Cold weather was hard to come by when you lived in a big city; the combination of concrete surrounding you at all times, pollution, and the sheer amount of people made it feel hot, even when the weather app said that it was a cool and breezy 20 degrees. So, when it actually started to snow in the city, Alex was excited. The tigress wore sweaters all the time, even when it wasn’t quite “sweater weather.” When the real cold came around, she was oh-so-ready to bring out her full arsenal of winter wear.

Sweaters, hoodies, and boots; the tigress wore them all. Even if she mostly stayed home, she dressed as if she had plans to grab brunch with her girlies out on the snow-dusted town. It didn’t matter if no one saw what she wore, or if she didn’t get to use the clothing out in the snow at all, she was happy with her cozy winter clothes, even if she wore them while curled up on the couch with her PS5 controller in hand, hacking and slashing enemies trying to stop her from reaching Valhalla.

She was missing one important piece of cold-resistant clothing, though. But not for long, as the Amazon delivery driver with her package was zooming through the streets at break-neck speed, possibly breaking a few traffic laws in doing so, to bring Alex the last piece to her winter wardrobe as we speak.

Alex mashed the buttons on her controller over and over like a panicking pilot losing control of a passenger jet in an attempt to defeat a big, burly, and definitely overpowered cyclops who stood in between herself and Valhalla. Her thumbs turned red as she fought with the joysticks on both sides of the controller trying to dodge the often unblockable moves that the mythical creature threw her way. She grunted, groaned, and yelled at her TV as she died and respawned on the shores of Valhalla over, and over, and over again. By the fifth time that she woke up on the black sands of the Norse afterlife, the doorbell rang.

‘Ding-dong!’

Alex, like many others during the pandemic, had been preconditioned to jump at the sound of the doorbell. When the high-pitched sound reached her sensitive kitty cat ears, she vaulted over the back of the couch and ran toward the door like her life depended on it. After a few long strides that caused the tigress to slip and slide as she turned corners, she arrived at the front door of her apartment. After undoing the chain lock and the deadbolt, she pulled the door open. Fully expecting to see the mailman with her package in hand, the tigress put on a cute smile and was ready to thank him for making the trip all the way up to her floor instead of leaving the package in the mailroom on the ground floor. But as she pulled the door inward, she was met with an empty hallway and a lone package on the floor. With a slightly disappointed frown, the tigress bent over to pick up her parcel. With her online shopping order that she had been waiting impatiently a whole two days for firmly in her grasp, she turned on her heels, walked back into her apartment, and closed the door behind her with her foot.

The door closed behind her with a click and Alex ran back to the couch. She made a quick stop to grab her utility knife from the kitchen, hopped over the back of the couch, and got settled back in her gaming seat to continue her journey through Valhalla. She set her package and knife aside, as her game took a little more priority over what she had ordered from Amazon.

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Fighting Tyr for the third and final time was hell. The final boss of Valhalla was relentless, painful, and unforgiving. Alex’s fingers hurt from all the button mashing and joystick maneuvering that she had to do to best the Norse God of War, and she almost threw her controller across the living room when she died and Tyr had just a smidge of health left. Luckily for her, she had a resurrection stone handy, used it, and came back to life with just enough health to finally beat the living shit out of him.

“FUCK… FINALLY.” The tigress let out a frustrated sigh and relaxed her grip on the controller in her hands. Her thumbs were red and her palms were covered in so much sweat that the usually matte-colored PS5 controller became glossy. It was gross, but gamer girl sweat went for a lot these days. After watching the final cutscene of the game and exploring for a few more minutes after the credits rolled, Alex turned off her game and shifted her attention to the parcel she had set aside earlier.

‘Click, click, click.’ The tigress pushed the blade out on her utility knife out, dropped the Amazon box into her lap, and sliced into the packing tape that kept the box together. After cutting through the heavy tape and pulling out the overkill amount of bubble wrap that protected her purchase, she pulled out a pair of peach-colored knee-high toeless socks. The tigress tossed the packing materials onto the ground and quickly moved to slice the small thread that kept the pair of socks tied together. With the two socks now apart, Alex placed them on her legs to see if the color went well with her predominantly orange fur. She spread the socks out all the way, lifted her legs up to stretch them out as straight as she could, and pinched the ends of her socks with her toes to simulate what they would look like if she had them on. It took her about ten seconds to realize that she was dumb and that she could just put the socks on to see how they looked.

