Manties in a Twist

by J. A. Rock

  For some reason, that pissed me off. I’d probably be a great fucking pony. “Pfff. Why would I even want to try?”

  “You’re right.” She glanced at Ryan. “Though, PetPlayFest is open to all types of animals. Your friend here would make a great little lapdog.”

  Ryan stepped forward, and I actually grabbed his arm to make sure he didn’t punch her. “Let me tell you something.” His voice was, like, Boots the Monkey gone all Harvey Dent. “We could enter that competition and kick your ass.”

  “Yeah!” I wasn’t actually sure we could, but I was pissed enough to bullshit.

  She tucked her lower lip under her upper and laughed. “You seriously think you could compete in PetPlayFest?”

  “Why the hell not?” I demanded.

  She held up her gloved hands. “All right, all right. That would be hilarious. Please, just for the entertainment value, do it.”

  “Maybe we will,” Ryan snapped.

  She grinned. “Uh-huh.”

  “We definitely will,” I said. Ryan and I looked at each other. Probably neither of us was thinking too clearly. But, like, all I wanted to do was prove Cinnamon wrong.

  Cinnamon’s mouth fell open in this kind of pretending-she-couldn’t-believe-it smile. “Do you guys have any experience with pet play?”

  “I guess you’ll see what kind of experience we have at PetPlayFest.” Ryan straightened his tie.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re gonna beat you so bad, you’re gonna w—”

  Stan came in then. He was a wiry bald guy with half-moon glasses, and he was carrying a tarp, a bucket of water, and a sponge. “Hello there,” he said to Ryan and me.

  None of us spoke for a moment. Then Ryan said, “Hey.”

  “You being good?” Stan asked Cinnamon.

  She just snorted and whinnied.

  I raised my eyebrows at her. Tried to convey to her without words just how hard we were gonna destroy her in this PetFest thingie.

  Cinnamon stared at me blankly. But as Stan led her to the far side of the room, she turned and smirked at us over her shoulder.

  As soon as Ryan and I got home, we pulled up the PetPlayFest website.

  “Holy shit.” Ryan stared at the pictures on the home page. Guys in puppy hoods. Women with curly tails like pigs. People pulling carts or carrying riders on their backs. “People really do this stuff?”

  “Yeah, man. It’s serious.”

  “I know, but I’ve never . . . What is that?” He pointed at a picture of a woman in black latex with cat ears.

  “She’s a kitten.”

  “I get dogs and ponies. Everything else—”

  “Oh my God.” I leaned back. “You would die if— Okay, first of all, have I told you about Dave’s thing with furries?”

  “No.”

  “So, he’s super freaked out by furries.”

  “What’s a furry?”

  “Like, when people dress up like animals. But it’s not like this.”

  He knelt by the computer chair, looking up at the screen. “What do you mean?”

  I tried to remember what Miles had told me. “It’s . . . I don’t know, dude. I can’t remember. But furries are different. No, wait, I remember what it is. Furries want to be animals with human characteristics. But the people who do pet play are pretending to have animal characteristics.” Thanks, Miles. “Anyway, Dave’s scared of them for mysterious reasons, and there’s this guy who posts on our discussion forum once in a while, named Fucktopus.”

  “Fucktopus?”

  “Yeah. He’s an octopus furry. And all he wants is for someone to act out the book Moby Dick with him.”

  Ryan turned to me. “But he’s not a whale.”

  “No. He just wants something like that. He wants someone to harpoon him.”

  “I’ll bet he does.”

  “Like, I just picture this lonely nerd dude in his mom’s basement, building robot tentacles.”

  “He has robot tentacles?”

  “Oh, hell yeah, he does. And he just posted the other day about how he found some guy to do ocean role-play with him over the summer, but now the guy’s gone and he’s lonely again.”

  Ryan frowned. “This sounds almost too weird.”

  “Dude, what we do is super weird.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t judge.” He looked back at the screen. “But maybe we shouldn’t have agreed to this.”

