Page 25 of Your Fault

Her tongue started licking at my hand so I’d let her go. Isqueezed her ribs, and it reminded me of the way she’d poked me that morning. We were both ungodly ticklish.

I let her go before I lost my nerve.

“Nicholas!” she shrieked.

“You slobbered all over me,” I said, wiping my hand on my pants.

She ignored me. “Okay, fine. If you won’t buy me a cat, I’ll buy it myself.” She turned on her heels and walked into what must have been any man’s hell. I followed her, exasperated, smelling animal fur, piss, and shit, hearing hamsters running back and forth and cats meowing, all of it so loud, I had to struggle not to drag Noah out.

With an Olympic effort at pretending I wasn’t there, she turned to the employee behind the counter, a young guy, her age, probably. His eyes lit up when he saw her.

“How can I help you?”

She looked over, and when she saw I wasn’t going to do anything, she turned indifferently to the guy and said, “I want to adopt a cat.”

Coming out from behind the counter with a huge smile on his face, happy to help her any way he could, the attendant headed down a hallway, and I followed behind Noah.

“This way. Just yesterday, we picked up some kittens from a parking deck. Someone had abandoned them there, and they can’t be more than six weeks old.”

Noah said a long and aggrieved “oh.” I rolled my eyes while the jerkoff took us back to a room with a bunch of cages full of cats of all shapes and colors. Some were sleeping, some mewing, some just being a pain in the ass.

“Here they are,” he said, showing us a cage at the end of a row. Noah walked over as if it concealed a magic treasure.

“They’re so tiny!” she said in that voice girls have when they talk to kittens or babies.

I came up behind her and looked at the mangy beasts lying on a blanket. Three were gray with white spots on their paws and head. One was black all over. Right away, they gave me a weird feeling.

“Look how they’re playing,” the guy said in a little-bitch voice. I scowled at him and edged over to Noah.

“Can I pick one up?” she asked, using all her feminine charms.

“Yeah, whichever one you want.”

Of course. So which did Noah pick?

The black one, obviously.

“He’s the calmest one. I haven’t seen him playing since they got here.”

The other three were anything but—they were jumping all over and slapping each other with their paws. They’d probably given the poor runt one hell of a time.

Noah brought the kitten close to her chest and caressed it like a mother holding her baby. The damned thing started meowing, and at that point, I knew it was game over.

I sighed.

“Look, Nick,” she said, her eyes tender.

The cat was ugly as hell, black, its hair standing on end, but I knew Noah wasn’t the type to pick the cutest or the most playful one. She would go for the outcast, the one that had been ignored, the one nobody loved… That reminded me of myself.

“Fine, shit, you can keep the fucking cat,” I conceded.

A huge smile crossed her face.

The employee led us to the counter where I had to sign a ton of papers promising to take care of the cat and get it vaccinated and a bunch of other nonsense. Noah started picking through a small selection of supplies for sale, and when she came back, she had a ton of stupid toys for this animal that didn’t even have a name.

“You gonna pay for that?” I said, needling her. I didn’t give a shit about the money; I just wanted to let a little air out of her balloon.

“You said whatever I wanted,” she reminded me, grabbing a collar, some food bowls, and a soft blue bed, and laying them on the counter.

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