//------------------------------//
// The Brony and the Mule (part 3) 
// Story: Love Letters Written on the Back of a Star Chart 
// by Dawn Stripes 
//------------------------------//

	Tom dipped his knuckle into the loam. It came up with a fistful of wide green blades, even though he had already torn away much of the grass where he sat. He reached over his shoulder. And as his fingers unclenched slowly, Tom meditated on the raspiness of the tongue that licked them clean.
He was reclining against Hilda’s barrel. Even lying down, the cow was taller than a high-backed chair. It made for a relaxing seat, but Tom could feel every little gurgle and undulation to pass through her, breathing and the turning of four stomachs. In fact, he could feel her spotted coat right down to the hair. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Tom frequently went without anything but a pair of gym shorts while in Ponyville, because nopony cared. He thought it wouldn’t have been kind to pointedly forego his usual habit just because he was on a date.
At least Hilda was having a good time. At least Tom thought she was. He was pretty sure. The judgment was based mostly on the way she pressed up against him, and the way her wet tongue lingered when she accepted each handful of grass. He’d never spent enough time around cows to become fluent at reading their body language, even though the outskirts of Ponyville were full of them. Not that he was proud of that. But it was unsettling, having to guess what thoughts lurk behind those blackened eyes and rolling jaw.
No matter. He was glad to feed her like this. It cost him nothing, and if her earlier hints were any indication, it gave her a great deal of satisfaction. Being hand-fed was at least as romantic in Equestria as it was on Earth. So maybe it was something Hilda used to daydream about. 
Another plus was that it was something Tom knew how to do. That was a step up from most of today. He’d thought he could rely on his ability to figure things out as he went along—much like he’d done on his first time in Ponyville. But it wasn’t like that. Once or twice he’d tried giving her a sort of hug, with his outstretched arms wrapped maybe a quarter of the way around her barrel. But that hadn’t gone anywhere.
It should have been the perfect picture of a romantic afternoon. It was the kind of spot for a date that even Tom daydreamed about—a creek-side bluff dotted by dandelions and wild petunias. The sun was warm. And over a copse of maples, one could see the rotunda of town Hall, like a mild reminder that the world’s friendliest town was only a minute’s jaunt away. 
Hilda seemed to belong here. Like a postcard for the fictional Wisconson that only existed on packages of butter and cheese curds. Tom only wished he meshed with these gorgeous wilds so well. Humans, at least the way Tom saw it, never seemed perfectly at ease at ease in Equestria, as though they weren’t really suited for this paradise—only getting along because the land was far too tolerant to dream of turning them away. But Hilda, she fit right in. Tom thought that this was something he could admire. He could find that beautiful, if he let himself soak it all in.
But he still wanted a little break from skin contact. Trying to be subtle, Tom leaned forward, unsticking his back from the cow’s coat, and then got onto his feet for a little stretch. With his eyes closed, he secretly relished his moment of freedom from any touch but the loose grasp of wind.
Hilda lifted her head to look at him, so Tom quickly shaded his eyes, letting on that he was getting up to scan the horizon. “You seen Dave and Greta?” he said. “They’ve been gone a while.”
Her tail flopped from one side to the other. She shifted her shoulders in a bulky shrug.
Tom frowned at the empty meadow. Now that he thought about, maybe it really should be worrying him. Neither Tom nor Dave had been to Equestria for a few months now. They’d always talked about taking a proper trip together before someone raised the price of a Gate ticket. There were a few towns in the tiny country which Tom hadn’t explored yet, including a place called Orange Hills out west that was supposed to be quite beautiful in the spring. But they’d never gotten around to it. Part of it was because Tom knew he would start running around gawking at things and wouldn’t get any work done for an eternity. He was trying not to get overly distracted while there was so to be done on Earth. Tom had made an exception for a date, of course. But that was just him. He wouldn’t put it entirely past Dave to try and ditch that mule so he could go off on his own.
“Hmm. Hope they’re doing alright.” Tom sat back down slowly, still sweeping the meadows and the winding blue track of the Candywine. He kept a sharp lookout for the rest of that day, concocting the terrible things he would do if he found his roommate causing trouble and heartbreak.

