by K. Ryan
“Well, if you change your mind, you know my number.”
“Got it. Thanks for asking though. Maybe next time, okay?”
She just waved me towards the door...she’d heard all my excuses already and I guess I had to give her credit for still trying after rejection after rejection. Someone clearly reaching out to me and wanting to be my friend wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself. It was everything that came along with it that I wanted to avoid.
So, I just waved goodbye, grabbed my to-go box, pushed out the door, and headed in the opposite direction. The art of keeping people at arm’s length was something I’d perfected since leaving my hometown behind and embracing anonymity.
Keep to yourself. Don’t ask anyone any personal questions, but listen if they volunteer the information to you. Thank them for their offers, throw out a ‘maybe next time’ to keep them happy. Let the people you work with know enough generalities about you to make you seem normal enough, so they don’t wonder about you, so their gazes don’t follow you with narrowed eyes, so they don’t dig, so they don’t Google your name, so they just leave you alone, and so you become unimportant enough to ignore.
It was how I stayed under the radar.
It was how I maintained whatever shred of dignity I had left.
As I set back out towards my apartment six blocks away from the café, I freed my hair from its rubber band and let my long, honey-colored waves air out some of the grease and salt stench, popped in my earbuds, and breathed the city in. This was the part I loved, the part about my life now that I actually enjoyed.
Cities like Milwaukee made antisocial the new norm. You could literally walk down the street absorbed in music, an email, a text message—whatever your weapon of choice—and you didn’t really have to pay attention to anything but what you were doing and where you were headed. So, in this city, no one really noticed me and as long as I showed up for work and paid my rent on time, no one really missed me either.
Stepping inside the middle of a crowded sidewalk, right where I was now, was the next best thing to an invisibility cloak. I could just get lost in it, moving in and out unnoticed, without judgment. Without stares. Without pity. Without disgust. That was exactly the way I liked it.
A rueful smile twisted my lips and I shook my head. It was crazy how different my life had looked in Hickory, where I’d been surrounded by cozy familiarity and careful, detailed plans. I knew every street inside and out, all the ‘hotspots’ in town, if you could really call them that, the best pizza place, best grocery store, best bookstore, best ice cream...all littered with shades of vanilla-flavored comfort. Hickory was set in its ways, comfortable in its generic, small-town atmosphere—the Maycomb of Wisconsin—where time and tradition seemed to move just as slowly. In Hickory, slow and steady didn’t win the race; slow and steady kept you forever miles behind the rest of civilization. Just the name itself bred old-fashioned, Christian mentalities where town scandals gained enough traction to last an entire decade.
It was what I’d always known and where I thought I’d always be.
Of course, that was before my entire life had crashed and burned right before my eyes and the eyes of my hometown.
If someone had told me a year ago that not only would I be working as a waitress in a café, living in a city 100 times the size of what I was used to, where the only person I actually seemed to want to be around was, in fact, a stray cat, but the reasons why I’d find myself in a such a position—all by my own doing—I wouldn’t have known whether to laugh until I puked or curl up in the fetal position and cry myself unconscious.
Life had a funny way of taking the carefully laid plans I’d set out for myself and completely smashing them to pieces.
My mind, thankfully, drifted back to that stray cat. Those sweet, little eyes. There was enough grey and enough green in them...maybe I should just settle once and for all. They were sea foam. Depending on the lighting, they were either green or grey. Sometimes there was more grey, sometimes more green. Either way, every time I looked at them, every time I thought about them, that familiar tugging yanked and tore at my heart.
This was going to be a serious problem for me. Not even a full 24 hours into it and I was sunk already. But still, he had to be somebody’s cat, right? He just seemed too friendly, too mild-mannered to be one of those skittish, feral cats that took off before you got within 10 feet of them.
He’d probably be gone when I got home.
But, a tiny voice whispered, if he’s still there, maybe you should think about buying some freaking cat food.
Maybe.
