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I don’t have a chance to check the messages from my sister and Kat, because Miles walks through the door. “Hello, beautiful girlfriend! Would you like to get naked first and then go for breakfast, or would you like to fuel up and then get naked?”
He finds me sitting on the couch. “Maybe we should make breakfast here,” I suggest.
I don’t have much of an appetite, and I’m not all that interested in going out in public. I may never be again.
“Is everything okay?” Miles grabs the back of the couch and bends to press a kiss to my cheek.
“I guess it depends on your definition of okay.”
He rounds the arm of the couch, moves Prince Francis from the cushion beside me to my lap, and sits down beside me. “What’s going on?”
I explain what happened this morning while I was taking our four-legged friends on what was supposed to be a nice, uneventful walk.
“Oh, Kitty, I’m so sorry. That must have been awful. But it’s fine now.”
“I don’t know if it is, though. Can you check my social media account and tell me if there are fires I need to put out?” I pass him my phone, too nervous to do it myself.
“I’ll check Instagram first, okay?”
I nod and pet Prince Francis, hoping that I’m being paranoid and everything is going to be okay. But Miles’s expression tells me a lot of things. Like my self-reassurances are potentially incorrect. His eyebrows do several bounces up and down. His lips flatten in a line. Sound blares out of the phone. It’s my voice, me calling out stop, followed by a high-pitched yelp. It must be a recording of when I fell on Wilfred. Miles turns off the volume.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“It’ll be fine.”
“The way your eyeballs keep darting around like you’re following a light laser tells me that is a complete lie.”
Miles sets the phone facedown on the table. “There are a couple of videos that are being taken out of context. And some gifs.”
“A video? Some gifs?” I echo.
He swallows thickly. “And a trending hashtag.”
“Oh my gosh.” I sink into the cushion, wishing the couch would open like a mouth and swallow me whole.
“It’ll be fine, Kitty. Once people understand that you weren’t trying to hurt Wilfred.”
“People think I was trying to hurt him?” My voice is shrill. “What kind of video is it?”
Miles tugs on his bottom lip with his teeth a couple of times. “This stuff changes by the hour. By tomorrow everyone will have forgotten about it.”
“I think I need to see the video.”
Miles blows out a breath and reluctantly hands me my phone once the video is cued up. It’s not long, maybe ten seconds, but it looks like I’m tackling Wilfred, and the angle also makes it look like I punched him in the side of the face. And that I put him in a choke hold. The video on its own is bad enough, but it’s the comments that make my stomach roll.
“Oh my God, Miles. People are calling me an animal abuser.” I cover my mouth with my hand as my eyes well with tears. And I scroll through the videos and gifs, all with me tackling Wilfred, some of them with text on them calling on people to cancel me. “The things people are saying.”
“It’s out of context. We’ll fix this. You can put up a video explaining what happened and dispel the rumors. Come here.” He opens his arms. If the couch won’t swallow me, I guess a Miles hug will have to do.
Prince Francis hops off my lap as I slide over and allow Miles to wrap me in his arms. I want him to be right, that we’ll be able to fix this, but there’s an uneasy feeling in my gut that tells me he might be wrong.
chapter twenty-five
THE CAT’S OUT OF THE BAG
Miles
My team has a game on Sunday night, and while Kitty has an open invitation to attend, she makes up an excuse about needing to be home. I don’t call her out on it. I know she’s upset about what happened at the park.
I accompany her and Prince Francis to the parking garage. On the way down, three people avoid getting on the elevator, saying they’ll wait for the next one, and someone else asks if she’s the one who punched a goose at the park. Apparently, the story has morphed quite spectacularly since yesterday afternoon.
It gets worse when we reach her car. Someone has spray painted a huge X across the side of her car.
“Oh my gosh, Miles.” Kitty, who was already looking like a deflated balloon after the elevator incident, seems to shrink even further. If she were a cartoon, she would be a puddle on the ground with a very sad face. “Why is this happening? How am I going to fix this?” She motions to the red spray paint.
