Tiger Winter - 11. Ice

Emmett woke, yawned, stretched, and rolled off his bed, taking the duvet with him. He rose blinking, onto all fours, and the polar bear took a deep breath through his black nose. Home smelt different: and his room smelt of Jian. The memory of the tiger lying on his mattress was blurred by the dream Emmett had told himself – nothing sexual, just he and Jian walking in the snow, hand in hand – and by the beautiful vision of him standing out in the snow, lit up in vivid colours by the dancing of The Great Spirits. Emmett grunted happily to himself and shouldered his way out of his room and towards the kitchen, which was the centre of any Moosonee household.

“I see you’ve not changed your habits then,” Kateri smiled and offered her hand to the big bear as he wandered in. Emmett rubbed against her palm with a sleepy grumble. “First night home he always shifts and wakes up in his fur.”

“Sometimes for the first week,” Rye chipped in. “Hey big brother: morning Tiger.”

Emmett lifted his head to look across the room, to find Jian, already in his species-striped hoodie, sipping from a mug of tea. He smiled at the polar bear.

“Haaoorn?”

“Not long,” Jian smiled, “turns out I finally discovered a situation in which owning pyjamas would be useful.”

“You can borrow some of mine,” Rye ruffled his brother’s ears and crossed the kitchen to start filling a bucket from the sink, “they’ll be too long on you, but that means you’ll have warm feet.”

“Oh, no, I mean thank yo-”

“Wooorm,” Emmett interrupted his friend, and then nudged his brother’s thigh, “Hurrnt.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rye stopped filling the bucket and lowered it to the floor, “impatient.”

“What’s that for? Oh…” Jian’s question was answered when Emmett stuck most of his face into the bucket and drank noisily. “You’re gonna stay in your fur all day?”

“Haaorm,” Emmett licked his muzzle dry and paced around the kitchen table to stand next to Jian. Even on all fours, his head was level with Jian’s shoulder. He nosed the back of his tiger hood gently, and the boy turned to stroke his fur.

“So what do you want to do today, Xue?”

“Ice fishing!” Rye chirped, “you promised.” He blinked quickly, “what did you call him?”

Jian grinned in a slightly irritating all-knowing sort of way, and sipped his tea. Emmett lay on the floor, taking up most of it, as his little brother made toast with marmalade, and ate the crusts from Rye’s sticky fingers while Kateri showed Jian where everything was in the kitchen so he could help himself in future.

“Should we, um… money? Grocery shopping?” Jian looked sideways at Emmett, his orange eyes asking for help, but the polar bear just grinned at him.

“Wooam.”

“You don’t have to pay for anything sweetie. You’re a guest,” Kateri smiled warmly at him, “though I’m sure at some point we’ll send the two of you to the store to refill the cupboards.

“Or we can just steal the stuff Emmett has hidden in his room.” Emmett turned as his father walked into the kitchen eating an orange. “Thanks, son.” Emmett snorted. He had been intending to save the oranges as a surprise until Christmas Eve. “Are you taking your brother fishing?”

“Hurrnt,” Emmett nodded, and Rye squealed in delight, “hoorm wurr hooawl.”

When Emmett turned to leave the kitchen, he brushed bodily against Jian, and was not surprised when the not-tiger followed him. He had the sense to wait outside Emmett’s door until, back on two feet and in his skin and a hastily grabbed pair of jeans, Emmett opened it for him.

“Morning.”

“Hey Xue,” Jian’s smile made Emmett’s insides very quickly resemble warm honey, “fishing?”

“You want to come with us?” he avoided begging ‘please’ on the end of the sentence in a pathetic whimper.

“I don’t wanna spoil it for you and Rye…”

“You won’t,” Emmett pulled a fitted thermal layer over his head before reaching for a sweater, “Go put some other layers on under your hoodie, it’s gonna be cold.”

Ten minutes later they left the house in a selection of salopettes and jackets to find the sky blue and crisp. Rye packed the fishing gear and fish-box into the back of the truck, but did not swing into his usual shotgun seat and instead sat in the back as though it was a perfectly normal decision.

“So, what is this ice fishing thing?” Jian arched an eyebrow at his companions, “I though fishing was done in lakes and rivers with running water: surely everything is frozen?”

“Something like that,” Emmett replied. “The basic principle is to make a hole in the ice, drop a line through, and wait for the fish to be hungry. It’s one of our favourite things to do.”

