Alice sighed as she stopped outside the door to the apartment. She pressed her head against the chipping paint by the doorjam, closing her eyes and telling herself that the day hadn’t been stressful enough to make her cry. It wasn’t easy to convince herself. Griffin Heights Academy was every bit as difficult as her teachers had warned her. She was still making A’s and B’s, but she’d had to work harder at school than she’d ever had to in her whole short life. Coming home was no relief. Beyond the door in front of her lay an empty apartment a few degrees too warm for comfort. Her parents kept the air conditioning off all day while she was at school and they were both away at work now that her father had taken a job to help pay for her tuition. Every dollar counted.
        All so she could go to a snooty private school that would be happier if she didn’t bother. GHA was filled to the brim with the kids of the city’s rich and affluent, each of them with an entitlement complex bigger than this apartment building, or scholarship brats who breezed through classes that she had to study hours for, who wore airs of superiority if only to deflect or deflate the barbs of the rich.
        And then there was Alice. Just as poor as a scholarship brat, and just as stupid as rich kid. Her mother had been furious with the curriculum at the public schools, but the scholarship process at GHA could take years. Alice didn’t feel like she deserved the sacrifices her parents were making just to put her through this stuck up school. And she hated coming home to an empty house.
        Alice opened her eyes, confused. Pressed against her forehead, the outer wall to the apartment hummed faintly. The air conditioning was on. Her mother would be furious. She hurriedly fished her key out of her pocket and jangled it into the lock, but when she twisted it, nothing clicked. The door was unlocked. Her heart started thumping wildly in her chest. Could someone be inside? Should she call the police?
        But what if no one was there? Her parents would be furious if she caused a big scene at their home out of a little paranoia. Her father had probably left in a rush this morning and accidentally left the air on and the door unlocked. The apartment would be nice and cool after her long walk home from the only bus stop in Brookfalls in the humid North Carolina spring.
        Besides, if there was an intruder, they’d underestimate her, and she’d have a perfectly valid reason for bashing something’s face in. That thought more than any other caused her to turn the handle. 
        Alice stepped cautiously inside, unable to contain a sigh as the cool air wrapped her up like a chilly hug. It was immediately obvious that there was someone else in the apartment with her. A stranger in overalls was on all fours, wedged between the couch and the wall, butt swinging from side to side, a hummed rendition of “Cherry Pie” faintly audible from behind the couch. A small tarp was laid out on the floor with an open toolbox and its contents strewn across it. Wire lay all over the floor.
        “Um, hello?” Alice asked cautiously. The swinging butt didn’t respond, and the tune carried on from behind the couch. Alice couldn’t help but giggle nervously. She couldn’t deny that whoever was wedged back there had a pretty nice butt, and the side-to-side snapping of their long, spotted, feline tail to the beat of the music was somewhat mesmerizing.
        Without turning, she kicked the door shut behind her, letting it close hard enough to be heard without quite slamming it. The tail stopped its dance and the person by the couch straightened up suddenly. She half-turned, resting an arm on the couch to twist herself around in her awkward position. The leopardess had a bandana tying back frazzled red hair, and the whiskers on one side of her nose were incredibly short, looking like they’d been singed off. She smiled and reached up to pop earphones out of her ears.
        “Um, hello?” Alice repeated.
        “Hello!” the woman replied guilelessly. She had an easy, genuine smile, and some kind of thick accent.
        “What, um, what are you doing here?”
        “Working!” she answered, as if that one word explained everything. When Alice’s stunned expression didn’t change, her smile faltered a little. “Sorry for intrude! All homes have old wires. New code, new wires! Your home this week.” She pointed urgently at the television stand by the door.
        Alice frowned and turned, spotting a bright pink slip of paper on the stand. It was a notice from the property manager, explaining that each apartment would have an electrician working to replace the wires for up to three days. Today’s date was penciled into a space left blank for that purpose. Her frown deepened. It would’ve been nice to know she’d be spending the week with a stranger. Had her parents mentioned it to her, and she’d just forgotten? Surely she would’ve paid attention to something like that. She would’ve spent all day fretting over the smelly, ugly electrician she could expect to meet at her empty home that afternoon. . .