Maybe I’d think about it more seriously if he was still hanging around tomorrow. If he was going to use my patio as his personal bed and breakfast, the least I could do was act like a decent hostess and offer him something a little more substantial than canned tuna and sliced cheese.
As I rounded the corner to my block, I felt a prickling I hadn’t felt in...I don’t even know how long.
Hope.
It fluttered and soared and spiked up all the way from my stomach into my throat. Now that hope dovetailed right back down, plummeting into my stomach and knotted into anxiety.
What was the point in hope anyway? Especially hope that a stray cat, who probably wasn’t really a stray and would end up leaving me for his actual home, was still perched on my patio?
It was stupid. Nonsensical.
Even if I did like cats, I couldn’t keep him.
Still...maybe if he stuck around, maybe I’d buy a bag of cat food. Maybe.
The parking lot right in front of my building came into view, but I stopped short. A menacing, over-sized black truck was parked directly in front of the walkway with a U-Haul trailer hitched to the back.
New neighbors. And I knew exactly which apartment they were moving into…shit.
From around the other side of the truck, the passenger side door was wide open and I could see a dark figure hovering around, reaching down underneath the front seats with long arms.
The door of our shared entryway slapped open and a lanky guy with wiry, carrot-orange hair jogged down the sidewalk leading from the door back to the truck.
“Yo, Finn!” he called out to the guy still tucked inside the truck. “What’s the hold-up? We still gotta get the TV inside.”
“Get it in yourself,” a deep, muffled voice yelled back.
“That’s what she said.”
“Shut up, jackass. I’m pretty sure you can handle your precious all by yourself, considering you’ll flip a tit if I get my dirty fingerprints all over it.”
The lanky guy was standing right next to the bed of the truck now and promptly kicked the other guy right in the ass. He yelped once and then shot up from the passenger side door to fire back, reaching out with a long, thick forearm to sock his friend in the shoulder.
Clad in worn dark jeans and a black T-shirt with a bright yellow neon sign pointing to the words Mechanical Bull, the guy just a mere 30 feet away from where I stood was a sight for sore eyes. Devastatingly handsome, even from the short distance away, with his strong jaw, a stupidly perfect nose, and light eyes that crinkled up at the sides when he laughed. Wavy chestnut hair flopped away from his face, curling around his ears and the lower half of his face was covered in thick, dark scruff that looked like it’d needed to be trimmed about three months ago. And that was about all I needed to see to know that all proper mental functioning had vacated.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I just stared.
I stood there for a few awkward moments, biting down on my bottom lip, and briefly contemplated backpedalling the way I came just to get myself the hell out of here. The scruffy Greek god’s light eyes were on me now and my hands shook around the straps of my purse in response.
It had to be a crime to be that chiseled, that perfect-looking, and just lean against a truck in the middle of the day like it was no big deal.
Like the curveball life had thrown at me last year, I had no idea how to hand
le the situation I currently found myself in. The guy that inexplicably stared back at me was different than any other guy I’d ever gotten close enough to ogle like this before. Different than he-who-shall-not-be-named and different, than, well just about anyone I’d known in Hickory. And it scared the hell out of me.
My eyes flicked back to him just once as I pulled on my big-girl pants and headed straight for the blocked walkway. He’d tucked his head down, resting it against both folded arms on the bed of the truck while he watched me, like he was hiding, like he thought that if he ducked low enough, I wouldn’t be able to see him somehow.
Too late for that.
Now, the lanky ginger waved to me. “Hey! Sorry about the roadblock. We’re almost done.”
I forced a quick smile on my face and waved back. “Don’t worry about it.”
Not wanting to give either of them an opportunity to carry this conversation any further, I hustled my ass all the way around the trailer and all but sprinted through the shared entryway, fumbling for my keys and feeling the guy’s—Finn’s—eyes on me the entire time from his hiding place behind the truck. My heart was still pounding when I scrambled through my apartment door, flipped the lock, and I blew out a deep breath.
