Adrian Crawford parked his Lexus LC 500 convertible at the loneliest corner of the new animal shelter’s gravel lot. Far from the handful of other vehicles and even farther from the centuries-old oaks that draped their scaly, fern-covered branches over the chain-link fence, the birthday bonus he’d given himself last month would be safe.
The construction/renovation of the shelter had progressed significantly since his last visit a week ago. The old Craftsman-style home’s exterior face-lift was complete. Quinn, Adrian’s old college buddy and the contractor in charge of the project, had already put up the new sign by the entrance. The sign, handmade with white lettering on a bluebird-blue background, matched the new paint and trim on the old house.
A bit bright for his taste, but as a business consultant working pro bono for the nonprofit shelter, it wasn’t his place to argue with the three women in charge of this project. And Quinn was so crazy in love with the trio’s leader, Abby, that he wasn’t thinking straight.
“Furever Love,” Adrian scoffed. “What kind of name is that for a business?” The unfortunately cutesy name the women had chosen for the shelter arched across the top of the sign in a curlicue font they had agonized over for hours. Beneath that, in more sedate lettering: MAGNOLIA BAY ANIMAL SHELTER.
Adrian pushed the button to close the car’s top. He left the windows open a few inches to keep the car’s interior from baking in the Louisiana summer sun. Halfway to the shelter’s front porch, he pointed the key fob behind him and pressed the button to lock the car with a quiet but satisfying blip-blip.
“Gang’s all here.” Quinn’s truck was parked by the outdoor dog runs, where the sound of heavy machinery droned. Reva—the organizing force behind the shelter even though her niece, Abby, was officially in charge—lived at the farm next door. Abby and Quinn were living on-site in the old estate’s pool house until the shelter’s grand opening, so unless Quinn was making a hardware store run, they were always here.
“Well, almost everyone’s here.” Heather’s car, he noticed, was conspicuously absent.
Typical. Heather was just about always late. Adrian couldn’t help but wonder why Abby and Reva thought they could trust her to be in charge of the day-to-day operations when she couldn’t even make it to their weekly meetings on time.
Reva’s dog, Georgia, trotted across the parking lot, coming toward him with a proprietary air. She was a funny-looking combo of dog breeds: a short, long dog with a thick speckled coat of many colors and a white-tipped tail that curved over her back. Her brown eyespots drew together in a concerned frown as she sniffed his jeans and then the treads of his new Lowa hiking boots. When she completed her inspection, she looked up at him with a “state your business and I’ll decide if you can come in” attitude.
He knelt to pet Georgia’s head. “I’m here to brainstorm with the team about another grant proposal for funding, if you must know.”
Then he scoffed at himself. Quinn, Abby, Reva, and Heather all talked to animals like they were human. Now he was doing it too. “Assimilation is nearly complete,” he told Georgia in his best imitation of the Borg.
Georgia stiffened and growled at something behind Adrian. He turned and looked, then bolted to his feet. The scruffy old black-and-white tomcat who’d been hanging around the area was walking tightrope-style along the top of the chain-link fence near Adrian’s car. “Don’t you do it…”
He could tell by the direction of the cat’s gaze that he was about to jump from the fence to the hood of Adrian’s brand-new, never-been-scratched car. “No!” He started running, but the cat was already gathering itself for the leap. “Bad cat!”
Too late.
Georgia took off like an avenging army of one, galvanized into action and ready to tell the cat what for, announcing her intention with a high-pitched, yodeling bark.
The cat was already mid-leap with front paws extended, body stretched out, and back toes spread when he spotted the dog barreling toward him. Eyes wide, mouth frozen in a grimace of terror, the cat twisted in midair to go back the way he’d come. Too late.
His spine hit the hood of Adrian’s car with a loud thwump, then his body twirled like a corkscrew, all claws extended as he scrambled to get his balance.
“No…” Adrian ran, but Georgia ran faster. She leaped up, scrabbling at the side of the car in an impossible effort to reach the cat. Never gonna happen; Georgia wasn’t even knee-high. But she didn’t know it, the cat didn’t know it, and none of that mattered to the previously shiny, immaculate finish of Adrian’s new car.