        Except the young, obviously foreign woman across the room from her was hardly what she pictured when she thought of the word ‘electrician.’ She had a vague ide of an overweight plumber with wires instead of pipes. She would’ve been terrified all day over nothing.
        “Oh,” Alice finally said, realizing she was holding up the woman’s work. The woman’s smile returned. It dazzled her a little. The woman was passingly pretty, but the quick, honest smile made her beautiful in a way that quickened Alice’s heart a little. Alice felt herself beginning to blush.
        “I’ll just, um.” she stammered. Her flustered reaction faded the edges of the woman’s smile a little as a crinkle of confusion creased the leopardess’s forehead. “I’m gonna be in my room. So I don’t. Get. In your way.” She had to force the words out in disjointed sentences. She felt warm despite the cool air of the humming A/C. Her disconnected stammering made it harder for the woman to understand her. but after as she started to flee down the hallway, the leopardess nodded.
        “A-okay! Back to work!” Alice caught that sparkling smile one last time before the electrician popped her earphones back in. She hurried into the hallway as she heard the leopardess begin humming “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”
        Alice slipped hurriedly into her room and closed the door behind her. With the A/C on all day and her door closed, it had gotten a few degrees cooler in her room than even the rest of the apartment, and she needed every last degree. She was just as warm and flustered as that time Cody had smiled and said hi to her by her locker, proving he really did know her name. Or the time time she’d gone to school without a bra and caught Mr. Taylor staring at her nipples in the cold classroom. She’d never really felt even a passing warmth for a girl before, but that woman’s smile made her heart flutter.
        She tossed her backpack into the corner by her steadily growing pile of dirty clothes, wishing she had the privacy to settle under the sheets and masturbate. Self-pleasure had been only a passing whim on her walk home, a way to fill some of the empty time before her parents got home, but now it was a full, distracting need, with her pseudopenis making her panties uncomfortably tight, and the cause of her need was the exact reason she couldn’t do anything about it.
        She grabbed her paperback of “Ready Player One” off her nightstand and fell onto her bed on her stomach, hiding her embarrassing erection and hoping to distract herself in the novel. Homework would be useless in the state she was in now, even though she had a huge pile of it to get done before tomorrow.
        She stared at the words on the page but saw only the swaying backside of the electrician. She grew stiffer, her pseudopenis pushing uncomfortably hard into the mattress underneath her. On their own, her hips started to move, grinding into the bed to the tempo of the hummed chorus of “Cherry Pie” in her memory. She bit her lip, forcing herself not to make a sound as she humped her bed, novel having tumbled out of her fingers. She could hear the woman’s sweet, heavily accented voice saying “Hello?” again as she turned to flash Alice with that brilliant smile.
        Except, she hadn’t said “Hello?” It hadn’t been a question at all.
        Alice gasped and jerked her skirt down. She rolled over and hurriedly sat up, finding a pillow to hide the tall tent in her skirt. Her hands fumbled with her book as she swallowed and nervously answered. “Yes?”
        The voice in her memory had actually come from the other side of her door, which now creaked open to treat Alice to another view of that smile that made her knees weak.
        “I do you, now!” the leopardess exclaimed happily, sauntering into the room. 
        “Um, excuse me?” Alice gulped.
        Alice got a good look at the woman’s body for the first time. She was all lines, lithe and dangerous, like looking at a woman forged from a knife. The only roundness in her was the backside Alice had been daydreaming of, and somehow the slightly oversized coveralls she was wearing still accentuated that nicely. It swayed when she walked, and Alice couldn’t help but feel her eyes drawn to it. She blushed and pushed the pillow down on her lap more resolutely.
        “Living room finish. Now, you!”
        “Oh!” Alice squeaked, reeling her mind back in from the ribald fantasy her mind had started to spin out based on the electrician’s imperfect english. “S-sure. Don’t you need to like, start in the attic or something?” she asked, thinking quickly and hoping for just a couple more minutes alone.
