Travis gave me strict orders to not go to the rescue until he gave me the okay.
It’s ridiculous, but he’s my pack leader, and I’m trying my best to trust him on this.
Travis, despite walking around with a permanent scowl on his face, is a good guy. He knows Blair better than the rest of us, and the last thing I want to do is fuck up a scent match.
But it still aches.
“She wasn’t happy to see me, Row,” Ryland sighs, his attention still on his screen. “She panicked. Ambushing her at her place of work is fucked up.”
“I’m not trying to ambush her,” I say. “I just don’t know why nothing has happened since the match.”
“Patience.”
“I don’t have patience.”
“I’m aware. But if you can’t do it for us, do it for her.” Ryland turns his chair to me. Maybe I’m not the only one this is affecting—dark circles are under his eyes, and his stubble is thicker than usual. “I want to go back to that rescue every damn day, just to scent her. You weren’t there—you didn’t see the way she looked at me at first. It was like she had seen a ghost. Like she was terrified.”
“But at least you’ve seen her,” I grumble.
Like a creep, I’ve been on the Furs and Purrs website, staring at the picture of a smiling Blair under the staff page.
She looks like a ray of sunshine,literally. Her hair is golden and falls in a shiny curtain around her shoulders, and her skin sun-kissed, like she’s been basking at the beach all day.
And her eyes…
Her eyes crinkle with pure happiness, her smile wide and elated.
I wonder how long ago the photo was taken.
By the way Travis and Ryland have described her, she’s not the cheery, carefree person in the photograph.
She’s smart, sweet and beautiful, but guarded.
“I don’t know if I made the best first impression on her,” Ryland continues, scratching at his stubble. “It was awkward. We mostly talked about the cats, and then she left. Trav says it took him months for her to even talk about herself at Scents. He says she’s very good at keeping conversation surface-level.”
I frown. “It’s still not fucking fair.”
“We’re brothers. You’re likely her scent match, too. If you show up at her work and she doesn’t expect it, it’s going to make her freak out again.” Ryland runs a hand through his messy brown hair, exasperated. “She hasn’t even mentioned me to Travis,” he murmurs. “She hasn’t mentioned any of it to him.”
Ash trots across my keyboard, closing one of the windows, and I pluck him off the desk and place him gently down on the floor.
Despite Ryland’s awkward moment at the rescue, I’ll be forever grateful that he came home with this behemoth of a cat. While Ash likes Ryland and Travis just fine, he sticks with me most of the time, following me wherever I go. He watches me work in the office, usually perched on the cat tree in the corner of the room, slow blinking in bliss.
He’s a great companion, and I love that fucker to bits.
I reopen the program that the cat closed and restart my playthrough of the indie horror game that was sent to us through one of our developers. “If she’s that jumpy, I can’t imagine she’ll like what we do,” I mutter, disappointed. It only takes a few moments for a ghost-like entity to appear on the screen with a garbled scream, and even Ash scampers away at the unpleasant noise.
“Those sound effects are shit,” Ryland comments.
“Yeah. I’ll give them the notes.”
My brother watches as I navigate through a haunted house, solving simple puzzles until I reach another jumpscare.
I think he’s forgotten about my comment until he says, “I don’t know. Who even knows if she’s into video games,” he chuckles humorlessly.
Another disfigured human face fills the screen with a high pitched, grating sound.
Ryland flinches. “Okay. Theyreally need to fix that.”
