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It being the glorious month of Taurgust (Taur - as in centaur - plus August), I did a poll for my patrons with a number of humanoid torso + monster body 'taurs' and they decided on a nonbinary drider who's a tailor to royalty, and a royal, gender neutral reader.
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Preview:
“How’s that, your Royal Highness?”
Gods, how that soft, susurrating voice in your ear made your heart flop over in your chest, and how those light, dancing fingertips made your skin prickle into goosebumps, even after all these years.
Sal had been your own, personal tailor for six years now, while their mother remained the court tailor to your parents and older brother. Having them stand so close to you in the seclusion of your private apartments, their fingers skimming over the lines of your body to make the final adjustments to your outfit before you emerged into whatever task or speech your role as the younger of the two royal siblings demanded, had become a guilty pleasure in which you indulged far too often. Nobody needed that many new outfits, after all.
Nothing was going to make you stop.
Nothing short of Sal asking you to stop, that is, but they didn’t seem inclined to back off either.
You’d been dancing around each other for years, after all. At least, in your mind you had… Finding out the truth would involve shattering this spun-sugar fantasy you’d woven around the two of you like spidersilk.
Sal had started coming along to their parents’ appointments to learn their mother’s trade when they’d only been around ten years old, and the first time you’d met them, you’d been fascinated by them. Of course, you were used to the sight of driders from having to attend your parents’ and older brother’s appointments already, dragged along like a piece of spare cargo and expected to sit quietly on a silk damask sofa until it was your turn to be fitted for something new.
The captain of the Royal Guard was also a drider, but he looked nothing like Sal and their parents. He had long, steel grey hair that he plaited back off his stern, slate-grey face, and he was armoured with his own, natural carapace that gleamed softly like burnished steel. His nightmare limbs were needle-sharp and hooked at the tips with stiletto-talons that could probably have punctured the steel of the royal vaults in a single punch.
Sal and their parents were more like tarantulas, with velvet-soft fur and low-slung, rounded bodies, but while Sal’s mother was white all over, including the thick, curly hair on her head, Sal’s fur had slowly turned from white to a cherry blossom pink as they’d grown. Their father, apparently, had done the same, and his fur was now a rich, vibrant fuchsia, banded with paler tones across his legs. He was a renowned leather worker in the upper city though, and while some of his skills had been used in his wife’s work, he rarely came up to the palace.
The first time that Sal had been there had been the day you’d first begun to enjoy learning about clothing, and at every appointment since, they’d been there to make you smile or reassure you, or keep you from keeling over out of sheer boredom.
More recently though, it had become exquisite torture.
Sal never did anything that wasn’t completely appropriate. Every touch had a purpose – to snip a stray thread or to tuck up a hem for adjustment, or to make a suggestion about the drape of a fold of silk – but the way their fingers lingered at your hip or the nape of your neck always made you shiver.
When you met their strawberry-pink eyes, your breath caught.
Read all of it right now, as well as August's monthly exclusive - a male gargoyle x f. human that's over 10k words long!