Page 91 of The Good Boy

“What I’m trying to say is that being tolerated by a cat is not the same as being loved by a dog. What we have isn’t mindless devotion, but it is something special. Something real, because I know if she didn’t like me, she’d leave. We take care of each other.”

“I can see that,” I say. This would be the perfect time to mention that I love him, but somehow I can’t quite seem to get the words out.

“Anyway, it’s not that I am not a cat person,” I tell him. “It’s more that I just don’t know any cats beyond nodding terms. And Rory has always been really quite skeptical about them as a species, which has influenced my own feelings. But I think, given the opportunity, I could probably be a cat person too. I mean, there isn’t a rule that you can only like one kind of pet, is there?”

Having finished her meal, Matilda sits on the worktop and begins to clean her paws, watching me all the while with her cool, yellow gaze.

“At first I thought that Matilda wasn’t my kind of person. Then I thought that actually she was really interesting and fun and she became one of my best friends,” I say as the cat literally looks down her nose at me. “Now I realize that I actually like her quite a lot, that I’ve liked her quite a lot, more than quite a lot, for a very long time. Because she is kind and funny and accepting and life without her wouldn’t be nearly as fun.”

“You are using Matilda as a metaphor to talk about us, aren’t you?” Miles says.

“Yes, yes I am.” I smile weakly. “I don’t think I tell you nearly enough how much you mean to me, and how glad I am to know you.”

Miles presents me with a cup of tea, taking a seat opposite me within what some people might call kissing distance.

“I’m really glad to know you too.” Miles looks at me for a long time. At least sixteen seconds more than is comfortable, and long enough to make me wish I’d taken a shower after all. Right, come on, Eugenie. It’s go time.”

“Miles, I have to tell you something...”

“Do you remember that Christmas dance that you took me to, your first term at college?”

“Of course,” I say. “How could I forget it?”

“Do you still have the dress you made?” he asks.

“Oh yes, I do, the emerald-green avant-garde off-the-shoulder bias cut with the split. I wore it with my pink Doc Martens boots. Yes, I still have it. Though it might not fit me anymore...” I smile at the thought of us walking into the dance together. “And I made you a shirt to match, with big billowing sleeves and a pussy bow fifteen years before Harry Styles thought of it. Exactly the same shade of green except it had”—I pause, my eyes widening—“a leopard-print pattern. I made you an emerald-green leopard-print-pattern pussy bow shirt, and you wore it so well.”

Miles smiles. “You do remember.”

“I remember everything,” I say. “Recently I’ve been thinking about it all the time.”

“The band started playing ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You,’” Miles says. “The hall was strung with hundreds of colored lights, and we ran outside just as it began to snow...”

“And then we... we almost kissed,” I finish for him. “But Aiden showed up.”

“Aiden showed up,” Miles said.

“Miles, I wish I’d—”

The doorbell rings sharply, followed by a loud rap on the door.

“We could pretend we aren’t in?” Miles suggests as we both freeze.

“Miles! It’s me! Claudia! Claudia-from-work!” Claudia calls from the other side of the door. “Thought you might like to go for breakfast?”

“Oh, it’s Claudia,” I say, so stupidly that I would quite like to stick my head in the toaster.

“Claudia, yes, for lo, it is her,” Miles says, not an awful lot less stupidly.

“Probably better let her in!” I grin madly.

“Yes.” He nods. “I’m going to do that right now.”

Matilda follows him.

The colored lights, the snow, the song: they were all telling me that the kiss that Miles and I never had ten years ago might not be gone. It might just be on a very long pause. Because I know for sure that, for some reason, Miles had that same leopard-print shirt in his bag.

It’s only after I hear Miles open the door that I realize I am sitting in his kitchen in my dressing gown. For a second I think about heading out the back door and over the fence, but I am not wearing any pants, which Claudia might find even more troubling were she to catch a glimpse of my nether regions. So I head briskly for the door like nothing is out of the ordinary at all.

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