Dave’s head rose out of the shrub like a periscope—rotating silently to scope out the terrain in every direction.
So far as he could tell, the coast was clear. There was no one on the trail, and no one in the glade behind him. As soon as he had determined this, Dave began pulling his legs out of the shrubbery. Ponyville was only a short sprint away. It beckoned in the distance. As soon as he was free, he rolled to the next patch of cover, and hunkered down into the next bush, preparing to repeat the process.
Greta’s head popped out of the foliage next to him.
“There you are! What are ve running from?”
Dave fell over in a scatter of leaves. “Running? N-nothing! I was just...looking for some tastier flowers!”
Hurriedly he patted the ground and plucked a tiny purple plant with narrow petals. Dave held the bud out in his cupped hands. “Yay…flowers. You like?”
Greta sniffed at it from a distance and stuck out her tongue. “Dave, that’s a thistle. I hate thistles.”
“Oh.” Dave drooped, held the flower close to his chest, and coughed. “Then, uh,” He stooped again. “…how about this yellow-ish thing?”
Another sniff. “I don’t know. It could be full of bugs and stuff. It hasn’t been cleaned!”
He lifted one finger bemusedly. “Uh…that’s true. Never thought of that.”
Greta opened her mouth around the chrysanthemum anyway. She was just about to bite down when she gasped. “Gentle Celestia. What if it has worms? I might get worms! Do you haff any idea how much it sucks to haff worms?”
Dave held the flower between two fingers. “Can’t…can’t say that I do.”
“My cousin died that way!”
Greta rollicked the air with a snort. “Who got to decided that feeding a girl wildflowers was romantic? Ugh. You just know it was a Ponyfillean. Nopony else could be that hopelessly romantic. Whoever it was deserves a good kick in the tail.”
Dave’s hands fluttered in a queer spasm. Had he been of a different inclination, he might have clapped a hand over his mouth. But it wouldn’t have stopped guttural burst of laughter which knocked him onto his back and upset a small family of quail in the process. 
Greta poked him nervously. But he couldn’t reassure her that he was still breathing until a few minutes later. He’d spent way too long being jealous of Tom’s stories about First Contact, such that he knew just how many of Tom’s friends thought that what he was doing right now was the hottest thing around. And he knew how many mares had lured them into the hills with the exact picnic that had just made Greta stick out her tongue.
“Oh…” Gasping for breath, he pulled himself back to his feet with one first cocked. “Hoof bump, girl. Hoof bump. You earned it.”
A hoof bump was especially nice because it took the focus off the goopy eyes Greta had been making at him ever since they left the Canterlot Gate. For the first time, they laughed together, snickering over the remains of a couple shredded flowers.
When Greta caught her breath, she stood back, looking at Dave from behind a blustery veil of swirling petals and floppy ears. She was smiling so fondly it seemed that she might try to nuzzle him any time. Dave readied himself for it.
“You know…” she said slowly, “we don’t have to stay out here. If you don’t vant to.” 
This was the opposite of what Dave expected to hear. He flung his hands out. “No! No, no, you don’t have to do that. Let’s totally go walking again, I was cool with—”
“No, I’m serious.” She tilted her head. Her expression was more inscrutable than usual.
“Well so am I. I'm totally serious all the time—”
“We could hit the Lick if you want. I think they’re putting the OSU-Michigan game on TV.”
“Wait. What?” Dave froze as if struck. “You know about that?”
“Duh.” Greta rolled her eyes. “Ponyfille’s close to Ohio now. We have to be at least a little curious what football is, since it makes you apes go so crazy. Besides, it gives a ‘ground-pounder’ like me something to talk about when the pegasi in my tower are going on about their stormball teams. I thought it was really sweet you were willing to miss the game for me, but honestly, I vouldn’t mind seeing it either.”
“And—they have a TV in Ponyville? I mean, this is Ponyville.”
“Ponyfille’s first idiot box. Tonight’s the debut night.”
Dave glanced past her at the chuckle-puffing rooftops. Greta followed his gaze over Ponyville’s chimneys.
