Springwell Creeks #5
She rubbed her puffy eyes, exhaling slowly before catching sight of the counter. Right. The community potluck. The food she still needed to cook. But first, she needed to rinse away Marielle’s scent and the bittersweet longing she couldn’t quite shake.
“I’m taking a shower,” she said to the cat, pointing at it like it had opinions she needed to pre-empt. “Don’t get any ideas. You’re not staying. This is,” her voice wobbled as she gestured vaguely at the tuna can, the kitchen, her entire life, “strictly temporary.”
The cat regarded her, unimpressed, then returned to licking the last traces of tuna from the bowl.
Safi sniffed then tried again. Firmer. “You heard me. Temporary. You’re not moving in. I don’t do commitment.”
The cat flicked its tail as if to say, “Sure sweetheart, whatever helps you sleep.”
“I sleep very well, thank you,” she retorted. Great, now I’m having conversations with a cat. Safi shook her head, defeated by six pounds of fur. “Right. Well, glad we understand each other.”
She headed toward the hallway, stopping herself from saying anything else to the cat. No need to be known as the woman who had full-blown conversations with her pets.
Strays, she quickly corrected herself.
The cat, finished with its bowl, looked up from it and followed her, tiny paws pitter-pattering across the floor.
“No,” Safi said, motioning to the kitchen as she walked. “You stay here. I’m just taking a shower. You are not…accompanying me.”
The cat blinked and kept following.
Safi stopped halfway down the hall, hair sticking to her damp cheeks, sweater sleeves pushed up, her composure held together by a fraying thread. The cat sat politely at her feet, tail curled like a question mark.
“This is not how this works,” she insisted, though her voice had no real bite in it. “You don’t get to just wander in here, eat my emergency tuna, and”—she gestured helplessly at its tiny face—“supervise my hygiene routine.”
The cat meowed, unfazed. Safi let out a thin, exhausted laugh that cracked in the middle. “Unbelievable.”
She turned toward the bathroom door, trying to gather the last scraps of her dignity.
The cat trotted right behind, small paws tapping the floorboards.
At the threshold, Safi placed a hand on the doorframe.
She was still shaky. Still hurting. Still trying not to fall apart again. She glanced down at her visitor.
The cat sat, patient and expectant. Safi sighed, opened the bathroom door, and stepped inside. Before she could close it fully, a small paw nudged at the crack and the cat slipped inside. She resigned herself to her fate, too exhausted to fight both the universe and a cat.
“You’re not staying,” she whispered, more to herself than the cat. “This is just…tonight. That’s it.”
The cat answered by curling up on her crumpled sweater beside the sink, tucking its face into the fabric like it had known her scent forever.
Tired from Marielle, from the crying, from the way her memories dragged her under, the thought of standing upright under hot water made her bones ache. She turned the faucet for the tub, letting warm water roar into the quiet. Steam began to rise, softening the harsh edges of the bathroom light.
The hot water enveloped her as she slid into the bath with her knees tucked up; the tub wasn’t long enough to stretch out.
She leaned back to dip her shoulders and head into the warmth.
Her hair swam around her as she hovered between sinking and floating.
For a moment, she simply breathed, water lapping at her chin, the rest of the world nothing but white noise beyond the water’s weight.
She exhaled and let the warmth and steam loosen the last knots in her shoulders. When the comfort threatened to tip into sleep, she sat up and rested her chin rest on her knees, arms curled loosely around them.
Christmas Eve always did this. Ripped her wide open, forcing her to try to mend the tear by slow degrees. But there was something else, too, something that hovered just beyond the reach of anger. A restless pressure she couldn’t settle or explain.
Things hadn’t been bad when it ended. That was the problem. Things had been good. The four of them had already found an apartment and were leaving Crickalade Bay. She and Nai were going on their biggest adventure yet.
And then, nothing. No fight she could replay.
No fracture she could trace with her finger and say, ‘There. That’s where it broke.
’ One day it was all fine, and the next…
it wasn’t. Nai was just gone. Not physically at first, but distant.
Like an ocean had sprung up between them and no matter how Safi tried, she couldn’t find a way across.
And then, Nai left.