        “Finish. Fishing time now,” the woman replied simply, laying out the tarp on Alice’s floor.
        Alice blushed as the woman set her toolbox down right by the pile of dirty laundry and began to unscrew one of the outlets. As she bent over, her butt was lifted up for Alice’s eyes to drink in again. She bit her lip and stared for a long time.
        “S-sorry about the mess,” she heard herself stammering into the silence, causing the leopard’s ears to swivel backwards toward her.
        “Tiny girl, tiny mess! No problem.” She glanced over her shoulder briefly to favor Alice with that smile. She melted and blushed at the same time. It felt strangely flattering to be called tiny. She towered over the other girls in her grade, and was an inch or two taller than most of the boys, too. Her frame was lean enough, tending toward a wiry build like her father rather than the impressive muscle of her mother, but she was still a far cry from ‘tiny.’
        “Puppy is sixteen? Seventeen? I work in so much mess. But from you, so little. No problem.”
        Alice frowned, trying to decipher the woman’s somewhat broken English. She couldn’t help but giggle when she realized what she meant.
        “You think I’m seventeen? I’m twelve!”
        The electrician sat up at that, surprise evident on her eyes. Alice briefly mourned the loss of view, but she needn’t have, for the woman was bent over again a moment later after a nonchalant shrug.
        “Twelve? Well. Pretty for sixteen. Beautiful for twelve.”
        Alice stared, feeling her heart race again. “Wh-what?”
        The electrician glanced over her shoulder and grinned, an entirely different look than her sweet smile. Alice felt like she ought to be creeped out. But she only felt hard, throbbing against the pillow. Then the leopardess’s ears swiveled forward again, her attention suddenly focused on the wall, her tongue poking out of the side of her mouth as she worked at something inside the wall. Alice could hear the noise of the wire sliding against the drywall. A few moments later, the screwdriver was out again. Dry-mouthed, Alice watched her work in silence until the outlet cover was back on and she move to a spot on a different wall.
        Finally, she couldn’t stand the silence any more. “What did you say?” she asked again, and the woman’s ears swiveled back toward her.
        “English is bad, but not so bad as that, I think,” she said in reply. Alice frowned. ‘You know what I said,’ she translated in her head.
        She blushed. This grown woman, this stranger alone in the house with her, was saying she found her attractive. Even more attractive considering her age rather than despite it, apparently. Alice’s head swam. She felt confused. The thought of calling the police flicked through her head again. But the last thing she wanted right now was less time with this sexy, exotic older woman.
        “Nice lines,” the leopardess murmured, surprising her. For a moment, Alice thought she was saying something about the wire, or the drywall, or something like that. But no, her ears were turned toward Alice. That comment was intended for her. “Like me. Lines and only little soft. Beautiful.”
        Alice could barely hear the softly spoken words over the pounding of her heart in her ears. “Th-thank you,” she whispered, or thought she whispered. She couldn’t be completely sure any sound got past her lips as dry as her mouth was. She licked her lips to try to wet them and tore her gaze away from the backside she realized she was still staring at. She opened her book back and stared resolutely at the pages, trying to calm herself down.
        Was this woman some kind of creep or predator? She had no idea what to do. She certainly didn’t feel threatened by the woman. Maybe she was just honest, or perhaps she was being perfectly appropriate for where she was from. Alice didn’t feel uncomfortable from the attention, except for the pinch of her panties against her hidden pseudocock. Her discomfort only stemmed from knowing how her mother would react to a grown woman saying such things about her.
        She tried to calm her body down. She wasn’t gay, she told herself. What did this woman have that could flip her stomach into butterflies the way Cody did? Alice stared at her book, determined to ignore the woman until she left. She couldn’t think in her condition. She might end up doing something dangerous or stupid. Or, more likely, something just plain humiliating. The woman was just doing her job, right? She probably had to make small talk with a dozen strangers every week, and the language barrier surely didn’t make that any easier. Surely she just didn’t realize the sort of effect her innocent small talk was having on Alice. That had to be it. It would just be best to let her do her work.