“Dude,” he murmured into the wind. “You’re serious.” 
“Well, by ‘TV’ I mean Lyra’s smart-phone steampunked to an old slide projector, but no one knows the difference. They figure if the Gate stays open until midnight, and they get Twilight to cast a Starswirl’s Eldritch Corridor spell to bend space and time, they can pirate wi-fi from the Starbucks on the Earth side of the terminal.”
“No, I mean…”
With a little twitch of his left hand, Dave trailed off. A fine-toothed gear had clicked into motion somewhere in his mind. Its teeth dug deep into his thoughts, and within an instant the whole of the clockwork was in motion. His other thoughts were suspended, unused to so much commotion. He felt cast adrift, and just a little nauseous—
But not entirely lost. The sensation was familiar. He’d felt this way once before.
It had been a lazy Saturday afternoon. Long ago. As Dave recalled, Tom had invited him over to watch some show or other, and Dave had accepted only because Tom was a pretty nice guy and he didn’t have much else to do. But he’d felt tricked when the screen powered on to unveil a chorus of singing, dancing ponies in all the colors of the rainbow.
“What the hell is this?” He remembered saying that. Tom, being the kind of person Tom was, had pushed Dave back into the armchair when he tried to get up. Dave had eaten the entire bag of pretzels out of petty spite.
Because what kind of show for little girls could possibly be worth watching? Sure, girls were just as smart as guys; they could do whatever, be engineers if they really wanted, so on and so forth. But when Dave turned on the TV he wanted to see adventure. He wanted to see explorers and warriors, people setting out to change the world. People fighting for what they believed. What use was putting a girl on the screen if she didn’t even have boobs?
But Tom hadn’t needed to push Dave into his chair a second time.
This time Dave recognized the turning of the gears. His head was still twirling, of course, so in flux that he felt he couldn’t recognize the creature sitting before him. But his vision focused on her momentarily. She was paying close attention to him—he’d been standing still for so long that she was probably worried about him. Her face had concern on it, but also a smile as warm as a fuzzy jacket fresh out of the dryer. 
“I can pretend to get drunk on salt?” he mumbled plaintively.
This time he caught Greta’s smirk of amusement. “Act wasted off your ass. No one vill notice.”
Dave hesitated a moment—on a precipice. But now that he was pausing to think about it carefully, it seemed important to note that the whole My Little Pony thing had worked out pretty well. Maybe he should follow this feeling for a little while. See where it led.
“Well, then? What are we waiting for?” He jumped to his feet, smacking his palm, her shoulder, his shoulder. “If we don’t miss the kickoff—let’s watch football!”

Tom, meanwhile, was turning green and trying to hide in the corner.
“And that’s how it’s done!” proclaimed a blonde cow perched atop a low wooden stage. She finished off her presentation by giving a rattling kick to the tall aluminum buckets scattered about the display. “Cap it up for the creamer’s and Bob’s your uncle.”
A three-year old foal quavered forward, slipping right under the rail and its lacquered information signs. He nuzzled the presenter’s foreleg as he looked up at her with big brown eyes. “Does it huwt, Misses Mawy-Ann?”
“Of course not!” she said, looking with care at the green spindly fuzzball. “No more than getting a hoof trim.”
“But I hate getting a hoof trim!” shrieked a pink filly, jumping up on her classmates. To avoid being knocked into Tom scooted back further, although he was already pressed against the back guide ropes.
“No—no, dearie.” Mary-Ann tried to calm the roiling masses. “It was just a metaphor.”
“Do metaphors hurt?” belted a blue colt.
Hilda waved from the back. “Heeeeeeeeey! Mary-Ann!” She probably would have been at the front of the tour group if doing so wouldn’t have blocked the view. Tom, for his part, was determined to stay far away from the wooden stalls at the far end of the large cabin.
The blonde tore her gaze away from her primary audience for a second. “Oh, hey, Hilda! About time you stopped by to say hello! Your mother coming in Wednesday?”
“I think so. Little Jeffrey’s starting to wean, you know, but she said a few more weeks yet.”
“Just lovely. You know I’d chat, but I’m giving a tour now. By a dear and help these sweeties on to the gift shop?”
