Kaia swiveled in her seat, scanning the bar as if she’d never truly seen it before. “I had no idea. I just thought…I don’t know what I thought.”
“It’s not your job to think anything about it. It’s mine. And I’ve been trying, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. So I asked Eve to help me, begged her, really.”
“And?”
“She turned me down flat.”
“Damn, that’s cold,” Kaia said, whistling softly under her breath. “Did she say why?”
“She doesn’t do bars, whatever that means.”
“Maybe she’s a recovering alcoholic,” Kaia suggested.
“Hmm.” Josie thought of Eve’s odd reaction to her request, that brief moment when she’d seemed to retreat inside herself. “Yeah, maybe. I didn’t think of that.”
“Ask her out, and maybe she’ll tell you.”
Josie gave her a frustrated look. “I’m not going to ask her out. I don’t even know if she dates women. And anyway, I’m not finished pleading my case. I promised to call her tomorrow about the kittens, so I’m going to do some research in the meantime and come up with an irresistible argument to convince her to have me on her show.”
“That’s the spirit.” Kaia raised her beer in Josie’s direction.
“Yeah, well, just cross your fingers for me that it works.” Because one way or another, she was determined to land herself a spot onDo Over.
4
Eve sat cross-legged in bed, box of kittens in front of her and her laptop beside it. Somehow, feeding them had been astronomically easier with Josie there to guide her. Eve had fumbled through her first solo feeding two hours ago, but now, everything was falling apart. She’d spilled formula all over herself while she was feeding the black kitten, and she couldn’t even wake the white one up, let alone make it eat. It was one in the morning, and Eve had only managed an hour of sleep. Annoyance buzzed in her veins as she laid the white kitten across her thigh while she held the syringe to its lips.
No luck. The kitten rolled over, snuggling into a crease in her pajama pants. She took a paper towel and helped it pee, hoping that might wake it up, but the kitten was still lost in dreamland. Leaving it in her lap, she pressed Play on a video about syringe-feeding newborn kittens, unnerved to hear Josie’s voice in her otherwise silent bedroom. The kittens really didn’t make much noise, except when she lifted them out of their box.
“You want to make sure to keep them upright while you’re feeding them,” Josie told her from the screen, hot pink hair in a high ponytail on her head. This video was a few years old, and Josie looked younger, impossibly bubbly and energetic…adorable, in a word.
Eve sighed. Exhaustion pressed over her, weighing her down. Caretaking didn’t come naturally to her. She wanted to pour some food in a bowl and leave the kittens to it. Syringe-feeding newborns was foreign and tiresome and stressful. She eyed the white kitten, currently nestled against her hipbone and still fast asleep.
Frustrated, she lifted the gray one out of the box and successfully got it to eat a small amount of formula. She had similar success with the gray-and-white kitten. The video ended, so she clicked on Josie’s avatar to bring up a list of all her videos, hoping she might find one that would help her deal with the sleepy kitten in her lap.
Until about two years ago, Josie had uploaded videos regularly, many of them with hundreds of thousands of views. There were instructional videos, educational videos about animal rescue, videos chronicling the stories of various kittens she’d cared for, and a series of livestream Q&A sessions.
By all appearances, Josie had been doing well for herself with her channel and her rescue. What had changed? She’d mentioned that she took over the bar after her father died. It would make sense that she’d had less time for kitten rescue after that. And now, despite her personal sacrifice, she was on the verge of losing Swanson’s too.
Eve felt for her. She really did. But she couldn’t work in a bar. She just couldn’t. Reflexively, she rested a hand against the ache in her lower back. She looked down at the white kitten, its tiny face pressed against Eve’s belly.
“We’ll take turns with the two a.m. feedings.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Lisa said, nudging her playfully. “You’re a beast when you don’t get your beauty sleep.”
“I’m serious,” Eve told her, meaning the words from the bottom of her soul. “I want to share it all with you.”
Lisa laced their fingers together. “You will.”
Eve’s breath hitched, her fingers clenched into fists, anger burning past the emptiness that usually occupied the place in her chest where she’d once loved so fiercely. Why wouldn’t the damn kitten eat? Why couldn’t Josie just take them? Why had some pathetic excuse for a human being thrown them out like trash in the first place?
In that moment, she hated him, whoever he was, hated Josie for asking Eve to save her bar, hated herself for not having the patience to feed the damn kitten. She hatedeverything.
This fucking day…
She leaned back, fists braced against the mattress behind her, breathing past the pain, blinking furiously through the moisture in her eyes. Sometimes it snuck up on her like this, in the dark hours of the night, how much she missed them. Her fingers twisted in the blanket beneath her, clinging to it until the moment had passed.
Sitting up, she lifted the white kitten. It lay limply in her hands, letting out a tiny whimper, utterly helpless. It was the smallest of the surviving four and by far the weakest. Would it live? Was she fighting a losing battle trying to save it?