“No, shoo, bad dog,” Adrian yelled. Why hadn’t he used the perfectly good, fitted canvas cover that he’d left in the trunk of the car? “Get down, right now.” Why hadn’t he bothered to toss it over the car the second he got out? “Hush, dog.” He tried to push the dog away with his foot. “Get back. Go home.”
The cat leaped up to the car’s convertible top and hissed down at the dog, who barked even more ferociously, moving to scratch a different area on the side of Adrian’s poor car. He snatched the little troublemaker up.
The little dog whined and squirmed but didn’t bark. The cat, frozen in a bowed-up caricature of a Halloween cat, stopped growling long enough to catch his breath. In the sudden cessation of noise, Adrian heard a sound behind him.
Reva rushed up, all flowing hair and patchwork fabric—a prematurely gray hippie. She snatched Georgia out of his arms. “I’ll put her up,” she said. “You grab the cat and bring him inside. We’ve been trying to catch him for weeks.”
As Reva hurried back across the parking lot with her Birkenstocks scuffing along the gravel surface, Adrian stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the damage. These scratches were not the sort that could just be buffed out with a good coat of Minwax. “Son of a bitch.”
But there was nothing he could do about the damage now. He heaved a sigh and plowed his hands through his hair, then applied his business-consultant problem-solving skills to the situation. “Okay.” First things first. “Come here, cat.”
He held his hands out to the cat and made kissy noises. The cat backed away, growling low in his throat. “Naw, don’t be that way.” Adrian softened his tone even further. “Come on, little man.” The cat was little but also a fully grown tomcat with a big jughead jaw. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
The cat glared at him, so he used one of the tricks he’d heard Reva mention when she was talking to the shelter girls about taming wild cats. He half-closed his eyes, looking sleepily at the cat and blinking slowly. The cat settled onto his haunches, his glowing amber eyes not as wide-open as before.
Well, fuck me, he thought. It worked.
He started humming, not a tune, just random low tones.
The damn cat started purring, and damn if he didn’t start doing that slow blinking thing too.
Which Adrian realized he had forgotten to keep doing, so he started it up again. His humming resembled a tune he’d heard his grandmother sing, so he added words to the tune: “What’s up, stinky cat?” The cat did stink. He smelled like dirt, motor oil, and cat pee. “Whoa, whoa, whoa… Come here, stinky cat; whoa, whoa, whoa…”
The cat’s body tensed, raising up a fraction off his haunches as if preparing to run.
Yeah, that shit wasn’t working, so he went back to humming. The cat settled back down. He didn’t seem inclined to move toward Adrian’s outstretched hands, but at least he wasn’t running or hissing or growling. Adrian eased forward and gently touched the cat, spreading his fingers lightly over the cat’s bony ribs.
The cat’s purring stopped. Adrian kept his fingertips on the cat’s haunches, letting the skittish feline get used to him before he pushed the envelope any further. He did more of the blinking thing, still humming, and slowly began to stroke the cat’s scruffy, greasy, black-and-white fur. It seemed peppered with tiny scabs.
No question, this dude was a fighter.
Adrian eased his fingers farther along the cat’s back, then slowly dragged him forward. The cat resisted at first, but at some point in the process, he padded along the car’s hood toward Adrian, assisted by the gentle pressure Adrian kept applying. They seemed to have reached some sort of unspoken agreement. Making soothing sounds, not even a hum anymore but a vibration in his throat that he could feel but barely hear, Adrian gathered the reluctant cat into his arms.
***
Cat let the man hold him close, only because the hands that held him didn’t grab too tightly or try to force anything. Cat knew, somehow, that if he changed his mind about accepting help, the man would let him go.
Cat had never been given any other name, though he had been called many different versions of it. As he rode along in the man’s arms—carried toward the building into which he’d seen other cats come and go of their own free will—Cat thought of the many names he’d been called.
Damn Cat. Fucking Cat. Asshole Cat. Go Away Cat.
His personal favorite up until now: Go Away You Damn Fucking Asshole Cat.
That one had always seemed particularly impressive to him.
But this man called him by a new name, one that Cat much preferred because of the tone in which it had been uttered. Stinky Cat. He liked that one. He decided that would be the name by which he would refer to himself, whenever he wanted to think of himself as a cat with a name.
Despite the man’s gentle reassurance, Stinky Cat felt himself becoming increasingly tense as they neared the door that would soon close behind him, cutting off the option of changing his mind.
