She curled her lip. “No.”
“I’m the cutest stray you will ever take home!” I cajoled.
“I already picked up a stray cat, and it was an epic disaster.”
“Please?”
“You’re going to make my apartment smell.”
I did my best Baby Yoda impression.
“Gah! Why do you have to be so attractive? Don’t say anything. Your ego is already ginormous.”
I smirked.
“Fine,” she huffed, “I will take you home. But if my cat hates you, and he will, you cannot stay!”
3
Ivy
Evan sat in the passenger seat, one arm lying casually on the armrest of the door, as I drove back into Manhattan.
He is so not staying at my apartment.I should have set a firm boundary, but thanks to my mother and her awful parenting, I had absolutely no boundaries, as evidenced by the fact that I had not insisted on payment before the wedding, and Weddings in the City was now twenty thousand dollars in the hole.
It’s fine. Fergus will hate him. Then bye-bye Evan.
The feral cat that I had so graciously invited into my micro NYC condo hated people. He regularly attacked me and my friends. The only thing he liked was food. That was our bonding thing, and as such, he had grown enormous. Fergus the Magnificent was a Maine Coon. A member of a huge cat breed already, Fergus was now as fat as an English king.
He hissed audibly as we approached the door.
“Sorry,” I told Evan as I stuck the key in the lock. “Fergus is probably going to attack you. He’s very sensitive, so if he gets too riled up, you cannot stay here.”
And in three, two, one, Evan is out of here, and you will be eating the last of the Cameli’s lasagna.
I opened the door. Fergus sprang out into the hallway, and I jumped back from habit. My cat was an ankle biter. Evan bent down and extended a hand. I winced. Fergus was going to take out an eye.
“Hey there, kitty cat! Oh, look at you, you’re such a big kitty! What a good boy!”
Fergus sniffed Evan then rubbed his head against Evan's hand.
“What a good cat!” Evan picked him up and snuggled Fergus to his chest.
What. The. Fuck. That fucking traitorous cat!
“I cannot believe it!” I fumed. “I feed him, I give him a warm place to sleep, and he repays me by biting and clawing me!”
“Fergus?” Evan kissed each of the cat’s toes, and Fergus purred as loudly as a vacuum in his arms.
“Not my precious Fergus! No he doesn’t. He’s such a good cat!” Evan, cuddling Fergus, waltzed past me into my tiny condo.
I had scrimped and saved to buy this condo. It wasn’t my first choice of residences, or even my second or twenty-fifth, but it was mine, from the outdated tiny kitchen to the bathroom with the leaky faucet to the fire escape and the single window with its struggling plants that looked out onto a dim alley.
“Fergus, are you going to give me the grand tour?” Evan asked the cat, bouncing him.
“You better be careful,” I warned Evan. “Fergus is going to chew your nose off.” But I knew as I said it that Fergus was instantly in love with Evan. I had never even heard Fergus purr, and now he was like a jet engine.
“So grand tour… well, here,” I pointed to a little galley kitchen, “is where I heat up food. That door at the end leads to the bathroom.”