Emmett drove in a north easterly direction out of town, and after a while the traction of the truck changed as they left the snow of the land and started out over the bay.

“Are we-?”

“Sailing, technically,” Rye replied with a grin, “don’t worry, the ice here is like, ten feet deep at the very least. It’s as safe as standing on an ice rink. Go west Emm, there’s a seal hole about another fifteen miles out.”

“You came out and checked?” Emmett reached back to ruffle his brother’s hair. Unlike the rest of the family, he was more of a traditional blond than white, and he had inexplicably dark eyebrows.

“Seal hole?”

“Seals are mammals right? So they need air, and what they do is dig themselves a hole up to the surface which they keep clear of ice so they can go breath through it. In the spring they build agloos, like little snow and ice houses where they can have their pups all nice and safe and warm.”

“Unless a bear finds them.” Emmett grinned.

“Is there good eating on a baby seal?” Jian queried.

“If you can get the mom too, it’s excellent,” Rye replied. “But you’ve got to be quick. Seals are fucking slippery as hell.”

“And they have teeth too;” Emmett said knowingly, “sharp ones.”

“You got bit by a seal?”

“He’s never shown you his scars?” Rye sounded genuinely surprised, “Emmett got into a fight with a leopard seal when he was seventeen and scared our parents half to death.”

“More leopard than seal, those things,” Emmett muttered.

“Left you great scars on your leg though, Emm,” Rye grinned, “oh, here it is!”

They left the truck sitting on the thick snow and walked to the edge of the seal hole. It was a decent size, plenty big enough for a full grown harp seal to swim up through, and excellent for their fishing use. The ice around the hole was thinner, but still perfectly stable, and Emmett set up the seats while Rye baited hooks and lowered them through the ice.

“You don’t actually have to have a rod for ice fishing, depending on what you’re going to catch,” Emmett explained. “We tend to tie our lines to the truck, which means there’s no way we’ll lose them. And there is nothing that can bite the end of the line that Rye and I can’t pull up.”

“You remember that salmon?”

“The one as long as you were tall? Sure I do, he was tasty.” Emmett sat down on a crate they would later use to hold the fish and handed Jian a line. “Wrap that around one finger and wait.”

“For?”

“Wait for the line to twitch, and then twitch again. Then you reel in your dinner!”

Jian looked sceptical, and Emmett didn’t blame him. It looked like a completely insane thing to do, three men sitting around a hole in the ice holding bits of string, and to outsiders the thing that Emmett and Ryley did for fun was probably incredibly boring. But Emmett liked to have the time with his brother, knowing that conversation would be natural or non-existent, and both of those options were fine. After a little while, Jian seemed to relax into the mood, and they chatted generally about what they would do for the next month.

“January is my favourite time of year,” Rye grinned like the excited child he still was, “’cause Emm comes home and we get to play in the snow.”

“Logan and your father don’t play?”

“Logan is always too tired from fishing…” Rye grumbled, “Emmett is the best.”

“Northland Fisheries?”

“Specializing in cod, perch, salmon and seal: It’s pop’s company, six boats, all of them ice breakers, and in the summer they go north right up into the Arctic Circle. It’s one of the biggest export businesses up here. I didn’t get the fishing gene. Neither did Rye.”

“So Logan will have to have some kids at some point?”

“Logan will have to find a girlfriend first! Oh!” Rye grinned and gestured to Jian’s line, “Look! You got something.”

“Oh fuck!” Jian reacted by dropping the line, “Shit!”

Emmett lunged for the fishing line as it slithered across the ice, and handed it back to his friend even as the fish was pulling it through his fingers.

“Quick!”

Jian tried to make up for his earlier panic, hauling the line through his hands over and over until the tension went out of it, and a decent sized trout appeared on the end. Emmett caught the fish in one large hand, stopping it’s wriggling, and took the hook from its mouth: there was no point in the poor thing suffering for longer than it had to. He handed Jian the small curved knife with a soft smile.

“Oh… obviously,” Jian blinked twice, “how should I kill it?”

“Slice from the base of the gills down to the tail, all the guts will fall out and he’ll be dead before he even stops breathing,” Rye explained.

From the look that passed across Jian’s face, Emmett half expected the little tiger not to do it, but he took the knife, flipped it over so the tip of the blade pointed to the ice, and as Emmett held the fish with his fingers in its gills, he sliced down in one swift movement.