        The woman’s work passed all too quickly for Alice’s liking, too. She jumped slightly at the sound of the metal toolbox being closed. Looking up, she realized it was nearly 5:30. Her parents would be home any minute. Looking around, she saw that the woman had finished with all the outlets in her room. She couldn’t even remember her finishing the second one. She looked up to find the electrician standing by the door to her room, watching her with one eyebrow quirked.
        When their eyes met, the woman’s lips broke into that sweet smile, and the hour Alice had spent calming herself down went straight out the window. The woman walked forward in a way that was unconsciously seductive, then bent over until her cheek brushed Alice’s.
        “Tanya returns tomorrow, devochka moya,” the woman whispered by the ear. Then she patted her cheek softly with one hand and gently pulled the book out of her fingers with her other hand. Alice stared down at her hands, dumbfounded and confused, until the electrician carefully turned the book over and placed it back in her hands. The woman winked at her and sauntered casually out of the room. Alice stared after her, blushing and short of breath. She looked down at the book she’d been holding for an hour. Holding upside down for an hour, apparently. Then she tossed the book aside, running to the bathroom to masturbate where her parents wouldn’t walk in on her if they got home before she finished.

        ***

        Alice stood in front of the door to her apartment the next afternoon. She’d practically run home from the bus station. Now she was too nervous to enter her own home. With the aid of a head cleared by a few desperate orgasms, she’d spent a half hour the night before trying to decipher the Russian phrase the electrician had whispered to her. After several horribly misspelled attempts, she’d finally found the only plausible translation: “My little girl.”
        She put her hand up to the door, careful not to make a sound. It was chilly to the touch. She could feel the hum of the A/C through it. Tanya was on the other side. Was she waiting for her? She probably hadn’t given Alice a second thought. She was reading too much into everything, confused by a culture she’d never experienced before. 
        Alice twisted the handle. Unlocked, like yesterday. Biting her lip, she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. She found Tanya’s toolbox just inside the door with the tarp tied up in a bundle beside it. She looked up to find Tanya sitting on the couch. The easy confidence she’d worn yesterday was gone. Now she was fidgeting and blushing a little, like a girl waiting to be asked to dance. Alice stared at her and silence stretched between them.
        “D-done already?” Alice asked, finally finding her voice. Rewiring the whole apartment had seemed like a huge job.
        Tanya smiled, tentative at first before blossoming into the wide smile that had warmed Alice the day before. “Fifty units the same. Easy now. And. . . Tanya hurried for devochka moya.”
        Alice blushed and her heart sped up. Without her telling them to, her feet carried her a hesitant step forward. “I’m twelve,” she said simply. 
        “I should feel shame,” Tanya said softly, her tone as if she were agreeing to an unasked question. “I do not.”
        She was a step nearer. “I’m. . .different. From girls, I mean.”
        “Pyatnistaya giyena,” Tanya whispered with a nod. “No problem.”
        Alice felt like she could barely breathe. She was only a step away now. Every line of Tanya’s body was taut. The electrician was just as nervous as she was. Neither one of them moved for a long time.
        “I’m so confused,” Alice finally whispered. The tension melted out of her when Tanya’s lips broke slowly into that smile. The woman reached up and took her hand. Alice felt herself being drawn forward. Then, for a brief, wild moment, she was falling. Tanya’s arms collected her, drew her in. There was more softness in the woman’s body than Alice would have guessed. And strength, too. She stared up into the woman’s eyes, dazzled and flush, barely able to breath.
        “So confusing, love,” Tanya said. “Simplify.”
        “L-love?” Alice stammered. She was answered by the older woman’s muzzle moving down to herself. Her heart trilled in her chest, pumping so fast she thought she might pass out. She tilted her muzzle up, parted her lips, and met the kiss willingly.