No note or warning, no last word. Only a glimpse of her slim frame through a fogged bus window as it rolled out of town. Safi stood on the curb, a bag of pastries cooling in her hands, the sky too bright and silent.
Safi’s brow furrowed. She tried to follow the memory upstream, back in time. Tried to remember the moment the air changed. The words that must have been said. Her mind held only blank water.
It wasn’t just about Nai. There were lost days, but not in the regular way someone forgets what they ate or did the week before.
There were absences that chewed through the fabric of that summer.
Entire afternoons and evenings flickered and vanished, like pages torn from the spine of a diary.
She would blink and find the calendar had leapt, conversations replaying out of order, the narrative of her own summer unraveling behind her.
There was a before and after to every memory, and for Safi, that line was drawn in the late summer of 1995.
She had awoke one morning to find her shoes by the door, caked thick with dried mud, the soles patterned with pine needles and moss.
Leaves were tangled in her hair, clinging to the back of her neck.
Her clothes were clammy with the lingering chill of lake water, that sharp, mineral smell of something wild and old.
Her skin felt scraped clean, raw at the elbows and knees, as if she’d spent hours in the water, or crawling through wet earth.
When she looked in the bathroom mirror, her own face startled her.
Her red-rimmed eyes wide, lips parted as if caught in the middle of a question she didn’t know how to finish.
She stood, heartbeat stuttering, as she tried to patch together how she’d gotten home and what had happened.
The woods? The lake? Nai? Nothing held. No memory of slipping out the door.
No recollection of running barefoot over roots and stones, or of swimming.
Only the residue: dirt, water, the scent of moss and mildew.
A tingle of unease had crept through her bones. A sense of being watched from somewhere just outside the glass, as if the bowing trees themselves remembered what she could not. As if they knew why Nai had walked away from them, leaving nothing but questions in her wake.
Safi drew her knees closer, water sloshing softly, and attempted to shake the feeling.
She’d learned not to linger on it. Or on that summer and what little she remembered.
Because if she thought about it too hard, her body did this stupid thing where it reached for Nai as if it could sense her somewhere in the static.
Twenty years later, and she still hadn’t found a place where she felt more safe, more at home, than she had with Nai.
Some nights she could feel the weight of Nai’s arm across her waist, the warm press of her body tucked close behind her. She’d blink awake to find the bedroom empty, nothing but silence and the ghost of the woman she’d once loved keeping her company.
She pressed her forehead to her knees, blinking away the last remnants of grief. Something brushed her arm, a gentle, curious nudge.
Safi lifted her head, vision blurred. The cat perched on the solid lip of the tub, paws steady, leaning close enough to touch its nose to her damp skin. Another careful nudge followed. Then a third, more insistent, like it was checking in.
A laugh escaped her. “You’re ridiculous,” she whispered, wiping at her eyes with wet fingers.
The cat blinked slowly, tail curled neatly around its paws, as if to say look who’s talking.
“Really?” she murmured. “I can’t even have a private meltdown in the bath?”
The cat booped her again. A firm little tap of reassurance.
Safi shook her head, warmth creeping into her chest in a way the bath water hadn’t quite managed.
“You’re impossible,” she said quietly. She never would’ve thought a stray cat could pull her out of her own head, but here she was, focused on this ball of floof.
Maybe forgetting was its own kind of survival.
The cat settled into a loaf beside her, keeping quiet watch like it had appointed itself guardian of her bath.
“Where did you come from?” Safi asked as she watched the cat. It didn’t have a collar, and Springwell wasn’t exactly known for its large population of strays. With all the coyotes and foxes roaming the foothills, most cats didn’t last long without a home. She could ask at the potluck tomorrow.
“Speaking of which…” If she stalled any longer, her reputation—and possibly her dignity—would be roasted alongside the potatoes.
Motivated by that, Safi washed herself, letting the hot water chase away the last of her restless, circling thoughts.
She wriggled into her oldest, softest t-shirt and a pair of mismatched socks, hair wrapped in a towel as she shuffled into the kitchen.
The cat followed, almost tripping her as it weaved between her feet.
She cursed and reached for the freezer to steady herself. When the cat was done trying to murder her, she cracked it open. Cold air ghosted over her face as the cat jumped up on the counter beside her, tail twitching.