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That second, the cat pounces on my head.
I scream, tossing the cat off the porch, and Truman bounds out the front door and down the stairs.
“Shit.” Kellan’s hands rove over my face. “Are you okay?”
I laugh. “I think so.”
“Okay—wait here.”
He chases Truman down and hauls the dog back into the house. While the door is shut, the cat jumps back onto the porch beside the bowl of chicken and curls int
o a ball, blinking her green eyes at me.
“Helen—you pussy!” I smile at my own ridiculousness and crawl slowly over to her. She scoots back a little, but she’s not going to leave the bowl of chicken. I watch her bend over to eat, taking note of how thin she is. But she doesn’t look mangy.
I scoot a little closer to her, until I’m close enough to hold my hand over her back. She peeks over her shoulder at me, then keeps eating.
Kellan comes out the door. He slides a hand into his pocket and leans his shoulder against the door. God, he’s hot. At a glance, he almost seems lanky, but his shoulders are so wide. And that face. He’s giving me that gentle smile of his, the one that tilts up a little on one side and is always accompanied by a twinkle in his blue eyes. The world indulgent comes to mind. I look at the bowl of chicken and smile back at him. He is indulging me.
He indulges me for five or so more minutes, until Helen seems to’ve had her fill. She looks skeptically at me, and I just smile at her.
“Not going in for a rub?” Kellan teases.
I shake my head and hold my hand out. He pulls me to my feet, and I’m pleased to find the cat’s still watching us from the corner of the porch.
“I don’t want to scare her off. I’m playing the long game here.”
He squeezes my hand. “Let’s play it inside for a second.”
“Mm, and why is that?”
He leads me through a formal dining room to the right of the stairs, and into a small half-bath, where he opens a cabinet and produces a bottle of soap.
“Antimicrobial. Aren’t you special?” I tease. “Looks like you’re a germophobe like me.”
“Strays can carry diseases,” he says, squirting soap into my palm.
“Helen doesn’t.”
Kellan gets a laugh out of her name, even though I’ve told him my intentions before, and I force him to spend the first thirty minutes of our car ride determining plans for Helen.
“If she’s there when we get back, I want to take her to the vet tomorrow. I’ll get her a purple collar, possibly purple with a leopard print pattern—” Kellan snorts at that—“and we can start litter box training.”
Kellan just laughs at me, and after hearing all about my grand plans, he tells me he’s allergic to cats.
“What a pussy,” I joke, miming claws.
He does a hilariously realistic “meow,” and I get a good laugh out of that.
The next twenty minutes are more subdued. We listen to a bunch of random stuff on Kellan’s iPhone—none of it overly sentimental, thank God—and when he pulls over on a gravelly shoulder to let a police car fly past, he asks me to turn my back to him. He tucks a few stray strands of hair into my bun and plants a warm kiss on my nape, and after that, he takes my hand.
We talk about robots, and sex robots, and sex toys, and Kellan tells me I should get a job as a spokeswoman for LELO, which I tell him would be a dream come true. Driving through the miles of flat, hot farmland outside Albany makes it a little harder to keep things light, but Kellan starts quizzing me, asking me silly things like pie in the face or whipped cream up the ass.
We stop so I can use the restroom at the first gas station in town, and he has a shot of Snow Queen waiting for me when I climb back into my seat.
As it burns its way into my stomach, I feel an awful ache for “R.”
I think the universe is trying to send me a sign, a show of solidarity or something... because we’re driving past a bunch of businesses on the main drag when “Sea Ghost” by The Unicorns starts playing. My stomach does a back flip, the way it does when I’m riding a roller coaster with loops.
