Work. And then some more work

Despite the commotion that had been their morning meeting, the rest of the day passed relatively uneventfully. Michael spent a couple of hours on his designs and communicating with a customer who really couldn't decide whether or not 'sexy' was a concept that described their stapler brand.

It was mind-numbing work, and honestly, his least favorite project at the moment. But it was work, and it needed to be done, so he did his best powering through. He still procrastinated a little, texting with Emi and occasionally catching himself daydreaming about their plans for the evening.

Committing work-time fraud with your boss felt weird, yet strangely satisfying.

At some point, his mom called again, asking whether or not he'd come over on the weekend. He declined the invitation, this time having a reason other than wanting to avoid the constant nagging of his parents.

"I actually have a date.", he told his mother over the phone. There was an unnecessarily long, stunned silence before his mother replied with disbelief oozing from her voice.

"Really?", she had clearly long given up on him in the ladies' department.

"Is it... a woman?" Michael barely suppressed the overwhelming urge to bash his head against the table.

"Yes, mom. I am still straight. That hasn't suddenly changed.", he pressed out with gritted teeth. Not even his parents managed to look past the stereotypes for men working in his profession. In fact, they were arguably worse than most other people.

"Well, congrats then!", his mom cheered, her mood suddenly switching from suspicious to jubilant. "Who is the lucky lady?"

Michael sighed, clamping down on the old wounds that his mother's obvious conservatism had opened up. He knew they loved him. He just wished they were better at showing it without displaying constant disapproval for his life choices.

"It's Emi. My boss.", he finally answered.

The rest of the conversation consisted of his mother peppering him with questions and Michael doing his best to evade most of them with platitudes. At the end of it, he honestly just felt exhausted.

After hanging up, he tried to work a little more, but couldn't get himself to focus. Checking the clock, it was already past 3 pm. An hour too early to check out normally, but he didn't exactly have fixed hours. As long as he kept up with his assigned projects, no one cared how little or much time he spent on them.

He did check out, figuring that there was no point in forcing himself since he wouldn't get anything done anyway. That said, it was too early to head over to Emi. She was a hard worker and did have fixed hours to coordinate the team. So he had time to kill.

He spent much of it catching up on his online feed before looking up some of the new trends in pet culture. Pet girls never really changed that much, after all, they'd been around for literal thousands of years now, but there were always new fads going on. Even as someone who only looked in from the inside, he could think of multiple short-lived movements popping up in the past.

When he'd grown up and just entered middle school, there had been a big movement around desert foxes. Some scify movie he couldn't remember the name of had just dropped and the main character had been a desert fox girl. Suddenly, they were everywhere and even in his class, some of the girls had started wearing fake fox ears and tails.

The trend had quickly died down again, though some people stuck with the aesthetic.

In high school, the trendy thing was for pet girls to crawl on all fours. It was a common enough element for the more traditional pets, but for a few months, even less committed parts of the community tended to go about their business on their hands and knees. The exact reason for it escaped Michael, but he dimly remembered it to have been a protest in response to some radical political party trying to introduce anti-pet legislation.

From what he read, the trendy thing right now was little bells. They were absolutely everywhere, all over his social media feed, and the women in the pictures. Some wore some on their collars, others attached to piercings in their ears.

He quickly went down a rabbit hole of increasingly ornate and expensive bells that were more jewelry than anything else. It did look nice, he supposed.

And the implication of always knowing where his pet was did turn him on just a little.

With a click of his mouse he spend a couple hundred bucks on a beautiful silver bell carved in intricate designs and promising a clear, loud sound. He felt incredibly silly right afterwards, but did not cancel the order.

It was at that point that he looked at the clock again and realized he was running late.

Cursing himself, he hurried up and got dressed before basically storming out of the house and catching the next bus over to Emi's place. He'd quickly written an apology text to her, but didn't get an answer.

Sweating and a little afraid of her wrath, he hesitated in front of her door for a moment before ringing the bell. There were a few seconds of silent anxiety. Then the door unlocked and opened to a crack, Emi's muffled voice coming through.

"Hurry up and come inside. Close the door behind you.", she didn't sound mad which calmed him down a little. He quickly obeyed, pushing through the door and pulling it closed after him. It closed with a muffled bang and Michael's eyes fell on Emi.

She knelt in the middle of the hallway, facing him. Her face was crimson red and ears flicked nervously. Despite that, she obediently presented her naked body, arms crossed behind her back, and breasts pushed out. She looked up, biting her lip in a hungry expression.

"I've been waiting for you, master."