Chapter 17 - Jamison #2
Hen: Lol I finished the lasagna while you were cooking. I even gave the cats a nibble each of the mystery meat from it.
Me: Great, now they’re probably gonna grow tentacles.
Hen: That would be badass. Tentacle cats! Wait, does that mean I’m gonna grow tentacles too, since I ate most of it? Not sure how I feel about that.
Me: Nah, mystery meat has different effects on humans. You’ll just start getting an urge to moo uncontrollably.
Hen: What? I want a refund!
Me: Mwahaha, too late. You’ll have to be content with your tentacle cats.
Hen: Lol imagine what mischief they’d get into with extra limbs. And aren’t tentacles prehensile? They’d be opening cabinets and packages all day long, helping themselves to things. Danger! Brb doing a cat limb count.
Hen: Still just four each. Though Solo’s tail is looking…suspiciously like it has a personality.
Me: Dun dun DUN. But I think that’s just the floof. The floof has a mind of its own.
Kellogg appeared on the table beside my bowl, startling me. Shouldn’t I have been able to hear her jump up? I needed to get these cats bells.
Me: Is there any reason I shouldn’t buy the cats collars with bells on them?
“No, Kellogg!” I dropped my phone and pushed her curious nose away from my food. “This is not cat food.”
Ignoring me, she continued to nose at the bowl until I picked her up bodily and deposited her on the floor. When I straightened up in my chair and returned my attention to the table, it was to find Minnie with a paw extended, delicately extracting a piece of macaroni from my bowl.
“No, dammit.” I gave Minnie a gentle shove until she made a miffed little noise and stalked away to the other side of the table. “This is people food,” I informed the little varmints. “Cats don’t eat macaroni and cheese.”
Minnie gave me a look that clearly communicated Says who? and tiptoed back across the table toward me. “No.” I wrapped a defensive arm around my bowl and began shoveling pasta into my face; clearly the only way to win this game was to empty the bowl so they couldn’t try to steal the contents.
My phone buzzed, and I gave Minnie another push away, getting her far enough to buy me some time to check my messages.
Hen: [link to listing for a belled cat collar]
Hen: You’ll thank yourself later, trust me. Sneaky little bastards.
I spooned up another bite of macaroni and stuffed it into my mouth with one hand, using the other to slowly thumb in a message to Hen.
Me: Sold. Will order when I’m done eating. Said sneaky little bastards are trying to steal my macaroni.
Hen: In my experience, cats love carbs. And cheese. I think you’re doomed.
Me: Fml. They’re lucky they’re so cute.
Kellogg levitated back onto the table, landing alongside her daughter, and now I was fending off two curious noses.
I spooned up the last bite of pasta and gulped it down.
“There,” I told the cats, “all gone. Now whatcha gonna do?” Kellogg darted in and licked the cheese sauce that clung to the bowl and I yelped.
“That wasn’t a challenge!” I pushed her away, but now Minnie was doing it.
“Damn it.” I jumped to my feet and went to rinse the bowl in the sink.
“You’re a pair of menaces to my sanity.”
Kellogg hopped up on the counter, and I prepared to defend my wet bowl from her, but instead she just popped up high enough to rub her head under my chin.
Meanwhile, Minnie twined around my ankles, scent-marking me as high up as she could reach, and then, apparently unsatisfied, hooked her claws into my jeans and started scaling my leg.
Dammit, why were they so cute? This was how they got what they wanted out of me, every damn time.
Well, they were out of luck this time. I shook the water off the bowl and plopped it into the dishwasher with Minnie still hanging off my thigh, then cupped my dry hand around her little butt and urged her to climb the rest of the way up to my shoulder.
“Menace,” I said affectionately as she nosed my ear. She purred.
Sighing in defeat, I walked back to the table with a cat on my shoulder to pick up my phone.
Me: [selfie of Jamison with Minnie hanging on his shoulder]
Me: See what I put up with?
Hen: Oh. You poor soul. How do you survive. Etc etc.
Hen: [photo of Curie curled into a perfect ball on Hen’s lap]
Hen: Welp, guess I’m not moving for the foreseeable future.
Moving carefully so as not to dislodge the kitten on my shoulder, I lowered myself to my couch and picked up the remote.
Me: Wanna watch something together?
Hen: [wide smile emoji] There’s a new Korean cop drama I’ve been wanting to start on Prime. The main character is gay and there’s apparently lots of gore and forensics.
Me: Sold.
I flipped my tv to Prime and searched the name of the series he sent me, then initiated a video call to Hen.
“Hey.” His sleepy face appeared on my phone screen and he smiled. “You ready for this?”