  “No, we absolutely should have. Can you imagine anything that would shut Cinnamon up faster than us beating her at her own game?”

  “Pushing her off a bridge?”

  “Yeah, but murder charges. This is the perfect way to show her that all the stuff she’s into that she thinks is sooo important is actually so easy anyone can do it.”

  “What if we can’t win?”

  I stared at him. “Are you doubting us already?”

  He shook his head slowly. “In the moment it seemed like a good idea, but—”

  “It is. You don’t even know all this represents, because you haven’t been dealing with Cinnamon for years like my friends and I have. If I put Cinnamon in her place, it’ll be like the Eye has fallen, the fire’s out on Pride Rock, fuckin’ . . . I don’t even know, but it’ll feel so good.”

  He kind of smiled at me. “You really want to do this?”

  “Dude. She was in that room with Hal.”

  This expression sometimes happened on his face when I talked about Hal or Bill or the whole incident, like when someone tells you they have cancer and you don’t know what to say and you want to seem sympathetic but not like you’re being condescending so you just sort of stand there awkwardly and don’t say anything. “You’re right. We can totally do this.”

  “Damn right we can. We wanted to try all the different kinks, right? Well, here’s a way to kill two birds with one stone.”

  I’d promised the hare I was gonna try something new. And this fit the bill.

  He fist-bumped me. “All right. Let’s figure out what this thing is.”

  We read the overview together. PetPlayFest was held on the last Saturday in September, at a Girl Scout campground outside the city. It was in its third year and open to pets of all types. Last year there had been over seventy entrants. Competitors picked five events, and their combined score from all those events determined their eligibility for best in show.

  “Okay, let’s look at what competitions there are.” I clicked the link. “Oh my God, there’s eighty thousand options.”

  Ryan stood again so he could see the screen better.

  “Dude, you want the chair? I can kneel.” I stood, and he took the chair. I knelt on his right side and leaned against him. “Cinnamon said she’s doing dressage. And the grooming thing.”

  “But you don’t have to compete against her directly.” He scrolled. “You just have to pick the events you’re most likely to win. So we can skip dressage.”

  “Oh no. I want to compete against her directly.” I paused. “What the hell is dressage?”

  “It’s like a . . . French fancy riding.” We looked it up.

  “So it’s basically horse ballet,” Ryan summed up when we were done reading the Wikipedia page.

  “I can do it. I’m graceful as fuck.” I reached up and grabbed a sticky note and a pen and started writing. “Dressage. Grooming. She said she’s doing the cart race, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cart . . . race.” I looked up. “So that leaves two more things she’s doing that we don’t know about. I wonder how we find out.”

  “Maybe just pick two things you know you’ll be good at.”

  “I’ll be good at everything.”

  He leaned down and slipped his hand into the back of my jeans. Snapped the waistband of my panties. “Cocky.”

  I wiggled closer to him as I read over the list. “Bobbing for apples! I haven’t done that since I was, like, ten. My town had this Halloween at the Farm thing every year, and I was a bobbing for apples maniac.”

  “Well, sig
n up for that, then.”

  “And a balloon pop! Look: ‘Pets will be set loose in an arena full of balloons and will have ten minutes to pop as many balloons as possible. Contestants must remain on all fours.’ Okay, those are gonna be my last two.” I wrote it down.

  We looked at pictures from past events. Everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun. There was a picture of a pup with a tennis ball in its leather hood jaws. A cat doing a blindfolded obstacle course. A pony tied up in a stall while its rider dude brushed it.

  Ryan scrolled down. “Where are we gonna get all this gear? Look at all the stuff the ponies are wearing.”

  I rested my chin on his thigh. “Let’s go to a horse store.”

  “A horse store?”

  “What are they called where they have horse supplies?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Google it. Google ‘horse store.’”

  He Googled it. “Uh, feed and supply? No, wait. A tack shop.”

  “We’ll go to one of those. Where’s the nearest one?”

  He checked. “It’s, like, thirty minutes away.”

  “And I’m off work tomorrow.”

