Chapter 4
Peter
Iwas at the stove, halfway through simmering a cumin-lime chicken that I’d been cooking on autopilot since my residency days, when three sharp raps hit the door and Hiro scrambled to his feet so fast he nearly wiped out on the hardwood.
Potato, predictably, did not move.
General Tso’s ears rotated toward the sound like satellite dishes, but the rest of him remained statuesque on the refrigerator, committed to his policy of sovereign indifference.
Terri had called an hour ago. “Your match is Mr. Kwon in 4A. He’ll be reaching out today to coordinate move-in.”
4A.
I’d let that settle for a moment.
4A was the unit directly across the hall, the unit with the door that closed like a gunshot at 3 a.m., and the cat that sounded like it was being fed into a wood chipper every day at noon.
“Is there anyone else?” I’d asked.
“Mr. Loupier, you were the only volunteer on the fourth floor. We’re grateful for your participation.”
So that had been that.
I wiped my hands on a dish towel, set the spatula on the counter, and went to the door.
Hiro followed at my heels, his nails clicking unevenly, three legs working overtime to keep up with his own anxiety.
I could already hear the muffled sound of something unhappy outside in the hallway, something feline and deeply offended by its circumstances.
I opened the door.
Benji was shorter than I remembered; or maybe he’d just seemed taller yesterday in the hallway, with all his energy creating the illusion of a larger person.
Tonight, though, he was contained, or trying to be.
There were no rhinestones, no visible glitter, though something about him suggested that glitter was less a choice than a condition, the kind of thing that followed him regardless of precautions, and his underwear was safely hidden beneath a layer of denim.
He was holding a cat carrier in his right hand.
It was vibrating, and the cat was producing a sound I’d been hearing through my wall for ten months.
A garment bag was draped over his shoulder. Even zipped shut, I could tell it contained things that sparkled. I could just sense it. The bag had an aura, a bit like the subdued Benji.
He looked at me. I looked at him. I looked at the carrier. I looked at the garment bag.
I knew this was the right thing to do. I’d done the math.
Still, standing in my doorway, looking at this person who was essentially the opposite of everything my apartment represented, I felt the full weight of what I’d agreed to settle onto my shoulders.
“Well,” I said. “You’re the weather check.”
“And you’re the bathrobe.”
His voice was different, still bright and fast, but pulled back somehow, as though someone had told him to keep it at a simmer instead of a boil.
I could see the effort it was costing him.
His eyes were doing something his mouth wasn’t, darting around the apartment behind me with a curiosity that his measured tone was trying very hard to contradict.
From inside the carrier, the cat let out a yowl that bounced off the walls and hit a frequency I felt in my back teeth.
I looked at the carrier, then looked at him.
“That the cat that sounds like she’s bein’ murdered?”
“She’s expressing herself.”
“She’s been expressin’ herself through my wall for ten months.”
“In fairness, you’ve been snoring through mine. Or your dog has. I spent the first six months thinking my HVAC was dying.”
I felt my mouth twitch.
I shut it down before it went anywhere.
This was not a bonding moment, a logistics exchange.
“That’s Potato,” I said, nodding toward the wheezing lump behind my legs. “He’s got a condition.”
“I gathered.”
Benji’s cat yowled again.
General Tso rose to his full height on the refrigerator, back arching into a shape that communicated, in the universal language of cats, that a border had been identified and would be defended with lethal force.
“That’s General Tso. He doesn’t like other animals. I’m not even sure he likes me.”
“Princess Consuela doesn’t like anything.”
“Then they’ll get along fine.”
I stepped back enough to let him through without any of his luggage or his energy brushing against me. I had a speech prepared, not a speech exactly, but a sequence of facts that needed to be communicated before this went any further.
“Foster room’s down the hall, second door on the right. There are kittens in the bathroom, so keep that door latched. The beagle in the crate is Shortcake. She’s post-surgical, so don’t rile her up. Feeding schedule’s on the whiteboard. Quiet hours start at ten.”
Benji stepped inside.
I watched him take it in. The books, the couch, the whiteboard, the organized chaos of a space that had been built for one person and a rotating cast of animals.
His eyes moved across the room with the quick, absorptive attention of someone who was used to reading rooms for a living.
I imagined he did this at the bar, scanning a crowd, taking inventory of who needed what.
He was doing it to my apartment now, cataloguing my life in real time, and I found I didn’t care for the sensation.
Then Hiro appeared.
Hiro, who was anxious around everyone.
Hiro, who hid behind my legs when the mail carrier came or the wind rattled the windows.
Hiro, who had been in my care for eight months and still sometimes flinched when I moved too fast.
He went straight to Benji.
Not cautiously or with his usual tentative, trembling approach.
He walked up to this stranger and sniffed his shoes with purpose.
When said stranger crouched slowly and held out his hand, palm up, fingers relaxed, Hiro leaned his entire body into it, all three legs and fifty pounds.
It was a full-weight, shuddering surrender of trust that I had spent months earning, and this person had achieved it in approximately four seconds.
“Hey, buddy,” Benji said, and his voice was different again.
It wasn’t the bright, performative register I’d heard in the hallway yesterday nor the pulled-back, trying-to-behave version standing in my doorway tonight.
This was something else. It sounded softer and lower.
It was the voice of a person who understood that a scared animal needed you to become very small and very still and very safe.
“You’re okay, little guy. You’re a good boy.”
Hiro’s tail wagged once.
It was his tentative, uncertain wag that always made my chest hurt because it meant he wanted to trust but wasn’t sure he was allowed to.
I stood in the kitchen doorway with a spatula in my hand and watched my most anxious, most guarded animal lean into the touch of a stranger, and I felt something I did not want to feel.
It wasn’t attraction or warmth. Oh no, it was something more dangerous than both: the suspicion that I might’ve misjudged Benji.
I turned back to the stove before he could catch me looking.
“Dinner’s in twenty minutes,” I said. “If you’re hungry.”
“Thank you. Really. Thank you.”
I could hear that he meant it, which was inconvenient, because it’s easier to tolerate someone who is performing gratitude than someone who is genuinely feeling it.
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “You haven’t met the kittens.”
On cue, the bathroom erupted. General Tso’s tail lashed once, a single stroke of imperial displeasure. Princess Consuela, still in her carrier, hissed at everything she could not see on the grounds that it probably deserved it. Potato didn’t stir.
I turned the heat down on the chicken, pulled a second plate from the cabinet, and set it on the counter next to mine.
Two plates.
I hadn’t set out two plates in this kitchen since Portland.
Since David.
It didn’t mean anything. It was practical. The man needed to eat. I couldn’t let someone move into my home and then not feed them. That wasn’t how hospitality worked.
I turned away from the plate and tried not to think about it.
From the living room, I heard Benji murmuring to Hiro. He was still using that voice, the soft one.
I focused on the chicken, let the sizzle and the cumin and the familiar rhythm of cooking fill up the space in my head that was trying to become something complicated.
General Tso watched me from the refrigerator with an expression that said he didn’t believe my outwardly calm demeanor for a second.