Eleven
was settled against her headboard with a mug of herbal tea and a purring cat on either side of her, her dress traded in for an old t-shirt and her softest sweatpants, the evening felt like a dream. She had thought she had known Burak and the space he occupied in her life well enough to have a handle on him, but when they had been out of their normal environment—and when their tongues had been loosened by wine and laughter—she was seeing him in a different light. And she couldn’t stop staring at him in her mind, as if by doing so she could make sense of this new, unfamiliar person he had turned out to be.
“We’re going to get your old colony settled tomorrow,” she told Cheddar, who looked up at her with sleepy eyes, blinking as if he were trying to understand her words. “It turns out it’s not that hard. We just have to move them all at once and keep them sort of enclosed in the new location, so they don’t just head right back to their old home. I’m thinking the courtyard behind the cafe will be the perfect new home. Here I was thinking it was going to be a months-long process, like we’d have to move one cat per day or something. But by the sounds of it, it’s pretty straightforward. Who knew?” Cheddar gave her another slow blink, and she nodded back at him. “Right,” she said. “You knew. I should have asked you.”
She scratched Cheddar behind the ear, replacing her mug on the bedside table so that she could reach for Gator with the other hand. “What am I doing here?” she wondered out loud, remembering Burak’s questions when he had entered the apartment. “This…this feels like my life.” She shook her head. “But it isn’t. Grandma will be back soon, and she and Morty are going to want their space and then…well, Cheddar, you and I are going to be on our own.” Her stomach dropped as a thought occurred to her. “Or I am going to be on my own, at least. Grandma will keep you in a second. And I know she would keep me too, but it doesn’t really work that way for humans.“ She gave the sleepy kitten a sad smile. “I sort of have to figure things out on my own. Absurd, isn’t it?”
Jasmine reached for her tea, taking a long sip as both cats curled deeper into themselves. “And what about Burak?” she asked herself. “I barely even want to let myself think about that whole thing. Does it make sense to go out with him? What’s the point of even liking each other as more than friends, childish as that sounds? It’s not like we’re going to move in together and I’ll stay in Istanbul forever. I’m going to be out of here soon, and we’ll both probably just regret that we invested any emotional energy in each other.” It didn’t matter if that thought made her feel a twinge of sadness; it was the truth. “I’ll go out with him tomorrow—it would be rude to cancel this late in the game, anyway—but that’s going to be it. No more. I don’t want his feelings to be hurt when it turns out that I can’t give him what he wants.” And okay, maybe she didn’t want her feelings to be hurt, either. She wasn’t a masochist, after all.
She switched off the bedside lamp and settled into the darkness, tossing and turning until both cats abandoned her to sleep elsewhere in the apartment. But no matter how much she flipped from side to side, sleep didn’t come for her, and the hours until morning stretched ahead of her like the stretchiest string of gooey melted cheese.