Get it together. One glance from an attractive—okay, fine, insanely attractive—stranger shouldn’t be enough to send you into cardiac arrest.
And then I remembered something that made that near heart attack-inducing encounter slip to the wayside. I took a cautious step deeper inside my apartment and my eyes landed right on the patio.
There he was, all curled up comfortably around the towels I’d set out for him this morning. His head jerked up as I padded over to the door and pulled it open, leaving just the screen door between us. He blinked at me and yawned wide, stretching his tongue all the way down to the bottom of his chin, and shook his head out like the effort was taking up too much of his energy.
Then, he stood up on all fours, shaking and twitching both hind legs, and hopped down to sit right in front of me.
Maahwr.
“Hey, buddy,” I murmured, smiling down at him. “How’s it going?”
Meh.
“Well, I had an okay day. I was wondering if you were gonna be here or not when I got home though.”
And, deep down, I knew I was glad to see that my hope hadn’t been misplaced, even if it was fleeting.
He let out one more long, low-pitched maahwr and scratched his thick claws up against my screen door. Let me in. Let me in. Let me in.
“Oh no, wait...stop!” my hands immediately flew out to the screen door to gently push his paws away and unhook his sharp talon-like nails from the wiring. Three tiny holes stared back at me. “Oh shit. Thank God for security deposits, right?”
The cat just blinked.
“I bet you’re hungry.”
More grumbling rumbled from his white chest. I decided it sounded like something between a purr and a mumble. A purrmble. No, that didn’t sound right. A purrumble. Sure.
Meh.
“That’s what I figured,” I smiled back at him and backpedalled into my kitchen. I looked around, hands on my hips, and chewed on my bottom lip in thought. I had one more can of tuna, three more slices of cheese, and half a loaf of bread left to give him.
I guess I was buying a bag of cat food today.
Did you hear that? That was the sound of my willpower flying right out the window. Going...going...gone.
. . .
With Highway 61 Revisited spinning on my turntable and Bob Dylan’s scratchy voice crooning through my speakers, I situated myself with my back against the wall closest to the screen door again and my laptop resting on my thighs.
I had a glass of wine on one side of me and the cat sitting outside the screen door on the other. Things could always be worse.
An empty plastic bowl sat just a foot away from the cat and I was kind of surprised he wasn’t maawhr-ing and purrumbling for another helping of store-bought dry cat food. He’d attacked that little bowl of kibble like there was no tomorrow, but then again, maybe he figured, who knows when I’ll see this shit again? I couldn’t blame the guy for taking advantage; I just hoped I wouldn’t have a sick cat puking on my patio anytime soon.
We’d done our little dance again of me distracting him with a piece of bread, him jumping off the chair to grab it, me hastily throwing the cat food out there, and then slamming the screen door shut again before he had a chance to get too close.
Even though I was feeding him and letting him crash on my patio, I was absolutely certain I didn’t want him inside my apartment. That was just bad news all the way around, not to mention setting myself up for some serious trouble, whether it was from my allergies or my landlord.
Now, though, he was just sitting patiently on the other side of the screen door, watching me type away, drink my wine, and listen to my music.
“How does it feel?” I sang along softly, “To be on your own...with no direction home...”
My eyes shifted to the cat, whose chest jumped at the attention. Meh.
“What do you think of Bob Dylan?” I asked him and his head tilted a little. “He was one of my dad’s favorites. I think he had every single album...well, I guess I have every single album now, but you get the idea. He’s pretty cool, right? With that crazy warble?”
The cat blinked.
