Sweet Romance10 min read
A White-Furred Debt: My Fox, My Favor, and the Chicken Order
ButterPicks15 views
I never expected rescuing a stray could change my whole life.
"It bit me," I said into the dark, rubbing the hand that still stung. "It was supposed to be a dog."
"It wasn't a dog," the voice above me said, amused and dangerous. "And you are certainly not allowed to do that."
I blinked awake to a face too pretty for midnight and a hand that felt like an accusation. The man—no, the creature—had hair that caught the moon and eyes sharp as almond pits. He sat on my couch like he owned the room, and behind him a rustle of white fur unfurled and fanned until my brain tripped.
"Please tell me that's a rug," I said, because joking buys time.
"The rug is mine," he replied, tone clipped. "I am Felix Perkins, pure white fox of the highest bloodline. What did you do to me, human?"
My mouth worked. "I—January Conway. I thought you were a stray dog. I brought you home. I fed you. I took you to get—"
"Neutered," he snapped, making the word sound obscene.
"I didn't know you were... a fox." I hurried into apology, hands already clasped like a bargain. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."
Felix let the apology hang, then reached to my wrist and pinched. "You used... dirt. On me. You're giving me scars."
"I used antiseptic powder!" I protested, pulling out the crumpled bottle from my pocket like evidence. "It wasn't dirt, I paid real money for that."
He squinted, reading the label, then tossed the bottle into the bin with theatrical disgust. "You ignorant human," he said. "But..."
"But?" I echoed, because his 'but' felt like a cliff.
"But you saved me. You plucked me off the street from the jaws of a guard dog. You carried me like an infant. You smelled of chicken and midnight. You made me feel... indebted."
That was the dangerous word. "Indebted?"
"Yes." He sat up, tail-tip twitching. "You owe me a favor."
"Heh." I managed a laugh that was part relief and part disbelief. "If this is a prank, it's elaborate. What do you want, a year of belly rubs?"
Felix's smile was a small, terrifying moon. He crooned, "KFC. Two buckets. And constant companionship till I say the debt is paid."
I blinked. "KFC? For a deity, that's your price?"
He nodded solemnly. "Fine. Three buckets. And your promise to not neuter anyone in my name."
I bought him three buckets while he sat watching the door like a prince awaiting a coronation. His tails—there were eight of them then—wagged like a carnival.
"You can change money," I said one awkward moment. "Why order food?"
Felix smoothed a tail and shrugged in fox language. "We cannot 'mint' human currency without causing chaos. We can, however, summon chicken."
It was ridiculous, and also, in the way ridiculous things sometimes are, oddly charming.
He introduced himself properly then, not just Felix. "Felix Perkins," he said, "and that man you saw at my heels tonight is my uncle, Sebastian Evans. He will decide how this debt is repaid."
We met Sebastian that night in the elevator. If Felix was a mischievous comet, Sebastian was cool, ancient shore. He looked at me like a careful custodian, then at Felix and said, "He belongs to you. This will be registered as a Class S favor."
"Class S?" I asked.
"Top priority," Sebastian said. "We do not forget when we are saved."
Felix tried to bargain, whispering to me like a child skulking out snacks. "Ask for money," he urged. "Ask for a million."
"I can't force him to give cash," I said. "It feels like... wrong."
Sebastian's hand found my shoulder and was gentle. "Whatever you request, we will consider," he said. "But know this: some debts are best paid with presence."
It felt like a strange contract: my wobbly, exhausted life in exchange for fox companionship, warm fur, and an endless appetite for chicken.
"Fine," I said aloud. "Make it useful. Help me get my life back on track for a few months. Help me keep my job. That's your compensation."
Sebastian nodded once. "Done." Felix's tails erupted in a dance like celebration. The whole scene was ridiculous and perfect in equal measure.
The next morning I woke to a new kind of support.
"You're ill," Felix announced, poking an accusing tail between my ribs.
"Not ill," I said, half-guilty, half-denying. "Just tired. Project deadline."
"You are sick." He leaned close, breath like snow on my face. "I will nurse you."
He made porridge with the seriousness of a chef. He wrapped a blanket around me. He hummed nonsense songs and shoved my phone away when work's demands screamed. It was infuriating and endearing.
"You're overstepping," I told him as if I had a spine.
"You're my debtor," he corrected. "That gives me rights."
It started as convenience and turned into habit. He would curl next to me, warm like an unassuming heater, and I would fall asleep to the steady thrum of his tails.
He wasn't useful only physically. Once, when my boss—Bryant Bond—cornered me at the office and snarled, "You're late again, Conway. Clean out your desk," Felix appeared the way foxes appear in myths: dramatic and disapproving of office etiquette.