He wanted to believe. He wanted to be like those other cats who seemed so confident, so unafraid. They even sat with the dogs—napped with them on the building’s wide front porch!—and everyone seemed perfectly content. Even the bad little dog who’d come after him was nice to those other cats. She licked their ears the way mama cats licked their babies.
But Stinky Cat had a bad feeling that the dog he’d heard called Georgia wasn’t going to lick his ears. She might not have used her teeth on him as she’d threatened to do, but she made it clear she didn’t want him around. She had been ready to chase him right back over the fence he had climbed. He had wanted to see more of this strange place in which dogs and cats and people seemed to get along much better than the dogs and cats and people of his previous experience, who were more inclined to try to kill one another.
But now he wasn’t so sure he was up for the challenge. He pushed his front paws against the man’s supporting arm and leaned his head back against the man’s chest.
“Shhh,” the man said, “You’re okay.” Then he stopped walking and stood still, halfway between the metal hill Cat had been stranded on and the building where the dogs and cats came and went whenever they pleased. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Stinky Cat didn’t know what the words meant, and he was too worried about what might happen to understand the man’s thoughts. But the tones of the man’s voice soothed him, just as the man’s fingers stroking his fur soothed him. He felt himself purring again, relaxing against the man’s comforting bulk almost against his better judgment. He knew this human wouldn’t harm him intentionally, as so many others had.
But he wasn’t sure about the people inside that building.
Stinky Cat wanted to see if he could be one of those cats who seemed so confident and happy and unafraid. But he worried that something terrible may have happened to the ones who were caught in the traps. That’s why he’d been so careful to avoid the wire tunnels that held enough fish-scented food to fill his belly for days. He’d been too afraid to risk it.
He’d been afraid all his life—or at least from the moment in early kittenhood when he’d woken with his siblings to find that their mother was gone. He even slept afraid—and lightly enough to wake completely between one breath and another, his ever-present fear fueling his ability to escape or fight for his life if a predator pounced.
Fear had kept him alive this long.
How could he give it up now?
***
Adrian had the damn stinky cat within ten feet of the shelter’s front porch when he heard Heather’s car coming. He knew it was hers because of the loud rattling sound the old Honda’s hinky motor made. She always brought her kids and her badly behaved dog. Knowing there was a high probability of mayhem about to ensue, he petted the cat and took another few, slow steps, hoping to make it inside the building before the car skidded into the parking lot. “What’s up, stinky cat,” he sang. “Whoa, whoa, whoaah.”
Tamping down the sense of urgency that kept creeping into his head and infusing his tone, he took a few cautious steps closer to the shelter. Balancing the need to move in sync with the cat’s fluctuating degree of compliance with the imperative of getting inside before…
Heather’s car careened into the parking lot, scattering gravel. The dog’s head hung out the window, barking as if he had something important to say.
The cat’s claws came out like Wolverine’s knives. Intent on escaping, the frightened feline dug those claws into Adrian’s flesh, slicing effortlessly through his shirt. The back claws gained traction by digging deep into Adrian’s abs, while the front claws latched onto his chest. The determined cat used his claws like grappling hooks to haul himself up to an unsteady perch on Adrian’s shoulder, where with one last, mighty effort, he launched off Adrian’s back and hit the ground running.
Before Adrian could gather the presence of mind to say, “Ow, shit,” the cat had scaled the chain-link fence and leaped into the thick underbrush on the other side.
Adrian watched Heather park her rattletrap car under the shade of a live oak whose trailing, fern-covered branches were as thick as a full-grown human body. She clearly had more trust in the universe—or her car insurance—than he did.
Heather’s dog—a honey-and-brown speckled Aussie with flashy copper-and-white markings—rushed up to greet him. Adrian reached down to pet the dog’s head. “Hello, Jasper. You don’t even realize that you just ruined everything, do you?”
Jasper panted with enthusiasm, wagged his whole back end, and grinned a doggy grin.
A second later, Heather’s son, Josh, ran up to bombard Adrian with the latest news. “I got in trouble at school today. See?” He pointed to a small bruise on his cheekbone. His wheat-blond hair stuck up in clumps, and his navy-blue polo shirt was gray from what must have been a sweaty altercation on the school playground.
“Wow, I bet that hurt.” Adrian gave what he hoped was sufficient attention to the almost nonexistent but clearly exciting wound. “Did the teacher punch you?”
