He was holding a cat carrier in his right hand.
It was vibrating, and the cat was producing a sound I’d been hearing through my wall for ten months.
A garment bag was draped over his shoulder. Evenzipped shut, I could tell it contained things that sparkled. I could just sense it. The bag had an aura, a bit like the subdued Benji.
He looked at me. I looked at him. I looked at the carrier. I looked at the garment bag.
I knew this was the right thing to do. I’d done the math.
Still, standing in my doorway, looking at this person who was essentially the opposite of everything my apartment represented, I felt the full weight of what I’d agreed to settle onto my shoulders.
“Well,” I said. “You’re the weather check.”
“And you’re the bathrobe.”
His voice was different, still bright and fast, but pulled back somehow, as though someone had told him to keep it at a simmer instead of a boil. I could see the effort it was costing him. His eyes were doing something his mouth wasn’t, darting around the apartment behind me with a curiosity that his measured tone was trying very hard to contradict.
From inside the carrier, the cat let out a yowl that bounced off the walls and hit a frequency I felt in my back teeth.
I looked at the carrier, then looked at him.
“That the cat that sounds like she’s bein’ murdered?”
“She’s expressing herself.”
“She’s been expressin’ herself through my wall for ten months.”
“In fairness, you’ve been snoring through mine. Or your dog has. I spent the first six months thinking my HVAC was dying.”
I felt my mouth twitch.
I shut it down before it went anywhere.
This was not a bonding moment, a logistics exchange.
“That’s Potato,” I said, nodding toward the wheezing lump behind my legs. “He’s got a condition.”
“I gathered.”
Benji’s cat yowled again.
General Tso rose to his full height on the refrigerator, back arching into a shape that communicated, in the universal language of cats, that a border had been identified and would be defended with lethal force.
“That’s General Tso. He doesn’t like other animals. I’m not even sure he likes me.”
“Princess Consuela doesn’t like anything.”
“Then they’ll get along fine.”
I stepped back enough to let him through without any of his luggage or his energy brushing against me. I had a speech prepared, not a speech exactly, but a sequence of facts that needed to be communicatedbefore this went any further.
“Foster room’s down the hall, second door on the right. There are kittens in the bathroom, so keep that door latched. The beagle in the crate is Shortcake. She’s post-surgical, so don’t rile her up. Feeding schedule’s on the whiteboard. Quiet hours start at ten.”
Benji stepped inside.
I watched him take it in. The books, the couch, the whiteboard, the organized chaos of a space that had been built for one person and a rotating cast of animals. His eyes moved across the room with the quick, absorptive attention of someone who was used to reading rooms for a living. I imagined he did this at the bar, scanning a crowd, taking inventory of who needed what. He was doing it to my apartment now, cataloguing my life in real time, and I found I didn’t care for the sensation.
Then Hiro appeared.
