23. Elara
Elara
The thing nobody tells you about four men leaving your apartment at once is how loud the quiet gets.
Also, I have no door. I have a doorway. There’s a difference, and the difference is that anyone in this building can currently watch me vacuum.
“Technically, Rayner broke the door,” I tell Gerald over the vacuum. “But sure. I’ll handle the murder confetti.”
And yes, I’m talking to him again. I’ve been publicly shamed for it once today already, so now it’s a matter of principle.
The splinters are everywhere. Under the desk. Behind the pull-out. There’s a piece of my door in the fruit bowl.
“The fruit bowl, Gerald! Explain the physics of that.”
I keep my back to the doorway while I work, which lasts about four minutes, because a doorway with no door in it is just a rectangle anyone could walk through, and apparently my body has opinions about that.
Fine. I turn around. I vacuum facing the rectangle like a woman guarding a castle with a Dyson.
Which is why I see him.
An orange head, peeking around the doorframe at exactly ankle height. One paw on my floor. The rest of him still in the hallway, undecided.
A cat.
I turn the vacuum off slow, like it’s a hostage negotiation, and I’m crouched down with my hand out before I’ve decided anything about anything.
“Hi,” I say, in a voice I will deny using. “Aren’t you just the cutest thing. Come here, baby.”
He watches me. Not skittish. Just watching, taking the whole room apart with his eyes first, like cats do.
Then he backs up a step, and my heart does something embarrassing.
“No no no, wait—”
I follow him into the hallway in my socks, doing the psspsspss, which I would rather die than have witnessed, and I’m alone and still embarrassed. He stops a few feet down the hall. Turns. Looks at me.
Then he comes to me like it was his idea the whole time.
I kneel on the hallway floor of my building, still in the sleep shirt with a hole in it, and this orange tabby walks straight into my hands, and that’s it. That’s the whole story. I’m gone.
No collar.
“Oh, buddy,” I whisper. “You know what that means.”
He blinks at me.
“Cat distribution system. Right to my door. That’s not a coincidence. That’s fate. Destiny. Possibly logistics. Who can tell?”
Because those are the rules. No collar means no owner. No owner means stray. Stray means the system has activated, and the system cannot be refused. Everyone knows this.
In other words, mine.
He’s got blue eyes. Deep blue, and I had no idea cat eyes came in that color. Which is the sort of thing that usually means somebody paid a lot of money for a cat once, which would mean he belongs to someone.
Designer kitty.
I overrule it. No collar. The system has spoken.
He lets me pick him up on the first try, which even I know is not how cats work. I decide it’s fate. Fate for sure this time, or excellent manners.
I carry him inside and set him down in the middle of the pull-out, right in the center of all my carefully arranged pillows, and he looks around once before he starts purring like he’s reviewed the accommodations and found them acceptable.
Then he flops down, rolls over, and shows me his entire belly.
I freeze. Cat belly is sacred. Cat belly is also, historically, a trap. And that absolutely does not make me think of another trap with curly hair and eyes that I could get lost in.
“That is a very reckless belly, sir.”
He looks at me upside down.
I go in.
He purrs harder. His paws curl. He does the full blissed-out stretch, head back, shameless, and I am rubbing the belly of a strange cat in my pull-out and I have never felt more chosen in my life.
“You can’t just show up here and deploy the belly,” I inform him. “That’s emotional warfare.”
He accepts this as a compliment.
Hospitality occurs to me. I have no cat food, because until eleven minutes ago I had no cat, so I pour him a little dish of cream and a bowl of water, and yes, I know cats aren’t supposed to have much dairy, but this is an emergency adoption and everyone needs grace.
He follows me around the kitchen while I do it, weaving through my legs in figure eights, and I nearly die twice. By the third pass I’m checking the floor before every step, automatically, like he’s always been down there.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Julie, my boss. Fantastic.
Need a rush piece — can you turn “Can Houseplants Improve Your Mood?” in two hours? Pulling a slot for it.
I look at my doorless apartment. The pull-out and the dragon box on the desk. The cat drinking cream out of my good ramekin. Gerald.
Gerald… My houseplant.
And suddenly I am so ready to write up every statistic I can find about how talking to your houseplants improves your mood. This time I am not thinking about a certain someone with a tongue ring.
Fucker.
Yes, I type, because I’m a professional disaster with a deadline and a vendetta.
I sit down at the desk and start typing, and I’m three sentences in when there’s a soft thump and suddenly there’s a cat on my desk.
He walks across it once, tail up, inspecting. Then he stops at the dragon box.
He sniffs it. Sniffs it again, longer. Paws at the lid, once, and presses his whole cheek against the carved dragon’s head, and for one second the purring stops.
“Nope.” I slide the box to the far corner. “That’s mine. We’re establishing boundaries on day one.”
He follows it with his eyes. Then he looks at me. I look at him.
I lose the staring contest. Badly. It’s not close.
The article stalls three paragraphs in, so I do what professionals do. Jumping jacks. Twenty of them, right next to the desk.
The cat watches the entire set with an expression I can only describe as reevaluating.
“Don’t judge me. It’s my process. The process ships nearly one hundred articles a year.”
When I sit back down, he steps off the desk into my lap like it was scheduled, turns around twice, and settles.
He’s heavier than he looks. Warm. My whole body adjusts around him without asking me — knees shifting, one hand typing, the other dropping to his back between paragraphs like it’s been doing this for years.
Somewhere around the section on pothos care, I look at Gerald.
“I always heard the cat distribution system was real,” I tell him. “Now we have proof. Which means he’s ours forever. Aren’t you excited? You have a brother!”
Gerald takes it well.
“He needs a name.”
The cat’s ear rotates toward me, which I’m choosing to read as participation.
“Pumpkin?” Too seasonal. “Marmalade?” Too sweet. “Toast?” Cute, but not him. “Kevin?” Tempting. Deeply tempting. But I can’t yell Kevin in an emergency without sounding like a tired mother in a grocery store.
He kneads my sleep shirt like he owns stock in it. Warm and orange and smug.
And I just know.
“Muffin,” I say.
His head comes up.
I gasp. “Oh my god. You know your name.”
He stares at me.
“Muffin,” I whisper, because obviously this is a sacred moment.
His tail flicks once.
“Gerald, he answered.”
Gerald says nothing, but I know support when I see it.
I finish the article with a cat now named Muffin in my lap and a deadline dissolving the way deadlines do when your nervous system has been professionally recalibrated by a stray.
And the whole thing beautifully shoves all the logic right in Gunnar’s stupid handsome face.
I grin at the monitor as I hit send because someone has to enjoy this.
Then I leave the article open. Full screen. Bright as a courtroom exhibit.
When he comes back, I want witnesses.
Somewhere in there I start talking without meaning to.
“You picked a weird day to show up, buddy.”
The purr goes on underneath my hand, steady as a motor.
“It’s kind of nice, though.” I scratch behind his ear. “Being picked.”
The purr changes. Deepens. He presses his head up into my wrist and holds it there, and I tell myself that’s a coincidence of cat. I lean back in the chair, and everything is, for one entire hour of my life, completely fine.
Which is when I notice someone standing in the doorway.
“Well, look who it is.”
Kyle.
“Told you I’d find you.”