Annie C: Kiss

(Chronological index: Immediately after Road Trip I.)

Pet and Annie were looking at themselves in the mirror when Ray announced a business trip. They were comparing their matching collars from St. Augustine. Annie had joked that hers was more shiny. Pet was comparing them with a critical eye.

Annie turned slowly. "You're in IT," she said slowly to the big giant goof. "For you, the daily commute is a business trip."

"You're going to work on a Saturday, Ray?" Pet asked.

"No," he said, answering Pet first. Annie felt a flash of jealousy, then realized he was just getting the easy answer out of the way.

He held out both hands and the sylphs climbed into them. They held on as he walked over to sit on the sofa. "No, our guys are setting up some animatronics in Orlando. The software is pretty proprietary, so-"

Ray paused as Annie drove her heel into his wrist. Pet was chewing her lip. "Ah," he said. "Pet, do you know what proprietary information is?"

"No, sir," she said. Annie coughed. "I mean, no, Ray."

"Well, it just means that it belongs to us, and we don't want to share it with anyone else."

"Oh!" Pet said with a smile. She pointed over at her new roommate. "Like chocolate!"

"That's exactly right," Ray said cheerfully. Annie growled under her breath. "So, when they set up the exhibit, they're going to set up the computer, too. And they don't want the game park people messing with our chocolate."

"Oh. That makes sense!"

"How long will you be gone, Ray?" Annie asked.

"Well, first, I was going to take you," he told her. "And we're going to be there for two weeks."

"Two WEEKS!?" Pet protested. She turned to look at Annie. "That's, like, for EVER!"

"No, no!" Annie said. She gestured but Ray was already moving his hands together. Annie grabbed the blonde in a tight hug. "We'll call every night. And send emails."

"I can't read!"

"Oh, sweetheart," Annie cooed. Ray moved both sylphs closer to his chest. "Denise will read to you."

"But not in your voice." Annie raised her head at that one. She looked up at her owner. Denise was not known for doing impressions. Certainly not of Annie or Ray.

He shrugged carefully.

"Sweetie, we have no idea what that means," Annie said.

"Reading to me? It'll be Denise saying things Annie should say! Not Annie. I just got used to your voice being in my head all the time. And now you're going away."

"I said we'd CALL!"

"Oh."

"On the phone!"

"Oh, yeah. Yeah, I get it."

"Every night!"

Denise came home, arriving in the living room as Annie was shouting at Pet. She paused, raising one eyebrow.

"Annie," Ray said, "made a promise to Pet, who misunderstood and got upset. And her being upset made Annie upset. And I've been trying to calm everyone down ever since."

"You're doing it wrong," Denise said. She scooped a brunette sylph out of his grasp and sat beside him. Annie sat on the woman's hand and looked from owner to co-owner suspiciously.

"If little sylphs are upset," Denise said in a lecturing tone, "and you force them to be quiet, then all that upsetedness just stews and ferments. Hold her like this."

Two fingertips pushed Annie's shoulders, rolling the sylph back to lay across the giant hand. Ray held Pet in a similar position.

"What you do, then, is increase the excitement. They burn up their upsetedness fuels and become too exhausted to continue being upset."

"How do we do that?" Ray asked. "Take away Annie's candy?"

"The hell!" Annie replied. Pet giggled. Annie flashed a grin at the other sylph. SO she missed two fingers stabbing down. She started to shriek as she was tickled.

Ray's fingers immediately followed. The sylphs screamed for mercy, for freedom and shouted out entirely unlikely threats of retribution.

The voices faded as they became rather out of breath, but the humans continued. Denise finally stopped, just as she judged that Annie was about to lose bladder control.

Very relaxed sylphs were poured into their beds in the living room carrier. Ray's hand hesitated a moment to shove the bed cushions together, so they could hold hands until their eyes uncrossed.

----------

Denise looked up from the paper a few days after her husband had left. There was giggling afoot.

She found Pet kneeling on the keyboard of Ray's computer. Not the laptop he'd taken, but the desktop computer he considered his backup.

Annie considered it her personal domain, of course.

"What are you looking at?" Denise asked as she stepped up.

"OH! Um...nothing." Denise looked at the innocent-looking sylph with fully blossomed suspicions.

"What does nothing mean? Should you be using Annie's computer?"

"Oh, sure," Pet said. "Annie said if I got lonely I could open up some of her pictures of bunnies and kitties and mice and hamsters and guinea pigs and I think one gerbil and a pork bellied pig."

"Pot bellied pig," Denise corrected.

"Umm....okay. Anyway they're super cute and she's got hundreds of them so-"

"Annie has hundreds of pictures of cute fluffy animals?" Denise asked. Her tone was suspicious.

"She saved them for her Mom."

"Ah." She nodded and Pet relaxed. For a second. She tensed when Denise asked: "So what was so funny?"

"I, uh, I couldn't find the bunny pictures. So I was poking around..."

Denise took the mouse and looked around. A directory was open. The title was 'Ultimate Secret Stay Out.' "Huh. Wonder why she didn't have it password protected."

"Have what password protected?" Pet asked.

