“Well.” I thought. “Well, if he’s happy, then I guess it’s ok.”
“He asked me for advice on new dating moves.”
“What does that mean?”
“He said that he’s been out of the game for a while and he’s rusty,” Levi explained. “He wanted to know if I had any tips for wooing her.”
“What did you say?”
“Stuff like, ‘Talk over her when she’s trying to say something, especially if it’s important. Walk in front and let doors close inher face. Always show up late to pick her up and stay on your phone the whole time you’re out.’ Those things always worked for me. It’s why my nickname in high school was ‘Romeo.’”
“You told me that you called your other friend ‘Godzilla’ but he was actually a weakling,” I pointed out.
“You and your damn transcripts,” he said, and laughed. “Are you feeling better?”
“Yes. I still wish Pandora hadn’t shown up, though. That stuff about my mother is in the past and I don’t need to think about it.”
“Then why did you keep the box?”
I looked up at him and didn’t have an answer.
“I do one move that works,” Levi told me and pretended to yawn, holding Coral’s leash with one hand and stretching the other over his head. He then wrapped it around my waist and drew me to him. “The old ‘yawn turns into hug.’”
“You can hug me whenever, no tricks needed,” I said, and looked up at him.
“Good.” He looked back at me for a moment and then gently kissed me, too. “How about that?”
“That’s…” I had to catch my breath. “That’s also good,” I answered.
“We should do it again,” he suggested, “and give the neighbors watching at their windows something to see besides this catamount. What—shit!”
Because at that point, Coral slipped her collar and ran, and we put on a different show as we chased after her.
Chapter 14
“What kind of antibiotics?” Hernán texted. “The same as before?”
“Yes, I washed out the wound but it was deep and the nurse practitioner recommended them again,” I answered. After a protracted chase, Levi and I had caught Coral—and she hadn’t been happy about it, which she’d demonstrated with her teeth. But even as I’d started my course of medicine, I hadn’t been thinking too much about the cat bite except as to how it had interrupted what was happening just before it occurred. I couldn’t tell Hernán because he would have immediately texted Levi, and I couldn’t have them talking about that kiss. I should have been the one talking about it, and…I wasn’t.
But right now, my friend wasn’t focused on romance. He was worried about bacterial infections and was currently mentioning that this was my fifth bite, wasn’t it?
“I thought we were making progress,” I told him. I heard the disappointment in my words as I spoke them into the phone. “She had just been cuddling me and purring.”
“I’m going to tell you something that you may not like, because you haven’t wanted to hear it before,” he returned, and I knew what was coming because yes, he had recommended this on several occasions since he’d given me the cat. “It may be time for Coral to live with someone else.”
“I think we’re forming bonds, or at least, we used to be. I’m not going to get rid of her.”
“I’m not talking about murder,” he wrote back. “Both of you might be happier if she was in a new home.”
“No.” I left it there and didn’t answer him again. It was true that right now, the cat was in Levi’s home, hanging out and not biting. Since her near-escape, she’d spent most of her time across the hall and we’d been closing our apartment doors so that there was no more wandering between our units. I flipped my phone over so that I wouldn’t see what else Hernán was writing to me about Coral’s bad behavior and I returned to my previous task, which was going about as well as that conversation just had. I squinted at the paper and tried to force the directions to make sense, but they absolutely didn’t.
There was no knock, but due to the ultra-thin walls in this building, I heard Levi open the front door. I also heard him greet someone and another man’s voice responded. Was August here? He hadn’t seemed like a morning person, since he’d never come to visit before noon. It made sense because he’dmost recently spent his time running a club that opened after midnight and closed when many people were arriving at the office. Levi and I had already been up for hours today, beginning our day as he’d gone to practice and I’d taken a walk while he was on the river.
Maybe August was changing his schedule since the club was definitely closed now. Levi had told me that the door was padlocked and they’d cleared out the interior. His beautiful apartment in Detroit was also up for sale and he was living in the big house with the square pool, but he’d mentioned that he was thinking about getting rid of that, too.
“Why is he divesting all his assets?” I’d asked and so far, there hadn’t been a response other than “he’s says that he’s changing up his business” and “I don’t know, he won’t tell me.”
How did you say “busybody” in Spanish? When I heard the other apartment door open and voices in the hallway, I rushed over to open mine, too.
