Chapter Eight
A sharp, painful weight on her chest cut through the confusing dream Ivy was having. One moment, she was on a date, but the person across from her kept changing from Austin to Grant. The next moment, ten pounds of flying fur used her nipple as a springboard.
Five years ago, the universe’s Cat Distribution System had bestowed upon her parents an orange cat in possession of exactly six brain cells.
He had wandered up the driveway one night when they were getting out of the car, meowing at them like they’d missed curfew; flopped on his side; and rolled around until her mom gave in and petted him.
His loud, lawn-mower purr stole Sophie’s heart.
Paul took more convincing. He refused to let the stray cat into the house for weeks, until the first cold night of fall.
Sophie came home to Paul sleeping in his armchair with the cat on his lap.
Ivy’s feline brother was named Hastings, after Hercule Poirot’s companion, and in the first twelve hours she’d known him, she’d discovered he was the annoying little brother she never wanted.
After she got home from the bar, confused and aflutter that Austin Underwood had asked her out on a date, Ivy found Hastings snoozing on her pillow. Not a big deal. She removed him to the hall, shut the door, and turned over the pillow so she wouldn’t spend the entire night inhaling cat hair.
Then the scratching started.
A few gentle paw taps became furious scraping, meowing, and yowling until she let Hastings back in the room. He padded in casually like he hadn’t been screaming the house down and made himself at home on her pillow again.
“No,” she said firmly, and moved him to the foot of the bed. Hastings scrambled right back.
Ivy was finally able to come to a compromise with Hastings: he got three-quarters of the pillow and she took up as little space as possible. And how did that orange menace repay her? By making her a key feature in his zoomies racetrack.
Ivy stared up at the ceiling, where the last remnants of her astronomy phase—glow-in-the-dark stars—stared back at her.
She was going to have to find a way to take those down.
Was twenty-year-old adhesive more or less strong than fresh adhesive?
Because while it was old, it was also a survivor in the eternal struggle against gravity.
Austin Underwood had asked her on a date.
Her inner sixteen-year-old was screaming, crying, throwing up.
So why was her outer twenty-seven-year-old not jumping with the same kind of joy?
Why, when he’d asked, had her eyes immediately gone to Grant?
The mixture of confusion and horror that flashed across his face before he could school it into a neutral expression had decided her answer for her.
“We absolutely should get dinner. Let me give you my number.”
If Grant didn’t think Austin could possibly be interested in her, she was going to prove him wrong.
The smell of coffee lured her downstairs. Her parents were in the kitchen, getting ready to leave for work. Her mother was packing their lunch boxes, and her dad was cradling Hastings like a baby, scratching his furry chest and telling him what a wonderful boy he was.
Ivy had some choice words about her dad’s new favorite child.
“How did you sleep?” Sophie asked.
“Fine,” Ivy said and took a coffee mug from the cupboard.
“Did Hastings snuggle with you?” Paul set the cat down and brushed a few stray orange hairs from his tweed jacket.
Ivy grabbed the coffeepot and started to pour. “He was definitely in my bed.”
Sophie put two open travel mugs next to Ivy’s coffee mug so she could fill them, too. “What’s on your agenda for the day?”
Ivy shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe start decluttering?” There were a lot of books in her room that could get boxed up.
“Don’t worry about that. You should relax,” Sophie encouraged. “Paul? Can you go scrape the car windows?”
“Of course.” Her dad kissed her mom’s cheek and headed outside, whistling.
Once the door closed behind him, her mother turned to her with all the seriousness of a general in a war room.
“I want to throw your dad a surprise retirement party. Have everyone dress up like him, maybe get a caterer, decorations, the whole shebang. So your job for today is to make some calls, work up some lists, and report back.”
“Mom, it’s Christmas party season; do you really think—”
“Yes, I really think.” The earnest pleading on her face melted Ivy’s heart.
“Okay, I will eschew packing to plan Dad a retirement party. Can you get me a guest list?”
“I will email you all of my preliminary party planning when I get to school.” Sophie wrapped her arm around Ivy’s shoulders and squeezed. “You’re my favorite daughter.”
“Good thing I’m running unopposed.”
The front door creaked when it opened. Paul shouted, “Soph, do you want to bring me the cookies and I’ll put them in your car so we don’t get the floors wet?”
“Sometimes your father is a real angel.”
Ivy helped her mother transport tins heavy with cookies, ran back to the kitchen to get her parents’ coffees, and finally shut the front door against the bitter morning cold.