        Tanya’s lips were gentle, even a little timid against hers. Alice closed her eyes and gingerly wrapped her arms around the leopard’s neck, hanging on to her, and Tanya grew more confident in response. The arms tightened around Alice’s body, firm hands splayed and pressing into her back. Tanya’s rough tongue spilled past Alice’s lips, deepening the nervous smooch into Alice’s first real french kiss. Confusion and doubt threatened the kiss as that thought occurred to her. Her first french kiss was with a woman at least twice her age. Then Tanya started to pull her tongue away, and the ticklish massage of that barbed tongue swirling in her mouth drove the vestiges of doubt away. Alice whimpered softly against Tanya’s lips, suckling on the tongue in her muzzle, her body arching excitedly.
        She wasn’t doing enough, some part of her brain prompted her. She couldn’t force Tanya to make all the moves. The woman was clearly just as nervous as she was. The need to take control suddenly stirred in her. She was slow to remember how her hands worked, but when she did, she lifted one to Tanya’s chest, cupping the woman’s pert A-cup breast firmly in her palm.
        Tanya purred against her lips, but Alice felt the tongue pulling away. She whimpered, suckling harder, not wanting the kiss to end, but Tanya pulled her tongue away with an audible ‘pop.’ Alice whined and pushed forward, trying to kiss her again, but the leopardess was quick and drew back. Tanya’s fingers wrapped around her wrist in a firm, careful grip, and pulled her hand away.
        “Slow, lyubimaya moya. Slow and gentle.” Tanya was breathless, her cheeks flush. Alice could see the conflict in her face and Alice blushed, embarrassed to have crossed some unspoken line. Tanya’s face softened quickly.
        “Hush that,” she said softly. “I am sweet on you. Not. . .not just for fucking. Understand?”
        Alice looked away, suddenly feeling shy and feeling like some sort of uncouth thing for grabbing at Tanya’s body like that. She gasped softly when Tanya’s fingers reached out for a firm grip on her chin. She pulled gently until Alice had no where to look but in her eyes.
        “Slow and gentle,” Tanya whispered. The three words were more of a nervous, shy question than anything else.
        Alice slowly felt herself smiling, and she bit her lip, giddy again, and nodded. “I. . .I’m sweet on you too. Not, um, j-just for fucking.”
        Tanya’s face broke into a smile all over again and Alice’s heart melted. When their muzzles met again, there was more intensity but less urgency. Alice’s arms returned to Tanya’s neck and the woman held her body tightly. Time lost meaning as that raspy muscle explored Alice’s little mouth. Her erection still throbbed, uncomfortably contained by her panties, a prominent tent in her skirt as she cuddled in the lap of the older woman, but it too lost its urgency in favor of the intimacy of the kiss. Tanya’s hands stroked her body lovingly and chastely, making her squirm in a slow dance on the feline’s lap, soaking in each touch as fleshy barbs explored her mouth, tickling her tongue and brushing her gums.
        She was both panting and trembling by the time the kiss ended. Tanya’s hands had found her hips and her fingers were curled around her body there in a fiercely tight grip, as if worried that they might wander more if she let go. Tanya leaned in and licked her nose playfully.
        “Time for Tanya to flee,” the woman said, gently sliding Alice out of her lap.
        “Already?” Alice breathed with a gentle whine. Then she saw the clock. It was already past five. “Tanya, I. . .” her voice trailed off. Would it sound silly or immature if she pleaded with this woman? Told her she needed her and couldn’t let her go? She didn’t want to come across as a clingy, childish little girl.
        But Tanya only smiled at her, her twinkling eyes suggesting she knew everything Alice was wanting to say. She bent down over the couch and kissed her again, hard and sharp and trailed by a playful nip of her lower lip that made Alice squeal.
        “Next two units are empty. Meet me? Unit four sixty eight tomorrow.”
        Alice gasped softly, squirming with excitement and nervousness on the couch. “In an empty unit?” she squeaked. “That’s. . .we could get caught!”
        Tanya only smiled her wide, sweet smile as she picked up her toolbox and tucked her tarp under one arm. “Love is dangerous,” she said, opening the front door. “Meet me!” Tanya was nearly out the door.
        “I will!”