“Very nice,” Emmett took the fish so he could deal with the more fiddly job of cleaning it before it froze on the way home, “bait your hook again: takes a lot of fish to feed our family.”

“I’ve never killed anything before,” Jian admitted a while later after Rye had caught and killed his fourth fish. Emmett was cleaning, de-scaling and filleting them up all on the ice, stacking the soft sides between pieces of cooking parchment and putting all of the heads and bones into another box; they would be used to make stock.

“You did it damn well for a first go then,” Rye grinned. “Not being squeamish will come in handy later.”

“What happens later?”

“Emm’s gonna go hunting.”

By the time Emmett had cleaned out the last fish and the boxes were full, Rye was already ferrying their gear back to the truck.

“You think you can smell him from here, bro?”

“Oh easily,” Emmett sniffed the frozen air. He glanced at Jian, who was standing on the ice looking faintly confused. “You and Rye both love the way I cook seal, right? Gotta go get us a seal.” When he saw Jian look around furtively, Emmett laughed. “Oh, fishermen don’t come out here much because the ice is too thick and there’s too much risk of getting eaten by a bear; we don’t have those same problems. Under this ice is the seal that made the hole. He’ll be fat and full of blubber. I’m gonna go get him.”

Getting a full sized polar bear through a seal hole necessitated making the hole bigger, and Rye cut away the ice with a toothed saw until it was just large enough for Emmett to get through. Emmett walked back to the truck in order to abandon his clothes, shifted, and padded back over the ice on all fours. This was what he was built for. His huge polar bear mass was designed to be out here in the bitter cold, big feet spreading his weight on the ice, the layer of fat under his fur keeping him happy and warm. When Jian smiled at him, Emmett couldn’t help but rub his head along the boy’s torso. In that moment, more than anything else, he wished Jian was a tiger, that he could change his shape, dash across the ice with him on all fours, roaring and snapping as they played. Orange and black stripes would make such a good contrast to Emmett’s white fur.

“Murroam,” he whined softly. He hated to feel that Jian wasn’t involved. Ryley had shifted as well, the smaller bear already taking off over the ice in order to sniff out the seal and scare him back towards his main breathing spot. To Emmett’s surprise, Jian glared at him.

“Don’t you dare pity me!”

“Wrooam?”

Jian’s orange gaze went hard, and his teeth flashed at Emmett as he growled. Emmett frowned, stepped forwards, and recoiled as Jian punched him. The blow was unexpected, and it hurt like hell. Emmett snarled without thinking much about the gesture, black lips peeled back to show off his long fangs. Jian hissed at him, all feline, and when he moved to jab again Emmett reared up onto his hind paws. He didn’t want to strike the boy, so wavered, and Jian took the opportunity to hit him again. His knuckles connected dead-centre to Emmett’s sternum, and the polar bear grunted. They fought quickly and in slight confusion. Emmett didn’t use all his strength, far from it, but Jian didn’t let up until the big white bear was on his back on the ice, paws in the air to admit defeat. He growled as he aimed a soft kick at Emmett’s haunch.

“I’m still a tiger.”

“Rawwal,” Emmett agreed.

He turned onto his belly, scraped his claws against the ice, and then slipped into the not quite frozen waters of the Hudson Bay. There was something wonderful about being under water and under the ice. It was slightly petrifying, but Emmett loved the intense cold, and the weightlessness. He spent so much of his time scared shitless that one day he would crush a small child without noticing, and it was nice to know out in the cold that he was not nearly as dangerous, unless there happened to be a seal around. Emmett smelt the seal before he saw it, and he knew the slippery creature would be coming from below him. He hung up near the surface of the ice, away from the hole, blending in with whiteness above him as the big harp seal came shooting out of the dark waters, aiming for his breathing hole. Now it was unoccupied, and the seal was nervous of the bear it had seen above the ice: as it stuck its nose out to suck down new cold air, Emmett pulled himself forwards through the water, jaws open wide, and snapped it. The power was enough to blow them both from the water, waves and rivulets running over the ice where they would freeze into the patterns of his paws, the seal’s thrashing, and Jian’s boots as he hopped away. The seal wasn’t dead, but the ice was stained red with its blood, and Emmett didn’t waste time and suffering before he went in for the kill. The seal rounded on him, jaws open and ready to fight, but Emmett was bigger, stronger, faster, and he crushed the seal’s skull against the thick ice with a slightly disturbing crunch. After that it was simply a case of slicing through the jugular, and drinking down as much warm blood as he could before Rye came running back, wanting his share.

