Update - Doing Nano, and a Snippet

I've been suffering from writer's block, which is frustrating because I continuously form ideas and start to go nuts underneath the weight of them. 

I've decided to do NaNoWriMo again this year, and my novel is - at this moment - a reimagining of Hawk as a gay kinky feudal lord. 

For now, have a first chapter of a possible sequel to "Captured by Cowboy Cougars". It's  also a sequel to "Taken by Biker Werewolves".

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I walked into the bar and everyone stared at me. I was drawn to the place by the name: Tracy’s. I had a soft spot for bars named after questionably-gendered proper nouns, because I used to own one.  

Tracy’s was the exact opposite of my bar. My bar had been an Irish pub, whose Irish-ness warranted about a C for completely average execution. This bar was a cowboy bar. It was an old west saloon, except instead of a faithful movie set replica put together to satisfy some blue or white collar drunkards, or maybe to give faggots a place to roleplay as cowboys who only want to fuck each other, there was nothing facetious about it. 

The front door was a double-swing that made a racket every time someone came through it, like the patrons needed something to startle them out of drunken reverie every once and a while. It wasn’t made of wood, but metal, probably one of those corrugated cisterns that catch rainwater or hold washing or drown toddlers. The floor was wood, but not flooring wood. Someone had just assembled scraps of the same thickness. The bar’s footrail was made of dingy scrap water pipe. Several of the tables were actually large cable spools. There was, however, an actual functioning piano that was not cobbled together out of junk, not out of tune, and not honky-tonked by a score of thumbtacks. The pianist was playing something that I vaguely recognized, a pop song that had originally come out of some computerized maelstrom of high-gloss production. People were talking, drinking, low key but soused. It was a townie bar, for a town that had one stop light. Actually, there weren’t any stoplights at all. 

An Irish Pub and a Cowboy Saloon aren’t really opposites. A lot of cowboys were Irish, and the two places basically serve the same purpose: making money for the owner, getting people drunk, and providing some human-society level of that Hierarchy of Needs pyramid.

They were opposites because I was the only human patron at this Tracy’s, and everyone else - even the bartender - were cats. 

At my bar, Casey’s, I was the bartender and all my patrons were leather-clad biker-gang kink-porn faggot werewolves. I use that word judiciously, because these were not pride-flag-waving activist homosexuals or pleasant suburban homosexuals or hipster creative-class homosexuals. They existed to eat, sleep, drink, and fuck, and do all of those things, at my bar, with me. Until they disappeared. They turned my hometown in a wolf town, then vanished, leaving everyone but me as wolves. 

This Tracy’s place was full of cat people, and considering that there wasn’t a single woman, I guessed they were probably also gay. They were not, however, enamored with me at all. I walked in to the entire room full of eyes on me. Cougars. Bobcats. A few tigers. A lion. A black panther. None of them looked happy to see me. A few reached for their hips, then shrugged it off. 

I went up to the bar, which distracted the bartender - the black panther - from chatting with the two tigers. “Hi. Is this a private club?” I put on my best cheery face, tilted my own cowboy hat a bit, put a hand on the bar. The cat looked at it like it was a snake. It was just a human hand, in a leather riding glove. 

“The hell you want?”

“That wasn’t ‘no’. Is this a roadhouse? If it is, I want a drink, something to eat if you make any food, and a room to sleep in. Same as everyone else.” I turned my head around the room after that last bit, and watched someone tap the pianist cougar on the shoulder and point to me. He stopped playing. “Oh. Right,” I said, and loosened the hanky I had around my neck as a very prototypical cowboy signal. I had a very serious scar around my neck. “Does that make you less likely to eat me?”

“Y’all humans think we wanna eat you,” the barkeep said, then sighed. “Alright, you show me you got money.”

I got out my coin wallet and showed off the rough-hewn metal used for currency. “I don’t know whatever you think I’m up to, but I literally need to eat, drink, and sleep. Same as everyone else.” I took out a few coins and put them down.

He scowled, then pulled out a glass and set it down with a thud. Unlike the rest of the bar, it wasn’t repurposed junk, merely a sturdy twenty two ounce beer glass. “You ain’t got a lot of choices. You want whiskey or beer? You ever eat a karak sandwich?”

“Beer’s fine. What’s a karak?”

“Somethin’ you wanna eat an’ not meet,” he snorted, with just a hint of incredulous grin. Cat people didn’t make a lot of different facial expressions.

“Alright.” 

