I thought about David, but not the way I usually thought about David, not the specific, stabbing memories that ambushed me at odd moments, but the broader shape of what he’d say if he were here. David, who had never met a stranger, who made friends in elevators and at gas stations and once at a urologist’s office, which he’d described as “the most unlikely and beautiful human connection of my life.” David, who would have heard this situation and said something like, “You’re telling me someone needs a place to stay and you have a spare room and you’re hesitating? Peter. Come on. This isn’t even adecision.”
But David wasn’t there.
And David’s easy warmth, his effortless, gravitational pull toward other people, had died with him, leaving behind a man who read newspapers alone and talked to his dog and wrote about grief in the hours when normal people slept.
“This is temporary,” I told Hiro. “Only few weeks. Then it goes back to normal.”
Hiro thumped his tail.
General Tso scowled at me from the refrigerator with an expression that said, very clearly, “You are going to regret this.”
He was probably right. He was usually right.
I finished my coffee, folded my newspaper, and went to write.
The words didn’t come. They’d been reluctant lately, circling the drain of a chapter I couldn’t seem to finish. So I sat at my desk and stared at the blinking cursor and tried not to think about the fact that within twenty-four hours, someone was going to be living in my foster room, sleeping in my apartment, and existing in the space I’d hollowed out and filled with animals specifically so I wouldn’t have to fill it with people.
From the bathroom, a kitten mewed.
Then another.
Then all five, in a staggered chorus that sounded like a tiny, furry fire alarm.
It was feeding time.
So I got up and did what I always did.
I took care of the things that needed me.
Chapter 3
Benji
Iwoke up on Mia’s couch with a crick in my neck, a cat on my face, and the distinct feeling that the universe was not done with me yet. Princess Consuela had migrated during the night from her carrier (which I’d left open beside the couch because I’m not a monster) to my chest to my face, where she was now draped across my nose and mouth like a warm, wrinkly, slightly damp washcloth. Her body rose and fell with her breathing. Mine was becoming increasingly difficult.
“Mmfph,” I said.
She didn’t move.
“Prnssss Cnsla.”
Nothing.
If anything, she settled more firmly, her tiny paw curling against my eyebrow with the possessive weight of a creature who had decided that this particular patch of human was hers and biology couldsort itself out.
I peeled her off my face with both hands, held her at arm’s length, and received a look of such concentrated betrayal that I almost put her back.
“I know, baby doll,” I told her. “I know. Everything is terrible, but Daddy needs to breathe, and you need to respect the boundary between affection and suffocation.”
She blinked at me. Slowly.
The blink that meant, “I have noted your grievance and filed it under things I will never care about.”
From the kitchen, Mia’s voice cut through morning fog, “If you’re done negotiating with your cat, there’s coffee.”
I sat up.
Mia was leaning against the counter in scrubs, her hair wrapped and travel mug in hand. She looked like a woman who had been awake and functional for at least an hour, while I’d been slowly asphyxiating under a hairless cat.
