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“I was just checking my phone,” I admit, before I move closer to get another look at the kitten.
Baby animals are the cutest, and this tiny grey and black striped kitty is absolutely adorable.
“Well, you can hold him while I move the couches next door,” Rueben says. “There’s a game on tonight. I know they’re small fry, but we’re big Tempests fans.”
“Oh …” I start, stopping myself before I can admit I still support the Crystal Lake Crocs.
Scarlett doesn’t follow sports. She was a cheerleader in high school, I was the basketball fan.
If we’d had a female team, I might have tried to join.
Scarlett tried to convince me to start one.
It was kind of sweet. She even attempted to do it for me when I wouldn’t, but everyone knew it wasn’t really for her, so we were never going to get enough sign ups.
The memory makes me smile.
“Do you like basketball, at all?” Rueben asks, as he holds the kitten out to me.
“Uh, no. Not really,” I murmur, feeling kind of mad that I can’t be honest with him.
I take the kitten out of his hands, heart melting when he lets out a tiny miaow.
He’s so soft and fluffy. He’s also kind of squirmy, but he settles after a few seconds.
“I think this little guy’s kind of attached to you,” I tell Rueben.
He smiles, clearly pleased by it. “I’m kind of attached to him too. I’m hoping his owner doesn’t really want him back.”
“Aw. Who wouldn’t want this cutie back?” I ask as I follow Rueben into the hallway.
He shrugs as he walks into the lounge. “It’s wishful thinking, I know. Maybe once I need to give him back, I can go rescue a new kitty from the pound. Now that I’ve got all the stuff for a cat, it would be kind of a waste not to.”
“Be honest, was that your plan all along when you rescued this guy?”
He smiles again. “No, but maybe it should have been. It is now.”
I watch as he moves the couches around as if they’re made of air.
His muscles are easy to see in the tank top.
“When did you get the tattoos?” I ask, noticing they’re only on his right arm and they’re pretty faded. Now that I know he’s into basketball, I can see the Tempests' silvery-grey logo in amongst some less obvious designs.
“Oh, those,” he says. “I was a dumb kid. Literally. I had a fake id when I was sixteen. Guess what I used it to do?”
I laugh. “Seriously? You went out and got all those at sixteen?”
“Well mostly. I didn’t get them all at once. I got one a month for a while. I think I was close to eighteen when I stopped. It didn’t seem as thrilling once it was going to be legal.”
“You got those for the thrill of it?”
“It was kind of a thing with me for years. I was always chasing one high or another. Tattoos and drinking were the big things in my teens. After high school, I gambled for a bit. That was less fun. Alpha instinct helped, to a point, but eventually I was betting on stuff I had no clue about, and I was losing, and losing. My Mom eventually sat me down and told me I was going to see a psychologist. That’s when I got diagnosed. My meds help a lot. At first, I wasn’t sure being medicated was a good thing, and I kept going off them. You can imagine how that went.” He gives me a wry smile. “I thought I knew best, but when my Mom sat me down again and made me see the vicious cycle I was running around in, I knew. I had to stick to the meds. God, that was hard. It took so damn long to get into a routine with them, but once I did, everything started clicking into place. I quit screwing around, quit trying different college courses, trying to get something to stick. I’m not built for school. Once I realized that, everything got a little easier. I stopped beating myself up about the stuff I couldn’t do, and I found something I was good at.”
He lets out a sigh. “Sorry. One of the things with my ADHD is I can ramble on a bit long …”
“Don’t apologize. I understand. Besides, I like listening to you.”
God, did I think he was smiling before? He beams at me now, and his whole face lights up.