"You are my employee?" Felix asked casually as he stepped between me and Bryant on the office steps.
"Who—" Bryant's face went red with the need to be cruel. "Who are you?"
"I am Felix Perkins," he said in a voice that could make winter still. "And you are fired."
Bryant laughed, then faltered as his phone buzzed. He held up one hand like he could still sculpt the situation. "What are you—"
The phone call lasted less than three minutes. I heard a man's voice on the other line, low and official, saying, "Yes, the board has reviewed the complaints. Terminate him immediately."
Bryant's face collapsed from indignation into pale, dangerous fear. He looked at Felix as if he were now a storm.
"I want my explanations," Bryant croaked.
Felix smiled thinly. "Explanation: you misused power. This is my repayment. Consider it interest."
Bryant turned to the small crowd that had gathered. "This is a mistake," he said, voice cracking. "You can't—"
Someone in the crowd, a junior who had received Bryant's wrath more than once, stepped forward. "You couldn't even fire her properly," the junior said. "You gave us headaches and then left us to burn. Good riddance."
Another voice chimed in: "I filed HR complaints too."
"Same," said a woman I vaguely knew from the marketing floor. She revealed an inbox full of messages Bryant had sent—public shaming, threats, obscene jokes—and people gasped. Bryant's bravado withered under exposure.
"You're done," Felix said, coldly satisfied. "And if you try to beg, the board has recordings. You will parade your humiliation with each replay."
Bryant's cheeks drained of color. "No—no, you can't do this. I—"
He crumpled, wild-eyed and pleading. "Please, I'll apologize! I'll withdraw everything!" He fell to his knees like a bad actor, hands clinging to Felix's shoes.
The crowd watched, stunned. Phones came out. Not all were in support—some filmed to prove justice—and murmurs rose and fell like gossip wings. Bryant's performance shifted through stages: indignation, disbelief, denial, bargaining, collapse. People circled him like spectators at a stage play of comeuppance.
"You—" Bryant cried at first to Felix, then to the crowd, then to no one. "I'm a good manager. I brought profit. I'm—"
"You're a bully," said the junior from HR. "And you made people miserable. We kept records. You got what you made."
Bryant's pleas grew ragged. Girls in the crowd who'd once been terrified of him now spat. A couple of colleagues clapped. One woman hissed, "I saved that file with his threats. You're lucky it's public."
Bryant begged, shrank, and finally slumped on the pavement while the crowd dismantled the will he had used as a weapon. Phones kept clicking. Someone broadcast the scene. Moments later the news cycle had its headline: "Local Manager Fired After Exposé."
Later, when I replayed that event in my head, it wasn't just joy at vindication. It was an ugly, satisfying truth: some monsters needed to be humiliated, and sometimes a fox with tail and a rich uncle could do it cleanly.
But the debt wasn't only revenge. Felix cooked for me, defended me, warmed my bed, and rescued me in ways a human might not imagine. He hid his fragility, too. He tried to be proud; he failed sometimes and then let his guard down enough for me to see a boy afraid.
We slipped into a pattern—one of comfort and small mischief—until the day the world broke.
There was a bus, an odor of sulfur, and a woman's shaking hand in a seat. Felix stiffened. "Bomb," he whispered. "Get down."
He moved like a struck arrow, whispering to the driver, smiling a fox smile. He misled the woman gently, persuaded the driver with words like silk that hid iron. The bus drifted, the woman wavered, and then someone screamed. Felix lunged, caught the device, and flung it toward the river.
"Don't!" I yelled, because my hands existed to make noise. He did it anyway. The explosion took out a chunk of bridge, a wall of heat and dust, and when the dust stung our eyes, Felix was not where he had been.
I crawled through smoke and rubble with hands that were suddenly not mine, choking for him. Someone carried me to a hospital. When I woke, the world smelled of antiseptic and despair.
"Where is Felix?" I asked the nurse, breath thin.
"Who?" she asked, puzzled. "The man who brought the device down? That's—"
"Yes! The one who—"
They looked at me like a patient inventing details. "We have a patient named James," one nurse said. "He was injured. But we don't have a Felix Perkins."
My sanity rattled. The CCTV showed only me on the bus. There was a man who had run down the aisle clutching a device—his name on the records was Jasper Miles. He had saved lives and taken the hit.
Where was Felix? The jade token Sebastian had given me had been torn from my neck in the explosion. I clutched at a memory and found only a blank.