With an embarrassed shade of red that almost matched her sweater plastered all over her face, she put her feet down on the ground and turned around to make sure no one saw her brief dumby moment. Once she was sure that there were no witnesses, she pushed herself off the couch, grabbed the trash that she had scattered around as a result of her unboxing, and left the living room with the TV still on. The tigress did that a lot. Luckily, her boyfriend knew of her catty ways and set the TV to turn off automatically after a certain period of inactivity just so Greta and her flock wouldn’t come barging into their place and blame them for climate change.

Alex tossed the empty box and packing material into the trash before she headed to the bedroom to take advantage of the full-length mirror that she had for her daily fit-checks. She excitedly scuttled her bottomless booty through the hallway toward her bedroom. As she moved in that direction, she felt the warmth of the living room’s heating fade away. With no one on the bedroom side of her apartment, she thought it would be wasteful to have it on. But now that she was there, the cold was enough to make the fur on her thighs stand up and her clit a little hard. A problem that she could have very easily avoided with pants. But this is Alex we are talking about; home is where the pants are not. After skipping through the open door of her bedroom, she made a quick little pit stop at the high-tech-looking control panel on the wall near the door to set the temperature and open up the motorized curtains. She lived in a high-rise building, on a rather high floor, so no one was going to be looking in to see her half-naked. Plus, the view was nice.

A couple of taps to the screen of the control panel later and the curtains slowly started to open to reveal the 4 PM pink-sky-covered skyline of the city. Alex smiled as she watched the city slowly appear behind the curtains, only to grit her teeth and cringe as she heard the noise that the smart curtains made.

‘Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…’ The soft whirr of the motorized curtains always bothered Alex; it was so annoying. Not to mention the speed at which the curtains opened was PAINFULLY slow. 15 seconds to open curtains; there was no clearer proof that smart homes were stupid than this. While the curtains opened slower than a car in LA traffic during weekday rush hour, Alex slid her fingers around on the control panel to move the temperature slider from the blue side to the orange side and turned on the heating.

With the heat set to a nice and cozy 25 Celsius and the curtains opened up, Alex walked up to the mirror next to her closet and stared at her reflection in it. Her brown and slightly longer than shoulder-length hair was messy, but not the homeless crazy kind of messy, just the stay-at-home day kind of messy caused by compressions of her head against the couch cushions and idle fingers toying and twirling with it. Her fur was just the right amount of unkempt; smooth in most places and extra fuzzy and fluffed up in some, and her turtleneck sweater was as wrinkled as gift wrapping paper on its way to the trash on Christmas morning. Alex ran a hand through her hair, tucked her two front locks under her ears, and tied them together into a braid. She smiled at herself, let out a happy sigh at her slightly cleaned-up appearance, and turned her attention to the salmon socks that she wanted to see herself in.

Alex stood in front of the mirror and lifted one foot up to slide her paw into the sock. She pulled the socks up just shy of her knee and her toes poked out through the hole on the other end. Once her toes were out, she wiggled them and then put her foot down on the floor. She giggled at her toe wiggle for a second before she lifted her other foot and slipped that one into the other sock. Once her beans slid through the tube of fabric, she wiggled her toes again before putting her foot down on the floor. Once she stood on both of her socked feet, she looked at her reflection in the mirror again.

“Hm.” The tigress turned and lifted her legs up one and a time repeatedly to get a full look at the socks on her. After marching in place for a few seconds, Alex turned around and faced her butt toward the mirror. She put her hands on her hips, turned her head over her shoulder, and kicked her right paw up to stick her pink beans against the mirror. A satisfied smile spread across her face as she looked at her fit in the mirror. She continued to make different poses in the mirror and her smile grew wider and wider as a result. After about a minute, the tigress ran back out to the living room to grab her phone, she slipped and slid across the floor like a clumsy cat jump-scared by a cucumber as she made her way back to the mirror with her phone in hand. Back in front of the mirror, she pulled her phone up to her chest, opened up the camera app, and started snapping cute pictures of herself in her new comfy socks.

‘Clk, clk, clk.’

After taking exactly 28 photos of herself in front of the mirror in different poses that all pulled focus to the socks and her paws, she scrolled through them; her expression changed with each swipe from one photo to the next and she slowly took steps backward toward the big bed in the middle of the room. She sat down on the edge of the bed, smiled, and let out an audible gasp; she had finally found it, the best out of the 28, her pièce de resistance of mirror selfies; one where she looked so drop-dead gorgeous and cute that if Alex were a guy and not Alex herself, she’d smash so hard that the Hulk would be put to shame. And all it took was Alex lifting and showing off her paw, and well, her rear-end, too.

