24. Elara
Elara
Kyle is standing in my doorway.
Kyle is standing in my doorway because I don’t have a door, and the part of my brain that handles paperwork during emergencies notes that we really should have led with the door today.
They tried. I know they did. That’s where they are now.
It doesn’t change the fact that Erik left me here alone.
Please. Let me do this.
He said that, and now here I am. No door. No Erik. Alone with my ex.
Under my hand, the purring stops.
Not winds down. Stops.
“Look at this place.” Kyle steps inside. No knock. No may I. Kyle has never needed a door to be open to walk through it, and the one time in my life I don’t have one, here he is. “Still cozy. Not as cozy as when we were together, but you never were that good at decorating.”
My phone is on the kitchen counter. Across the room.
Okay…
Okay.
I breathe in, trying to calm myself.
It doesn’t work. It never did with him.
So we’re doing this the old-fashioned way.
“You can’t be in here,” I say.
“There’s no door.” He smiles like that settles it. To Kyle, it does. Kyle’s whole life runs on technicalities that only work in one direction.
Muffin pours off my lap and onto the floor. Unhurried. He crosses the rug and sits down directly between us, tail wrapped around his feet, and looks at Kyle like he’s an annoyance in his new kingdom.
“You got a cat.” Kyle doesn’t look at him. He’s wandering now, hands loose in his pockets, doing his lap of my apartment like it’s a showing. His eyes catch on the pull-out. The pillow wall. The blankets. “Big bed for one person, El.”
El. There it is. Everyone in my life is renaming me lately and his is the only one that feels like being handled.
“What do you want, Kyle.”
“To talk. We didn’t get to finish, the other day.
Your friend made sure of that.” Something moves under the easy voice when he says friend.
He drifts toward my desk. The monitor’s still on, still full screen, still glowing with the article I wrote as a weapon for a completely different man.
“Houseplants,” he reads, and huffs a laugh through his nose.
“Still doing the little articles. That’s good. That’s really good, El.”
There was a version of me that would have already apologized twice by now. For the mess. For the cat. For having a job he could shrink to a diminutive. I keep waiting for her to show up.
She doesn’t.
“You should go,” I say, and it comes out level, and level surprises both of us.
Kyle stops pretending to read my article. He turns around, and the easy is still on his face but it’s stretched thinner now, and underneath it is the thing I used to mistake for intensity back when I was grading on a curve.
“You’ve changed.” He says it like a diagnosis. Like something he’ll be generous enough to fix. “You know nobody’s going to know you like I do, right? That’s not a threat, El, that’s just—” he shrugs, reasonable, so reasonable, “—history.”
Muffin makes a sound.
I’ve had this cat for maybe three hours and I have never heard this sound.
I’ve had ears my whole life and I have never heard this sound from a cat before.
It’s low and continuous and it doesn’t rise and fall the way cat sounds do.
It just holds, and it’s coming from fourteen pounds of orange fluff sitting perfectly still in the middle of my rug.
“Your cat’s defective,” Kyle says.
“He has taste.”
That hits somewhere Kyle doesn’t like. I watch him decide to reset, watch him pick the old tool off the old shelf, and then he’s crossing to me, voice dropping into the register that used to work, “Hey. Come on. It’s me—”
His hand comes up.
The same move from the café. Fingers aiming for my cheek like no time has passed and no no has ever counted. My whole body goes cold and backward and I hate that, I hate that he still gets the cold—
Orange.
That’s all I see. Orange, off the floor, one motion, no sound at all — and then Kyle is screaming.
Actually screaming. Stumbling back with his hand clutched to his face and four bright lines opening across his cheek when he pulls it away. He knocks into my desk chair, and Muffin is already on the floor again, sitting, wrapping his tail back around his feet like he didn’t just do that.
“Your cat— your fucking cat—” Kyle swipes a kick at him. Muffin is no longer in any way located where the kick goes. He doesn’t even hurry about it. He’s simply elsewhere, watching, and the sound has stopped, because apparently it was a warning, and warnings are over.
“You should get that cleaned,” I hear myself say. “Cat scratches can get infected pretty quick.”
My voice comes out calm.
That feels worse than shaking would.
Kyle looks from the cat to me and back again, blood bright on his cheek, his shirt cuff, his fingers. Whatever math he’s doing, he doesn’t like the answer.
“You’re insane.” He’s backing toward the rectangle now, the easy gone, holding his hand like it’s the wounded party in all this. “You and your— whatever furry fucking monster that is. This isn’t over, El.”
“It’s Elara,” I say.
He leaves. No door to slam, because there’s no door. So he just — leaves, footsteps hard down the hall, and my apartment is mine again, and it’s so quiet I can hear my own pulse doing the thing it’s doing.
I walk to the doorway on legs I don’t fully trust, look out at an empty hall, and then I take hold of the vacuum and wheel it into the middle of the rectangle and park it there, facing out.
Sentry duty.
It’s not nothing.
The adrenaline holds for about four more seconds.
Then my knees inform me they’ve been load-bearing this entire time as a personal favor, and I sit down on the floor right where I am, and Muffin walks over and takes his lap back, and I run my hands over every inch of him — paws, ears, ribs, the works — checking for damage that isn’t there.
He’s fine. He’s insultingly fine. He’s already purring.
“New rule,” I tell him, and my voice only shakes a little. “We do not tell the guys you committed assault.”
The cat says nothing. Obviously.
“I mean it. They’ll make it a whole thing.”
He bumps his head under my chin and holds it there, and the purr comes up through my hands, and I hold on to Muffin because I can’t be alone right now.
And Erik can never know.