For two years I lived with the hollowed-out ache of missing him and the shame of being told I’d imagined everything. Friends nodded and said, "You must've been traumatized." My apartment still had a dog bed, a scattering of chew toys, and a lingering scent of snow-scent cologne. I bought a dog, a fluffy Samoyed, and for a while the house filled with barking life, but it wasn't the same.
Then, a day that felt ordinary exploded into impossible.
"January?" a voice said behind me at the pet store.
I turned, and there he was: Felix Perkins, sitting cross-legged on the floor, tail twitching, annoyed. He looked at the Samoyed and wrinkled his nose. "That one's ugly," he said, loud enough for me to hear.
My hands went cold. "You're—"
"Real." He grinned like a kid. "Very real."
"You're back."
He puffed up, a white puffball of arrogance and tenderness, then changed into human form the way he always did for me—slowly, like a reveal in a play. He took my hands and, with an exasperated sincerity, recited, "I am Felix Perkins. I have tails. I owe you a debt."
I let the laugh that had been stuck in my chest out, and something broke in me; the two years of absence and suspicion and the hospital's dismissive looks all released as a river. I punched him right in the chest until he couldn't help laughing.
"You vanished," I said between punches. "You left. You erased your traces."
"I had to," he said, suddenly serious and breaking my comic moment. "I was broken. The explosion tore me so badly that even the old magic couldn't hold me in form. Sebastian pulled me back, hid me, and healed me in secret. I thought I was protecting you from the weight of me."
"By erasing yourself from my life," I said. "Thanks."
He looked genuinely pained. "I'm sorry," he said. "I couldn't risk you watching me die."
Later that night he told me details—how he had been wrapped in fox-healing at his uncle's estate, how the village of their kind had hidden him until he grew nine tails, how the world had nearly lost him. He told me how Sebastian had come to the office the day Bryant was fired and had staged a quiet, surgical purge that made the truth impossible to ignore.
"And you didn't tell me?" I demanded.
"I thought you'd hate me for involving your life in our wars," he replied. "I thought you'd be safer if I was a memory."
"Felix," I said, softer. "You saved my life. You were here for me when everyone else was cruel. You made soup with blood in it and kissed me and edited my work email and warmed my bed. You can't just be a ghost and then pop back when it's convenient."
He winced. "I know."
We argued and laughed in turns. We made up with kisses and with the absurd solemnity of two people agreeing on chores. He taught me things about the old magic. I taught him how to navigate corporate Slack channels without accidentally scheduling a ritual meeting.
There were tender moments like small weather.
"You're the only one who has ever seen me be shameless," he said one night, tail around both of us. "That's why I will not leave you again."
"Promise?" I teased.
He kissed my forehead. "I don't make promises lightly. I make warmth."
When the world through the window fogged with winter breath, when the smell of fried chicken and fox fur combined in a way that always made me grin, I realized how many debts we keep in our chests.
Felix had repaid his debt in ways I hadn't expected—by rescuing me, by defending me, by turning a boss's cruelty into public disgrace, by being absurd and indignant and greedy for my attention. In return, I gave him URLs to online ordering, a human's clumsy affection, and permission to stay.
One evening, after he had wrapped me in a coat made from his own fur—an act that made my cheeks burn—I whispered, "Are you sure you want to stay?"
He snorted, tail smacking my thigh. "You gave me chicken," he said simply. Then softer: "I want to stay because this is the best place. Because you are my person."
I pressed my face into his coat. The fur smelled like snow and spices. "Then stay," I said, because deciding was harder than asking.
He kissed me that night in a way that felt like a contract that needed no paper. It was messy and sweet and fully real.
There is a jade token still hidden under the couch, and sometimes, when I pick it up, Felix will flare all nine tails and demand three buckets of chicken just because he remembers. He still makes me laugh until my ribs ache. He still gets jealous like a pup and proud as a prince.
We keep each other's scars and supply each other's warmth. When people ask about how it happened, I smile and tell them, "He was a dog. Then he was a fox. Then he was wild and soft and mine."
It is a strange household. We sleep in the same bed. He warms my feet in winter. He steals my fries. He once publicly shamed my worst boss until the man begged and broke. People record the spectacle and call it justice.
And sometimes, when a piece of my past threatens to reappear—an old hurt, an old boss, a cold memory—Felix will look at me with nine tails flicking and say, "Don't worry. I'm still here. I was always your favor. Now I'm your choice."
I choose him. He chooses me. The jade token hangs in a box now, a reminder of how fragile and ridiculous the world can be.
"One day," Felix murmured, tail curled around my fingers, "we will have fox kits—nine tails each, naturally."
I laughed and elbowed him. "One step at a time, nine-tails. One step at a time."
We ate the chicken.
The End
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