  “This’ll be good,” he agreed. “We can get a sense of what real horses need, and then we can look online to see how it stacks up with what human ponies use.”

  “And if we don’t get a bagless vacuum, we can use our money for this. Because the entry fee’s like a hundred dollars.”

  “Are you fucking kidding?”

  “It said it on the home page. Plus gear.”

  He placed a hand on the top of my head. I held my breath for a second, leaning on his thigh.

  “Love you,” I murmured.

  “Love you too.” He petted my face.

  “We only have four weeks. You know what that means?”

  He looked down at me, and our eyes met. “It means we need a montage.”

  I laughed, pressing my face against his pants. I looked up again. “Yeah, we need a fucking montage.”

  “You know what?” He rubbed my scalp with his fingertips. “I’m not even worried. You’ll be an awesome pony.”

  The weird thing was, I felt like he was right. Because even though it made us sound like a walking motivational poster, honest to God: if he believed I could do something, I could do it.

  Except getting pissed on.

  But everyone’s got their Achilles’ heel.

  The next day, we drove out to Horseman’s Needs, the tack shop. It was a small, white wooden building, and inside it smelled ridick amazing. Like leather and new clothes and Murphy’s Oil Soap. The walls were mostly pegboard, and there was all kinds of stuff hanging from them—leather harnesses and colorful ropes and helmets and what have you.

  The woman behind the counter had curly hair and kind of a big, flat face, like Collingsworth.

  I smiled at her. “Hi, we’re here for, just, um, some horse equipment. Do you have, like, the things that go over their heads?”

  “Bridles,” Ryan supplied.

  She narrowed her eyes at us a little. “Yes, we have bridles.”

  I nodded. “And do you have any really light saddles? Like the kind they use for racing? Our niece is a jockey. I mean, she’s getting there. You won’t, like, see her in the Kentucky Derby or anything. Yet. But some day, man . . . Triple Axel.”

  “Crown,” Ryan corrected. “Triple Crown.”

  “Trip-le Crowwwnnn,” I agreed.

  The cashier wiped her hands on her pants. “We don’t have racing saddles.”

  “Let’s just look around,” Ryan suggested.

  We wandered for a while. I found gloves with little bumps all over the palms. “Hey, what are these for?” I called to the cashier, holding them up.

  She gave me that narrow-eyed look again. “Those are pebble-grip gloves. They help you grip the reins.”

  “Cool.” I nodded and put them back. Wandered over to some bottles of liniment gel. I opened one and smelled it. It smelled like Icy Hot. “Ry, c’mere.”

  He came over. “What’s that?”

  “Smell.” I offered it to him. “It’s like Icy Hot.” I sniffed it again. “I didn’t know they put that on horses.”

  “Well, their legs probably get sore.”

  “You know one time Dave let D put Vicks VapoRub up his ass?”

  Ryan glanced over at the cashier.

  “Oops.” I lowered my voice. “But, seriously, he did.”

  “Do you and your friends talk about the sex stuff you do?”

  “Duh. Remember when Dave was, like, interrogating us about what we were into?”

  “I thought that was a joke. That’s kind of weird.”

  “You’re kind of weird.” Was it kind of weird?

  “So you’re gonna tell them you’re doing pony play?”

  “Uh, yeah, if it goes well.” Except maybe not Dave, because furries.

  I put the liniment gel back, and we headed into the back room, away from the cashier.

  Ryan went over to a giant metal, like, arrow quiver or something. “Ooh, look. Here are the whips.”

  “Ryaaannn,” I whispered, propping my arm on his shoulder. “You’re not gonna whip me, right?”

  “The whips are to give cues. You don’t really whip a horse unless you’re a dick. Aw, look.” He picked up a crop that had a leather thingy on the end shaped like a little hand. He pointed it at me. “Bend over. I need to test it.”

  I glanced around to see where the cashier was. Looked back at him. “Don’t hit me with the tiny hand! I already have to deal with that all the time with your tiny doll ha— Ow!” I backed away, laughing, as he started smacking any part of me he could reach with the crop.