“So that’s how you kill a seal…” Jian smirked at him, “I suppose we have to gut it too?”

Emmett gutted the animal, wearing nothing but his salopettes and boots, and he took the two still warm kidneys and offered one to Jian. Rye snatched the other without asking.

“Share it with me?” Jian used the little knife he’d been loaned to slice a thick sliver from the organ, and Emmett nearly took it from his fingers with his lips, but resisted.

“Thank you.” The warm flesh was like butter, soft and rich against the tongue, and Emmett heard Jian’s purr as he ate. “You like it?”

“Totally worth sitting on the ice for.”

“Here,” Emmett scooped a palm full of lake water to wash the blood off Jian’s fingers, and found the boy’s knuckles under the pad of his thumb. Under the smear of seal blood, Jian’s fists were bruised. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah,” Jian took his hand back quickly, “you’re just bloody bony, that’s all.”

“C’mon you two!” Emmett was suddenly glad his little brother hadn’t chosen to shout anything else to describe them, “let’s get this damn seal in the truck and go!”

Emmett washed off in the lake as best he could and pulled on a long sleeve t-shirt on before grabbing another discarded green Northland Fisheries hoodie. All the way home in the truck, Emmett wanted to say something to the diminutive Chinese man who had, in essence, beat him up; but Jian and Rye were locked into conversations about music which Emmett found generally impenetrable. Just as he was getting jealous of all that his friend and his brother had in common, Jian smiled at him briefly in the rear view mirror, and Emmett felt his heart start beating at a million miles an hour. The tiny glance made him hot and distracted, and even as Emmett was cursing the fact that he seemed to have become a teenager all over again, he couldn’t wait for Jian to look at him again.

When they parked up outside the house, Jian hopped out first, and Rye took the opportunity to lean forwards in his seat with a cocky grin.

“Dude, it smells really red in here.”

“Shut up Rye…”

“I know hunting turns you on, but Emm…” Ryley knew exactly what he was doing, smugness written all over his features, “I’ll bring the fish, you get the seal.”

“Rye…” Emmett didn’t know what he wanted to ask his little brother, but Rye knew him better than anyone.

“It’s not my business, I’m just happy that you’re cooking.”

*

“Xue-bear?” Emmett could hear the not-tiger crunching in the snow, but he didn’t move. He’d been wondering how good Jian’s sense of smell was, so Emmett had decided to test it. He lay unmoving under the mound of deep snow that he had dug for himself, perfectly cosy and warm in the tiny space. “Xue? Where are you hiding?” Jian’s voice and his footsteps came awfully close, but as Emmett shut his eyes against the imagined image of the boy in his head, smiling with his bright eyes shining, they started to recede again.

Trying to keep Jian out of his head had always been something Emmett struggled with, but now that the little not-tiger was in his house, investigating his life and his family, it was even more so. When they’d come home with fish and seal, even Logan had raised an eyebrow and smirked, and Emmett knew what everyone else thought was going on. But it was Christmas Eve, and nothing was actually different than it had ever been between them. The previous evening Emmett had wondered if he was fooling himself about what he felt for the boy: Jian had barely looked at him when he’d said good night, and they hadn’t made any plans for the morning. After more than a week, since he and Zeke had broken up, of Jian dogging his every word and footstep, the grunted reply Emmett had received was like a slap in the face. All night all he’d heard in his head was the replay, long memorized and worn out by too many showings, of the argument in Chinese he’d overheard Jian and Huan-Yu having the first night Zeke had stayed over.

They’d lazed around all morning, and when Emmett had decided to go for a walk in his fur, Jian had followed him. It hadn’t taken long to lose the skinny boy in his bright tiger stripes, and though Emmett felt kind of bad for having done so, lying undercover gave him the time he needed to ponder his situation.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Jian, far from it, and his subconscious was still bringing him ever more wonderful and detailed fantasies on a nightly basis. Just remembering what his imagination had furnished him with was enough to make Emmett blush under his fur, the snow around him beginning to melt ever-so slightly faster than it had been. It had been Emmett’s favourite so far and, predictably, the bear had been on his knees, his lips wrapped around Jian’s tumescent cock. Emmett loved giving head, even in a dream, and sucking on Jian’s erection had been about the most ecstatic moment of his whole life. Right up until the point when Jian had looked down, orange eyes smiling, and grinned: instead of the hot rush of orgasm, Emmett had woken with a strangled shout, sweaty, exhausted, and with an erection of his own which throbbed almost painfully. He’d jerked off for less than seconds and come very messily all over himself.

