Chapter 2 #3
Silver headbutted my phone to the side, then lowered onto her belly, folding her arms beneath her.
A thrill ran through me. This was the first time she’d taken a position of relaxation in my company, though there was an alertness to her gleaming eyes, the irises quivering like poked jelly, that signaled she might leap away at any moment.
Carefully I ran my hand over her back. Up close her gray fur looked nearly lavender, like the breast of a dove.
I lowered my nose to the plume of her neck.
She was the softest thing I’d ever touched.
She smelled like cloth that had dried in the sun.
I was struck by the intensity of my affection for her. “You don’t know what you look like, do you? You have no idea.”
Silver began to dig her paws into the bed, as if massaging a lump of Play-Doh. Then she rubbed her face into my thumb. Her nose was wet and left a trace on my skin.
“You’re very cute.” I looked into her eyes. In the muted light of James’s bedroom, her black pupils grew voracious, swallowing the surrounding ring of green. “I forgive you, by the way. For eating my birthday cupcakes.”
Then, as if she understood me, Silver rolled happily over, exposing her belly.
Here the fur was frizzy and clumped in neat flat swirls.
If they were any longer, they might have been ringlets.
I felt the way little girls felt when they received a new doll, itching to rub and stroke and work the untouched hair, which was of course the best part of a new doll and always the first thing to get ruined.
When I reached to touch Silver, she flinched.
“What are you so scared of? You like me, remember? I introduced you to milk.”
The click of the front door turned her head.
“Who are you talking to?” James’s face appeared in the doorway, his brown hair made darker by the rain. “You’re talking to Silver?”
“Sort of,” I said. “We were bonding, until you came in.”
“She likes you. Cats are just like that, they’re fickle.”
“Why would you want a pet that’s fickle? Isn’t the whole point of them to love you?”
“I’m not sure about that.” James bent and tousled his hair with a T-shirt. Beads of water flew onto the duvet. Silver hopped around on the bed, as if dancing through a sprinkler. “It’s nice to look after something. I guess it’s kind of like having a kid.”
He could see I was confused. “Or a relationship?”
“You see me like a pet?” The notion excited me.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
But already I was replaying his words, turning the sentiment over like a prism in my head. Taking care of me was not an obligation, it was nice. I was somebody he liked to look after.
“I meant,” James said, “that in a relationship you’re not just thinking about what you’re getting from the other person, right? You’re also thinking about what you can give to them.”
“That’s big of you.”
He shrugged. “You see it the same way, I’m sure.”
I didn’t. I liked being with James because he made it easier for me to be alive. With him the world felt safer, my place in it more appropriate. Did James really feel this way about me and everything he loved? Or was he lying, pretending to be better, more mature than he was?
I changed the subject. “Lou’s mad at me.”
James sat on the bed. I put my head on his damp shoulder. “Again? What’s the crime this time?”
“Nothing too bad.”
“I’m teasing.” James pushed my shoulders gently so I fell backward on the mattress. He leaned over to kiss my nose. “You can do no wrong.”
My cheeks warmed. Silver poked between our faces, her whiskers tickling my lips. Her left ear, I noticed, was missing its tip. “What happened there?”
“Oh, her superhero backstory. Vets do that to stray cats after they neuter them and release them back into the wild.”
“I didn’t know she was a stray.”
“Yeah, we found her by the sea.”
“In Holme?”
“Yeah. I was, what, fifteen, sixteen? She was super small, completely alone.” James’s voice softened. “She crawled onto my towel, basically straight from the ocean. There was gunk all over her eyes, and she was all cold, but she wasn’t shaking at all.”
I considered the information. If James found her when he was a teenager, that meant Silver was more than ten years old, more adult than kitten.
This disappointed me. Silver didn’t act like an adult.
She acted like she was discovering the world for the first time, and everything was either threatening or beautiful.
Milk, for example, which she lapped until she burped.
The dust motes that hung below the big window, enemies to be batted into oblivion.
And James, whom she followed everywhere, which was understandable.
“You took her from the beach? What if she had a family there?”
“She didn’t, she was alone.”
“What if she was lost? Or trying to lead you to her owner.”
James laughed. “No way, trust me. She was a stray, it was just her. I had to help.”
I looked at Silver and felt a mixture of pity and awe. Why did she choose to go to James out of everyone on the beach? Maybe she’d approached others before him, and he was the first to care. If I were him, I wasn’t sure what I’d have done. “I would’ve been pretty scared.”
“Me too, if I were her.” James patted her head. “But she was strangely calm. She came straight to me. The vet said she wouldn’t live because she was so sick, but she did.”
I frowned. Silver’s head bobbed to the movement of James’s fingers. Her eyes cracked open and shifted between the both of us. She seemed to have something important to say about the whole situation and how little either of us knew about any of it. Then she yawned, her breath milky, and fell asleep.