Chapter 4
Taio
Living alone is mostly hell, but there’s a certain freedom in heating up a Hungry-Man at four p.m. while still wearing yesterday’s sweatpants, with no witnesses to your decline except the walls.
Well. Almost no witnesses.
Black Cat sits on the kitchen counter—a place he knows he’s not supposed to be because his furry ass is not welcome where I prepare my food.
I’d scold him but nothing works. He likes water sprayed in his face.
Shaking a penny can just riles him up. And he thinks “Bad Cat” is a compliment.
I feel his glowing yellow-green eyes transfixed on me as I peel back the plastic film on my Salisbury steak to vent my frozen meal before nuking it in the microwave.
I glance up to see him staring with the intensity of a food critic at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
He tracks every movement of my hands, whiskers twitching in what I can only describe as disappointment.
“Don’t judge me,” I tell him. “You eat right out of a can.”
He blinks slowly. Judgment rendered.
I found Black Cat four months ago, yowling in the alley behind my building like someone was murdering him with a rusty spoon.
He used to be scrawny, matted, feral as hell—the kind of cat that would sooner claw your eyes out than accept a belly rub.
I made the mistake of leaving a bowl of tuna on my fire escape, thinking I was doing a good deed for a wild creature who’d move on by morning.
He did not move on.
He moved in.
I refuse to name him because naming him would mean admitting he’s mine, and I’m still clinging to the delusion that he’s a free spirit who chose to crash at my place temporarily.
Any day now, he’ll remember he’s a wild animal with places to be and disappear into the urban jungle from whence he came.
Any day now.
The name “Black Cat” was supposed to be a declaration of my apathy.
He’s not my pet, just a passing stray. Except it stuck like gum to a shoe.
Now when I say it, his ears do that radar-dish swivel thing, and he makes this chirpy half meow that sounds suspiciously like he’s correcting my pronunciation.
So much for maintaining emotional distance.
The microwave whirls to life, and I shuffle my ass to the couch to wait—the same couch where Forrest and I used to demolish entire pizzas while arguing about NFL playoff contenders and whether the DC Universe is superior to Marvel.
For the record, it is. He’s wrong. I’m the literary critic here.
There’s something enthralling about the hauntingly beautiful broody heroes from DC.
The apartment feels too big without him, which is ridiculous because it’s a shoebox even by Brooklyn standards. But when you’ve shared barely seven hundred square feet with your best friend for two years, his absence leaves a crater.
Not that I begrudge him. Forrest left the business when he found love.
Real love, the kind that makes a guy a simp who moves to a brownstone with a woman to play house, and somehow finagles her father’s blessing despite the fact he’s a former escort.
He built this beautiful, traditional family lifestyle for his four-year-old who says “Daddy” like it’s the highest praise.
I’m happy for the guy. He deserves every bit of it.
I just miss the bastard. He’s never around anymore.
The microwave announces my gourmet feast with a pathetic little ding.
I extract my plastic tray of sadness and shuffle the five steps to what the rental listing generously called a “dining area.” It’s barely enough room for a coffee table with one wobbly leg propped up by a Stephen King paperback in front of my couch that sags in all the wrong places.
That Stephen King novel came from my other best friend, Saylor, who thought he was doing me a favor when he discovered I “read books.” Little did he know it would serve me better as furniture repair than entertainment.
These days he’s well aware of my actual preference: romance novels, stacked in precarious towers beside my bed.
I started devouring them after the one-two punch of my father’s perp walk on the local news, and then finding Alaina’s side of the closet cleared out.
Something about watching fictional people get the endings I never would became its own kind of therapy.
Black Cat leaps from the counter to the couch in one fluid motion, landing beside me with the grace of a panther and the entitlement of a trust-fund baby. He stares at my Salisbury steak.
“No.”
He stares harder.
“You have your own food.”
He puts one paw on my thigh. Gentle. Almost polite. The audacity.
“Fine.” I tear off a corner of the mystery meat and hold it out. He sniffs it, recoils, and gives me a look that clearly communicates: I expected better from you.