But he had no idea what to do with his lust, adoration, and desire for the young man. Emmett had never really fancied his friends before, unless he counted a few of the straight guys on his hockey team, and he didn’t want to ruin all that was good about the time he already spent with Jian. So instead he lay in wait under the snow, and listened carefully as Jian’s footsteps crunched away from him.

Emmett burst forth from his snowy hideout with a mock-roar, throwing powder everywhere from his enormous bulk as he rose into the crisp air. But Jian wasn’t there, where Emmett had expected him to be standing, and the polar bear spun around with a confused bark to see Jian crouched down just behind where Emmett had been hiding. He grinned with a knowing sort of expression.

“I told you my nose was good.”

“Raaoom!”

“Silly Xue-bear,” Jian smirked, and Emmett huffed. He’d had enough of the little hot-climate kid telling him off. Emmett pushed his head against Jian’s chest until he knocked him over in the thick snow. “Hey!” Emmett ignored him, and shovelled more snow onto the little tiger until Jian yelped and his fingers tightened in the thick fur of Emmett’s ruff. The polar bear pulled him out of the snow, and Jian shook himself down and smoothed his palm over his hood and ears. “Mean,” he exclaimed, without feeling, “it’s cold in the snow Xue: I don’t have fur like you.”

“Wrroam.”

“Hey,” Jian ruffled his ears, both hands suddenly either side of his face in a manner Emmett couldn’t help thinking of as being intimate, “no sulking. So what is there to do in the woods anyway?”

Emmett grinned. Rye always said that no one had ever seen the north until they’d seen it from the back of a bear, and Jian weighed next to nothing astride Emmett’s huge shoulders. He clung on with hands and knees, his thighs trembling over the back of Emmett’s neck as the polar bear stood.

“Are you sure this is a good idea Xue?”

“Wooam!”

“Oh fuck!” Jian nearly screamed as Emmett took off without warning. His fingers were so tight in Emmett’s fur as to be almost painful, but after a minute Jian shifted his weight, relaxed, and Emmett smiled to himself as the young man settled more naturally and without tension across him. Emmett bounded through the snow, giving the trees a wide berth, and throwing up powdery flurries with each step. “THIS IS AWESOME!”

“RRROARM! Emmett agreed. Jian’s heart was hammering hard against the back of his neck as the boy adjusted his grip and began to sit up. Emmett really didn’t want him to try throwing his arms up into the air as Rye had once done at the age of eleven and ended up flat in a snowdrift. When Jian laughed, it sounded to Emmett like the dance of new icicles formed on telephone wires. They skidded to a stop as the woodland ended and Emmett panted in huge white clouds as he looked out over the frozen scrub before the Hudson Bay began. Jian sighed with a happily feline noise and slithered against his body until he was almost lying down, pillowed on the polar bear’s thick fur. The clouds were high and wispy, but the sun had gone down an hour ago, and the twilight which set in was only alleviated by the brightness of the snow and ice. Eventually Jian slid down from his shoulders and crunched into the snow. The tiger brushed flakes from his ears and settled his hood into better position.

“That was fun.”

“Wuurrm,” Emmett replied: they got to do the same thing going back too.

“So, I um… wanted to give you your Christmas present.” Jian shuffled his feet as he spoke, glancing between the polar bear’s black eyes and the white snow at his feet. Emmett frowned.

“Hurn wrool rooam.”

“I know, I know,” Jian exhaled sharply, “but I got mine early so…” he glanced across the frozen water for a while, and Emmett wondered if there was something in the distance that had attracted him, “I gave it to you once before, but I think I timed it wrong.”

“Huuurom? Emmett sat in the snow, confused by Jian’s obscurity.

The boy turned, smiling gently, his orange eyes smiling. Delicate fingers reached out and took Emmett’s jaw, and Emmett flicked forwards his ears even as Jian smoothed over his fur. Jian’s breath against him was warm, soft, and full of borrowed summer scents. Emmett blinked, and then Jian kissed him.

