The sequel to Ty Game is chugging along over on Patreon (for $20+ subscribers, all of whom are wonderful people), and because I haven’t been writing a lot of new stuff, here’s an excerpt from several months back that all those people have already seen. Ty is out at a nightclub with a margay named Danielle who was hired by the people he’s shooting a commercial for to show him a good time in Crystal City:
Beyond that, near the dance floor, a group of five was coming off, laughing with each other. It only took a second for Ty to figure out that the ferret was the center of the group, the one with his shirt open halfway down his chest and tight leather pants. The other four (two squirrels, another ferret, and a pronghorn) all circled around him, keeping ears perked toward him, and when he nodded toward the bar, the pronghorn leapt over there and signaled the bartender for drinks.
Wonder who that is, Ty thought as the ferret sauntered through the bar, pulling the other three in his wake. They went to a back corner where one of the squirrels drew a heavy curtain back and talked to the wolf behind it, then all four of them disappeared behind it.
Must be some kind of VIP room back there. Ty shook his head with a grin and looked around at some of the other people in the room, and then Danielle came back with two drinks.
“Oh my gawd,” she said. “Did you see who that was?”
“The ferret?”
“Yes!” She waved her paws. “That was Taylor Caplan.” When Ty stared blankly (but, he hoped, politely) at her, she said, “From Marten’s Point?”
“That’s…a TV show?”
She shook her head. “What do you watch?”
“Game film, mostly,” Ty deadpanned. “Movies when I’m not watching that. Some reality TV.”
“Marten’s Point is a crime show. Taylor Caplan plays this super-young kid who’s brilliant, he graduated from police school at like seventeen and became a detective at twenty, and he goes around solving crimes but the captain, who’s his uncle, doesn’t think he should be a detective yet, and his mom thinks it’s too dangerous. And there’s another detective, and she really likes him but thinks he’s too young for her. Oh, and every week,” she giggled, “every week his roommate has a new get-rich-quick scheme and he tries to get Marko—that’s the character’s name, Marko Polo—”
Ty had to stop himself from laughing as Danielle went on. “He has to figure out how his roommate’s scheme is going to fail.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for it,” Ty said.
“Oh, don’t watch it,” Danielle said. “It’s not that good. It’s just popular right now.” She gazed back at the curtain. “Actually, do you mind? I’ll just be a second.”
“Uh…sure.”
A moment later, she was gone, and Ty was left with two drinks and the feeling that he should’ve said, “Aren’t you here to escort me?” But that was selfish and prickish, he thought. Let her go get her selfie or whatever, and he’d stay here and chill until she got back.
He’d finished his drink and her ice had mostly melted some twenty minutes later, and Ty decided, to hell with it, he was going to go dance some more. So he left the glasses on the table and went back out to the dance floor.
He wasn’t any stranger to dancing by himself, and enjoyed finding his own rhythms to the music almost as much as matching those of a partner. Besides, he was sure Danielle would find him soon, or else someone else would. He was one of the tallest guys in the club, and usually when he was dancing, someone asked if he was a professional athlete.
Nobody did come up to him over the course of the next ten or fifteen minutes. Maybe it wasn’t the kind of club where you tried to meet new people, although Ty felt like he’d seen a lot of people chatting up other people.
Then someone did grab his arm. He turned and looked down into Danielle’s wide eyes. She got up close so he could hear her. “I’m so sorry,” she half-yelled over the music. “I just lost track of time!”
Her breath smelled strongly of peppermint, not the spearmint that was in a mojito, and there was a familiarly sour smell under it. Ty’s nostrils flared, and she saw it and jumped back, clapping a paw over her muzzle. “I didn’t mean to leave you alone so long,” she said through her paw. “But it looks like you’re having a good time.”
“I like dancing,” he said. “Did those guys give you a breath mint?”
“Yeah,” she said with a smile still mostly hidden behind her paw. “I had mojito breath.”
He frowned, not sure if he’d heard her properly. She dropped the smile and the paw from her muzzle and nodded toward the bar.
In the moderately quieter bar, he followed her to a section of the wall away from people, because there weren’t any tables free. They leaned on either side of an old pen and ink drawing of a plant leaf, and Danielle pressed her paws together earnestly. “I thought the peppermint would cover it, but your nose is pretty good, huh?”
“Pretty good,” Ty said.
“Okay, listen,” she said. “I know I could get in trouble for leaving you alone.”
“You could?” His ears splayed.
“I’ll do you too if you want,” she said, and then registered what he’d said and nodded. “Yeah, I’m not supposed to do…stuff like that while I’m escorting. But it was Taylor Caplan. And he said he might be able to get me onto Marten’s Point! That would be so huge.”
Ty smiled. “I thought you said it wasn’t a good show.”
“It’s not. It’s popular.” She shook her head. “Anyway, please don’t tell your agent or anyone, okay?”
“Of course not,” he said, and then he put together “I’ll do you too” with the smell on her breath under the peppermint, just in time for her to reach out and take his paw.
“Honestly,” she said with a smile, “I was gonna offer anyway, because you’re fun and cute, and,” she shrugged, “I like doing it. So it’s totally not anything sus.”
“Yeah.” Ty squeezed her paw back lightly. He didn’t want to jump on the offer of a blow job; that seemed a little creepy. “Okay. Um, let’s keep dancing for a bit, and you can tell me about Taylor Caplan, and then when we’re back at the hotel, we’ll see how we feel?”
“That sounds fair.” She lashed her tail. “I promise not to abandon you again. Well, unless Lester Seren shows up.”
Ty did know that name, a lion who’d become a huge action movie star in the last few years. “You think he might actually show up here?”
Danielle shook her head with a smile. “It’s not exclusive enough for him. So don’t worry.”
Ty suspected there were a lot of celebrities between Lester Seren and Taylor Caplan, but he let Danielle lead him back onto the dance floor without another comment.
Lessee. She WILL blow this star because he's on a popular show right now, and MAY blow Ty because she's here to escort him... what... an interesting priority list.
Looking forward to see what this one's about, especially after Titles.