Page 6 of Kitten

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

But already I was replaying his words, turning the sentiment over like a prism in my head. Taking care of me was not an obligation, it wasnice. I was somebody he liked to look after.

“I meant,” James said, “that in a relationship you’re not just thinking about what you’re getting from the other person, right? You’re also thinking about what you can give to them.”

“That’s big of you.”

He shrugged. “You see it the same way, I’m sure.”

I didn’t. I liked being with James because he made it easier for me to be alive. With him the world felt safer, my place in it more appropriate. Did James really feel this way about me and everything he loved? Or was he lying, pretending to be better, more mature than he was?

I changed the subject. “Lou’s mad at me.”

James sat on the bed. I put my head on his damp shoulder. “Again? What’s the crime this time?”

“Nothing too bad.”

“I’m teasing.” James pushed my shoulders gently so I fell backward on the mattress. He leaned over to kiss my nose. “You can do no wrong.”

My cheeks warmed. Silver poked between our faces, her whiskers tickling my lips. Her left ear, I noticed, was missing its tip. “What happened there?”

“Oh, her superhero backstory. Vets do that to stray cats after they neuter them and release them back into the wild.”

“I didn’t know she was a stray.”

“Yeah, we found her by the sea.”

“In Holme?”

“Yeah. I was, what, fifteen, sixteen? She was super small, completely alone.” James’s voice softened. “She crawled onto my towel, basically straight from the ocean. There was gunk all over her eyes, and she was all cold, but she wasn’t shaking at all.”

I considered the information. If James found her when he was a teenager, that meant Silver was more than ten years old, more adult than kitten. This disappointed me. Silver didn’t act like an adult. She acted like she was discovering the world for the first time, and everything was either threatening or beautiful. Milk, for example, which she lapped until she burped. The dust motes that hung below the big window, enemies to be batted into oblivion. And James, whom she followed everywhere, which was understandable.

“You took her from the beach? What if she had a family there?”

“She didn’t, she was alone.”

“What if she was lost? Or trying to lead you to her owner.”

James laughed. “No way, trust me. She was a stray, it was just her. I had to help.”

I looked at Silver and felt a mixture of pity and awe. Why did she choose to go to James out of everyone on the beach? Maybe she’d approached others before him, and he was the first to care. If I were him, I wasn’t sure what I’d have done. “I would’ve been pretty scared.”

“Me too, if I were her.” James patted her head. “But she was strangely calm. She came straight to me. The vet said she wouldn’t live because she was so sick, but she did.”

I frowned. Silver’s head bobbed to the movement of James’s fingers. Her eyes cracked open and shifted between the both of us. She seemed to have something important to say about the whole situation and how little either of us knew about any of it. Then she yawned, her breath milky, and fell asleep.

3

I woke to an assortment of fresh bagels and a pot of cream cheese waiting for me on the dining table. A few feet away, James packed a tote bag with Silver’s things. As I chewed on my bagel, Silver jumped onto the table and began to lick the cream cheese. It was the first time I noticed her tongue, thin and sharp as the tip of a flame. I glanced at James. He was folding a blanket with his back turned. “Are you allowed to do that?” I whispered to her.

Silver paused to look at me, then continued to eat. Impressed by her audacity, I decided not to tell James. Even through headphones, his music was so loud I could hear it from the table. My mother always warned against turning the volume above the halfway point. I watched James through her narrowed eyes, wondering what she would make of him. Almost certainly she would find him foolish. As soon as this thought came to me, it gained the resoluteness of belief. It didn’t matter that the belief wasn’t my own; knowing it would be my mother’s was enough. In that moment, James looked foolish to me.

James was my first boyfriend. I’d had crushes before, butnever seriously pursued them. What went on in my brain, I believed, didn’t have any business manifesting into real life. Even as a kid, I refrained from speaking to classmates I liked. My mother always said that other children didn’t understand me. But that was okay, because the other mothers didn’t understand her, either. She had no wrinkles and never contributed a dollar to the PTA. “They don’t need my money,” she said. “They just want us to feel poor.” Most of my classmates’ fathers, I learned, made a lot of money, which explained our situation. The first time I asked about my father, she grinned, tight-lipped and mischievous. Then she held me close so my lips pressed into the hollow of her throat, her cheek velvety like the skin of a plum. “Girls like us,” she said, and I so loved her smell, warm yeasty breath against crisply perfumed collarbone, “are meant to be with each other. Nobody else. Otherwise, it would be too much, wouldn’t it?” I couldn’t imagine loving someone else the way I loved my mother. If I had a father, he would be very lonely. He would suffer.

Watching James wiggle his shoulders to the music, I felt a sting of guilt, like I was spying on a stranger. Then he turned to face me. My lips curved into a smile before I registered that the guilt had faded; I was happy to see him. He took off his headphones.

“You’re a slow drinker,” he said. I’d barely touched my coffee. “Want milk and sugar?”