foot tall lion.

"Good morning, Speckle Augustine, I'm Dan Hobbins, EMT."

I think I said "hey"... I think... my memory is patchy in places... but the next thing I knew you had your paw around my arm and you were leading us out and towards the small diner that stood on the other side of the road outside the hospital. We entered the almost deserted place, and you made me sit in on of the booths while you went out to order something for us. I sat there, dejected, staring out through the window that had open Venetian blinds. I idly took a napkin from the dispenser on the table next to the bottle of Tabasco, and blew my nose and dried my eyes before you returned from the counter with coffee and cinnamon buns. They were actually still steaming as you put the plate on the table and sat down opposite me.

"Here, that's what we always get at the station after a particularly rough dispatch," you told me with a smile and pushed the plate and the mug closer to me.

"Thanks," I uttered quietly and sighed deeply.

We drank coffee and ate cinnamon buns in silence for what must've been about half and hour or so, maybe. I must've glanced at the clock but the hour escapes me...perhaps it was five in the morning, or six in the morning, it hardly mattered.

I really looked at you for the first time then, I think. It was the first time I saw you without your jacket, too, revealing your T-shirt-clad torso, your strong, bulked-up arms, and the thick suspenders that held up your heavy duty trousers. Your mane was cut short, so that it wouldn't get charred or caught up anywhere at the line of duty. All those things I noticed, as well as your eyes, and your thoughtful expression as you watched me eat cinnamon buns and drink coffee and sniffle and snort. At least I wasn't crying anymore, though I must've been holding it back.

I can't remember if we talked about anything important...maybe we did, but I really don't recall. Perhaps it was the adrenaline coming down and the caffeine going up that has obscured the memory...but I do remember one thing, when we were about to leave the place.

"Do you have anyone at home waiting for you?" you asked me, sill concerned.

"No, I...I live alone now," I told you, feeling a spike of pain course through me even at the oblique mention of my newly single status.

"Gimme your cell phone," you said to me.

"Why?"

"Can't let you be all alone," you told me and extended a paw, and after quietly staring at it for a moment, I dug up my mobile phone from my pocket and handed it over to you.

You flipped the small plastic thing in your paws and quickly typed in something before you handed the phone back to me.

"Here, I saved my number in under name Dan the fire lion," you smiled to me as you dropped my phone into my awaiting paw. "Just in case you need someone to talk with."

I remember giving you a look, feeling vaguely uneasy.

"Hey, I really appreciate that," I remember speaking to you, "but you really needn't feel like your responsible over me, man...I man, I..."

"Just if you need an ear to talk to, alright?" you told me with your best convincing smile, and I couldn't help but nod in agreement.

"Okay, okay, I... gods I feel such a puppy...," I grumbled, brushing my face with my paw.

"That you were, rushing out to the blizzard without any proper clothes on!"

I became suddenly aware of the heavy jacket still bestowed around my lithe form and I handed it back, feeling heat grow over my cheeks again as you accepted it with a smile and pulled the garment back on yourself.

You told me to take care of myself, and I told you the same, and then you disappeared into the night, leaving me standing alone in that small booth in that small diner.

I wonder if I'm being too wordy here, baby...I mean, you were there, when all this took place, but somehow I feel like I have to write all this down...maybe to show to our nephews or something, or anyone who might care to hear the disjointed ramblings of a gay drama-prone Dalmatian who was practically stalking a fire lion at his job. Well, maybe it wasn't quite that intense, as you recall, but I must've had conflicting thoughts about it all when I made my way back to the ER.

Nurse manager Carol was in and we had a long talk, going through the motions. I even dared to ask about the cougar, and she said that upstairs, four lucky furs were already being operated on by our best surgeons. Apparently the heart, the lungs and the kidneys had been viable. It didn't make me feel any better, but hell, at least those four furs' lives had been changed forever by the tragedy of the cougar and his poor family.

My head was heavy with these thoughts as I made my way back home on the L-train. I stared through the window into the city that was waking up for the new dawn, and I remember sighing so that my breath fogged up the glass.

That's when I felt the vibration of my phone in my pocket. With tired paws I dug it out and flipped the phone open, seeing that I had receive a text.

_ You ok? _

That's what the first text you ever sent me read. My answer was:

_ Surviving. Pretty morning. _

I think you answered...

_ That's cool. _

*

The next time I saw you, we called each other by first names. Wasn't that great? I remember that day very well because I saw you twice that day, coming up with a different patient two times to the ER, and both times we'd sort of nod and say "hi" and that'd be it. On the second go I was getting out of the ER again, wearing my blood-splattered gown and my goggles, and you caught the sight of me, said something to your partner and walked over to me, smiling.

"Hey there, Speckle."

"Uh...hi," I think I replied ever so charmingly.

I must've looked like an odd yellowish snowman standing there in my loose gown. A really odd-looking snowman with a Dalmatian's head bestowed on top of it.

"How've you been?" you asked me in your wonderful, rumbling, chesty voice.

"I'm okay," I must've told you, still thinking about our encounter a week or so back, when I had been a wreck after that car crash kid.

"I was wondering, if you'd want to go to the movies or something," you asked me, your eyes...I think they were hopeful, or at least so I felt then, or it could be my memory glossing things over afterwards - you know how starry-eyed I can be when I get to the mood!