The dozen or so Canterlot foals swarmed about Tom’s ankles, herded to the far door by a navy-blue teacher with an apple for a cutie mark and a frazzled grey sprout for a mane. Dave followed at a distance, but he did surreptitiously hand out bits to a few of the foals who were clamoring for pocket change to buy cups of ice cream from the gift shop. He saw the semi-terrified stares with which the grade-schoolers regarded him, and watching them transform into gleeful smiles was far too much to resist. It wasn’t a big handful of bits to give out anyway. The principal feature of Equestrian gift shops was that the prices were actually in the range of basic decency.
“You should try some too,” Hilda said. “This stuff’s even better than what you get at Sugarcube, don’t you know. Fresh out of the mixer.”
“Oh…” Suddenly paling once more, Tom raised his hands and backed away from the cooler. “No thank you. I’m—not quite hungry right now.”
“Really?” Hilda tossed her head. “Are humans squeamish about everything?” 
“Where’s this coming from?”
Hilda led the way past shelves filled with gleaming cheese wheels. “I don’t know. You just seem…squeamish since we got here.”
Tom scratched his neck. “I don’t know about that, I’m just…under the weather a bit, maybe.”
They exited onto a path of well-fit granite plates, which led past a small herb garden, and down the steep hill to one of Ponyville’s main road. It was a lovely cottage. The daisies lining the fence were wild, inasmuch as anything in central Equestria could be considered ‘wild’. 
“Still,” Tom admitted, “I sometimes imagine Equestrian society would collapse if it weren’t for your dairy products. It must really defray the cost of raising a calf.”
“Why would you say that, silly? We all split the profits. Everyone helps out, after all. It brings us together.”
“Ah! Of course, of course.” Tom placed his fingernails against her coat and tried to scratch his way up to her ears—but they were too high to reach.
“It lets the old sows gossip,” Hilda went on, “the kids have someone to play with…how else would we have time to catch up? If it weren’t for Saturdays I wouldn’t know what was going on in anyone’s life!”
As opposed to the present state of affairs, Tom thought, wherein Hilda seemed to know the name and history of every cow in Ponyville.
“How do humans keep up with each other?”
“Oh, you know.” Tom shrugged. “I guess we all just sort of—do our own thing.” 

The Lick wasn’t quite what Dave had imagined when Greta referred to it as the seediest spot in Ponyville. Perhaps this should have come as no surprise. It struck him as more a seven-year old girl’s idea of a bar than a bar itself. 
There was hardly a spot of drab or ill-lit brown anywhere to be seen. The façade was impressively pink, and the interior was dominated by the back shelves—which were stuffed with such a rainbow of exotic-looking drinks that Dave couldn’t believe anypony actually knew what was back there. But salt and hard cider were on tap, as long as apples were in season. And the barkeeper, who whistled when they came in, was more than friendly. A couple mares brought their foals to watch Lyra duct-taping a smartphone to a contraption of mirrors atop an Equestrian slide projector. One was even breast-feeding her youngest, standing over the knock-kneed foal and caressing its fuzzy mane. 
The one real bar-like characteristic the place had was that it was never quite big enough for a real party. The place was packed to the rafters even an hour before the game. Greta passed the time by telling everypony about Dave’s polo exploits, without his permission. When Lyra got the screen to come on, Dave was summoned to steal the spotlight by explaining the rules of football. He got away with stretching the facts a bit, because ponies made allowance for his having downed nearly half a block of salt. But Lyra eventually did call him out on that and everypony pulled him down to give him noogies.
Interestingly, Greta pressed him for a sober explanation of the rules. Dave started to take great pleasure in initiating a willing student to the great game.
He was just debating whether to actually intoxicate himself—Ponyville hard cider was a weighty opportunity—when Greta rescued him from Lyra’s noogie grip. “Dave! You’ll neffer guess who’s here!”
Dave was going to guess, but he didn’t have time before she sat him on a swivel bench and spun him round. When he blinked, he was being examined by three copies of Greta.
Dave blinked again. Two of the Gretas were taller than the original, and one had slightly darker coat hair. Dave stiffened up and released a cramped hand-wave.