“No, silly.” Josh grinned, revealing a gap where he’d recently lost a tooth. “Teachers don’t get to punch kids.”
“What happened, then?”
“I pushed Kevin for calling me a crybaby, and then he punched me. We both got in trouble, and Ms. Mullins—she’s the principal now—said we’ll have to apologize to each other in the morning, but after that, we’re gonna forget all about it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“As long as it doesn’t happen again,” Heather added with a stern look at Josh. She and Josh’s twin sister, Caroline, walked toward them hand in hand. Caroline seemed to be the complete opposite of her brother. Wearing a still-pressed-looking jumper, her white blouse and socks neat and clean, her long blond braids tied with crisp blue ribbons, Caroline was as reserved as Josh was outgoing.
Adrian couldn’t help noticing how cute Heather looked, even dressed as she was in slightly baggy jeans and a simple white blouse with a modest neckline. What seemed like a deliberate effort to hide her femininity wasn’t working. Had never worked, in fact, at least as far as he was concerned.
The needy kid who now clung to Adrian’s leg in an effort to regain his attention kept him from reaching out to touch the bright blond curl that had escaped Heather’s haphazard ponytail. It wasn’t that the kid was physically in the way because if Adrian wanted to touch Heather, no one would be able to stop him. What stopped him was the fact that she had kids.
It wasn’t because Josh’s attention-seeking behavior could be exhausting.
It wasn’t because Caroline was so unbearably shy that she often hid behind Heather with her thumb in her mouth.
It wasn’t because Erin, the willowy girl who strolled toward the shelter with her nose in her phone, was prone to flare-ups of teenage angst.
There wasn’t anything wrong with Heather’s kids in particular. If not for all the hangers-on in her life, Adrian would have been up for a quick fling with her, as long as it came with a flexible expiration date. But her kids were a major part of her deal—as they should be—and he wasn’t emotionally ready to be a stepdad.
So he kept his distance, and she kept hers.
She surprised him by reaching out and touching his chest. Her fingers spread across the fabric of his T-shirt, lightly stroking, barely even a touch at all. “You’re bleeding.”
Had she not seen what just happened? “That’s the usual result of being climbed like a tree by a freaked-out cat.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, Mom,” Josh supplied. “Adrian was holding that black-and-white cat y’all have been trying to catch.”
Her eyebrows went up, two delicate blond arches of surprise over her wide, leaf-green eyes. “You caught him?”
“I had caught him, yes. I was almost at the shelter with him in my arms when y’all drove up.”
“Jasper barked, and the cat went nuts.” Josh hopped with excitement at the remembered event. “Huh, Adrian?”
He smiled down at the kid. “That sums it up.”
Heather’s pretty face was windowpane easy to read. Her cheeks washed with pink, and she brought a hand up to cover her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”
“Jasper tried to chase it when we got out of the car.” Josh tugged on Adrian’s shirt, encouraging him to look down. “But it ran too fast, didn’t it, Adrian? It was already over the fence by then.”
Adrian looked down and put his hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Yep, it was.”
“Lord help us,” Heather said softly, her voice breathless, which had an unsettling effect on Adrian’s peace of mind. “I am so sorry Jasper caused all this trouble.”
As if to underscore her comment about Jasper, the dog took off after another of Reva’s cats from next door who was stalking something in the shrubbery by the shelter’s front porch.
“Jasper,” Heather yelled. “Get back here.”
The overexcited dog paid zero attention.
“Josh, Caroline, please go get that dog and put him in one of the kennels out back.”
Josh ran after the dog and grabbed him by the collar. Caroline followed more slowly. “Caroline,” Heather called out. “Open and close the gates for Josh, okay?”
Caroline changed course, heading for the walk-through gate that led to the kennels. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Make sure they are securely latched once you go through, okay?” Even though there weren’t yet any animals residing at the unfinished shelter, Adrian knew that Heather had been making a point of teaching her kids good safety habits.
“Yes, ma’am,” Caroline said again. The child was a model of good manners.
Heather shook her head. “That damn dog.” Then she reached out and took Adrian’s hand. “Come on inside and let me doctor those scratches.” She even tugged at his hand to tow him into the building as if he were one of her kids.
And he let her do it, without hesitation.