I was really taken aback by the request, and I'm sure you must have noticed my surprised in me. I mean...I'm not exactly flaming, I don't have any manners to talk about, nor do I have piercings or dyed head furs or anything that'd make me stand out. I was just the odd, mild-mannered gay nurse at the ER, and that was who I liked to be. I didn't need to shout out "Look at me, I'm queer and proud!", I just were who I was, and I was happy as I was. And now this big lion was asking me out, practically!

That was my part about it, nothing about you yet, baby! I mean, you were a seven-foot tall lion, a fireman and a paramedic, you looked like you could carry a helpless fur down sixty floors from the top of a high-rise building, you reeked of testosterone and silently confident masculinity and confidence that was all so very apparent starting from your voice all the way to the swing of your tail, all so ordinary that I'd never even harboured THAT kind of thoughts about someone like you.

I think that's why I must've opened my semi-frozen maw and uttered.

"Like a date or something?"

You scratched the back of your head and looked a bit awkward at hearing that, and I think you blushed...I think.

"Just thought you might need some distraction, you know... maybe grab a couple of beers and a burger and see a movie... a guy's night out," you detailed to me your idea of a perfect night out, and I started to warm up to the idea.

It all sounded so...hetero-normative that nothing could've been odd about it. We'd just go out and hang out together, just two guys unwinding after a hard day's work at the lifesaving service sector.

"Uhh...yeah, Dan, okay...," I was being verbally challenged again, but I did manage to suggest that we could go out on Thursday, since I was having a few weekend and no night shifts coming up, so it would be good for me to stay up for a while and try to keep my sleep rhythm as well as possible since the night shifts would resume on the following week.

"Hey, that's good, man, I...I'll call you up later and we'll set it all up, okay?"

I gave you a nod, and would've probably said something else, but your radio crackled and you had to be on the go again, zooming out in your ambulance with the lights flashing out and signalling that you were on a life and death mission once more.

I think I waved to you a goodbye with one latex-glowed paw, and felt odd.

*

This really is running up to a lot of pages...my paw has already gone all smudgy with ink from my ballpoint pen...but I still feel like I have so much to say. These year and a half we were together have been eventful, and many memories come to mind...and getting them through this pen and over to the paper is not the easiest task to begin with. I will keep trying, though, so that this record will be a worthy memorial to us.

Well... there I was...Thursday eve and waiting for you outside a movie theatre in downtown Chicago. It was still freezing cold but the snow had been reduced by rain earlier in the week, so it was simply miserably dark and cold and not snowy white as before. I was wearing my thick winter coat and my winter cap, hopping about from paw to paw while expecting for your familiar form to appear and make me feel just a bit warmer on the inside. Yes, I knew you were attractive, but you were also straight and simply wanting to make friends with a random nurse he once saw crying. I decided to give myself a rest, though... let myself enjoy your company, and your looks, too...it was a safe kind of enjoyment, knowing that you were off limits and that there wouldn't be any relationship hassle. I certainly wasn't ready for anything so soon after Ken.

You arrived from the L-train station about five minutes late, I guess, and told me that it had been so damn busy, and you apologised, and asked if I was ready for a fun night out. I told you that I was, and we headed in to the movie theatre.

We ended up watching Rambo.

There we sat, eating popcorn and watching how Sly Stallone single-handedly killed probably half of the Burmese army as he made his way through the jungles killing everything he could get his paws at. We laughed a lot and cheered and generally were all guy-like and stupid while we enjoyed the carnage and mayhem and the corny dialogue. I really felt I could start relaxing around you, imposing as you were for someone like me, a mere meekly doggy nurse while you were the big and handsome firelion. I could watch your profile as you laughed and stuffed popcorn into your muzzle, and it didn't make me feel weird at all. I wasn't planning to try to hit on the straight guy, or anything. I wasn't planning anything at all...just laugh, grab those beers, cavort, get back home and sink under the blankets and hope you won't be hung over on your first free Friday in weeks.

The movie finally came to its blood-splattered ending and we filed out from the movie theatre with all the other excitingly chattering furs, I following tightly in your tow through the masses of people already waiting up for the next movie to start - a Hannah Montana flick, if I remember the glossy posters correctly. We were suddenly surrounded by a mass of squeky school girls, and we laughed some more as the firelion acted as a living plough and cut a way for us to pass.

We stood out on the sidewalk for a little while, puffing out breaths into the chilly air, and then you asked me if I wanted to have those couple of beers you had promised, and after my affirmative answer, we ended up to a small, rather cosy establishment, where the beer was nice and imported, and it made my belly nice and warm. We sat there like any pair of ordinary dudes, one gay, one straight, though that didn't matter as we chattered this and that was all fine with me. Just two guys hanging out, it wasn't a date, just a night out.

I don't know why I kept convincing myself that through the night, I mean, I didn't have any reason to doubt it'd be otherwise. Maybe we'd never meet again, if he'd find out I wasn't the company he wanted to hang out with. He must've had a lot of big, burly friends at the fire station, with which to shoot hoops or go to the gym and pump some iron, or go fishing or some stuff like that. I was just a quiet Dalmatian who liked quiet eves at home with books and music and some television or a DVD maybe.

Your eyes were beautiful when you laughed at a terrible joke I told you.

*

Thank you for reading my story. If you liked it so far, why not to take a second to comment, fav, vote, whatever? It'll help me become a better writer.

Cheers!