I recoiled, astonished. His reaction, his displeasure—they were incongruent with the man who had run out of a room at the first hint that I was going to confess. Across from me, Ezra hadn’t looked away from me, his lips tucked into a line, waiting for me to speak.
I opened my mouth to say something—What do you mean by that? Did you know all along? Are you so greedy that you want things to go back to the way they were, with me pining away in your number two slot?—when suddenly I was engulfed in a coconut-lime scent.
“I hate to interrupt,” Dahlia said, “but the bartender wants Ashley out of here. We should probably get the check...”
Ezra’s features convulsed, then settled into the polite, neutral expression he always used with my roommate.
“Right,” he said. He turned in his seat, smiled good-naturedly at a passing waiter, who zipped to his side immediately, busy restaurant be damned, and hit us with a “How can I help you?” Ezra handed him his black card. Then to me: “When am I seeing you again?”
I swallowed down air, still reeling. “At the benefit?” I said. “Probably?”
“You don’t have time for me before that?” Ezra asked, his expression unreadable. When I shook my head (I need a little more time than a week to sort through this mindfuck.), he grunted his displeasure.
Luckily I was saved again, this time by the waiter, who zipped back to Ezra’s side like he was attached to a string. Ezra scrawled his tip onto the receipt, barely breaking his eye contact with me, and the waiter, who’d been waiting over his shoulder, looked like he was about to faint.
“Fine,” Ezra said to me, handing back the check presenter. “We’ll talk then. Don’t let my mom monopolize you.”
“Thanks for paying,” I said.
“Of course,” Ezra said. His gaze was heavy on me as I stood. It was this singular focus that had made him so popular on the screen, how he managed to make the female lead look like she was the only woman in the world worthy of his notice. It was strange, to feel that intensity directed at me. “I’m going to assume that means we can sit at the same table?”
I laughed in spite of myself, too stunned to react otherwise.
“Sure,” I allowed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Mal
Mal found himself at the front desk of Paws and Peace, the two-story complex that showed up in Google Maps when he’d typed “animal shelter near me” into the search bar. Impulsivity was not his style—he’d once visited an REI store four times before deciding on a smartwatch—but technically, this wasn’t an impulse decision. He’d been considering adopting a pet since moving into his own place. Mal simply hadn’t woken up this morning expecting to get onetoday.
He also hadn’t expected to be ghosted by a girl immediately after he’d slept with her, so in the grand scheme of things, this was pretty mundane.
A gray-haired woman with giant paw-print earrings and a rainbow tie-dye apron over a red shirt greeted him at the front desk and barraged him with questions to which he seemed to always have the right answer. He was looking for a cat, yes, a senior cat would do just fine. Yes, he lived alone and would not be adopting with a roommate. Yes, he’d had a cat growing up.
“Would you be interested in fostering?” the woman askedbrightly. Her name tag readCindyin blocky, handwritten letters. “Or, if you’d like to adopt today, that would be great!”
The way Mal’s social anxiety was set up, there was no way he was leaving here empty-handed.
“Maybe let me meet them first before I decide?” Mal said quickly, then, because perhaps that had been too terse: “If that’s okay with you.”
If Cindy was offended, she didn’t show it. Instead, she led him into the shelter, opening the door with a flourish. It being a Wednesday afternoon, there were only a few people wandering inside, most of them wearing the shelter’s fire-engine-red shirts. Mal pointedly avoided eye contact with the dogs, who, as if sensing that he could provide a potential escape, all began wagging their tails vigorously as he and his guide walked past them to the “Kitty Korner.”
The Kitty Korner was expansive, its white walls outfitted with shelves and slings from which several cats lazed. Several others padded across the floors, playing with toys, scratching at posts, kicking furiously in their litter boxes. A flat-faced orange fellow rubbed against Mal’s legs, then skirted away when he bent down to pet him.
The sight was nostalgic. When he was five, he begged his parents for a puppy, only for them to compromise on a cat instead. He’d gone to the shelter and met Choux and Roux, two rambunctious paired siblings who tumbled all over the floor and eventually into his lap. His parents tried to steer him toward other options, but he’d been set on not splitting up the brothers, and so the puppy he’d initially requested became two kittens. Choux and Roux lived pampered lives in his parents’ house before passing aweek apart while Mal was away at college. His parents had waited until he was done with finals to tell him, and when he’d found out, he’d spent an entire day sobbing in a blanket cocoon in his top bunk. Kieran, unsure of how else to show support, had showered his desk with his favorite snacks.
“Everything all right?” Cindy asked.
Mal shook himself back into the present. He’d gotten lost in thought, and he suspected his expression had looked inappropriately morose for a guy in a room full of kittens.
“Yes, absolutely,” he said. He gestured at a fluffy bicolor tabby who was cleaning herself vigorously on top of a cat tower. “I had a cat who looked just like that one, is all.”
Cindy nodded, understanding.
“They never really leave you, do they?” she said. “All right then, I’ll let you look around. All the cats here are available for adoption.” She pointed to a scruffy tortoiseshell in the corner. “Except Lola over there. I wouldn’t try to pet her. She’s still quite feral.”
Mal thanked Cindy, then began his rounds. Most of the cats paid him no mind, but the tabby approached him, sniffing his hand when offered, darting around his legs when he dropped into a squat. She really did look a lot like Roux. He scratched her head, and she arched into his touch before abruptly breaking away to clean herself.