“Mother,” said Greta, a little twinge of nervousness in her voice, “this is Dave. We met at—er—at the planet Earth. Dave, this is Mom, Dad.”
“Charmed.” Dave bumped two hooves, keeping his smile nailed in place.
“Oh, that’s just darling,” said Greta’s mother. “Are you haffing a nice time?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re so tall. Are you fully grown yet, or vill you keep getting bigger?”
Dave nodded. “Fully grown,” he added quickly when that failed to answer the question.
“You look good together,” observed Greta’s father.
But the Mrs. tugged on his neck. “Ooh, Sugar-cakes! Look at what that unicorn’s up to!”
The second they had drifted away, he turned to hiss at Greta. “Who brings their parents on a first date?”
Greta’s nervous smile melted into an honest giggle. “An Equestrian, silly! Now stop looking at them like you’re about to get interrogated! You’re going to make them feel bad.”
Dave glanced suspiciously over his shoulder. The mules were clustered around Lyra’s impromptu vaudeville show at the moment. He tried to steer himself and Greta off to one side, where they could have a couple drinks on their own. Greta downed a sip of cider with him, but went for a small bottle of clear stuff that looked as though it burned on the way down.
Then, while Dave was keeping an eye on the parents, another mule snuck up on him from behind. “Yo!” said a tall mare with a nearly peach-colored coat and sunglasses. “You must be that Dave chap! I’m Periwinkle Star, say, Greta tells me she never once met a human who had mule pie before.”
Dave hung there with his mouth open as the new arrival wriggled his way closer around the crowd. “Now that you’re in town,” she went on, “Gloria should be making a couple as soon.”
“As soon as we can get the cashews!” added another, smaller mule which popped up on her back. His voice was squeaky as a train whistle. “She has to send all the way to Trottingham to get the good ones! You can’t make real mule pie without good cashews.”
“No way, no hay!” they chorused in unison.
“Don’t mind the cousin,” Periwinkle said with a nudge to Dave as she pushed her echo down behind her. “He’s never seen a human before, probably wants to add you to his butterfly collection. Welcome to the Starsaddle clan!”
“It’s….just one date,” Dave waved both hands about in a vague defensive posture.
“That’s cool. But listen, you ever need a place to crash while you’re in Ponyville, drop by my place! Sixty-two Whinny Court, the poshest pad on the block. Oh, and before I forget, take one of these. Couldn’t forgive myself if I let a date of Greta’s go without the proper welcome.”
Greta barely nudged Dave into raising his hands in time for Periwinkle to drop a steaming funnel cake on a plate. It was three layers high and decorated with a smiley face of cherries and molasses.
Dave stared at Periwinkle.
Greta rolled her eyes. She eventually got the chance to wheel Dave away on the pretense of bringing him for a cider refill.
“He’s trying to be nice!” she whispered “What are you scared of?”
“I…” Dave shrugged. “It’s just weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“You know, all these mules. They act like they know me.”
“Dave, you act like you know efferyone!”
“Yeah, but this is…different. Took me by surprise is all.”
Greta bit her lip. “Sorry if you feel a little claustrophobic,” she said earnestly. “We were bound to run into someone, though. There’s about forty Starsaddles in and around Ponyville, and I’m sure half of them know that I’m going on my first date in a year.”
“Really?” Dave tried to spy on them over his shoulder. “Do you just all…keep up with each other all the time?”
“Das’ how it is.” Greta took another swig from her bottle of fire-starter. “It gets kind of annoying sometimes. Why do you think I work in Canterlot? When fifteen mules come running every time I sprain my ankle, you’d think I couldn’t take care of myself, you know? Kind of annoying.”
“Yeah…” Dave stared at the funnel cake waiting for him to bite into it. “…Annoying. I’ll bet.” 

Tom strode away from the wooden fence, waving both hands over his head.
“Nope!” he cried. “I just can’t. Not going to do it.”
“Tom!” Hilda lumbered after him. “Don’t be like that! A little gambling never hurt anybody.”
