Pacho walked carefully under the bed. It was clean down there, but with the usual clutter of shoes, sandals and assorted footwear. After weaving through it in the shadowy underbelly of his protectress bed, he made it to the wall separating Tloche’s room from the one of her flatmates.

The light was coming from a circular aperture flush with the ground. It as about a meter in diameter and he could barely see indistinct shapes beyond.  He looked back, hesitantly, and then up. There were no cables, hanging covers of bedsheet around to help him climb the bed. He already had been around her room enough to know there was no way to scale the metal tubing of the bedposts or the chair legs. Tloche had eventually explained to him that the cabling for the light fixtures on the ceiling and the switch ran inside the bed’s tubing and were attached to the bed, not the walls.

Pacho knew there were quite a few hours before Tloche woke up. It had been quite a few days since he had the opportunity to walk anywhere on his own, and overcame by curiosity, he stooped and crawled through the opening. He guessed he could always run back if there was any trouble.

When he came out and looked around, he realized he was under a bed much like Tloche’s, but the lights in this room were on, and it was way more crowded and messier than there. Besides the footwear, he could see there were also several bottles of various sizes and shapes, and by now he could read enough of the alien script to know some were cosmetics and hair products. Most of the bottles were light blue and taller than him. The room was in total silence, however.

Pacho looked back at the dark hole he had just come out of. Feeling reassured at the overall silence, he strolled a bit, noticing that the door to this room was closed, and unlike his room, there was a noticeable gap between the floor and the door. A gap he might be able to crawl under.

He had arrived at the edge of the underside of the bed, near one of the legs. He stared at the possible escape route. Shaking his head, he regretfully realized running away from Tloche into the unknown giant world was a terrible idea, especially naked as he was. He realized that Tloche would be worried sick if he disappeared. It would also be too much like a betrayal. Like betraying her trust, her care. Besides, despite his helplessness, the feeling of inadequacy he felt every time he was handled by the giant beauty, he reluctantly but surely and with sudden clarity, knew that he did not want to part from her. Now that he had a way out, he unexpectedly knew he really would not take it.

He had the dim, foolish hope of getting to know the giant woman better. Not only as a pet, a refugee, a simple guest, but as more. He wanted her to trust him as a man, a friend. But if he was honest to himself, he mused, he wanted to be more than just a friend. He desired her. But his desire went beyond the simple lust of seeing a beautiful woman willfully disrobe before his eyes, to give her body to him and to know that same woman expected him to reciprocate with his physicality upon hers. It was more than the basic male desire to gawk at her tits and her revealed, spread sex. He wanted to look into her eyes and see her look back at him as…   It was then that he became fully conscious that he had fallen in love with Cantlutloche Parrotflock. He wanted, needed, more time with her.

His contemplation was stopped by a most terrifying sound that made his hair stood on end. It was a hoarse, throaty, deep and protracted grunt, worthy of a tiger. The bed shuddered and groaned above.