I shrugged, looking down to see what was rubbing against my feet, and Katie moved around me to grab the plates. It was the huge orange cat, fatter than any television Morris or Garfield. He always muscled out the rest of them at dinner time. I opened the drawer back up that I’d just closed and grabbed two forks.
Katie retrieved our drinks from the living room, shooing two cats out of the way as she went who were trying to make figure-8’s around her ankles. I got napkins from the counter and put the basket of garlic bread on the table.
“Wow!” My eyes widened, my mouth already watering as she pulled the lasagna out of the oven. “You went all out, baby! That’s not even Stouffer’s!”
She laughed, using the spatula to cut a huge corner chunk and plopping it on my plate. The fat orange cat was sitting at my feet, looking up at me and blinking like he was bored, but his tail swished and his gaze was on my plate. The lasagna was too hot to eat so I munched on garlic bread while I watched Katie serve herself about half my portion.
“So how was work?” I asked, although most of the time I didn’t. Katie was majoring in veterinary medicine and her internship often involved disgusting medical procedures she liked to discuss in gory detail.
“You don’t want to talk about that.” She smiled, tucking her foot under her as she sat. I looked at the pink instep and found myself wanting to kiss it.
“How did you guess?” I grinned, watching a grey cat appear from around the corner and jump up into her lap. She adjusted as it settled in.
“How was the after-party last night?” She blew on a piece of lasagna hanging off her fork. Her mouth made a little ‘o’ when she did that and it enthralled me.
“Not bad. Wish you could have stayed.” I took another bite of garlic bread and followed it with a swig of soda. Katie had begged off, complaining of a headache. “But Theo was all depressed and being kind of a dick to everyone. You know how bitchy he can get.”
“What do you expect?” She tested the pasta with her lips and found it cool enough to slide into her mouth. “I think you may be the only one in the entire performance who isn’t gay.”
“Just because I sing opera doesn’t mean I’m gay.” I tried out my lasagna. It was still way too hot. I knew I was flushing. I could feel the heat creeping up my neck. “Quit teasing me, Katie.”
“I like teasing you.” She reached for her glass of wine, smiling. She knew I was sensitive about it. Singing opera didn’t exactly make me a chick magnet-quite the opposite, since girls seemed to find it about as masculine as a guy sporting a tutu.
“Besides, I know it’s not true.” She licked a bead of wine from her lip. “Believe me, I know. I’ve always thought it was sexy. Italian, German, French… you sing in all the romance languages.”
She knew just how to twist me around her little finger. “You know, most opera singers don’t know the languages they sing in. They just learn the words… but you do.”
She smiled at me with those dark blue eyes. The cat in her lap had nearly identical ones, and they were both staring at me, blinking. “Fluent in seven languages and conversational in twelve.”
“Almost as many languages as we have cats,” I joked. “You really find that sexy?”
“Uh-huh.” She shooed the cat off her lap and I blinked in disbelief as she crawled across the kitchen floor, nuzzling my crotch under the table.
“Katie?” I said her name as if to check-who was this girl and what had she done with my girlfriend? The one who had to have sex in the dark with most of her clothes still on, the one who barely made a sound, even when I knew she was having an orgasm? Who was this Katie?
“Mmmm, I think it’s time for that hero’s blowjob,” she murmured, working on the zipper of my jeans.
I stared at her, wondering if it was the wine gone to her head. I didn’t want to even entertain that it might have been the visit from the ex that had precipitated her change of sexual mood. It had to be the wine.
“Oh god, Katie.” I moaned and she sucked and we forgot all about dinner and school and Malcolm’s unwelcome interruption. We forgot about everything but each other for a long, delicious while, and I decided that night, with Katie asleep in my arms, that I didn’t care if it would make her an alcoholic, I was going to make sure she had alcohol in her system as often as I could!
* * * *
I was lying on the sofa, balancing a bowl of Trix cereal on my chest. Deciding I was mostly done, I let one of the cat drinks out of the bowl. He lapped around the little fruity circles, his tongue soaking up the sweetened milk.
“That’s not good for them.” Katie didn’t even look at me from her perch in the chair. She was peering out the window. Since the surprise kitchen-table blowjob, things had been cooler than ever. I didn’t get it. I’d tried everything-including lots more alcohol, which just ended up with me holding her hair while she puked in the bathroom-but she went back to the quiet, frigid Katie I’d come to know. And after getting a taste of sexy-Katie, going backwards was particularly painful.
“He likes it.” I tipped the bowl so he could get more. He sneezed when some milk got up his nose.
She snorted, tilting her head as she watched a bird move skyward. “Just because we like something, doesn’t mean it’s good for us.”
“Tell me about it.” I pushed the cat off my stomach and sat up, setting the bowl on the end table. “The new director is a complete fuck-up. He emails line changes every night we’re supposed to learn the same day. I swear he sent me that virus. Hey, did you pick up my laptop from the computer shop?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot,” she murmured, absent-minded. She’d forgotten a lot of things lately.
“I’ll get it before rehearsal tomorrow.” I just shrugged. “Anyway, he wants me to sing baritone, and he refuses to put Anne in the lead. Although, I don’t know why she’d want to dress up as a cat anyway.”
“A cat?” Katie’s nose wrinkled and she did look at me then. She was sprawled across the chair by the window on her belly, her hands draped over the edge so she could look outside. Fall had finally come, and we’d been blessed with some cooler weather.
“The English Cat.” I snorted. “That’s our next production. He wanted us to do The Fairy Queen-nude. Like a Midsummer Night’s Dream version of Hair. The dean shot that down in a hurry. Now we’re stuck with this-what are you doing?”
Katie had rolled over and was leaning her head back over the arm and batting at the white filmy curtains. “Nothing,” she said, not stopping.
“I almost didn’t get the lead either,” I said, noticing how her sweater rode up when she was arched backwards like that, showing her navel. God, I missed summer, just for the sight of her tank tees. “New director nearly gave it to a freshman, and I found out later, it’s his cousin. Holy nepotism, Batman.”
I noticed that the cat had settled back in front of my bowl of cereal milk and was lapping away. The white cat, Sassy, was sitting below Katie’s chair and batting at her long dark hair hanging off the side.
“But you got the lead right?”
“Yeah,” I grumbled, leaning back on the sofa. “But this freshman kid is the new bane of my existence. Now he stalks me all over campus. I think he’s the one who’s been going all Hannibal on me and leaving dead animals in my car.”
Katie looked over at me, eyes wide. “You’re kidding?”
“Nope.” I watched her stand up, taking the bowl of milk away from the cat and shooing him off the table. I smiled, noticing that she was wearing the necklace I’d made for her out of the cat statue I took from Theo. I’d had a friend drill a small hole through the ears and had strung it on a soft leather tie. “I’m just so glad it’s my last year.”