The panther poured me a beer, then hunkered down and opened a not-junk small refrigerator, then retrieved an uncomplicated cold sandwich. “Don’t start any shit. You start shit, someone here’s gonna end it.” He then swiped the coins up and dropped them into a beaten old electronic cash register with the clatter of a cash drawer. “You want a room, you just stick ‘round until late. No one buys them all up, you can get one.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, then took my beer and food and left the bar counter for one of several open tables. I picked the one furthest from anyone else. The rest of the patrons seemed to appreciate that. 

No one wanted to talk, which was fine with me. I really didn’t want anything more complicated than food and a place to stay for the night. I tried the beer: it was almost lukewarm, but in the way that proper beer was supposed to be. I’d never bothered with anything that frou-frou back at my own place, since small town guys usually wanted a nice, cold, American beer. While nice and full, it wasn’t very high-gravity, which was fine, since I really shouldn’t have been drinking. I didn’t have a good history with drinking. Beer was a nice way to save my disinfectant tablets. 

The sandwich was bread and smoked meat. Vaguely like chicken, the way a lot of things that aren’t cow are like chicken. A bit like rattlesnake, which I’d had once way back in the day when I was in college, in a more human kind of place. It was just past sundown, so I drank leisurely, ate leisurely, and kept an eye on the rest of the bar. They slowly went back to whatever they had been doing, all while keeping an eye on me in return. When I was done, I sent the plate to a wash tub on a rack next to the counter and exchanged another coin for another beer. Some cats came in, some cats left, and two went up to talk to the bartender while gesturing at me. He argued with them, and they looked disgruntled, but left me alone. I made sure that anyone who could look at me, could see the patterned scar around my neck. Sometimes, I swore it hurt a little, although it’d been long enough since I gave it to myself that I figured it was all in my head.

I spent a while considering my general options in life. I could go back to where I came from. Supposedly, no one would let me back across the border alive, but I didn’t figure that would be a problem. My life over there, back home, had mostly ended. I could find something to do in this place, which would mean spending my time making sure people didn’t try to enslave me again. In the general sense, that also wouldn’t be a problem, but it was also going to be a pain in the ass. Finally, I could keep going after what I was after, which most people I ran into thought was stupid. They were usually cats, sometimes various other animals, and the story was always the same: there was no such thing as the West Coast. There was just wasteland, hybrids, and karak. I’d lied about that one to the bartender; I found playing stupid made people less likely to start shit with me. I knew what karak were. I was fine eating one, since generally they wanted to eat me first.

After a few hours of cat-watching, the bar’s demeanor changed. Fewer people out in the room I was in, and more people going into another room. Cats and the occasional hyena or coyote would come in, get a drink, then disappear back there. After a longer while, they’d come out. Most of them looked furtive about it, like housecats caught licking themselves. I stayed bored and stayed waiting. 

For all the time waiting, there was only one other person beside the bartender who stayed along with me. A cougar in a full set of cowboy leather kit, who slowly devoured an unlabeled bottle of some liquor and slowly lowered his ears and scowl as he got and stayed drunk. He kept an eye on me now and then, never quite satisfied that I wasn’t up to something. I knew the look. Finally, someone came in who wasn’t a typical desert animal. Like everyone I’d seen since I blew into town on my motorcycle, he was male, but this one was a buck. Instead of a big rack of antlers, he had nubs on his head, the bases of where antlers had been. They looked sawwed off. He wore cut-off jean shorts that were a bit too short, a tank top that was also cut off too short, and a pair of cowboy boots that looked more fashionable than anything work-friendly. He might have been an animal guy, but I knew that gay trick look anywhere. 

“Don’t you walk in the front,” the barkeep panther hollered, rolled his eyes, and gave the bar a smack with the towel he was absently mopping with. 

“I’m making you money, you big ass,” the buck said, in a fruity lilt, and looked around. “Huh! Who let the skinbag in?”

“He’s not causin’ trouble.”

“Hmf. Who let this asshole kitty-cat in?” He then said, and gave the soused cougar a sour look, but with his hand on his hip, his hip cocked to the side. The cougar responded by taking his shot glass and clanking it upside down atop the nearly empty bottle. “Knew you’d be here. Just like clockwork. You wanna?” The buck then tipped his head towards the door towards the back. 

“Uh-huh,” the cougar said, then got up. They both went back through the door. 

I waited around for what my mechanical watch told me was another half hour. I didn’t put a lot of stock in it, because it was old and battered, and I never really trusted anything I’d found so far save my motorcycle. Then I stood up. “It the end of the night yet?”