It was as much a shock as the first kiss, and every bit as spine tingling. Emmett froze, rooted to the spot, and he felt very much like his brain was exploding in slow motion, bits of his sense of self flying apart like the smashing of a glacier. He drew into the contact, the sensation of lips on skin and fur, and for one long moment his heart stopped altogether.

Jian drew back with a smile.

“Merry Christmas Xue-bear…”

Emmett took a deep breath as his heart started, and his chest rumbled happily. Jian had kissed him: twice. It was an undeniable gesture that even Emmett could not bring himself to misconstrue, as was the heat that rose from his loins, the red scent in the air around them, and the quickening of Jian’s pulse. Emmett’s chest heaved as the world went golden at the edges, and with a whimper he sank down into the snow.

“Xue?”

“Wrooal…”

“It’s OK,” Jian ruffled his ear like it was nothing, “we’ve got time. Can we walk back?”

Jian sat astride his shoulders as Emmett padded softly through the snow, and with his fingers hidden in his sleeves he scratched and petted at Emmett’s fur and ears. Jian had forgotten his gloves, because apparently spending a large amount of time in a single item of clothing on a beach had not benefitted his organisational skills, and his fingers were cold against Emmett’s skin. Jian purred at the warmth radiating from the bear, and for a moment Emmett wished that he was human and could eloquently explain the functional properties of his super-warm fur. With no wind chill and the air still ‘warm’ from the recently ended day, Emmett was having more issues keeping cool than staying warm. Jian was grateful for his exothermic abilities.

“You’re like riding a giant hot water bottle, how is it that you’re not cold?” Jian rubbed a few of the long guard hairs between his thumb and forefinger, and Emmett shivered at the slight tug. He let go, then dug all his fingers into the dense soft undercoat that protected Emmett from the cold air much better than any of his coats or parkas ever could. “And so soft…” Jian purred, “I think I wanna just sleep on you. Not that the couch is uncomfortable; but it’s no polar bear.”

The idea of Jian snuggled up in his thick fur made Emmett almost dizzy with happiness, and he couldn’t shake the image as they neared the house. Unfortunately with his family home, curling up in front of the television or the fire with Jian using him as a combination rug-sofa-pillow was somewhat out of the question. When Rye had been little, and even now, it was a common occurrence, but Emmett knew that somebody would say something, even in jest, and Emmett couldn’t stand the thought of anyone making Jian uncomfortable in his home. He still, and always had, resented Zeke slightly for what he’d said to the little not-tiger when they had first met.

Upon stopping in the back garden, Jian hugged him hard, then slid down the side of his shoulder and landed cat-like in the snow. He straightened up with a little shiver, and Emmett wrapped his huge paws around the boy, holding him tight against his chest. Jian melted there instantly.

“We could just stay like this forever.”

Right then, Emmett wouldn’t have minded one bit about not being human and having to deal with rather obviously aroused appendages. But the moment didn’t last, and they both scented the approach of Emmett’s grandfather through the snow. Without a word, they headed inside, and Jian turned away as Emmett shifted back into his skin, pulling on a pair of discarded sweats and another green Northland Fisheries hoodie: they were almost as ubiquitous as snow. With a soft smile, Jian followed Emmett through the house to his bedroom.

“Here,” Emmett held out the little handful of super-soft fur, “not as good as a whole polar bear blanket, but they’ll keep you plenty warm. They haven’t fitted me for years.”

Jian took the garment from him, and smoothed his fingers over the fine, nearly black fur of the seal skin booties. They were indoor wear; the kind of thing Emmett knew would look cosy and adorable on the little tiger, and Jian giggled happily.

“Thank you Xue.”

“You’re welcome.” Emmett wanted, so much, to thank Jian; but he didn’t dare. The polar bear was filled with the sudden knowledge that even to admit the kiss would push their relationship into some new and exciting realm. As amazing as the prospect was, Emmett wasn’t ready. Instead he simply ruffled Jian’s ‘ears’ and felt the not-tiger purr under his hand.

“At least I won’t get cold feet now.” Jian cocked his head, “your grandfather’s calling.”

“He is?”

“Emm!”

“See?” Jian flinched away from Emmett has he reached to tickle him.

“You’re just too good at that, Tiger.”