1
MAEVE
The kitten witheyes as blue as the ocean stares at the feather wand toy while I dangle it in front of him.
“What’s that?” I ask him softly, enticing him with the bright colors and loud bell attached to the feathers. “What are you going to do?”
He was found outside the coffee shop down the street, digging through the trash and to chew on coffee beans.
Now, he lives at the cat rescue.
After receiving a panicked call from an overwhelmed barista, I picked him up and brought him to his new home at Furs and Purrs.
The cat playroom has become Bean the kitten’s favorite spot, and this feather wand his preferred toy.
With cream-and-brown-colored fur and breathtakingly blue eyes, he’s absolutelyadorable.
I can’t decide if I want to squish him, smooch him, or both.
He even smells good, like a forbidden vanilla latte.
It’s hard to explain to Piper and Blair, the owners of the rescue, and they look at me like I’m crazy.
But huffing cats is arealthing, which I proved to them when I showed them all the videos I found on it.
They weren’t impressed.
“Hey, Maeve,” Blair says as she enters the playroom. “Did that litter company reach out earlier?”
I nod, still entertaining Bean. “Yup. They want to do a collaboration! They’ll send us some litter and all we have to do is make a video about it and post it on socials.”
“Wow. You really did it, huh?” Blair says fondly. “You made us cat influencers.”
I grin at my best friend, who is technically my boss. “As long as you keep letting me run the accounts, we’ll be thebestcat influencers.” I bat my lashes at her.
She chuckles. “You got it.”
Since I’ve taken over Furs and Purrs social media accounts, we have gone viral more than once in the past six months. I purposely make videos about our longest residents or our oldest cats that need homes.
Kittens are usually the first to be adopted—but the mature cats with complicated backstories or special requirements need to find their forever families, too.
Blair looks fondly at Bean, who has flipped onto his back and is exposing his cream-colored belly. “I can’t imagine he’ll stay here long. He’s immediately adoptable,” she says.
My heart aches at parting with Bean, but it’s something unavoidable.
Sometimes, I end up shedding a tear for the cats we say goodbye to, and my friends kindly pretend not to see me cry.
“I want to take him home,” I murmur.
“You say that about every kitten.”
“No! I didn’t say it about that crazy one,” I insist. “That white one we found under Piper’s car on her birthday.”
“The one that ate your salmon roll?” Blair isn’t impressed.
“Yeah. Because heate my salmon roll.I’ve got beef with him.”
“You’re not supposed to hold grudges against animals, Maeve. You literally work at a cat rescue.” But my best friend is amused, judging by the glint in her hazel eyes.