Hastings’s meow almost made her hit the ceiling.
“What do you want?” she asked the cat.
He meowed again.
“Do you want…pets?” She bent over to scratch him behind the ears, but the ginger idiot turned and trotted into the kitchen before she could touch him. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. I don’t speak cat!”
She followed him. Hastings paced in front of his food dish, crying like a poor, starved orphan.
“Did they forget to give you breakfast?”
Another pathetic meow as he rubbed against her legs.
Ivy found a few cans of wet food in the pantry, cracked one open, and deposited it in his bowl. Hastings dove on the stinking mass with all the elegance of a hyena. Despite herself, Ivy’s stomach rumbled.
The fridge was stocked to the point of bursting.
On a hunch, Ivy started checking expiration dates.
Six bottles of salad dressing later, she pulled the garbage can to the fridge and began tossing out anything “shelf stable” that wasn’t from the current calendar year, plus anything perishable that was past its sell-by date or had visible mold.
She stopped when she’d filled the trash can. Twice.
She made toaster waffles for breakfast and shuddered to think of the state of her parents’ garage deep freezer.
“I’m going to need to rent a dumpster,” she told Hastings as she buttered her waffle. In response, the cat groomed himself loudly and vigorously. “Oh yeah. You’re exactly what having a little brother would have been like.”
Ivy took her plate and her coffee mug up to her room, Hastings close on her heels. He jumped onto her pillow so she wouldn’t get any wrong ideas about whose room it was these days.
Her phone was vibrating on her nightstand. She checked the caller ID to make sure it wasn’t the airline trying to trick her into working.
Brad was calling her back.
“Where were you last night?” she asked immediately.
“Hello to you, too.” He yawned. “I was working the red-eye to Amsterdam. It popped into premium and Daddy needed the money. I guess you survived small-town bar culture?”
“Just barely.” Ivy sat on her bed and leaned back against her pillows. Hastings yelped, and her coffee splashed onto her hand as she shot up.
“What was that?”
“My parents’ cat. He thinks my bed is his bed. I’m going to have cat hair in my nose and mouth for the next year.” She glared at Hastings, who glowered right back.
“You poor baby,” Brad said flatly. “How was the high school reunion?”
“The bar was packed, so I didn’t spend any time with Starr, but she gave me tequila.”
“Did all of your clothes stay on?”
“Yes, and thank goodness. The Coeur-de-Lac police force would literally have nothing better to do than come arrest me for public indecency.”
Brad chuckled. “Remember in Puerto Vallarta when you got so drunk you threw your empty lobster tail into the ocean so it could ‘be free’?”
“Let’s not compare mistakes we’ve made while drunk, Bradley. At least mine don’t have names and social security numbers.” Ivy’s eyes wandered out her window. The Underwood house peeked through her partially parted curtains. “I saw him last night.”
If she didn’t before, she had Brad’s full attention now. “Which him?”
“Both.”
Brad’s voice reached previously undiscovered octaves. “Both? Why didn’t you lead with that?”
“I was working up to it!” Hastings headbutted her elbow, which made her spill coffee all over her pajama pants. “Fuck!”
“Okay, it’s not that big of a deal. Or maybe it was? What happened?”
“No, the cat made me spill my coffee again…argh.” Her frustrated groan rumbled deep in her chest. “Remember how I said I sometimes get sad because I don’t have siblings? I take it back.”
Ivy put her coffee mug on her nightstand and tried to take off her pajama pants with one hand.
“What happened,” she began, “is that Austin had no idea who I was.”
“In his defense, you did stop hating your hair and embraced those glorious curls.”
“See, I would agree, except Starr recognized me, Austin’s sister Piper recognized me, Grant recognized me—Tony fucking Egbert recognized me!”
“Is Fucking his real middle name?”
“I will hang up on you, and then you’ll never know what happened,” Ivy threatened.
Brad chuckled. “Okay, so everyone but Austin Underwood—I still cannot believe you know him—recognized you. It happens, babe. Why is it bothering you so much?”
“Because Grant said Austin would never notice me. Our last names were next to each other in the alphabet for thirteen years. Our pictures are right next to each other in every single yearbook. Our mothers are inseparable. We’re neighbors!
I don’t want Grant to be right. So I agreed to go on a date with him. ”
“You’re going on a date with Grant because Austin didn’t recognize you?”
“No, I’m going on a date with Austin because Grant said he’d never notice me, and I want him to be wrong.”
There was an extended silence on the other end of the phone call.
“Brad?”