Page 77 of Last Flame
He blinks at me.
“Cat distribution system. Right to my door. That’s not a coincidence. That’s fate. Destiny. Possibly logistics. Who can tell?”
Because those are the rules. No collar means no owner. No owner means stray. Stray means the system has activated, and the system cannot be refused. Everyone knows this.
In other words, mine.
He’s got blue eyes. Deep blue, and I had no idea cat eyes came in that color. Which is the sort of thing that usually means somebody paid a lot of money for a cat once, which would mean he belongs to someone.
Designer kitty.
I overrule it. No collar. The system has spoken.
He lets me pick him up on the first try, which even I know is not how cats work. I decide it’s fate. Fate for sure this time, or excellent manners.
I carry him inside and set him down in the middle of the pull-out, right in the center of all my carefully arranged pillows, and he looks around once before he starts purring like he’s reviewed the accommodations and found them acceptable.
Then he flops down, rolls over, and shows me his entire belly.
I freeze. Cat belly is sacred. Cat belly is also, historically, a trap. And that absolutely does not make me think of another trap with curly hair and eyes that I could get lost in.
“That is a very reckless belly, sir.”
He looks at me upside down.
I go in.
He purrs harder. His paws curl. He does the full blissed-out stretch, head back, shameless, and I am rubbing the belly of a strange cat in my pull-out and I have never felt more chosen in my life.
“You can’t just show up here and deploy the belly,” I inform him. “That’s emotional warfare.”
He accepts this as a compliment.
Hospitality occurs to me. I have no cat food, because until eleven minutes ago I had no cat, so I pour him a little dish of cream and a bowl of water, and yes, I know cats aren’t supposed to have much dairy, but this is an emergency adoption and everyone needs grace.
He follows me around the kitchen while I do it, weaving through my legs in figure eights, and I nearly die twice. By the third pass I’m checking the floor before every step, automatically, like he’s always been down there.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Julie, my boss. Fantastic.
Need a rush piece — can you turn “Can Houseplants Improve Your Mood?” in two hours? Pulling a slot for it.
I look at my doorless apartment. The pull-out and the dragon box on the desk. The cat drinking cream out of my good ramekin. Gerald.
Gerald… My houseplant.
And suddenly I am so ready to write up every statistic I can find about how talking to your houseplants improves your mood. This time I am not thinking about a certain someone with a tongue ring.
Fucker.
Yes, I type, because I’m a professional disaster with a deadline and a vendetta.
I sit down at the desk and start typing, and I’m three sentences in when there’s a soft thump and suddenly there’s a cat on my desk.
He walks across it once, tail up, inspecting. Then he stops at the dragon box.
He sniffs it. Sniffs it again, longer. Paws at the lid, once, and presses his whole cheek against the carved dragon’s head, and for one second the purring stops.