Denise checked the document history. Kiss was the most recent file opened. It was a short film.

"What's Kiss?"

"It's funny," Pet said. Then she looked horrified. "OH, but you might not get the joke."

"Too late," Denise said. The file loaded and started to play.

There was a tape deck. Hands that looked kind of like Ray's put a cassette in and started it playing. Tom Jones started to sing a cover of a Prince song, Kiss.

"Thus the title," Denise said quietly. Pet cringed.

Annie appeared, dressed so slinky Denise thought it would fall off at any second. She started to dance like she was auditioning for the video.

Ray's face appeared, mouthing the words and assuring Annie she didn't have to go to great lengths to get his attention. All she had to do was kiss.

There was a bit of editing. When Tom sang that he didn't care about zodiacs, Ray changed that to scale. 'Particular sign' became "no particular size I'm more compatible with."

From the faces, and a glimpse of the shirt Ray wore, this was taken when the two were in college. Or, when Ray was IN college, and Annie attended the same college.

They kept al-MOST kissing through the song. He or she would purse their lips, the other would approach...then they'd spin apart.

Until the very end. He put his hand down, she danced up onto it. The music stopped except for a piano... Tom stopped singing for a moment, then breathily said, 'Kiiiisssss.'

Annie stood on tiptoe and Ray kissed her face. It was deep, loving and apparently quite sincere. Denise smiled. The 'video' froze on their embrace and faded to dark.

"That was funny?" she asked Pet.

"Yeah," Pet said slowly.

Denise picked her up to cuddle. "You think I should be mad?"

"You're not. Are you? Because you shouldn't be. That was a long time ago. I remember when the song came out. And you're married now. He didn't even know you. Or me. Or both of us.

"So if he was thinking about cheating on you there wasn't really a you to cheat ON. Right?"

Denise laughed. "Pet, I'm not angry." She hugged the worried sylph with her hands. Pet relaxed a bit, but now she looked confused.

"You don't mind that he kisses Annie? Kissed, I mean?" Denise stroked Pet's hair and thought about it. "Are you searching your feelings?" Pet asked. She cheered when her owner nodded. She always felt important when Denise thought about something Pet had said. Not that she ever really ignored her sylph. But the rest of the family sometimes seemed to... Not take her seriously. And some of Denise's friends. And her coworkers.

She gasped, realizing that Denise, Annie and Ray ALWAYS took the little sylph seriously, even at her most airheaded moments. They were, like, MADE for each other. All four of them!

"Pet?" Denise asked. "What do you think would happen if we could only love one person at a time? Or if Ray thought that? Imagine if Ray told me that for us to be married, we'd have to get rid of our sylphs. That I'd have to get rid of you."

Pet curled up into a defensive ball in Denise's hand. "I'd miss Ray after you kicked him to the curb."

Denise laughed at that. "Where'd you learn that phrase? Oh, never mind. Annie?" Pet nodded. "Well, that's pretty much what would happen. If I could only love one person... you're so deep in my heart, I should charge you rent for the ventricle."

"That's good!" Pet said. She wrapped the nearest thumb in a tight hug.

"It is good," Denise agreed. "But we're not limited, are we?"

"NO! I love you and Buttercup and Carolyn and Carla and Chuck and Annie and Ray and Mom and Dad and Howard and Susan and Bowser and..." She paused.

"You don't have to love Carla's cat, Pet," Denise said.

Pet, who'd been about to mention the tiny hippo she loved, before she remembered that Denise didn't really believe in Happy and didn't quite like Pet to 'pretend' that there were sylphed hippopotami just took the offered ending to the paragraph and nodded.

"But then it's okay that Ray loves Annie!" she said, and asked.

"I... Pet, I don't think I could love a man without being sure he could love a sylph nearly as much as I do." She pulled Pet up to kiss the top of the little silly head. "And watching him with Annie... Hell, watching him with you? I know he can. He does."

"Yeah," Pet said with a happy sigh.

"But what was so funny?"

"Annie kissing someone on the lips with the lips being as big as her leg!" Pet said. She turned to face the computer, glancing surreptitiously (or so she thought) back at Denise's face. "You'll never see me kissing someone like that."

"Is someone trying to trick me into an extra kiss?" Denise asked.

"Nooooooo," Pet said. "Unless it would work?"

"Say please," Denise ordered.

Pet opened her mouth to obey. Before she could do more than breathe in, she was rushed towards the waiting, pursing lips. There was a soft, pillowy impact and a loud 'MWAH!' sound and she'd been kissed across the face.

"PLEASE!" she shouted a little belatedly.

---------

After Ray finished talking smoochy face stuff with Denise, he put the handset on the nightstand and Annie by the handset. She straddled the grip and placed her face near the mouthpiece.

"Hey, Pet! What have you been doing?"

"I watched some educational videos today."

"Really? What did you learn?" Annie was thinking of Bert, Ernie and 'today's show was brought to you by the letter P.' Instead, she got...

"I learned there ain't no particular...SIZE...I'm more compatible with..."

Annie paled. Then started to shriek.



Back to the Index