Chapter 11 — TEO
Zay texts at six fourteen that he’s on his way with the cat toys. A friend of his was moving and giving away a cat tree. This is a professional courtesy. Nothing more than that. Obviously.
I buzz him in without asking any follow-up questions because I am deeply committed to the integrity of feline happiness. The bolognese on the stove is a coincidence. The playlist running through the speaker on the kitchen counter is just music. Nothing to see here.
Parker is on the couch corner in her corner. The one with her special blanket and twenty toys she moves around the apartment every hour. She hears the knock before I get to it and her ears rotate but she doesn’t move.
I open the door. Zay is in a gray quarter-zip and joggers, carrying a box. His eyes move past me into the apartment immediately, scanning the way he scans. Taking inventory.
“Shoes okay here?”
“Anywhere.” I step back. “Parker’s on the couch. Holding court.”
He steps in. His shoes come off and he lines them up by the door, paired, angled.
Then he’s standing in my living room and I watch his eyes take it in.
The counter crowded with a cutting board and open spice jars, nonna’s bolognese recipe taped to the cabinet.
The fridge with nonna’s opinions: a note about proper tomato storage, a prayer card from my cousin’s baptism, a photo of me at eight holding a fish I caught that summer in Belmar.
Kitten toys scattered across the hardwood.
Sneakers Parker hasn’t destroyed yet, living on borrowed time.
“It’s a lot,” I say, trying to look at my space through his eyes.
“It’s exactly what I expected.” He lets the smile grow, the one he doesn’t allow at work.
Parker watches him approach the couch. One ear forward, one rotated sideways, the full security assessment. Zay crouches and holds out his hand. She sniffs and touches her nose to his knuckle. Then she turns around, flicks her tail across his wrist, and resettles with her back to him.
“I think she just rejected you.”
“She acknowledged me and then chose her own terms.” He opens the box and pulls pieces out. “Think she’ll get in the way?”
“Definitely.” And as soon as the box is empty, Parker jumps right in. We both look at her, then each other, and break out laughing.
It takes less than thirty minutes to assemble the cat tree. Parker watches us from the security of the cardboard box. I push the tree toward the window and Parker jumps out of the box, approaches it, sniffing every inch. Then walks directly to Zay’s lap.
He freezes. His hands hover, palms up, like he’s not sure he’s allowed. She settles into the space between his crossed legs, tucks her paws under her chin, and closes her eyes.
“She likes you.”
His hand lowers, his whole palm running along her spine. She leans into it. I’ve never seen this look on him at the facility, a softness around his mouth, his jaw looser. How he holds himself at work just gone. I go to the stove and stir the bolognese and let the moment be.
“What’s playing?” he asks.
“Your track from Tuesday. The Moonchild one.”
“You made a whole playlist.”
“I sequenced them. Ranking implies hierarchy. Sequencing implies narrative.”
His laugh is quiet, barely there, directed at the kitten more than at me. “You read too many books, Marchetti.”
The bolognese is ready and I serve it in the wide bowls nonna sent me when I moved. He takes a bite and his eyebrows go up and he doesn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“This is really good.”
“It’s my nonna’s recipe.”
He eats like my family eats. All in, wholehearted, enjoying every burst of flavor. Parker has abandoned Zay’s lap for the space between us, her body a small warm weight pressed against both our thighs, connecting us through four pounds of orange fur and total disregard for personal space.
Zay sets his bowl on the coffee table. I set mine next to it.
The song changes to a track he sent last week.
He’s leaning back, his head resting against the couch cushion, and Parker adjusts to accommodate the shift, wedging herself tighter between us.
One paw stretches out and lands on my thigh. Her other paw is on his.
His hand is on the back of the couch, not touching me, but close enough that I can feel the warmth of his arm.
His shoulder is six inches from mine and I close the distance.
Not all of it but enough that my shoulder touches his and he doesn’t move away.
Parker, inconvenienced by this tectonic shift, stands, walks across both our laps in protest, and then resettles on top of Zay’s thigh with her chin on my knee.
Claiming us both. Refusing the separation.
“Parker.” Zay’s voice is low. “You can’t be on two people at once.”
She can. She is. She ignores Zay and closes her eyes.
