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“What can I say? I’m good with my hands,” I say with a straight face, and she gives me a dimpled grin.
“You are. Thank you for helping.”
“It was my pleasure.” I mean it too—and not just because I got to handle her underwear without looking like a pervert. She doesn’t have a washer and dryer in her studio, and the laundromat she uses is three long blocks away. I have no idea how she’s always dragged her stuff there on her own, but I’m glad I was here to carry the heavy sack for her today.
I’ll have to make sure I’m always with her when she does laundry going forward, or better yet, have Geoffrey do it for her.
At my place.
Where I want her to be all the time.
I’m not quite ready to put a label on that desire yet, but it’s definitely there, and the more I look around her cramped studio, the stronger it gets.
I don’t want her here.
She belongs at home with me.
“Are you hungry?” I ask when she picks up a cat—the mid-sized one, Cottonball—and sits down on the bed to stroke him. “We could grab dinner around here before heading back, or go someplace in Manhattan. Alternatively, if you’re not in the mood to eat out, I can ask Geoffrey to prep us something.”
She blinks up at me as the smallest cat, Queen Elizabeth, jumps up on the bed and joins her purring brother on Emma’s lap. “Heading back? As in, to your place? The two of us?”
“Of course. This bed is too small for us both, don’t you think?” Not to mention, overrun with cats—the third of which joins her as I speak. “You can bring an overnight bag if you’d like, so you don’t need to wait for Geoffrey to do laundry in the morning. Maybe also leave the cats extra food, so we don’t have to come back here tomorrow at all. You can go to work straight from my place on Monday; I’ll have Wilson drive you there.”
Her eyes widen more with every word coming out of my mouth, and I know—I fucking know—I’m giving away my hand, but it’s too late to try to be smooth and subtle. Not that I’ve ever been able to achieve that with her. When it comes to Emma, my instincts are as primitive as it gets, my need to claim her too powerful to deny.
I want her in my home, at my side, and I can’t pretend otherwise.
“I don’t think I can…” She swallows. “I can’t leave my cats alone for that long.” She’s petting the furry beasts as she says this, and I again feel a strange stab of jealousy.
I want her touching me.
Worrying about me.
“Fine,” I say tightly, pushing down the irrational desire. “Then you’ll come back here tomorrow. I’m sure they’ll be fine until then. You’ve fed them, changed their litter, played with them… What more do they need?”
Three pairs of green eyes narrow at me, as if the cats know what I’m saying, and Emma looks down at them, stroking each one in turn.
“Come here,” she says softly, looking up. “Sit next to me.”
I frown in confusion but approach the bed.
“Sit.” She glances at the spot to the right of her.
I comply gingerly, not wanting to squash a tail or a paw. I may not like her pets, but I don’t want to hurt them.
“Here.” She picks up Cottonball and places him on my lap. “Stroke him like this.” She demonstrates with her own hand, her short, neatly trimmed nails lightly scratching at the fur as she runs her palm from the top of his head to the start of his tail.
I stare at the cat, unable to believe he hasn’t jumped away or scratched me. Instead, he’s staring up at me, as if waiting to see what I’ll do.
Cautiously, I touch him like Emma showed me, running my hand over his back. The fur is ridiculously soft, and I can feel his animal warmth underneath. It’s like having a heating pad on my lap, only an extremely fluffy one.
I try to recall if I’ve ever held a cat like this, but I’m drawing a blank. Certainly, there were no pets in my childhood—unless I count the stray cats that raided the garbage bins at the apartment complex where we lived when I was six. For a couple of months, I gave them whatever scraps I could find in our kitchen, but then we got evicted, and I never saw the cats again. In any case, they’d been feral, too frightened of people to let me pet them.
Afterward, there was a neighbor’s dog—a little one, some kind of mutt. He was friendly, and I’d definitely petted him and played with him a bunch of times. In fact, I liked him so much I asked my mother to get a puppy for my seventh birthday. She laughed and promptly puked into the half-cooked pasta that was supposed to be our dinner, and that was that. I realized soon after what a huge responsibility a puppy would be, requiring food and money we couldn’t afford to spare, and I stopped wanting one. I also stopped feeding stray cats.