“Yeah, well. Join the club.” I only eat well when my clients are paying for it. Every spare dime I have goes to Dad’s legal team who apparently want my nonexistent firstborn child to chip a few years off from his sentence.
I eat in the dead silence, annoyed by the sound of my own chewing, trying not to stress about the promise I made to Anne Carrington three days ago.
A hundred thousand dollars by fall? What the actual fuck was I thinking?
I said the words like they were nothing, like I had that kind of money sitting in a sock drawer somewhere.
Like I wasn’t already drowning in my father’s debts with no life raft in sight.
Joy deserves to go to Stanford. She’s worked her entire life for that acceptance letter, and she shouldn’t have to give it up because my dad decided to play Robin Hood in reverse—stealing from people who trusted him and keeping it all for himself.
But a hundred thousand dollars.
I set my fork down, appetite gone. And not just because the gray-ish mystery meat is scalded on the outer rim and still a little frozen in the middle.
Releasing a deep exhale, I force myself to think about anything else outside of the pressure of my impossible promise. Unfortunately, my brain—the traitor that it is—immediately swaps out one form of self-torture for another.
My phone is right there on the coffee table, and I know I shouldn’t. I know it’s self-destructive and pointless and will only make me feel worse. But my fingers are already moving, already typing her name into the search bar, already pulling up the profile I swore I’d never look at again.
Alaina Carrington.
Her profile picture is new. She’s on a beach somewhere—Turks and Caicos, maybe, or one of those other places that rich people go to feel richer—wearing a white sundress and laughing at something off-camera. She looks happy. Genuinely, radiantly happy in a way I’m not sure I ever made her.
I scroll down.
There he is. Bradley. The fiancé. And as advertised in the vacation photos, this guy isn’t just rich. He’s Scrooge McDuck rich.
He’s exactly what I expected: clean-cut, strong jaw, the kind of guy who probably played lacrosse at some Ivy League school and summers as a verb. His arm is around Alaina in every photo, possessive but casual, like she’s always been his.
Met the love of my life three years ago today, his caption reads. Can’t wait to make her my wife.
Three years ago.
That math doesn’t sit right in my stomach. Three years ago, Alaina and I were still together. Three years ago, I was planning to propose at the Marionette with her parents’ blessing. Three years ago, I thought I knew exactly what my future looked like.
Did she meet him before or after she left me? Did our timelines overlap? Was she already falling for Mr. Lacrosse while I was picking out rings and rehearsing speeches and believing we had a future?
I scroll further. Engagement photos. More vacation photos.
Photos of them at restaurants that look suspiciously like our old spots.
There’s one of them at a rooftop bar I used to take her to—our bar, the place where we had our first real date where I made it clear I was no longer interested in playing ball in the friend zone.
He’s kissing her cheek in the same spot where I told her she was the one.
I study the image closer… How can she laugh for the camera like that when the ghost of us is surrounding her?
A vise clamps around my ribs, squeezing until I can barely breathe.
I slam my phone down. Self-destruction has a rhythm—first the search, then the scroll, then the crushing weight in my chest as I’m reminded exactly why I scrubbed her from my digital life, why that diamond sits in some stranger’s jewelry box, and why I’ve tried to surgically remove two decades of memories like deleting corrupted files.
But some nights, the masochism wins.
I close the app before I spiral any further.
None of it matters. She’s moved on. Anne told me to move on. Everyone keeps telling me to move on, like it’s as simple as deciding—like I can flip a switch and stop loving someone I’ve loved since I was six years old.
Black Cat head-butts my elbow, which is his version of emotional support.
I scratch behind his ears and he purrs like a motorboat with a cold—raspy and gurgled.
He probably needs a vet visit for that raspy purr, but there’s something about filling out paperwork with my name in the “owner” field that I’m not ready for.
We have an arrangement—I provide the tuna, he provides the judgment—but making it official feels like tempting fate.
The minute you start calling something yours is usually when the universe decides to take it away.
“You know what we need?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer. He’s a cat.
“We need to take the edge off.”
I haul myself off the couch and dig through the kitchen cabinet where I keep my stash—a small tin of gummies I bought from my favorite dispensary last month. I don’t excessively partake, but tonight most definitely calls for chemical assistance.