“He really liked Rush, too. Liked isn’t the right word. It was more like an obsession. A hard-core, unhealthy obsession. He used to say that Neil Peart was the greatest poet who ever lived...I don’t know, I guess I’m just partial to Dylan. Anyway, I buy a Rush calendar every year...just because, I guess...and a few years ago, there he was right in the front row on one of the pictures. He was all the way in the corner, but that’s not the point. He was there, with that God-awful 80s mullet and everything, and I’ve got the proof framed right over there,” I pointed to the black frame hanging in the hallway. The cat’s sharp, sea foam eyes followed the direction of my hand and then darted back at me.
“My mom doesn’t like Rush,” I sighed. “I don’t know why I’m even talking about her. I don’t want to talk about her. Talking about her just pisses me off...makes me wanna cry. So, let’s talk about something else, okay?”
Meh.
“I’m gonna be an aunt soon,” I shifted gears and took a deep gulp from my wine glass. Just thinking about my mom drove me to drink. “Noah—that’s my brother—he’s gonna be such a good dad. He pretty much was my dad when we were growing up, so I guess he’s had a lot of practice. His wife, Cristina, is way too nice for him, by the way. Not that I don’t think my brother deserves to be happy or anything. He does; he totally does. He’s just always been such a hot-headed asshole most of the time. I don’t know how he ever snagged that one, you know? She’s either a saint or completely certifiable. Maybe both. I don’t know.”
My mind drifted back to the sacrifice Noah made for me last year, the risk he’d taken in what he’d believed was the right course of action. It wasn’t, of course. And he’d just ended up making everything a million times worse and costed himself thousands of dollars in legal fees all in the name of defending my honor. He shouldn’t have done it; I hadn’t wanted him to do it and at the time, I’d been shaking with anger when I went with Cristina to bail his sorry ass out of lock-up. Now, I knew he was just protecting me, even if it was wasted effort.
I sighed again, pushing those depressing thoughts out of my mind. No use getting upset over something Noah refused to apologize for.
“What am I gonna do with you, huh?” I asked the cat now and his ears twitched a little at the sound of my voice. “I don’t know how much longer you can stay here. I mean, let’s face it, you seem pretty settled on that chair. I’m just gonna go right ahead and assume you’re planning on crashing here for another night?”
His chest bumped, like he was hiccuping. Purrumble. Meh.
“It’s gonna start getting cold at night pretty soon,” I smiled down sadly at him. “That�
�s no good for you. If you don’t have anywhere to go, I’m gonna have to figure something out for you, aren’t I? You can’t sleep on my patio forever, you know.”
A loud knock on my apartment door tore my attention away and the cat leapt up onto his haunches, ears alert and twitching.
“Simmer down, buddy,” I laughed as I set my laptop aside and stood to head towards the door. “I’ll be alright.”
But when I pressed an eye through the peephole in my front door, that goofy guy with that shockingly orange hair stood on the other side of it.
Huh.
And now, yet again for what seemed like the tenth time today, I felt frozen in place. Stunned into immobility. Then just as quickly, I shook myself out of it. He was probably just being friendly. Being neighborly. Being normal. All the things I wasn’t.
With a sigh, I pulled open the door and found him grinning back at me triumphantly, his chubby cheeks spreading out right along with that shit-eating smile.
“Hey, neighbor!” he told me and shot out his hand for me to shake. “I’m Slinger. Me and my roommate just moved in,” he gestured behind him to the door literally five feet away from us, “right there.”
“Yeah,” I replied and carefully slid my hand into his to shake, my eyes watching his every move for some sign of disingenuinty. “I figured that. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Emma. And you...your name’s really Slinger?”
It was such an odd name, I just couldn’t help it. Slinger was actually the name of a small town not too far from Milwaukee, so maybe that was some weird nickname? God, I hoped he didn’t launch into a 10-minute story I didn’t want to hear.
“No, not my real name,” Slinger laughed, pushing some wiry hair back on his head, which, naturally, sprung right back into place. “My name’s really Marshall, but everyone calls me Slinger. And if I told you why, we’d be sitting here for like, two hours, and then I’d just have to end up killing you anyway, so there’s that.”
I blinked back at him. “Uh…”