Betting on the Brainiac: a Sweet Romantic Comedy

11. Chapter Eleven

“Do not try to be cool.” I give myself a hard stare in my car’s visor mirror. “Madison is a human. You are a human. You know how to talk to humans. You talk to humans all the time. Talk to her like she’s a human.”

So far, I’m the only one parked behind Gatsby’s. It’s Monday, and Madison may not even come in today after working last night, but if she does, I want this self-coaching to stick. It might if it weren’t for a small problem: my subconscious knows that I’m into her, and my conscious knows that my subconscious knows, and my conscious also knows that I don’t have time to date, so it’s sabotaging me.

Probably.

I grab my gear and head into the club, noticing a pile of marketing materials stacked near the office as I pass it. Black and gold lettering in an art deco font announce a First Friday Masquerade for the upcoming weekend, the first weekend in September. I’ll have to ask Madison if that will change the quiet times in the club, but so far, she’s been pretty good about notifying me of what to expect.

About an hour later, I hear the faint beeping of the alarm pad.

Be cool, dummy. I will not invent an excuse to walk around the top floor to “stretch my legs” while I stretch my eyeballs to the end of their cartoon stalks and appreciate Madison’s salsa form. Or yoga form. Or air boxing form. Whatever form her exercise takes today.

Instead, I set a timer on my phone for ten minutes. Those are ten minutes in which I will code as fast as I can so that it takes all my concentration and the urge to be dumb passes.

I end up finding a good rhythm, which—if I can stay in long enough—will turn into a flow state. I’m unstoppable in a flow state, and my shoulders relax even as my fingers fly over the keys, my eyes scanning the code, tapping out the familiar brackets and semicolons.

Yes. This feels good. This is the state that I’m lucky to slip into once or twice a week. This is the whole reason I looked for a quiet, off-site place to work. This is—

“Oliver?”

Madison’s voice is coming from the closest staircase. She rarely comes to the third floor, and I gear down the code running through my brain. I turn as she reaches the top step, today in a fitted white tank top with the UT longhorn logo in burnt orange across the front and black leggings with a UT racing stripe down the side.

Well, that’s a plus. I didn’t go to the University of Oklahoma, but I’m still from there, and anyone dressed in UT’s burnt orange goes down two hotness points while wearing it. Which is only fair since UT fans subtract attractiveness and IQ points from anyone in OU crimson.

“Hey, Oliver, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but there’s a situation?” She’s fiddling with the tie at her waistband.

Why do leggings have ties? There is zero chance those are falling down. I slip out of the booth to meet her at the stairs, trying to read her energy. Slight distress but no fear, I think. “What’s up?”

“A cat.”

A cat? This doesn’t seem distressing. “In the building? Is it feral or something?”

Her eyes widen. “I don’t know. Please don’t say feral. That makes it sound attacky. I wasn’t planning on attack cats today.”

“Feral just means it’ll be easier to get out,” I tell her. “It won’t attack you, I promise. It’s probably mad it’s stuck in here and wants you to open the door and let it out.”

“Okay. I can hear it, but I can’t see it. Could you, uh, help?”

“Sure.” I follow her when she turns and heads back down the stairs. “Are you allergic or something?”

“No. More like unfamiliar. We didn’t have any pets growing up, and I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with cats.”

What does anyone do with cats? “You don’t have to do much. Usually if you even act like you’re thinking about petting it, it will go away by itself.”

“That’s good.”

When we get to the bottom step on the main floor, I hear it. It is definitely a cat. It is loud and it’s distressed.

“It sounds like it’s in the storage room,” Madison says. She gives me plenty of room to take the lead, like either of us is going to need protecting from a ten-pound cat.

We cross the dance floor, and the cries grow louder, definitely coming from the back of the storage room. The cat doesn’t make any noise for several seconds. “Here, kitty, kitty.” A soft scuffling comes from the ceiling, and I point. “Up there. It’ll be easier to get to it from the pantry.”

The kitchen pantry is on the other side of the wall, and as soon as we walk in, I see the problem. “I found her.”

“Her?” Madison’s voice is close behind me. She takes in the situation. “Ohhh. Babies?”