The tigress looked at her own picture and bit her lip as she thought so narcissistically about fucking herself. Her mind wandered to how her paws would taste, how they would feel against herself in the way she liked to use them on others, and how tight and warm her holes would feel around her hypothetical dick were she to have one. However, her moment of penis envy was brief as she quickly came to the realization that she knew someone with a penis who would be more than willing to let her borrow it; her horse-schlong-equipped boyfriend, Tashi.

The problem with that was the equine was still at work, and it would be a few hours at the very least before he would get back. That didn’t mean the tigress couldn’t convince him to go a little over the speed limit on his drive back home, however.

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Tashi worked a very confusing job (from Alex’s point of view, at least); he was a software engineer, a coder, and an overall computer whizz who knew almost everything there was to know about modern electronics. He could write programs that managed the various “behind the scenes” tasks that kept the world running and Alex would never know. He was very helpful when her computer blue-screened every now and then, though, and for that, the tigress was eternally grateful.

The horse’s job paid well, and while he had been able to perform his job from home with no negative effects since the height of the pandemic, his work recently asked him to come into the office at least twice a week, something he called “Just an excuse for the company to still have their investors pay for the fancy schmancy office space in the CBD.”

Even if it was just a few days a week, Alex missed hearing the horse’s keyboard clicking and clacking loudly throughout their apartment as he worked through and squashed bugs in his coworkers’ code. He was still doing that since his coworkers were mostly incompetent, but now he could physically point the bugs in the code out to whoever made them in the office.

Tashi worked a 9-5 but often went overtime because of how much he got lost in his work. There had been many days when his boss and HR had to beg him to stop working and head home as he had racked up so many overtime hours that the company’s payroll bill was at risk of taking the company into the red. Oh, the woes of working at a startup funded by venture capital.

Tashi let out a heavy sigh as his fingers glided over his keyboard and he deleted the poorly written code presented in front of him. He had a YouTube video playing on the left-most of his three monitors, his code on the main monitor in the middle, and his corporate email on the right-most monitor. He had his noise-canceling headphones on and was in the zone, not even an earthquake would be able to pull him out from it. He was hesitant about noise-canceling headphones at first and was a bit worried that Alex spent so much buying them for him as a gift, but once he put them on and activated the feature, he found himself able to focus on his work so much better once he was back in the office.

He continued to work even as most of his coworkers had decided to take off early, and by 5 PM, one hour before he was contractually obligated to head home, he was the only one left in the big, expensive, ping-pong table-filled office. The only thing that was able to take him out of his focus was anything from his phone, which he had linked to the smartwatch on his wrist. He had the tendency to lose track of texts on his phone, and frustrated by how many times she texted him while he was at the store to grab something for her only for him to miss the small vibrations his Samsung phone gave him, the tigress bought that for him, too. Again, he was hesitant toward it, feeling that the device was too expensive of a gift, but ever since he started wearing it, he never missed an important text about buying cheese, tampons, or lasagna sheets ever again.

As he aggressively typed code on his keyboard, he felt a soft tapping vibration on his wrist. After ending the line of code he was writing and moving his typing indicator to the next line, he flicked his wrist up, glanced at it, and furrowed his brows when he saw what was presented to him on his watch’s screen.

New Message from Alex: [Image]

Tashi turned his attention to his phone, which was sitting on a wireless charging stand just to the right side of his desk. Once he grabbed it and unlocked it, he went straight to his texting app to see what the tigress had sent him. As soon as he opened her message, his thin equine ears flickered upward and he banged his knee on the underside of his desk.

It took a few seconds for the tigress to add any context to her photo.

Alex: Remember, you can’t do any more overtime today.
Alex: Also, do you like my socks? 😏

Tashi had big hands and a big phone to help with them, but even then, he still fumbled his fingers around on the screen of his phone as he frantically typed a response back to the cat who had just sent him a picture of herself in socks and barely anything else. The horse was a stickler for rules, and since he wasn’t contractually done until 1800 hours, he typed a response back to his girlfriend to reflect that. But before he could hit send, his girlfriend, with much smaller fingers, was faster.

Alex: If you stay late again, I’ll have to rely on Chance…
Alex: [Image]

The Clydesdale’s eyes widened when he looked at Alex’s new message and the picture that came with it. The tigress stood in front of the mirror in their bedroom with one hand pulling her sweater up to show her tits, one leg up on a stool, and her pussy fully in view. Zooming in, he could see that she was wet, too. The light in the bedroom reflected and gave her cooch a nice sheen. Tashi banged himself on the underside of his desk again, but this time, not with his knee.