Tom spun about, still walking backwards, eyes crooked with bewilderment. “It’s not…Hilda, how is it even gambling? Whoever goes on the field basically just decides which square wins!”
“It’s not like that. You enter a sort of zen state.”
He tried to refocus his vision, see something curvy in the blotches falling into step behind him. But trying so hard made his eyes redden.

Several dozen mules, and not a few earth ponies, clustered about the grassy space in back of the Lick. The tailgate party was officially in full swing, but there was no longer enough space to fit everyone inside the building.
Dave was inside a chalk rectangle, with Greta on his side, and three other mules on the far side of the net. Periwinkle was standing in the back corner, spinning a volleyball on the tip of one hoof. It was tied for the winning point. Dave knelt close to the ground and cracked his neck.
“Waboosh!” Periwinkle cried. The ball came zinging in, but Dave jumped forward with surprising agility for the largest player around. He punted the ball up almost at ground level, setting up for Greta to dive over his prone form and spike it back over the net.
“We did it!” she shouted as the other team tripped over themselves in the final rush, and the ball bounced off to the side. She clapped Dave’s shoulders almost before he’d gotten up. “Number one! Number one!” 
Dave picked her up on his shoulders and ran about the yard, roaring and scaring as many of the fillies as he could. “That’s how it’s done!”
She shrieked with laughter, bouncing on his shoulders.
“Not bad for a nerd,” he said, looking up.
She batted his hair. “Yah! I was going to say not bad for a knucklehead. Volleyball is a mental game, efferypony knows dat.” 
“Hey!” Now there was a yellow unicorn shouting at them from the door. “Game’s about to start! You in or not?”
Dave looked about, trying to count the number of bodies around him. There had to be at least thirty, and that wasn’t even beginning to count the already rafter-high crowd inside. “But there’s no way to bring it outside, is there?” he called out. “I don’t see how…woah!”
His words were lost when the flood of equinity swept him up in its tides, squeezing him through the door and into the now-musky dim of the Lick. Ponies and mules stacked on top of each other. The smells of crusty salt and fermented apples were present in quantity.
Dave wasn’t completely sure what happened, but he wound up seated on a round table with two other ponies, a mule, and some pegasus foal who kept bawling until somepony picked her up and burped her. He was afraid to move his legs, as he would only have been able to see who they were touching if there’d been more light than the silvery glow from the projector screen.
Somepony poked Dave in the arm. He turned to find an oval face and curled hair squinting back at him. He screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue. “Wait…” he said, “wait…” 
“Greta’s mom,” she whispered with a little smile.
Dave snapped his fingers. “That was my second guess!”
She shimmied a little closer, to whisper a bit more conspiratorially. Dave felt odd for a second, but decided not to scooch away, and watched her carefully as she settled in near and patted him on the shoulder. 
She whispered. There were mules stacked up behind them into a mountain which seemed to help block the sound. “Greta hasn’t been home for a couple months, and you must know how I worry being a mother. How is she doing?”
Dave pinched his brow. “You want to know like if she got in trouble?”
“Horseapples, I hope not! I just want to make sure she’s happy. You don’t have to spill her private life, but I want to make sure she’s okay.”
“Well…” Dave rested back on his hands and tried to conjure up an answer for that question. “I haven’t known her super-long. But she’s real smart. She came up with a one-man rule to avoid extra polo collisions. And she smiles a lot. Most of the time, anyway. Yeah. I guess she’s doing just fine.”
He came up with a good idea for what to say a second later, and puffed out his chest with a grin. “Hey. She scored a date with me, didn’t she?” 
Somepony noogied his head with a hoof, causing Dave to cringe under the friction. “Ow, ow! Hey! Not cool!”
Then a horseshoe-shaped stadium appeared on the screen. A brown warmth closed in as the crowd quieted down. Everypony was fixed on the moving images now, and Dave took the opportunity to glance around himself. He was surrounded on all sides.
Ohio State was going to have the kickoff. Dave cleared his throat at the appropriate time. “Alright,” he declared loudly, “when that guy runs at the ball, we have to do what’s called the kick-off chant. Just follow my lead!”