“Yeah.” A gray tabby with dark eyes sits on top of a stack of boxed tortilla chips. The stack is shoulder high, and she stares down at us, two tiny kittens beside her. They’re wiggling kind of sleepy-like, and as we watch, she bats her paw in the direction of the ceiling and yowls again.

One of the ceiling tiles is knocked askew enough for a cat to get through. She meows again and nudges one of the tiny babies with her nose, pushing it an inch in our direction.

“Are you supposed to take it?” Madison asks. “The kitten?”

I reach up to find out, moving slowly so the mama cat can warn me if we’ve got this wrong. I pick up a gray-striped furball and Madison gasps, but as I settle it against my chest, the mama cat only watches.

“Is it okay?” Madison asks, coming closer to peer at the kitten.

It doesn’t even cover my palm and weighs about as much as a pair of balled-up crew socks, but it’s warm and breathing. I brush a finger over the dark strand extending from its abdomen about four inches. “It seems all right, but this might be the umbilical cord.”

“I’ll get the other one.” She reaches up, slow and steady like I did. As soon as she settles it, a black and white one, against her chest with a small, delighted “Oh,” the mama cat turns and jumps from the box to the gap in the ceiling tile. Then she pokes her head back out and meows.

“She had her litter in the ceiling,” I tell Madison as the mama disappears.

“That’s what she needs help with?” Madison asks, but it’s a distracted-sounding question because she’s busy studying her tiny new friend, running a finger over its head.

Before I can answer, the mama cat’s head pokes through again, this time with a dark gray kitten dangling by its scruff from her mouth as she makes a leap down to the box and deposits the kitten. She eyes me, waiting.

“You’re up again,” Madison says.

I take the floof, and mama jumps back into the ceiling to repeat this with another gray tabby kitten, which Madison takes. Mama cat stays put.

“Is she done?” Madison asks. “Is that all the kittens?”

“Could be. If I put these down, I can climb up and look.”

“I’ll hold them all, you investigate,” she says.

I bring my two over and gently set them in her arms. Madison sits right down on the ground, her legs crisscrossed, the kittens snuggled against her chest. Lucky kittens. The mama cat hops down from the boxes and pads over to watch them. None of them spare me a glance when I drag a ladder over and climb up to verify that this is the whole litter.

“We got them all,” I tell Madison when I climb down. “We should look for a box or a carrier or something until we figure out what to do with them.”

“Just get my gym bag from my office and dump everything out. It’s a good size for this.” Her voice is a soft coo as she brushes her nose against a kitten head.

I retrieve it, and even though I feel weird about going into any woman’s bag for any reason, I decide not to act weird about it. I crouch and unzip it, turn it over and give it a shake. When the bag is empty, I set it down next to a small heap that includes a stick of deodorant—not candy scented, so the mystery is unsolved—hair elastics, a bottle of moisturizer, a towel, folded socks, a small pair of shorts, a gray sports bra, and on the top of the pile, a scrap of teal blue lace that can only be underwear.

Interesting. Always good to learn new things about people.

“Are you sure you want to use this bag? It seems really nice. It might not clean that easily.” It’s made out of natural fibers, not like my nylon gym bag.

“It’s fine. I can buy another one if it gets stained.”

Ah, there’s the girl who rolls up in a Mercedes every day. I don’t hold wealth against people, but I might judge that kind of waste. Except it’s hard to judge a woman sitting on a storeroom floor with an armful of stray kittens.

“Are there clean dishtowels around this place I could put in to make a bed for them?” I ask.

Madison glances at the pile. “My stuff is all clean. Just put the towel and clothes back in and use those.”

I can’t figure her out. Is she high maintenance because everything she directs me to put back into the bag is name brand? Or low maintenance because she doesn’t care about a litter of kittens turning them into their bed? She also doesn’t seem to care that Victoria’s Secret is crowning the heap of her nice things.

A phone vibrates from the floor beside her. It’s fairly loud against the tile, and the screen flashes “Dad.” She doesn’t look at it. Instead, she glances over to the mama cat then down at her armful of bigheaded cat babies with tiny, crinkled ears. Her expression is charmed—and like everything else about her, it also charms me.

“Great,” she says. “We’ve got them all, and they have a bag.” Then her smile fades as she meets my eyes. “Now what do we do with them?”