I grinned. “Bring on the blood.” I reached up to scratch Minnie’s butt, which wiggled in pleasure under my hand. “So, how long have you been trapped under Curie?”
“Only like ten minutes.” The view on my phone dipped until I could see the cat with Hen’s hand resting on her back. “She’ll probably get bored of me before too long and wander off.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” I teased, rolling my eyes. “I hope you didn’t want any viewing snacks. I’d get them for you if I were there, but…”
“Hmph,” he grumped at me. “I wish you were here. TV is always better with someone to snuggle.”
“What about -”
“Someone human. I mean, the cat is nice, but it’s not quite the same thing, you know?”
My mind drifted to what we could be doing if we were together, and I sighed before I could stop myself. “I know. Two more days.” This whole living-apart thing was for the birds.
Wait, what? What, did I suddenly want to move in with my boyfriend of two weeks? That was moving just a smidge fast, I reminded myself. Let’s not terrify the poor boy.
We hit Play simultaneously on our televisions and settled back in relative silence to watch the first episode of the new show.
Minnie settled down hanging half-over my shoulder, purring loudly in my ear, while Kellogg made herself a nest out of my afghan on the couch cushion next to me, also purring.
I flipped the kickstand out on the back of my phone and set it on the coffee table so Hen could see my face without me having to hold the phone the whole time.
“Damn,” he said about twenty minutes in when the first body appeared, covered in blood spatter. “This makes me reconsider that lasagna.”
I chuckled. “There are no cow lips in this scene, I think you’re safe.”
“I mean hey,” he protested, “there might be. What do you think they make on-screen gore out of, anyway?”
“Not cow lips!” I insisted. “Pretty sure it’s, like, putty sculptures and fake blood.”
“Ok, you’re probably right.” He sighed and shifted his weight slightly. I heard a peeved little mrrp from the direction of his lap, and he looked down. “Sorry, sweetie. My butt’s going numb.”
Mmm, butts. “I can help with that,” I said, licking my lips lasciviously.
He looked back up at me. “Friday, you can help all you want. All night long. Oh!” We jumped in unison as a shot rang out on the screen. “Damn, wasn’t expecting that. Sorry, Curie.”
A furry cat head popped up between Hen and the phone camera; apparently Hen’s jump had disturbed Her Majesty, who was now standing. “Hey baby,” I couldn’t help but coo to her. “How you doing?”
Curie turned her head to regard the phone curiously, then nosed at it as if she was trying to get to me. I squeed quietly. “She misses me!”
Hen gave me a gentle smile. “I think she does. That makes two of us.”
“Aww.” I blew him a kiss, then looked back at the tv, where the detective was conversing in subtitled Korean with a forensics tech. “Ten bucks says they’re going to bang.”
“The cop and the tech?” he asked, eyes rising over the top of the phone and presumably focusing on his tv. “Hmm, maybe. Or maybe you’re just horny,” he added teasingly.
“?Por qué no los dos?”
He grinned and cocked his head to the side curiously. “Do you actually speak Spanish, or are you just quoting the commercial?”
“Un poco. Suficiente para pedir comida.”
His smile widened. “I have no idea what you just said, but I’m sure it was impressive. I speak…English. And a little German, from high school. Wo ist die Toilette? Mein Name ist Henry. Et cetera.”
“That’s more German than I speak. Too bad neither of us speaks Korean, or we could be critiquing these subtitles.”
“Yeah.” He stroked Curie’s ears. “That was definitely not offered in my high school. There’s always DuoLingo.”
I shrugged. “I’m holding out for the invention of the Babelfish.”
“Like in Hitchiker’s Guide?”
I blinked at him. He blinked back at me. “Exactly,” I finally said, picking the phone back up and bringing it closer to my face. “I didn’t expect you to get that joke.”
He grinned. “You should see the contents of my Kindle. It’s a madhouse.”
“I…would actually love to do that sometime,” I confessed. “Seeing someone’s library shelves is like seeing them naked. And I’ve already seen you naked.” I wiggled my eyebrows. “I liked the view.”
He laughed loudly. “Well, my library shelves contain a mix of sci-fi, nonfiction, and embarrassing gay romance, so…”
“What makes it embarrassing?” I couldn’t help but ask. “I mean, is it just that romance is cheesy, or…?”
He mumbled something I didn’t catch.
“What?”
“Omegaverse empreg.”
That…didn’t clear anything up. “Come again?”
He coughed. “M-preg,” he enunciated a bit more clearly. “In the omegaverse.”
“Ok I…sort of know some of those words. A little. Explain?”
He flushed dully. “There’s a genre of gay romance set in what’s called the ‘omegaverse’, where it’s sort of like…wolf pack dynamics? With alphas and betas and omegas?”
“Like, the alphas are in charge, and…?”