“I don’t ever close up really, but when that pansy-ass deer boy shows up it’s usually pretty late.” The bartender looked through a paper notebook on the counter. He’d scribbled in it each time someone talked to him and then went back through the door. “Guess I got a room. It ain’t big but it’s got a bed. Shitter’s at the end of the hall upstairs. If it’s locked an’ no one says somethin’ if you bang, just come down here and I’ll clean it out. C’mon.”

I followed him through the back door. The room it led to looked like a boudoir, smelled like liquor and cock and a pickled sour scent that I’d encountered often but hadn’t yet understood. The buck and cougar had already passed through, as did pissy panther and I. Another door led upstairs, this one unlocked by the cat, and we entered a hallway wallpapered with tacky red velvet. “I gotta say,” I started, but the panther crowded me against the wall.

“You shush up,” he hissed in a rough whisper. “Don’t disturb nothin’ up here. Don’t mess with customers. Don’t knock anyone’s door. You’re here,” he said, and opened a door at the close end of the hall. “Lock it when you’re in there ‘less someone else who don’t like skinbags shows up. An’ you be glad you wandered into a god-damn brothel or you’d be gettin’ some rope burn over top of that bull-shit on your neck. Mornin’ comes, you’re outta here first light, an’ if your fancy motor-cycle ain’t out front, I ain’t seen nothin’.”

Then he pushed me into the room and pulled the door shut. I followed his advice and locked it.

Technically, the room contained a bed, in that there was something in it I could sleep on. A roll-up camp mattress lay on the floor, along with a battered green olive army blanket and a couple of pillows that looked like they’d been taken from the prostitute staging room downstairs. One was tubular, the other red velvet with frills, and both were battered and stained. The room was hardly wider than the mattress. The wall had a rough-looking pipe sticking out of it, cut off and jammed with a rag, while two smaller valves were equally stuffed above it. Judging from the mismatched paint, there’d been a sink there. I pulled up the mattress’s head-end, and sure enough, there was a badly done patch job in the floor. I was sleeping in a former bathroom. The other wall was badly constructed out of boards, separating it from the room next door. I took a wild guess that this had been part of a ‘suite’ and had been converted to make another slot for money-making.

At this point, I was so tired that finding out I’d be sleeping on some cum-stained pillows and an itchy blanket wasn’t enough to keep me from falling drowsy. I lay down, boots and all, and fell into a sweaty, hot slumber punctuated by incomprehensible dreams.

Then I woke up after an awful bang. My heart pounded and I quickly cowered over against the wall. The door was still shut, still locked. No one was in the room with me. I heard laughter from a deep rough kind of voice. “Oh, you dumbass!” “You shaddup.” “Mmm, you can’t even find a hole in the dark.” “I said, you shaddup.” Right next door, the sounds of moving around, a bed frame creaking, a heel clop, a few groans. The non-gruff voice was the same prissy lilt from downstairs. The buck and cougar were on the other side of the wall. 

And what a shitty wall it was; instead of actually building a real wall, whomever put it there had simply put floor joists vertically. They’d done it a while ago, too, as the boards had warped. I rolled back over and could see between them. Bathed in red mood lighting, there they were: one buck, now in only his boots, and one cougar still mostly dressed and just thrusting into his partner’s hole for the first time.

The cougar was my kind of guy, which meant he was a monster - all of the various animal hybrid people counted as monsters, as did the lizard-y karak - and he was mean and pushy and wearing a bunch of fancy leather gear. He’d had pants on beneath his chaps downstairs, but now his bare furry butt sprouted its lashing tail my direction as he screwed himself forward. I couldn’t actually see what was happening in detail, since he had the buck bent over the bed facing away, but I could side-on see the deer’s hole-punched grimace and then the twitchy slack of a dick right against the prostate. 

I wasn’t looking for sex, or even smut, but when in Rome… I carefully opened up my fly and as quietly as possible started milking my foreskin around. I looked back through the peep-sliver and caught the cougar taking a tease break, obviously stroking himself even though it was unseen, before he pushed back in. 

“Oh god, it’s so damn big,” the buck said, squeezing and clutching at the tawdry red ‘velvet’ pillow he was propped upon. 