I reach over and scratch behind her ear. His hand finds my forearm, rests there. His thumb moves once across the inside of my wrist, one pass, and the touch is so small and so deliberate that my breath sits still for a second. The song ends and another starts in the background.
He turns his head and I move in and kiss him.
His mouth is warm and he tastes like nonna’s bolognese, which is the least romantic and most perfect thing I can think of.
His hand slides up my arm to my neck and I pull him closer and Parker, wedged between us, emits a single indignant chirp that says she is being compressed and would like us to take this elsewhere.
We both laugh into the kiss. His shoulders shake and I’m laughing too, a laugh that fills my whole chest and pushes out through my ribs.
Parker extracts herself from between us with the irritated grace of a woman who has been displaced by nonsense.
She jumps to the arm of the couch. Sits. Stares at us with both ears flat.
“She’s furious,” Zay says against my mouth.
“She’ll recover.”
“She might have permanently scars.” I feel the smile against my lips more than I see it.
I kiss him again and his hands are in my hair and the quarter-zip is soft under my fingers and I pull him closer until there’s no space left and the couch is too small for what I want and I don’t care.
His mouth moves to my neck and I make a sound I would never make at the facility and he laughs against my skin.
He pulls back to look at me and his face is open, his grin matching mine, and it hits me that I’m happy.
On a couch with the person I have been wanting all week, in my apartment where nobody can see us.
I get the smile I never get at work, and I earned it by making nonna’s bolognese and having a terrible kitten.
I pull his quarter-zip over his head. He lets me.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and he pulls it off.
His chest is warm against mine and I run my hands across his shoulders and down his back, the muscles I’ve watched work on my shoulder for months, but here they’re just his body and I can touch them because I want to and not because there’s a chart tracking the interaction.
We shift and the couch creaks and his hip hits the armrest and I catch him before he slides off. “Bed,” he says, and it’s not a question.
We walk down the hallway and land on my bed. His weight settles over me and I hook one leg around his hip. I run my thumb along his jaw.
He lowers himself and kisses me slow. Then less slow. His hand traces down my side and I arch up and the laugh that comes out of me is involuntary.
“Are you ticklish?” He pulls back and looks down at me.
“I didn’t know that was still a thing.”
“You didn’t know you were ticklish.”
“I forgot.”
“You forgot you were ticklish.” He presses the spot again. Deliberately. I twist away laughing and grab his wrist and he’s laughing too, the sound rumbling through his chest, and I flip him and pin his wrist above his head and his eyes are bright with challenge.
“Don’t.” He’s giving me a look that’s daring me.
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You were going to.”
“Prove it.” His voice is low and warm and daring and I kiss the grin off his face and his free hand slides down my back and pulls me flush against him. My hips press into his and the sound he makes is quiet and private and I want to hear it again.
He rolls us back, easy, his hands on my waist guiding me under him. His mouth trails down my jaw to my neck and his teeth scrape the tendon below my ear and my hips push up on instinct. He does it again, slower, and I feel the grin against my skin while he does it.
His mouth moves to my collarbone and his hand slides down my stomach, fingers tracing the line of hair below my navel, slow and deliberate and going nowhere near where I want him.
His palm flattens against my hip and his thumb traces the hollow above the bone and stays there, making small circles, and my whole body is paying attention to that thumb while the rest of him is kissing my chest like he has all night and no plans to speed up.
“Zay.”
“Mm.” His tongue drags across my nipple, flat and slow, and I exhale hard.
“You’re enjoying this too much.”
“No such thing.” Another slow pass with his tongue, and his thumb is still tracing my hip, and he’s not touching me where I’m hard and obvious against his stomach and the patience of this man is going to kill me.
He looks up and his eyes are warm and sharp and entertained. “You’re welcome to submit feedback.”
“My feedback is that you’re taking too long.”
“Noted.” He drops his mouth to my ribs and works his way down, press of lips, scrape of teeth, his hands on my hips holding me still when I try to push up.
He reaches the waistband of my joggers and hooks his fingers in and pulls them down slow, taking my briefs with them, and the cool air hits my cock and I’m so hard it’s almost funny.
He wraps his hand around me and holds me there. Just holds. Looking.
“Feedback window is still open,” he says.
“I’m going to kill you.”