The punter began his journey. Dave threw up his arms. “Ooooooooh!”
He was alone in a room. Dave trailed off before the second note, turning rapidly red as he looked around until suddenly something jumped onto the table.
“Oooooooh!” Greta shouted, throwing her hooves in the air.
Leading by example, they managed to get everypony doing the Ohio State kickoff chant by the time the ball was in the air. 
OSU opened strong. They were able to get keep getting first downs for the longest time, and had a couple lucky field goals. But just a little after half-time, the streaming video was interrupted by a flurry of sparks. Both smart-phone and projector went up in smoke to a chorus of disappointed groans. 
Dave and Greta weren’t too disappointed, though. As far as they were concerned, they won that game.

Tom and Hilda walked back into town slowly. From a distance, they looked like two lovers savoring a slow return from an afternoon away from civilization. Up close, they looked like two fillies who’d just lost their favorite cardboard Royal Guard armor to the rain.
Tom kept playing the day over in his head. Sitting had been too boring for either of them to bear after a while. Letting Hilda give him a tour of Ponyville had seemed like a great idea. After all, it would get her talking. And it was always nice to let a girl talk, or so Tom had been told. 
But even that couldn’t last forever. When he got desperate, Tom had drawn on some of the wilder stories from his friends who’d been in relationships with mares. Timidly, he suggested that maybe Hilda give him a ride on her back. That simply hadn’t gone well at all.
He coughed. “I had a good time today, Hilda.”
She was looking directly forward.
“But…I, uh…I don’t think it would work out.”
“Obviously,” she said tersely. Tom winced.
She swung her head to fix him with an incredulous gaze. “Hey. What were you trying to prove, anyway?”
Tom threw up his hands. “I don’t know. Celestia damnit! I have to go apologize to Dave. I can’t even imagine how those two have been faring.”
“Have a nice trip back to Earth,” Hilda smirked.
“You aren’t coming back?”
“No, I think I’ll stay with the family. Earth was nice to visit, but…this is home.”
Tom looked around at the colorful houses and the sunny sky. “Can’t argue that.”
“Besides, there was some guy at the bus station that kept looking at me and licking his chops. It was really creepy."
Tom didn’t say much else until they found Dave.
It took so long because they weren’t in the back nine or at the designated meeting point, out behind Carousel Boutique. Of all places, they were in the Lick, and it took sifting through quite a crowd to find them there.
Tom didn’t get a chance to use his choice words, because a minute after he caught sight of Dave, Greta popped up behind him.
“What did you do?” Tom said. “And…how did you get those?”
Dave and Hilda tugged at the collars of the OSU jerseys they both sported. Hilda’s was fitted rather trimly, and if Tom’s judgment meant anything, ran some small danger of starting a new trend. “Three words, mah man,” said Dave. “Unicorns ain’t the only ones who can tailor like lightning.”
Tom smiled wanly. He took a deep breath and snuck a peek at Greta. “Okay. Dave? Listen. Um, I…feel like I owe you an apology. And…for what it’s worth, you’re uh…you’re done now. You know. With the thing.”
“Done?” 
Dave exchanged a look with Greta. After a pause, during which they seemed to have a short conversation with their eyes, they gave subtle nods.
“Actually,” said Dave, glancing at Hilda, “we were gonna’ ask if you two wanted to tail us to King’s Island next week.” His gaze flitted between them. “Guess…that’s a no. But hey! That’s cool.”
Tom made a face. “But…Dave, what happened?”
Dave made an innocent face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. You said this little number was going to be a swag date and she was. I’m thinking I might make it a habit.”
Tom stared slackjaw. Dave stared back nonchalantly, sipping a flagon of cider through a crazy straw.
Tom put his hands on his pockets, and tried to chuckle, but it came out breathy and hopeless. After covering his mouth for a second, he smiled. But then he had a thought and the smile disappeared just as quickly. “Say Dave, you’re not going to tell anyone about all this, are you?” 
Dave leaned forward just long enough to poke his roommate in the chest. “Dude. What happens in Ponyville stays in Ponyville.”
Tom shut his mouth, because he recognized this statement as an immediate and universal truth.