The song ends, and I sit there with my hands on the keys, the final notes still hanging in the air.
I love singing. I’ve always loved singing. But playing in private rooms was never enough for me. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to stand on stages and feel the roar of the crowd and know that I mattered, that my voice meant something, that I wasn’t invisible.
I got exactly what I wanted.
And I’ve never felt more alone in my life.
But I can’t stand the silence, so I draw in a deep breath, and start from the top. I play it again, and again. And one more time.
Until the music drowns out the blaring nothingness in my mind.
chapter 4
Taio
Living alone is mostly hell, but there’s a certain freedom in heating up a Hungry-Man at four p.m. while still wearing yesterday’s sweatpants, with no witnesses to your decline except the walls.
Well. Almost no witnesses.
Black Cat sits on the kitchen counter—a place he knows he’s not supposed to be because his furry ass is not welcome where I prepare my food. I’d scold him but nothing works. He likes water sprayed in his face. Shaking a penny can just riles him up. And he thinks “Bad Cat” is a compliment. I feel his glowing yellow-green eyes transfixed on me as I peel back the plastic film on my Salisbury steak to vent my frozen meal before nuking it in the microwave. I glance up to see him staring with the intensity of a food critic at a Michelin-starred restaurant. He tracks every movement of my hands, whiskers twitching in what I can only describe as disappointment.
“Don’t judge me,” I tell him. “You eat right out of a can.”
He blinks slowly. Judgment rendered.
I found Black Cat four months ago, yowling in the alley behind my building like someone was murdering him with a rusty spoon. He used to be scrawny, matted, feral as hell—the kind of cat that would sooner claw your eyes out than accept a belly rub. I made the mistake of leaving a bowl of tuna on my fire escape, thinking I was doing a good deed for a wild creature who’d move on by morning.
He did not move on.
He moved in.
I refuse to name him because naming him would mean admitting he’s mine, and I’m still clinging to the delusion that he’s a free spirit who chose to crash at my place temporarily. Any day now, he’ll remember he’s a wild animal with places to be and disappear into the urban jungle from whence he came.
Any day now.
The name “Black Cat” was supposed to be a declaration of my apathy. He’s not my pet, just a passing stray. Except it stuck like gum to a shoe. Now when I say it, his ears do that radar-dish swivel thing, and he makes this chirpy half meow that sounds suspiciously like he’s correcting my pronunciation. So much for maintaining emotional distance.
The microwave whirls to life, and I shuffle my ass to the couch to wait—the same couch where Forrest and I used to demolish entire pizzas while arguing about NFL playoff contenders and whether the DC Universe is superior to Marvel. For the record, it is. He’s wrong. I’m the literary critic here. There’s something enthralling about the hauntingly beautiful broody heroes from DC.
The apartment feels too big without him, which is ridiculous because it’s a shoebox even by Brooklyn standards. But when you’ve shared barely seven hundred square feet with your best friend for two years, his absence leaves a crater.
Not that I begrudge him. Forrest left the business when he found love. Real love, the kind that makes a guy a simp who moves to a brownstone with a woman to play house, and somehow finagles her father’s blessing despite the fact he’s a former escort. He built this beautiful, traditional family lifestyle for his four-year-old who says “Daddy” like it’s the highest praise. I’m happy for the guy. He deserves every bit of it.
I just miss the bastard. He’s never around anymore.
The microwave announces my gourmet feast with a pathetic little ding. I extract my plastic tray of sadness and shuffle the five steps to what the rental listing generously called a “dining area.” It’s barely enough room for a coffee table with one wobbly leg propped up by a Stephen King paperback in front of my couch that sags in all the wrong places.
That Stephen King novel came from my other best friend, Saylor, who thought he was doing me a favor when he discovered I “read books.” Little did he know it would serve me better as furniture repair than entertainment. These days he’s well aware of my actual preference: romance novels, stacked in precarious towers beside my bed. I started devouring them after the one-two punch of my father’s perp walk on the local news, and then finding Alaina’s side of the closet cleared out. Something about watching fictional people get the endings I never would became its own kind of therapy.
Black Cat leaps from the counter to the couch in one fluid motion, landing beside me with the grace of a panther and the entitlement of a trust-fund baby. He stares at my Salisbury steak.
“No.”
He stares harder.
“You have your own food.”
He puts one paw on my thigh. Gentle. Almost polite. The audacity.