  “My tiny what?”

  I squeaked, putting my arms up to shield myself. “Abuse!”

  “My tiny what?” He smacked the top of my thigh. It didn’t hurt at all through the denim, but I made a dying dinosaur noise and pulled my hips back, trying to get away.

  “Doll hands. Your t— Stop! I’m just being real!” I was laughing so hard that it startled the crap out of me when I backed into a row of leather strappy things hanging on the wall. I turned to look.

  Bridles.

  Ryan stopped assaulting me and stared too. He set the crop down, and we looked through the bridles together.

  “This is nice.” I touched a black one. It was so . . . new. The straps were smooth and stiff and shiny. “But it wouldn’t fit on a human, right? Pony people need ones designed for human heads?”

  “Probably,” Ryan agreed.

  I checked the price tag. “Holy shiboles.” I showed him.

  “Oh my God. I hope human ones are cheaper.”

  “Are you finding everything you need?” asked a voice behind us.

  We both turned to face the cashier.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re good. Do you have anything more moderately priced? Bridle-wise, I mean?”

  She nodded toward the end of the line. “Cheapest bridles are down there.”

  Even the cheapest bridles were kinda pricey. We moved on to saddles. Ryan picked up the smallest one and made me bend forward. He tried to sling it over my back, but it slid off. “I mean, how would we even get this to stay on you?”

  “Yeah, it’s too bulky. We might need one for miniature horses. But I’m doing the cart race, remember? I’m gonna be a driving pony, not a riding pony.” We’d spent last night reading up on the different types of ponies. We’d also found a website with information for pony newcomers, and it had like a horse character sheet you filled out. So we were gonna do that tonight.

  We put the saddle back and found a third room full of brushes.

  “Hell yes. Look at this.” I held up a red rubber mitt with little spikes on it. “You tell me horse riding isn’t already kinky as fuck.”

  Ryan put his palm against the rubber spikes, making them flex. “I’ll bet that feels really good. For horses.”

  “Are you gonna groom me?”

  “Well, we are in the grooming co
mpetition. So, I mean, yeah. I guess I have to, like, brush you all over and braid your hair with ribbons and shit.”

  “Okay, get this thing.” I threw the mitt against his chest. It fell to the floor.

  “Jerk.” He reached down to get it.

  I grinned and picked up a brush. The bristles were stiff and left little red lines when I ran it down my arm. I got a strange feeling then, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

  I dragged the brush down my arm again.

  If we did this pony stuff right, Ryan was gonna be touching me a lot. I know, duh, and he already touched me a lot anyway. But he’d do the kind of stuff that everyone knows feels really good, but you never hear anyone talk about. Like, it was amazing as fuck if someone else brushed your hair or washed you or whatever. Or if they petted you and it wasn’t the kind of petting where they were just foreplaying their way to your dick. But sometimes it was tough to ask for that, because once shit got all hot and heavy, then you were just like, Okay, yep, never mind petting, let’s do the dick grabbing.

  And I loved sex. Seriously loved it. But I was also a total slut for just—touching. Backrubs, holding hands, all that shit. And the idea of being tied up while Ryan brushed me, like in those pictures, was doing a lot for me at the moment.

  “Feel this one.” He held out a brush with white bristles. I extended my arm and let him use it on me. It was like the feathers of a goddamn downy baby eagle.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Here.” I took the brush from him and did his arm.

  “That’s amazing.”

  “I know.” I brushed him again.

  He gazed at me for a long moment. “What?”

  “What’s what?”

  “You have a weird look on your face.”

  “Nothing. I’m just excited for this.”

  He took the brush. “We’re really doing this?”

  “Unless you’re chickening out.”

  “Chickening out of victory? When have I ever?”

  I grinned. This was gonna be a victory. And I was gonna show my friends that even though I wasn’t around as much for meetings, I was still totally loyal to the Subs Club. I was prepared to do us the ultimate service: defeat our arch-fucking-nemesis. “We could get some brushes here. Right? And then just shop online for the other stuff?”