“Shaddup,” the cougar growled, then started pumping forward. He didn’t use any kind of nice bedroom manner, and he didn’t even fuck like a porn-star. That made me realize I hadn’t seen porn in a long time, at least not like the glory days of Internet Pornography’s drinking from the cum-fountain firehose. He fucked like someone who just really needed and wanted it, upper body tense and stoic beneath a fancy tooled leather vest, lower body creaking about in leather chaps as his rump flexed and helped power his cock forward into his cervine partner. Every now and then, his boot heels lifted off the floor and clomped down with a stacked-heel clack and the unmistakable jangle of cowboy spurs. The buck, whose boots stuck off the bed spurs-up, jostled enough that his own spurs rattled too. 

Meanwhile, I stayed hidden in my stained, cramped hovel, face mashed against the shoddy wall, grinding precum and dick sweat into my riding glove. I slept with my leathers on. Better to stay dressed if something bad happened, I could argue. Really just because I could; wandering into this psychotic wasteland let me live out every fantasy I had freely and without restraint. For the moment, that meant lathering up over some pretty garden-variety voyeurism and prostitution, all beast-people and cowboy stuff considered. 

“Mmm, flip me over an’ make me cum,” the buck cooed in his slimy prancing drawl, only to get smacked with the dull whack of glove leather on fur.

“I said, shaddup, you always talk so damn much,” the cougar hissed, and only thrusted harder. I could hear his leather chaps smacking the buck’s rump. I could hear the subtle smaller thwap of balls on taint. I could even hear the messy squelch of slippery cock through hole. “I’ll get you cummin’ when I want,” the cowboy cat said, then adjusted his leather cowboy hat.

They weren’t the only ones enjoying themselves; I could hear various groans and moans and creaking bed frames, but that was all muffled and distant compared to the sound that squirted through my little peephole. I could practically smell the sex, although really all I smelled was my own stink. A day in leather on a motorcycle as a ‘skinbag’ in a desert wasteland meant I was ripe. 

The cougar appeared to orgasm abruptly, pounding thrusts suddenly energized, shoulders up, tail stiff and twitching as he grunted. He ground to a halt, huffed a few times, then pulled out. The buck made a surprised, strangled sound, and there was a wet splat as a bunch of spunk pushed up and out onto the floor. 

“I ain’t done with you,” the cougar snarled, then practically pounced up into bed and wrestled with the lithe deer. He dumped himself back down on the bed, clutched the buck back-first up against his chest with an arm around his pecs, and grappled with his cock in the other. I could see both of their bodies from the front now, and both had the inky black shafts of beast people. That jived with the werewolves and always-wolves I was familiar with back home. Uncut and inky black. 

The buck started to plead but the cougar clapped a brown-gloved hand over his mouth, stifling him into groans and whimpers. Despite boot heels and spurs, the buck’s kicking did nothing to dissuade the cougar from restraining him. I imagined being the buck and came on the spot, hurriedly twisting to the side so I blasted onto the tubular pillow I’d been propped up against. 

They weren’t done. Amidst the struggling handjob, the cougar knocked his hat asunder as he lunged his face in and bit the buck hard on the neck. That made his captive prey spasm and take his turn ejaculating, cock splashing a mess up across the cougar’s furry arm and gloved hand, the side of the cat’s hat, and one jet even hit the wall with a smack. The buck gave a last twitch, and the cougar bit again, then let him drop with all the interest of a housecat depositing his latest gift to his owner.

For a moment, I felt gross inside, now post-orgasm and watching a buck lie limp on the bed. Then his cock twitched and he tried to startle the cougar with a syrupy, “boo!”. The cougar just chuffed.

“Oh, my life flashed before my eyes,” he said, swooning as he collapsed back, then reached over to pet the cougar’s face. No biting this time.

“Bet it was jus’ all dicks.”

“Mmm-hmm, and yours was the last one I saw.”

“Everyone out here’s nuts,” the cougar sighed, but turned and the two met snouts, licked. 

“Well, I sure came around here late lookin’ for you. It’s been a little while.”

“It’s gonna be another while. I can’t stand these kinda towns. Why I’m out in the wild.” The pair continued to post-fuck cuddle, and I continued to watch. Now I felt bad for myself. I used to get post-fuck cuddles from a brawny, black-furred biker wolf. His whole pack, or gang, or whatever, would fuck me all the time, but only he ever got to spend time with me. His name was Falconer. I imagined him as the cover of a sleazy romance novel about brutal alpha werewolves. And he was gone. 

While I stewed in the abrupt sorrow of post-masturbation, the pair looked a bit more alive. The buck packed himself back into his shorty-shorts, while the cougar took a hidden wallet out of his boot shaft and paid up in a few coins. The buck pranced out, and the cougar collapsed back into bed. I swore he looked as lonely as I felt.